There are five desks inside, all hooked up to phones. I weave through them to the far side of the garage, turning right into the kitchen. The kettle is already full and I press it, lifting two mugs from the drying rack. The toilet perches in the corner of the narrow room, topped by rolls of pink paper. Someone has left a half-finished cigarette on the tank that has stained the ceramic. The kettle’s scaly deposits crackle faintly as I open the door of the fridge.
Fresh milk? No.
When I come out of the kitchen Anna is already on the phone, talking softly to someone in the voice that she uses for boys. Perhaps she left him slumbering in her wide, low bed this morning, the smell of her sex on the pillow. She has opened up the wooden doors of the garage so that daylight has filled the room. I hear the kettle click. Anna catches me looking at her and swivels her chair so that she is facing out onto the mews. I light a cigarette, my last one, and wonder who he is.
‘So,’ she says to him, her voice a naughty grin, ‘what are you going to do today?’ A pause. ‘Oh, Bill, you’re so lazy…’
She likes his being lazy, she approves of it.
‘Okay, that sounds good. Mmmm. I’ll be finished here at six, maybe earlier if Nik lets me go.’
She turns and sees that I am still watching her.
‘Just Alec. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.’
Her voice drops as she says this. He knows all about what happened between us. She must have told him everything.
‘Well, they’ll be here in a minute. Okay. See you later. Bye.’
She turns back into the room and hangs up the phone.
‘New boyfriend?’
‘Sorry?’ Standing up, she passes me on her way into the kitchen. I hear her open the door of the fridge, the minute electric buzz of its bright white light, the soft plastic suck of its closing.
‘Nothing,’ I say, raising my voice so that she can hear me. ‘I just said, is that your new boyfriend?’
‘No, it was yours,’ she says, coming out again. ‘I’m going to buy some milk.’
As she leaves, a telephone rings in the unhoovered office, but I let the answering machine pick it up. Anna’s footsteps clip away along the cobbles and a car starts up in the mews. I step outside.
Des, the next-door neighbour, is buckled into his magnesium E-type Jag, revving the engine. Des always wears loose black suits and shirts with a sheen, his long silver hair tied back in a ponytail. None of us has ever been able to work out what Des does for a living. He could be an architect, a film producer, the owner of a chain of restaurants. It’s impossible to tell just by looking into the windows of his house, which reveal expensive sofas, a wide-screen television, plenty of computer hardware, and, right at the back of the sleek white kitchen, an industrial-size espresso machine. On the rare occasions when Des speaks to anyone in the CEBDO office, it is to complain about excessive noise or car-parking violations. Otherwise, he is an unknown quantity.
Nik shuffles his shabby walk down the mews just as Des is sliding out of it in his low-slung, antique fuck machine. I go back inside and look busy. Nik comes through the open door and glances up at me, still moving forward. He is a small man.
‘Morning, Alec. How are we today? Ready for a hard day’s work?’
‘Morning, Nik.’
He swings his briefcase up onto his desk and wraps his old leather jacket around the back of the chair.
‘Do you have a cup of coffee for me?’
Nik is a bully and, like all bullies, sees everything in terms of power. Who is threatening me; whom can I threaten? To suffocate the constant nag of his insecurity he must make others feel uncomfortable. I say, ‘Funnily enough, I don’t. The batteries are low on my ESP this morning, and I didn’t know exactly when you’d be arriving.’
‘You being funny with me today, Alec? You feeling confident or something?’
He doesn’t look at me while he says this. He just shuffles things on his desk.
‘I’ll get you a coffee, Nik.’
‘Thank you.’
So I find myself back in the kitchen, reboiling the kettle. And it is only when I am crouched on the floor, peering into the fridge, that I remember Anna has gone out to buy milk. On the middle shelf, a hardened chunk of overly yellow butter wrapped in torn gold foil is slowly being scarfed by mould.
‘We don’t have any milk,’ I call out. ‘Anna’s gone out to get some.’
There’s no answer, of course.
I put my head around the door of the kitchen and say to Nik, ‘I said there’s no milk. Anna’s gone–‘
‘I hear you. I hear you. Don’t be panicking about it.’
I ache to tell him about SIS, to see the look on his cheap, corrupted face. Hey, Nik, you’re twice my age and this is all you’ve been able to come up with: a low-rent, dry-rot garage in Paddington, flogging lies and phony advertising space to your own countrymen. That’s the extent of your life’s work. A few phones, a fax machine, and three secondhand computers running on outdated software. That’s what you have to show for yourself. That’s all you are. I’m twenty-four, and I’m being recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service.
It is five o’clock in the afternoon in Brno, one hour ahead of London. I am talking to a Mr Klemke, the managing director of a firm of building contractors with ambitions to move into western Europe.
‘Particularly France,’ he says.
‘Well, then I think our publication would be perfect for you, sir.’
‘Publicsation? I’m sorry. This word.’
‘Our publication, our magazine. The Central European Business Review. It’s published every three months and has a circulation of four hundred thousand copies worldwide.’
‘Yes, yes. And this is new magazine, printed in London?’
Anna, back from a long lunch, sticks a Post-it note on the desk in front of me. Scrawled in girly swirls she has written, ‘Saul rang. Coming here later.’
‘That’s correct,’ I tell Klemke. ‘Printed here in London and distributed worldwide. Four hundred thousand copies.’
Nik is looking at me.
‘And, Mr Mills, who is the publisher of this magazine? Is it yourself?’
‘No, sir. I am one of our advertising executives.’
‘I see.’
I envision him as large and rotund, a benign Robert Maxwell. I envision them all as benign Robert Maxwells.
‘And you want me to advertise, is that what you are asking?’
‘I think it would be in your interest, particularly if you are looking to expand into western Europe.’
‘Yes, particularly France.’
‘France.’
‘And you have still not told me who is publishing this magazine in London. The name of person who is editor.’
Nik has started reading the sports pages of The Independent.
‘It’s a Mr Jarolmek.’
He folds one side of the newspaper down with a sudden crisp rattle, alarmed.
Silence in Brno.
‘Can you say this name again, please?’
‘Jarolmek.’