by Johnny Mains
‘Whoa,’ he said.
‘Shut up,’ Nic said.
Before he was able to make another comment, he found something slipped over his head and tightened round his neck; it felt coarse and constricted his breathing immediately. It was jerked sharply by Nic who had moved behind him and as he struggled, he looked up and saw that it was in fact a length of rope that had been coiled over a roof beam. His head was inside a noose. The rope dug deep into his neck, and his face began to swell, though due to lack of light it was not possible to fully appreciate the colour it was turning. In rapid succession it went from carmine to burgundy to the yellowish purple of an old bruise. Anton released his arms and he stood precariously on the stool, wobbling, thrashing and turning, fully awake at last. Speech was not possible, only wheezing, and a bubble of blood trickled down from his nose to be absorbed by the silk pyjama top. His chubby fingers went to the rope, though there was no slackening of it, no loosening, no give, as the strong young man behind him applied all his own weight to the job in hand. Turning once too often, Ron lost his footing and the stool slipped from beneath him. He was gurgling and choking, spitting and sighing, dying at the end of a piece of rope. Never a pretty man in life, in death he was an obscene caricature of the hanged man: deep plum face, bug eyes ready to pop from their sockets, and a bloated fat grey worm of a tongue protruding from liver coloured lips. His arms fell to his sides, fingers spasmed like sausages on a griddle; his legs kicked, while his feet continued to describe invisible steps in the air. A pool of urine formed just ten centimetres beneath his feet and steamed lightly on the cool floor.
Anton recorded the whole thing on his iPhone 7, newly purchased with a Christmas cheque.
‘Oh look, Nic. Dad dancing!’
The older twin came round to inspect his handiwork and watched the instant replay on the phone.
‘Bloody good show.’
Content with their night’s work, they tightened the light bulbs in the sockets, removed their latex surgical gloves, and retired to their respective bedrooms.
On the windscreen of the Aston Martin was a folded piece of paper. On it, written unmistakably in Ron’s own hand were just two words: Sorry, Dad.
The Arse-Licker
STEPHEN VOLK
I have to say I’m not really temperamentally suited to business, as such. It’s never been a particular interest of mine. To succeed, to really succeed, you have to have a ruthless streak and a selfish, ambitious bent. I have neither of those attributes. I don’t think of them as being particularly desirable attributes to have, to be honest with you. But you have to fit in, obviously. You have to pretend you’re one of them. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. So I’ve learnt to look like a dog and bark like a dog, but I’m not really a dog at all. I’m probably a worm.
Not that it worries me unduly. You have to come to terms with who you are in life and I realised fairly early on I wasn’t exactly a go-getter. I wasn’t somebody who others looked up to or were impressed by in any way. I was physically unprepossessing and intellectually average. My parents never deluded themselves I was special, because I wasn’t. In school I always envied the children in class whose arms always shot in the air when they had answers to the teacher’s questions. The ones who got gold stars. The ones who got the school prizes or won cups on sports days. I never acquired any of those noble achievements for effort, probably because I never really applied any effort to anything. Though I did pick plums from the tree in our garden once and leave them in a paper bag for our English teacher, and I’m sure that was instrumental in getting me get a B+ at the end of term. After that she definitely looked over at me with a smile on her face, Miss Hexham, so that had to mean something, I thought. She had a nice smile, Miss Hexham.
This is the crucial thing, you see. From an early age I learnt how to get what I wanted by ingratiating myself.
I found that if my mum said she loved me as she tucked me up in bed, it was politic to say ‘I love you too’ back. Experience showed things worked in your favour that way. If you said to your grandparents ‘I miss you’ when they visited, as often as not it meant they’d buy you more Lego. Basically, if you show people you like them they’ll find it very difficult not to like you back. All the more so in the workplace. If you treat the right people – always the big cheese, never the breadsticks – with innate reverence and pander enthusiastically to their every whim, however ill-founded or undeserved, there’s a good chance you might prosper, while others who have been less conspicuous in their admiration go to the wall.
My behaviour was simply a strategy for survival in life. I didn’t plan it. It just fell into a pattern that way. I didn’t know I was doing it, half the time. It was just – well – me.
Telling X that they’d saved the company. Telling Y that the way they dealt with a situation was impeccable. Telling Z that I envied their resolve and business acumen beyond measure. That I thought their wife was great fun and their children were gorgeous enough to be photographic models – though neither was even remotely the case.
Frankly, it was my default position. It was also, frankly, the one thing I was good at.
For instance, I would offer to cast my eye over one of Innox’s internal reports in my spare time, saying the next morning I thought it was brilliant. Sometimes, as a way of nuancing my effluent praise, I’d offer spurious notes – ‘. . . not that one can really improve on perfection . . .’
I’d get him a tea or coffee. ‘Milk, no sugar, isn’t it?’ (I’d long since made it my business to know it was.)
Staying late. Making sure not only was I last in the office but that he saw I was the last in the office.
‘Don’t work too hard!’
‘I won’t, Brian! Love to Margaret and the boys!’
Careful to leave a spare jacket on the back of my chair, so it looked like I was first in the next day.
Opening doors before he got to them.
