The Zoo (8 page)

When I get home Sally and Harry are curled up on the sofa. I kiss them both on the tops of their heads. They're watching Fawlty Towers. John Cleese is contorted with rage, his body screwed up.

‘He's f-funny,' says Harry looking up at me.

‘Yes he is,' I say, imitating Cleese's walk.

They both laugh at me then return to the TV. I go into the kitchen and get a beer from the fridge, then smoke a cigarette out the back door. Sally joins me, takes the cigarette from between my fingers and drags on it. I watch her lips on the filter. When she passes it back she's kissed it red.

‘I know what we should do for his birthday.'

‘Yeah?' she asks.

‘Let's take him to Monkey Kingdom. I think he'd love it.'

‘You'd love it.'

‘Yes. But he would too.'

‘I think he might.'

She kisses me on the cheek and goes back inside. I gaze up at the night sky and try to recognise some of the constellations, but I can't grasp them at all.

Mark is talking, telling us about his family.

‘I don't want them to see me like this,' he is saying. ‘I don't want me daughter to think of her Da as a mad person. I want to get better so I can hold her again.'

He begins crying, his greasy hair falling forward and touching the table, and I can't help but think that someone has to eat their dinner off it. A nurse puts her arm around him. He's crying silently, shoulders shaking, rising and falling. The room waits for him to stop.

‘Sorry, everyone.' There's a quiver in his voice.

I try not to think of my boy, aware of the parallels. Push him down. Push him down.

‘When it started getting hard I tried to keep myself away from them. Was worried what would happen.'

He takes a passport photo from his pocket and hands it to the person next to him. It's passed around the group. When it gets to me I meet Mark's eyes and smile. He manages the tiniest quiver of his lips back at me. I'm surprised at how pleased I am about this. The picture is of Mark and his daughter. His hair is shorter, a ring in his eyebrow. His daughter is dimples and smiles and straw-coloured hair. I reach back across the table and put it in front of him.

‘She's beautiful.'

‘Thanks, mate.' He puts the picture back in his pocket.

‘Are you okay to go on?' asks the nurse, voice warm and gentle and passive-aggressive insistent.

‘Yes,' he says, takes two deep breaths and then continues. ‘When I lost my job I began to resent them. I couldn't help it. They needed me and I failed them. I know now it was my failure that was hurting me, but at the time I thought they were blaming me. I didn't know what to do. I'd always worked at the same car factory. I thought I was going to lose my job before when they automated stuff. Thought I was going to lose my job to a robot. They retrained me then. But they just let me go this time.'

I know who he's talking about. They had some serious problems with the brakes, recalled thousands of cars. People died. Brakes failed. Smashed through the central reservation and into oncoming traffic. People got trapped in their cars. Whole families burned to death. Never good for sales, that. Nothing puts the consumer off more than the chance of a violent death and the smell of burning flesh. No amount of fancy seats and good stereos can make up for that. Recalls we can deal with. News pictures of burned corpses are an entirely different matter. Once the doubt is there in the public's mind it's very hard to get rid of. We got the chance to pitch for their account – turned it down, no chance, too risky.

‘I went to work for six weeks. Or pretended to. I just sat in the car in a lay-by. I took the sandwiches my wife made me and sat in a lay-by.'

Someone sniggers. I scan the group and see Newbie smothering his mouth. I scowl at him. He's still got his briefcase on his lap, his arms wrapped around it.

‘Something funny?' I ask,

He looks at the table. The person next to me puts their hand on my arm.

‘It's okay,' I say to them, a little too much aggression in my voice, and they take their hand away.

 

In my room. I'm thinking about another room from the past: an oak table with chairs that cost more than a month's salary. A salesman from one of our suppliers. I remember the smell of his aftershave. Sharp. Lemony.

‘I can guarantee you 20,000 visits. Guarantee,' he assures me. Freckled skin and eyes that can look only to the close of the sale. His top button is undone under his tie. His neck is fat and sweaty.

‘Can you geo-target it to the North-East?' I ask him.

