Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (9 page)

50

'Please, call me Jack if it would make you more comfortable.'

'You don't want me to call you what would make me more comfortable. But as I was saying, do you think it's a good idea to be insulting your fellow guests by implying that they couldn't recognise and avoid a waste of their time if they saw it looming ahead of them?'

'Isn't it more insulting to suggest that vacuous "pro-active" managementspeak, or taking part in sub-drama school role-playing games is gaunny make them perform better at their jobs? Or that it makes you closer to your colleagues to know that they caught you when you fell backwards during one of those trust exercises - which I fully expect to be engaged in before nightfall, by the way.'

'If it makes you feel any better,' she replied, 'if we
are
made to do one of those trust exercises you described, you can rest assured I won't attempt to catch you.'

Parlabane's name was familiar, to say the least, even before UML requested he be invited. It was part of her job to know, or at least know about, as many journalists as possible, and though he wasn't likely to be on her guestlist for a new gallery opening, she'd been aware of his byline and his reputation even before he became Ian Beadie's nemesis. Granted, little she had heard about him prior to that had been complimentary, but anyone Ian Beadie hated so much that he'd tried to kill him couldn't be all bad. Working at what might be termed the sunnier end of the PR industry - parties, junkets and launch events, mainly for fairly small, leisure-and media-based businesses - she had thus far no occasion to lock horns with Parlabane, nor had she imagined doing so unless his editor went insane and made him the food critic. This was something she was grateful for, and the reason she lobbied hard, if ultimately in vain, against UML's wish to invite him.

Emily had imagined him to be bigger, somehow. Older too, gnarled, nicotinestained, beer-bellied and grey-skinned from a lifetime under flickering striplights: the grizzled old school hack to out-grizzle all old-school hacks. What she'd seen standing by the minibus she had in fact taken to be part of the UML set-up, as he looked lithely fit and had something unmistakably of the outdoors about him. It wasn't just that his face looked healthily weathered by sun and wind beneath a dirty-blond mop that seemed likely to shed sand if he shook it; some people (and there were a few present) simply looked out of place away from their desks, their phones, their bar or their favourite table, and he conspicuously wasn't one of them. It probably enhanced the impression that he was standing next to the infamous Rory Glen, who had typically spent a lot of money on looking the outdoor type, but who had succeeded only in looking all the more like a yuppie on a weekend country break. Parlabane's photographer was a surprise package too. With Parlabane hav51

ing cultivated - some might say hammed up - his anti-establishment credentials through the self image he conveyed in print, it seemed particularly incongruous that he be accompanied (as a condition of attendance, no less) by someone who could have walked out of a No''el Coward play. He was another who looked cut out for whatever the weekend might have in store, though she couldn't decide if he looked fit beyond his years or facially aged by his outdoor exertions. Neither could she decide of which thespian Fox brother he most reminded her, nor explain why she could as much picture him looking through a scope as a lens.

'I'd argue that any social activity - the more pleasurable the better - would bring work colleagues closer together,' offered Rory Glen. It was an intervention for which Emily was grateful enough to offer a conspiratorial smile, even at the potential cost of offering encouragement to a man whose reputation for promiscuity was often denoted by the phrase 'ferret up a drainpipe'. 'Actually,'

he continued, 'it might be more accurate to talk about morale-building than team-building, if it's the latter you're so sceptical about.'

'So why not gather the staff and just go for a few drinks, if it comes to the same thing?' Parlabane asked, turning in his seat to take on Emily's ally. 'Why come all the way up here with them?'

'Because you can get to have a few drinks up here too. It's what else this weekend might offer - and what your local pub presumably doesn't - that we're here to judge,'

'So if we're not the bestest of buddies by the end of it, I'll have proven my point?' Parlabane challenged.

Glen laughed, Parlabane too.

