Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (16 page)

Alison was, she understood, supposed to be insulted, disgusted and coweringly intimidated by this, and thus rendered tearful, trembling and crushed. She was insulted and disgusted, but other than the perky tits remark (in conjunction with that UML guest whose eyes popped out on stalks when she'd entered the bar) making her think she should ditch the camisole for a bra tomorrow night, that was it. Unfortunately for Mathieson, two out of three didn't cut it. She hurled the plates down at the floor, causing him to spread his feet to avoid being hit, and thus exposing his crotch in advance of the foot she was already sending in. He jumped back, enough to cushion the impact but not enough that the message failed to register. However, he had a reply ready and prepared.

'Right. She's out of here. Assault. You're fucking fired, and you won't work anywhere my name is known again.'

'Bollocks she is,' Ger interjected, walking over and looking Mathieson in the face. 'You hit her first. But tell you what, why don't we run it by Sir Lachlan?

How do you reckon he'd feel about us being another person short on the crew this weekend?'

Mathieson said nothing, but clearly knew the answer.

'Aye,' Ger confirmed. 'And bear in mind he won't want to fire me before Monday either if
I
boot your baws.'

90

Night of the Eighties Undead

(Parental discretion advised)

It had all been going far too well. He really should have seen this coming. Parlabane hadn't been so much lulled into a false sense of security as effectively distracted from the potential horrors at hand, and this, he'd have to admit, was a testament to UML's success in achieving part of their stated objective. From the shared-adversity/mutual humiliation ordeal of the 'identity affirmation exercise', through the uncomfortable but necessary coalescing and cooperation, to the surprisingly enjoyable mayhem of stalk and splat, the effect had indeed been to mould them into a functioning unit and thereby suppress the individual traits that might otherwise prevent them getting along. It was plausible UML had picked up the principle from an ant colony. It didn't matter who you were, you all had a shared objective and your contribution to achieving that made you valuable to your colleagues irrespective of blah blah blah. Yeah, magic. Group hugs and high-fives all round.

But now they were all having dinner together.

That was when he remembered that he had been less apprehensive about whatever indignities UML might visit upon him this weekend than about the type of people he would be having to put up with: viz, the type of people who thought this kind of carry-on was a great idea.

The important thing was to keep reminding himself that it was good copy. Contrary to what Emily Bell believed, he had not come here to bury UML: he'd guessed his fellow guests would do that for him, just by being themselves. He only had to write it down. It wasn't exactly a scoop, for instance, that the endlessly self-congratulatory advertising industry believed image, design, wit, humour, concept and vision to be no substitute for a nice pair of tits, but it was rare to have such a candid admission to quote.

Poor bastard. Parlabane had almost felt sorry for Rory, seeing the guy stitched up like that by a colleague whose high-minded principles were nonetheless not forcing her to seek employment where she wouldn't be party to the wholesale exploitation of etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. He could read the script pretty clearly: it wasn't just a spot of boss-baiting, it was conscience therapy. 91

Even if the guy had it coming, doing it in front of a group of near-strangers he'd be stuck with at close-quarters for two days had made Liz look as cynical and ruthless as Rory. Everybody had laughed, but as much to dispel the tension as out of genuine humour.

For a guy who struck Parlabane as having skin so thick you couldn't cut it with one of those two-handed broadswords adorning the staircase, Rory's response was surprisingly subdued. He'd done a bit of playing the incorrigible rogue, pretending to take it on the chin, but his reticence around the dinner table seemed conspicuously out of character, especially when the vino began eliciting more veritas than Parlabane wanted to hear from everyone else. It was Toby who started it, albeit inadvertently.