Calling the lift.
Calling a cab. Paying the taxi driver before he could delve into his pocket for change.
Getting flowers for his wife on their anniversary. ‘No worries. There’s a florist right next to where I get my baguette at lunchtime. No trouble at all. What does she like? Roses, d’you think? How much do you want to spend? No, don’t give it me now. We can worry about that later.’
Brushing crumbs from a seat before he sat down. Wiping the table under his coffee cup with a paper napkin. Offering him my expensive retractable ball-point pen across the board room table when his had run out.
‘Keep it.’
‘No . . .’
‘Don’t be silly. Really.’
‘Are you sure? Well, that’s . . .’
Bingo.
More brownie points.
‘Nice tie. Beautiful colour. Brian, I’m not being rude, but do you mind me asking where you get your male grooming products? Do you use moisturizer? Because lately you look ten years younger. No, you really do.’
Birthday cards. Naturally.
Christmas cards. Vital. Quality ones. None of your cheap charity rubbish. The message written inside carefully composed for the occasion. Not too long. Not too obsequious. Not too crawling or obvious. Just striking the right balance between formal and friendly. Just implying, slightly, that his friendship as a colleague and mentor was so important that without it you might take your own life. That kind of thing.
It was an art.
An art I’d perfected over years of diligent application. It put me in a special position. Close to the throne. It gave me the ear of the King. It made me secure and unassailable.
Or so I thought.
His name was Terry Kotwika, and the moment he said ‘Hi’ I decided I didn’t like him. I don’t like ‘Hi’ at the best of times. I don’t see what’s so wrong with a good, old-fashioned, Anglo-Saxon ‘Hello’. But mainly I disliked him because he wore his suit li
ke a best man at a wedding who wanted to sneak out at the earliest opportunity for a Silk Cut. He also had a haircut like Paul Weller. Never a good idea. Not even if you’re Paul Weller.
We were all called into the board room and change was announced. I don’t like change. Innox was rubbing his hands with glee – never a pretty sight – and we were introduced to two thrusting new executives joining the company with the specific brief of bringing in new clients. Oh, goodie.
There was another chap, Rashid Barker, who seemed pudgy and ineffectual, incessantly hoisting his belt up over his draught-excluder of a midriff bulge. Even his moss-like beard was apologetic. I could handle him. He was invisible even as you looked at him. This other one – this Kotwika – that was another story.
As soon as the meeting dispersed, I hurried up and shook him enthusiastically by the hand – old habits die hard – impressing on him how eager I was to work together. He didn’t reply, simply staring me out with a fixed, oily grin and crow’s feet entrenched at the sides of his face in an expression somewhere between indifference and contempt.
I was the one who should have been contemptuous, if anything. I was the Financial Director and this was the first I knew about us taking on new blood. The other board members wandered off, silently peeved at being cut out of the loop. I merely knocked on Innox’s door, poked my head round, gave him a staunch thumb-up and whispered that I thought his decision had been ‘really exciting’.
I lied.
The duo were good at their job, no doubt about it, but they looked down their nose at us in accounts. We were the bean-counters, while they were the alpha males of the pack. They even sat in their chairs differently. They lolled.
Even so, it didn’t bother me at first. Live and let live is my motto. I never rock the boat. Then something did rock it. My boat, anyway.
We were in a meeting. Kotwika had his little take-out cardboard cup of latte from Starbucks because it was just after lunch, but I didn’t have a coffee and, as I was going to the kitchen, I asked Innox if he’d like me to get him one too. ‘Milk, no sugar?’
‘Three bags full, sir,’ muttered Kotwika. And sniggered.
I pretended not to notice, but there was a definite smirk on his face. And when I came back from the coffee machine, the smirk was still there.
I think it was the smirk that did it.
After that, whenever I opened a door for Innox, or pushed the lift call button, or brushed his chair with my hand before he sat down – I knew Kotwika was watching. I knew Kotwika was at his desk, yards away, lolling. Not saying anything. He didn’t need to say anything. It was enough just to loll.
Pretty soon I didn’t need to look at him to get a cold chill on the back of my neck. And when we’d go to The Cittie of Yorke in High Holborn after work, that’s where it would happen again. I was always first to the bar, ordering the first bottle of red wine. Knowing the Shiraz Innox liked best. And when the others drifted off after the first bottle to catch their little trains home to suburbia from Farrington or Waterloo East, I’d habitually keep my beloved M.D. company over the second bottle, and third. Listen to his tiresome tales of woe, however boring. Laugh at his long-winded jokes and stories I’d heard a hundred times before. Endure yet again why his wife didn’t understand him and his spoilt children made his life a nightmare. And if he got too paralytic, I’d make sure he got a cab to the station. Sometimes be there to mop the dribble from his tie and make sure he got on the right train to Dorking.
‘Colin. What a surprise, mate.’ It was Kotwika, already with a bottle of Shiraz and three glasses. ‘Are you going to hang up Brian’s coat? There’s the rack over there. Go on, old son. Chop, chop.’
When I turned back from the coat hooks, there he was, laughing. Innox sitting beside him, laughing too.
