Collected Stories

by Peter Carey

  4.

  The hate in the staff canteen was as palpable as the humidity outside. It buzzed and stung, finding weak spots in my carefully prepared defences. We had played the videotape with the chairman’s speech to the employees but it did nothing to dilute the feelings of the office staff, who behaved like a subject race.

  The girls giggled rudely. The men glowered, pretending to misunderstand the nature of the orders we gave them. I felt that their threat might, at any instant, become physical and an attack be made. Barto, more agitated than usual, produced the .45. He was laughed at. He stood there aghast, no longer feeling as cool as he would have liked.

  It was a particularly bad start. I requested the sales, marketing and production managers to escort me to my new office where we could discuss their futures.

  When I left the canteen I was burning with a quiet rage. My hands were wet. My stomach hurt. I was more than a little frightened. I began to understand why men raze villages and annihilate whole populations. The .22 under my arm nagged at me, producing feelings that were intense, unnameable, and not totally un-pleasurable.

  5.

  I fed on my fear and used it to effect. It was my strength. It hardened me and kept my mind sharp and clear. It gave me the confidence of cornered men. It made sleep almost impossible.

  We worked from the old general manager’s office, the brown smudge of his suicide an unpleasant reminder of the possibility of failure. We found the floor more convenient than the desk and spread papers across it as we attempted to piece the mess together.

  It became obvious very early that the marketing manager was a fool. His understanding of conditions in the market-place was minimal. His foolishly optimistic report had been a major contributing factor in the present state of affairs.

  He had taken too many store buyers to too many lunches. It must have been a little awkward for the buyers to tell him they weren’t taking any more of his products.

  It was also difficult for me to tell him that he could not continue as marketing manager. He was large and weak and watery. He had the softness of those who lie long hours in hot baths before dressing carefully in tailor-made suits. He could not adjust to me. He could not think of me as a threat, merely as someone who needed a wash. When I dismissed him he did not understand. He returned to his office the next day and continued as usual.

  When you kill flathead you put a knife in their foreheads. Their eyes roll and sometimes pop out. The marketing manager reacted in a similar manner when it occurred to him that he was being fired. His mouth opened wide with shock and I was reminded of a flathead when I looked at his eyes.

  As with the fish, I found it necessary not to think too much about what I was doing. I consoled myself with the knowledge that there would have been no job for him if we had not arrived. He had been thorough enough to have destroyed any hope of his own survival. He had covered it from every angle.

  With the marketing manager’s departure I discovered a whole filing cabinet full of documents that he had withheld from me. As I examined them I felt like a surgeon who comes to remove a small growth and finds a body riddled with secondary cancers. I had promised the board of directors things which, given all the available information, had seemed reasonable at the time. But here the gap between the diseased body and my promises of glowing health seemed an inseparable gulf.

  I began to feel that I might be less remarkable than the glorious picture the board had of me. When I had presented my credentials and broad methods to them I had felt myself to be quite glamorous, a superior being who could succeed where they and their underlings had failed. It was a good picture. I preened myself before it as if it were a mirror.

  I claimed to despise the board but I didn’t want that mirror taken away from me. It was very important that they hold me in high esteem.

  Incensed by the appalling news we found in marketing, we recalled the sales force and threatened them with violence and torture if they did not succeed. I am thin and not particularly strong but I had a gun and I had the genuine craziness of a man who will do anything to get what he wants. Anger filled me like electricity. My fingertips were full of it. They felt so tight and tense I couldn’t keep them still. Bart stood smoking a joint and waving the Colt around the office with the most carefree abandon, sighting down the barrel at first one head and then another. We spoke to them quietly and politely about the sales targets we expected them to meet in the coming year.

  Whether through accident or design Bart let off a shot into the ceiling and the sales manager involuntarily wet his pants. His staff laughed out loud at his misfortune. I thought how ugly they looked with their big cufflinks and silly grins.

  It was not the ideal way to do business, but the times were hard, other job opportunities non-existent, and the competition in the trade intense. Our products had been de-listed by five major chains and were in danger of being kicked out of another three. Only our cheapest lines survived, and these — frozen dinners of exceptionally low quality and price — would have to spearhead our return to the market. They were cheap and filling and there were a lot of people who needed cheap filling meals.

  I gave Bart control of the marketing function and watched him nervously like a driver who takes his hands from the wheel but is ready to take it back at any serious deviation. Apart from twelve months as a trainee product manager with Procter and Gamble, Bart’s previous experience had been totally in advertising agencies. There was really nothing but my intuitive judgment to say that he’d be a success in this new role.

  I needn’t have worried. He had a business brain the like of which is rarely seen, as cool and clean as stainless steel and totally without compassion. It was Bart who dumped two warehouses full of frozen food straight into the river, thus clearing a serious bottleneck in the system and creating space for products that could actually be sold. He budgeted for the eight-hundred-dollar fine and spent another eight hundred dollars on the finest cocaine to celebrate with. I approved these expenses without question. The goods had been sitting in the warehouse for two years and had been written down in value by a thoughtful accountant who seemed the only person to have anticipated the company’s present plight.