‘No, I wouldn't do it if I had to narrow it that much. I can say North of England. But no more than that. If I have to reduce to North-East I would have to do too many sends and, to be frank with you, I feel I have to be honest at this stage, it just wouldn't be worth my while.'

‘Whose lists are you planning to get the names from?'

I know I have to buy this data. I have promised I'll increase visitors to my client's site by fifty percent in eight weeks, but he's putting me off. My gaze is drawn to my cufflinks. Sterling silver, a ring of diamonds. A present from Sally for our first wedding anniversary. A stay at a country hotel. She's dancing on the bed, a towel around wet hair, laughing as it unravels and she whips her hair around and around, and I'm laughing too.

“These are all our names. All of them opted in and all of them are used to receiving offers from us. These are hardened Internet shoppers. They look forward to our mails.”

I doubt this. Instead I look out of the window. An aeroplane has written my initials in the sky.

“These are people who love offers, they wait for them,” he continues. “If you get the creative right, which I'm sure you will, you guys know what you're doing, then they'll fucking lap it up.”

“Okay. I'll get accounts to raise you a purchase order. How soon can I have the data?”

“You get me a PO now, I can put a call into HQ, and you'll have it asap.” He holds his hand out as if he is going to spit into it. I shake it, feel like I am arm wrestling, testing his strength and wonder how many poor people are going to have their in-boxes invaded with mindless crap to generate 20,000 visitors. It must run into hundreds of thousands. Information waste on an unprecedented scale.

When he has left I get a bottle of vodka out of my desk drawer, lock myself in one of the tele-conferencing rooms, pull the blinds and drink until my throat burns.

 

Now in the room,
here
. This room. Now.

There is a noise. It sounds like music.

I get up from the bed. Scrabble around looking for the source. Too quiet to hear, I can't work out the tune, but it's there. I know it's there. Louder now, nearly loud enough for me to find it. On my hands and knees under the bed, I follow the wall, until I can just make out the beginning refrains of
Helter Skelter
.

I am on my knees in front of The Zoo listening to it sing and I know that it is coming. It is coming for me and it won't be long.

Jessica wafts through the office on a wave of Angel. Heads turn. Collins mouths ‘fuck me' in my direction. It's the first real communication we've had since I told him. I arch my eyebrows back at him and lead her into the boardroom. Hilary joins me. Alan is already there, peering out over his laptop. We sit either side of him. Jessica demurely arranges herself opposite.

‘Good morning, Miss Hardy,' says Hilary, eyes over glasses, ‘You've met Mr Marlowe, and this is Mr Reach, our Client Services Director. Whoever gets this role will be reporting directly to him.'

‘You're the one I need to be nice to, then?' she asks and Alan laughs like a little girl.

We talk her through the role and what is expected of her. She takes it all in. When she concentrates there are small furrows either side of the bridge of her nose. From the corner of my eye I can see Hilary trying to lean forward enough to look down her shirt.

‘You know what we do here?' I ask.

‘You're a full service agency.'

‘Yes. But you know what we do?'

There are those furrows again. Nose all wrinkled up. ‘You help people sell things?'

‘Well, yes we do. But we essentially make people do things they don't want to do by being smart-arses. Can you live with that?'

Furrows. ‘I think so,' she says.

‘Look at it this way. The gap between person and product has been reduced to a microsecond. It's not just a case of making your product better than the next one on the shelf, it used to be but it isn't anymore. What we do has been narrowed down to a simple point of differentiation. You either have a product that someone loves or you have a product that isn't as annoying as its competitors. An annoying product is never going to be loved, but if it's less annoying than the other products on the market it will become a leader. A product that someone loves is the goldmine, because they'll always buy it and will tell others to buy it. As long as it doesn't become annoying. And aside from that it is just a matter of degrees, how much do you love it opposed to how annoying is it? It is our job to provide the information that lets people make the desired choice. Make sense?'

Hilary is looking at me as if I'm insane. Alan is closing his laptop lid. Jessica is searching the ceiling with her doe-likes. Between them the furrows.

