The Portable Door (1987) (2 page)

According to the book Paul had got out of the library, they always asked this, so of course he’d rehearsed a model answer—reading, keeping up with current affairs,

music and badminton. All lies, of course, but it had never crossed his mind to tell the truth at a job interview. Instead, he replied, “I watch TV a lot. I used to paint little model soldiers, but I don’t do that so much now.”

The tennis champion looked up at him. “Sport?” he said sharply.

“Sorry?”

“Sport. Football, fencing, archery. Do you do anything like that?”

Paul shook his head. “Not since school,” he replied. “And I was rubbish at it then.”

“Languages?” the woman asked; surprisingly, she turned out to be American.

“No,” Paul replied. “Well, I did French and German at school, but I can’t remember any of it now.”

“How about your social life?” asked the grim-faced man.

“Haven’t really got one.”

The white-haired man opened his eyes. “Can you tell me the four principal exports of Zambia?”

“Sorry, no.”

The white-haired man closed his eyes again. The woman put the cap on her pen and dropped it into a tiny black handbag. There was a long, silent moment; then the grim-faced man folded his hands on the table in front of him. “Suppose you were in the Tower of London,” he said, “all on your own, with all the cases unlocked, and suddenly the fire alarm went. Which three things would you try and take with you as you left?”

Paul opened his eyes wide, and asked him to repeat the question. The grim-faced man obliged, word for word.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said, “I don’t know. I’ve never actually been there, so I don’t know what they’ve got.”

Dead silence; as though it was the Last Judgement and he was standing before the throne of God, flanked by archangels and cherubim, and he’d farted. “How about the Crown Jewels?” said the woman. “I guess you’ve heard of them.”

“What? Oh, yes.”

“Yes, you’ve heard of them, or yes, you’d try and save them?”

“Um,” Paul said. “Both, I suppose.”

Another silence, which made the one that had preceded it seem positively jovial. “If you had a choice,” said the white-haired man, “between killing your father, your mother or yourself, who would you choose, and why?”

Oh, for crying out loud
, Paul thought; and then,
I bet they didn’t ask the Dog Boy any of this shit
. “I really haven’t got a clue,” he said. “Sorry.”

The woman opened her bag again, took out a pair of tiny rimless spectacles, put them on and stared at him through them. It was like that trick where you set light to a bit of paper with a magnifying glass, except it wasn’t done with heat. Quite the reverse. “You say you used to paint model soldiers,” she said. “Which period?”

The hell with it
, Paul thought.
Tell the horrible bitch the truth, and have done with it
. “Medieval,” he said. “Also I did a lot of those fantasy ones, elves and orcs and trolls. I tried Napoleonic too, but they were too fiddly for me.”

The woman nodded gravely. “I see,” she said. “Can you tell me the properties of manganese when used as an alloying agent in steel?”

“No.”

She nodded again. “What did you think of the latest Living Dead album?”

Paul gave that one a little thought before answering. “It sucked,” he said.

“Who would you rather be, Lloyd George or Gary Rhodes?”

“Sorry,” Paul said. “Who’s Lloyd George?”

“What do you most admire about the works of Chekhov?”

Paul frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “The way he says,
Course laid in, keptin
, is pretty cool, but mostly he doesn’t get to do much.”

Nobody spoke. There hadn’t been such a silence since the beginning of the world. Then they all looked at each other (apart from the white-haired man, whose eyes were tight shut, his chin on his chest), and the grim-faced man said, “Well, I think that covers everything from our point of view. Is there anything you’d like to ask us?”

Paul managed to keep a straight face. “Not really, thanks,” he said.

“Fine.” The grim-faced man stood up and opened the door. “We’ll be writing to you in a day or so,” he said. “Thank you very much for coming in.”

“Pleasure,” Paul replied, and he followed the grim-faced man out. Some joker had seen fit to steal his leg bones and replace them with sticks of rhubarb, but so what? No more than he deserved.

As he passed the thin girl in the doorway he shot her a glance that tried to convey encouragement, warning and pre-emptive sympathy all rolled up together. He reckoned he made a pretty good fist of it, but she was looking the other way.

