The Magpie Trap: A Novel (16 page)

Parkers’ Fine Foods

Chris Parker kept the nature of his father’s
business a guilty secret from his employers. Peach Marketing Agency had been
founded by an idealistic, forward-thinking vegetarian named James Rush, and
Chris figured that it was pretty obvious that Rush would frown upon his
father’s old-school meat production racket.

In fact, Chris told
them very little about his former life: nobody there knew anything about what
had happened to his brother, for example. He therefore appeared to them like a
force of nature. He had arrived from nowhere, like a whirlwind and had dragged
the ailing company forward into the twenty-first century by embracing new
technologies which had previously been frowned upon by the senior management,
and particularly by the overly moralistic Rush.

           
What
Chris Parker delivered was results, creativity, and enthusiasm. Yes, he made
mistakes, but these were more than made up for by his sweeping successes. To
them, he was like a young shark that had made his first kill, and now could
sense the smell of blood from miles away. His senses were all attuned to
attracting attention to the clients which employed the agency. The thing was
however, Chris simply didn’t care about his job, and it was this sheer
effortlessness which translated itself into his work and made it brilliant, and
so easy to grasp. He would sketchily propose a few uncertain comments onto a
spider diagram on a piece of scrap paper, and somehow stumble upon the essence
of what the particular company wanted to portray to their customers. He would
barely pay attention to what his customers said, and therefore came up with new
insights on how they could sell their business ideas. He relayed ideas in
simple terms, which everybody could comprehend and they loved him for it.

           
Chris
was allowed the space for his creative powers to flourish; they tolerated his
long boozy lunches, they virtually encouraged his ‘thinking time’, which
roughly translated as lie-ins, and they employed others to take on the
administrative slack which he left in his wake. This simply gave him more time
to day-dream, to plot and plan how he could actually get out of the job. At the
back of his mind was always the promise which he had made his brother on his
deathbed. He had to make good that promise.

That Friday morning, as
was customary, Chris had arrived early. This was because everyone knew that he
left at
2pm
, and he did actually have to do some work. He
opened his laptop on his big bare desk and loaded up some files. Reminders
about meetings (some of which he’d already skipped) and deadlines (most of
which he’d be able to buy extra time on) popped up. It was depressing, he
thought, the way that his life was now governed by these reminders; by the
computer’s electronic clock. When a reminder popped up, accompanied by that
jolly ‘ding’ sound, he was supposed to
do
something. He’d become like one of Pavlov’s dogs that know food is coming
when they hear the sound of the bell.

Chris was presently
involved in a couple of projects which demanded urgent attention. One of the
projects in particular made him uneasy. He was supposed to be coming up with the
bare-bones of an advertising campaign which would herald the launch of a new
drink from one of the local breweries. At first he’d been faintly excited by
the idea; he liked a drink himself after all. But when he’d actually
encountered the men, he’d found them to be so much like his father that it made
him feel sick. They were men from a bygone age, still clinging on to their
positions of power in spite of everything.

Maybe when people like his
father and the men from the brewery finally retired, the world would work to a
different model. Maybe business would become less slippery then; perhaps the
golf-club buddy mentality would go away.

But the idea was a
stupid one; men like them would never retire. They would hang around and make
sure that
things were done right
all
the way to their graves. It was their job to frustrate, aggravate and belittle
the thrusting shoots of growth from the generation below them until finally,
what grew out of the ground were men just like them.

And Chris had tried the
new drink too. Part of him wanted to bring in Danny Morris on the project, just
so he’d be able to tell the men just how crap their drink really was. It was
basically a reinvention of Babycham - ‘something for the ladies’ – but it
tasted like water which had been dredged from the depths of the Leeds-Liverpool
canal. Chris could have sworn that he saw an old boot in one of the sample
bottles. Ship in a bottle? Shit in a bottle more like.

Instead of bringing
Danny in on the campaign, he’d tipped Danny the wink that the brewery
might
be after some extra security on
their site. Well; if a company is going to shell out thousands and thousands on
a shoddy advertising campaign, they might as well spew up a little more in
order to make sure that their new drink was safe. Because if anyone actually
broke in and somehow
tried
the drink,
it’d all be over; the brewery-men would be exposed as the golf-club charlatans
that they were. They knew nothing about what today’s generation actually
wanted.

Golf; once upon a time,
Chris had tried to get into golf himself, he reflected, with some
embarrassment. He remembered the wild swings on the tee; the five or six shots
he’d had to play en route to the fairway, where his father’s ball had landed
plumb in the middle. He remembered is father’s sneering and the way that he’d
brought the game to an end after three holes.

‘You’re fucking
useless, son,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t bother coming back here. I thought you said
you could play?’

Both of them had
retired to the nineteenth hole, where Babycham was still served, where they
still had those old peanut-boards on the wall like an advent calendar; with
each bag of nuts removed, more and more of the picture of the scantily clad
woman on the board behind was revealed. Chris had the sneaking suspicion that
his father thought marketing was all about the tits and arses still, and
realised that in a way, Mal was probably right.

Take Melon Masher;
that’s what they wanted to call the new drink;
Melon Masher.
At their first meeting, the brewery men had joined
him in some blue-sky thinking regarding what the overall message of their
campaign was going to be. From the looks of it,
Melon Masher
was going to be marketed to men as something they
could buy women in clubs and pubs so that it’d get the women so drunk, they
wouldn’t be able to say no. Chris had been able to say no though, and he’d
informed them that he’d come up with some alternatives.

His first idea was to
change the name. Only problem was, he had to think of another one. For some
reason, the name of that horse, Quick Fix, kept suggesting itself to him.