‘Yes,' she says, ‘I think it does.'

‘Christ, you're better than me then. Are you sure you're going for the right job. You don't want mine?' Hilary is all professional smarm now. He asks her some questions and her answers are adequate if not inspired. When it becomes obvious they've dried up he rises from behind the table, reaches across, takes her hand, which looks clean and white in his liver-spotted paw.

‘Thank you for your time, Miss Hardy,' says Alan, showing her to the door.

Hilary leans back in his chair and sighs. I can hear Alan talking to the Office Manager outside. When they return he says, ‘What the fuck was that?'

I shrug.

‘Are you trying to scare the shit out of her, James?'

Again shrug. Don't know what to say.

‘Sometimes I swear you speak another fucking language.'

‘When does she start then?' I ask.

They don't answer. Alan finishes packing his laptop. Hilary makes a show of checking his phone.

‘Alan? I asked you a question.'

‘You were being a prick. You know we've got 3 more candidates to interview.'

‘Come on. Let's be serious. They're going to have to be unbelievably good to beat her. Or better looking, and I doubt that's going to happen. What do you think, Peeping Tom?'

Hilary flicks me the Vs. ‘Due diligence. Employment law's a bugger nowadays.'

‘Come on then. Let's get this over with then, I've got work to do.'

 

Two days later I'm talking to the receptionist as Jessica, Miss Hardy, walks in. She's wearing a light grey trouser suit, hair pulled back, black rimmed spectacles. She looks like the stereotypical horny librarian. My heart sinks as the rest of me rises.

‘Morning,' she says and her glasses slide down her nose. She pushes them back up with her index finger. I lead her to Alan's office. When she opens the door I can see him arranged in his thoughtful pose and it's all I can do not to snigger.

 

The same evening I'm in a gallery for the launch of Lou's exhibition. The gallery is glass-fronted so we can all watch the wrath of God hurl entire oceans onto the street outside. Despite the biblical weather there is a healthy turnout. We get there late and the guests have already begun tucking into the free wine. I take a glass of red. It's too cold and it's cheap and I'm quickly onto my second.

‘James.' Lou is wearing a dress.

‘Fucking hell, Lou. Look at you.'

She clutches her hem and curtsies.

‘Don't tell me you've shaved your legs too?'

She grabs my cheek and pinches it.

‘Where's Dan?' I ask.

She points to a group of people in the main gallery space, takes Sally by the arm and leads her away. I walk over to the paintings. A man joins me. He's wearing a trilby. We both stand back from them, arms folded, cocking our heads. I imagine I'm looking artistic and appreciative.

‘I don't get them,' I say eventually.

‘They're about noise,' he says. He's got an Australian accent, faded from living here for a long time.

‘Okay.'

‘Yeah. They're about noise. These ones on this side are about human noises. Or the noises we make. Those ones over there are about the noises we can't hear. The ones that are out of our spectrum of hearing.'

‘Like dog whistles?'

He walks over to one of the paintings behind us and examines the painting closely.

‘Yes, look, a dog whistle.'

I join him. He's right. In the bottom of the painting, scratched into the thick oil painting is a tiny dog whistle. We return to the original painting.

‘And this, I think, is supposed to suggest that we, the viewers, are responsible for the consequences shown in the painting. This here is a nod to the fourth wall.'

I think he's right again.

‘You really get these?'

‘Yeah, I guess so. Seems fairly obvious. You not?'

‘No. And I know the artist.'

I go back to the bar. They're out of red so I grab a glass of white. This time it's too warm and cheap. Work my way around the paintings. The Aussie could be right. They appear to be about noise. There is lots of reference to white noise. Some satellites. One looks like the inside of an ear. One has a childlike drawing of someone holding their hands over their ear to block out sound. A loudhailer. Two paintings are connected by a telephone cord. They are created using lots of media, some virtually collages. I find one with a picture of us all at university. ‘Bitch,' I say under my breath. I look young and happy with my arm around Sally. I move closer and see that she has drawn little stitch marks across all of our mouths. I'm wearing a Levellers t-shirt.