by Robin Ince
‘I’m sorry about the mug.’
Candy finally realised something was troubling Nerys. She softened, perching her amazing arse next to Nerys’s stapler.
‘I’ve never told anyone this. Ever. But yes. I did see something. Once.’
‘You’re crapping me up,’ Nerys often made up her own lingo. It was one of her quirks.
‘No. I really did. I was about five years old. It was winter, the ground was white. It was so cold it took your breath away. I’d been sent to bed early for being a ‘pathetic dick’. I heard a noise outside. A terrifying whisper. I was scared but I needed to know what it was . . .’
Nerys was barely breathing. Candy continued.
‘I looked out of my bedroom window and saw him. Sat there silently in the snow. He looked up at me with his big coal-like eyes and long carroty nose. It was amazing.’
Nerys vowed that if she didn’t die today she’d definitely kill Candy once this month’s audit had been done.
Later that afternoon, Nerys started to feel much calmer about the whole thing. She’d downloaded an ‘anti-anxiety’ app and had turned the radio from some local bullshit station that played Pharrell too often, to Classic FM. She liked listening to Classic FM. There would always be some point in the afternoon where you could pretend you were in Superman or Jurassic Park or Jaws. So peaceful and relaxing. Nerys always thought she’d be in a movie someday. A real one. Not like the one she had to get taken off of YouTube of her wearing ‘tops no bottoms’, pretending to ride a static washing line. Proper movies starring people with verified Twitter accounts. In her heart she thought she could still be an actor. She just needed to join a local group, maybe make a short film. Send it out to some agents. She just wanted to shift those last few pounds off her thighs before she’d feel really comfortable in front of the camera. Yes, that was her plan. She needed to lose a bit of weight, join an AmDram group, meet some young film-makers and then she’d probably be in Hollyoaks within twelve months. And in Hollywood in two years. But maybe she wanted to go back to university? She’d dropped out after getting gout at the end of her first year. She always wanted to be an astronaut. And in some ways she thought she probably still could be. She’d just get her degree, learn French and German, apply for a job at the European Space Agency (she had worked at the Leicester Space Centre for six months while her Nan was dying so her CV was already quite impressive), so within five years she could start her astronaut training. Although maybe she should learn French and German first? Do an evening class? Yes, she’d do that. In September. No point starting in the middle of the academic year.
Nerys was ripped from her thoughts by . . . she didn’t know what. She looked around the office, not even Candy was here. She’d gone home early because her cat was sick. Though come to think of it, who had texted Candy about the cat? Not the cat itself. Dirty lies!
Nerys was once again interrupted by something . . . but it wasn’t a noise. She felt as if her soul was being invaded by an army of jackbooted soldiers made of Play-Doh. As if something was slicing into her and climbing inside. However, it wasn’t painful. It was sort of wonderful but horrific at the same time. Like having acupuncture. As soon as the sensation started, it was over. And then it came, wave after wave, a convulsion of indescribable terror and joy. When it finally stopped she felt as if she’d just vomited herself to an orgasm. Her heart was racing, she was freezing cold. This was doing nothing for her hangover. She looked up the symptoms on the internet but could find nothing for ‘Play-Doh men dancing in your soul’. The cold sweats however suggested she might not have eaten enough lunch. Nerys stood up to make her way to the communal fridge and promptly blacked out.
When Nerys awoke, the office was pitch black except for the tiny flicker of her screen saver and the faint dots from a variety of electrical items put on standby rather than powered down. (So bad for the environment.) She’d been on the floor for three hours. Even Nerys, with her relaxed attitude to personal safety, knew this wasn’t good. But she was feeling OK and she’d not got round to registering with a GP, although she’d lived in the area for six years.
‘If it happens again I’ll definitely go to hospital or something,’ she thought to herself.
