JENNY COLGAN
Working Wonders

Dedication

To Robin Colgan and Dominic Colgan,

for all the reading I got in as a child while you

were playing First World War/sailing boats/

digging enormous holes for no apparent reason.

As annoying brothers go, you’re absolutely

the best a girl could wish for.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

‘Stop kicking me.’

Arthur had been dreaming of thundering hooves, when suddenly the hooves came to life. Fay hadn’t been dreaming of anything, and redoubled her efforts.

‘I have to keep kicking you! Otherwise you don’t get up and go make the tea.’

‘Why don’t you use the energy you’re expending on hurting my legs to get up and go make the tea?’

‘What are you, a time and motion expert?’

‘Yes, actually!’

Arthur sighed. An argumentative approach to mornings with Fay had never benefited him before and seemed unlikely to start now. He rolled out of bed, wincing. Outside it was still dark.

‘There’s no milk!’

There was no reply, either. Fay had rolled over and grabbed the pillow, luxuriating in a few extra seconds of warmth – his warmth, Arthur thought crossly.

‘Do you want juice, water or ketchup on your cornflakes?’

Fay eyed him balefully. ‘I want you to remember to buy milk.’

Arthur moved into the bathroom impatiently, as usual knocking over several of the ornamental starfish and candles with which Fay insisted on cluttering up the place. The house was a boring estate semi in Coventry, not a New England beach house. No-one would ever, ever walk into their little bathroom and think – ah! Grooved wood! Perhaps I have been magically transported to a world of fresh lobster and windswept sands. Arthur had never been to New England. He briefly wished himself there, if only because the time difference would give him another five hours of delicious sleep.

Groaning, he stared sticky-eyed into the mirror and splashed water on his face. It was normally a nice affable face, although right now it looked cross and tired. He looked at his hair and resisted the urge to measure it. His floppy brown hair was one of his favourite things about himself and he was terrified of the day it would finally desert him, although it was bearing up all right (his forehead was just getting a bit longer, that was all). At thirty-two years old, the confused vertical groove line between his eyes was becoming permanent but his smile was lovely, which he would have known if he ever smiled at the mirror or in photographs, which he never did.

‘Hurry up in the bathroom!’

For God’s sake!

‘You’re not allowed to hurry someone out of the bathroom and still be functionally asleep, okay?’

He took off his pyjamas to get in the shower. When had he started wearing pyjamas? When had he and Fay stopped diving into bed naked as piglets all the time?

He briefly considered a quick Kevin Spacey in the shower but he had to get to work … oh, Christ, work. Arthur hit the plain white tiling with his fist. He’d forgotten.

‘Shit. SHIT!’

‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Fay, wandering past the shower curtain. She was wearing a hideous dressing gown. When you thought about it, he supposed, all dressing gowns were hideous. Why had he never noticed that before? The pattern had not yet been invented that didn’t render them staggeringly unattractive. Nighties were sexy and nudie was beautiful, but dressing gowns were like dating a sausage roll.

‘Why don’t you take off your dressing gown and get in the shower with me?’ he said impulsively. He suddenly wanted to do something cute and fun and detract from the fact that he had just remembered that today he was due to be interviewed about his job by some people who had the power to take it away.

‘I thought you were busy with all the tile hitting and cursing,’ said Fay, brushing her teeth.

‘I was, then I saw you, a vision of loveliness in acrylic.’

‘Uh huh. Well, personnel issues won’t just sort themselves out, you know.’

I bet they would, thought Arthur mutinously to himself. He’d been with Fay for five years and still wasn’t a lot closer to understanding what a recruitment adviser did now than when they first got together.

‘And don’t you have that survey thing?’

He groaned again. ‘Please, don’t remind me. And it’s not just a survey, it’s a total strategic review of our entire function.’

‘What, playing Sim City?’

‘Yes, that’s right, Fay. That’s what I do. I play computer games all day and deliberately make the traffic go slowly.’

He felt her raising her eyebrows at him.

‘Well, you’re incredibly successful at that. Anyway, the condoms are downstairs.’

Arthur stood in the shower and let the water cascade over him. This was new. He had a sneaking suspicion Fay wanted to throw away the contraception and get on with the business of having babies. She was thirty-one. He thought that might be it. Anyway, she’d taken to hiding the condoms in unconventional places, possibly in the hope that he’d be so carried away he would say not to bother. It wasn’t working, particularly not when she was wearing a dressing gown that rendered her nicely curvy body practically bovine.

He closed his eyes, wondering whether to risk shaving in the warmth (which would earn him a lecture and a bottle of Cif shoved into his hands). Suddenly he got a strong sense again of last night’s dream. The hoofbeats were pounding on snow. He could almost remember the smell of the sweating body of the mare … That was odd. How did he know it was a mare? Well, dreams were the most peculiar things; he’d never met a horse in his life.

‘Can you ride a horse?’ he asked Fay downstairs. She was now unattractively done out in a purple business suit with accenting scarf.

‘Why, would it be quicker getting me to work than the Mondeo? Is this your new scheme for the town centre?’

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘What are we doing this weekend?’

‘The Hunters on Friday night and some cheese and wine thing on Saturday.’

His face fell. ‘But the Hunters are very very boring.’

‘Well, they live in our street. And, you know. So are we.’

She pecked him on the cheek and disappeared out of the door, shutting it a little too forcefully.

The clouds were as heavy over Arthur’s head as the bedclothes had been. The traffic was a heaving mass stretching out in front of him as far as he could see. When the system had been designed by Arthur’s office in the 1960s, the concept of even every house having a car was completely ridiculous. Now everyone felt it was their basic human right to keep two, though it meant that, in practice, nobody could move. And at least half of the cars were as large as vans and fitted out so that if you had to take a quick detour through the jungle, they’d be ready. Mind you, driving via the jungle and up through Borneo might be quicker than most trips on the A405 to Coventry. But this morning, the A405 suited Arthur fine. Anything that kept him as far away from work as possible whilst letting him listen to Radio 2 was a good thing as far as he was concerned.

The man in the white jeep next to him managed to pick his nose, scream into his mobile and make a rude gesture at a lorry simultaneously. Arthur shook his head. Days like this had been getting more frequent recently. He might be only thirty-two, but he felt fifty-five. When he looked ahead, he didn’t seem to see anything – just more of the same, with less hair. This is just Tuesday mornings, he thought to himself. The grey road and the grey horizon and the long monotonous journey ahead were conspiring to make him maudlin. This wasn’t new. And today’s forthcoming inquisition was merely serving to remind him that he’d been feeling this way for a long time.

Fay slammed the door on the way out of the house that morning, then winced at herself. Very mature, she thought, that will definitely make him love you. Of course, he wouldn’t have noticed – probably wouldn’t even have cared if he had.

She got into the little Peugeot and slumped forward onto the wheel, wincing as she felt the roll of fat press over the waistband of her skirt. It was just … God, Arthur. What was it going to take? He seemed to be going directly from student to mid-life crisis with no intermittent period of, you know, adulthood. She loved him so much. And it felt that she just got nothing, absolutely nothing in return. She couldn’t leave him. She loved him. And did she really want to be single again? And not twenty-five-and-living-in-London single – thirty-one-and-buried-in-Coventry single. That really didn’t bear thinking about. Prey to the cream of dandruffed middle management. And it would be divorcés or nothing and you’d get their horribly whiny brats with E-numbers smeared all over their greedy maws …

I want a horrible whiny brat, she thought to herself, pulling out into the already incredibly heavy traffic. Only mine would be sweet and interesting and well-behaved and only eat organic vegetables and actually like them.

Maybe I should just tell Arthur straight out. I do love him, and the timing is right. There’s never a good time to go for it. He’s never thought about it for a second, but if I just said, ‘Hey, why don’t we have a baby?’ then maybe he’d just say, ‘Oh yeah, wow. I never thought of that before. I love you, darling.’

Or he might not look up from Integrated Transport Today.

I really have to tell him tonight.

The large dingy lobby in the grim, low-rise public sector building – barely brightened by some amateur executive artwork depicting what might have been Lady Godiva or a camel and a bear having a fight – was humming. Arthur realized that subconsciously he had put on his smartest suit and tie.

‘Yo,’ said the temp on main reception. She had arrived as a temp – a particularly surly one – in about 1983 and never left. Unfortunately Arthur had never got around to learning her name and felt it was a little too late to ask now.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Some bunch of wankers turned up and took over the management offices.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘Wankers, I just told you.’

‘Scary wankers, or the normal sort?’

‘What, like you, you mean?’

‘Um, yeah.’

The temp pondered for a moment. ‘No, I would say they were more arseholey than you.’

Arthur smiled. ‘Do you know, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me for ages.’

She looked at him. ‘I could believe that.’

Arthur grimaced and sidled past her, into the open-plan space beyond. The office was cunningly done out in various shades of grey on grey which blended into the background outside, so that it rendered the world in black and white, punctuated occasionally by a particularly jolly stapler and purportedly humorous Garfield posters peeling from the walls.

His nearest colleague grunted, from behind his partition. Sven was a Neanderthal umbilically connected to his computer. He had convinced himself that in traffic patterns lay the ultimate sequence of truth: the perfect number, the end of pi and the key to universal harmony, or so he explained the hours a day he spent staring at the screen and plotting wildly complicated graphs in the further reaches of Excel.

Arthur could smell something. Part of it was Sven – if you’re looking for the ultimate sequence of truth, as Sven often pointed out, personal hygiene is not a priority. Also, Sven liked to think that really he worked in Silicon Valley in California, or Clerkenwell, which meant a surfeit of slogan t-shirts, trainers, and a diet consisting entirely of junk food, none of which helped the hygiene issue particularly.

The office of course smelled the way it normally did – of ink, dirty computer keyboards, bad food and a general low-lying depression. Under that smell, though, there was something else – something different, Arthur thought. Something reminiscent of wet school blazers and drool. He navigated the last few identical grey desks – newcomers could often be found scurrying around here like panicking rats before they gave up and simply became resigned rats.

Oh God, this was all he needed. Sure enough, now he thought about it, he could hear the heavy panting. He stood up and peered over the partition. There was Sven in all his normal early-morning sweatiness, munching his way loudly through a breakfast bun, but today – yet again – with the help of Sandwiches, his small, droopy-eared, stubby-legged, dribbly, stinky basset/sausage/ God-knows-what of a dog.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Arthur, all the frustrations of the morning welling up. ‘Sven, I thought you were supposed to stop bringing that fucking dog in. Today of all days!’

Sven grunted, entirely unconcerned. ‘Are you my boss?’

‘That’s not the point. Your dog is so dirty he’s a fire hazard. It’s health and safety.’

‘It’s “Bring Your Dog to Work Day”, innit?’

‘It is not,’ said Arthur fiercely, although a faint glimmering of doubt crept into his mind. Was it?

‘Yeah, it is. It said so in the Guardian.’

‘What? What on earth could a dog possibly do in an office? Well, yours could lick all the stamps.’

Sven snorted. ‘Yeah. And he could probably do your job. With one paw tied behind his back.’

‘Oh, don’t start.’

‘Who started? You started, you doggist bigot.’

Sandwiches reached up and carefully ate the end of Sven’s malodorous bun.

‘And if you fed your dog properly he wouldn’t fart all over the place.’

‘He doesn’t fart all over the place!’

‘Yes, he does, actually. You just don’t notice because you, too, fart all over the place.’

‘Why are you so fucking grumpy this morning then? Not getting any?’

