You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (10 page)

He walked in through the factory gates, under the wrought-iron H&F in a gilded oval, and turned left, heading for the side door. As he passed the stack of pallets, it struck Colin that if she was from JWW, and they were professional magicians - what did that make her? A witch? He grappled with that concept for a moment, but it slithered through his mind’s fingers like a greased fish. Instead, he tried to guess which stations her car radio was tuned to: Radio 4 for the news, Classic FM for motorways and dual carriageways, and probably she had one of those radios that defaults to the local traffic news just as you’ve got to the interesting bit in Book of the Week; and in the glove compartment, quite possibly, was a small stack of home-made compilation CD’s, for tailbacks on the M25. Something along those lines. A witch? No, he couldn’t really see it.

‘Where the hell did you get to?’ Dad thundered at him, as he came through the office door. ‘I came back and you’d gone.’

‘Slipped out for a pee,’ he said, without thinking.

‘Out in the yard? Bloody hell. I know you’ve got your faults, but I had hoped we’d got you house-trained.’

‘Breath of fresh air.’

‘Since when have you needed fresh air?’

‘I felt like some,’ Colin mumbled helplessly. ‘For a change.’

Dad grinned. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘In that case, you can nip down to the newsagent and get me two packets of my cigars.’

Colin was, of course, supposed to resent being sent on a menial errand. Not this time, however, since he needed time to recover from the profoundly weird conversation he’d just had under the lamppost with the girl who thought he’d once had a moustache. Also, he needed a drink; not alcohol, since Dad would be sure to smell it on his breath, but a coffee or something.

There’s something about your average suburban high street that anaesthetises even the most blatant weirdness. By the time he’d passed Marks and the DIY place, it had occurred to him that there was at least one rational explanation for the whole moustache thing. For instance: it was entirely possible that somewhere in the vastness of London there was someone who looked quite like him, and who had at one time insulted his face with foliage. She’d mistaken him for this taste-impaired specimen, hence all the confusion. As for the magic stuff; well, Dad did have a rather offbeat sense of humour. Maybe it amused him to make up an obviously ludicrous story and see if he could bully his only-begotten into taking it seriously. There was also, Colin reminded himself, the Santa episode. Putting all issues of filial respect on one side for a moment, he had clear evidence that Dad wasn’t above telling porkies when it suited his purposes. Following up that line of argument led him into even richer areas of speculation. If he had to sum up his father’s character in two epithets, the second one would have to be devious. Just because he didn’t understand what Dad was up to, it didn’t follow that there wasn’t some cunning plan underlying it all. It’d be about fiddling the VAT or wriggling through the meshes of some obscure EU directive, and his own role in it would be fairly trivial - deputy assistant sucker, something like that. And as far as the deja-vu stuff went—

He stopped outside the door of the little cafe next to Currys. (Except that it wasn’t next to Currys any more; the cafe was still there, all dark blue, stripped pine and tubular chrome steel, like something out of Kafka, but Currys had turned into a very small Monsoon. Definitely hard times all round in the retail sector.) Coffee, he told himself; and, since he’d been through a rather unsettling experience which was bound to have played hell with his blood sugar, a custard Danish.

The deja-vu stuff. Well, it couldn’t be all that rare, or there wouldn’t be a word for it. Probably happened every day, and there was nothing to worry about. Really, he was ashamed of himself for ever having given the weird stuff the time of day.

Kitted out with food and drink, Colin looked round for somewhere to sit. The place was unusually full, but there was a seat at one of the tables in the window. He’d have to share, but what the hell. He didn’t mind. He’d long suspected that there was a latent streak of bohemianism in his character, and here it was, bursting out like a lava flow.

‘Anybody sitting here?’ he asked, putting down his cup and plate.

‘No that’s—’

They recognised each other simultaneously, and by then it was too late. He sat down. She twitched - you couldn’t really call it a shudder. ‘Hello,’ she said.

Typical of his luck that thieves should have chosen that moment to break into his head and steal all the words. ‘Hi,’ he replied.

