“I don’t know why she puts up with it,” I said.

Jim shook his head. We were in the pub, drinking beer and talking about his girlfriend’s wallpaper.

“I don’t get it either.” He made as if to ball his fist into his forehead like a comedy madman. “God! It’s so annoying!”

“She paid him, didn’t she?”

“No, no,” he said. “Well, yes, I mean she did pay him but the thing that’s so annoying is that Gerrard still turns up at her office.”

“Oh.” I had visions of Gerrard’s lustful pursuit of Jane under the pretext of discussing or, more probably, explaining unfinished decoration work.

“He’s moved into printing now.”

“I didn’t think he knew anything about printing.”

“So what? Exactly!” Jim had a habit of contradicting himself when he got excited but I caught the drift. “He didn’t know anything about hanging wallpaper. Or selling stolen mobile phones. God, you’ve met him!”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was selling lino then. He turned up two hours late and he was so ripped that he worked out our kitchen was six hundred square yards.”

“How big is it?”

“About fifteen. His pupils had pretty much disappeared. I’m surprised he could even see the tape measure.”

Jim laughed. “There you are. But, no, he’s doing printing now. And, of course, he knows Nick.”

I nodded. Nick ran Goldswan Trading, where Jane worked. They sold things – I never discovered exactly what – and Jane’s job seemed to involve organising the administration of the salesmen: making sure their orders were sent out, preventing them straying like confused wild animals into forbidden areas of the building, soothing bruised egos. It seemed to call on the same kind of skills one might need for running an open prison or, if such an institution existed, a hospital caring for mentally ill conjurers.

“And you know what Nick’s like.”

“Actually, I don’t. I only met him once, at Steve’s party. He seemed like a nice enough guy. A bit, you know, formidable, as the French would say.”

Jim considered the description. “The thing about Nick,” he said at last, “is that he likes to be surrounded by people who make him laugh.” He paused. He seemed unsure as to how much further he could go without betraying confidences or, perhaps less importantly, boring me.

“Goldswan’s quite big now, isn’t it?” I prompted him.

Jim seemed happier. “Oh huge. Over a hundred people. A few years ago there was him and about three others, working in a cupboard in Bethnal Green. They’ve got this great big office in Clapham now.”

“Rickie works there”

“Course he does.” Jim paused again. This too made him feel better about what he was confiding. “And they’re making a lot of money. The thing is that, even so, that if Nick wants to get something done, like have an office redone, or organising a plane ticket, or picking up someone from the airport – well, most people would employ a proper builder or travel agent or whatever.”

“Yes” I said encouragingly.

“But not him. No. He has to employ these…sort of Mr Fixits. Except they don’t fix anything. They generally screw up. It’s all done on barter. Like a war zone. Nothing’s ever paid for.”

“Doesn’t he have any money?” I asked naively.

“Loads of it. But he hates spending it. There’s a builder, for example, who’s got all these sidekicks who have to be more or less nailed to the floor before the job starts, otherwise they wander off and get lost. They never, ever finish anything. Then there’s someone who works in the travel business who’s prepared to swap tickets for some of the things Goldswan sells.”

“What kind of things?”

“God knows. Anything. Cat baskets, toothpaste, light bulbs…”

“How many cat baskets do you need to pay for a ticket to New York? It would have to be hundreds.”

We both tried to calculate this, eventually agreeing that around six hundred would be about right.

“Why would a travel agent want six hundred cat baskets?” I asked, really wanting to know.

“He can turn them into something else. He swaps them for, say, computers. Then he finds someone who wants to exchange computers for, say, crates of Pepsi. So it goes on. Then he might turn what he’s got back into air tickets.”

“But he’s already got the air tickets,” I insisted.

“Well, yes,” Jim said. “Quite. You’d think he’d be satisfied, wouldn’t you? But no. He has to turn them into other airline tickets. Sometimes he makes it work. Sometimes he doesn’t. People get stranded…”

“I wouldn’t like to be his accountant.”

“Accountant? What’s that? Anyway, Nick won’t hear of using anyone else. The trouble is, sometimes the tickets aren’t there. It’s all last-minute stuff. You have to pick them up at the check-in desk and sometimes the arrangements go all to hell.”

