The Portable Door (1987) (3 page)

“Thanks,” Paul replied, slightly stunned. “If you’re sure it’s no trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” Mr Suslowicz replied. “Follow me.” He set off at a brisk walk, so that Paul had to half skip, half trot in order to keep up with him without treading on the backs of his heels.

“Actually,” 14r Suslowicz called back over his shoulder, as they passed the second lavatory, “it might be an idea if I send you down a map. Would that be helpful, do you think?”

“Oh yes, definitely,” Paul replied. “Thank you very much.”

“No problem,” said Mr Suslowicz cheerfully. “In a day or so, I’m sure, you’ll be able to find your way around in the dark; but to start off with, a map. My secretary will bring it to you this afternoon.”

Well, Paul thought, that would be something to look forward to, assuming he ever managed to find the place he was supposed to go to after he’d seen Mr Tanner. Not for the first time, he noticed how hot the building was. He could feel sweat crawling under his armpits, though running up and down a dozen or so flights of stairs in his overcoat might have had something to do with that.

“Here we are,” Mr Suslowicz announced abruptly, coming to a dead stop outside one of four identical doors. “Hold on,” he added, “I’ll introduce you.” He knocked sharply once and jerked the door open, so hard that the wood actually vibrated.

“Dennis,” he said, standing in the doorway and blocking Paul’s view. “Here is Mr Carpenter.”

“About time,” said someone on the other side. Judging by his voice, Mr Tanner was Australian. “He should’ve been here twenty minutes ago.”

Mr Suslowicz smiled at Paul as he slid past and scampered away down the corridor. Paul took a deep breath and went in.

He recognised the man behind the desk straight away. Once seen, never forgotten. Mr Tanner was the freeze-dried child with the acupuncture eyes.
Marvellous
, Paul muttered to himself, and walked across to the desk.

The room was blue with cigar smoke, and it took him a moment to peer through it. All he could see of Mr Tanner behind a gigantic desk was his head, which looked like a grotesque novelty paperweight on top of a pile of brick-red folders. “Got lost?” Mr Tanner said.

“Yes,” Paul replied. “Sorry.”

Mr Tanner shrugged. “Move that stuff and sit down.”

Paul lifted about ten pounds’ weight of files off a narrow plastic chair and sat down. The cigar-smoke fog had lifted slightly, and Paul could just about make out the two dozen or so framed photographs on the walls—all portraits, signed, of people so astonishingly famous that even he had heard of most of them. Interspersed between the pictures were what looked alarmingly like a collection of tomahawks, each in a glass case with a neat printed label.

Mr Tanner grinned at him. His teeth were unusually narrow, and some of them were almost pointed. “Not a wonderful start,” he said, “getting lost on the stairs. Still.” He stubbed out a half-smoked cigar and immediately lit another. “First things first, here’s your employment contract.” He pushed across two bundles of typescript, certainly no thicker than the Bible or the omnibus edition of
The Lord of the Rings
. “If you want to sit there the rest of the morning and wade through it all, fine,” he said. “Or you could just sign both copies on the back page, where I’ve marked your initials in pencil, and save us both a lot of time.”

Paul signed (his pen had run out; Mr Tanner passed him another without saying a word) and handed back the bundles. Mr Tanner signed, shoved one copy back to him and dropped the other into a deep drawer, which he then locked. “That’s that out of the way, then,” he said. “Next. I expect you’d like to know what you’re actually going to be doing.”

“Yes, please,” Paul said.

“Right.” Mr Tanner blew smoke at him. “Actually, it’s all really simple, boring stuff. Filing. Photocopying. Collating. Stapling things together.” For some reason, Mr Tanner laughed at that, like it was a sick joke. “Fetching and carrying. Franking letters. Making tea. Do you think you can handle it?”

Paul nodded. “I’ll do my best, certainly,” he said.

Mr Tanner looked at him. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “Anyhow, after you’ve done that for six months or so, we’ll have another look at you and see if you’re actually any use, and take it from there. All right?”

“Fine,” Paul said. “And, urn, thanks for having me.”

