‘Did you recognise any of these people?’
‘N-no. Though it was strange, because I did feel that I might somehow come to know them — ‘
‘In the future?’
‘That's right. In the future. But I understood where I was even as it was happening. You see, the Mars Bar gimmick and the man with his penis pulled up around his throat, they're nightmare figures culled from old children's jokes. You know, the sick kind, the kind that depend on such awful visualisations.’
‘I see, I see, of course, this is brilliant.’
‘I knew that it was the Land of Children's Jokes instinctively.’
‘Yes, yes, I'm certain we're on to something here. I'm sure that we've begun to penetrate this damaging cathexis of yours. I'm convinced that we must go on.’
‘I don't want to go on — it's scary.’ Ian was struggling up from the bed. He still felt very woozy; hardened sleepy dust crackled on the skin around his eyes.
‘Oh but you must,’ said Gyggle, ‘you must. Remember, no catharsis, no full genitality. Got that? Got the photo?’ Gyggle was already walking when he said this; he threw it over his handlebar shoulder as he rode his spoke legs off down the ward. Ian couldn't have been certain, but he thought Gyggle also made a peculiar gesture, curling his thumb and his two middle fingers into the palm of his hand, then poking the index and little fingers towards his own testicles. Then he was gone, through the cat-flap doors.
Monday morning. In the purulent heart of the city heat is smell and smell is heat. The hot haunch of the late-summer day is brazenly insinuating itself against the pallid flanks of the office blocks around Old Street Tube Station. The diurnal heat is crudely importuning ‘Software House'; ‘Television House'; ‘Polystyrene House’ and all the other sad sack commercial premises.
Ian Wharton popped out of the subway like a champagne cork. He was bounding this morning, full of enthusiasm, geared up for the fray. This was Ian's work self, quite distinct from his haunted other self. No one at work knew about his problems. At D. F. & L. Associates, whereto Ian was bounding, he was perceived as a solid type, a Roseland man, a regular middle-class guy, full of bonhomie and jocularity. He was also a successful marketeer, and on this particular Monday morning there might well be an important new account for him to begin work on. An account that had been provisionally named ‘Yum-Yum’.
Ian veered off the roundabout, down a path that led in the general direction of Norman House. The path became a passageway that traversed a bomb site between two high wooden fences. To the left of the fence the site had been cleared and building work was in progress, hard hats and JCBs were grunting and grubbing in the dirt, but the site to the right of the fence hadn't been cleared yet. Through chinks in the fence Ian could see a tangle of stringy privet, lanky nettles, wild flowers and triffid weeds, all forming a fuzz of camouflage over the sunken foundations of the bombed-out building. He took a deep breath and sighed. What a marvellous morning to be so stylishly suited and on his way to a stylish job.
Norman House, which contained the offices of D. F. & L. Associates, was set between two similar, somewhere to the north of the twisted rectangle formed by Old Street, City Road, London Wall and Shoreditch High Street. In truth, the only thing Norman about the building was the pseudo-Bayeux lettering on the doorplate that proclaimed ‘Norman House’. Otherwise it was an undistinguished six-storey smogscraper, faced in London brick, its eighteen rectangular windows projected out by double surrounds of leading and yellow stonework.
Ian bounded up the three steps to the glass doors and pushed them open. In the cramped vestibule by the lift, he encountered Dave, the porter, with his hairy chest oozing up from behind his collar, like some mutant merkin.
‘Morning, Mr Wharton,’ said Dave.
‘Morning, Dave,’ said Ian, punching the lift-call button.
‘Going to be another hot one today.’
‘So they say, so they say.’
The lift doors peeled back on the third floor to reveal the reception area of D.F.& L. Behind a brushed steel bulwark, Vanda, the statuesque black receptionist, sat stroking the keys on her Merlin console. The laquered busby of her hair hid a combined mouth-and-earpiece set, so that, to Ian, it appeared as if she were talking to some spirit guide, deeply familiar with the London club scene.
‘Morning, Vanda.’
‘Morning, Mr Wharton.’
Ian barrelled through the reception area and headed on up the stairs. The decor of the D.F.& L. suite was unremarkable, beige-corded carpets and utilitarian strip lighting. The walls were hung with framed display advertisements the agency had been responsible for commissioning, alongside various marketing-award certificates. Set here and there, on the stairs, along the corridors, were freestanding glass cabinets, filled with other kinds of awards. These were symbolic bibelots, pseudo-products. Brushed steel and cedarwood pediments jostled on their baize bottoms, pushing forward on spindles of acrylic tiny metalicised examples of packaging, little rubber stoppers, assortments of diminutive clips, valves and widgets. In amongst them Ian spotted the award given to D.F.& L. for one of its most successful campaigns, the Painstyler.
The Painstyler was a kind of tool, that could be used by amateur decorators to tease the surface of a particularly thick, plaster-enriched brand of paint into a landscape of petrified fronds. The Painstyler — God knows why — had caught on in a major way. The D.F.& L. billings had been massive, and, as an expression of gratitude, Hal Gainsby, the American senior partner, had the entire offices painstyled. Every single ceiling and vertical surface was fluffed up in this manner, so that to progress around the corridors was to feel one's self to be some kind of human bolus, being peristalsised along a giant gut.
The employees couldn't abide the painstyled surfaces, which were by way of being a hideously itchy incentive to the scratching and picking of apathetic fingernails. No desk or work station in the whole suite was without its accompanying snowfall of chipped-off paint fragments. This progressive distressing of the office environment sent Gainsby into bubbling furies; some employees had their wages docked, others were fired. The very success of the Painstyler had started to scrape away at the corporate fabric.
Ian Wharton absorbed all of this and looked out for fresh little snowfalls as he bowled down the corridor towards the fifth-floor conference room. He pushed the heavy door open and confronted his colleagues.
Together with Hal Gainsby there were Patricia Weiss, Customer Account Manager; Geoff Crier, Media Buyer; and Simon Arkell, Planner. Gainsby, a plump little man who endlessly sought out any point of potential height-advantage, was on top of the air-conditioning unit, set beneath the rectangular window. His rear end pincered by its two slabs, he was being subjected to a chilly blast, and as his fashionable Barries’ shirt turned into a chilly shroud, he bitterly regretted the posture.
That was Gainsby all over. He was a man whose millisecond to millisecond disposition was bounded by posture regret. The most obvious form of this was physical, but it extended through his career, on to his anglophilia, and terminated in a sadly pointless emotional loneliness. As it goes, the same was true for the rest of them, these other three marketeers.
Patricia Weiss was a German-Jewish bombshell, an antithetical Leni Riefenstahl. Her swarthy face was hidden behind a life mask of thick caramel foundation. Her big eyelids were enpurpled, their faux lashes gooey with mascara; her severe lips were raw red and a lurid beauty pimple formed a trigonometric point on the hard plain of her cheek.
If Weiss's jewellery indicated membership of a yet-to-be-created tribe of millennarian Amazons, her couture was contrawise: a set of vampish relics left over from the fifties. Under a black cuirass jacket there was no blouse, only a heavily reinforced brassière that coned her breasts into Strangelove projectiles. Weiss's legs were thrust beneath the blond-wood conference lozenge, but anyone could have told you that her stockings were sheer, sheer, sheer, and that her legs were sheerer still. Her skate-blade feet were rapacious and violent to look at, spiked by patent leather at toe cap and high-heel.