The Portable Door (1987) (13 page)

Paul got smartly out of the way, and Mr Suslowicz knelt down beside the machine, like a vet attending to a sick calf. He didn’t seem to be doing anything; just kneeling and listening. His head nodded from time to time, and once or twice he clicked his tongue, as if in sympathy. Then he gave the machine a gentle tap—more of a reassuring pat than a thump—and stood up. The beeping stopped, and the lights went out. “Try it now,” he said.

A perfect copy, unwrinkled, unsmudged, oozed smoothly out from between the rollers.

“What was the problem?” Paul ventured to ask.

Mr Suslowicz shrugged. “Search me,” he said, “I don’t know the first thing about these gadgets. But it always used to work on an old Datsun I used to have, years ago, so I guessed it might be worth a try. Have either of you two seen the long stapler?”

Paul nodded. “Actually, we were going to use it for putting these together, after we’ve finished copying.”

“That’s all right,” Mr Suslowicz said. “I only want it for a moment.”

Paul nodded. “It’s just there,” he said, “on the table, next to the—” He frowned. “It was there a minute ago,” he said.

Mr Suslowicz grinned. “Elusive little tinker, isn’t it?” he said. “Not to worry. If I manage to track it down, I’ll drop it back to you here after I’ve finished with it. OK?”

After he’d gone, and the machine had churned out a dozen or so faultless copies, Sophie said, “That was just like in that film, with Robert Redford.”

“What film?”

“Where he’s this man who can talk to horses,” she replied. “It was like he was listening to what it was saying.”

“Robert Redford?”

“No, him; Mr Suslowicz. It was like the machine was telling him what was wrong with it. Don’t gawp at me like that,” she added. “I know it sounds nutty, but that’s what he reminded me of.”

Paul shrugged. “Talking to horses is one thing,” he said, “but you’d need to be able to sweet-talk an Army mule to get any joy out of this heap of junk. I don’t need to listen to it to know what it’s thinking. It doesn’t like me, simple as that.”

Whatever it was Mr Suslowicz had done, it seemed to have worked. Apart from one torn page (for old time’s sake, Paul assumed) the device polished off the rest of the copying without a hitch. That just left them with the relatively straightforward job of cutting and sticky-taping the rest of the copies up together, collating them and stapling them into bundles.

“We need that long stapler,” Sophie pointed out.

Paul nodded. “I’ll go and see if I can find it,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of Captain Oates taking a stroll through the permafrost.

To his surprise, he didn’t have far to look. He’d decided to make a detour by way of the coffee room; and when he opened the cupboard where the sugar lived, there it was.

“How did it get in there?” Sophie asked, when he’d told her about his mission.

“Oh, you know what it’s like,” he replied. “You put something down in this place, next minute it’s gone and it doesn’t turn up for weeks. Probably a spatio-temporal anomaly or a vergence in the Force.”

“Or people taking stuff and not putting it back when they’ve finished with it,” Sophie said disapprovingly.

“Possibly,” Paul replied sceptically, “but maybe a trifle far-fetched. Sod, it’s out of staples.”

He refilled it from a box on the shelf. It was a cumbersome thing, ancient and grouchy, with a spring that appeared to have a distinct appetite for human flesh. He handled it warily, and got away with nothing worse than a slight graze. “It’s five to one,” he observed. “We might as well leave the sorting and stapling till after lunch.”

It was all in the way he said it, and he hadn’t intended for it to come out that way, but there was no mistaking the assumption; namely, that they were going to go out of the office and have lunch together, like they’d done the day before. It was another moment.

“All right,” Sophie said, after a brief hesitation.

(“
Simple as that
, Paul thought.
Maybe that’s how it happens, for everybody else
.)”

They went, by mutual unspoken agreement, to the same sandwich bar. As they stood in the queue, Paul did a spot of mental arithmetic, figuring out how long it’d take him to walk home from the office to Kentish Town for the next week, and said, “What’re you having?”

“That’s all right,” she said.

“No, but you paid for me yesterday.”

She looked at him. “You haven’t got any money,” she said.

He ought to have shrunk by six inches or so, but he didn’t. “True,” he admitted.

“Well, then.”

He didn’t know what to say. “That’s very—”

“Yes. Coffee and a ham roll, wasn’t it?”

