London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  All these thoughts Paul had as he walked, still in his stale suit, back to the unfashionable part of west London where his flat was. A very long walk. He left Eddy at Old Street roundabout – silent at that hour – and made his way slowly down Old Street itself, and into Farringdon. Clerkenwell. Bloomsbury. When he passed Russell Square station it was open, just, and for a moment he paused. He decided that he would keep walking. He was in no hurry. Oxford Street was eerily empty – only a few delivery trucks and street sweepers, preparing for the day’s massed, shopping hordes – and preceded by his sharp shadow, starting to sweat in his suit, he walked its whole length. There was something strange and sad about entering his sunny flat, everything exactly as it was when he set off for work twenty-four hours earlier. It seemed totally indifferent to him. He pulled the curtains (it was still light enough to set the alarm for noon) and undressed, and went into the kitchen for a glass of tepid tap water. He remembers lying down, his mind still fizzing exhaustedly, his heart knocking. Yes that morning, which he remembers so vividly – with its sunlight and sense of impalpable menace – he thinks of as the first intimation of what happened next.

  When Simon took the call from Alan at International Money plc, one fresh and open-windowed morning a few weeks later, it was immediately obvious from his prolonged silence on the phone that something serious had happened. ‘We’ve lost the contract,’ he said, and smiled, and they all went to the pub. Not the Chesh – it seemed inappropriate – another one, which they did not normally go to, down by Blackfriars. When he was asked why they had lost the contract, all Simon would say was: ‘I don’t know. Because they’re cunts.’ They stayed in the pub until it was dark outside – Simon’s gold card was behind the bar – and then, too drunk to stand or see properly, they dispersed. On his own, Paul was sick in the street. The next afternoon, Simon called them all individually and said that he was sorry about what had happened, and that he had ‘something exciting in the pipeline’ which he hoped they would be interested in working on. They never heard from him again. Paul didn’t anyway. For a while, with money in the bank, he did nothing and during this short sabbatical, sitting in the hot sun on the balconette of his flat (which was just large enough for a straight-backed chair and an ashtray), smoking spliffs, he thought about doing something that he positively wanted to do. Nothing in particular occurred to him, however, and in early September – the school time, summer’s end – he started to look for work. And work, of course, meant sales.

  That his first stop was Archway Publications, and not one of the other multi-storey telesales factories that stud London, was down to nothing more than alphabetical order, and once he had arranged an interview with someone called James Grey, he shut the phone book and went back to his balconette to soak up some more of the Monday-afternoon sun. The interview itself was a formality. James Grey – a slick, oleaginous man who sat with his soft, manicured hands loosely interwoven, and whose tiepin, Paul noticed, featured the Playboy bunny – asked a few unsearching questions, the final one being when Paul would be able to start. Archway had a voracious need of salespeople. More or less anybody could walk in off the street and sign up for the next intake – a week of training starting every Tuesday. There was no salary, of course. Waiting for James Grey, Paul had been able to see the open-plan training area, the week’s dozen trainees – it would be difficult to imagine a more varied set of twelve people, scooped from the sloshing population of London, and united only by their need of money – and the training manager saying, ‘We are not selling advertising space. We are selling sales. The prospect will only buy space if he thinks it will increase the sales of his company – that is the only thing he is interested in. So you do not sell the space – you sell the increased sales. So, what are we selling?’ Paul did not have to do the training week. He was put straight onto a team. It was, perhaps, only a month or two later, when he saw Eddy on the escalator at Tottenham Court Road, that he understood quite how unhappy he was.

  Picking, with a heavy thumbnail, at the label of his Bacardi Breezer, Eddy says, offhand, ‘So what you up to these days, Paul?’

  ‘Oh …’ Paul exhales vaguely. ‘Did I say on Friday? I can’t remember.’

  ‘You said something …’ Eddy says, equally vaguely.

  ‘I’m working over Holborn way. Place called Park Lane Publications.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Murray’s there as well. D’you see him on Friday?’

