Soft (15 page)

‘Hot Wings Are Back!,' she said, and laughed. She still didn't have the slightest idea what it meant.

Tom's eyes darkened, and he turned away and ran one hand through his hair. She leaned back on the bench, looked up into the sky. This was something she had always done, ever since she was a child. She never ceased to be astonished by the quality of that blue. All depth. No surface to it whatsoever.

‘How do you feel now?'

She could hear no tenderness in his voice, no real concern. He just wanted information. Facts. She nodded to herself. ‘Better. Much better.'

‘In that case,' he said, ‘maybe we should go back in.'

That evening, while Tom was downstairs in the bar, Glade called the airline and asked if she could bring her flight forwards, from Tuesday afternoon to Monday morning, early. If she'd been holding a discount ticket, she wouldn't have been allowed to change it, the man told her, but since it was Apex, there was absolutely no problem. Seats were still available on the seven-thirty to New York. She should check in no later than six-thirty.

At nine o'clock that night Tom took her to a restaurant on the edge of the French Quarter. He ordered two dozen oysters and a bottle of Dom Perignon. The waiter smiled, saying it was his wife's favourite champagne. Glade was staring at her glass; it was so tall, so slender, that it looked like a vase designed to hold a single flower. Throughout dinner Tom talked about a case he'd been working on, which involved narcotics and embezzlement. They'd had to employ a detective agency to track the defendant down. They had located him, eventually, in a small town in Colombia. Tom raised his eyebrows, then lowered them again and reached for his champagne. Glade found herself wishing that the defendant, whoever he was, had got away.

They returned to the hotel and Glade ran a bath while Tom called San Francisco and LA. Lying in the water, she could hear him talking, a low murmur in the next room. Is that what I'll remember, she wondered, the sound of him talking to other people? By the time she finished in the bathroom, it was almost one in the morning. Wrapped in a hotel bathrobe, she turned out the lights and opened the door. Tom was lying on the bed, watching MTV. The whole room flashed and flickered. When she fell asleep, he was still watching.

She woke just after five and slipped into her clothes. She didn't need to switch the lights on; she'd already packed her case the night before. Standing by the door, she looked back into the room. ‘Tom?' she said.

He didn't answer.

‘Tom, I'm leaving now.'

‘Where are you going?' he murmured.

She felt stupid saying London, but she said it anyway.

He sat up in bed, one shoulder edged in cold grey light, and she thought for a moment that he might try and stop her. Then he said, ‘It's early,' and fell back among the pillows.

In the lobby the clock above reception said 5:25. A porter in a red tail-coat carried her case out to the semi-circle of driveway at the front of the hotel. He spoke to her kindly, but kindness wasn't something she could think about. A taxi curved towards her out of the darkness. The porter held the door for her. She thanked him and climbed in.

‘The airport, please.'

She wound the window down and settled back. A thin stream of air washed over her, cool and slightly stagnant. To the east the sky had cracked open, and pale-pink light showed through. Above it and below it, only dark blue-grey. She had been tempted to leave Tom a note, but at the last minute she'd decided against it. She didn't want him thinking she was going to kill herself.

Waiting for the tube at Tottenham Court Road one Monday morning, Jimmy noticed a man standing further down the platform. The man was in his late forties. Dressed in a cream-coloured raincoat and a dark-grey suit, he was reading a copy of the
Telegraph
, which he had folded until it was small enough to hold in his left hand. His right hand moved rhythmically, almost mechanically, between the pocket of his raincoat and his face. It took Jimmy a few moments to realise that the man was eating. What, though? Curious, he circled round behind the man, edged into a position at his shoulder. Then, peering down, he saw three glistening, chocolate-coated spheres. Maltesers! He watched them bounce and jostle in the man's cupped palm, almost as if they were being weighed. He watched them being lifted swiftly towards the man's lips, which had already parted, bird-like, in anticipation. He heard their crisp pale-yellow interiors surrender to the man's determined teeth. Sometimes there was a slight delay, the man's hand unable to find the opening in the packet, perhaps, and a look passed across his face, the troubled look of a child dreaming, but he never took his eyes off the paper he was reading and in the end his hand always emerged again and moved unerringly towards his mouth. How much of what we do is automatic? Jimmy wondered as the westbound tube pulled in.