Now, most people after such a weird and frightening experience would have called someone. A parent, a sibling, a lover, a best friend. Nerys had none of these. Not anymore. She was pretty proud of being able to take care of herself, although it was a situation circumstance had thrust upon her rather than one she chose. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about it. It’s the only way to stay strong. Just go home, watch five episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and call it a night.
As soon as Nerys stepped outside the office door, as soon as she’d set the alarm and triple locked the heavy front door, she felt as if she was being watched. It was so intense she couldn’t quite believe no one was with her. She could almost, almost see someone. A shadow in her periphery but not even a shadow. A shadow of a shadow of something that wasn’t there. She took a deep breath and started the fifteen-minute walk home. Was it her imagination or was it darker this evening? Maybe some of the streetlights were off? The night felt as if it had been dipped in treacle. Every step took enormous effort, but as soon as she thought about the motion, the movement of joint and muscle, the sticky feeling dissipated. The eyes on her though, they remained.
She quickened her pace, she slowed down, she walked past three different fried chicken shops. Nerys even popped into the local cinema to see what was coming out at the weekend. And yet the only constant was the feeling she was being watched. And not from afar. Not some pervert with night vision goggles peering at her from behind a bush as he tugged his winkle to climax. No. Eyes attached to a face that was breathing hot air on to her neck. Nerys turned excruciatingly slowly, as if whatever was behind her might disappear with any sudden movement. As she moved she caught her reflection in a darkened shop window. She looked terrified. And yet there was nothing there.
The sense of relief that crashed over Nerys as she raced up the stairs to her cramped bedsit and slammed the door shut was palpable. Unfortunately it lasted merely seconds before the eyes without a face bore into her once more. The feeling of dread and horror, of being watched, that something was waiting, became too much for her. She went to her bathroom and opened the mirrored cupboard over the sink. Staring at the few bottles in there, she didn’t even know what she was looking for. Was she going to overdose? No, of course not. So what was she planning? Nerys started to close the door but stopped herself. What if the thing that has followed her, that was looking at her, was in the mirror? She’d be face to face with whatever it was that was making her heart feel like it was about to burst from her chest. She shut her eyes and slammed the cupboard door with such force that the mirror smashed into the sink. Holding up one of the larger shards, she stared directly at herself, before turning the angle to see what was behind her. Nothing. There was nothing there.
Nerys shook as she sat on her sofa clutching the shattered mirror in her hand. The oppressive impression of being under surveillance was too much.
‘Leave me alone.’
She waved the glass at nothing in particular, the feeling growing more intense with each swipe. It was as if whatever had been looking at her was now in her personal space. Half in her, half out, nesting in the bed it had prepared in her body earlier at the office. What had earlier been a sensation was full blown crippling pain now. Had the Ouija board been right? Was today the day she died? But there was nothing there. Suddenly feeling brave, feeling absolutely certain she was going to find this . . . whatever, she stood up and started to search the room, overturning the table, tearing down the curtain, smashing the TV screen.
Nothing. No one. Not even a mouse.
She sat back down on her sofa and pulled a blanket around herself. If no one was here, who was looking at her?
The answer to that question was easily answ
ered if she’d just opened her eyes a little wider. If she’d given in to the fear. That look of horror on the face of a corpse. That’s how wide she needed to open her eyes to see the young man, wearing all black, sat next to her. He’d been with her all day. He felt sad she had ignored him, had dismissed his attempts to love her. He took her hand and held it tight. Nerys turned her head towards the tiny window of her tiny bedsit where she kept a framed photo of her parents. It was the last thing Nerys Bag ever saw.
Anthemoessa
phill jupitus
‘You muppet, Staples, that’s never a fucking gram!’ said Mike.