“‘I’m sorry, sir, we have no tickets for you but can let you have six hundred cat baskets’, that sort of thing?”

“No! There’s nothing. No one knows anything about it.”

“So this guy makes Nick laugh? He wouldn’t make me laugh. He’d give me an ulcer.”

“It’s all a great big game for him. He loves giving people a hard time about things that aren’t their fault because he’s told them to do them in the first place, then making them feel guilty about the things which go wrong that are his fault. The more complicated he can make everything, the easier it is to give them a bollocking. I think he had to grow up sooner than he would have liked, to run Goldswan – but he still likes having a sort of…gang, I suppose you could call it. “

“And he’s the leader?”

“Nick’s always the leader. And then there’s Julian.” He paused for a moment to consider Julian. “Julian is…different.”

“Different?” All the others had seemed a bit different to me: different in the sense of deeply odd. I suspected that Jim was using the word in a…well, different way.

“Yes…different,” he said, rolling the word around his tongue like bartered whisky. “The rest of these guys are just weird, or losers. Julian is genuinely bonkers. The thing about Julian is that he does all the stuff that Nick would like to do but can’t cope with. Like going to functions and winding people up. Like organising events which show Nick up to best advantage. Like talking to people Nick doesn’t want to talk to.”

“He’s his agent.”

“Exactly!” Jim, as so often the case when he agreed with anything which was both accurate and mildly funny, slightly over-did the reaction. “Exactly right. He’s his agent.”

I glowed slightly. It’s always flattering be told you’ve described, in a word, a person you’ve never met. It made me feel at one with a larger world, in tune with my powers of perception. It made me feel good about myself.

“Actually, no,” Jim said after a pause. “More like his producer. He doesn’t just find people. He makes things happen.”

I maintained an icy silence.

“Or his pimp…performing monkey – I don’t know. All of these. The thing about Julian,” Jim went on, “is that no one ever understands what he’s talking about. Not even Nick. He’s like…” He waved his hand but was unable to say what exactly it was that Julian was like. I didn’t suggest anything.

“Does he get paid in cat baskets as well?” I said at last.

Jim grinned, ignoring the sarcasm. “He trades on loss. The more money his area loses, the more he persuades Nick that it was all because of the things he was producing for him that took up all his time. In that sense, Julian is doing OK. The more Nick has people producing things for him the more he likes them, so the more money he pays them.”

“And so the more money…whatsisname, Julian, loses?”

“Exactly.” Jim grinned at me. “You’ve got it. Welcome to Goldswan.”

I shivered. “No thanks.” In fact I was fascinated. The place seemed to have the quality of supporting two simultaneous but opposite reactions.

We fell silent for a moment. I tried to add these new facts to the vague and confused images of Goldswan Trading. Most of my information came from my brother Rickie who had recently joined the sales team. On his first day they had all been paid, due to cash flow problems, in seasonal but largely unnegotiable frozen turkeys; somehow this had led, via a sequence of events which I had never got straight and which Rickie wasn’t keen to discuss, to a fight in an Indian restaurant and the end of his relationship with his girlfriend. Rickie himself had also had to spend Christmas in hospital, luky not to have lost his left thumb to frostbite.*

He had since become something of a star. Whenever we met, I spent the first twenty minutes listening to tales of his targets, sales scripts, closes and, above all, the unspeakable wickedness of the sales director. It sounded very intense. I was starting to fear for his sanity.

“So what’s with the wallpaper?” I said at length.

“About two years ago she asked Gerrard to wallpaper her flat. He asked for the money up front. She paid him. Nothing happened.”

“Why did she pay him up front?”

“Because Jane believed that he was a friend and that he was going to do the work.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Every time a different story. He spun out the excuses so they were further and further apart and eventually he knew that she’d have to put cupboards and pictures and so on up, or get someone else to do it. Either way the problem would disappear, for him.”

“What sort of excuses?”

“Can’t get the pattern; can get the pattern but it’s a roll short; pattern you wanted now not available at all so you’ll have to choose another one.” He paused. “Have you ever looked through a wallpaper pattern book?”

“No.”