‘I was going to drive back to the office,’ she said, ‘but then I thought, I’ll take an early lunch.’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Excellent idea.’

She wasn’t a big eater, then, if lunch consisted of a cup of tea. ‘Fancy bumping into you again,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Where are you parked?’

‘The multi-storey round the corner.’

‘Ah.’

This was clearly hopeless. Sooner or later he was going to have to—

‘Can I ask you something?’ he heard himself say.

‘Sure.’

‘Well—’ Colin rallied his intellectual resources, what there were of them. However he phrased it, it was going to sound as daft as a container load of brushes, so why not just open wide and have at it? ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but do you do magic?’

She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.

Oh, he thought.

‘Actually, that’s a pretty vague term,’ she went on. ‘Since I’ve been with JWW, I’ve been mostly working in the ancillary and administrative sector, rather than the actual practical and effective side of things. I did a year of spatio-temporal engineering in my last job, I guess that’s the last actual hands-on magic I did. I wouldn’t mind getting back into the field, so to speak, at some point further down the line, but at the moment I think Mergers and Acquisitions offers quite a lot of scope for some pretty exciting challenges—’ She paused. Colin guessed that she’d probably heard the last bit of what she’d been saying, and had realised that she was babbling. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do magic. Why?’

‘Oh, no reason,’ Colin replied, in a quiet, strangled sort of voice. ‘So, is it interesting work, most of the time?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s like a lot of things. When you start off, you think it’s going to be glamorous and exciting and fun, and after you’ve been doing it a bit, you find out that all work is basically just work - on balance, better than being dead, but it really cuts into your free time. Is that what it’s like in the ball-bearing industry?’

‘Precision casting and hydraulic fittings,’ Colin corrected her. ‘Yes, pretty much. Except I always knew it wasn’t going to be glamorous and what you just said. But I was brought up with it from when I was a kid - family business, see - so there wasn’t the disappointment.’

‘Probably better that way,’ she said. ‘Changing the subject completely, is there a Boots around here anywhere?’

‘Ah.’ Colin smiled. ‘That’s actually a very good question. There always used to be, about six doors down on your left, next to the baker’s, but it suddenly disappeared - can only have been a few weeks ago, but now it’s a John Menzies.’

‘Oh’ She frowned. ‘Well, not to worry. All I wanted was some nail varnish remover - it’s not urgent or anything.’

Pause. Her introduction of the Boots motif had sounded like a well-I-must-be-going line, but she made no effort to move. It was almost as if she was being held there against her will.

Come to think of it, that was how Colin felt. Not a chained-to-a-dungeon-wall feeling or anything like that, it was more a case of waiting politely while someone you don’t want to risk offending finishes telling a long and boring story. Something like that, but not quite. It was as though both of them knew that there was something expected of them; you can’t go and play till you’ve finished your nice greens. On the other hand, it also had the feel of that first ghastly, small-talk-ridden interview that always has to be got through in between the first lightning-bolt meeting of eyes and the headlong fumble for bra straps. Kxcept—

‘Other than that,’ he heard himself say, ‘I think the nearest one’s in Richmond.’

‘What?’

‘Boots.’

She stared at him. ‘Boots? Oh, right, Boots. Sorry. Really, it doesn’t matter.’

‘There might be one in Kew, I suppose, but—’

‘Really,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s not important.’

‘There’s a Superdrug in—’ Colin forced himself to shut up.

There was an almost desperate look in her eyes now; it seemed to say, I don’t know what to do next, help me. No good looking at him like that. He felt like he was in the school play again, and had forgotten all his lines.

Then - it was as though the unseen puppet-master had said, ‘The hell with it’ and let them both go. They stood up simultaneously, like sprinters out of the blocks.

‘Well,’ Colin said, ‘nice to see you again.’

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘You haven’t eaten your pastry thing.’

‘What? Oh, not hungry.’

‘I’ll be seeing your father tomorrow, then. I’m really sorry about the mix-up today.’

‘Maybe you’re not feeling too good.’

‘I - I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Bye.’

