David Szalay - London and the South-East

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 into 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.’