Arthur wondered if job stress might make him impotent for the rest of his life. ‘NO!’

‘I reckon Sandwiches gets more than you, and I chopped his bollocks off five years ago.’

‘Nyeaarrgh,’ said Sandwiches.

‘Coffee?! Anyone? Who wants coffee!?’

A woman in a bright pink mohair sweater popped her tidy, short-white-haired head round the other side of Sven’s desk. This was Cathy who administrated the planners, oiled the troubled waters, did far too much of everyone else’s boring jobs and gave off an aura of complete desperation. She had a horrible husband and two horrible teenage boys, and coming to work was just about the most fun she ever had. Arthur tried not to think about this too often.

Sven and Arthur stopped sparring for a moment and grunted back at Cathy. Sandwiches’s tail wagged sturdily: he was the only person in the office, and possibly the world, who loved her unconditionally.

In fact, Arthur didn’t mind fixing coffee in the morning: it deferred the ultimate computer switching-on moment when the jolly day’s crap would begin.

‘No, it’s okay, I’ll manage.’

‘Ooh, I’ll come with you. But we can’t be too long, or people will start to talk!’

Cathy tried to look flirtatiously at Sven, who gave a groan of disgust and ignored them.

‘Do you like my new brooch?’ Cathy showed off the diamanté panda bear incongruously fastened to where her nipple must be underneath her shapeless sweater. ‘It was a birthday present!’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Arthur. ‘From Ken?’

‘No.’ She looked at the floor, then jollied up again. ‘I got it for myself. Well, you know, the boys are soo forgetful. Which is actually better, you know, because I get to choose what I want!’

‘It is,’ said Arthur, trying to nod as if this were true.

‘So … it all starts today …’ Cathy offered tentatively as she pottered around the urn.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’ In fact, he reckoned mousey work-horses were almost always the first to go; they complained less about redundancy.

‘Is it really a good idea to make us reapply for our own jobs, do you think? I mean, management must be right, but …’

Arthur nodded. ‘Absolutely. The fact that we’re in these jobs to begin with, of course, must be sheer chance. I got mine through my lottery numbers, in fact.’

Cathy perked up as she spotted someone on the horizon.

Great, thought Arthur, as Ross, his Tosspot Boss, came striding towards them in his cheap suit, with a big grin on his face implying that, whatever might happen to the rest of them – destitution, poverty, depression – he, mate, was going to be just fine, alright, mate? Yeah.

‘Art. Cath.’ Ross the Tosspot Boss was a year younger than Arthur and liked to point it out. His shirts were always on the wrong side of shiny, his voice on the grating edge of bonhomie and his actions mean as a snake. Arthur half-suspected that this strategic review thing was his idea. It meant Ross got rid of people with no direct route to himself: the consultants made him do it. Perfect. Although on reflection, Ross would probably have absolutely no trouble telling people to go by himself. He’d like it, in fact. A lot.

‘What are you getting up to in here then, yeah? Hanky panky!’

Cathy grinned and blushed. She had a hopeless crush on Ross – she clearly had a type. ‘Oh no!’ she fluttered.

‘Unlucky, eh Art?’

‘Yeah,’ said Arthur, as if yearning for nothing more than to be banging a sad-looking fifty-year-old woman on top of a coffee machine. Every time he let Ross call him Art, he reflected, a little bit of his soul died. He suspected (correctly) that Ross knew this. ‘I was doing alright until you came along.’

‘Oh!’ Cathy blushed again and waved her hands. This was possibly the most wonderful time she’d had in years.

‘Never mind, eh, pet?’ Ross leaned in chummily. ‘If you get made redundant today we’ll just go and cruise round the world, eh?’

Cathy smiled happily. Arthur shut his eyes. This was awful. Why didn’t he just punch him? He’d seen the picture of the ex-page-three model Ross claimed to be going out with, and she didn’t share much in common with Cathy apart from a certain look of resignation around the eyes. He should defend Cathy and punch Ross and … thrust a sword through his heart.

He opened his eyes. A sword? That was a bit much, surely. Offensive weapons weren’t really his style: he was a Labour voter and an inveterate spider freer.

‘Worried, Art?’ said Ross.

‘No,’ said Arthur, panicking.

Ross sniffed, looked as if he knew something the others didn’t, and walked away.

Can I feel my blood pressure rise? thought Arthur. Ooh. If I had a heart attack I’d get three months off to recover. Then: I am thirty-two years old and wishing for a heart attack. That cannot be good. Perhaps a mildly painless form of cancer, that got lots of sympathy. Or if he jumped out of the window here, made it look like an accident …

He wandered back to his desk, ostentatiously holding his nose as he passed Sven. ‘You’ve got mail!’ said a smarmy American voice. Arthur was surprised to see he’d automatically turned on his computer. Oh God. This, as well as a tendency to dial ‘nine’ before making a phone call at home was starting to make him think that his brain was gradually melding with the office. Soon, he would have no independent thoughts left of his own. His computer would beep ‘You’ve got thoughts!’ and then proceed to delete them, one by one.

Eighteen messages, almost all involving the project he was currently working on – the mooted bid for a new hypermarket near the town centre which involved knocking down substantial bits of old houses and creating a six-hundred-space multi-storey car park which would obscure the view of the marshland. It would also create fifteen hundred jobs and, on the whole, people tended to like handy hypermarkets. As a government worker charged with reviewing the viability of such projects, he often figured it would, in the long run, be quicker for him just to pull down his trousers and pull open his butt cheeks for the mega-grocers.

The e-mail he was looking for, however, was about a third of the way down the screen.

re: Strategic review job reassessment schedule.

In his head, he heard them mispronounce ‘schedule’.

Please report to conference room B at 10.10 a.m …

Ah hah, he thought. Not even doing it in half-hour cycles. They must already know who they wanted in or out.

… for your psychometric testing.

Oh crap. The last time Arthur had done any psychometric testing, it had recommended he join the army. Although, on balance, how could that possibly be any worse than what he was doing now? Well, he could be shot to death, he supposed.

I would like to remind all staff that this is simply a cost-benefit-efficiency exercise devised to see how we can get the best out of all public service environments – a goal with which we’re all in agreement!

Yes, thought Arthur. I would gladly let my family starve and my house get repossessed if it benefited public service environments.

So, don’t worry and you never know – you might even enjoy taking the test!

Yours, Ross.

Cathy leaned over from the next booth, twisting her brooch nervously.

‘I get three twenty-five,’ she said. ‘You know, I’m not sure if I will enjoy taking the test.’

Arthur wanted to be reassuring, but couldn’t think of a way. ‘I’m not so sure, either. Otherwise they’d call it a “party”. Although not one of our Christmas parties. Which are also misleadingly titled.’

Cathy’s face fell even further. ‘I organize those.’

‘Of course you do! Just being …’ he groped for a word. ‘Um, “wacky”.’

Cathy, not normally a good judge of wacky behaviour (eg: having more than two piercings would count as wacky, as did being gay; filling your house full of china dolls bought on a monthly payment plan however would have crossed her radar as perfectly normal), narrowed her eyes at this travesty of the Trade Descriptions Act.

‘It’ll be a piece of piss,’ said Sven, standing up for his twice-hourly trip to the vending machine. He normally timed them for whenever his phone was ringing, which drove everybody crazy. ‘Just tell them you’re not doing it!’

‘Yes, well, the only way someone could get away with that,’ said Arthur, realizing he was sounding peevish and exactly like his father, ‘would be to do a job so incomprehensible that no-one understands it, so they can’t fire you. Or your dog.’

Sven nodded with satisfaction, taking the compliment. His phone started to ring. He ignored it and walked away.

‘Yeah. I’m so happy I’m not some generic paper pusher – ooh, sorry,’ was his parting shot.

‘I am NOT …’ Arthur took a deep breath, conscious that Sven was always trying to rile him and that it always worked. Also, that whoever the evil consultants might be, they would probably choose a good moment to walk past while he was getting involved in a yelling match. And also, that it was true.

He sighed and turned back to his computer. Sven came back slopping coffee, and took an enormous bite out of his second roll, spluttering crumbs all over Arthur’s in-tray. Management had discouraged the habit of going out to lunch by situating the offices seventeen miles from the nearest conurbation, so the entire room had a patina of other people’s pot noodles and Marmite.

Arthur sat in purgatory for the next forty minutes, unable to concentrate. How had he got here, struggling to hold on to a shitty job he didn’t want, on a wet Tuesday in Coventry? School had been alright, hadn’t it? College – fine, fun. Geography, the world’s easiest option in the days when universities had still been fairly exclusive organizations that didn’t include degrees in Star Trek and Cutlery. And, ‘There’ll always be a need for town planners,’ his dad had said, pointing out with unarguable logic that people did, indeed, continue to be born. And now he was thirty-two and wanted to kill someone for accidentally spilling small pieces of bread into a black plastic container that didn’t belong to him, filled with crappy bits of paper he didn’t give a flying rat’s fart about. Hmm.

At four minutes past ten, he got up as casually as he dared without pondering too much on the fact that if he was absolutely spot-on for time, this could mean something on the psychometric testing. Cathy looked up at him with wide-eyed fear.

‘I’ll write the answers down on the back of my hand for you,’ he said.

‘Will you?’

‘No right answers, mate,’ said Sven. ‘Ooh no. Just wrong ones. Then they escort you out of the building and lock you up for life.’

‘He’s kidding,’ said Arthur. ‘Leave her alone.’

‘Woo, back off Sir Galahad.’

Cathy giggled and blushed again. Arthur wondered how much he would mind starting his working life all over again as a lonely shepherd on a hillside.

‘Sheep is to shepherd as goats are to … banker-shepherd-goatherd-banana.’

Arthur sighed and ploughed on with his pen. These were unbelievably crap, but he knew in the way of these things that they might suddenly get really hard in about fifteen seconds. At this point they were still checking his ability to read, which didn’t exactly reflect well on their hiring strategies in the first place.

‘Pig is to sty as dog is to … house-sty-kennel-banana.’

What was the fascination with farm animals, anyway? Was it an additional measure of stress, to conjure up bucolic fantasies whilst being held prisoner in a room without any windows? Arthur suddenly felt a desire to draw one of those adolescent penises, with enormous teardrops coming out the top, all over the paper.

‘Monkey is to banana as polar bear is to bamboo-banana-fish-asteroid.’

Hmm. Perhaps being a town planner was marginally better than being the guy who had to make up questions about polar bears.

‘Sword is to truth as horses are to … loyalty-dreams-journeys-bananas.’

Arthur started and sat back from the table. He looked at the question again and remembered his dream suddenly. Well, that was a strange one. Horses again. Then he ticked ‘journeys’, even though it wasn’t the least bit the same at all.

It was ten forty-five and he’d barely made a dent in the piles of paper. Now he was doing stupid maths questions along the lines of squares of things and whether or not two is a prime number, just because it really doesn’t look like one. He dispatched these quickly enough – one doesn’t become an expert on suburban bus ratios without being able to do long division – and reached the largest section of the test. Stretching, he realized how incredibly hot it was in the room. His shirt was sticking to his back.

‘There are no right or wrong answers on this test,’ it said at the top of the paper. Arthur snorted, then instinctively looked around for a security camera. ‘Please answer questions as quickly and honestly as you can and give the first answer that comes into your head.’ I would do, thought Arthur, if there was a box that said, ‘Augh! Christ, get me out of here!’

Please tick whichever you feel most applies to you.