What else this weekend might offer.
It didn't look promising through the minibus window. Their vehicle meandered slowly along a single-track road, its pace dictated less, she suspected, by the driver's desire to showcase their surroundings than by the tortuous bends and dips he was cautiously negotiating. They had disappeared under a canopy of greenery only yards past the gateway, the deciduous forest testament to the remoteness and historical isolation of the spot. Most tree life north of the central belt was planted conifers, vast acres of them in file and column like a Roman regiment. There was plenty of that too, only a mile or so south-west, but the borders of the McKinley estate were buffered by something darker and truly ancient. There was a stillness about it that was like a distant, estranged relative of tranquillity. This was the kind of woodland, she imagined, where the darkest tales, myths and metaphors had been born: treacherous pathways, primal temptation, ripe carnal fertility and bloody, carnivorous death. If any of Beatrix Potter's shower had ventured forth in here, their heads would have ended up on sticks. Maybe it was just the weather. They emerged from the trees to cross a 52

bridge thirty or forty feet above a wide stream tumbling energetically over rocks, unwearied by the efforts of carving this deep V into the landscape these past few million years. It would surely have been a beautiful sight on a bright, clear day, as would the woods with the sun angling crystal beams through the foliage to the mossy floor. Under heavy clouds and swirling drizzle, there seemed a sense of harshness, even cruelty about the exposed isolation of the place, though this was probably exacerbated by the thought that she'd be spending a lot of time out in it. Such landscapes were really best admired through a double glazed window with a cold glass of Sauvignon Blanc in front and a warm fire behind.

That would be happening at some point, of course, but she was not without trepidation about what might come first,
what else this weekend might offer
. Taking possession of her first paintgun did little to assuage her doubts, and that was before Campbell began his pep talk.

Within moments of the UML man opening his mouth, she could sense Parlabane's glee. Having all checked in and discovered their accommodation to be of a reassuringly luxurious standard (diminished only by the sartorial suicide note lying across the duvet), they were mustered under order in a grand, high-ceilinged drawing room. There was a glorious fire blazing in the cavernous hearth, causing Emily to survey the room with much the same longing she imagined Eve regarded the garden as the gates closed forever behind her. Instead of a comfy chair and a menu, she was issued with 'the tools of teambuilding': equipment the efficacy of which looked at that stage in some doubt. Campbell stood before the fire, Baxter deferentially positioned a few feet behind and to the left. Campbell looked younger than his colleague, perhaps the youngest person in the room, but had been introduced by Baxter as 'the motivational genius UML head-hunted for this post from a shortlist of one'.

'Good afternoon,' he began. 'And welcome to the UML Experience. I have to say, I envy you your position because you don't know what's in store, and I really wish I could be in your shoes. I feel like a parent waiting to see his children opening their Christmas presents.'

'Well begun is half done,' one of Emily's primary teachers used to say, and from an 'enthusiastic pitch' point of view, she couldn't fault Campbell's opening gambit. Nonetheless, she'd wager that if old Mrs McQueen could have heard Campbell continue, she'd have changed her proverb to 'well begun is no guarantee that the rest won't be a complete fucking embarrassment'.

'What is about to be engaged with here is essentially a paradigmatic prospective assemblage intended to render a dynamic orchestration of employee energistics across multiple vertices. Through a system of non-apparent motive vehicles, we will seek to initiate from within the disintegrated participatory constituents an innovated focus-drive generating a core-gravity that will chan53

nel exertory critical impulses along complementary and bi-reflexive vortals. . . '

He looked up to a semi-circular gallery of jaw-gaping silence.

'Or is that what you were expecting me to say?' he asked. There was relieved laughter around the room, and a rather too self-satisfied look on Campbell's face, like a cheap stage magician overimpressed by his own trick.

'Okay, let that be lesson number one. If you have expectations, we're going to mess with them. If you have assumptions, we're going to debunk them. I'm not here to give you any lectures or to presume to tell any of you how better to do your jobs. Nor am I daft enough to preface what's about to take place here by projecting a standardised outcome from it. The only thing I can predict for sure is that you're all going to learn a few things you didn't know about yourselves and each other, and whether that helps you back in civilisation, who can say. . . though I'll be surprised if it doesn't. The main thing to bear in mind for what lies ahead, the absolute crux of the exercise, is that we're here to have some fun, okay?'