'A coup d'etat,' he suddenly said, during a lull in conversation over generous digestifs. Prior to that, discussion had been polite but dull, with Campbell as UML Master of Ceremonies inviting a bit of oral CV circulation from each of his guests. Baxter hadn't joined them for dinner, having 'preparations for tomorrow' to attend, according to his china. They were all seated around one large oval table in a book-lined conference room, commandeered for their dining purposes because of its intimacy. It lent a more relaxed, dinner-party air to the proceedings (initially at least), which would have been lacking had they taken their places in the conspicuously under-capacity main restaurant. It also facilitated Campbell's desire to encourage large-scale single discussion rather than private little chats between those closest by, which was no doubt intended to bond the greater unit, but felt in practice like an inadvisedly awkward game of spin-the-bottle. Rory Glen was about the only person Parlabane imagined being naturally comfortable holding the floor like that, but between his sudden attack of bashfulness and the fact that everybody now knew more than they cared to about how he made his living, he had little to contribute, leaving the spotlight to rightly reluctant others.

Normally when surrounded by those who would describe themselves as

'business people' jawing about their jobs, Parlabane felt like Charlie Brown in those scenes where adults were talking, their speech rendered as meaningless

'waah-waah-waah' noises, the speakers oblivious to the listener's incomprehension. On this occasion, however, the empathetic dread and cringing he felt watching each of them stumble and flounder meant he was unable to zone out so much as usual of what they said.

In addition to what he already knew about the Reflected Gleam and Seventh Chime delegations, he learned the following:

Max Redman was Something In The City. Parlabane may have been listening more closely than he particularly cared to, but the string of titles and positions Max had held defeated his ability to comprehend what exactly the guy did. It had long been Parlabane's belief that the more complicated your 92

job title, the less tangible the contribution you made to society in return for your wage packet (or stock options).

'I'm a plumber. Call me in late September when the weather turns Baltic and your central heating system throws a seven after deciding it can't face another winter.' Any problems there?

'I'm an electrician. Call me when you flip a lightswitch and end up looking like Don King.' Clear enough?

'I'm a Strategic Coordination Supervisor in charge of Investment Risk Assessment in Nascent Technology Markets. No, I'm not sure what the fuck I do either, but I'm pulling down six figures, so it must be pretty important, wouldn't you say?'

Max recounted umpteen such bafflingly nebulous posts, but to further muddy the waters, while failing to adequately describe what it was, on any given day at the office, that he actually
did
, he was now doing it on a freelance consultative basis and currently held no title whatsoever. He confessed a little surprise as to why, therefore, he had been invited on the junket. Campbell wasn't forthcoming in response. He threw the question back to Max in an attemptedly coy fashion, prompting the mutually satisfactory musing that, as someone moving among several companies, he'd be well placed to spread the word.

Max had neglected to fill the 'plus one' place offered on the weekend, citing a desire to 'throw myself in without a lifebelt' because now that he was freelance, it was his day-to-day job to 'drop into the midst of strangers and make myself an indispensable part of the machine'. Parlabane suspected this was a circuitous way of saying 'I have no mates', which might be an embarrassing admission, but would at least have made him sound less of a ham shank. Another person confused, if flattered, by her invitation was Joanna Wiggins. Although these days working long term for Catalyst IT Solutions in Liverpool, she was also an independent contractor, and not one particularly high up the Catalyst food chain either, by the sound of it. This time Campbell did volunteer that 'it's part of UML's philosophy in making people feel part of something, that the impetus should not always have to come from the top'. He neglected to add the proviso that the top was nonetheless where the decision and the outlay would have to come from, no matter how many eager employees sang in praise of what UML had to offer, but that would have spoiled the faux-egalitarian New Labour cuddliness of the sentiment. Joanna had opted to bring a companion in the shape of the singularly gormless Grieg Rossi, who in his role as a Human Resources apparatchik at an IT

outfit was in the pitiful position of being someone computer geeks actually looked down on. As such, he was utterly made for the job, as his combination of physical clumsiness, verbal ineptitude and unwaveringly glaikit expression 93

must have made even the most gauche and pallid code-cruncher feel like a cocksure sophisticate.