I want everyone to like me

I want to be successful

I want time to read my book

Hmm, thought Arthur. It’s like a haiku. And I want all of these things. Let me see: like me means weak, read my book means slacker – he ticked successful.

I want to travel in my life

I want to be successful

I carefully finish projects

Ooh, getting tricky. Let me see: slacker, successful, anal. Okay. If there was a ‘I want to be successful’ line in every question, then he was home free.

Only your mother really knows what is best for you

I want time to read my book

I want to be the leader

Okay. Hmm. Between all the successes and leaders, he was coming out a bit too type-A-heart-attacks-risk. The mother thing was a nightmare waiting to happen. Books are good.

Four hundred identical ones of these later, Arthur was going stir-crazy. The same lines, repeated in seemingly infinite patterns of stupidity, designed to gradate just in whichever direction, given that you were already going to lie, you would prefer to lie. Would he rather come out as the teacher’s anal sneak or the crazed ambition seeker? The joiner-inner or the workaholic? What was more important – the good name of the company or getting every detail finished? Working yourself into an early grave or keeping up the good name of the company? Arthur groaned and let his head sink forward onto his arms, then pulled it up again in his ongoing hidden camera paranoia. He stared at the paper, distraught. This was meaningless. Useless. And if he didn’t pass … well, he was a town planner without much of a life and absolutely sod all he cared about. His body boiled with fury and he was very close to crumpling up the papers and storming out when the last question caught his eye.

I was made to gallop through the trees

I miss my sword

This is not my time

He stared at it, then swirled round in confusion as the door opened behind him. A tall, elegant-looking woman walked in.

‘Are you finished?’

He looked at her. She was a very pale blonde, slender without being skinny, and had a high forehead and quite a long nose. Not exactly beautiful, but undeniably striking.

‘Um … Just about …’

She swept the papers away from in front of him. ‘I’m afraid we have a strict time limit.’

‘Can I just see the last page …’

‘Sorry.’ She didn’t smile. ‘I’m Gwyneth Morgan. CFC consultancy.’

‘Ah, the Crazy Frightening Company,’ said Arthur, and immediately wished he hadn’t. ‘I’m joking. You know, I’m sure our excellent chief executive Sir Eglamore would agree that humour in the workplace and …’ He was starting to stammer.

She stared at him coldly. ‘Yes, I take your point, except of course that humour is normally funny.’

Arthur was stung. ‘Well, very little is funny when you’ve been chained to a desk in a windowless room for ninety minutes.’

She raised her eyebrow. ‘Perhaps you’d rather be excluded from the process.’

Arthur stood there for a minute, feeling the adrenalin rush through him. Suddenly, he felt furious. What the hell was he doing here and why was she treating him like this? Shaking, he pushed back his chair and stood up. She was offering to sack him and he was swallowing it like chocolate. He hated himself.

‘Am I done?’

‘For now.’

He almost pushed past her into the corridor.

Open-plan offices don’t have anywhere to hide. Well, the solitary cubicle in the men’s toilets, but that isn’t a pleasant place to be at the best of times and this was emphatically not the best of times. Unconsciously loosening his tie and wiping his forehead – Jesus, why couldn’t that bitch have given him two fucking minutes to read the last fucking question – he strode back to his rat hole, hot and furious.

‘How was it?’ asked Cathy anxiously.

‘It’s fine,’ he said, almost spitting the words out. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

‘Why are you such a funny colour, then?’ Sven said, picking his nose behind a magazine.

‘I am not.’

Sven looked over pointedly, still exploring with his finger. ‘Nah, you’re right. You look incredibly casual and relaxed.’

Cathy stroked him on the sleeve. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

Her pitying kindness was worse than Sven’s predictable indifference, and left Arthur shaking off her arm, half wanting to scream and half wanting to cry.

‘It’s okay.’

Ross stopped past. ‘Hey guys!’ He smiled unconvincingly. ‘You know, just because it’s a special day doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done, hey?’

Arthur briefly closed his eyes, as Sven’s phone started ringing. Sven ignored it for the eighteenth time that morning and Ross made himself scarce.

‘Sven, answer the phone.’

‘I can’t, I’m engaged in an important creative mission.’

‘ANSWER THE PHONE!’

‘You answer it! It’s two feet away.’

This was true. Didn’t prisoners get ten feet by twelve?

Ross may have moved on, but the other office monkeys looked up, sensing something interesting.

‘I am NOT answering your phone, Sven. It’ll be some Danish roofing contractor who wants to know British tiling serial numbers again.’

‘How? How can I create a city if I’m being constantly distracted?’

‘Answer the phone!’

‘No!’

‘ANSWER THE BLOODY PHONE!’

‘NO!’

People who had blended in against the grey background and the aura of coffee breath were openly watching now; signs of animation and interest were showing in weary eyes long-sighted from reading consultancy proposals.

Arthur unplugged the phone, picked it up and walked to the window of the office, which overlooked the business ‘park’. His mind a blank, he had only a very vague idea that he was planning on throwing it out when he got there. Of course, the windows weren’t designed to open, and he hurt his fingers tugging at them.

‘FUCK!’ he said, out loud. Somebody in the office – probably Cathy – gasped. Everyone was silent now.

He put the phone down on the photocopier, still clutching it furiously, his knuckles white with anger, blood flowing like acid through his veins. Suddenly, all he wanted to do was smash the window with the phone, sending it hurtling to the ground and sending Sven right after it.

It’s only a phone, he thought to himself. Calm down. You’re having a bad day. What the hell are you doing? For fuck’s sake, it’s only a fucking phone. That was right. He couldn’t. He should pull himself together, walk back over to Sven’s desk and plug it back in. When it started ringing again he would calmly pick it up and say, ‘Sven isn’t here. He got a bit of a fright from a hole-punch this morning and accidentally crapped himself. He’s gone home and is never coming back again, the shame was so much. You wouldn’t believe how bad it still smells in …’

And then Sven would grab the phone off him and everything would be okay.

Instead, Arthur stepped back from the window, picked up the industrial-sized photocopier with the phone on top, and hurled with all his might.

The photocopier flew through the air and broke through the bullet-proof glass like a flying hippopotamus, gracelessly soaring out onto the grass below. The phone bounced back off the window-frame and knocked him out.

Chapter Two

Arthur looked around. It felt like sun on his face. Where was he? What about a window? Was he outside? He risked opening an eye, and instantly staggered backwards. He was on the edge of a forest and there wasn’t another building in sight. It was dark and icy, and he caught a glimpse of something white through the trees. Then he woke up.

He couldn’t tell where he was. His face was pointing upwards towards some light, which could either be good, as he wasn’t face down in a gutter, or bad, if he were dead. He realized how ironic this would be after wishing himself dead all morning, then realized that if he really were dead irony probably wouldn’t come into it. He tentatively opened his eyes.

‘Well, hello.’ A warm voice sounded in his head. He focused. He was lying on a sofa. A woman in her mid-fifties, with long grey hair tied back, was sitting opposite him, regarding him calmly. She was staring at him without blinking, and her eyes were an odd shade of yellowish hazel.

Arthur blinked twice. ‘Um … Where am I?’ he sputtered, in the traditional way.

‘You’re … just here,’ said the voice.

He became aware of the throbbing in his head, as the faint memory of what had happened started to crystallize. He didn’t think it was going to be good.

Arthur sat up a little way and looked around. He was in a heavily furnished room. The room was full of things: sticks, models, pipes; every available surface was covered in clutter. There was a familiar noise which he realized was the whistle of an old-fashioned kettle. The furniture was old – dark wood mostly, including a long desk. There was even a window, which looked out onto a small sunny garden – it must have been round the back of the building, away from the car park. That was odd; the rain must have cleared up. Then in a flash, he remembered the whole thing.

‘Oh, God. Oh no. Oh no.’

‘Sssh.’ She smiled and leaned forward. ‘Don’t worry about it. It appears a telephone jumped up and attacked you.’

‘Oh,’ said Arthur. He was feeling it deeply. ‘Oh, my God. Did I really throw a photocopier …’

The woman nodded. ‘Yes, you did. That’s why we thought you had probably better go somewhere quiet for a little while.’

Arthur tentatively fingered the impressive bump on his head. ‘Where am I?’ he asked again.

‘Oh, you’re still in the building. You’re just in my office, that’s all.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Lynne,’ she said, reaching out to shake his hand. ‘I’m the company psychotherapist.’

Arthur lay back and exhaled. ‘I was afraid of that,’ he said ruefully.

‘What?’

‘When I saw, you know, the non-office soft furnishings and stuff. Company shrink. Today of all days.’

Lynne smiled. ‘And that is so terrible?’

‘I would say me turning into an official, rubberstamped nutjob on the day the consultants come in is, on the whole, pretty terrible, yes.’

‘Nobody is saying you’re a nutjob.’

‘Well, I just did. Oh, hang on, if you think you’re a nutjob, doesn’t that mean you’re not one? Or maybe it’s the other way around. In which case I’m really in trouble.’ He sat up again.

‘Calm down,’ said Lynne. ‘Relax. I’m a doctor, you know. And it’s not every day someone throws a photocopier through a window then knocks themselves unconscious. We had to look you over. You’re going to be fine.’

‘Oh, God.’ Arthur winced at the memory. ‘I am so not going to be fine. I’m going to get fired for this, aren’t I? That’s why I’m down here with you. You’re to calm me down with yoga or something so I don’t run upstairs and strangle Ross’s pimply little carcass. Great. This day could not possibly get any worse.’

‘Ssh,’ said Lynne. They sat in silence for fifteen seconds.

‘So this is treatment, is it?’ said Arthur eventually, as it became clear that she wasn’t thinking of saying anything to follow up ‘Ssh’.

She stared him down until he went quiet again, lay back, then finally began to relax. After five minutes – and as Arthur was on the point of dozing off – she leaned over slightly.

‘That’s better.’

Arthur blinked up at her through sleepy eyes.

‘Am I in serious trouble?’

She shrugged. ‘No. I don’t think so. You may have to see a bit of me, though.’

‘But why not? I mean, I destroyed half the office and could have killed someone.’

‘I know,’ said Lynne. ‘And when that copier went through the window I could hear the cheers and applause all the way down here.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes. You’ve become something of a folk hero.’

‘Good God.’

‘Well, possibly not amongst the professional photocopier repairman fraternity. And yes, you certainly sparked some excitement upstairs.’

Arthur couldn’t quite take this in. ‘You mean, they’re not going to fire me?’

Lynne permitted herself a quiet smile. ‘Who’d dare escort you out of the door?’

He blinked. ‘Doctor …’

‘Lynne is fine.’

‘Lynne …’ He turned and looked straight at her. ‘Lynne, I can’t lift a sack of potatoes. How on earth did I do that?’

She looked right back at him. Her gaze was penetrating, and he noticed again that her eyes had a curious, almost yellow cast to the iris.

‘Well, maybe if you keep coming to see me we’ll find out.’

Arthur crept slowly out of the building – he’d been given the rest of the day off. From the corner of his eye, he saw something burning. A horrid acrid smell was being given off and as he went closer he saw that someone had set fire to the photocopier, which had landed in a mangled heap on a patch of landscaped grass. A small crowd of people were standing round it, watching it burn from either end, the paper igniting and the plastic melting.

Fumes, he thought, slinking his way to the car. But one of his colleagues saw him and peeled off from the group.

‘Hey! Hey everyone, it’s Arthur!’ The crowd of people gathered round, then all began to clap and cheer. Arthur took a step backwards, touching his bump again. Marcus, the accounts manager, came running up to him.

