Barking (10 page)

The box turned out to be slightly too small, but Duncan couldn't face the thought of making two journeys, so he balanced a few books and the spare pair of shoes he always kept at the office on top, and staggered back down the stairs. He stopped at the desk, still half expecting to find all his colleagues gathered there, with cakes and champagne, to reassure him that it had all been a merry prank, and really he was being promoted—

‘Jenny said you're to hand over your keys before you leave,' Reception said cheerfully. Why was it, he couldn't help wondering, that she always called the partners by their first names and got away with it? He dumped the box awkwardly on the desk, tried in vain to catch a fugitive shoe as it slid past, and pulled out his keyring. Needless to say, the office keys were stuck, and he broke two fingernails trying to prise them out.

‘I think that's everything,' he said briskly, when Reception had taken the keys away from him and locked them in a drawer. ‘Well,' he added, ‘it's been—'

‘'Scuse me.' Reception darted past him to pick up the phone. ‘Craven Ettin solicitors, how can I help you? No, sorry, Mr Hughes isn't with us any more. Ms Sidmouth is handling his cases for the time being - shall I put you through?'

He waited till she'd transferred the call, then asked: ‘Who was that?'

‘Oh, just a client.' She was looking through him, as if he wasn't there.

‘Well, bye, then.'

‘Bye.'

The phone rang again; she swooped down on it. Duncan juggled with his box for a bit, then stuffed the leftover books in his coat pockets, binned the shoes and walked out.

Out in the world, it was drizzling. The box was heavy, and he knew that everybody who passed him on the pavement couldn't help but realise what it signified; if a passing artist had happened to be looking for inspiration for an updated Business Tarot pack, he'd have needed to look no further for the perfect image of the Sacked Man. Needless to say, nobody looked at him. It's a well-known fact among office workers that unemployment is contagious, and is passed on by eye contact.

I'm an eccentric senior partner
, he muttered under his breath all the way to the Tube.
I carry all my stuff with me wherever I go because I don't trust the cleaners
. But it appeared that the Stanislavsky effect didn't always work, because no matter how passionately he struggled to believe the lie, it still wasn't true by the time he got off the train at the other end. The weight of the box was making his shoulders and elbows ache. It felt bizarre and unnatural to be walking home in the middle of the day. The streets were much emptier than they were during the morning and evening lemming-runs, and he was reminded of all those sci-fi films where the Last Man In The World wanders through the deserted city.

When Duncan finally got home, he dumped the box on the kitchen table and left it there. It contained, he realised, nothing he actually wanted: pencils, a calculator, his desktop electric fan, the strange and vaguely disturbing paperweight he'd been given by his aunt for his last birthday but one. He wondered why he'd bothered bringing it all home, when it'd have made much more sense to have dumped it in the first rubbish-bin he'd come to.

He flopped into his chair and shut his eyes, asking himself,
What the hell just happened to me?
It made no more sense here than it had back at the office. Why had they fired him? Well, because he wasn't exactly an asset to the firm: clash of mindsets, difference of attitudes, square pegs and round holes. Fine; but why now, so suddenly? Sacking the unwanted staff wasn't the Craven Ettin way; instead, they made life so miserable for them that they quit of their own accord. He'd seen it happen half a dozen times, he knew the drill, and that wasn't what had happened to him. It must have been something he'd said or done, something so intolerable that they'd reacted with the swift, sudden, bloody stroke rather than the gradual easing-out. He had no idea what the something could have been; but anyway, it didn't matter now.

Quick ransack of his memory, followed by a flurry of mental arithmetic. Add the interest on his credit-card debts to the mortgage, the bills and even the bare minimum for subsistence, and you came up with a depressingly substantial sum of money, which he now had no way of earning: because nobody would give him a job without some kind of reference.

Nobody. No normal employer—

He groaned out loud.
No
, he thought,
I'd rather stack shelves or clean toilets
. No doubt; but neither of those vocations paid well enough to keep him solvent. Working for Luke Ferris, on the other hand - assuming the offer was still open, after he'd insulted, abused and practically assaulted his well-meaning old friend, who'd only been trying to be nice.