Inside the carriage, he glanced at his watch. Seven-forty-five. It was an early start, but with a job like his he could always use
the extra hour. He worked for the East Coast Soda Corporation – ECSC, as it was known in the trade – a soft-drinks company with its head-quarters in Chicago. For the past five years ECSC had been developing a new product, a soft drink known as Kwench! (the exclamation mark being part of the registered name, part of the logo). Jimmy hadn't known what to make of the name at first. The K seemed slightly cheap, somehow, and as for the W, wouldn't that cause problems for people who didn't speak English? It certainly communicated refreshment, though, and as time passed, the name began to grow on him: it had a crunch to it, a succulence, something beautifully onomatopoeic working in its favour. In any case, they had launched the drink in America, and it had been a marketing sensation. They had shifted three hundred and forty-five million litres in the first twelve months. You couldn't hope for better sales than that. Now, predictably, the company wanted to reproduce the phenomenon in the UK and, as Senior Brand Manager, the launch would be Jimmy's responsibility. Everything depended on it: his key performance indicator for that year would be the successful entry of Kwench! into the British marketplace.

His stop came. He left the train and rode a long, slow escalator to the street. Outside the station he turned left, past the woman selling flowers, and walked quickly towards the ECSC building, which gleamed like a solid block of platinum in the bleak October light. Since it was only ten-past eight, he was alone as he passed through the revolving doors and on into the lobby. He said good morning to Bob, the security man, and waited outside the lifts. He could taste the fifteen or twenty Silk Cut he must have smoked the night before. Some friends had come round – Marco, Zane, Simone. He could still see them, sprawled at the dark oak table in his dining-room: Marco with his shaved head and his air of truculence, Zane in a purple velvet shirt, Simone's red hair falling forwards as she leaned over the mirror. In the end he had been forced to throw them out. Still, he'd been in bed by three. He yawned. The lift
doors parted. Stepping inside, he pressed the button that said 9 and felt a kind of cushioned power hoist him skywards.

In reception a tall bank of TV screens flickered quietly with images from the latest show-reel. The work was acceptable, but tame – too much sunshine, too many smiles; if Jimmy had his way, all this would change. He passed two dark-blue sofas and paused in front of the wall that faced west. One vast expanse of plate-glass, it offered a dizzying view of London's drab extremities. The slate rooftops of Acton and Ealing. The lazy ribbon of motorway reaching towards Oxford. The endless planes making identical descents, one after another, into Heathrow. Initiate. That's what he had to do. Initiate, and be seen to be initiating.

‘Morning, Jimmy.'

He turned. ‘Morning, Brenda.'

Brenda was the receptionist at ECSC, though with her many layers of foundation, her pendant earrings and her heavy, fleshy arms, she had always reminded Jimmy of an opera singer.

‘You're early,' Brenda said.

‘I've got a lot on. Good weekend?'

Brenda made a face. It was never good, Brenda's weekend, but you had to ask.

‘Did you hear about the American?' she said.

He looked at her. ‘What American?'

‘I don't know. Some American. He's flying in this week.' Brenda had opened a gold-backed pocket mirror. She was applying more mascara.

‘I haven't heard about that.'

‘I thought you were up on everything, Jimmy. I thought you were the hot shot around here.' She smiled at him over her mirror, her eyes bland as ponds behind the wrought-iron railings of her eyelashes.

For the next few hours Jimmy had to push Brenda's gossip to the back of his mind. At nine-thirty he had a meeting with
a new below-the-line promotions agency. Between ten-fifteen and eleven he was briefed on how the US packaging for Kwench! had performed in UK research groups. By eleven-thirty he was discussing distribution levels with two members of his sales force. Towards midday, though, he ran into Tim McAlpine by the coffee machine. McAlpine worked in the financial division. He had white hair, even though he had only just turned thirty-one. At some point in his life, it seemed as if his hair had decided to conspire with his name. Jimmy thought of him as McPyrenees – or sometimes, if he had impressed Jimmy in some way, if he had risen, so to speak, in Jimmy's estimation, Jimmy thought of him as McEverest. Watching the coffee splutter down into his polystyrene cup, Jimmy asked McAlpine if he'd heard anything about an American. McAlpine told him that a trouble-shooter was being flown over from Chicago. The trouble-shooter's name was Connor. That was all McAlpine knew.

