David Szalay: London and the South-East

Slowly, with showy sadness, Paul shook his head. ‘You’ve got to sort yourself out, mate,’ he said. ‘You’re taking the piss. If you don’t make any sales it’s because you’re in here all day. You don’t make enough calls. It’s a numbers game. You’ve got the leads. You just need to make the fucking calls.’

Andy nodded. ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Yah.’

‘Go back to the office,’ Paul said. ‘Go back to the office, and get on the phone.’

Andy gulped down half of his pint. Then the other half. ‘I’ll see you later then, yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

‘See you, Murray.’

‘Yeah, see you later,’ Murray muttered. And then, when Andy had gone, ‘He forgot his umbrella. Fucking tosser.’

He was soon back, though. Within minutes.

Paul said, ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you on the fucking phone?’

‘There’s something I forgot to tell you.’

‘What?’

‘Flossman called.’

‘Flossman?’ Hurriedly, Paul stubbed out his cigarette. ‘When? What did he say?’

‘Um, I don’t know. That you can call him this afternoon if you want. And he’s going somewhere on Monday.’

‘Where?’

‘Um. I don’t know. China?’

‘For fuck’s sake. When did he call?’

Andy hesitated. ‘About an hour ago?’

‘For fuck’s sake …’

‘Is there a problem?’ Murray enquired.

Paul stood up. ‘I’ve got to go back to the office, mate.’

‘You’re not serious …’

‘Yeah I am, unfortunately. I’ve been trying to speak to this cunt all week.’

‘Flossman?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You staying here, Murray?’ Andy said. He said it — so it seemed to Murray — with a sly, mocking smile.

‘No,’ Murray said, without thinking.

‘What …’ Andy seemed surprised. ‘You’re coming back to the office?’

Squinting scornfully, Murray shook his square head. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘Well … Marlon.’

‘ Who? ’

‘Marlon.’

Still Murray did not seem to follow. ‘Marlon?’

Smiling as though the whole thing were some kind of joke, Andy said, ‘He says you nicked one of his leads. He’s telling everyone he’s going to punch your lights out.’

‘What, that little shit?’

‘Yeah …’

‘I’ll punch his fucking lights out.’

For a moment, there was an uneasy silence. Murray was still sitting down. ‘Should we go then?’ Andy said. Slowly Murray swallowed what was left of his pint, and stood up, a tall man in a shapeless blue suit. Quite pale, he did up his jacket and they followed Paul towards the front of the pub. ‘You coming back?’ Paul said when he saw Murray. Murray nodded. ‘What about Marlon?’ Murray shrugged — like the nod, a small, tense movement.

Despite the hurry, and the drizzle, when Andy said, ‘Should we have a quick doob?’ Paul stopped. ‘Get a move on then.’ They were in an alley near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, grey old office buildings looming on all sides. Murray seemed nervous, making strange munching movements with his mouth and staring at the words CITY OF WESTMINSTER on the side of a dumpster. Paul was also preoccupied, impatient. If Andy’s good at anything, he thought, it’s making spliffs. In the rain, the wind pouring intermittently down the alley, he made the spliff in the palm of his hand, dipping into his pocket for what he needed. The result was something that looked like it had been manufactured by a machine. They smoked it quickly, in silence, ignoring the inquisitive looks of purposefully striding passers-by.

The entrance to King’s House, a nondescript office building on Kingsway, is on a side street, a glass door tinted greyish brown. Wobbling slightly, the small, gloomy lift went up. There is some other company (Winchmore Leasing Ltd) on the first floor; Park Lane Publications has the second and third floors; the fourth floor has been vacant since the spring. Paul looked at his watch, an old Swatch with a red plastic strap. Three twenty — four twenty in Germany.

Tony Peters’ team occupies one half of the upper sales floor, Paul’s the other. The room is long and low — when salesmen stand on their desks to ‘power pitch’, their heads are not far from the off-white ceiling panels — and usually loud with overlapping voices. There are windows down both sides — on one side the sad, unleaving plane trees of Kingsway; on the other a grey jumble of roofs and fire escapes. Even with so many windows, at this time of day, and this time of year, the room would be dim were it not for the extensive strip lighting. Paul stopped at the cooler to drink several paper cones of icy water in quick succession. Frustratingly, the dryness of his mouth was almost unaffected. In his intoxicated state, everything seemed unnaturally intense, and at the same time not real — as if he were lying in a hot bath imagining it all. ‘Come on!’ he shouted — he heard himself shout — as he crossed the grey carpet towards his team at the far end of the room. ‘Get on the fucking phone!’ He shouted it only out of a sense of obligation, and everyone ignored him, except Elvezia who looked up sceptically from her magazine, then let it fall shut and started to leaf through some old index cards. It was, everyone understood, Friday afternoon. Paul took off his jacket and sat down. There is a large whiteboard on the wall behind his desk, on which the names of the ten members of his team are written, and their total sales, and their sales this week — a column filled with zeros. Different-sized zeros, some blue, some black, some red, some green, but all zeros. Some of the zeros — Andy’s for example — have been there so long that it is probably no longer possible to erase them. In the total sales column some of these indelible zeros have been incorporated into later, larger, multicoloured numbers.

Without preliminaries, Paul picked up the white handset of his phone and punched in Flossman’s number. The long pulses of the foreign tone in his ear, he pulled off the plastic lid of his tea, fished out the sodden bag, and burned his mouth with an impatient sip.

‘ Koch!’

‘Oh hello,’ Paul slurred, smiling, ‘it’s Charles Barclay.’ Not, of course, his real name. His sales name, his nom de phone . For various reasons, most of the salespeople use pseudonyms. In some cases because their real names are considered inappropriate — too foreign-sounding, too difficult to spell. Andy for instance, who is of Polish descent (Andy is short for Andrzej, not Andrew) has a surname consisting of a dozen consonants, mostly Zs and Ws, and one isolated vowel, somewhere in the thick of it. His sales name is David Lloyd. (When selecting a sales name, the names of banks are often felt to have the right tone — one young man made a promising start to his career as James Natwest.) In Paul’s case, his real name — Paul Rainey — was not particularly problematic. He has had numerous identities over the years, though; switching whenever a dissatisfied advertiser is furious enough to demand his dismissal, and he is ‘sacked’. ‘Nicholas James’ was ‘sacked’ in February, since when he has been ‘Charles Barclay’. ‘I think Dieter tried to get hold of me a little while ago, Frau Cock,’ he said. ‘I was in a meeting. I’m just returning his call.’

‘Oh, yes, Mr Barclay.’ Frau Koch’s tone seemed changed — more congenial. ‘Yes, but Herr Doktor Flossman is in a meeting himself at the moment.’ For fuck’s sake , Paul thought. ‘In about twenty minutes, I think, he will be finished,’ she said. ‘You will call back?’ Startled by this unexpected transparency, Paul said, ‘Right. Fine. I will call back.’

‘Thank you, Mr Barclay.’

‘Thank you , Frau Cock.’ He dropped the handset into its plastic berth and looked at his watch. Three twenty-seven. Drink the tea, he thought, have a fag, then phone Flossman again. Satisfied, his plan thus in place, he slid his chair back on squeaky wheels, put his feet, his scuffed black lace-ups, on the desk, and waited.