That just made Mr Tanner laugh again. “It’s pretty simple,” he said. “Do as you’re told, don’t get under anyone’s feet, and we’ll get along fine. All right.” He picked up his phone and muttered something into it that Paul didn’t catch. “My secretary’s going to take you to the office where you’ll be working most of the time,” he said. “Don’t want you getting lost again, we might not find you this side of Whitsun. Anything you want to ask?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something anyway,” Mr Tanner replied. “You can call Mr Suslowicz Cas and Mr Wurmtoter Dietrich, or Rick if you’d rather, though I don’t suppose you would. But Humphrey Wells is Mr Wells, Theo Van Spee is Professor Van Spee or Professor, and Judy Castel’Bianco is always Contessa, if you value your life. And of course, Mr Wells senior is JW, that ought to go without saying. I’ll answer to pretty well anything short of Fido, though I’ve got to say I don’t go much on first names, it makes the office sound like one great big early-morning chat show. You can call Benny Shumway down in the cashier’s office any damn thing you like, he won’t take a blind bit of notice of you unless you’ve got a pink slip signed in triplicate. What you call the girls is between you and your conscience. Right, here’s Christine, to show you the way. She’ll be your real boss for the next six months, but it’s OK, she doesn’t usually draw blood.”

A moment later the door opened, and a smart-looking middle-aged woman came in. Since he’d apparently ceased to exist as far as Mr Tanner was concerned, Paul mumbled, “Thanks.” under his breath and followed her out of the room.

“Well,” she said, as soon as he’d closed the door, “so you’re Paul Carpenter. I’m Christine.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Paul said awkwardly.

“Oh, they all say that,” she replied cheerfully, and for the next five minutes, as he followed her down corridors, up corridors, through doors, up and down stairs, sideways along corridors and (if he wasn’t mistaken) across the same landing twice, she rattled through a barrage of complex information without looking back at him once.

“Your reference,” she said, “will be PAC. Usually it’d be PC, but we’ve already got one PC, that’s Pauline Church in accounts, and you haven’t got a middle name so we put in an A. The toilets on the third floor are partners-only except in an emergency. Don’t ever switch any of the computers off, or we have to call out Basingstoke and nobody’ll thank you for that. Coffee is eleven to eleven-fifteen and lunch is one to two, we lock the street door so don’t forget anything if you do go out. Tracy and Marcelle will do typing for you if they haven’t got anything else to do, if you do any letters or anything yourself, send it through to the laser on the second floor, the paper jams so you’ve got to stand over it. The strongroom keys are in reception, and for crying out loud don’t forget you’ve got them and go waltzing off. Paper clips and rubbers are in the green cupboard on the fourth floor, notepads and pencils and felt tips are in the closed-file store but they’ve got to be signed for. Pens, see me. Dial 9 for an outside line and if you use the long stapler, make sure you put it back where you got it from. Mr Wells has two sugars in coffee and one in tea, Professor Van Spee never has milk, he’s lactose-intolerant. You’re sharing the small back office with the other new clerk, it used to be the second interview room but the damp’s chronic, but I don’t suppose you’ll be in there very much. All right?”

“Thanks,” Paul said. He hadn’t caught any of that, and he was absolutely positive he wasn’t going to pick it up as he went along, at least not without a great deal of suffering and embarrassment along the way. All in all, he decided, he really wished he’d got the job in the hamburger bar instead. One thing, though, did register with him. “What other new clerk?” he asked.

“What? Oh, Sophie. Nice girl, you’ll like her. That’s the broom cupboard there, it’s where we store all the file copies of the
Financial Times
. There’s a notebook in there to sign them out if you need to borrow one.”

That reminded him; he’d really meant to ask someone at some stage exactly what it was that J.W. Wells and Co. actually did, but so far there hadn’t really been a suitable cue. He thought about asking Christine, but decided not to.

“Here we are,” Christine announced suddenly, in the middle of a detailed account of the system for numbering closed files. “Your new home from home.”

She pushed open the door and bustled in. Paul, however, stopped dead on the threshold and stood absolutely still, as if he’d just been switched off at the mains.

The cause of this extreme reaction wasn’t the room itself; it was just a roughly square space enclosed by four white-emulsioned walls, a rather dusty Artex ceiling and a very old carpet-tiled floor, containing a bare plywood desk, a scratched green filing cabinet and two plain wooden chairs. It was what was on one of the chairs that got to him.

“This is Sophie,” Christine went on, apparently not aware that Paul was standing in the doorway doing waxwork impressions. “She managed to get here on time,” she added. “You two just hang on here, someone’ll be along any minute now to tell you what you’ll be doing next. We have a fire drill the first Wednesday in each month, there’s a notice on the door that tells you where to go.”

Paul managed to get out of the way as she bustled out of the room. The doorknob hit him in the small of the back, but he hardly noticed.

“You,” said the thin girl.