So it was true.

A tense week followed. The idea of an American being appointed to the UK office sent tremors of unease throughout the building. One or two of the leading brands had been under-performing during recent months, and the aggressive in-house slogans were beginning to sound hollow. Obviously there was going to be some sort of shake-up. Walk down any corridor, look in anybody's eyes. You could see the same question lurking there.
Who's he going to fire first?

On Friday morning everyone who worked for ECSC UK received a memo. They were asked to assemble in reception at four o'clock that afternoon. No reason was given. Delayed by a phone-call, Jimmy pushed through the swing-doors with his watch showing two minutes past. Fifty people stood about, all talking quietly but urgently. A kind of voltage in the air. A negative charge. Jimmy moved towards the vending-machine in the corner. He saw Tony Ruddle, his immediate superior,
throw himself almost recklessly into an armchair and lounge there, scowling …

Then two men entered from the right and took up a position in front of the plate-glass wall, the sun setting behind their heads. The buzz of voices died away. Slowly, though. With a curious reluctance. Like the sound of a car disappearing into a silent landscape. Bill Denman, the Managing Director, spoke first. He would not be talking for long, he said, not long enough, in any case, to do justice to the many accomplishments of the man who stood beside him. One of Denman's jokes. The staff laughed, but only out of duty, or habit; the laughter was half-hearted, thin. Denman went on to announce the appointment of Raleigh Connor to the post of Marketing Director. He outlined the unique opportunity this presented to everybody in the company, himself included: they could all benefit from Raleigh Connor's wealth of experience etc. etc. Jimmy leaned against the vending-machine, its metal case vibrating sleepily beneath his shoulder. A brief burst of applause signalled the end of Denman's speech. Then Connor stepped forwards.

If Jimmy was disappointed, it was perhaps because he had been expecting someone who resembled Kennedy – or, if not Kennedy, then Charlton Heston – but Connor was a squat, bald man, his round head just clearing the Managing Director's shoulder like a full moon rising from behind a mountain. He had a benign face, almost avuncular; his fingers were the fingers of a gardener. As soon as he opened his mouth, however, his authority, his true stature, became apparent. He described his appointment – rather cockily, in Jimmy's opinion – as ‘a simple transfer of expertise'. He talked at length about ‘the future', making it sound big, as people from that side of the Atlantic often do. He spoke in particular about Kwench!, which was the first ECSC product to be launched in the UK for three years and which should, he said, substantially broaden the UK company's brand portfolio. It was a premium product, with
high profit-margins. It promised taste and satisfaction, and it was healthy too: no caffeine, very little sugar, and a unique recipe of life-enhancing ingredients which, like Coca-Cola's Merchandise X, was a closely guarded company secret and which made it, potentially at least,
the
soft drink of the twenty-first century.

At that point Connor paused, and then continued in a quieter, more meditative vein. Success could not be guaranteed, he said. You had to work for it. ‘There's nothing soft about the soft-drinks industry,' he concluded, ‘nothing soft at all.' His eyes drifted amiably around the room. ‘I'd like you to take that thought away with you.'

On his way home that night Jimmy found himself in the lift with Neil Bowes. Neil waited until the doors slid shut before he spoke. ‘Don't let that smile fool you,' he said. ‘The guy's an axeman. An executioner.'

Jimmy looked across at Neil. There's one in every office. A hawker of hysteria, a walking Book of Revelation. But he liked Neil. For his sickly pallor and his doomed blue lips. For the fervency with which he played his role.

‘He was in Korea,' Neil went on. ‘Or Vietnam. One of the two, anyway. They taught him to kill with his bare hands. He carried on the same way in peacetime. A few years back he was sent to the office in LA. Fired thirty-five people in his first week.' Eyes filled with dread, Neil watched the glowing floor numbers being extinguished, one by one. ‘Know what they call him in the States?'