  Bart doubled the advertising budget, a move which terrified me but which I approved. He planned to stop advertising altogether in the second half and plough an equivalent amount into promotions. It was pressure-cooked marketing. It was unorthodox and expensive but it was the sort of brutal tactic that could be necessary for our success.

  Bart pursued the practice of business with the logic of an abstract artist. Things were, for him, problems of form, colour and design. He pursued cool acts with relentless enthusiasm.

  From my office I watched him walk across the wide bitumen apron to fire the production manager. His hair was now dyed a henna red, and his cowboy boots made his out-turned toes look curiously elegant. He walked as casually as a man who has run out of cigarette papers taking a stroll to a corner shop.

  6.

  The typists had stopped staring at us and were actually managing to get some work done. However, I still continued to have trouble with my secretary. She was nearly forty-five, matronly in style, and as the secretary to the most senior executive, she was the leader of the others. She was pursuing some guerrilla war of her own, expressing her distaste for me in a hundred little ways which were almost impossible to confront directly.

  On this occasion she found me alone in my office. I was sitting on the floor going through the computer print-outs from the Nielsen survey when she crept up behind me and hissed in my ear.

  “May I have a word.”

  The bitch. She made me jump. I turned in time to catch the last sign of a smirk disappearing from her face.

  I stood up. The idea of looking up her dress was beyond contemplation. I thought, as I stumbled to my feet, that I should fire her or at least exchange her with someone who could handle her. As she continued to disapprove of me she was making me more and more irritable. Yet she seemed
able to bully me. I felt awkward and embarrassed every time I talked to her.

  “I think,” she declared, “there is something you should know.”

  “Yes.” I put the Nielsen survey carefully on the desk. Her face was pinched and her lips had become tightly pursed. If there had been a smirk it had well and truly been superseded by this angry, self-righteous expression.

  “I have come to tell you that I can’t work for you.”

  I felt enormously relieved. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in why.”

  “Yes, of course I would.”

  This would be her moment and I would pay attention. I did as she wished.

  “I cannot respect you.” Her sanctimonious little face gave me the shits.

  “Oh,” I said, “and why not?”

  “Because you are not worthy of respect.” She stood stiffly upright, tapping her lolly-pink suit with a ballpoint pen which was putting little blue flecks all over it.

  “You don’t respect yourself.” She cast a derisive glance over me as if I were someone at the back door begging for sandwiches. So she didn’t like the way I dressed. “You don’t respect yourself, how can I respect you.”

  “Oh,” I laughed, “I respect myself, please don’t concern yourself on that one.”

  “You’ve obviously had a good education. Why don’t you use it?”

  She was beginning to push it a bit far. Her complete ridiculousness didn’t stop her from upsetting me. I should have been beyond all this. “I’m your general manager,” I said, “surely that’s using my education.”

  She tossed her head. “Ah, but you’re not the real general manager.”

  She shouldn’t have upset me at all. Her values were nothing like mine. She was trapped and helpless and had to work for me. She had no education, no chance of change. All she had was the conviction that I was worthless. It shouldn’t have upset me, but it is exactly the sort of thing that upsets me. The thing she wouldn’t give me was the only thing I wanted from her. I felt my temper welling up.

  “Do you realize the power I have over you?” I asked her.

  “You have no power over me, young man.”

  She didn’t understand me. She thought I was just a scruffy punk who had come to make a mess in her old boss’s office. She couldn’t know that I have a terrible character weakness, a temper that comes from nowhere and stuns even me with its ferocity and total unreasonableness.

  She shouldn’t have spoken to me like that, but she wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t leave when I asked her to. I stood in my office and I asked the old bitch to leave. I asked her coolly and nicely and politely, but she continued to berate me.

  I watched her mouth move. It became unreal. I had the .22 under my arm, and my feelings were not like the real world, they were hot and pleasurable and electrically intense.

  It was rage.

  She had just repeated herself. She had just said something about respect when I drew the pistol and shot her in the foot.

  She stopped talking. I watched the red mark on her stockinged foot and thought how amazingly accurate I had been.

  She sat on the floor with surprise and a slight grunt.

  Barto came running through the door and I stood there with the gun in my hand feeling stupid.

  Later the incident made me think about myself and what I wanted from life.

  7.

  The provincial city nearest the plant was a most unappealing place, catering to the tastes of farmers and factory hands. We devised, therefore, quarters of our own at the plant itself and managed to create a very pleasant island within the administration block.

  Here a quite unique little society began to evolve, hidden from a hostile environment by dull red-brick walls. Here we devoted ourselves to the pursuit of good talk, fanciful ideas and the appreciation of good music.

