‘So, if I could just ask you, Dieter, what are your priorities?’
‘Well …’ He seems to be on the point of answering — of telling Paul what his priorities are — when he hesitates, and says, ‘But we have decided not to do this. Thank you for thinking of us, Mr Barclay.’
Paul experiences a moment of pure frustration. Frustration that there is no way to force Flossman into the publication. There is, in fact, no point prolonging the call any further — contrary to the orthodoxy of the training room, it is more or less impossible to turn a situation like this around. Experience informs Paul of this, and, normally, he would wind up with a bruised, embittered goodbye. His voice is still level, though nothing remains of the laconic tone with which the call began. He says, ‘I understand, Dieter. I understand. If I could just ask you though — who are your most important clients?’
The conversation is now an undignified tussle — demeaning to them both — and Flossman is openly impatient. ‘I … I don’t know, Mr Barclay. I must tell you, we are not interested.’
‘But you said you were interested last week.’
‘Yes, but now we are not interested.’
Despite his enormous sense of injustice, of having been misled — lied to even — Paul knows that it would be useless, worse than useless, to dispute what Flossman said and meant or didn’t mean last week. All the power in the situation is, as always, with the prospect, and Paul is terribly aware of his own powerlessness. He says, ‘You have clients in the automotive industry?’
‘Of course.’
‘Such as which companies?’
‘Mr Barclay —’
‘DaimlerChrysler?’
‘Yes. Mr Barclay, I have told you —’
‘Could I just —’
‘I have told you we are not interested.’
‘What I was going to say, Dieter —’
‘If you have anything to say, please send me a fax.’
‘Let me just say this — is General Motors a client of yours?’
Flossman sighs. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Now, Mr Barclay …’
To persist, Paul knows, is totally futile. Flossman now dislikes him. Flossman is irritated, even angry. Nevertheless, he says, ‘What I wanted to say, Dieter, what I wanted to say is that I’m constantly speaking with … Actually, just today, for example, I’ve just come from a lunch meeting with a chap in GM — very senior individual on the purchasing side …’
‘This is bullshit,’ Flossman says dismissively.
For a moment Paul is so shocked, so insulted, that he is speechless. In sixteen years of selling, surprisingly perhaps, no prospect has ever openly put it to him that he is lying. Of course, there has been insinuation, there has been euphemistic scepticism, there has been innocent incredulity. Never this.
‘What did you say?’ He is stunned, his voice quiet.
Flossman laughs edgily, aware of having transgressed something, some etiquette — and also, it seems, elated to have done so. ‘You are speaking bullshit,’ he says, with a smile in his voice. The outrageousness of this is simply too much. Paul’s face blooms an alarmingly deep red. ‘I am speaking bullshit?’ he says hoarsely. ‘I am?’
‘Yes, you —’
‘No.’
‘You are speaking —’
‘No.’
‘— bullshit. You are —’
‘You are speaking bullshit, Flossman.’
‘— a liar, Mr Barclay.’
‘— speaking bullshit, Flossman.’
Flossman is laughing.
‘You are speaking bullshit, Flossman!’ Paul shouts it several times more, his hatred — ardent and humiliated — the hatred of the long-oppressed for the oppressor. Suddenly, though, there is no one there, no one on the end of the line. A small plastic silence. It is finished, and pulling his jacket from his seat, ignoring the looks that are fixed on him from all over the suddenly quiet sales floor, he sets off purposefully, urgently, for the Penderel’s Oak.
2
A PAINFUL KNOT of self-hatred, Paul wakes, as usual, in the pre-dawn darkness. Unseen, the seconds tick, trudging over the eventless desert, the depression of the hours of darkness — and the depression is huge, immediate, though he knows that in the morning it will look melting and pale, like the moon will in the sky. The morning, however, seems infinitely distant. Though the pain is located mainly in his head, stirring slightly under the duvet he starts to find mysterious secondary pains everywhere, especially down his left side. If only it were possible to smother himself in sleep again — to sink into insensible fathoms with his eyes stuck shut. If only it were possible … And now, worse, things are whelming up — surfacing — memories — he is unable to stop them. Yesterday afternoon and Flossman. It is all still there, exactly as it was.
Lying in his tepid bed, wheezing shallowly, eyes shut, ticker fluttering, his head a tightening knot of pain, he is once more sentient of his self, and his situation. His life is exactly where it was at four o’clock yesterday afternoon when he hung up the phone and walked, stony-faced, off the sales floor. The escape was no more than a temporary oblivion. And now, like objects thrown up by the surf on the shifting pebbles less than a mile from where he is lying in the dark, he starts to find odd things littering his memory. The oddest sees him scrambling on a train track among the surprisingly large stones and heavy sleepers of the rail bed. Some people watching him, laughing, from the greenish light of a station platform. Him shouting at them to ‘fuck off’. Them pelting him with empty cider tins and half-eaten kebabs wrapped in greasy, sauce-smeared paper, scattering shredded cabbage everywhere — the memory squeezes his eyes more tightly shut, shoves his chin into his chest. And how did that situation end?
How, for that matter, did it begin?
Darkling, mortified, his memory feels its way. He had expected to find Murray in the Penderel’s Oak, but Murray was not there. The pub was fuller than it had been when he left it an hour earlier. He wandered up to the bar, hoping to see Michaela, but she had still not started her shift, and he leafed uninterestedly through an Evening Standard that someone had left there. He had just read something about house prices, and was searching through the sports section, looking for the snooker, when Murray appeared. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Paul asked. Murray answered in profile, staring at his own reflection in the dim mirror behind the bar. ‘Where d’you think?’ he said. ‘At the office.’
‘Did you see Marlon?’
‘That little shit?’ Murray paused. Then, offhand, ‘I think so.’
‘So it’s all sorted out?’
Murray had still not made eye contact. ‘Is what all sorted out?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Oh aye.’
‘What did you agree?’
‘What did we agree?’
‘Yeah.’
‘We agreed that he should fuck off and stop whingeing.’
‘You agreed that?’
‘We did.’
Implausible. Paul, however, did not press him; he would hear on Monday what had happened.