Instead of heading straight for the bus stop, he stopped at a pub and asked for a half of bitter shandy. He couldn’t really afford to go squandering money on booze, particularly since it was obvious he was unemployable, but he needed somewhere to sit down and shudder quietly for a while. Since he’d just spent his entire entertainments budget for the next fortnight on the bitter shandy, he resolved to make it last a while. He also wondered why he’d ordered it, since he didn’t like bitter. He grinned; it sounded like the sort of question they’d have asked him, and of course he didn’t know the answer.

From there, Paul went on to consider a wide range of issues, all of them depressing. When he’d had enough of that, he looked up and saw the thin girl, just turning away from the bar. She was holding a pint of Guinness, in a straight glass. She went and perched on a bar stool next to the door. Under normal conditions, nothing on earth would have induced him to get to his feet and walk over to her, but after what he’d just been through, there was a limit to how much harm she could do him.

She saw him coming and dived into her duffel-coat pocket for a book, but she wasn’t quick enough on the draw. Also, she was holding it upside down. “Hello,” he said. “How did you get on?”

She lowered the book very slowly, rather in the manner of a defeated general surrendering his sword. “Oh, I don’t think I got it,” she said. “How about you?”

He shook his head. “Just as well, really,” he said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to work for those nutters anyhow.”

“Nor me,” she said. “They asked all these really stupid questions. I told them they were stupid questions.”

He could believe that. “Did you get the one about killing your parents?”

She looked at him as if he was mad. “They asked me to list the kings of Portugal,” she said, “and what my favourite colour was. I told them, none of your business.”

Well, quite
, he thought.
A person’s relationship with the kings of Portugal is a strictly private matter
. “I got a load of rubbish about the Tower of London, and stuff about
Star Trek
.”

She clicked her tongue. “Not that Chekhov,” she said. “The Russian playwright.”

“There’s a Russian playwright called Chekhov? Oh.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. I think I’d lost it before I even sat down.”

She nodded. “I wonder what they asked the Julia Roberts female,” she said. “I bet she’d have told them her favourite colour. Pink, probably,” she added savagely.

Somehow, talking about it to the thin girl made it seem rather less awful. “Would you fancy coming out for a meal?” he asked.

“No.” She stood up, glugged down her Guinness to the last drop, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “I’ve got to go now,” she said. “Bye.”

She was gone before he had a chance to open his mouth. He sat down, drank the last quarter inch of his shandy and left the pub. She wasn’t standing at the bus stop when he got there, which was probably just as well.

§

That night, Paul had a dream. He was standing in a dark cellar—the scenery was straight out of an old–fashioned Dungeons and Dragons computer game, but originality had never been his strong suit—and he was facing a mirror. He could see his own face; also, for some reason, the thin girl’s. That much he could explain away by reference to toasted cheese and pickled gherkins, but that didn’t really account for the other two faces in the mirror, nor for the strong feeling he had that he knew them, very well, as though they were close family or something like that. They were two young men, around his own age; one with curly red hair and freckles, the other fair-haired and slab-faced, and they were waving frantically, as if trying to get his attention. Why he’d chosen to dress up these two figments of his subconscious in what he vaguely recognised as Victorian clothes he had no idea; probably it was something he wouldn’t have wanted to know, anyway. Then the cellar door opened, allowing yellow light to seep in round the door frame, and a man and a girl came in. He thought he recognised them from some TV commercial; either they were the Gold Blend couple or generic beautiful people from a car ad. They were chatting and laughing, as if they hadn’t seen him there; but, as they passed him, they both stopped sharply, and the man pulled out a long, curved knife. Something went snap, and then he woke up.

The snap turned out to have been the letter box, out in the hall. He pulled on his dressing gown, a sad grey woollen object he’d inherited from a dead uncle, put his bedsit door on the latch and went to see if there was anything for him. As usual, most of the letters were for the two nurses on the floor above, with three for the guitarist opposite him and two for the landlady. There was, however, one for him; and the back of the envelope was embossed with a logo, JWW.

I know what this is
, he thought;
still, I might as well look at it, nothing better to do
. He went back into his own room and sawed it open clumsily with the bread knife.