‘Quick Fix,’ he
whispered. ‘Does exactly what it says on the bottle; fixes you up quick so
you’re drunk enough to give in to your wild side…’

Or perhaps something
else…

‘What about calling it
‘You are a cunt’?’ he asked himself. ‘After all, that’s basically what they are
saying to their customers by selling them this muck.
That is the overall message that they are communicating.’

Chris opened up the
image file which had the design work for the new bottle. He deleted the words
Melon Masher and started to type in his new alternative, sniggering away all
the while. The brewery men were so stuck up their own arses, they probably
wouldn’t realise the change until it was too late…

He was still laughing
as he answered his ringing mobile: ‘Chris… ha, ha… Parker?’

A quick-fire, urgent
voice on the other end: ‘Chris? That you?’

‘I’ve just said it was,
haven’t I? Who’s this?’ asked Chris, rather absently. He had the phone cradled
between his ear and his shoulder and was using both hands to manipulate the
image of the bottle on screen. He’d now altered the shape of the bottle so that
it resembled a penis.

‘It’s Mark Birch. I
work with Danny…’

‘Oh, hi Mark; I know
who you are. There’s no need to explain… Why are you calling me?’

‘
Houston
, we have a problem,’ said Mark, rather bizarrely.
‘Danny’s done a major disappearing-act and I wondered if by any chance you’d
seen him?’

‘He’ll be in the pub;
what you worried about? He’s always in the pub. Mind you, he’d better not be in
the bookies. If he’s in the bookies, I’ll…’

‘He’s not in the pub,’
breathed Mark. It was clearly an effort for him to explain and to rein in the
galloping horses of his worries. ‘And what I should have said was that his
disappearing-act was right in the middle of a company presentation to some top
men from the brewery.’

Chris couldn’t help but
laugh. ‘What? He just upped and left a presentation? To those fat bastards;
that’s too funny!’

Mark paused a moment as
though collecting himself. ‘He got some kind of phone call. All his face went
white, like, as though it was someone he really didn’t want to hear from…’

‘Ah, there’ll be plenty
of people our Danny-boy doesn’t want to hear from. Think about it: how many
people does he upset in one single night out on the town? Multiply that by the
number of times he’s actually been out in the last year – probably three
hundred and sixty five times – and you’ve got a lot of angry people out for his
blood.’

‘But nobody’s heard
from him since… The brewery men just walked out in the end, we waited that long
for him. There was a bit of an argument too. Martin Thomas, our boss, is out
for blood. The only one that is not pissed off with him is Paula, the receptionist,
who seems to find his whole disappearing-act very funny.’

Chris stopped fiddling
with the image on screen and concentrated on the phone call. ‘What do you
expect
me
to do about it, Mark? I’m
not his bloody wife, you know. I’m not his employer. I’m just an old mate that
he comes to when he needs a bit of cash or when he gets another of his
crack-pot ideas.’

‘I just thought you
might have seen him, that’s all,’ muttered Mark. ‘And that you might have some
ideas on where we could find him.’

Suddenly Chris felt a
little guilty. He was so used to reacting to Danny’s perpetual disasters with a
weary shrug of the shoulders that when it came down to something that was
potentially serious – certainly Mark thought it was serious – he found it quite
hard to break the mould. Danny was like the boy who cried wolf, he reckoned.
And he supposed Cheryl would feel the same way.

‘You’ve not called
Cheryl, have you?’

‘Nah; not yet anyway.
Paula knows her from somewhere or other and reckons that we should shield her from
the worst of this until we find him. And it is bad, Chris; he’s really pissed
off these potential customers. Maybe he’s gone and done something terrible…’

‘Don’t say things like
that,’ cautioned Chris. ‘Don’t ever say something like that. Don’t even suggest
it.’

‘But you sound like
you’re not even bothered…’

‘All right; you’ve made
your point. As soon as I finish work, I’ll come and meet you and help you look
for him. But if this turns out to be another of Danny’s stupid little games
like when he goes on a three-day bender and loses his phone, then I’ll… I’ll. I
don’t know what I’ll do, but I won’t be happy.’

‘Thanks Chris,’ said
Mark, sounding
too
grateful.

Chris sat for a moment
and stared out of the window. A boat was bobbing slowly along the river and he
watched the family on board as they laughed and joked. There were two small
boys that reminded him so much of the photograph in his desk drawer that he
became entranced. One of the boys was holding a fishing-rod and the other was
trying to grab it from him. A typical brotherly snap-shot; what one had, the
other wanted.

Danny, he reflected,
was like a stand-in brother to him.
Yes
,
that would be a good way of describing their relationship. There was a bond
formed by years of knowing each other; years of shared experience. But also,
under the surface, there was that uncomfortable competitive-edge that
characterises
so many male relationships. Chris had long tried
to drown this competitive-edge. He’d tried to drown it through exaggerated
kindness; lending Danny far too much money and never asking for it back, for
example. But Danny had always managed to see these acts of kindness as
something else; he’d always seen them as unwanted reparations after their
silent war.

Chris shook his head
and picked up his mobile once more. He dialed Danny’s number and waited eight…
nine rings until Danny’s stupid answerphone message kicked-in.

Hi this is Dan the man from EyeSpy Security. If
you’re buying, then leave me a message; if you’re selling, then don’t bother.
I’ll speak to you when I’m back from wherever I’ve gone, squire.

He sighed and clicked
off the phone, not even bothering to leave a message. He’d have been better off
calling the incompetent barman at the Adelphi for answers about Danny’s
whereabouts. He’d have been better calling the damn Killingbeck Turf
Accountants. He did neither of those things. Instead he called down to Gemma in
reception.