  We introduced fine old Belouch rugs, rich in colour, others from Shiraz, Luristan, old Khelims, mellow and pleasant, glowing like jewels. Here we had huge couches and leather armchairs, soft and old and vibrating with the dying snores of retired soldiers, the suppleness of ancient leathers a delight to the senses. We had low, slow, yellow lights, as gentle as moonlight, and stereo equipment, its fidelity best evoked by considering the sound of Tibetan temple bells. The food, at first, was largely indifferent but the drugs and wine were always plentiful, of extraordinary variety and excellent quality.

  In these conditions we marvelled at ourselves, that we, the sons of process workers and hotelkeepers, should live like this. We were still young enough to be so entranced by our success and Barto, whose father sold stolen goods in a series of hotels, was eager that a photograph be taken.

  Barto seemed the most innocent of men. He approached life languidly, rarely rising before ten and never retiring before three. Ideas came from him in vast numbers and hardly ever appeared to be anything but wisps of smoke.

  Lying on the great Belouch saddlebag, graceful as a cat in repose, he would begin by saying, “What if …” It was normally Bart who said “What if …” and normally me who said “yes” or “no”. His mind was relentless in its logic, yet fanciful in style, so the most circuitous and fanciful plans would always, on examination, be found to have cold hard bones within their diaphanous folds.

  We were all-powerful. We only had to dream and the dream could be made real. We planned the most unlikely strategies and carried them out, whole plots as involved and chancy as movie scenarios. It was our most remarkable talent. For instance, we evolved a plan for keeping a defecting product manager faithful by getting him a three-bag smack habit and then supplying it.

  Our character judgment was perfect. We were delighted by our astuteness.

  The product manager stayed but unfortunately killed himself a few months later, so not everything worked out as perfectly as we would have hoped.

  We saw ourselves anew, mirrored in the eyes of each new arrival, and we preened ourselves before their gaze.

  Thelma was the first to arrive. She came to be with Bart and was astounded, firstly by the ugliness of the plant, secondly by the beauty of our private world, and thirdly by the change she claimed had occurred in Bart. She found him obsessed with the business enterprise and unbearably arrogant about his part in it. This she blamed me for. She sat in a corner whispering with Bart and I fretted lest she persuade him to go away with her. She was slender and elegant and dark as a gypsy. She had little needle tracks on her arms, so later on I was able to do a deal with her whereby she agreed to go away for a while.

  Ian arrived to take over the sales force and we delighted in his company. He thought our methods of enthusing the salesmen historically necessary but not the most productive in the long term. He took them fifteen miles into town and got drunk with them for two days. He had two fist fights and, somewhere along the line, lost the representative for southern country districts, a point he continued to remain vague about.

  He was the perfect chameleon and won them over by becoming vulgar and loud-mouthed. He affected big cufflinks and changed his shirt twice a day. He had his hair cut perfectly and he looked handsome and macho with his smiling dark eyes.

  The sales force loved him, having the mistaken idea that he was normal. Naturally he didn’t discuss his enthusiastic appetite for a substance called A.C.P., a veterinary tranquillizer normally administered to nervous horses which he took, rather ostentatiously, from a teaspoon marked “Souvenir of Anglesea”.

  It was Ian who persuaded me to fly in Sergei from Hong Kong. With his arrival, a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders and I had more time to relax and enjoy the music and talk. Sergei was unknown to me and I found him, in some respects, alarming. It was as if he found nothing remarkable in our situation. He made no comment on the decor of our private quarters, our penchant for drugs, or the brilliance of our strategies. It was as if we stood before a mirror which reflected everything but ourselves. He made me nervous. I didn’t know how I stood with him. />
  Yet he was the most ordinary of men: short, slim, and dark, moving with a preciseness which I found comforting in such a skilled accountant. He was eccentric in his dress, choosing neatly pressed grey flannel trousers, very expensive knitted shirts, and slip-on shoes of the softest leather. Only the small silver earring on his left earlobe gave an indication that he was not totally straight.

  Sergei talked little but went quietly about the business of wrestling with our cash flow. In the first week he completely reprogrammed our computer to give us a simpler and faster idea of our situation. Each week’s figures would be available on the Monday of the next week, which made life easier for all of us.

  After three weeks I gave over the financial function almost completely to his care and tried to spend some time evolving a sensible long-term strategy suited to the economic climate.

  Whilst the unemployed continued to receive government assistance there would be a multi-million-dollar business in satisfying their needs. Companies which should have had the sense to see this continued to ignore it. Obviously they viewed the present circumstances as some temporary aberration and were planning their long-term strategies in the belief that we would shortly be returning to normal market conditions.

  My view was that we were experiencing “normal” market conditions.

  I instructed our new product development team to investigate the possibility of producing a range of very simple frozen meals which would be extremely filling, could be eaten cold when cooking facilities were not available, and would be lower in cost than anything comparable. I had a series of pie-like dishes in mind but I left the brief open. It seemed like a golden opportunity.

  Whilst I was engaged in this, word came from Ian that they had had a highly successful sell-in of our existing lines of frozen meals. He had given the trade substantial discounts and we were operating on very low profit margins, hoping to achieve a very high volume turnover and, more importantly, get our relationship with the trade back to a healthier state.