It was, he decided, his Japanese game show moment; a point in his life where he had no choice but to embrace the humiliation, plunge right into it as if immersing himself in a hot bath. As he called directory enquiries for the number of Messrs Ferris & Loop, Mortmain Street, he tried out various opening gambits in his mind—

‘Hello, could I speak to Mr Ferris, please? Duncan Hughes.'

The being-put-on-hold music buzzed in his ear like an electric hornet, disrupting his attempts at structuring a well-turned phrase. Count to five, he told himself. If they don't put me through by then, put the phone down and think of something else.

Three, four - ‘Duncan?'

‘Hi, Luke.' Just enough of a pause to swallow some breath, then: ‘I've been sacked.'

‘Sorry, what did you—?'

‘They fired me. Craven Ettin. This morning.'

‘Bloody hell. Why? What'd you done?'

Duncan laughed, for some reason. ‘No idea.'

‘Any warning?'

‘Clear blue sky.'

‘What an absolute bugger. So, what can we do to help? You want us to sue them for unfair dismissal?'

Duncan closed his eyes. One small step for a lemming. ‘Actually, Luke,' he heard himself say, and he sounded very far off and strange, ‘I was wondering if—'

‘Did they give you the proper written warnings; you know, the section one stuff? Because if they didn't—'

‘No. Look—'

‘What about dispute-resolution procedures? Are there any in your employment contract? The tribunals come down like a ton of bricks—'

‘Actually,' Duncan repeated, ‘I was wondering if I could have that job.'

Silence. You could have skated on it, or smashed it up to go in whisky. Floating chunks of it could've sunk liners.

‘I thought you'd decided you didn't want to come in with us,' Luke said.

‘Yes. Sort of.' A mammoth trapped in the pause that followed would keep fresh for a million years. ‘But I've been thinking about that, and—'

‘Yes?'

He gave in. ‘The bastards say they won't give me a reference,' Duncan said.

‘That's nasty,' Luke replied. ‘You sure you don't know what it was you did? You must've got up their noses so far you were practically coming out of their ears.'

Duncan counted to three. ‘Well,' he said, ‘is the offer still open, or what?'

‘The partnership, you mean? Joining us?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh, sure.' Completely offhand, as though Duncan had just asked him for a light. ‘No problem there. Only, I got the impression you'd rather starve in the gutter and be eaten by rats.'

‘No, not really.'

‘Well, then.' Luke sounded
happy
, for crying out loud. ‘Sorted. Tell you what. Drop in some time tomorrow morning, give us a chance to clear all the crap out of the upstairs front office. Do you prefer tea or coffee mid-morning?'

‘What? Oh, tea.'

‘Fine. No rush. I generally drift in around ten-ish, unless I've got to be in court. Give me half an hour to get the morning clutter out of the way, any time after that that suits you.'

‘Um,' Duncan said.

‘That's really good news,' Luke said. ‘The others'll be chuffed to buggery when I tell them.'

How could he be so sure of that? ‘Listen, are you absolutely sure—?'

‘See you tomorrow. Bye.'

‘Bye,' Duncan replied into the dialling tone. He put the phone back, then wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. One can of beer, a packet of plastic ham slices and a carrot. He ripped open the beer and drank it, but it bloated rather than anaesthetised him. He went back to his chair, sat down and closed his eyes.

Whether it was nervous exhaustion or the beer, he fell into a doze, which in turn slipped gradually into a dream. He was still in his chair, but in front of it was an office desk: a big, impressive thing made of shiny golden oak, with a green leather top. There was another desk next to his, and another in front of him; in fact, the room was full of the things, like a classroom. He looked up, and found that he was being glowered at by the teacher.

‘Duncan,' the teacher said. ‘Perhaps you'd like to share the joke with the rest of the class.'

‘What, sir?' he heard himself say.

There was something in his hand. He clenched his fist around it, but too late; the teacher had seen it, and advanced on him like a siege-tower. He knew that if he opened his hand and let the teacher see it, whatever it was, he'd be in all sorts of trouble.

‘All right,' the teacher said. ‘Let's see what you've got.'