‘Hey, well done, mate!’

‘Yeah!’ shouted one of the secretarial staff. ‘Won’t be getting any more paper jams from this bloody thing, will we?’ She kicked the smouldering mass with her shoe.

‘Yeah! Collate THIS!’ yelled someone else, kicking it again.

‘That was great, what you did,’ said Marcus, clapping Arthur on the shoulder. ‘Much respect.’

‘Yes, well, um, good,’ said Arthur. ‘Well, I’m off.’ And he wandered slowly towards his car. As he reached it, he turned and looked up at the offices. He could see Ross, eyeing him up from behind the glass. When Ross noticed him, he very slowly drew a line across his throat.

Cock, Arthur thought to himself. That tosser’s going to sack me after all.

The house was quiet when he got in. Unused to being around during the day, he padded up and down, looking for something to do. The semi looked gloomy and dark – immaculate but somehow unpleasant. Arthur didn’t like the relentless tidiness; it implied a panic that anyone should ever smell anything or see anything not entirely bland and lemon-scented. He picked up the TV remote control, then threw it back on the sofa in fear. His life may be going to the absolute shits, but nothing would make him watch daytime television.

He knew he should phone Fay, but he was putting it off for as long as possible.

Putting what off? he suddenly thought. How much with Fay was he really putting off?

He went over to the mantelpiece and pushed aside a prominently displayed christening invitation. Fay had left next to it a Baby Gap catalogue, with a note for him to look through and choose the ‘cutest’ pair of dungarees for some sprog or other.

I’m not ready for a baby he thought, for the millionth time since he’d been … well, a baby. I’m not ready for a baby with Fay he thought, more honestly. Oh well, if I’m about to lose my job for being a nutcase, it’s hardly going to be an issue. I’ll have to tell her tonight.

‘Do you want to watch West Wing?’

‘Yeah, all right. Nice dinner, by the way.’

‘Thanks. It’s called pasta – apparently the Italians invented it. Not bad, eh? Shall we have it again sometime?’

‘Give us the remote.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine. Why – are you?’

‘No, no, I’m fine.’

‘Okay.’

Well, she’ll find out soon enough, thought Arthur, crawling through the next morning’s traffic. When I get given my cards … do they still give cards? Well, P45. Whatever. I hope I get redundancy. Ooh. What if I get redundancy? Maybe I should go round the world. On my OWN. Maybe I should go to Brazil and get plastic surgery and a fake passport and become a diamond smuggler.

He parked, for possibly the last time, and looked up at the grey building. Its boundless conformity scared him; always had. Whoever designed this building – what were they, a robot? Did they really despise people so much? To go through thousands of years of civilization and end up with a big grey portaloo with windows that didn’t open and flat roofs without gardens?

The office actually went quiet when he walked in. People would kind of half look at him, then pretend to be incredibly busy with something else as he approached. Ooh, the walk of shame. Any doubts he might have had about whether or not throwing a photocopier out of a window was quite as cool a feat as Lynne had implied were immediately confirmed. He could feel the tension in the air. He was going down.

And sure enough, when he got to his desk, there was that consultant bitch Gwyneth standing imperiously over it, her back to him. He felt his face colour. She’d bloody better not have been going through his stuff. He wished he’d had time to scribble ‘Gwyneth is a big nosy cow’ all over his papers, which had always done the trick at school.

She straightened up slowly, her back still to him. ‘Wonder what crappy power management weekend she learned that on?’ he muttered to himself.

‘Arthur,’ she said, turning round and extending a long hand. He didn’t take it.

‘Yeah?’

‘Would you mind stepping into my office?’

‘Is that really necessary?’ He’d decided to say this on the way in, as he reckoned it would sound rather cool and suave.

‘Yes, I think it is.’

‘Um, yeah, all right.’

Dammit, he thought. And, I wouldn’t be that rude to people, even if I did have fabulous legs … Arthur shook his head. Infidelity, unprofessionalism and favouring someone he despised all in one scoop. Dammit.

Gwyneth closed the office door.

‘Well, we’ve studied your tests, and everything that happened yesterday,’ she began.

Arthur attempted to jut out his jaw. ‘And?’

She sat down on the edge of the desk. ‘We’re making you – the new head of department.’

‘How soon can I leave?’

Gwyneth looked at him curiously.

‘Oh,’ said Arthur. He looked embarrassed. He had been expecting the phrase so much, he actually thought she’d said, ‘We’re making you redundant.’

Then he fell silent. ‘No diamonds, then,’ he muttered to himself.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘But what about …’ he started up again. ‘You know, the whole …’

‘The photocopier?’

He nodded, glumly.

‘Don’t worry about it. We’d like you to keep seeing that therapist, if that’s okay, but apart from that, we think you’re the man to take on our new project.’

‘What project?’

Gwyneth stood up with a theatrical flourish and unleashed a flattering picture of Coventry (taken from quite far away). Overarching it was the European flag. One particularly big star hovered over the top of the town hall.

‘What I’m about to tell you is extremely important,’ she said. ‘It’s entirely confidential for now, and is going to change your life.’

Arthur raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Don’t tell me, they want me to retime the traffic lights in the pedestrian precinct.’

She ignored him. ‘Right,’ she started again, indicating the picture. ‘We, with the help of you,’ she said proudly, ‘are going to make Coventry … “European City of Culture 2005”!’

Arthur stared at the picture for a long time. Then he looked at Gwyneth to see if this was some terribly unfunny office prank, which would eventually lead to him losing his job after all. She wasn’t smiling – smiling did not seem to be a Gwyneth attribute so far – but was looking at him expectantly. He winced. The silence lengthened until he realized he had to say something.

‘Um …’ He coughed. ‘Why would they choose us and not, say, Birmingham?’

‘Exactly!’ said Gwyneth dramatically. ‘We have an epic fight ahead and many strong competitors!’

Arthur shook his head. ‘Gwyneth, I don’t know what this has to do with me but, you have to admit, we are generally considered to be the ugliest town in the entire world. Well, we’re running a very close thing with the dung heap shanty towns of Rio de Janeiro.’

‘That’s why it’s such a great challenge! We need someone strong and motivated and unafraid to make this happen – we need you, Arthur.’

Arthur was stunned. ‘But … This’ll never work. I don’t even think there are that many hanging baskets in existence.’

‘’Course it will. Glasgow was a slum.’

‘A slum with a working infrastructure and thousands of beautiful Victorian sandstone buildings.’

‘Grab this!’ said Gwyneth, dramatically leaning in close and looking straight into his eyes. ‘This is your great opportunity, Arthur. Seize it with both hands!’

‘Oof, hang on.’ Arthur leaned backwards to reclaim some personal space.

‘Oh, sorry.’ Gwyneth immediately retreated and dusted herself down. ‘I knew that weekend assertiveness course was a bad idea.’

They looked at each other.

‘It’s completely impossible,’ said Arthur.

‘You get your own office,’ she replied. ‘And a budget. Your own team. And access to corporate catering.’

‘Access to what?’

‘You know, those mini prawn thingies. And sausages and stuff like that.’

‘When would I get those?’

‘Whenever you like. Every day.’

Arthur stared into space and said a brief farewell to the diamond mines of southern Brazil.

‘Well, I guess I’m your man.’

‘I know.’

She stood up and held out her hand. He shook it. It was soft and warm and … oh crap. He fancied her.

‘We’ll be working together quite a bit,’ she said.

I was afraid of that, thought Arthur.

‘Great!’ said Arthur.

‘Oh, and by the way,’ she called out to him when he was nearly free, ‘I’m afraid you have to tell Ross.’

‘Tell Ross …?’

‘That you’ve taken over his job.’

Arthur marched back into the middle of the room.

‘I’ve what?’

‘Well, how did you think it was going to work? It was you or him. It’s you. Now, tell him.’

‘I have to fire him?’

‘No, you have to give him some sweets. Yes, you have to fire him. You’re in charge.’

Arthur backed out, feeling white in the face, with deep and profound misgivings as to what he’d just agreed to do.

‘Right … Yeah … I’m in charge.’

Being in charge, Arthur decided the best thing to do straight away would be to take a quick slip through the side door, drive into town and go for a little walk. This was going to take a while to sink in, and he fancied a quick look at the size of the problem he was going to be dealing with. Plus, wandering through towns and cities, reading their infrastructure and examining how they were put together had had a calming influence on him for years.

It was a chilly grey morning, and now most people were locked into their offices for the day it was incredibly quiet around the shopping precinct. He walked across the pedestrianized street. This had been meant to improve the city. Instead, it had provided a good ground for people to fight each other, and hanging-out areas for the local youths. Dilapidated brick stands of pot plants filled with phlegm and cigarette butts stood forlornly at intervals, and the garish shopfronts told their own story: ‘Everything for ninety-nine pence’, ‘Pricesavers’, ‘Remnant Kings’. Plastic products nobody wanted spilled out of their fronts. Two hulking teenagers in sports gear were kicking around a tin can, watched appreciatively by four or five others. One just sat on the ground, eyes glazed with cheap cider, or worse. Underneath the centre were miles of deserted, dank underpasses that most people were too scared to use.

Arthur circumvented the youths carefully and wandered into the run-down shopping centre to ponder what to do. It felt … This was what he was supposed to want, wasn’t it? To run things his way. More money. Power. Responsibility. Surely he should be more excited than this?

Truthfully, all his life Arthur had waited for things to come to him. It saved too much boat-rocking. God, Fay had practically had to jump him the first few times they’d met. And this … what were they expecting? After all, he hadn’t meant the thing with the photocopier. What if they expected him to be that macho all the time? And how the hell was he going to fire Ross? He scratched the back of his neck. Christ! Maybe he should just stick to this leaving idea. He’d almost got his head around it, after all. In fact, the very thought of having to run this project was bringing him out in a cold sweat. It would be bad for him. Bad for his health. Bad for everyone. It would end in ruins and they’d shunt him to the back office and …

Deep in thought and staring at the ground, he didn’t even notice Lynne until he walked right into her as she came out of a shop.

‘Argh!’

Lynne dropped several packages on the ground whilst Arthur started a long litany of apologies.

‘God, I’m so sorry … Let me help you with … Wasn’t looking …’

Scrabbling around on the pavement, he couldn’t help noticing that some of the packages were quite peculiarly shaped. Looking up, he realized Lynne had been coming out of the pet shop. A fat man, obviously the shopkeeper, came out behind her.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. We just can’t get crocodiles, okay? They’re illegal.’

‘Illegal? How on earth does anyone make soup?’

Lynne raised an eyebrow at Arthur as the man retreated inside. ‘Hello, Arthur. Well met.’

Arthur swallowed. ‘Em, hello there.’

‘Are you going this way? Let’s walk a while.’ It sounded more like a command than a query.

‘Why …’ Arthur stumbled for something to say. He didn’t really know any therapists and was slightly worried about being misinterpreted in some way that would mean he was a terrible person. ‘Why do you want a crocodile?’

‘Who wouldn’t want a crocodile?’

Arthur shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘What’s the matter?’

Arthur looked at her kind face. Today, her hair, decorated with pendants that looked like leaves, was loosely pinned back in a bun with tendrils escaping.

‘Well …’ He explained about his conversation with Gwyneth. She was meant to be his counsellor, after all.

‘Hum.’ Lynne stared straight ahead. ‘That was quick.’

‘What? You knew they were going to do this?’

‘No, of course not. Not as such,’ said Lynne, twisting up her face. ‘Office grapevine, you know.’

