I was nodding with approval, trying to give the appearance of a man who was quite interested in hearing some details about these New Directives.
‘The new directives state that clients who do not achieve reasonable credit maintenance objectives may become subject to account review and renegotiation of terms, and in certain circumstances, amicable closure following settlement of outstanding debts. Client incapacity to comply with renegotiated terms in extreme circumstances can result in recourse to legal sanction.’
Whoever wrote this stuff could really pile on the agony.
‘I’m afraid you fall into this latter category, Mr Stretch.’
‘Last, not latter. There are more than two categories.’
‘Oh, are there?’ He looked in puzzlement at the piece of A4 that presumably contained this deathless prose. It occurred to me that if this grammatical solecism was corrected because I had pointed it out, I would have cost them thousands in re-printing charges. It was some comfort, but not much.
His gaze met mine again. I noticed that he looked very tired. Beneath the strangulating coils of management speak I could detect a decent bloke trying to communicate. He really didn’t want to say what was coming, but he forced it out somehow.
‘Simply put, Mr Stretch, unless you repay your overdraft within the month, we’re going to foreclose and take you to court. I’m really sorry.’ He looked about to break down. ‘Thirty days maximum.’
‘Oh God. It’s that bad, is it? Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world. I’ll sort it out.’
‘There’s not much I can do. It’s all gone upstairs.’
So there was an upstairs in this Flatter Structure, was there? I thought there might be.
He showed me out, right into the street, and instead of shaking my hand gave me a little pat on the shoulder.
‘Good luck. I can’t say how sorry I am about this.’ He raised his brows and looked at me with sorrowful eyes. I felt like giving him a big hug. How had the bastard managed to do this? Threatened to bankrupt me and then made me feel sorry for him? But I reasoned that it wasn’t him who was doing the threatening. Mr Big was elsewhere, in some airconned money mountain in EC2, stroking his jacquard silk tie and flexing his burgundy gut. Frost was just the unwilling kneecapper. He had been emasculated. All his old powers of discretion, the things that had made it possible for him to derive some satisfaction from his work, had been usurped by New Directives until he had become little more than a talking leaflet. On the coach home I imagined him sitting drunk in a hotel bar near Swindon on some infernal Client Service course, hopelessly railing against the new ways, or flopping himself down on his Dralon settee and whingeing at the wife all night about lost self-esteem. ‘What I don’t bloody understand is …’ How much time before the laptopped whizzkids at HQ switched from a Strategic Refocus on Customer Needs and Wants to a Strategic Refocus on Firing Half the Staff? Not long, I’ll be bound.
None of this indulgence was making me any richer, so I surveyed my options. Theft, prostitution, beggary, abscondment, prison, Bart. By the time I’d alighted at Victoria it was clear to me that Bart was the only way forward. I would rather be in thrall to a fat gangster than become a cat burglar, panhandler or rent boy. I phoned him on his mobile when I got back to O’Hare’s for the evening shift and acted in a manner so craven I yelp to remember it. I could hear the dull jabbering of croupiers and Hong Kong Chinese, so guessed he was at the roulette again. After two minutes of my timid greasing I realised that he had already agreed to my request. His only conditions were that it was a personal loan from him to me, and that I had to repay it in full, not in dribs and drabs. He didn’t even want any interest. His payment was that he had effectively put me in manacles to O’Hare’s for as long as I was unable to save twelve hundred quid. On the money he paid me that was likely to be a very long time.
That night, though, despite the sloughing hangover, the egg of pain on my forehead and a sense of regret, I couldn’t make myself care. I bossed everyone about and was dangerously charming to the customers. It was warm in there, nobody knew who I was, and I could do it falling off a log. Work was a kind of deeply provisional happiness. This is the effect a hand-addressed envelope and the prospect of a job interview could have on me. For a brief period of time, obviously.
I remembered my job offer to Sadie. The thought brought me down a little. I genuinely couldn’t remember trying to get off with her, but I had no doubt that I had done. If she combined that example of my behaviour with my humiliation at the hands of Colin, she probably wasn’t currently holding her new boss in particularly high esteem. I think I’d told her to turn up at six-thirty-ish, which turned out to be lucky, because Paolo the chef told me that the witless girl I’d hired a week before had phoned in to say that she was quitting. She had been typical of the general standard. She was Irish, from Kerry, but she was so off the pace she could have been either from the Frozen North or the fourteenth century. She had spent all her time smoking crazily out by the bins and weeping softly into her apron. O’Hare’s had had them all in my time there: thieves, mutes, illiterates, screamers and truants. The rates Bart paid attracted people with such ineptitude with the English language and such scrofulous skin that McDonald’s would reject them out of hand. There was little chance of Sadie not being up to the job.
She turned up about ten minutes late in a dirty mac and tiny once-black mini skirt. I was standing by the bar putting white plastic flowers into vases.
‘Shite. Sorry I’m late, got lost in Clapham.’
She seemed breezily unconcerned that nineteen hours previously I had attempted to tongue her face.
‘That’s OK, get your coat off and I’ll tell you the deal.’
Her hair really was very red indeed. It wasn’t sandy or hint-of-mouse-y, it was bright orangey red. She had it pinned back to her scalp and gathered into a complicated curled bun, but you couldn’t tone down hair that colour so easily.
When she was ready, I took her over to an empty table and told her the deal: ‘Lunchtime shift eleven-thirty till five, evening shift five till eleven-thirty, read the specials off the blackboard, £2.91 an hour.’
Finis.
‘That’s outrageous.’
‘Plus tips, you could be clearing well over twenty quid a day.’
‘What does it say in my contract about my rights when the boss tries sexually assaulting me?’
‘Oh, come on, give me a break. I didn’t have to give you this job, you know.’ I was aware that this had hit the wrong note.
‘I don’t have to accept.’
‘OK, OK, OK. But try not to mention the … incident … again. I’m really sorry about it.’
‘Don’t be sorry, I was flattered.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, particularly the bit when you said you don’t normally go for gingers or people in the vocations, but I was worth making an exception for.’
‘I didn’t say that, did I?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘That’s bad.’
‘Yeah, but I’ll get over it. How’s your concussion?’
‘Better. It was more of a blackout, I think.’
‘And how’s the poetry coming along?’
‘What