Laurel’s mis-shaven cheeks were marbled in a scraped yellow and pastel red. He was strangely gauche for a person of his seniority, Adam had noticed, for someone with a solid career at one of the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms behind him. It was as if all the resources bestowed on him by evolution had gone into the substance of his work, the time-and-motion equations, leaving nothing over for social or cosmetic fripperies. In the past couple of years Laurel had grown slightly stooped, as if his height had become embarrassing to him; Adam found him intangibly camp — something in the stretch of his vowels and tight cross of his arms — though Laurel didn’t seem to be aware of the effect. He had a wife, two or three kids, but in three and a half years Adam had never heard him speak of them.
‘Twenty minutes max.’
‘Clients this afternoon.’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Okay. See you at the meeting?’ — a statement intoned as a question. Laurel smiled and loped away. He had the power, Adam had concluded, most of it, anyway, which was why he didn’t mind when Hardy interrupted him. He had the long-haul confidence to be eclipsed.
Neither Alan/Hardy nor Craig/Laurel was his friend. The pair of them were yoked and segregated by an invisible barrier that everyone else could see, those two on the inside, the rest of the staff peripheral. They weren’t his friends, but Adam trusted them. He trusted them when they implied that he was safe.
Since the new government came in, slashing and burning, public-sector consultants had been reviled. Not so much as bankers or journalists or the politicians themselves, but up there, in the league table of infamy, with estate agents or squeegee merchants. They were indolent and dispensable, a luxury of the incontinent boom. They were parasites. They were fucked.
The work had slowed, and Adam had worried again. They all worried. They were right to worry. He received a string of emails inviting him to leaving drinks for people he hadn’t previously known existed. Sometimes the fall guy would follow up with his or her own valediction, rashly Replying All — some tragic, adrenalin-driven gush about how he would miss everyone and hoped they stayed in touch, or the snarky observation that she had enjoyed the job, most of the time. The various, equally pointless bearings of the tumbrel.
Yet Hardy had winkingly implied, one afternoon when they had shared a lift, that he was safe. He asked after Adam’s family and Adam made a nervy crack about how expensive they were. Hardy mumbled something about a permanent contract just as the doors opened and they were released. Afterwards, when he was recounting the conversation to Claire, and he tried to conjure the precise phrases, the actual formulation, which had created the impression of security, Adam couldn’t grasp them. But he had been pretty sure that he was safe. He had his harness; he was strapped in.
He tried and failed to log on to the shared Leisure Services file. He felt the bile rising, in a way that only tailgaters and malfunctioning computers could induce. Password incorrect: he had distractedly input the one he used for his credit card and Amazon accounts. Bank accounts, shopping accounts, email accounts, newspaper subscriptions, multiple computers — Adam sometimes felt he had become the sum of his passwords, that his lazily disguised pet names, phone numbers and ‘meaningful dates’, the odd extra digit or letter affixed as required, were his new DNA, the double helix of the touch-screen age. If they got scrambled, you were lost.
Finally his fingers remembered the necessary sequence: ruby, followed by the six digits of her birthday (no space). He called up the document, ran the promised spell-check, passed an eye over the formatting. He emboldened the sub-headings and introduced some bullet points in the executive summary (‘… service optimisation… customer footfall… DCMS strategy…’). He added his name to the unobtrusive middle of the list of authors.
He saved and closed the document and emailed it to Laurel, cc-ing Hardy. Outside his window the cords attached to the bucket were twitching, as if, somewhere below, condemned men were hanging and choking at the end of them.
He had sworn off MySpace. He had vowed never to look her up again, had weakened once or twice and finally, the previous winter, when he was setting up a new computer, found that he had forgotten his log-in details. He had guessed and guessed, but on that occasion he couldn’t remember them, which, for once, was more a riddance than a loss. The need to re-register had been enough to dissuade him, one of those tiny online impositions that had become demoralising obstacles, in this case turning the pursuit of Rose from casual hobby to blatant obsession. He had resisted Facebook and almost forsaken Googling, though he permitted himself Chaz and Archie. Also, every few months, Neil.
These days Adam could tolerate mentions of California, California was always everywhere, but Colorado still made him shiver. Once he switched off the television when a report about the poor little girl in Boulder came on; Claire had glanced across at him, but let it be. At the end of term, on prize day, as he watched Ruby climbing the stairs and crossing the stage, he thought of her striding across the campsite, alone in front of everybody.
Almost certainly, she was fine, Adam reminded himself at his desk, preparing himself for that evening. She might have her own children by now (he imagined Eric cradling them in his thick, hairy arms). Perhaps her life had been better than was her destiny before Yosemite, she being more studious or warier, less headlong in her rebellions, than she would otherwise have been. In which case, no harm had been done by either of them.
Adam would never know and nor, come to that, would Rose. He felt, that afternoon, as clear of her as he would ever be.
She might not be fine, of course.
In the conference room he took a chair set back from the table, against the wall. He rarely said anything in these meetings. He didn’t think that he was supposed to say anything; he suspected he was only invited out of courtesy. He slotted his chin between his thumb and his forefinger, stroking his stubble, a pose he valued for its contemplative appearance, but more for the micro-pleasure of the stubble’s rough, synthetic feel, its diurnal reliability.
Laurel came in with a photocopier-hot set of Leisure Services reports. He fanned and distributed the copies as Hardy arranged his jacket on the back of the chair at the head of the table. Laurel sat at his partner’s right hand. He crossed his arms and smiled.
‘Okay,’ Hardy said. ‘Let me walk you all through the deck.’
He was safe but stuck. After the early prisons contract Adam had struggled to bring in further work, and when, after the election, the commissions became scarce, it made no sense to send him out to a hospital or council when other, more proficient associates were available. The bill of his billable days was shrivelling. To the colleagues who had begun to invite him for after-work drinks, or for lunchtime sandwiches by the river, thinking that he might be a permanent someone, he was again an uninvitable no one. He was leprous, precarious. He was dangling from a rooftop by a thread.
He was rescued. Hardy had noticed, and Laurel agreed, or said he agreed, that Adam had a valuable, marketable skill, namely his familiarity with the English language. They called him back to Hardy’s office (he had installed a tub of moisturiser on the desk) and told him that, henceforth, his job would be to edit the product: to beautify the unreadable reports that outlined their scorched-earth or asset-stripping advice to clients, or at least to remove the most painful of the excrescences that crowded his colleagues’ mogul-run prose. ‘The Civil Service gift for story-telling,’ Laurel called it, and smiled.
Adam became a ghostwriter. He was the consultants’ wing man; he was the other guy.