Arthur nodded.

‘So. How are you going to begin?’

Arthur shrugged. ‘I was actually just considering … that I might not.’

‘Might not? Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘What’s ridiculous? Do I have the look of the man who’s going to spend the rest of his life stuck in an office?’

‘Around the mouth … and the nose, yes.’

Arthur grimaced and walked on. Lynne caught up with him.

‘I think it is time, don’t you?’

‘What?’ He turned round. ‘It’s not my time.’

‘It is,’ said Lynne urgently. She looked at him, and he felt something odd pass between them. He shook his head.

‘Sorry – I don’t quite know what I meant by that. I mean – well, what do you mean? Time for what?’

‘Time for you to take all this energy and …’ Lynne cast her hand around the desolate parking garage where they found themselves. It was puddled with oil and cigarette ends. ‘Ssh,’ she said.

Arthur followed her gaze. In the far corner, three white faces were huddled round a brazier, staring at them like ghosts out of the darkness. Not an unfamiliar sight in the back roads of the town. Arthur and Lynne quickly hurried on through the car park.

‘Who’s going to change all this if you don’t?’

‘What, now you want me to tackle the drugs problem?’

‘Environment matters, you know that. Pride, Arthur. It’s time to pick up your sword and go for it.’

‘Pick up my what?’

‘It’s just an expression.’

‘Oh. Only I seem to have been hearing about swords rather a lot recently.’

‘Yes, well unfortunately I’m not a Freudian type of analyst, so I can’t help you with that one.’

‘What sort of analyst are you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Let’s just see how it goes along, eh?’

‘You are a real therapist, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she patted him on the arm. ‘Yes, I am. Now, what have they asked you to do? Fire someone?’

Arthur gave her a sharp look. ‘Do you do everyone’s therapy or just mine?’

‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, then. Obviously you already know. Yes, they have.’

‘Then do it quickly. Show who’s in charge. Don’t mess around. If you’re going to run this thing, Arthur, you’re going to need respect.’

‘I know. But even though I hate the guy, I don’t want to ruin his …’

‘Week, perhaps? Month, maybe? His type always bounces back. Look over there.’

Arthur followed where her finger was pointing. Two nine-year-old boys were bent over a rain puddle in the cracked concrete. They should have been at school. Instead they were mindlessly, repetitively, picking up pieces of rubbish, setting them on fire with a lighter and dropping them in the water.

‘You don’t have long,’ said Lynne. Arthur watched the two boys for a moment more.

‘But I …’ He turned round. In the darkness of the car park, Lynne had gone.

Ross was sitting alone in the canteen, a place made up of hideous plastic furniture that somebody believed would be made to look like the Dorchester by the addition of some wickerwork and some pathetically touching pot plants. He was rocking on the edge of his chair and prodding a pencil at a glutinous piece of Danish pastry. Arthur stood in the doorway and looked at him. Suddenly, he didn’t look much of a tosspot any more. He looked like an ordinary young man, already running to fat, anxious and insecure.

‘Ross,’ said Arthur softly. He’d felt nervous about doing this, but seeing him, he couldn’t be.

Ross blinked and let his chair fall back to the table with a start. He couldn’t quite look at Arthur but stared straight ahead.

‘Hey Art!’ he said, forcing the jocularity into his voice.

‘Do you want a coffee or something?’ As soon as he’d said that, Arthur realized it was cruel. Why prolong the uncertainty while he buggered about getting a cup of coffee? He might as well have said, ‘Would you like an extra four and a half minutes of excruciating torture?’

‘No, thanks,’ said Ross.

‘Ross …’

‘Yeah? What? Good news, is it?’ He coughed a cynical laugh.

‘No,’ said Arthur. He wondered if Ross would punch him, but he still felt all right; quite under control.

‘Ross, they’re doing something different. I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave.’

Ross stood up, as if he couldn’t bear to be any closer in airspace to Arthur. ‘God, God, I bloody knew it.’

‘I understand you’ll be feeling upset …’

‘Might have known they’d get some namby pamby PC non-car bloody saddo who just happens to be good at fucking poofter tests …’

‘Okay … maybe not quite that upset.’

‘I told ’em. Sort out the roads. Build more. Don’t hire some soft wanker who can’t even get laid.’

‘Yes, well, we seem to be moving from upset to offensive …’

‘And now they’ve got you running the whole bloody town! Well, God help them, that’s all I can say.’

Ross stood up and kicked his plastic chair crossly, his heavily gelled ginger hair sticking straight up from his forehead. He advanced on Arthur.

‘I don’t give a fuck, you know. You’re not the first guy in here. Some bloke walked in and offered me a job in Slough. You just bloody watch me. I’ll sort out that place and we’ll be using your fucking pedestrianized precincts as car parks.’

Arthur got riled. ‘That will be great. Why have just one town hating you when there are so many more opportunities out there?’

Ross leaned into him menacingly. The room was eerily silent, it still being out of lunch-hour time. Arthur suddenly found himself thinking back to his first and only fight ever. He was ten years old and, after kicking the shit out of everyone in the class in ascending order of size, McGuire had finally got round to him. The time had been pre-ordained. The class had encircled them. Arthur had taken a deep breath, trying to remember what his stepfather had told him – ‘Don’t worry, son, you only have to square up to the bullies once, then they’ll leave you alone. Run at him as fast as you can and try and hit him on the nose.’ Of course McGuire had held out one arm, held him by the forehead and pounded him into the ground – on that day and so many days after that, it long ceased to be a spectator sport. Arthur’s nerves were not, at the moment, at their boldest.

Without warning, Ross’s left arm shot out and smashed him on the ear. It felt like being stung by an extremely large bee. Arthur was dimly aware of a buzzing noise, then realized there wasn’t a bee, it was the rest of the office, attracted to the open door of the restaurant. Before he could stop to think, the adrenalin kicked in, and he threw up his arms like he was playing volleyball. He caught Ross a glancing blow on the underside of the nose. Ross grunted and staggered backwards a few feet. Whilst Arthur was taking this in, Ross threw out a foot and cracked it into his gut. Arthur squealed – it was as undignified as that – but, finding it in him to ignore the pain, came charging forward, yelling and letting fly with an erratic punch which landed straight in Ross’s eye socket.

Ross was roaring now, like a giant bear, lunging around with his hand to his eye. Furiously, he dragged up one of the plastic chairs which, Arthur dully noted somewhere in the bottom of his mind, were normally bolted to the floor, and brandished it in the air across the canteen.

And Arthur, noted coward, who had never done anything even vaguely out of step in his life before yesterday, who had balked at everything that came his way, who was ready to get soft and old in his middle age, said something he’d never said before in his life, not even in fun. Instead of clenching his body and waiting for the blow or trying to make himself as small as possible, he pushed out his shoulders and opened his body wide, like a gorilla, or Russell Crowe. He stood, legs apart, eyeing up the other man with as much ferocity as he could muster.

‘BRING IT ON!!!’ he roared.

The sound bellowed and bounced off the walls. Then – silence.

Ross and Arthur stared at each other. The crowd of people by the door were completely silent. Nobody dared breathe. Then, with a crash, Ross hurled the chair across the room, but away from Arthur. It split through a picture frame hung from the raffia.

‘Fuck you! This will come around,’ said Ross, his face purple and red to bursting. He pointed his finger at Arthur. ‘THIS WILL COME AROUND!!’

And he stormed out of the room, leaving Arthur and the rest of the office staring in his wake.

‘How was your day?’ Fay asked carefully.

‘Oh, oh, it was fine, you know. Usual.’

This was becoming a nightmare. He used to share everything with her. Now he could barely talk to her beyond politeness, before she’d sigh and start mentioning somebody or other’s toddler who had done something which was supposedly cute but in fact just sounded incredibly annoying.

Fay was well aware of this. She flicked quickly through Heat magazine, elaborately casual.

‘So the black eye …’

Arthur winced. Okay, that was stupid. Perhaps he should have double-checked for the visual evidence.

Fay let out a long sigh. She remembered what the book had said – never nag, never burrow into his affairs. She tried to do her best. But he was late, tired, distracted, he’d hardly said a word to her for what felt like months – ooh, and, by the way, there was blood on his collar and he had a black eye. Her man – the sweet, gentle man she’d fallen in love with five years ago at a training conference in Peterborough – couldn’t even tell her why he was dripping blood. She set aside her magazine.

‘Arthur, we have to talk.’

He grunted into his newspaper. Yes, he knew they did. He looked up at her. His eyes were hollow.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘Well …’ Arthur did a quick summary in his head.

Hmm not that bit … No, maybe not that …

‘I got promoted.’

Fay’s face lit up. ‘Really?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, really.’

‘But this is brilliant!’ Her eyes shone. ‘I mean … we’ll have enough money to – hang on.’

She ran to the fridge and came back with a bottle of champagne they’d been keeping for good news.

‘This is so fantastic!’ She kissed him on the top of his head. ‘You’re so clever, darling! And think what we can do now …’ She straightened up for a second and smiled at him. ‘And the black eye is, what – the official entry token to the executive washroom?’

‘I had to fire Ross,’ said Arthur matter-of-factly, uncorking the bottle.

‘Oh! God, well, that’s even more brilliant. Isn’t he the one you thought was a bit of a tosspot?’

Arthur nodded. ‘With a good tossy right hook.’

‘Ooh!’ She sat by his knees, hugging her own, and lifted up her glass to be filled. This was it. This was the moment. No wonder he’d been so quiet, if he’d been working up to such a wonderful surprise!

‘So, there’ll be a bit more money coming in, won’t there?’

‘Um, we didn’t discuss it … Probably.’

Oh God, thought Arthur. He suddenly had an inkling as to where this was heading. Thank God his eye was already black. Although of course she could still scratch it out.

‘So, you know, maybe we could …’ She twirled her manicured finger around the top of her glass. Looking at it, Arthur realized for the first time that he didn’t really like manicures. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to sound like he was encouraging her. The pause grew longer. She looked up at him, firstly with hope, then, as the silence continued, almost as he watched, the light in her eyes slowly dimmed.

She stared at the seagrass carpet for an even longer time. It was killing Arthur to keep quiet, but he didn’t know what else to do. He felt a lump in his throat. The wait grew interminable. Finally, and very slowly, she raised her head back up to look at him. Her eyes were full of tears, quivering, hovering and waiting to fall.

‘Are we …’ She was attempting to sound dignified, but there was an immediate wobble to her voice. ‘Are we – are you …’ She shook her head to get a grip, and managed to steady herself. ‘Do you really want to be with me, Arthur? Properly? To settle down and have a – a family and everything?’ Immediately her eyes flicked away. A ten-ton weight settled on Arthur’s ribcage. He had to say something soon. He had to.

He couldn’t think of anything. He was failing.

‘Aren’t you even going to talk to me?’ The tears were falling now.

‘Aren’t you going to even deign to … Am I really worth that little to you?’

Fay’s voice was angry now, and hard.

‘Look at me, Arthur.’

Slowly, Arthur lifted his head. Her face was white, and her hands were gripping the wine glass so hard it was frightening. Neither of them spoke. Arthur loathed himself, and his cowardice.

‘Are you – are you talking about having a baby?’ Arthur managed to force out, quietly.

‘No!’ said Fay, indignant. ‘Can’t I ask a perfectly reasonable question about where our relationship’s headed without it turning into a big fuss about … babies.’

‘Oh. Only, I thought you were talking about babies.’

‘Yes, of course I’m talking about babies.’