At the door they parted; the full one hundred and eighty degrees, no hesitating, quick march, no surreptitious backwards glances. Colin hadn’t paid much attention to GCSE physics, but he could dimly recall something about opposite poles repelling. It was that sort of thing. Maybe, he thought as he marched briskly down the street, all witches are like that—

My God, he thought. She’s a witch.

Somehow, when Dad had been trotting out all that utterly weird stuff, he’d - he’d believed it, but with a subconscious reservation that came of the knowledge that Dad was always up to something and therefore wasn’t to be trusted; a deeply buried awareness of the points he’d been rehearsing to himself just before he bumped into her, about lies and expediency and Father Christmas. Hearing it from her, on the other hand, was something quite other. If she said that she was a witch and magic really existed, then he believed her.

Bloody hell.

It was at this point that Colin realised he was going the wrong way. Easy mistake to make, since he’d just passed Argos, and surely Argos was next to the Post Office - apparently, not any more. He was practically at the end of the High Street. He turned round.

If magic really really existed, and Dad was getting them both mixed up in it, then he desperately needed to know what the hell was going on. He ran.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘So,’ he asked her, ‘where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’

Cassie snapped out of her train of thought like a dog surprised with its nose in the shopping. ‘Well, here, I hope,’ she said. ‘I like it here, really.’

She could see him mentally counting - two, three, four. ‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ he said. ‘But what I meant was, do you feel that you’re likely to progress exponentially inside the team structure? Do you regard yourself as essentially goal-driven?’

She blinked. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I don’t know very much about football. I didn’t even know we had a company team. Someone told me about the pub quiz, but—’

Seven, eight, nine. ‘What we’re looking for, essentially,’ he said, ‘is predators. Team players who’ll go out there and take the market place by the scruff of its neck. Which is why, among other things, we’re actively evaluating a more performance-related salary mechanism.’

If Cassie had been paying attention, she’d probably have been able to figure out what he was getting at. ‘Ah,’ she said.

‘Predators,’ he repeated. ‘Pro-activity. The days when we could just wait for clients to come in through the front door are over, Ms Clay. In today’s market environment, you’ve got to go into the long grass and flush them out. Do you think you’re prepared to do that?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ she replied.

‘What we all need to take on board team-wide,’ he went on (he had a little pointy nose, like a hamster), ‘is that we’ve all got to take our share of responsibility for ensuring that we get out on the street and fight for every last scrap of business we can get our claws into. Hence the performance-correlated pay structure concept. In today’s business arena, Ms Clay, the rule is, you only eat what you kill.’

Cassie frowned. ‘I’m a vegetarian.’

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then wrote something on his piece of paper. ‘Have you got any hobbies?’ he asked.

‘No.’

He ticked a box, paused, tapped his glasses down his nose an eighth of an inch so that he could read his own handwriting. ‘What key performance indicators do you feel would be most indicative, given your position in the team network?’

She looked at him. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I was miles away. Do you think you could repeat that, please?’

He repeated it. Still drivel. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose whether I’m getting my work done properly and on time. Is that the sort of thing you mean?’

He folded his arms. He had tiny wrists poking out of billowing white cuffs, as though he was wearing his big brother’s hand-me-down shirt. ‘What I want you to think about,’ he said, ‘is benchmarks.’

‘Benchmarks.’

‘You’ve got it. Preferably, we want to be working toward a steeply escalating benchmark curve, ideally within a six-to nine-month time-frame. Do you think that’s something you could fully commit to?’

‘Rather,’ she said.

‘Excellent. So how would you set about achieving target attainability?’

Cassie looked at him and thought, I wish you’d shut up, you stupid little man. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the usual way, naturally.’

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. ‘Maybe you don’t quite understand. I’m talking about how we can work together to make sure you push the envelope in your particular post.’

She had absolutely no idea what he was drivelling on about. ‘You mean, letter-boxes?’

‘Fine.’ He drew a great big black cross in one of his little squares. ‘So, how would you characterise your performance over the last nine months?’

‘I’ve only been here six.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Oh well, you know.’ She shrugged. ‘Just sort of jogging along quietly, I suppose.’