“They’re six inches thick. He brought round eleven. It took her two days just to look at the all the patterns once, never mind work out what might look right. She said it was like being on drugs. Eventually she chose one. Then Gerrard said that pattern wasn’t available either.” He paused, took a sip of his beer and carried on with the list. “Trestle table’s broken; trestle table now fixed but the paste brush has gone missing; the trestle table and the paste brush are in the van; the van’s broken down; the van’s fixed but the girlfriend’s gone off to Scotland with the keys; the van’s been stolen. That sort of stuff. The annoying thing is that about a year ago we actually managed to get him to do some of it. There are rolls of paper piled up in every cupboard.”

“Why doesn’t Jane get someone else to finish it off?”

“It’s gone beyond wallpapering now,” Jim said enigmatically. He paused. “Anyway, you know these guys never finish off each other’s work. They suck their teeth and say ‘who did this?’ and complain that its all metric when it should be imperial and rip the whole lot down. Then there’s no guarantee that they’ll do anything either. Anyway, she’s paid him. Why should she pay someone else? It’s just getting him to do it, that’s the problem. Actually, I think she’s got used to the plaster. It’s started to go a rather fetching pink in places, like mother-of-pearl.”

“But she still likes him?”

“Oh yeah. People do. I do. That’s one of the great things about the Z-Team. Even though they’re a bunch of crazies.”

“The Z-Team?”

“The gang. They’re all in it.”

“Even this guy Julian?” As I asked the question I was aware of how much the place was already starting to prey upon my mind. It was like experiencing the first stirrings of a bent towards some esoteric religion.

“Julian? Oh yes, they all are. The whole place is a Z-team. Julian wouldn’t like to think so but he’s one as well.”

“Even Jane?” I asked rather waspishly.

Jim was good enough merely to smile. “Oh, Jane just works there,” he said. “In fact, she even managed to fix Gerard up with a cheap flight through Nick’s travel agent chappie.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“I’ve given up trying to find out. It makes me so angry!” He grimaced, then smiled and shook his head. “I think it’s a reversal of guilt. That’s something they’ve all learned from Nick. First rule of the Z-Team: don’t expect to get paid money. Second rule: do it now, don’t argue. Third rule: never apologise to anyone, except to Nick. She knew that someone had to feel guilty about the wallpaper and as it clearly wasn’t going to be him then it had to be her. You can’t have guilt floating around. It has to have someone to latch onto. Fourth rule: make the other person feel guilty.”

“But he ripped her off!”

Jim waved his hand, as if to dispel the idea that anything he had said should be taken at face value. I could see there was complex psychology at work. Possibly it was necessary to experience the peculiar atmosphere of Goldswan Trading to appreciate it. We bought more beer and spent the rest of the evening talking about football.

The following Friday I had arranged to meet Rickie after work in the pub near the office. I was, yet again, between jobs and had been reduced to considering asking him if there was anything doing at Goldswan. The conversation with Jim had confirmed my interest in the place, while at the same time making me feel inadequate. It seemed unlikely I could contribute anything to its strange chemistry.

The fact that Rickie was doing well there didn’t, in the circumstances, make me feel better about myself. To safeguard my diminishing store of self-respect I had prepared an attitude of condescension towards anything he might say on the subject.

As soon as I arrived, however, I realised I had underestimated the extent to which the place had started to take him over. I might just as well have been talking to the spectral Nick, communicating through the mouthpiece of his latest creature, his latest Z-teamer. Rickie was not the person I would have picked for a salesman if I had been in Nick’s shoes. Then again, what did I know about it all? Vistas of ignorance washed across me as I returned from the bar, pushing through the Goldswanners in full post-battle array.

“…then Geoff the Bastard pulled the plug on the deal – phoned the guy straight back and said we’d sue…”

“…cut me back to five per cent…”

“…it was full-card to Iceland – twenty-five-past-five! Shit, man, I tell you…”

“…so I just turned the whole thing round and sold him the knives instead…”

It was like listening to fragments of someone else’s nightmare.

Jim and Jane were also in the pub. We separated ourselves from the throng of salesmen and took a table near the door. The noise was deafening.