As he stood shoulder to shoulder in the cramped cubicle with the two other men, Steve Webb felt an old familiar warmth creeping up his neck and across his cheeks. This moment was one that he had imagined often since first starting in mergers and acquisitions and he was most put out that it wasn’t anything like as exotic or rock and roll as he had seen in all the films. In Scarface, which Steve watched for the first time two weeks ago, Al Pacino stands wild eyed and wired in front of a pile of cocaine generous enough to kill an elephant. The small hillock of pure white powder put Steve in mind of The Great British Bake Off. At the time, he remembered thinking that he wouldn’t have been surprised if Pacino had set down his machine gun before cracking three eggs into the pile while Sue Perkins arches her eyebrows saying, ‘Three eggs! Well it looks like Tony Montana certainly means business with this Battenburg . . .’
‘Don’t be a cunt, Mike! At least he’s gone and got some.’ The voice of Jon Phelps managed to halt the reddening on Steve’s now mercifully cooling cheeks. Since starting at work Steve had found Jon to be one of the few men who seemed to like him. Not that this was in any way a certainty, but what he did know was that Jon treated him less like a dick than everybody else.
Steve hadn’t been shocked by what he had encountered when he started work. The world of high finance had barely been dented by the incredibly public financial scandals of the previous six years. The world had been brought to its knees by the insanely cavalier wheeler dealing of the financial sector. The government made all the right noises about regulation and putting controls in place to the press, but it became rapidly apparent that all they would ever really do is make noises. Every time you saw Cameron or Osborne on telly talking with their ‘serious frowny’ faces about controls within the financial services industry, the only thing that was missing at the end of each statement was the colossal wink to their old school mates who owned the fuckers.
Growing up in Essex and drinking in the bars around Fenchurch Street station whenever he came up to London for a jolly, he had seen swarms of these brash, sharp-suited men standing around and barking at each other for years. The noise they made as a group was always a little louder than you heard in any other pub, a little more feral. Whenever he heard their laughter it was violent, brash and utterly joyless. But curiously, he found himself wishing that he could laugh like that at somebody one day. To be stood in one of those groups of men and laughing at the misfortune of someone else. Not to be the one being laughed at would be a refreshing change of pace for Steve Webb.
His mates at sixth form had mostly gone on to university, but Steve always knew he wanted to work in the Square Mile. Nothing else would do. And so he began writing to hundreds of companies while he was still doing his A-levels. Any kind of job would do, he just needed to get through the door and then could take matters from there. He signed up with every employment agency along Bishopsgate, scoured the internet and pestered friends with parents in the business. And that was how, when he was eighteen, he started as a delivery clerk in the stationery department of J.D. Penrose.
His job was curiously anachronistic for such a mercilessly high-tech industry. He would deliver pens, pencils and Post-Its to all the departments of J.D.P. The stationery warehouse was located away from the main buildings, in the warren of lanes just east of Old Street. He would make four or five tours of the main buildings each day, come rain or shine. Sometimes there would be a ‘special’, which he would have to fill out immediately and run across.
Making deliveries for such a massive organisation gave him a unique overview of the whole structure. A full circuit of the two buildings would take him an hour and ten minutes depending on how many departments had ordered. He’d always begin in the bowels of the post room and then up to reception and security on ground and then up to where he really wanted to be: the floors.
For such a vast operation the department he worked in was quite modestly staffed. George Hughes was the stationery manager and had been with Penrose since he was Steve’s age. He was a tiny wiry man with a slicked back mop of slate grey hair, rarely at his desk because he would be at the loading dock smoking. Pretty much all of his duties were conducted from the loading dock in order to facilitate his habit. George’s number two was Terry Moss an imposing northerner who Steve thought might have been a miner at some point in the past. This was never really certain as Steve couldn’t understand a word that Terry said. This was not ideal as it was Terry’s job to show him where all the various departments were. As they pushed the trolley along the corridors Terry would gesture at certain doorways arching his eyebrows and frowning or chuckling like a large avuncular bear.