  Eddy smiles. Whenever Murray is mentioned, people smile. ‘Yeah, for a minute.’

  Paul smiles too. ‘I’m his manager actually,’ he says.

  Eddy laughs. ‘Bet he’s not fucking happy about that.’

  ‘I don’t think he is.’ Paul lights a cigarette. That Murray may be even less happy about it than he seems sometimes troubles him. ‘No, it’s all right.’

  ‘How did that happen, then?’

  Paul shrugs. These things are, after all, always happening – people move from one job to another, and often find themselves being managed by someone they managed themselves a year or two earlier. Murray was Paul’s manager for a few years when he started out at Burdon Macauliffe. Then they worked at Northwood together – Simon was the only manager there (though the Pig was his lieutenant, and on an override). When Northwood ended, Paul fetched up at Archway and Murray somewhere else – some place in Covent Garden that he found through a newspaper ad. Years passed. They more or less lost touch. Then, one morning, Paul – now a manager at PLP – picked up his phone, and it was Murray, looking for a job. Which was, of course, humiliating for him. ‘I haven’t done a pitch for fuck knows how long,’ Eddy is saying. ‘I miss it. Honestly.’

  ‘I wish I never had to do another pitch ever again,’ Paul says. And then smiles, to smudge the unintended sincerity of what he said.

  ‘You’d miss it.’

  ‘I doubt it. Maybe.’

  ‘Is it not going well?’ Eddy asks.

  ‘It’s going all right. Anyway, what are you up to, Jaw?’

  Eddy takes out his wallet, and flips it open in his big hands. From it he pulls a business card, which he holds out, mysteriously, to Paul. Paul presses his cigarette into the ashtray’s glass notch, and takes the card. The first thing he notices are the words ‘EDWARD FELTMAN, DIRECTOR OF SALES’. Then he notices the stylised elephant-head logo in the top left-hand corner, and the words ‘DELMAR MORGAN’ next to it. ‘Is this you?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course it’s fucking me,’ Eddy says.

  ‘Sales director?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Paul offers him the card back, but Eddy says, ‘Keep it.’

  ‘All right.’ He puts it in his pocket. ‘So how d’you get that then?’ There is something sour about the way he asks the question, and, hearing this, he is slightly ashamed of the shadow of pique that seems to have fallen on him. Eddy is still smiling, and there is undoubtedly something smug about his smile. But then, perhaps in an effort to smooth over what has become an unexpectedly prickly moment, he leans back, and says, with a laugh, ‘Oh, mate, I don’t fucking know.’ And if that was his intention, it works. Mollified, even smiling, Paul shakes his head and says, ‘Fucking hell – you.’

  ‘I know. It’s mad.’

  Having put the card in his pocket, Paul takes it out again. ‘What’s Delmar Morgan?’ he asks.

  ‘Sales place,’ Eddy says, looking away with a sort of sudden shyness, and swigging the sweet, green dregs of his Bacardi Breezer.

  ‘What sort of sales place?’

  ‘The usual sort. Ad sales.’

  ‘How long’ve you been working there?’

  ‘A few years. Do you want another one?’

  ‘It’s my round, isn’t it?’ Paul says.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Same again?’

  ‘Cheers.’

  Standing, waiting at the bar, a tenner in his hand, Paul feels an unpleasantly keen sense of shortfall. That Eddy Jaw is director of sales somewhere … It suddenly puts things in
to perspective, makes him suddenly dissatisfied with his own life – even slightly ashamed of it – a shame deepened when he thinks of the flustered, envious shock with which he took the news of Eddy’s unexpected success. And there, in the press of people at the bar, he experiences a savage twinge of panic, a dismaying sense that he has somehow overslept, that it is too late. It is his turn and he says, ‘Pint of Ayingerbrau and a Bacardi Breezer.’

  ‘What flavour?’

  ‘Um. Melon.’

