by Neil Cross
After a moment, she said 'I see' in a manner that Nathan had learned to recognize; it was the way people chose to hide their sudden, incandescent interest in celebrity, even minor celebrity. She looked Nathan in the eye and said, 'It must have been terrible for you.'
'It wasn't good, no.'
'And if it's all right to ask - how is he?'
'How's who? Mark? I haven't spoken to him.'
'I see,' she said. 'Yes. That poor girl.'
So Nathan went on the books of the employment agency, and a week later, the agent called to let him know she'd lined up an exciting interview with a prestigious company he had never heard of.
Nathan no longer owned an interview suit or good shoes; they'd gone into the washing machine and then to a charity shop, scrunched up in a carrier bag. So that afternoon, he went shopping.
On Monday, he was interviewed for the position of sales executive at Hermes Cards, Ltd. The interview was conducted by two men and two women, who sat behind a long desk like the top table at a wedding.
Nathan
told them he had no sales experience, and that he had no particular interest in greetings cards. Nor had he ever stopped to consider the profound part greetings cards had to play in observing British rites of passage - birth, marriage, illness and death.
But I've certainly been thinking about it over the weekend,' he said, and the interviewers laughed. From one of the women there was even a little flirtatious pen-playing.
When the chuckles had died down, he said, 'The truth is, when times were good, working with Mark taught me about working under pressure. And when times were bad, it taught me a lot about loyalty.'
When he'd done talking about Mark Derbyshire, a certain gloom settled on the room.
They thanked Nathan for coming along. He shook their hands one by one - and thanked them, and left, and went directly to the pub. He sat in the garden. The sun shone so bright he could barely read his newspaper.
Hermes Cards called back the next day: they wanted to see him again next Tuesday.
He bought a new tie, a raincoat and a folding umbrella, in case it was raining on the day. He wondered how the person who wore these clothes related to that lost man in Greece, in his Gap cargo shorts and Nike sandals; and how that man related to the wired madman in the Paul Smith suit, scrabbling with bleeding nails at the cold, wet earth. He could draw no line of connection between them.
He was a series of disconnected dots, a Morse code.
The second interview took place in a different room. This time, they sat round a shiny oval table, and Nathan knew before anyone spoke that he'd got the job.
He was to start on the 1st of July, which gave him ten days of nervousness.
He had no idea how to go about doing a proper job.
He went to the Business section of his local bookshop and spent seventy pounds on titles that promised to make him a more effective communicator -- but none of these books seemed to tell him anything that was not already perfectly obvious.
During the sleepless nights he lay in his bed, clamped between the past and the future. In the morning he lay listening to the children play.
And then the day came, and he went to work.
At reception, he introduced himself, saying: 'I'm the new boy.'
The receptionist said, 'If you'd like to take a seat, Roy will be down in a moment.'
Nathan had no idea who Roy might be. He sat with his briefcase on his lap, and waited.
Behind the reception desk was a wall-to-wall, ceiling-high, hardwood bookcase. Ranked on it were hundreds of greetings cards.
There were bawdy cartoons; floral tributes to the sick and the bereaved; congratulations for new parents and new graduates. Blank inside, they were rich with the passage of lives yet to be lived.
The receptionist saw him, scanning their ranks.
Nathan said, 'Is there a Congratulations on your new job ?'
She swivelled in her chair. 'There must be one up there, somewhere.'
He
smiled, then turned to the ping of an elevator door. A man he took to be Roy came striding towards him. Roy was trim and sprightly, not far from retirement; his handshake nearly pulverized Nathan's finger bones.
'You must be Nathan.'
Roy put an arm round Nathan's shoulder. Nathan had not been touched by another human being in many months; he tried to relax into Roy's paternal grip, as Roy said, 'I've heard a lot about you.'
'Okay,' said Nathan. 'Good.'
Roy led him to the lift. Nathan stared at his reflection as they whispered up two floors. Then Roy led him past what he described as the glass boardroom then through a set of double doors into the office building's working interior.
The floor was open-plan, lined with small, glass-fronted offices in which imprisoned executives and managers spoke into telephones or listened to telephones or hunched over laptop computers.
'This is sales and marketing,' said Roy. 'Welcome home. You'll soon get to know it.'
He wasn't wrong. When he wasn't on the road to Swindon or Edinburgh or Birmingham or Cardiff, the modern sales executive spent a great deal of time on the telephone and the computer.
The modern sales executive also spent most of his time engaged in pursuits which didn't involve selling anything to anybody: Nathan found himself attending weekly marketing meetings, and weekly pre-marketing meetings, and weekly post-marketing meetings which, with grim and affected professionalism, were called 'postmortems'.
In
addition, there were quarterly, half-yearly and annual sales performance review meetings. There were monthly sales projections meetings. There were bi-monthly regional and national sales meetings.
There were two sales conferences. There were buyers to entertain. There were lunches and dinners and drinks without number. There was karaoke in Sheffield and go-karting in Swindon.
The sales department was structured in a way that Nathan didn't completely understand. There seemed to be four UK sales directors, three of whom were beaten and bitter men who reported to one, younger boss, whose job title was simply Director (UK
Sales).
