by Tim Parks
‘What about switching to Kid?’ Thomas once suggested. ‘It’s a little cuter, isn’t it? It sounds a bit more mainstream.’ ‘Don’t be a silly billy, Goat,’ Mary laughed. ‘Our kids will be kids!’ It was then that Thomas guessed that this name they had for each other needed to be slightly outlandish, slightly awkward in company; that way it became a declaration of love, of dignity forgone; before the world of sensible people they would acknowledge that they were one Goat. They would go out on a hairy limb. For Christmas and birthdays Thomas invariably received presents with images of goats: a mug, a pair of underpants, a key ring. In return he would pick up cards, or posters, or even paintings for Mary with images of goats: Emile Munier’s cute Young Girl with Goat & Flowers, Kimberly Dawn Clayton’s droll Yuppie Goat showing a goat’s head, painted Matisse-style with a bow tie and an air of comic melancholy. Years later, in a different mood, he bought an original gouache by John Scott showing a mountain goat with horns leaping threateningly to butt an invisible target.
‘Ever the romantic Goat,’ Mary commented.
However, the most fertile naming came with the children. Here Thomas was allowed his say, for the registry office. ‘Sally’ and ‘Mark’ were the fruit of happy negotiation. Then Mary set to work on infinite permutations. Sally, Alley, Miss Bowls, Lorry, Stardust; Mark, Muck, Cluck, Chuck, Chuckles. Here it was not so much, as it had previously been with old friends, a question of the music stopping with a name that worked better than the others, at least to Mary’s ear. Rather, as the years passed, different members of the family came to have different names for each other, though all generated by Mary. So Thomas and Mary together called Mark Chuckles, but when Mary was with Sally they called him Cluck; however, Thomas was soon aware that he wasn’t supposed to call Mark Cluck since this was the girls’ name for him. Likewise for Sally. Thomas and Mary called her Stardust, but Mary and Mark called her Lorry. From time to time Thomas became half aware of names he wasn’t supposed to be privy to, in particular for himself between Mary and the kids. Rambo, for example, and Old Stoat. Finally, Old Squeak. They giggled among themselves. Thomas let it ride. When he spoke to the kids of their mother, he just said Mum. Or later still, your mother.
In adolescence the rebellions began. First Sally wouldn’t reply to any name but Sally. ‘Both syllables, please, Dad.’ If you called her Sal she wouldn’t so much as raise her head. If you called her Stardust at dinner with guests she stood up and left the room. Mark was more amenable. He allowed them to call him Chuckles right into his late teens. But he put an abrupt stop to it when he found a steady girlfriend. ‘It’s over, Mum,’ he said one lunchtime with his girlfriend present. ‘Mark is my name and Mark is what you call me.’
‘You’re both so damn touchy!’ Mary shook her head, ‘Aren’t they, Goat?’
‘They are indeed, Goat,’ Thomas replied, and realised as he spoke how he envied his children, who were being allowed to grow up and decide what they would be called. Already he foresaw the day when he would say to his wife, ‘I want you to stop calling me Goat, Mary. I can’t deal with it any more.’
‘But it’s so cute,’ she objected when that conversation finally happened. She couldn’t seem to get it into her head that he was serious. She couldn’t see his problem. ‘It’s us, Goat, isn’t it, it’s our story? We’re Goat.’
The two of them were in bed, in the half dark.
‘It was our story,’ he accepted. ‘It was fun once. But not now. I’m Thomas and you’re Mary.’ When she was silent, he repeated, ‘Our Goat days are over, love.’
‘Love’ was a coward’s mockery.
They had the dog by then of course, and Mary called him in the quiet of the bedroom that night. ‘Ricky, Ricky, love.’ The dog pattered over to her. ‘KiKi,’ she fondled his ears. ‘Yikyik,’ she let him lick her mouth. ‘Will you call me Goat?’
‘For Christ’s sake!’
‘Baah,’ Mary muttered to the dog. ‘Ba-a-a-aah.’ Ricky pranced around, excited.
‘Mary, love.’