  Eddy is more forthcoming when Paul returns to the table. He has a less edgy way of speaking now – the first Bacardi Breezer seems to have smoothed him out. ‘Everyone thought I was mad when I went to Delmar,’ he says. ‘I thought I was mad. It was going nowhere. It was going down. That old Chink with the Scottish name was running it then – Malcolm Kirkbride. He was MD. Five-foot-tall Malaysian bloke with a Fu Manchu moustache who could hardly fucking speak English and was called Malcolm Kirkbride. He was in charge in those days, and it showed. Morale was on the floor. People were leaving every day – whole teams disappearing overnight. But we turned it round – me, Tony Littleton and John Pascoe. We were just three salesmen, but we got together one day and decided to sort things out. I was sick and tired of fucking around, Paul. We all were. Since the end of Northwood I’d just been fucking around.’ Paul nods in sympathy. Eddy smiles, and says, ‘First thing I did was try to make money off the fucking horses. Can you believe that? I lost all the money I made at Northwood on the fucking nags. Lost it all in about two or three months. Then I went through a few sales jobs, here and there, just getting by. You know how it is. And I was still trying to make money out of the horses. I spent all my fucking time on the Internet, looking at tipsters’ sites, looking at the fucking form and all that shit. Trying to put together the perfect staking plan …’ He laughs. ‘I never made any money from that. Everybody always thinks they can, they always think they’re different. They’re like fucking medieval alchemists, trying to turn base metals or whatever into gold, and the more they try, the more they believe it must be possible, because they’ve spent too much time and too much money to believe anything else, and it never is.’ Eddy stops speaking for a moment and smiles, remembering all the hours he spent in smoke-filled bookies – and there’s nowhere smokier – the little stubby plastic pens, blue in William Hill, red in Ladbrokes. He still goes in sometimes to have a bet – or just to taste the failure he no longer shares – enjoying the status he has in there, a big man in a suit, among the nervous unemployed, the dusty builders, the garrulous Chinese, the threadbare middle-aged men in overcoats who always sit in the same place, like it’s their desk at work, their personal Racing Post spread out, their paper coffee cup, their dreams, their fags. ‘And one day,’ Eddy says, ‘I thought, what the fuck are you doing? If it’s money you want, you’d be making a fucking fortune if you put the hours, the dedication, the single-mindedness you’re putting into the horses into selling ad space. You’d be making more than you’d be making off the horses even if your fucking system was working. That was the stupidest thing. You see, I’d always thought I was lazy, and that was just the way it was, but actually I wasn’t. I was working evenings and weekends, working on the fucking horses – working on the wrong thing. So one day, when I’d just lost a couple of grand, I took all the fucking crap I’d accumulated, all the papers and pages of numbers and fucking spreadsheets and tipsters, and chucked it all. I chucked it all out, and wiped it off my hard drive, and cancelled all the subscriptions, and it felt fucking great. Like a fucking great load off my back. And obviously at first there was a void in my life. And nothing to hope for – that was the worst thing. Nothing to hope for – if you’re trying to turn lead into gold, and you believe it can be done, and you think you’re getting close, there’s always something to hope for, something to dream about. Suddenly not having that is fucking hard. You’ve got to dream about something else, you’ve got to have something else to expend your energy on, to get you out of bed in the morning. And preferably something that will actually fucking get you somewhere.’

  Pausing for emphasis, Eddy swigs green alcopop, and Paul lights a B&H. ‘We were selling on a book called International Pulp and Paper Yearbook,’ he goes on. ‘Not a great book. A rubbish book, in fact. A basket case. Everyone knew it was rubbish, and no one expected it to make much money. So no one really bothered. We’re all fucking good salesmen – John and Tony and me – we just weren’t trying. And then one day, we just said, Fuck this – there’s just no point doing this like this. And we really had a go. It’s a shame you weren’t there, Paul. I’d have liked you to have been there. Tony and John felt the same way I did – there’s no point muddling through any more, faffing about. We wanted money, everything we needed was there, to hand, we just had to stop making excuses, and fucking get on with it. You seen Taxi Driver?’ he asks, surprisingly.