“Are you getting paid in money now?” I asked Rickie.

He looked at me in a rather sniffy way. “Top salesman this week.”

“What does that pull in?” Jim asked.

Rickie reached into his pocket and pulled out a fistful of banknotes. They were screwed up into a ball as if he had had to wrestle them away from the Chief Accountant in a trial of strength. A few fluttered out of his hand and landed on the floor.

“Jesus,” I said. “How much is that?”

“’bout twelve hundred,” Rickie said, grinning owlishly. He shoved them back into his pocket.

“Didn’t you used to get paid in cats?” Jim said. “Or was it chickens?” The economy of Goldswan Trading seemed to revolve around animals.

“That was a bonus,” Rickie said.

“But you got a chicken, your first day,” I protested.

“A turkey, actually.”

I paused, hoping more details of this story would leak out. Nothing did.

“I was on holiday that week,” Jane said. “I never quite found out what happened.”

“Water under the bridge,” Rickie replied and smoothed down the arm of his jacket. I noticed that he was sporting a pair of gold cuff-links. It was all rather hard to take in.

“Sounds like quite a night.”

Rickie shrugged. It was clear he wanted to forget the whole business. Perhaps printers or firemen, when pressed in later years about the violent and obscene details of their initiation ceremonies, clam up in much the same fashion.

I shelved any idea of enquiring about work there. My next job, two weeks as a cashier at Wembley Stadium, would have to be good enough.

Rickie and I chatted for a few minutes; that’s to say, Rickie told me about a deal he’d done with an Emir in the Gulf which had resulted in five grand pianos being trans-shipped in Malta, there exchanged for nylon tights which would be delivered via Budapest; or maybe it was Bucharest, I found it hard to follow and not particularly interesting.

What struck me was the change in Rickie’s personality which the job had produced. When he was a child it was as much as our mother could do to persuade him to go down to the shops and buy an ice cream, so deep was his reluctance to talking to strangers. Now here he was, or so he implied, hob-nobbing with Arab princelings, hard-faced freight forwarders, Levantine hosiers and effete piano manufacturers. It certainly proved the success of Nick’s propagation of the barter mentality amongst his staff.

I found myself thinking of the Z-Team and Nick’s horror of rewarding them with folding money. Rickie was favoured indeed to have got his hands on so much of the stuff today. At the other side of the table, Jim and Jane looked as if they were plotting something. From time to time Jane looked at her watch and cast her eyes round the pub.

Rickie had launched into an even more complex story of a deal he was setting up, which therefore didn’t even offer the satisfaction of a definite conclusion, when Jane said: “there he is.”

Gerrard was walking towards us. I had forgotten how much he looked like a fly-weight boxer, forever bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet and dodging minutely from side to side as if avoiding imaginary punches. He fixed us with a toothy and insincere smile which didn’t touch his eyes: these remained watchful and shifty, scanning the room while he spoke. Maybe he was worried that Nick might appear and casually click his fingers. Then the various Z-Teamers would spring from their corners, falling over themselves like spaniels to be the first to lick his hand.

“Hi, hi, hi,” he said in an animated way which nevertheless showed that, compared to Nick, we were all beneath contempt, mere salaried staff and hangers-on. Indeed, his next words were: “Seen Nick?” He produced a mobile phone and stabbed out a number as if expecting the answer to come down through the earpiece.

“He left about four,” Jane said.

“I’ve got to see him,” Gerrard went on, smiling thinly at her but ignoring what she had said.

“He went to a meeting with Julian.”

“Julian, eh?” said Gerard with a sneer.

“In fact,” Jane said, “there he is.”

An expression of alarm crossed Gerard’s face. “Who?”

“Julian. There.”

Gerard’s expression cleared. So, I thought, it was Nick he didn’t want to see: probably because he knew that Nick didn’t want to see him. I sneered to myself, in much the same way that Gerard had earlier sneered at Jane.

Jane waved at Julian who drifted over towards our table. “Evening all,” he said.

Everyone nodded – and in Gerrard’s case grunted – a reply. Without further pause he turned to Jane.

“Well, those prats at Allied Mailing have knackered my last promotion,” he began.