She attempted to laugh and half choked, loudly in the quiet room. Arthur reached out his hand to her but she shook it off.

‘Fay, – I’m not sure I’m ready.’

Her face creased with disappointment, then she took a breath. ‘How … How … When would you be ready? We have three bedrooms and two cars, for fuck’s sake!’

‘I know.’

‘We chose this place together!’

‘You chose it, Fay,’ he said, as gently as he could, realizing of course that this wasn’t fair.

‘I chose it because … because we’re going out and you’re thirty bloody two years old! And so am I, nearly! We’re not fifteen! You don’t fuck about with someone just to go out with them!’

‘I – I’m not fucking about with you.’

‘I’m thirty-one years old. If you don’t want to get married and have a family with me, you’re fucking about.’

Arthur felt disgruntled. ‘Who invented that rule? I thought we were having a perfectly nice time.’

‘Did you?’

He ignored the obvious truth in her statement.

‘I don’t see why, just because we’re seeing each other … I mean, I don’t owe you anything.’

As soon as he said this he realized how awful it was. She blinked twice rapidly and edged away from him. ‘You … you …’

‘Listen, Fay, I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t. It’s just … I’ve had a really tough day and you’ve just started in on this and …’

But she had already stood up and was backing away across the room.

‘Look, Fay.’

But she didn’t even look like Fay any more. She looked like some strange person he’d never met before in his life. Her eyes frightened him.

‘You don’t owe me anything,’ she echoed.

‘Oh, come on, let’s talk about it.’

‘No, no need for that. You don’t owe me a thing.’

‘Fa-ay.’

Now she looked around, bewildered. She stopped herself. ‘Well,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Well, I guess I’ll be back to pick up my stuff … whenever …’ She cast an eye round the tasteful living room that they’d gone down to London to furnish – the brown leather sofa, the Habitat rug, the widescreen TV. Suddenly she had pulled herself together, and was eerily calm.

‘You owe me that sofa,’ she said. Arthur was standing now, casting his arms around, trying to say something, anything, but realizing as he did so that somewhere, underneath all of this, there was a definite feeling of relief – and that this was the biggest betrayal of all.

‘You … you betrayed me,’ she said, unnervingly voicing exactly what was going through his head. ‘Maybe not with another woman – but then, of course, I don’t know you at all, do I?’

‘There aren’t any other women,’ said Arthur dully, although he couldn’t help wondering – it was a flash, nothing more – about Gwyneth’s set up.

‘But you betrayed me, nonetheless. You saw me every day and you knew absolutely what I was in for, and absolutely what I was after and you spat on it and pissed it out the window the whole damn time. Did you laugh as the years went by, Arthur? Did you laugh every day because I still hadn’t cottoned on that nothing – nothing I did was any use? That there was nothing I could do? You stole that time from me, Arthur Pendleton. You stole it, and you know you did.’

‘I …’ Arthur exclaimed helplessly.

‘You absolute wretch. Well, fuck you! That’s my curse on you. Fuck you and everything that will ever happen to you.’

‘I wish people would stop saying that today.’

‘Fuck you,’ she said again, and it echoed around the room as she slammed the door. Arthur stood there for a second, until she marched back in, scooped up the television remote control, her bag, her dressing gown, then stood in front of him where he was frozen to the carpet and calmly blacked his other eye.

Chapter Three

‘I think I’d maybe … I’d quite like to come in and see you.’

Lynne regarded the strange purple-eyed apparition peering round her doorway coolly. Arthur had driven in at five miles an hour.

‘Can you see?’

‘Ha ha. Is this a good time?’

‘Time …’ mused Lynne. ‘What a funny question. All times are exactly the same.’

She stared out of the window. Today she was wearing six layers of different colours of brown. They floated all over her chair. One layer looked like it might be made out of a piece of sacking.

‘Er, yes they are,’ averred Arthur. ‘Except you know, they’re not. When you’re doing something or, you know, waiting for black eyes to heal.’

‘Is that what those are? I thought you were turning into a panda. I saw that happen once …’

Arthur threw up his hands in defeat. ‘Fine, I’ll come back later.’

‘No, no, come in.’

Arthur mooched in and slouched onto the sofa. There was an expectant silence.

‘Well?’ said Lynne.

‘I don’t know … Can you give me some therapy or something?’

‘What, just like that?’

Arthur shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Jolly good,’ said Lynne. ‘Right. You get confused between umbrellas and your penis.’

‘I do not!’

They both looked out of Lynne’s windows, where it was raining.

‘Just as well,’ said Arthur.

‘Quite,’ said Lynne. ‘Well, you get that kind of thing with off the peg therapy.’

Arthur sighed. Lynne peered over her spectacles.

‘Do you want to talk about it or do you want me to psychically guess that Ross took a swing at you and you’ve split up with your girlfriend?’

‘That’s creepy,’ said Arthur. ‘Well, what do you recommend, seeing as I’m supposed to be starting the most difficult job of my career this morning and I look like George Dubya eating a pretzel.’

‘Talk to your girlfriend,’ said Lynne. ‘That’s probably better than talking to me.’

‘What! That’s the most useless advice I’ve ever heard! You’re the worst therapist ever!’

‘What do you want me to say? Well done for betraying your girlfriend?’

‘I didn’t betray her. She bloody said that too. It’s not like I did anything.’

But his face gave him away.

‘Well, exactly. You should have done something. You should have split up with her years ago.’

‘Okay, well, thank you Germaine Greer but I happen to completely disagree. All she ever had to do was ask, then she did ask and I told her.’

Lynne shook her head. ‘You’re going to regret that.’

‘What? I thought I could say anything in here!’

‘Not what you said. What you did.’

‘Yes, I’m sure I will regret it, if I lose the sight in one eye.’

They were quiet. Arthur was seething. This was a hard time for him, goddammit. Didn’t he deserve a bit of sympathy?

‘You’ll be late,’ said Lynne.

The huge cubicle room was not just quiet, it was completely, utterly silent. It was hard to believe there was anyone in there at all. From the second Arthur stepped through the door, heads disappeared into files, up close against computer screens, probably even in some cases straight under the desks, using the ‘if he can’t see me he can’t fire me’ technique. Arthur went forward gingerly.

‘Hello!’ he said as usual to the grumpy temp at the front of the office. But instead of grinning and giving him some cheeky answer, she looked up, startled.

‘Er, hello Mr Pendleton.’

He squinted at her. ‘Um …’ Of course he still couldn’t remember her name. ‘You don’t have to call me Mr Pendleton.’

She looked at him. ‘What, do you want me to go back to calling you “Not Too Much of a Wanker”?’

From somewhere he could be sure he heard a very quiet giggle.

‘No, I stay away from my Native American name when I’m working,’ he said, heading past her.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just didn’t recognize you with your sunglasses on.’

‘I’m not wearing … oh, forget it.’

He was conscious of her eyes on him as he started to make his way through the maze. And everyone else’s, for that matter. As he was nearly at his desk, he realized with a cold shock of horror that of course this wouldn’t be his desk any more – he’d be expected to go to Ross’s old office. But he was already too far along in the opposite direction. Oh crap. He felt his face go puce and the back of his collar felt damp. He decided to try and pretend that he was just on his way to pick up a few things and actually said, ‘Huh, just going to pick up a few things,’ tentatively out loud as he was going along, feeling more and more that he should just carry a sign saying ‘Dickhead! Hate me forever!’

Of course, as usual, the smell hit him first. No. Of all the cruel tricks to play on him. Sandwiches was sitting lugubriously in his chair – or rather, what had been his chair – stinking the place out and looking up at him with a mildly quizzical air. He was wearing one of Arthur’s ties. Sven was nowhere to be seen.

‘Sven!’ Arthur yelled, breaking the silence in the room.

The fat blond head raised itself incrementally over the partition, like a Wot! cartoon. ‘Oh … Hi, Arthur!’ he said, with elaborate unconcern.

‘Sven, you know how we had that talk the other day about who was the boss?’

Sven nodded.

‘And I couldn’t ask you to remove your dog?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Remove the fucking dog.’

Cathy put her head round the cubicle. ‘Arthur … Mr Pendleton … Hello!’

‘Hi, Cathy. You don’t need to call me Mr anything.’

Cathy came round the side of the partition. ‘Um … Arthur …’

‘Yes?’

‘Um, it was just … Well, I spoke to the girls in the typing pool and … well, we just wondered if there was any way we could keep Sandwiches. You know, for therapeutic value.’

‘What? What’s therapeutic about a methane machine who eats staplers?’

Sandwiches obligingly spat out the stapler he’d been attempting to maul. A long trail of drool still connected him to it, and he regarded it closely.

‘We thought,’ Cathy shrugged, ‘seeing as you’ll have a new office, you won’t be near enough to smell him.’

Arthur shook his head. ‘You’re telling me you actually want that thing in here?’

Sven regarded the scene carefully.

Cathy snapped her fingers. Sandwiches took a careful glance at Arthur to make sure he was watching, then shuffled on his stubby legs off the chair and rounded the partition – his bottom disappearing last, like the slinky dog in Toy Story. Arthur stood back so he could see. Sandwiches was fawning up against Cathy’s legs, rubbing his head and giving his best pathetic dog eyes. Cathy leaned down and scratched his head.

‘It’s more affection than I get from my husband,’ she said, trying to laugh, although the statement was so obviously true it was painful. She knelt down and gave the dog a scratch.

‘Happy workers, innit?’ said Sven. ‘Lowers aggression in the office and all that.’

Well, he’d rather got him there. More aggression in the office was something he could definitely do without for the moment.

Arthur sighed and looked at Sven. ‘Will you change what he eats? So he doesn’t fart so much?’

‘Charcoal biscuits only,’ said Sven solemnly. Sandwiches coughed and deposited four loose staples on the carpet. Cathy rubbed him as if he’d done something clever and unwrapped him a Fox’s glacier mint.

‘Oh God,’ said Arthur. ‘My first executive decision and I’ve let the place be overrun by wild animals.’ He headed off towards Ross’s old domain.

‘Marcus, I believe you’re goin’ to have to set up a new expense account,’ he could hear Sven say, grandly.

Ross’s office still smelled of him – Lynx deodorant, sweaty hair and air freshener. Even the boss’s windows didn’t open. Arthur paced around the room, picking things up and putting them down again. There was a long, standard issue pine desk facing the door right in the middle of the room – Ross liked to play the part of Blofeld, and sit with his back to the hapless visitor in his office (it didn’t matter what they’d done: the fact that they were in a room with Ross at all already made them pretty hapless). He hadn’t even left time to pick up his personal possessions. Arthur looked at them now, vowing to pack them up and send them on to Slough. On the desk there was the framed picture of Ross, trying to smile, with the very attractive woman he called his girlfriend scowling. Arthur wondered idly if this was his girlfriend or some woman he’d sidled up to at a motor trade fair. There was also a model of his car (a ridiculously over-customized silver-blue Audi that positively screamed ‘dickwad’.) Well, maybe he wouldn’t return all the stuff. On a whim he threw the model in the air and kicked it as it came back down to earth. The plastic shattered with a satisfying noise. He caught the main part of the chassis with his foot and kicked it into the air again. It flew across the desk and knocked the framed photograph onto the floor. Goal!

‘Oh, whoops!’ he said out loud.

‘You know, your destructive skills weren’t the only reason we hired you,’ said the cool voice.

Gwyneth, wearing a peppermint-green suit, was cool and unruffled-looking. She had been standing in the corner behind the door and was now pretending to examine the files against the far wall.