‘Don’t call me love,’ she said sharply.
Moments passed. The dog whined.
‘Bleat,’ Mary said, her voice resigned. Very softly, she began to cry. ‘Is it all right if I bleat a little from time to time?’
‘Damn.’
Thomas went downstairs to pour himself a whisky.
PROMOTION
Four years ago Thomas was denied the big promotion he expected, the final elevation. The MD gave the post to Ms Cavanaugh. It would be hard to find anyone in the company who does not believe that Ms Cavanaugh is the MD’s lover and has been for many years. It is a relationship Thomas does not understand, since Ms Cavanaugh is rather mannish and the MD rather effeminate. He lives with his blind and ancient mother, Ms Cavanaugh with her schizophrenic brother. Go figure, Thomas thinks. The fact is that for the foreseeable future he will have to take orders from a woman ten years younger than himself who knows nothing about their line of business but is unwilling to expose her ignorance by asking for advice. When things go wrong he can hardly appeal over her head to the MD, since in that case he would be appealing against the man’s mistress, not to mention questioning his judgement in appointing her. Why the relationship is officially secret is a mystery, as there is no spouse on either side to feel betrayed. Not even a dog, Thomas thinks, smiling.
But he is not smiling now. He has just received an email in which Ms Cavanaugh invites him to come to her office to discuss precise allegations: that Thomas, in conversation with Sue Peers, misrepresented the motives behind the latter’s removal from the important account she had hitherto been handling. The appropriate moment for them to clarify the situation, Ms Cavanaugh writes in this email, will be immediately after the meeting of department heads on Monday afternoon. Since it is now Tuesday morning, Thomas is at once aware that he will have to spend six full days being extremely anxious.
Returning home, he tries to explain the gravity of the situation to his wife. Having requested, more than a month ago, a private meeting with the MD to discuss issues in his faltering department, he had found Ms Cavanaugh unexpectedly present, apparently affable but no doubt concerned that Thomas was trying to go over her head. One of the dozen or so issues Thomas had discussed was the removal of Sue Peers at least from the Bullard account, which he had always said she did not have the experience to handle and which he felt they were now in danger of losing, along with 23 per cent of his department’s income. Since Sue Peers had been rather hurriedly handed the account when, shortly after her appointment, Ms Cavanaugh had clashed with the rather brilliant Mike Dillon, who laughed in her face, told her she was brainless and immediately found himself a job elsewhere, it was quite possible that Ms Cavanaugh saw Thomas’s request as an indirect criticism of her management, though he had been extremely careful not to present it that way. Nor had he actually expected that Sue Peers would be removed from the account, since no one was more assiduous than Sue in flattering her superiors, Ms Cavanaugh first and foremost, and no one more used to seeing his requests turned down than Thomas. In fact it was to his great surprise that he discovered at the next department meeting not only that Sue Peers had been removed but that the Bullard account had already been allotted, somewhat unexpectedly and without his having been consulted, to Karl Quentin, a promising member of staff recently brought in from another company of which the MD was a non-executive director.
‘However, when I spoke to Sue,’ Thomas explained to his wife, ‘after the meeting …’
Suddenly he found his voice drowned out by the roar of the liquidiser. Mary was preparing pumpkin soup.
‘You’re not listening,’ he remarked when the noise stopped.
‘Because you’re not really talking to me, are you?’ she replied. ‘You’re just worrying out loud. You’re always getting yourself into these messes, Goat. Resign if you don’t like the place. Go somewhere else. You’re supposed to be so smart, aren’t you?’
Thomas would have liked to resign, but his
present job had the advantage of putting him in regular contact with his own lover, who was a junior in Personnel. It was also true that the money was good. Later that evening his wife relented and, while Thomas was on the sofa with his laptop and she at the sitting-room table with hers, asked him to explain exactly what had happened.
‘Oh, nothing much,’ he told her. ‘I wouldn’t like to stress you unnecessarily with my work problems.’
‘Suit yourself, Goat,’ she said.