Paul nodded. Some explanation, he felt, was necessary; or at least some assurance that he wasn’t just a fortune-hunting gigolo, battening on to her as a source of free carbohydrates and nothing more. But he knew he wasn’t capable of putting stuff like that into words without making things a whole lot worse, so for once he did the sensible thing and gave up. “Thanks,” he said.

“That’s all right.”

In a way, it felt as though all his adult life—ever since he’d realised that girls weren’t irrelevant alien creatures who only cared about inane trifles like hair-toggles and glittery nail varnish (instead of vitally important things, such as making balsa-wood aeroplanes and painting 1⁄72 scale model soldiers) but were in fact beautiful, terrifying alien creatures who never seemed to notice he was there—all his life, he’d been pulling and heaving at a door that led into an enchanted garden, and quite suddenly he’d noticed that in fact it opened inwards and all he had to do was push gently with the tips of his fingers. It would have been nice, he couldn’t help thinking, if someone had told him about this, but maybe that was what Darwin had in mind when he talked about natural selection. After all, Paul reasoned, you wouldn’t want idiots like him splashing about in the shallow end of the gene pool, with their inflatable armbands and polystyrene floats.

That said, he hadn’t got a clue what he was supposed to do next. Presumably at some point he was going to have to say something toe-curlingly embarrassing, and if that went okay there’d be kissing and, well, stuff like that. Obviously he was all for that, just as he’d always really fancied owning a big yacht and sailing it single-handed to New Zealand. Now that he was at least part of the way along, he had the unpleasant feeling that his yacht was an open boat, and he was adrift in it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, he assured himself—after all, it couldn’t be too difficult, could it? He considered his relatives; Uncle Trevor and Cousin Darren and Cousin Lorna’s husband Eric, men with the personal charm of dustbins and just enough intelligence between the three of them to power a traffic light, and yet they’d all contrived to attract, woo, bed and marry females, often not in that order. If they could do it, so could a lawnmower or an answering machine or a tin-opener or a small rock; and so, by implication, could he. In theory.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Sophie said.

Paul looked up, startled. “Sorry,” he said, “I was miles away.” She was frowning at him slightly, and he remembered those occasions on which she’d appeared to have read his mind. He guessed this wasn’t one of them, because she hadn’t thrown the ham roll at him. “I was just thinking,” he said, “about those spreadsheets.”

“Oh.” Maybe there was a tiny spark of disappointment in her voice. “What about them?”

“Well.”
Absolutely; what about them
? “That theory of yours, about them trying to get rid of us. What we’ve been doing this morning seems very like what you were saying; you know, giving us horrible, pointless jobs to do so that we’ll leave, and they won’t have to fire us.”

She shrugged. “I’m not so sure about that any more,” she said. “Like, now I come to think of it, it’s just the sort of thing I’ve seen people doing in my dad’s office. I mean, someone’s got to do it, and the partners aren’t going to muck about with scissors and Sellotape.”

Paul scented a possible change of subject, and pounced on it gladly. “What does your dad do, then?” he asked.

“Oh, he’s an accountant,” she sighed. “It’s a family business, him and Uncle Joe and Uncle Steve. He really wanted me to go into it, but I told him, no way.” She made it sound like her father had been nagging away at her for years to join him in sailing down Niagara Falls in a barrel. Exactly why sorting spreadsheets and copying them for J.W. Wells was so much better than doing pretty much the same sort of thing for her father and uncles he wasn’t quite sure, but no doubt there was a reason. “How about you?” she went on, with a certain degree of effort. “What does your father do?”

“He used to be something to do with double glazing,” Paul replied. “But he retired early, and he and mum moved to Florida.”

She nodded. “You didn’t fancy going with them?”

“I wasn’t asked.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “My sister Fleur—she’s five years older than me; she works for a bank, and they sent her to New York for a year. She really liked it over there.”

“Mum and Dad say it’s great there,” he said. “Nice hot weather, and the people are very friendly. I’d like to go and visit them,” he added, “some day, when I’ve saved up.”

“Fleur’s in Borneo at the moment,” she said. “After that, it’ll probably be either Tokyo or Chile. Travelling around is one of the things she likes most about her job.”