‘Oh!’ said Arthur in a high-pitched voice, which annoyed him. He cast around for some excuse for wilful destruction of somebody else’s property, but couldn’t come up with one. He tried to change the subject. ‘Nice … breakfast?’ he asked, then winced at the pathetic question.

Gwyneth looked to the side. ‘I don’t eat breakfast,’ she said.

‘No, of course not, otherwise how would you keep your slim …’ Oh God, he said to himself, shape up, you’re starting to sound like Vic Reeves.

‘Well.’ She turned and stepped forward to confront him. ‘Your first day. Welcome.’

‘Thanks,’ said Arthur, mumbling and looking at the floor.

‘What did you have for breakfast? Or rather …’ She looked at his bruised face. ‘What had you?’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Arthur, pawing his face. ‘Um …’ Well, he wasn’t going to get into this. ‘Did it myself … You know, to even things up. Don’t you think it looks better?’

Rather than answering him, Gwyneth snapped her fingers and a scared-looking secretary marched in, carrying three tons of files. The secretary dropped them onto the table with an exhausted sigh.

‘Thanks, Miriam. You can go home now.’

‘That doesn’t seem bad for a day’s work,’ mused Arthur. It was still nine thirty.

‘Night shift,’ snapped Gwyneth. ‘Efficiency drive.’

‘Of course,’ said Arthur, sitting down gingerly.

‘Okay. Here we have financial projections, budgetary restraints, minutes from the working party, the futures committee, the town council, the planning board, the county council, the department of the environment – oh, here’s the white paper. Over here are the application guidelines, the tendering process, the likelihood graphs. Plus studies from Glasgow, Manchester, Amsterdam, Prague and Budapest. I wouldn’t bother with that last one, depending on how good your Hungarian is …’

‘Bit rusty, actually.’

‘Fine.’

She eyed him over the wall of paper that now divided them.

‘Why don’t you get started?’

‘Sure,’ said Arthur, as if having to read fourteen thousand pages of the most mind-numbing information ever committed to paper was exactly the kind of thing he’d been dreaming about all these years.

‘Ehem, what will you be doing exactly?’

Gwyneth stared at him. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I think it’s best if you call a team meeting. Then we can outline all our roles. I’m going to be working on the bid with you. Get your best people.’

Arthur stared at the pile of papers. He picked some up. He smelled them. He did not have a clue what to do with them. But, casting around, he noticed one thing – he had an intercom!

He reached over and pressed a button. As soon as he started speaking, his voice boomed right back at him – he could hear it out on the main floor. Oh, this was cool. Resisting the immediate temptation to sing ‘Angels’, he coughed – nearly bursting the eardrums of anyone on the floor – and leaned forward to the speaker. Who were his best people? He chose to make a management decision and simply ask anyone he knew.

‘Er … Hello, everyone. This is Arthur … Um, could I see … Sven, Cathy … er … Gwyneth …’

‘I’m only in here,’ said Gwyneth, crossly opening the connecting door.

‘Marcus … Marcus … Um, if I think of anyone else I’ll say in a minute.’ There was a long pause. ‘Um, sorry. Can you come and see me in the conference room, please?’

With trepidation, they filed in.

‘Sit down, everyone.’

The group bustled around, looking at the table.

‘Anywhere special you want us to sit?’ asked Gwyneth.

Arthur looked up, startled. ‘No, of course not. Sit wherever you like.’

They seated themselves around Marcus, the finance director, whom they found safe, being the only person in the office who knew how to add up. He lived in a world of fake friendship and promises, as girls gave him lascivious winks if he promised to help them out with their expenses, and many pints were bought for him round about the March mark. Sandwiches sat at the end of the table.

Looking round the room for the first time, Arthur realized, suddenly, that he didn’t care in the slightest. Whatever he did, this was it now. He was in charge. He was the boss. They were going to like him or – well, who liked their boss? Forget it. They were going to hate him, but they might respect him or they might not. He took a deep breath and began.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Things have changed a bit round here.’

Yes, that was obvious enough. He decided just to get down to it.

‘Okay … team. Here’s what we’re going to be doing.’

He revealed the graphic overhead just as Gwyneth had done, and tried to garner the same level of dramatic enthusiasm.

‘Our new project,’ he announced, ‘is to take Coventry all the way to becoming European City of Culture!’

There was dead silence round the table.

‘What’s that then?’ said Marcus.

‘Ehem … It’s whatever you want it to be,’ said Arthur. ‘We’re going to create the city of our imagination!’

Gwyneth coughed discreetly.

‘Within certain highly defined boundaries, of course.’

‘It’s an urban rejuvenation project,’ said Gwyneth. Immediately, the eyelids of the entire room began to droop.

‘This … I cannot imagine the amount of money it would take to transform Coventry,’ said Marcus, wonderingly. ‘All of it?’

‘It’s to bring out the beauty of the city, make it a tourist attraction. Show its true colours.’

‘Those being what – grey, grey and dark-grey?’ joined in Sven.

‘What’s the slogan going to be?’ added Marcus. ‘“Coventry’s Crappily Better”?’

‘Come to Coventry … if you’re a cu—’

‘Is anyone else really missing Ross?’ said Cathy.

‘Yes, yes, okay, okay, calm down,’ said Arthur, the tips of his ears going red. This wasn’t starting well.

‘Gwyneth and I …’ This felt very odd to be saying, almost like ‘my wife and I’. ‘Gwyneth and I think you are the best team to take the project forward. I know it seems a huge, huge mountain to climb, but I really think we are in with a chance.’

The room went silent as they all looked at him.

‘Any questions?’

‘Yes, one. Very important,’ said Marcus. ‘Are we going to get access to those executive snacks?’

‘Tea,’ said Gwyneth brightly. ‘Let’s all take a break for tea.’ And smiling like a primary school teacher, she hustled everyone out of the room towards a table which had been set up specially – with chocolate biscuits. The group fell on them with gusto. Gwyneth came back into the room, where Arthur was still standing.

‘They’re … they’re absolutely dreadful,’ she said, her face like thunder.

‘What?’ said Arthur. This woman was completely incomprehensible. ‘What is?’

‘Your so-called staff.’ She practically spat. ‘Is that bunch of work-shy cynics the best this office can do?’

‘That lot?’ Arthur looked at them. ‘But you’ve just given them all chocolate biscuits.’ He sat down. ‘I don’t think that will work particularly well as staff aversion training. Here – annoy Gwyneth. Have a biscuit!’

‘They’re like a bunch of children. And that Sven – he’s just a pig!’

‘Yeah, he is a pig,’ agreed Arthur. ‘A strange, ugly pig with superior logistical ability.’

‘For a man or a pig? That’s an important distinction.’

‘Go easy on him, Gwyneth – do you know he’s never had sex? ’Fessed up to the temp at the Christmas party, poor bastard. He’s a virgin.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ She shuddered. ‘Can you imagine …’

‘No,’ said Arthur quickly, trying very hard not to think about sex and Gwyneth in the same context at all.

‘And you’re meant to be leading this bunch of reprobates – look at them. They’re slagging you off right now.’

‘They are not,’ said Arthur, looking out of the door nonetheless.

Sven was holding up his chocolate biscuit plate and saying, ‘Please sir, I’m little orphan Arthur. Please can I have a European City of Culture?’

The others were laughing.

‘I’m never going to get them to do anything, am I?’ said Arthur.

‘You just have to get tough with them.’

‘That will never work.’

Gwyneth turned round and stalked into the open area outside the meeting room. She stood before them with her hands on her hips.

‘Right, you’ve had your chocolate biscuits. Now fuck off, and Arthur wants two-page memos from each of you on your preliminary ideas for the bid, on his desk, Friday morning. Here are copies of the guidelines, budget not an issue, just brainstorm.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Marcus, and the rest of them shuffled off obediently.

Gwyneth turned round again to Arthur, who tried not to show how impressed he was. God, but this woman was annoying.

Arthur was stretched over the empty bed, one of the few pieces of furniture Fay had left behind. It still smelled, faintly, of her conditioner. There was a long brown hair lying across the pillow. He picked it up. It felt for a moment like a trap – like she had left it there to see if her bed would be disturbed; to see what would happen.

Later, he was dreaming of horses again. He was pounding over the land. It was winter again, and the frosted wind caught against his throat. This time, he wasn’t alone. He looked down and realized his arm was around a girl. She was cowering into him and holding him tight, but oddly, he felt no emotion towards her. Suddenly he realized it was Gwyneth. Her fair hair was blowing over the cowl of her cloak. He groaned once, in his sleep, and turned over.

‘I can’t believe they’re actually all here,’ said Gwyneth that Friday. ‘And they’re all pretty much legible. Sven’s has something on it …’

‘I think that’s dog slobber,’ said Arthur.

‘Oh, God,’ said Gwyneth, dropping it as if it were acid. Arthur watched her, remembering the fragile creature he had held in his dream three nights before, not this smartly dressed efficiency machine standing before him.

‘Why do you do this?’ he asked suddenly.

‘What? Pick up pieces of paper typed by dogs with dirty paws? I have absolutely no idea, I assure you.’

‘No, I mean, your job. How did you get into it?’

Gwyneth looked at him. ‘Well, at university, I spent my summers working for …’

‘I don’t mean your job interview answer. Just … why?’

She shrugged. ‘Well, why does anyone become a management consultant?’

Arthur sat back.

Gwyneth was looking at him like the answer was obvious.

‘I genuinely don’t know.’

‘I think it was … the travel, the glamour … meeting new people …’ Gwyneth looked around the office.

‘Oh, yeah.’

Gwyneth flopped into a chair. ‘You know, I used to believe that, and now – look. Trapped in sunny Coventry.’

Suddenly, something in her face shifted. She looked like she was having an internal battle within herself. She glanced around as if she’d forgotten where she was, she looked at Arthur, she looked at the floor. Then, in almost a whisper, she leaned over and said, ‘Oh, God, sometimes I hate it.’ Then, she kind of shook herself. ‘Gosh, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t mean that. It’s just, you know, sometimes I think maybe I should have become a vet after all.’

‘A vet. You wanted to be a vet?’

‘What’s so funny about that?’

Arthur looked at her immaculate suit. ‘Gwyneth, all you do is complain about dog slobber.’

‘That is not all I do.’

‘Have you any idea what the slobber ratio is like in being a vet? And not just dog slobber, either. Ohhh, no. Elephant slobber. Yuk. And have you ever seen a lizard slobber?’

She shrugged. ‘No. Have you?’

Arthur considered. ‘Well, no, but I’d bet it’s revolting, wouldn’t you?’

There it was again … almost a smile. ‘What kind of a lizard?’

‘Oh, geckos. They’re filthy.’

She nodded. ‘Or limpodos.’

‘You’re right. Even a gecko wouldn’t give house-room to a limpodo – bleargh!’

Arthur could have sworn she nearly giggled. Then she pulled herself together and stood up, nervously tugging on her immaculately ironed blouse.

‘Give me those papers,’ she said. ‘Not Sven’s, thank you.’

Arthur picked up Sven’s and started to read. On the page was a picture of a large neutron bomb with an arrow pointing downwards towards Coventry. Oh, very funny, Arthur thought to himself. He looked over to the outside area. Gwyneth was standing next to the coffee machine, leafing through the unexpected submission from the temp, which seemed mostly to concern the amount of temporary staff required for the new-look town (lots, apparently). It was the first indication that this project might be of some interest to people outside their own small circle.

‘Is that about the temps?’ yelled Arthur. ‘How many?’