‘However, when I spoke to Sue,’ Thomas explained the following day to Cathy, ‘she was absolutely furious since the Bullard account was the main thing in her career, a make-or-break job for her. So I told her that the decision had been Cavanaugh’s and the MD’s, that I simply didn’t have the power to make these decisions, even assuming I wanted to. The fact is I still have to work with Sue, and of course pretty much everyone in the department loves her since she’s always doing favours for everybody. She’s that kind of person.’
Cathy was drumming a beat on the pub table. There was rarely a moment when Cathy was not drumming a beat. ‘You must have said more than that,’ she objected. ‘Who went and told Cava?’
Thomas admitted that he had told Sue these out-of-the-blue reshufflings were typical of the way the company was now being run; capricious displays of power that made everything difficult for everyone. The truth is he had been in a hurry to get away and unprepared when Sue had confronted him. As for the spy, feasibly there had been three people within earshot, but he felt pretty sure it must be Frank Law, who always complained that Thomas was dictatorial and hypercritical.
Cathy stopped drumming and took his hands across the table. She looked into his eyes with such intensity that for a moment it seemed to Thomas she was fighting her way across the twenty-five-year gap between them.
‘Let’s do a runner,’ she said. ‘The hell with it. You’re worth so much more than these shits. It’s a sin somebody as smart as you having to toe the line to someone as dumb as Cava. And I was never made for office life. Let’s just vamoose.’
The young woman had spoken urgently, her body swaying a little as she did so. Thomas smiled. Then she had to go to a practice session with the band. That night Thomas woke in the early hours to find his brain absolutely ungovernable, between the acute awareness that his girlfriend would soon leave him, the acute awareness that he would not leave his wife, the acute awareness that the meeting with Cavanaugh would be unpleasant and their relationship soured beyond repair, and the very acute awareness that this was largely his own fault for having spoken carelessly to Sue Peers when other staff members were nearby, not to mention the possibility that Sue might actually have told Frank what Thomas had said to her and that Frank might then have pointed out that if he now told Cavanaugh that he had overheard Thomas saying what he had it would cause all kinds of trouble for a department manager who had been highly critical of both of them and was probably pushing to have both of them removed from the company altogether. Yes, Sue Peers and Frank Law, Thomas reflected, had long formed an alliance of losers. Until they were fired, his department would be unmanageable.
So the night passed. His body was rigid. He didn’t sleep. And again the next day and the next night. Two hours’ sleep, then hour after hour fiercely awake, running through all the possible scenarios of what he might say when the famous meeting occurred, and all the possible ways a peeved Sue Peers might respond to whatever line he took, and how Ms Cavanaugh might react to both of them. Certainly if Sue repeated word for word his remarks that Ms Cavanaugh couldn’t manage a Women’s Institute muffin party and cared even less about the staff than she did about her sickly deodorants, things would grow heated indeed. Sitting on the sofa in the dark, drinking camomile tea, Thomas couldn’t understand why he had made himself such a hostage to fortune. He was a stupid, careless man. Did he want to be fired? Perhaps he did, just as he often wished his wife would chuck him out of the house. On the other hand, he was doubtless the most respected, experienced and creative member of his company’s staff and the MD would be almost as loath to lose him as he would be to see Ms Cavanaugh humiliated. Almost.
By Friday, Thomas had understood that no useful work of any kind would be done this week. Various appointments had to be cancelled and deadlines postponed. His mind was running riot. He was distracted with the children, distracted with his wife, distracted with the dog. ‘You are hell to live with,’ Mary informed him. ‘For Christ’s sake, snap out of it.’ At a concert with Cathy on Saturday evening he found it impossible to concentrate on the bands that were playing, impossible to lose himself in even the wildest rhythms. Heavy drinking only fuelled his anxieties. He imagined telling Cavanaugh exactly what he thought of her. That she was a complete incompetent whom the whole world found ridiculous. That without the MD behind her, or rather between her legs, always assuming he was still up to it after heart surgery and prostate cancer, she would be a complete nobody and when the old bastard finally kicked it, as very likely he soon must, given the way he was forever yelling at others for mistakes that were all her doing – when he finally kicked it she would be out on her neck in no time and the board would almost certainly appoint him, Thomas, in her place as they should have done four years ago. It was hard to exaggerate, he might tell her – no, impossible to exaggerate – what an utter nullity the rest of the world considered her. An utter utter nullity.
