The Northern Clemency (73 page)

“If I were a serial killer,” Helen said, “this is where I’d come to leave the bodies.”

“That’s a charming thought,” Daniel said. “If I were a serial killer, this is where I’d live, under the staircase, lying in wait for the next pair of my victims.”

“—!” Helen shrieked, as just then Daniel, with a sharp fingernail, had reached round her back and pinched her bare arm, just where a serial killer might seize her. “That’s not very funny.”

“Well,” Daniel said, shining his torch around the whole space quickly, “don’t you think it’s fantastic?”

“I wonder who owns it?” Helen said.

“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Daniel said.

“What for?” Helen said. “You know, sometimes I get the impression there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“That might be an accurate impression,” Daniel said. “I’m going to tell you now.”

She looked at him; he brought the torch back to his stomach, and shone it upwards, giving his face heavy shadows, a horror-film expression. She couldn’t help thinking, though, what a charmer he was, even with the special effects.

“We’re going to buy it,” he said.

“You must be joking,” Helen said.

“I’m not joking,” Daniel said. “We’re going to buy it. If we can find someone who can actually sell it, we’re going to buy it. It must belong to someone, and if we can find out who that is, I’m going to make them sell it to us.”

“And who in the name of Beelzebub do you think ‘us’ is, Daniel?”

“That’s the thing,” Daniel said. “By ‘us,’ I mean you and me, and your dad Philip and your mum Shirley.”

“Very funny,” Helen said. “I suppose we’re all going to live down here like the frogs.”

“No,” Daniel said. “We’re not going to live here.”

“To be honest, Daniel,” Helen said, “I don’t mind you bringing me down here to see where you used to hide yourself away, but I don’t appreciate you making a joke out of my mum and dad. I thought you might have noticed that about me by now.”

“I’m not joking,” Daniel said. “I’ve never been more serious.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something,” Helen said, “you might have started
going out of your mind, but I can tell you my mum and dad haven’t. There’s no reason on earth could persuade them to get involved with any kind of scheme, being polite for the moment and assuming this isn’t some kind of stupid joke.”

“You’re too late,” Daniel said. “They’re quite keen on the idea.”

“You what?” Helen said.

“I said, they’re quite keen on the idea,” Daniel said. He switched off his torch; the gloom surrounded them. “Do you see?” he said. “There’s a sort of trapdoor over there. I bet it’s where they used to deliver the timber, they must have used this for storage. The raw materials.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Helen said. They stood there in the dark, and in a moment Daniel came towards her, took her folded arms, one in each hand, and tried to kiss her. She wouldn’t kiss back, and in a moment he stopped it.

“I tell you what,” he said. “We’ll walk through as far as the Manchester road—we’re not far from the post office, they’ll do us a cup of tea—and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Book Four

THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA

                  W
ell, have a look at this,” Damon from the direct marketing said. “We just had the boys in Design—” blood-curdling chuckle “—‘run up’ a little example of the sort of thing we might be talking about. ETA in the press, eight weeks.”

Nine of them were standing around in the central sort of discussion-space thingy in the office. It was lucky there were four pillars holding the roof up, or nobody would have had anything to lean against, and they’d all, like Jane, stand there formlessly. Would it really be so much, she asked silently and not for the first time, for a table and chairs around it and a door you could shut? But this was called hot-desking, which meant you didn’t have one. Russell’s idea from some American nonsense weekend in Berkshire. Two of the younger lads had dragged over low leather armchairs from the sort of reception-area thing, and were sitting in them with embarrassment, looking upwards. Jane didn’t care, though she would have liked a desk and a room of her own where you could put a vase of flowers and a photograph or two. Instead, there was just a sort of plinth-arrangement thingy with a computer on it every now and again; that was supposed to be for everyone or anyone’s use when inspiration struck. What you were supposed to do when inspiration hadn’t struck? … In practice everyone had their own little computer on a pedestal and their own armchair nearby, where paperwork piled up on the floor alongside. You couldn’t be neat without a desk with drawers, and Jane looked forward to Russell’s experiment soon being modified, then abandoned altogether.

As the most experienced person there—they didn’t do “senior” in Barney Spacek Boughton—Jane took the piece of A4 laminated card from Damon from the direct marketing. She inspected it. It was an advertisement for a weekend in a holiday camp, the same old chain of holiday camps that the poor kids at Flint used to go to and claim was great fun. Things had moved on. This weekend was reserved for queer-boys. There was a lot of talk about how much money they’d all got, the queer-boys, not having children and not talking to their elderly parents or anything else that looked like responsibilities. Russell
had an expression for it; the “pink pound.” We’ll be doing more and more of that sort of business,” he said to her. “It’s where the money is.” When the question of doing the marketing for this weekend had come up, he’d gone for it with a degree of enthusiasm that had, frankly, surprised the clients, lowering the fee as they were taking their coats off, looking round fruitlessly for somewhere to hang them (and would a cupboard really be too much to ask?).

As it happened, it turned out that nobody really knew whether the queer-boys, despite having more money than anyone else, thanks to not having any kids and not talking to their elderly parents, were all that likely to part with it in exchange for a weekend in the lowest of low seasons, in dead February in a holiday camp in north Wales facing Liverpool across the Mersey. Jane had always seen these places quite clearly: a swathe of yellow-painted plaster peeling off the surface of grey concrete, and a middle-aged clown trudging round the corner with his soiled yellow-plush props dangling from his hand in the rain. That didn’t seem very gay, in any sense at all.

She looked at the mock-up, reading from the bottom right upwards. “Is that what the costing came out as?” she said. “It seems quite a lot for the—a lot to ask.”