The letterhead was old–fashioned, embossed in black on thick paper;

J.W. Wells & Co.

70 St Mary Axe

London W1.

Thought so, he told himself. Now then:
Dear sir, piss off, loser, yours faithfully
. He unfolded the rest of the letter.

Dear Mr Carpenter
(he read)

Thank you for attending our offices for interview on the 21
st
inst. We are pleased to offer you the position of junior clerk, on the terms stated in your notification of interview. It would be most helpful if you could make yourself available for work from Monday 26
th
inst. Kindly confirm your acceptance in writing at your earliest convenience
.

Sincerely
,

(Obscene-looking squiggle)

H.G. Wells

Partner
.

T
here was a different receptionist on duty, Paul noticed. When he’d come for the interview, the girl behind the desk had been a stunning brown-eyed brunette, who’d scared him so much he’d almost forgotten his name when she’d asked him for it. Today, her place was occupied by an equally stunning sapphire-eyed ash blonde.

“It’s Paul Carpenter, isn’t it?” she said, smiling at him in a manner liable to cause a breach of the peace. “Mr Tanner would like to see you in his office straight away.”

The smile had been bad enough. Usually, when girls like that smiled at him, it was through the thick glass of a TV screen, and they were trying to sell him hair conditioner. That and the alarming news that he had to go and see someone, presumably one of those terrible partners, before he’d had a couple of hours to calm down and prepare himself for the ordeal were almost too much for him to cope with.

“Right,” he said. “Yes, thanks.” (Also, how had she known who he was?)

“Do you know the way?”

The way? What was she talking about? “Oh.” he said. “Um, no. Sorry.”

She stood up to point. “Left down the corridor,” she said, “through the fire door, turn right, up two flights of stairs, then right again, through the photocopier room, turn left, second door on your right, you can’t miss it.”

That statement contained at least one bare-faced lie. He could remember as far as
through the fire door
. “Thanks,” he said.

“If you get lost, just ask.”

“Right.”

“I’m Karen, by the way,” said the blonde, lifting a telephone receiver. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Yes,” he said. “Me too,” he added. Then he bolted like a rabbit.

It was a large building, and the floor plan turned out to be the sort of thing you’d expect to find if the Hampton Court maze had been designed by the Time Lords. At one point, he found himself in some sort of basement; he could see the soles of people’s shoes passing overhead through thick green glass panes in the ceiling. Some time after that, he opened a door and stepped out onto a flat, lead-covered roof. The hairiest moment was when he pushed through the door that ought, by his calculations, to have brought him out onto the fourth-floor landing, but which in fact opened into a vast portrait-lined boardroom, where two dozen men were sitting round a table. He apologised and got out of there as quickly as he possibly could, but not before they’d all swivelled round in their chairs and stared at him. Other discoveries included two lavatories, a kitchen the size of Earls Court, a stationery cupboard filled from top to bottom with typewriter rubbers, and a door that opened to reveal a solid brick wall.

Just ask someone, the receptionist had said. That was all very well, but (apart from the mob scene in the boardroom) the building appeared to be deserted. Bizarre, he thought; why on earth would anyone want a place this size if they didn’t have any people to go in it? He was just painting in his mind a picture of his desiccated bones propped up against a corridor wall when he turned a corner and collided with something extremely solid, which turned out to be one of the partners from his interview; to be precise, the short, wide man with the huge black beard.

Blackbeard recovered first; hardly surprising, since he appeared to be built of solid muscle. “Ah,” he said, in what Paul reckoned was probably a Polish accent, “Mr Carpenter. And how are you enjoying your first day with us?”

Paul stared at him for a moment. Then he said, “Excuse me, but are you Mr Tanner?”

For an instant, a frightful scowl hovered on Blackbeard’s face, as though he’d just been mortally insulted. Then he laughed. “Heavens, no,” he said. “Allow me to introduce myself. Casimir Suslowicz.” He stuck out a hand you could have landed a Sea King on. Paul braced himself for a bone-crunching handshake, which didn’t happen. “Dennis Tanner’s office is—actually,” he said, “it’s probably best if I show you the way. This place can be a little confusing, till you get used to it.”