Thomas imagined his satisfaction on saying these words. He imagined the consternation on Linda Cavanaugh’s face, the quiver on her pale lips. She would be wearing one of her silver-grey trouser suits, a look of crisp efficiency, which was exactly that – a look and nothing more, something cultivated to cover up for the nothing behind it – with the kind of flashy cufflinks young male executives wear, the kind of glasses a young man chooses if he wants to give himself an authority he doesn’t have. The truth was that Cavanaugh was fragile. If she didn’t actually know she was a fraud, she was certainly afraid she might be, afraid of any kind of criticism and exposure. And this was exactly what made her so dangerous, so unwilling ever really to discuss anything, ever to take Thomas’s advice on anything.
Then Thomas imagined confessing instead, and asking forgiveness. Yes, he would admit to Ms Cavanaugh, he had spoken out of turn. His private life was not going well. He was feeling frustrated in various ways. Stupidly and absolutely unjustifiably he had allowed these frustrations to cloud his vision and make him say the most unpleasant things to Sue Peers, partly because he would have to go on working with the woman despite her losing the Bullard account and partly because of the way she had confronted him so heatedly when he had least been expecting it. He hadn’t actually been warned that she had been taken off the account. But these of course could hardly be excuses and he had been criminally disloyal, not to say injudicious, in speaking like that about a superior.
Thomas found the confessional approach easier to imagine than venting his spleen. He could very easily see himself leaning forward over Cavanaugh’s outsize leather-topped desk and speaking with great intensity and earnestness. He was good at confessions, good at apologies. From the earliest age his puritanical parents had schooled him in the habit of contrition. Nor was this version without its elements of truth. Immediately he spoke, he would begin to feel he really was guilty, even sorry. Or part of him would feel that. The performing part. Performance would make him feel what he had chosen to perform. Hadn’t he experienced that often enough with his wife? Or the other way round with his girlfriends. Romance was also a performance. And Cavanaugh was bound to fall for it. It would be such a relief to that brittle lady to receive this confirmation of her own rectitude and competence. No doubt in her own mind she was rightfully his superior; in her own mind she wasn’t where she was because she fucked the MD; rather, the MD fucked her because as well as being brilliant and efficient she was also seductive and affectionate and loyal. Thomas imagined Ms Cavanaugh becoming suddenly affable and generous, demurring, calling him Tom, telling him please to stop, no problem, n
ot to worry, we all have these disheartening moments when we say things we shouldn’t. Now he had set the record straight, she would be the last to hold it against him.
So, yes, perhaps this was the way to play it, Thomas told himself in the thick of the concert while an American punk band belted out inanities and Cathy grinned over a bottle of Beck’s, head swaying from side to side.
Except of course that Sue would be present, Thomas now remembered. And Sue had heard a hundred times what he really thought of Cavanaugh. Sue would see through his abject opportunism. How could she not? And later she would enjoy a good snigger with the other members of the department over his pathetic capitulation. His authority would be utterly diminished. The situation would be unworkable, unliveable. She might even contradict him to Ms Cavanaugh’s face. Perhaps she imagined that if Thomas was fired she would get the Bullard account back, or might even be appointed to his position. Long experience warned Thomas that there was no end to people’s overestimation of themselves.
Then how miserable, Thomas went on thinking as the band launched into a new cacophony, to humble himself like this, as he had humbled himself a thousand times with his wife, acknowledging that he was the guilty party in battles of every kind, when he didn’t feel he was guilty at all, or not of the things he had confessed. Yes, he had eaten humble pie simply in order to return to a state of peace, to stop the fight and concentrate his mind on the things he preferred to concentrate on. If I’m guilty of anything, Thomas thought, it’s of too often choosing to declare myself guilty. It’s the coward’s way out.