Say something
, Paul ordered himself. “Yes,” he said.

There’s two ways I can play this
, Paul decided.
I can carry on standing here like a deep-frozen Ent, or I can sit down
. He stayed where he was.

“You’re still wearing your overcoat,” the thin girl said.

“Am I? Oh, right.” He struggled out of the coat, which had somehow grown far more mechanically complex than he remembered. A button came loose, bounced off his toecap and skittered away under the desk. He dumped the coat on the floor, then bent down, picked it up again, and tried to drape it over the back of the chair. It slid off. He let it lie.

“You got the job, then?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Me too.”
All right
, he promised himself,
I’ll shut up now
.

There was a long, brittle silence, during which his left foot went to sleep. Paul wondered briefly if there was actually anything to stop him walking straight out of the building (apart from the pins and needles, of course) and never coming anywhere near this part of London ever again. He’d signed a contract, of course, but would they really bother to take him to court? Almost certainly not.

“Did you see Mr Tanner?” he asked.
Yes, I know
, he told himself,
I promised. But ten seconds more of this ghastly silence and my brain’ll boil out through my ears
.

The thin girl nodded. “He’s horrible,” she said.

“Did he tell you what they actually do here?”

This time she shook her head. “Did you ask him?”

“No.”

“You should’ve asked him.”

“I expect we’ll find out, sooner or later.”

She frowned. “I hope so,” she said. “Otherwise we’re going to look very stupid.”

The pins and needles had spread to his right foot too. He rested one hand on the desk for balance and tried to keep absolutely still.

She was sitting slightly forward in her chair, tiny hands folded in her lap. For some reason, she reminded him of a picture he’d once seen of a man who’d been on Death Row in some American prison for twenty years. Somewhere, in the distance, a telephone was ringing. It carried on, unanswered, for a very long time.

“Big place, this,” he said.

“Mm.”

“The Polish bloke said he’d send me down a map,” Paul went on. “I hope he does. I got really badly lost just trying to find Tanner’s office.”

She looked at him with mild contempt. “Did you?” she said.

“But then,” he continued, “I never did have much of a sense of direction. My mum says I could get lost in a shoebox.”

“Really.”

His feet tingled sharply, making him wince. “So,” he said, “have you got any brothers or sisters?”

“Yes.”

Something like a thousand years passed. Then she frowned at him and said, “Why don’t you sit down, instead of standing there?”

“I—.”
No
, he thought,
don’t even try explaining, just get your bum parked
. He sat down, yelping very slightly as his left foot brushed the chair leg. He looked round for a window to stare out of, but there wasn’t one.

“Did they tell you why you got the job?” the thin girl asked suddenly.

“No,” Paul replied. “How about you?”

“No.”

“If you remember, I was absolutely convinced the Dog Boy was going to get it,” he said.

“Who?”

“There was a bloke at the interview who looked like a dog.”

“Was there?”

Please
, he thought,
please can someone turn up with some work or something, and rescue me from this? I don’t think I can stand
—“I’m sorry,” the thin girl said. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, gazing down at her closely chewed fingernails. “I’m afraid I’m not really a very nice person.”

Unanswerable. To his credit, Paul didn’t even try.
In fact
, he said to himself,
the hell with it. I can keep my face shut as well as anybody on earth. Just watch me. We’ll see who fossilises first. And besides
, he consoled himself,
every second I spend in here, I’m getting paid for. All the other times I’ve sat in stony silence with girls were on my own time. That’s got to be progress, hasn’t it?

(And the cruel irony of it was, he realised, that this was almost, but not quite, the scenario he’d daydreamed about so often, the one where he’d got the job and found himself working side by side with a girl. A nice, jolly girl, of course, quite nice-looking but not beautiful or anything like that, because that’d mean she’d already have a boyfriend, and that’d be no good. A mere fortnight ago, if a wise old gypsy woman had gazed into her crystal ball and told him she’d seen him sitting in an office with a girl he was going to be working with for the indefinite future, he’d have whooped with joy; because a fortnight ago, the hardest thing in the whole world had been finding his way into a situation like this; because for one thing, you never get girls on their own, either they’re with their friends or some bloke, always further away than the Pleiades or Orion’s Belt.
Just give me a chance
, he’d implored heaven;
just let me be alone with one for five minutes, and I’ll be able to give it my best shot; not really a lot to ask, surely. But I should have guessed
, he told himself;
it’s the same as with this bloody horrible job
. The worst punishment there is for wanting the wrong thing is getting it.)