Not bad, Emily reckoned, and he'd pulled off a good gag; though she couldn't help suspect it had been coached rather than natural. Campbell still struck her as someone who'd have been more comfortable talking in management-speak than taking the piss out of it. 'Projecting a standardised outcome' had slipped in there fluently enough. And taking the piss out of something was often a cheap way of buying your indulgence in it: you make one joke about it and people are less aware of how seriously you're taking it the rest of the time. This suspicion was borne out by Campbell's subsequent reference to their overdue mutual introductions as 'an identity affirmation exercise'. It sounded second-nature to him, but plenty of people laughed, assuming he was still at one cool-ironic remove.

'Now, you were told as you entered the room that we were issuing you with the tools of team-building. Can you show me those tools?'

A number of paintguns were held aloft with varying degrees of enthusiasm, ranging from Rory Glen striking a macho pose, to cursory waves of the barrel, and of course Jack Parlabane pretending to shoot himself in the head.

'Wrong,' Campbell announced. 'And we'll call that lesson number two. You thought we meant the paintguns. We didn't. We meant your colleagues here in front of you.
They're
what you build a team from. And we're about to demonstrate that right now.'

They were each invited to come forward and introduce themselves to the rest of the room, whereupon they were required to thrust their hands into a black sack and pull from it a strip of cloth, either red or blue. Again, participation ranged from the self-conscious to the over-assertive, with the conduct of the two Reflected Gleam delegates illustratively calibrating the spectrum. The invitation had gone out to 'Rory Glen and guest', so it 54

didn't reflect much of UML's gleam if Liz Ford had been the RG staffer who
most
wanted to attend. Reading between the lines, it was plausible to imagine a number of disappointed male employees whose enthusiasm for the jaunt had carried less lustre for Rory than the prospect of getting into Liz's pants amid the conducive informality of a boozy jolly.

Emily, despite having hung back until almost the last, announced herself with practised professional enthusiasm, beaming to the room with her invaluable PR technique of making eye-contact with everybody but focusing on no-one. She delved a hand into the sack and pulled one of two remaining strips from it. A swift tally of the assigned colours told her the last would be blue also, and she observed with a stifled groan that Parlabane was yet to draw.

'My name is Jack Parlabane,' he said, having ambled forward with a tediously demonstrable lack of haste. 'I'm from
The Saltire
. I'm here to have my expectations, assumptions and prejudices thoroughly confirmed, and if they're not I'll write that they were anyway, because I'm a journalist and that's what we do.'

So that made two people who were pretending to be self deprecatory. Emily and Kathy had set up Seventh Chime six years ago, both having worked most of their professional lives in the assorted tiers of public relations. Emily's introduction to the field had been as a press officer for an umbrella group of voluntary organisations, legacy of her guilt-ridden lefty past, while her fellow traveller Kathy, having studied drama, had discovered a greater talent for publicising theatre groups than for acting in them. They'd both seen the grotty and glam ends of the business, each having had uniformly brief corporate tenures and appointments at major media houses. When they decided to go out on their own, it was so that they could represent companies and organisations that they believed in, or were at least not ashamed of. They'd both witnessed the professional obfuscation their job could require, and neither wanted to be the 'spokesperson' on
Newsnight
squirmingly trotting out the corporate line in shamefaced defence of the indefensible, while at home a million viewers gave their telly the finger. It would be fair to put it that they didn't want to be representing the kind of people who would have them locking horns with the likes of Parlabane. What was it he'd written about Beadie? 'Personal contrition is realising you're in the wrong and consequently making amends; corporate contrition is realising you're in the wrong and consequently hiring Ian Beadie.' Something like that. Seventh Chime was in the information business, and their philosophy was that it should always be about giving, not concealing. She had nothing to be ashamed of, and neither did UML. Even if this did turn out to be a pile of crap, nobody was being deceived and nobody was being hurt, so she wasn't going 55