He knew what it was: the ripped-off lapel of a jacket. To be precise, the lapel from the teacher's suit. ‘I haven't got anything, sir, honest,' he said. ‘You can trust me, sir, I'm a lawyer.'

He raised his hand, opened it and showed that it was empty. The teacher nodded, then vanished in a shower of green sparks, as the rest of the class cheered.

 

The architecture of the office in Mortmain Street was early Mordor with strong Dalek influence: a gleaming rectangular tower of black glass, with fountains and palm trees in the entrance lobby, and doormen who looked as though they'd turn to stone in an instant if they happened to be exposed to direct sunlight. Ferris and Loop were on the twenty-first floor. The lift moved so fast, Duncan had an unsettling feeling that he arrived before he'd left.

The twenty-first floor, seen through the lift doors as they opened, wasn't what he'd been expecting at all. There was a great deal of oak panelling, dark and glowing as though beeswaxed by generations of housemaids. The carpet on the floor was deep and expensive but softened with long use; old and very well cared for. The front desk was apparently genuine antique, beautifully figured and carved walnut but with heavily scratched legs. On the walls hung ancient, slightly faded tapestries, in what Duncan guessed was supposed to be Elizabethan style: hunting scenes and so forth. In one corner stood something that looked like a sawn-off church font: a large granite bowl on a marble plinth.

Reception was a small, elderly bald man with a pointed nose and very large ears. ‘Ah yes,' he said, when Duncan told him his name. ‘Mr Ferris is expecting you,' he added, making it sound as if Duncan was either the Messiah or Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent. ‘If you'd care to take a seat.'

Duncan looked round. One thing there wasn't, in all this genteel splendour, was a chair. The old man was muttering into a phone, like an elderly clergyman intoning responses at evensong. On his desk, a VDU the size of the screens they show football on in pubs flickered and dissolved into a screen saver of prancing antelopes.

‘Do please sit down,' the elderly man said. ‘Mr Ferris will be with you directly.'

Duncan glanced round again, but saw no chair. He turned away and pretended to be fascinated by the nearest tapestry - a bunch of big, nasty-looking dogs bothering an anatomically improbable unicorn, wearing what looked like a gold Christmas-cracker party hat.

‘Duncan. You're here at last. Come on through.'

There was Luke. He wasn't wearing a jacket, and his shirt-tails hung out over his trousers, as they had all those years ago. There was an enormous grin on his face as he lunged forward. For a moment Duncan thought he was about to offer to shake hands; instead, he walloped Duncan between the shoulder-blades like a cyclops performing the Heimlich manoeuvre, then grabbed him by the arm and dragged him towards a panelled oak fire door.

‘Guided tour,' Luke thundered in his ear, as the door swung shut behind them. ‘The others'll be down to see you in a tick, but I thought you might like to see the old dump first.'

Dump, oddly enough, wasn't too inappropriate a term. A great deal of money had been spent at some point on decorating and furnishing; there was enough solid hardwood around the place to account for decades' worth of despoiled rainforest. But every single desk, chair, table and door he saw as Luke whisked him along was chipped, scratched or gnawed up to a height of about four feet off the ground. The filing cabinets were more than usually battered, and the flex spaghetti that hung out of the back of the technology like disembowelled entrails was heavily patched with black insulating tape. The fabric of all the chair seats was frayed, and covered in grey and white hairs. All in all, it was a bewildering mix of industrial extravagance and lived-in scruff. There was also a curious smell, which Duncan couldn't quite place.

‘Library,' Luke said, as they swept through a huge room, floor-to-ceiling with the usual black, blue and fawn-spined volumes - law reports, forms and precedents, the loose-leaf planning encyclopedias, Kemp and Kemp on mutilations, a whole wall full of tax statutes. On the floor, next to a battered grey waste-bin, something had apparently savaged an elderly and obsolete edition of Megarry and Wade's
Law of Real Property
; it lay open on its broken spine, and several pages had been torn out, screwed up and shredded. In the opposite corner, a bank of computer screens showed the same running-antelope screen saver he'd seen in the front office.