Finally, there was Toby Seaton, on the face of it another unlikely invitee given that he was in charge of a local charity in Newcastle, and such organisations tended not to have much green to throw around on upscale moraleboosting exercises, staff's motivations generally coming from less capricious sources. Toby's organisation collected furniture, household appliances and generally anything of practical value from those who no longer wanted them, and then redistributed the goods among householders currently in no position to upgrade. They specialised in house clearances, coming in after the removal firm had taken all the treasured belongings and offering practical catharsis to those left wondering what to do with the orphaned sofa that doesn't match their new living room. Parlabane sensed something incongruous about the man and his job, there being a distinct whiff of the upper orders about him. Sure, there were plenty of aristos at the head of charities - where would the lunch and party circuits be without our good causes, darling? - but this was small-scale, unheralded and very much down-and-dirty. From the sound of it, Toby spent his days driving vans and lugging fridges, not glad-handing dignitaries and managing photo-ops. There was a tale of a toff laid low here, and Parlabane intended to hear it. If nothing else, perhaps it would explain what UML hoped to gain from his endorsement. Connections to big money and big influence were a far more plausible motive than any more of the phoney reaching-out-to-all-levels mince Campbell was hawking. Toby had come alone too, though this turned out to be because his assistant had gone down with appendicitis the night before, leaving him with no time to seek a replacement before setting off from Tyneside at dawn. When he heard this, Parlabane expressed his sympathy for both of them. Within an hour, he was wishing he'd subsisted the past week on a diet of clipped toenails.

'A coup d'etat.' Really pretty much out of nowhere, conversationally. The last signpost sighted on the road of discussion had been pointing to the paintball post-mortem rehash exit ramp, Vale having prematurely concluded the careers version of you-show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you mine by judiciously -

and not entirely dishonestly - stating that he was 'a former civil servant'. Not even Campbell wanted to coax forth any elaboration on that.

'What did you say?' Campbell asked Toby.

'Oh, sorry. Just thought of something we were talking about this afternoon. Before the game got going, Liz and Joanna were discussing whether there were any other circumstances in which you could shoot your boss and still keep your job.'

There was laughter, mainly from those who'd been on the red team, though it was unclear whether this was because they hadn't heard the remark the first 94

time or because they had spent the match teamed up with Liz's boss. Rory cracked a thin smile, but appeared to have moved on from cowed and reflective to borderline huffy. Unaccustomed as he was to public not-speaking, he had been keeping his mouth busy by filling it with wine, and one could measure the distance between feeling sorry for himself and inevitable belligerence in fluid ounces.

'No,' Vale interjected. 'Strictly speaking, in a coup d'etat, if you shoot your boss, the point of the exercise is that you end up in
his
job.'

'Good point,' Toby conceded. 'If a pedantic one. The thing is, though, you could shoot your boss but not get fired, like Liz here today.'

'I don't think she did actually shoot her boss, to be fair,' Max pointed out.

'Might not stop her getting fired, though,' growled Rory. His tone and timing were comically perfect, but Parlabane clocked a look in his eye that didn't entirely suggest he was joking.

It wouldn't normally fall to Parlabane to play peacemaker in any kind of situation, being someone who had built if not a career then at least a reputation upon an irresistible tendency to pour kerosene on smouldering timber just so he could stand back and write about the flames. However, jail had taught him a whole new respect for the need to calm the herd, so the thought of someone getting pissed and volatile in such already awkward and socially confined circumstances was something he literally didn't have the stomach for these days. Consequently, he intended to cap the growing aggro. The results demonstrated why the opposite was more his forte, but he did at least try.

'What do you call a heifer in a number-seven football jersey carrying an M16 assault rifle?' he asked the assembly, pitching a gag he'd heard on
Off The
Ball
.

Every head turned his way expectantly, in anticipation of some moment of comedy genius that could justify such a peremptory derailing of the conversation and impudent requisition of the floor.

'A right-wing military coo,' he informed them, to blank looks almost all round. It perhaps understandably whipped over the heads of some of the English contingent, and the football reference evidently sidelined a further constituency in the Scottish females, leaving only Rory, who was buggered if he was going to cheer up for anybody; Campbell, who had displayed no evidence to suggest he could ever be successfully prosecuted for possession of a sense of humour and was anyway still peeved at having lost control of the discussion; and Vale, who'd laughed the first time he heard it but was determined to enjoy the spectacle of Parlabane dying on his arse.