Which was the moment I knew it could all be taken away from me in an instant. Everything I’d worked for. Everything I’d put my heart and soul into all those years.
I felt inadequate. I felt pathetic. Most of all, I felt threatened. But I didn’t know what to do about it. I suppose I waited for an opportunity to land in my lap. And land in my lap, eventually, it did.
I was presenting the annual figures for the company and they weren’t good. They weren’t optimistic at all. I couldn’t sugar-coat it. Budget restraints had to be made. The question of redundancies came up, as I knew it would. The directors had gathered in the conference room – we all knew the writing was on the wall, quite frankly – and I’d been up all night working on the only rescue strategy I had to offer, but really it was a strategy to do what I wanted and had waited for patiently for the previous three months.
‘Last in, first out.’ I lifted my eyes nervously. ‘Sorry, but it’s the only practical solution. The blunt fact is it’s far too expensive to get rid of people who’ve been with the company for years – twenty, thirty years, some of them. The pay-offs, pensions. Look at the bottom line . . .’ I could see Innox’s normally florid complexion turn the colour of Milk of Magnesia. ‘Horrid, I know – but we can’t think with our heart, we have to think with our heads, if we want this company to survive. It’s rotten, but . . .’ A pall of gloom descended like a slab of concrete as they silently perused my single, brutally concise, final page of A4. ‘I like Barker and Kotwika as much as anybody, I really do, but . . .’
For a long while nobody spoke, and neither did I.
Innox said, ‘Bugger.’ He leaned back and exhaled air at the ceiling, looking like a putto misplaced from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ‘Hell.’ He threw down my spreadsheet, which skidded across the surface of the board room table and ended up, almost magically, in front of me. ‘Fuck.’
‘I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes, telling them,’ murmured the ash-blonde stick insect from Human Resources. ‘Do you want me to do it?’
‘Fuck off, Christine,’ said Innox.
‘Brian’s fantastically good at giving people bad news,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him in action first-hand. He really is exceptional. Even inspirational.’
Innox didn’t look at me. Maybe he didn’t even hear me, and for a short, unpleasant frisson of time I thought I might have overstepped the mark.
‘Fuck off, the lot of you,’ he said. ‘And Chubb, tell the two of them to step in here and let’s get it over with. Bollocks,’ he added, like punctuation.
Most of the staff had gone home. They tended to drift away early on a Friday. I never did, of course. I think I was arranging a BACS payment to a freelancer who’d chased me twice by e-mail and three times with a phone call, virtually claiming he was living a hand-to-mouth existence and his house was about to be repossessed and his children sold into slavery, no doubt. The usual sob story. Water off a duck’s back to me. I always tried to avoid payments in the month they’re invoiced, delaying them into the next quarter by subterfuge or obfuscation, preferably. That was my job.
Innox was working late too. Seeing a tweak of an opportunity, I rapped the glass separating our two offices and mimed the drinking of a hot beverage. He nodded as if I’d read his mind.
‘Coffee or tea?’ I mimed.
He lip-read, calling back: ‘Coffee. Thanks. You’re a life saver!’
I smiled, at the time absolutely convinced we were the last ones in the office. Most of the overhead lighting panels over the desks were off and the black lady was circumnavigating with her ridiculously large vacuum cleaner, a machine roughly contemporaneous with Stevenson’s Rocket. So when I saw Terry Kotwika standing at the coffee machine, it stopped me in my tracks.
I hadn’t spoken to him since the fateful day. Not surprisingly, I had kept my distance. This was the first time I had seen him close to, and it shocked me to see that he was a shadow of his former self, monochromatic under the fluorescent tube.
‘Hi. What did you want? Coffee?’
‘Yes,’ I said. The wind taken out of his sails, he seemed almost human.
‘I’ll make you one.’
‘No, it’s all right. Actually I’m getting one for Brian.’
‘That’s OK. I’ll get one for him, too.’
‘Sure?’
‘How does he like it?’
‘Milk, no sugar. I’m the same. Are you sure about this?
‘Yeah. Why not?’
‘OK. Well. That’s really kind of you. Thanks. Thanks a lot.’
If it was a parting gesture, it was a nice one. I felt my cheeks reddening, so turned away and returned to my monk’s cell.
On the way I passed his desk and could see now that it was starkly denuded of personal possessions. Everything – the robot pencil-sharpener, crayon drawing to ‘Daddy’, pictures of his wife and kids making faces on a rollercoaster ride – all had been piled into a cardboard box.
I sat at my own, dumbly staring at my screen saver until he brought me my mug. As he turned to go I said: ‘There are cuts across the board these days everywhere. You can’t be certain of anything these days. It’s terrible.’
He shrugged philosophically.
‘Terry, you know it was pure logistics. Nothing Personal.’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘You know what they say. One door closes another one opens. Got to stay positive, eh?’
‘Sure.’
‘Everyone’s suffering in the current economic climate.’
‘Absolutely.’
Then, to my astonishment, he turned around, came back in and, smiling, took my hand in both of his, smiling as he shook it, but he didn’t meet my eyes and I thought he looked – diminished. After he shut the office door gently after him, I sat there drinking my coffee, draining it to the dregs.