Over the coming months Steve got to know every single corridor and room of J.D. Penrose. He knew the names of everybody on staff and which departments they worked for. One thing that struck him about the geography of high finance was the way that the buildings got quieter the higher you went up them. The trading floors were like Bedlam. Mergers and acquisitions was no less manic but just a bit quieter and somehow more assured. This pattern of diminishing volume repeated itself right the way up to the chairman’s floor, which was quiet as a graveyard. He was always polite and cheery and within three months had even gained a nickname, ‘Staples’, given to him by Jon Phelps on perhaps his fifth visit to mergers and acquisitions.
Steve’s long-term game plan was gradually coming together. He was on a nodding basis with the heads of every department. He had felt confident enough on several occasions to actually have football discussions with some of them. Harsh, testosterone-fuelled banter was the order of the day. The energy was intense and everybody seemed grimly aware that you not only had to be good at your job, but you also had to be able to hold your own in the pub afterwards. You worked hard, talked fast, but played harder. And if you couldn’t hack it, then you would perish almost immediately. Steve’s easy manner and the non-threatening nature of his position meant that any room he walked into immediately co-opted him as an arbitrator in some or other petty dispute.
‘Oy, Staples, is this tie blue or green?’
‘Oy, Staples, would you rather shag Cheryl Cole now, or when she was first in Girls Aloud?’
‘Oy, Staples, how many Jägerbombs do you think Jackson could do before he’d pass out?’
After six months of careful consideration he had made up his mind. He was going to go to HR and apply to take an internal entry-level appointment board for a position in mergers and acquisitions. The internal promotion of staff had been a key aspect of life at J.D. Penrose. It was said that old man Penrose himself had been in the post room for two years before becoming a ledger clerk and then climbing the ladder to make J.D. Penrose one of the world’s most prosperous financial operations. The part of the legend, which had been glossed over, was the fact that his dad, old-old man Penrose owned the bank anyway and had made his errant son work in the post room for two years after he got a secretary pregnant while he was still at Oxford.
Steve had been patiently gathering information over the previous months in preparation for this moment. And as he walked into his boardroom and sat at the table his heart leaped with joy to see that the two people opposite were Jean from HR and Jon Phelps. He had to fight to keep a straight face as Jon actually winked at him when Jean asked the question: ‘So, Stephen. Why do you want to work in mergers and acquisitions?’
After a fairly low-level grilling which lasted a shade under twenty minutes, Jean offered a hand over the table and smiled, ‘Welcome to mergers and acquisitions, Mister Webb.’ Steve smiled and turned to Jon who handed him a manila folder.
‘Well, Steve, everything you need to know is in this folder. We have already notified your department that you’ll be starting with us in two weeks, and we look forward to having you on the team.’ As Steve took the folder, Jon shook his hand, the grip just a little firmer than he had expected. He walked out of the room and headed for the lifts, pressing the button to call it. As the lift took him down he opened the folder Jon had given him. The front page contained the words:
j.d. penrose
mergers and acquisitions
Underneath this was a small three-inch square Post-It note on which was written the words:
While not as savage as the trading floors below, mergers and acquisitions still hummed with a controlled urgency. Jon put Steve at a desk with Mike Taylor in order to be shown the ropes. This was a slight disappointment as Taylor was one of the older members of staff. At thirty-four he was fucking ancient for this game. He had moved up to M&A three years previously, after the reorganisation of the Hong Kong desk. He was full of all sorts of far-fetched stories about nights out he’d been on in the Far East, tales of expensive prostitutes and mounds of cocaine and exotic foods and incredible hotels. ‘’Fing is, Staples,’ he slurred – Steve bridled a little at this. While everybody else now called him by his name, Taylor had persisted in addressing him by his old stationery department nickname. While this was basic-level gamesmanship it didn’t make it any less annoying – ‘’fing is, Staples, that when you get a bird in Hong Kong you fuckin’ make sure that it is a bird. ’Cos I’m not fuckin’ joking, the geezers out there who dress as birds look fuckin’ well tasty. And if you’ve ’ad a few, well . . .’ He let the sentence hang.