“We queried it,” Damon said. “Actually, the boys in Design queried it. They wondered whether the price was right. But the client said they’d run it past their focus group and it seemed to stand up. Fifty-eight per cent of the ITA taking part, I think—where is it?—fifty-eight per cent said that they
would
be prepared to pay up to, ah—”

“You see, Jane,” one of the boys in the armchairs piped up, “the intended target audience have a high disposable income. The Pink Pound. The thing is, they don’t have—”

“Yes, I know,” Jane said. She and Scott didn’t have any children, or any obligations to elderly relations, but no one was trying to lure them and their supposed riches to holiday camps in north Wales in February. It seemed like a lot of crap. “I know all that. Could I just ask a question? You said it was the boys in Design who queried the figure. Now, I don’t really know about these things, but I would have thought that Design is the place where, if anywhere, you were going to find, well …”

She shrugged, looked at Damon. “I don’t follow,” Damon said.

“Well, are none of the boys in Design, themselves, are any of them themselves …”

Damon stared at her. “Are you asking whether they’re gay?”

“Yes,” Jane said. “They often are.”

“I honestly haven’t asked them,” Damon said, affronted. “I don’t think it would be an appropriate thing to start an inquisition into.”

“I see,” Jane said.

“The thing you have to remember,” the boy in the armchair said—a helpful type, “is that this is a sort of experimental exercise. The client’s never done anything like this before, and he wants to cover his costs and quite a bit more. After all, there might be a consequential effect on his core business—”

“That was really quite a serious concern,” Damon said.

“The families don’t want to sleep in beds where the queer-boys have been a week or two before,” Jane said, “so the queer-boys have to pay for getting the AIDS off the sheets too—is that it?”

“Well,” Damon said, “I wouldn’t put it quite like that myself, but—”

“Let’s have a look at this, then,” Jane said. More and more, she found herself thinking, quite happily, some awful word whenever someone passed her in the street, or sold her something in Boots, or even spoke to her on the telephone. Nig-nog, Jew-boy, Paki, queer-boy—it ran through her head like the nursery rhyme from hell as she walked the streets or waited for a tube train to arrive, counting them like cherry stones, and more and more often she found herself discovering excuses to say them out loud. If Scott died before her, she’d be a mad old woman within days, yelling obscenities in public, there was no doubt about that. “Well, it looks—”

“What we’ve done,” Damon said happily, “is really more tweaking than anything else. It’s really quite similar to the mail-out the client always uses. We took out the family going down the water-slide and put in—well, you see, and the sort of glitterball there, there’s usually a clown with two kiddies instead of that. But the rest of it, it’s just the adjectives.”

“Pardon me?”

“We’ve just tweaked the adjectives in the copy. So, where it talks about the rooms—”

“Fabulous double rooms.”

“That’s it. Normally that says, ‘great double rooms.’ We ran it through the focus groups and they responded very positively to that. ‘Great’ is a terrific family word, families with two-point-four kids like that a lot, but the target market didn’t really go for it, it was too family. They like ‘fabulous’ a lot. A full twelve PCP more said—”

“What?”

“A full twelve percentage points more said that they were extremely likely or fairly likely to book this holiday when the change was made, and the not-at-all-likelies fell from twenty-seven per cent to thirteen. Which is amazing.”

“Or fabulous,” Jane said. PCP, for heaven’s sake.

“Yes, it’s a fabulous result,” Damon said, risking a drag-act squeal and throwing his hands in the air. Everyone duly laughed.

“I’m going to call this meeting to a close now,” Jane said, “so that we can all look at this and think it over and brainstorm it and come back to you—what? Day after tomorrow? OK, thanks, everybody.”

“Right,” Damon said, disconcerted. But they did everything differently at Barney Spacek Boughton, everyone knew that, no meeting lasting more than half an hour. They’d won awards. He picked his coat up from the back of a chair where he’d left it, and his team let themselves be shown out.

Jane came back in five minutes, wearing her coat. They were all still milling around, passing the proposed advert between themselves. “I’m going out for lunch,” she said, her hands in her pockets, grumpily.

“OK,” the juniors said. They knew these moods of hers, always after a presentation. Some people thought she was taking herself off to think about strategy, others thought that she quite often considered the whole thing a load of crap, though it was daring of them to float the possibility that anyone might think their business a load of crap. When she ended meetings abruptly with most questions undecided, or took herself off “for lunch” at a quarter to twelve, like now, it was, some people thought, to stop herself saying something unforgivable, unretractable. There’d almost been trouble a year or two back at a management training weekend she couldn’t have walked out of: three-quarters of an hour of direct questions to the facilitator about the exact meaning of the terms he was using, one after another, and, they said, that glare. She had some licence in the office. She was the only married person who worked there, for one thing. And she always came back from these two-hour absences, whatever she did in them, talking sense. The load-of-crap school was in the minority.

“Do you want company?” Robert said mildly, calling over from behind a pot-plant.

“Yeah, why not?” Jane said. The others watched them go.

“Tell me something,” Jane said, as the two of them got out of the lift
into the lobby, shared with twenty other companies on different floors. “This is a load of crap, isn’t it?”

“Total crap,” Robert said comfortably. They had known each other, worked with each other, for ten years on and off, in different companies here and there. She’d come over to Barney Spacek Boughton when it was just starting up and Russell was looking for someone with a portfolio of tame clients. He’d brought the subject up, of all places, at their wedding, and she’d found herself discussing the salary and BSB’s client list in her wedding dress. She’d come back from the honeymoon safari to find an invitation from them to come over and talk a bit further, and she’d been there for four years now.

“Jesus,” Jane said. “When he started on about ‘great’ and ‘fabulous,’ I really thought—”