On the pavement afterwards Jess held onto him for longer than their handshake required.
‘You’ll hear from us.’
‘Will I?’ She laughed aloud at the pregnancy of their farewell, nervous and brassy at the same time. He like the unapologetic, male way she smoked, and, later, the taste of smoke in her mouth.
‘Fuck it, let’s hire her,’ Bimal said. ‘We need a designer anyway.’ Bimal frequently wanted to hire people, and almost as frequently to fire them, which for a time resulted in a gruesome attrition rate.
‘I’m not sure,’ Neil said. ‘Not sure we can afford her.’
Don’t shit on your own doorstep.
Bimal insisted, and Jess — on the lookout, like half of London, for her jackpot move, her dotcom apotheosis — accepted. She moved into their ramshackle single room above a shop in Camden, where there were more phone lines than employees, and more employees (six, including her) than desks. She and Neil sat opposite one another, separated by a metre and a half of table top and two fat, humming computers, emailing each other in suggestive exchanges that he found deliriously flattering, and which were much less covert than they imagined.
‘More than four thousand,’ Adam said, three hours after he closed the stained-glass front door in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Probably. No, definitely.’
‘How many more?’
‘Hard to say. Depends on the Youth Justice Boards. I suppose you could say “at least four thousand”.’
‘Okay, “at least”. Christ.’
The spin doctor made the change on screen and printed out the speech again. He sighed and mumbled inaudibly as he headed for the photocopier, honing the offhand charmlessness that was evidently considered essential in his trade. He returned with three copies of the speech in the sacrosanct double-spaced, single-sided, non-stapled format.
‘Chuck that one away,’ Adam said.
‘I have,’ the spin doctor said. ‘I will.’ This man was only a couple of years older than Adam, but he spoke to the minister every day, the Home Secretary every week.
‘Don’t mix them up.’
‘Okay. Christ.’
‘Tea, coffee?’ Colin asked. He was making the rounds in his office slippers, two empty mugs castaneting between his fingers, both of them his. Colin drew the line at washing up: the previous week he had fixed a hand-scrawled sign above the cluttered sink that said What did your last slave die of? ‘Adam, anything?’
‘No thanks. I’ll page you with anything else,’ he said to the spin doctor. ‘Page and line number, all right?’
Version control was an infamous nightmare. Adam had heard horror stories of career-ending oversights in which officials sent their minister to a podium with the wrong iteration of a speech: mangled statistics, unmeetable promises that ought to have been excised.
‘Four o’clock kick-off,’ the spin doctor said. ‘Some further education place in Bermondsey. Principal is onto me about her capital budget!’
He gave a mean little chuckle. You could already see in his mottled cheeks and tinted nose that he drank too much.
A-S-B-O: Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Or rather, son of ASBO, that was the crime directorate’s current focus, and therefore Adam’s. Quicker and harsher sentencing for the degenerates, community punishment for entry-level villains, plus some extra cash for after-school clubs and mentoring schemes: the standard carrot and stick one-two. These days wayward kids were the government’s main enemy, Rat Boy, Blip Boy and Spider Boy the new, pre-pubescent Most Wanted.
They were fourteen and fifteen, these kids. Thirteen, some of them. Returning to his desk Adam remembered how, when he was fifteen, he had drunk two-thirds of a bottle of cider in the cadets’ hut and thrown up outside the fives courts. One of the housemasters was investigating the mess, interviewing the boys one-on-one in his study, promises of immunity for informers, the works. Half-resolved to confess, Adam had phoned home for his father’s endorsement.
‘Little white lie,’ Jeremy said.
‘But —’
‘Just this once.’ That had been his introduction to the prime genteel commandment: First, get yourself off.
When Harriet was fifteen their mother had found, in the pocket of her coat, a note she had written about a boy (not to the boy, even, but about him), and had kept her in for half the Christmas holidays, enlisting Adam to disturb her weepy internal exile for meal deliveries and health checks.
Fifteen: sometimes, in the past few years, that number, that age, had seemed to Adam to be stalking him.
At twenty to one he went out to his preferred Italian deli in the narrow lane opposite the crenellated ministry. Standing in front of the glass display, watching the disembodied hands make his lunch, Adam thought they were short-changing him on chicken. He ground his jaw in disapproval; one of his fingers twitched towards the glass. The sandwich-maker (Indian or Pakistani, he guessed, tired-looking, striped apron) glanced up with an expression of abhorred pity. Adam turned sharply away from the man’s eyes and the sandwich and towards the streaked parquet beneath his feet.
Three years in the Civil Service, eighteen months in the Home Office, two or three of these cherished sandwiches a week. Adam ought to be grateful to Jim, he supposed: Jim the executive producer, with his balding crew cut and mockney accent, the man who had inadvertently landed him in Whitehall. Three and a half years before, Jim had sent his secretary to extract Adam from the open-plan grid and deliver him to the corner office. He had offered Adam a pursed, funereal smile, like the smile of the examiner who failed him at his first driving test, virtually Adam’s only other substantial failure until this one. When Jim looked out of the window as he began to speak, towards the skyscrapers across the river in the City, Adam immediately understood.
‘First of all I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for us.’ Us and you. There was an ornamental chilli plant on the windowsill.
Jim was mercifully brief, but throughout the few, tormenting minutes Adam worried that he might be sick. Everyone outside the goldfish-bowl cubicle would soon know why he was sitting there, he had realised. Or perhaps everyone knew already, Will already knew, and he was the last to find out. He half-turned his head to see if Will was watching.
‘I would keep you if I could, you know that, we could keep everyone…’
Adam’s mind flew back to Tenerife, to Gavin the chimerical bar manager — fucking Gavin! — and slid from him to the girl on the beach.
That poor girl. And the two of them. Amazing, the things you caught yourself thinking about, and when. That was the moment it struck: afterwards he thought he could trace his fifteen-o-phobia to Jim’s cubicle, one crisis summoning and eliding with another.
No, Adam told Jim, there was nothing he wanted to ask. He heard himself say ‘Thank you’ as he rose to leave, like a condemned aristocrat tipping his executioner, the indiscriminate euphoria of something happening.
The following evening, in Soho, he had indeed been sick, Neil holding his hair back from his face as if they were teenage girls. Adam pinballed between the tables on his dash to the toilets, spilling several drinks. Two of the spillees stood up — rugby types, play-acting toughs — and Neil interposed himself, his hands raised in his Don’t shoot! pose. ‘Just leave it, mate,’ Neil said to the larger man, his voice descending the social register to imply an acquaintance with violence.
Sitting on the kerb, toeing the broken glass in the gutter, Adam had tried to explain how he felt. How, for him, life was like one of those childhood line-ups in which everyone stands against a wall to be measured and ranked, except for Adam the comparison wasn’t biannual but always, and the comparators were everyone, the rankings vertical as well as horizontal, featuring all the people he had ever been to school or worked with, and his father and his grandfathers and his great-grandfather the judge, all of them eternally jostling in the eyes of some super-arbiter, his stature suddenly the lowliest.