Paul decided he couldn’t care less about her sister Fleur. “Sounds pretty interesting,” he said.

“Oh, most of the time it’s just sitting behind a desk, talking on the phone,” Sophie replied. “And I don’t think she’s ever got time to go out and see things or stuff like that. Still, I guess it must be nice to know that you’re in the same country as all the scenery and fascinating stuff, even if you never get around to doing anything about it before it’s time to come home. It’s like me,” she added, with a faint wry grin. “A cousin of mine came up from the country to stay for a while, and she went off to see the Tower and St Paul’s and the Planetarium and the London Eye and all that sort of thing, and a week later she’d done it all and went back to Norwich. I’ve lived here since I was three and never been to any of them. I suppose I might get around to it some day. But it just goes to show; you can be surrounded on all sides by loads of amazing stuff and never really know it was there.”

He had the feeling that she was telling him something, but he couldn’t make out what it was. “I went to the Planetarium once,” he said, “with a school party. Can’t say I liked it much. You had to lean right back in your seat to see what was going on, and I hurt my neck.”

There wasn’t much anybody could say about that, and Sophie duly didn’t say it. Paul had the feeling that things weren’t going well. This was supposed to be the stage where you got talking about things—family, childhood experiences, all that stuff—and lost track of the time, and eventually the waiters came and threw you out because they wanted to tidy up and go home. He was sure that was how it was supposed to be, and presumably Uncle Trevor and Cousin-in-law Eric had been here and done this and got a passing grade at the very least, good enough to get them through into the next round. He tried to think of a perceptive observation about Life, but nothing occurred to him.

“Eat your ham roll,” she said.

“What?”

“Your ham roll,” she said. “You haven’t touched it.”

“Oh, right.” He wasn’t the least bit hungry; also, he had no illusions about what sort of spectacle he presented when consuming food. In fact, he’d always been deeply puzzled as to why so many dates, assignations and encounters are traditionally structured around meals; because by no stretch of the imagination is eating an attractive spectacle, and even golden lads and lasses tend to sound like hotel plumbing when drinking soup. He nibbled self-consciously at the rock-hard roll, and was painfully aware of the crumbs that snowed down his shirt-front.

“Did you bring an old pullover?” she asked.

He nodded gratefully. “I don’t know if he actually meant that seriously or if it was just him being funny,” he said, “but I thought I’d better not take any chances. What about you?”

Her eyebrows tightened a little. “That’s why I’m wearing this horrible scruffy old suit I bought for six pounds in an Oxfam shop,” she replied. “Not that it bothers me at all, I hate having to wear all these stupid work clothes. My mum had to go out and get them for me, I haven’t got a clue about all that stuff. Might as well be back at school, wearing uniform.”

Paul nodded. In the wild, he wore interchangeable jeans and anything he happened to find in the T–shirt drawer that passed the sniff test. Dressing up in suits struck him as a bizarre leftover from a previous century, while doing laundry and ironing shirts had come as a very nasty shock, as if he’d gone to the doctors and been prescribed a course of leeches.

“I’m still not sure exactly what it is we’re meant to be doing,” he said. “For one thing, what do they need a strongroom
for?
I thought that was just banks.”

She shook her head. “Lawyers and accountants too,” she said. “My dad’s office has got one. Well, they call it a strongroom; it’s actually a converted toilet with a Yale lock on the door. It’s where they keep people’s share certificates and bonds and stuff.”

He thought for a moment. “Maybe that’s what J.W. Wells and Co. does,” he speculated. “Maybe they’re just accountants, after all.”

“Don’t think so,” she replied. “I mean, I’m not an expert or anything, but it doesn’t strike me as much like my dad’s place. I think they’re either stockbrokers or they do import-export. Or commodities,” she added, “whatever that involves. I think they buy up loads of stuff from one lot of companies and sell it to another lot of companies for more than they paid for it.”

“The bauxite, you mean?”

“Yes, though really that wouldn’t fit at all, would it? Maybe they’re into mineral rights as well as minerals.”

Paul frowned. He wasn’t sure minerals had rights, though he couldn’t see offhand why they shouldn’t. He couldn’t remember having seen mineral rights activists picketing steelworks on the telly, or being stopped in the street and asked to sign petitions about it, but maybe the movement was still in its infancy.