His manner was neither offensive nor even offended. The accent was impeccable pure rough Oxbridge, or smooth cockney. As he spoke, his eyebrows­­ – first one, then the other, then both – went up and down like trousers in a bedroom farce. His eyes were searchlights, flicking from face to face, hunting for a reaction. The overall effect was overpowering. Even Gerrard, no slouch when it came to conversational terrorism, was momentarily on the back foot.

Julian paused to adjust his mobile phone holster.

“Sixty thousand cat basket vouchers sent off to Debbie What’s-her-face at the Times instead of the steak-knife coupons. It’s only the Times beef supplement this week-end which I’d spend seven frigging months sucking up to Peter Burden to get but never mind that.” His manner had switched to being assertively conspiratorial. The final remarks were delivered out of the corner of his mouth so as to make it seem that the whole business, indeed the whole of life itself, was a sort of light-hearted crisis, a self-inflicted labyrinth which he alone understood; one that the rest of us would perhaps figure out sooner or later, by which time he would have enmeshed himself in some fresh and exciting nightmare.

The effect was mesmerising and involved everyone, except Gerrard, in his problem, whatever exactly it was. Julian didn’t appear at this stage to be demanding sympathy.

Rickie stirred himself.

“I sold some calculators to Bahrain last month and they shipped off the Enid Blyton Coasters by mistake.”

It was hard to say why but this story didn’t have quite the same raw colour as had Julian’s. Something was lacking. Rickie thought so too.

“Bastards,” he added.

Even that didn’t really work.

Julian stabbed his finger towards Rickie. “You did that deal with John Parrish at Bosman’s, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Rickie said warily.

Julian laughed. “You know Stephanie? His PA, or whatever?”

Rickie slowly shook his head.

Julian arched an eyebrow at this omission. “A long fond blonde. I met her just before the TTIM dinner and she was telling me what a space cadet Parrish was. I felt sorry for her, so got her a seat at the top table between me and Roger Beamish from Interfreight.”

Gerrard sprung into life. “Beamish? I met him last week. Sorting something out for Nick,” he added, rather menacingly.

Julian flashed his gaze onto Gerrard’s lupine grin, assessed the risk the remark posed for his own anecdote, decided it was negligible and said: “He didn’t manage to sort out your jacket, though.”

“He’s going to place a big print job with me,” Gerrard went on, grinning weakly at the insult but otherwise ignoring it.

“He’s not the decision-maker any more,” Julian said. Gerrard’s face fell. “You’ll get to hear about it soon enough.” There was a pause. Gerrard opened and closed his mouth a couple of times.

Julian’s manner effortlessly sucked us all, even the unwilling Gerrard, into the bottomless pool of his own egotism. The sensation was surprising but not particularly unpleasant, like unexpectedly being given a neck massage by a stranger on the tube.

“I’ve got a big print job to sort out with him,” Gerrard went on, picking up his phone. It was clear he believed that what he wanted to get from the situation would happen as long as he talked about it for long enough. I reflected that this might well be the Z-Team’s fifth rule; indeed, was probably one followed by the whole Goldswan organisation.

This time Gerard’s call was answered. He stood over us for a couple of minutes, talking of possie seps, ozalids, cromalins and wet proofs. I gathered from the context that these were connected with printing but he could just as easily have been discussing designer drugs or fluffy animals he was procuring for a Friends of the Earth commercial. Rickie was involving himself in the phone discussion with various nods and other intelligent expressions, although to what purpose could not be imagined as I was certain he knew nothing about printing. Jim and Jane seemed to be in a state of suppressed excitement. When Gerrard finished his conversation, Rickie immediately started talking to him.

“Nick said he wanted the job to be two-colour,” he said importantly.

“You what?” said Gerrard.

“The French brochure, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Gerrard said warily. He looked annoyed that Rickie knew about the job at all and worried that he might know more about it than he did himself.

“I proof-read it for him,” Rickie went on with great panache. I nodded. This was one of Rickie’s few skills: he could speak French.

Gerrard licked his lips. “Thing is, right, Nick relies on me to sort out all his print. I need to see the proofs. Did he give you those to go through with me?” Gerrard smirked, knowing that Rickie would have been given no such authority.