In addition, sales shared an arcane crossover of responsibility with marketing, which meant each department was in a position to blame the other when budgets were overspent or financial targets hadn't been met, which was always. Thus, the relationship between sales and marketing was alternately cordial and hypothermic.
At first, Nathan enjoyed the inanity of it. He was paid an initially modest but increasingly handsome salary, plus theoretical bonuses, to sit round a table for hours, pretending to care about the late delivery of 5,000 New Line Easter cards to a godforsaken warehouse in East Anglia.
As the weeks bled into months, then years, Nathan would sometimes be struck by wonderment as he was cleaning his teeth in the morning - but by the time he was knotting his tie, the sense of affable farce would have deserted him and he'd be worrying that Norfolk (as the warehouse was simply and ominously known) would be unable to clear the late delivery of 55,000 New Line Eclipse cards that had arrived late from the printers.
Getting into his car, an Omega, he would be anxious that the proposed New Lines for Christmas-after-next would not correlate with what marketing had identified as the post-Millennial Mood; or that a leading chain of high-street stationers would not after all decide to retail the new, cartoon-Jesus Easter cards which had been enthusiastically endorsed, first by the board, then by every other department - and which would just as systematically be disowned if they failed.
He knew thinking about all this was a waste of time; but it was much, much better than thinking about anything else.
And then, during the Winter Sales Conference, 2001, he saw Elise's family on television. They were making an appeal for information that might lead to her return.
12
He'd spent a long, buttock-numbing day in an overheated hotel conference room, listening to inept presentations by senior management and non-executive members of th
e board.
Nathan was always frustrated by the Sales Conference; partly because he wasn't allowed to participate in the presentations, and partly because he was forced to share the complicit eye-rolls and watch glances of the stultified sales reps, who weren't listening to a word of it.
The day's session ended at 4.45 p.m. In the foyer, there were coffee and biscuits for the delegates, who would then enjoy an hour or two of free time before reconvening in the Boleyn Bar for the formal dinner.
Overheated and itchy with boredom -- except the senior management, each of whom glowed with the invigorating success of their talk on Seasonality: A Picture of Shift? Or Opportunity for Growth? -- the delegates filed into the lobby where little clumps began to form, like matter after the big bang.
The muttered conversation centred on how bored everyone was, how hot it was in there - and who was sitting with whom at that evening's Formal Conference Dinner.
Among the marketing department's regular triumphs was a fastidious seating plan for the formal dinner. This seating plan tacitly acknowledged the company's deep structural enmities; those who loathed each other were seated at different tables - as were those who were sleeping together, and those who were no longer sleeping together. Those who'd been passed over for promotion weren't seated next to the successful candidate. Despised graduate wunderkinder weren't seated by strawberry-nosed alcoholics still stewing over the loss of Christmas bonuses long past.
Ten days before every conference, this piece of work - known with unfeigned reverence as the Draft Seating Plan - would be submitted to the CEO and other members of the main board. The CEO and the main board would then ignore the draft seating plan until ninety minutes before the formal dinner, at which point they would reject it.
This caused the marketing department - six women and two handsome, diffident male graduate trainees wondering what the hell they were doing here - to hunker down, as in a military command centre, and descend into logistical, chain-smoking chaos.
The result of which was: nobody got to sit next to somebody they liked - nobody except the marketing department, who placed themselves, the art department and a select number of the brightest and funniest reps on two tables in the farthest and most private corner, where they would get drunk and tell jokes about the CEO and the board of directors until 3 a.m.
Like everyone else, Nathan hated the formal dinner - it never failed to achieve the opposite of what was intended; one could sense the nexus of resentment, neurosis and outright hatred, festering like bad wiring.
And worse, there was never any way to predict if this time he was in favour with the marketing department, and therefore chosen to sit with them.
So, as everyone in the foyer gathered in murmuring clusters, Nathan decided to avoid the stress of discussing it.
He stopped, patting himself down as if confused - perhaps looking for the expensive lighter that should be right there, in his pocket. With a scowl of consternation, he walked off, still patting his pockets as if expecting the lighter to weirdly materialize. Then he ducked to the right, and into a lift, and pressed UP.
Nathan liked hotel rooms. In them, he could pretend that he really was the person he'd made himself into. He liked the tautness of the bedding and the bright sterility of the bathroom; he liked the constant hum of air conditioning. He liked the unquestioned might of the Do Not Disturb sign. He liked turning it to read Please Make Up My Room when he left in the morning, straightening his tie. And he liked the transgressive feeling of closing the door and loosening the tie, then removing his suit and lying in socks and boxer shorts on the bed with his rumpled clothes in a pile alongside him, flicking through the television channels.
Doing this, he fell into a doze with the remote control clasped in his hand. He woke with a jolt, glued to the bed by a line of spit that had dried to a fine, flaky crust on his chin.
He'd turned up the air conditioning too high: his legs were cold.
He drew into himself. It was dark outside. He had no idea what time - it was; he thumbed the volume on the remote control. The national six o'clock news was just beginning. So there was plenty of time to wake up properly, have a good shower and still be changed and ready for dinner.