  Paul nods. ‘Yeah, of course.’

  ‘I love that film. There’s a great line in it. I can’t remember it exactly. It’s that older taxi driver – remember him? – and he’s talking to De Niro, and he says he sometimes wonders how he’s ended up, at his age, still driving a company cab. You know, not having his own cab. And he says in the end it must be because he didn’t really want his own cab. Because he didn’t really want his own cab. I think that’s brilliant.’

  Paul nods slowly, meditatively.

  ‘Isn’t that brilliant? It’s the only explanation he can think of, because if he really wanted his own cab, there was nothing to stop him having it. Nothing.’ He watches Paul – who has gone quiet – to see what effect his words are having on him. Then, with a smile, he says, ‘Just going to point Percy at the porcelain. Back in a sec.’

  When Eddy gets back, he continues his story. ‘Once we started trying, once we started working, once we started only being satisfied with the max – it went through the fucking roof. Nobody else could believe it. And they weren’t too happy about it either because it showed them up. Kirkbride was fucking happy, though.’ Eddy does a crude, comedy Chinese accent – ‘“You boys de best! You de best! Me so horny!” Of course he was fucking horny – he got ten per cent of everything. When we finished Pulp and Paper, he put us on International Project Finance, which is a much better book, and we made much more money. More than at Northwood, Paul.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Paul says sceptically.

  ‘Much more. And the books were rubbish, rubbish compared to what we were working on at Northwood. When I think about what we could have made if we’d actually worked those books properly …’ He shakes his head. ‘Anyway. We were making a fuck of a lot of money, and everything was hunky-dory. Then we said we wanted better terms, more commission – because if you’re working that hard, you don’t like to see eighty-five per cent of it go into other people’s pockets – but Kirkbride wasn’t so keen on that. “I see wha’ I can do, boys. Ma-com see wha’ he can do.” And he did fuck all – so we asked again, said we weren’t happy, said we were going to leave. That got his fucking attention. He got us into his office, very serious, very fucking sincere, and said he understood our concerns, and had an idea. He said he’d make us all managers, with a team each, and we’d get a special override, plus what we’d get anyway, if we improved the whole company’s sales like we’d improved our own – which basically meant doubling them. The override was five per cent. Five fucking per cent!’ Eddy drinks indignantly. ‘So we got rid of Kirkbride. His sales director was a ponce called Pascal Olivier – we got rid of him too. We went to the chairman, behind Kirkbride’s back – a bloke called Sir Trevor Cawthorne. A Geordie. I get on well with him. He knew us even then, because the three of us were making half the company’s sales. We said to him, why don’t you let us run the company? Get rid of Kirkbride, and we’ll make you a lot more money than you’re making now. It took him about two hours to think it over, before he called me and said, “All right.” And I was in Kirkbride’s office at the time, talking to him about some shit, and my mobile rang, and it was Trevor and
he’s saying, “I’m going to sack Kirkbride – you lot can take over.” And I’m pretending it’s someone else, and looking at Kirkbride, and thinking, “You don’t know what’s about to happen to you, mate. You don’t realise that your life is in my hands.” And I say, “Yeah, that’s fine.” And then a few minutes later, Kirkbride’s phone rings and he answers it, and puts on his best arse-licking voice – “Ah hewow, Sah Trawah! How ah you, Sah Trawah?” And he waves at me to get out of his office, and whispers, “Is Sah Trawah.” And I’m thinking, “Yeah, I fucking know it is.” So he went for a meeting with Trevor that afternoon, and Trevor sacked him, and then we had a meeting with Trevor – John and Tony and me – and he basically gave us the keys to the company, and said we had six months to show him what we could do. And we showed him. We turned things round. We changed the image of the company. I came up with the elephant logo,’ Eddy says proudly. ‘It’s a new image. Honesty, integrity, long-term relationships.’