“I had a talk with Nick about it,” Rickie went on, unruffled. “We decided I ought to have a look at them at home.”

Fifteen-all, I thought.

“Nick needs to have the brochures next week,” Gerrard countered in an even more challenging tone, laying stress on the ‘Nick’. “You probably don’t realise it’ll take a few days to do. You can’t just knock’em out.” He paused to sneer at Rickie before continuing but he had run out of things to say. “He needs them next week,” he repeated. He was bobbing and weaving quite noticeably now, his small eyes flashing round the room in a most unfriendly way.

“As I said, Nick wants to have another look at the roughs next week,” Rickie continued. “You’ll probably have to run out the seps again. In any case it’s a short-run job, so it’ll be done sheet-fed work-and-turn so there’ll only be two plates to make. Plus there’s no binding. I’m sure there won’t be any trouble about the slot.”

I stared at Rickie in astonishment. Where had he picked up all this stuff? It was possible he was inventing it as he went along, knitting the jargon into a pattern of intensive gibberish that would call Gerrard’s bluff concerning his own probably sketchy knowledge of print production. Whether or not this was his intention, he was doing a first-rate job of winding Gerrard up.

“I’m glad you dropped in so I could tell you,” he concluded in his best under-manager’s tones.

Gerrard looked at Rickie with suspicion. Was this guy bullshitting him or was he a newly-favoured side-kick, being groomed to usurp his position as Goldswan’s print guru? If what he had said had been even partly true it wasn’t worth risking the wrath of Nick, from whose lips these instructions had come, albeit via this jumped-up little shit smirking there in his blue suit. Gerrard decided to let it lie. He nodded once and turned on his heel to leave.

Jim nudged Jane and Jane said:

“What about those tickets? Do you still want them? Genesis at Wembley on Thursday?”

It surprised me that Gerrard should like the bland, middle-aged spread of Genesis’ music: I had him marked down as more of a Springsteen or Prince man when it came to stadium rock.

“Oh, right, yeah.” His manner became more open but almost at once his true nature reasserted itself. “Kosher tickets, yeah?” he asked suspiciously.

Jim suppressed a giggle.

“Sure.” They discussed arrangements. Jane, who lived only half a mile away from the stadium, would be taking that day off work so the best thing would be to meet inside. “But it might be better to leave the tickets on the door. Also the passes for the party afterwards.”

“Wow,” said Gerrard, now thoroughly returned to a good humour, “bit of ligging as well.”

“Maurice sorted out. He knows the manager, or something.”

“Crafty old frog,” Gerrard said. “Might even let him off that tenner he owes me.” Everyone smiled. “Have to sort out the girl friend to do the baby sitting.” I was interested that he expressed no interest in seeing if ‘the girlfriend’ might want to come too. Possibly she had better things to do, or a better taste in music.

The arrangements were concluded. “Ask for Pete,” Jane said, “Box 13, Gate F. He’ll have everything there.”

“Ripper,” said Gerrard and moved off.

“What the hell was that about?” I asked.

“Wait and see,” Jim said.

“I’m working at Wembley next week,” I reminded him.

“So you are,” said Jane. “If I were you, I’d go along to Box 13, Gate F at about 7.30 on Thursday.”

I thought I’d guessed it. “There is no Box 13, Gate F, is there?”

“Oh, yes.”

“No Pete, then?”

“Very much so.”

Rickie, who didn’t seem to think that anything odd had happened, carried on with his story. But then he didn’t know about the wallpaper.

On Thursday afternoon I was carrying a box of leaflets to one of the offices at Wembley when I ran into Jim, sauntering up the road from the railway station.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Come to see Pete. Seen him around?”

“I don’t know him.”

“Ah, there he is. Won’t be long.” He turned towards a man who was just coming out of a doorway. They had a hurried conversation and Jim passed him an envelope and what looked like some money. They laughed and shook hands. As he turned away, Jim pointed Pete out to me. Pete waved. Feeling rather foolish, I waved back.

“So that’s Pete,” I said.

“See you over the weekend,” Jim said. “Enjoy the show.”