He crawled under the covers and lay with his eyes closed, listening to the headlines, the usual catalogue of metropolitan calamity and international speculation. The thing in him that, long ago, had been moved and enraged and scared by the television news had long gone.
After the major headlines, he heard this: And, almost four years after her disappearance, the family of missing Elise Fox launch a new appeal for information. Nathan sat up.
In this unhaunted hotel room, the blue television light flicked and lashed at his face and naked body. At 6.15, the headlines were rounded up. After this, the newsreader addressed the camera: The family of Elise Fox, who disappeared almost four years ago after a party in Gloucestershire, have today relaunched an appeal for information which might help to find her.
Nathan watched as, on screen, three people filed into a flashing room and took seats behind a desk. A trim, refined man. A woman in a wine-red suit. And a younger woman - a little older than Elise would have been, had she lived.
She was Elise's older sister.
They sat before a blown-up snapshot of Elise. She looked young and beautiful and careless. Nathan wouldn't have recognized her. His Elise was a flickering series of snapshots: the white-faced bundle by the tennis courts; her white breasts in the darkness of Bob's car; the shocking warmth inside her; the way her dead foot twitched on Bob's naked lap. A naked shape, face down in a scooped-out grave.
As the cameras flashed, the man spoke from a prepared statement.
'If somebody out there, anybody out there, knows what happened to Elise, or if someone out there knows where Elise might be, we beg you to please, please, get in contact.'
His voice broke on the word 'please' and his daughter reached up and touched his elbow, squeezing gently.
'We beg you,' she said. Elise's sister.
She was staring into the camera and through it.
Nathan jumped out of bed and turned on all the lights - the ceiling lights, the standard lamps, the bedside reading lights; the lights in the bathroom and in the wardrobe. Then he removed a miniature bottle of whisky from the minibar. His hands were shaking too badly to break the seal - he opened it with his teeth and tipped the bottle into his gullet.
The phone rang. Nathan snatched it up, not thinking.
'Hello?'
'Hello, mate,' said Justin, who was Nathan's boss. Justin thought himself an old school salesman: at conference dinners he drank whisky and loosened his tie and rolled his sleeves and smoked cigars into the early morning.
Justin and Nathan didn't trust one another. Because of this, they pretended to everyone -- including each other -- to be very close friends.
Justin said, 'Where are you?'
Nathan looked at his watch, then glanced at the TV. They'd moved on to another story now. Global warming or something.
'Sorry, mate. I must have fallen asleep.'
'You'd better get down here. The drinks have started.'
'When's dinner?'
'In forty minutes. But I need you down here, soon as poss.'
Nathan realized that he'd broken an arcane rule -- that the sales reps should never be left to mingle and speak freely. Instead they should be vexed by someone from head office whom they did not like, and who had nothing to say to them.
Nathan hurried to the shower. He stood under the water and tested his fingers, to see if he could feel them. He shampooed his hair and washed himself with the expensive soap he'd brought along. He put on fresh boxer shorts and socks and shirt and a fresh suit, and shoes and cufflinks. Today's suit he hung from the shower rail, where the shower steam would ease the creases from it.
He saw himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator. Smart suit and perfect hair. Bloodless lips.
He went to the formal dinner.
T
wo weeks before, Nathan had argued with Amrita about the cost effectiveness of an advert she'd placed in the Oldie magazine -- Amrita had called him a pompous wanker. So Nathan's long-term favoured status had taken a setback. He didn't get to sit with the marketing department.
The Foxes were on television again that night, and in the morning they were in the newspapers.
Over the next two weeks, he became almost accustomed to seeing them on the news, or in magazines and newspapers: the father's fine boned face, the mother's air of bewildered efficiency. And the clear-eyed directness of Elise's sister, who featured in many of the print interviews.
Her name was Holly.
Nathan read and reread these interviews until he'd memorized them.
He didn't know why he did this; familiarity with Elise's name in print didn't relieve the dread of seeing it again - or make it possible to sleep with the lights off.
But he connected with something in Holly Fox's clear-eyed gaze, and was greatly moved. It felt like a kind of love, forged in the same smithy.
He wished that things could be better for her - that Holly Fox could be happy.
Nathan wished that he could be happy, too.
Eventually, he wondered if their possible happiness, like the fact of their unhappiness, might not somehow be linked.
That's when he decided to find her.
13
He had to wait until after Christmas.
It was the worst time of year. Even when he came home drunk following some work-related function - work-related functions amounted to the whole of Nathan's social life - it was necessary to drink a bottle of wine and double-check all the lights before attempting to sleep. It was also necessary to check the spare long-life bulbs were stacked in a pyramid in the kitchen, next to the kettle.
Over the utilitarian mirror in the bathroom, he nightly secured a thick blue towel - hanging it firmly from nails hammered into the wall for the purpose, such that it was impossible for the towel to work its way loose during the night and fall. If it had -- if Nathan heard that sudden, slithering noise behind the closed door in the empty flat -- he would simply and immediately lose his mind. The second mirror, full length, he kept inside the wardrobe door -- and he secured the wardrobe door with two simple sliding bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom. He would not risk it swinging open during the dark hours.