At seven thirty, wild horses would not have kept me away from Box 13, Gate F. I created some pretext for absenting myself from my duties at the other side of the stadium and hung around the booth. From time to time I could see Pete’s head through the glass panel: once he waved at me. Wembley was filling up, mostly with people who looked as if they had come straight from work in an office. It looked like a very nice, well mannered crowd. Box 13, Gate F was for people picking up tickets and was not very busy.

At five to eight I saw Gerrard ducking and diving his way towards the booth. He checked a scrap of paper, then strode up to the window. It had suddenly become important for be to see but not be seen, as whatever deception Jim and Jane had prepared was unlikely to leave Gerrard in a good temper. I slunk after him, keeping about six feet away.

“I’m picking up a ticket,” Gerrard said, shouting through the glass. He gave his name and Jane’s. Pete smiled and produced the envelope which Jim had given him earlier.

“I am instructed to tell you that in this envelope is a key.”

“You what?” Gerrard said, pressing his ear against the glass.

“A key,” Pete repeated. There was no doubt that he said ‘a key’ but Gerrard couldn’t bring himself to accept this. It made no sense to him. It didn’t make much sense to me either.

“It is the key,” Pete went on, “to Jane Fairfax’s house at 134 Westland Road, Wembley.”

“What?” As well as angry, Gerrard now looked stupid.

“She asked me to tell you that unfortunately there was a mix up over the ticket and she couldn’t get it at the last minute. But as you’ve come all the way up and arranged baby sitting and as you haven’t got anything else planned, she thought it might be nice if you dropped round to her flat and finished off the wallpapering you started last year.” Pete paused. “She thought you might like to do that.”

He pushed the key through the slat in the glass. Gerrard’s hand closed round it automatically. At that point someone pushed into me so I wasn’t able to see his expression. When I had recovered myself he was stalking away from me.

Pete winked at me. “Went off OK, I thought,” he said.

I called up Jim at work the following day and told him what I’d seen. “Did he do it?” I asked.

“Do what?” Jim said. His voice sounded thick as if he were chewing a piece of bread.

“The wallpapering.”

“Oh that, no.”

“Did he come round?”

“Yeah. We’d gone to the pub but Jane thought it was rather unfair so we went back home just as he turned up. He had some very strong grass, actually.”

“So?” I couldn’t see where this remark was leading.

“So, the three of us smoked it. By the end of the third joint he thought it was quite a stunt we’d pulled. We had a good laugh about it. Feeling a bit off my face at the moment, in fact.”

“So is he going to do the papering?”

“Er, probably not, no.”

“You don’t seem very bothered.”

“I probably will be tomorrow, Right now I don’t really care.”

“I see.”

“Seems he’s on Nick’s shit-list as well, sort of thanks to your brother.”

“Oh yes?”

“Gerard went ahead and printed that French brochure but didn’t get Rickie to check the proofs, like Nick asked. The typesetting got cocked up and all the letters with accents were missed out altogether. Not knowing a word of French, Gerard didn’t spot it. Complete gibberish, five thousand copies.”

“Nick must have been furious.”

“He was, for about five minutes. Then he and I had a laugh about it. Gerard doesn’t seem to care either, said he never liked printing anyway. He’ll be back, doing something else he doesn’t know anything about. Wished your brother all the best with it.”

“So Rickie’s on the Z-team.”

“So it would seem. Good luck to him.”

“As long as it lasts.”

“Well, quite.”

Rickie’s sudden promotion was perhaps not that strange considering his recent hectic rise at Goldswan. As for the wallpapering, I felt I’d been cheated of a punchline to a little drama I’d happened to witness. It had shed its interesting aspects of guilt and revenge and been moved onto the level of a private joke from which I, through not being part of the Goldswan circle, was excluded.

I had to resolve this half-life. Goldswan was getting under my skin. I needed either to drag myself from its strange gravity or else give into its pull. But which?

For several moments I stared blankly at the phone. Then, like an addict skulking back to a foresworn dealer, I picked it up and dialled Rickie’s work number.

 

* This story is related in The Last Turkey in the Shop in Unaccustomed as I Am, available from all good bookshops – click here for details.

Brian Quinn

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