‘Everybody,’ said Gwyneth, without looking up. ‘Everyone should do their job on a temporary basis so that anyone can just move on when they feel like it. Makes everyone a lot happier when they feel footloose and fancy free, and apparently happy people don’t litter.’

‘Is that true?’

‘There’s no evidence provided.’

‘I’d have thought you’d have been more likely to litter when you were happy – you know, tra la la, dum de dum; I’m so comfortable with myself today I don’t even care what I throw around, la la … Wouldn’t you think?’

‘I don’t litter.’

‘Well, there you are. You’re an unhappy non-vet, and you don’t litter, so maybe the theorem is true.’

‘I’m not unhappy.’

Silence fell as they skimmed through the other proposals.

‘Sven wants an internet connection on every park bench.’ Arthur examined it closely as Gwyneth wandered over to take a look.

‘Oh yes,’ said Gwyneth, ‘some other council tried that.’

‘What on earth for? So the flashers could get quicker access to their internet porn?’

‘No, to show their interconnectivity in the world. To let people get out, smell the roses, enjoy the trees. Work in different environments; experience nature.’

‘What happened?’

‘Oh, you know. There was a whole flasher internet porn incident and they discontinued it.’

‘Uh huh.’

They continued leafing.

‘Marcus has laid out how much money we can spend,’ said Arthur, holding up a densely typed wad of Excel spreadsheets.

‘How much?’

‘Well, judging by these calculations here … and this table over here …’

‘Yeah?’

‘God, hang on …’ He paused for a minute, his brow furrowing with concern. ‘Well, it seems to say here – no, it can’t be. It looks like absolutely nothing at all. In fact, he seems to have gone into the realm of imaginary negative numbers.’

Gwyneth squinted over at him. ‘Like how?’

‘Well, apparently if we did anything – anything at all, including moving from these seats, right now, we’d have to cull every lollipop lady within an eleven-mile radius.’

‘That can’t be right.’

‘God, but look at the figures. It adds up.’

‘We’ll get an extra budget. It’s been approved.’

‘It’s been spent.’ Arthur held up a second sheet. ‘It says here … “extraneous disbursements”. There you go. That’s our entire budget.’

‘Sixteen million pounds?’

‘Sixteen million pounds. I wonder what extraneous disbursements are?’

Gwyneth stared at the paper in disbelief. ‘So you bloody should.’

She picked up the phone. ‘Marcus?’

The voice on the other end was timid.

‘What the hell are these figures?’ She switched on the speaker phone.

‘Um … yes, I had a funny feeling those might come up,’ said Marcus.

‘Did you, now? Then what the hell are they?’

Marcus mumbled something incomprehensible.

‘What? Speak up, for God’s sake.’

Then he spoke up, and Arthur turned white.

‘I don’t understand,’ Arthur was saying for the sixth time, standing over Marcus’s desk. Marcus was cowering and concentrating on the paper in front of him.

‘How the hell can it cost sixteen million pounds to fix a photocopier?’

‘It was a weekend. Call-out charges.’

Oh, God. This place was disastrous. Gwyneth came round into the grey car park and fished in her handbag for her car keys, with a half-hearted plan to go back to her main office and think this through. Across the motorway, the sun was setting over a field. If you could ignore the town, this really was a most beautiful part of the world. She looked back at the office.

Suddenly she remembered the look on Arthur’s face that morning when he’d got the photocopying bill and almost laughed. The way his soft brown hair had flipped over his face …

Oh no, she thought, fumbling with her key in the lock. No, no no no. She couldn’t possibly fancy the guy she was working with. She couldn’t. For a start, it was forbidden in company policy (until you reached director level, at which stage you could shag the pope and it would be discreetly ignored).

Not only that, it was obscenely unprofessional and Gwyneth was nothing if not a paradigm of professionalism.

‘I am a paradigm of professionalism,’ she said to herself, looking in her car mirror and trying to make it sound like a positive reinforcement statement.

Oh, but his hair’s so cute, she thought to herself.

No, no no no no no no, she also thought to herself.

But she wondered what would happen if the project got cancelled and there was nothing in the way.

Chapter Four

Fay shivered and pulled her coat further around her. The November air was chilly, even if it wasn’t raining this morning. She’d driven all the way from Birmingham, where she was staying with her mother. They spent most of their time together slagging off men – Fay had never known her father – and even the very concept of maleness. It wasn’t as much fun as it sounded. Fay could hear the vinegar creeping into her voice as they spoke.

Arthur hadn’t phoned since she’d left. Not even once. It wasn’t as though she expected vast bouquets watered with tears, although they wouldn’t have gone amiss. She didn’t require marching bands although how come, when Bono fell out with his wife, he’d recorded a single about how she was the sweetest thing he’d ever known and got all her favourite stars like Boyzone to be in the video and it worked and they had a baby – why couldn’t she have been going out with an international rock star instead of a bloody useless bloody town planner?

With Arthur there’d been nothing, absolutely nothing at all. It was as if he’d just popped out to take the video back. It was as if she was the video. How could he? How could he just waltz on so very bloody quickly? This wasn’t Men are from Mars, Woman are from Venus. This was ‘Men are From Mars, Arthur is an evil demon from the pits of HELL’.

There aren’t many places to go in Coventry if you’re single and not fourteen years old. That’s how Fay found herself in Cork’s wine bar, nursing a solitary glass of wine and trying to look as if she was engrossed in her copy of Red magazine. Why, she was wondering, does the time from Jackie to Red go so fast? Next stop Woman’s Own. She was reflecting on the fact that the age ranges of magazines appeared to be in alphabetical order when someone, who’d obviously been nursing slightly more than a simple glass of wine, heaved himself onto the next stool along.

‘In’t you,’ – he screwed up one of his eyes – ‘don’tcha know Arthur Pendleton?’

Fay regarded the rumpled chunky mess in front of her with some alarm. ‘Um, yes, but …’

‘’E’s a bastard.’

Fay looked closer.

‘Is me!’ he expostulated.

‘Rosh, you know! Arthur’s bloody boss. Well, Arthur’s bloody ex bloody boss, bloody bastard, bloody …’

Oh, yes. Fantastic.

‘Bloody ex-bastard,’ said Fay, allowing herself a tight little grin.

‘I recognize you … from the Christmas party … always fancied you …’

What were you doing in the stationery cupboard with that poor Cathy woman then, thought Fay, but decided not to mention it.

‘Yes, of course I remember,’ she said, using the brisk tone one reserves for children and drunks.

‘Do you know … he bloody sacked me … bastard.’

‘Me too,’ said Fay with a half-smile. ‘I know how you feel.’

‘Really?’ He moved forward across the stool.

‘Not that much.’ She promptly removed his hand from the top of her thigh, where he’d landed to steady himself.

‘Can I buy you a drink?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Oh, go on.’

Fay arched her eyebrows, hoping he’d continue on over to the bar and forget he was ever talking to her. On the other hand, the article in Red was ‘Baby Massage With You, Your Baby and Your Ever-Loving Partner – First, pick your largest, sunniest reception room …’

‘You know,’ said Ross, trying to be conversational, ‘they’ve offered me the other job.’

‘What other job?’

‘His job. In Slough. Same deal. BUT! Only one city gets to be European City Culsha.’

She looked at him. ‘Slough’s a city?’

‘Yeah, it’s – it’s got an IKEA and six polyversities. Yeah.’

‘Oh. Right.’ But inside she was thinking that this might be rather interesting.

‘What do you do again?’ he said.

‘Personnel management.’

He pointed a beefy finger at her. ‘We NEED one of those.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Ross became momentarily distracted by a passing waitress. ‘Oh, she’s gorgeous, eh? I bet I could have her. I had this page three girl once. Well, I met this page three girl once …’

Fay sighed and went to finish her drink.

‘No, no, right, you’d be perfect for the job.’

‘What job?’

‘Coming to be in my team, thass wha job.’

‘What, you’d give me a job just because I hate Arthur Pendleton?’

‘Precishely.’

‘I’ll have a white wine spritzer, please.’

And that was how, a week later, she found herself on secondment from the recruitment firm (‘City of Culture’ her boss had twittered, ‘such an exciting opportunity for the firm … all those heads! … all that hunting!’) driving to start her first day’s work for Ross, a man whose tosspot qualities had been expounded on at such length and in such detail by Arthur, she was warming to him already.

There was a summons.

Arthur would be meeting the chairman for the first time, to have a discussion about the delicate financial situation.

He hadn’t been able to chat to Gwyneth before he’d left the night before. Weighing up the balance of the evidence, he reckoned she was going to grass him up. He sighed. Sixteen million quid, and he’d be back to where he started. Or worse: they might sack him. Or he’d go to prison, maybe. No, surely not prison. Still. Nowhere good.

Arthur looked at his forehead in the bathroom mirror. Was there more hair there or less? And where was the soap? By utter coincidence, ever since Fay had left he’d run out of soap, toilet roll, razorblades and clean towels.

That is a coincidence, he thought to himself. He stomped out of the bathroom to iron a shirt, and immediately forgot all about it when he realized he was going to have to be eating cooking chocolate for breakfast again. At least something good was happening.

There were a million other things to do. Or, of course, none, he reflected.

For the first time, realizing that he might lose this job, he became aware of how much he wanted to do it.

When he entered the main boardroom – distinguishable from the rest of the plastic grey building only by a singularly incongruous stag’s head attached to the wall – Gwyneth was already there in a pale grey trouser suit with a lilac coloured top. He didn’t know anything about women’s clothing, but he noticed there was a subtle difference in the suit she had on and the dumpy two-pieces Fay used to wear. He bet she smelled nice. Right before she grassed him up of course, the cow.

Gwyneth was sitting next to the chairman, so it looked like they were in it together already, Arthur thought glumly, taking a seat across the table. There was another, younger man, sitting at one end, obviously there to take minutes. Nobody said good morning.

The chairman, Sir Eglamore, seemed an amiable enough old buff. He studied his notes, then glared at them incredulously.

‘Is this in shillings or – drat it, what are those blasted things called?’

His softly spoken PA leaned in. ‘Euros, sir.’

‘That’s right. Blast their eyes. That Tony Blair, you know. Should be hanged.’ He sneezed. ‘Who’s in charge of this affair, anyway?’

‘Me,’ said Arthur.

‘Ah, young Arthur, am I right?’

Arthur nodded, already surprised. Well, he was one up if the top brass could bother to find out his name.

Eglamore pulled his half-moon spectacles further down his long nose. ‘You’ve got a long way to go, then.’

Arthur nodded vehemently. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Not the best of starts, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Hrumph.’ Eglamore turned his attention to Gwyneth. Arthur looked at her curiously.

‘And we thought this was the best man for the job, did we?’

‘Um, yes.’

‘On the basis of …?’

‘Um.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘Many reasons, sir.’

Sir Eglamore made a noise like an angry horse. ‘Photocopier incident, wasn’t it?’

‘Um, yes.’

‘So what do you think now, hey?’

Gwyneth looked at Arthur, then straight at Sir Eglamore.

There was a pause. Then she said, ‘He’s still the best man for the job, sir.’

Both Sir Eglamore and Arthur’s eyebrows shot up in the air.

‘What’s that, what?’

‘And he fits candidate requirements.’

‘And accidentally losing sixteen million pounds is a candidate requirement, is it?’

‘It seemed the right thing to do at the time,’ said Arthur and Gwyneth simultaneously. Then they looked at each other.

Sir Eglamore studied his papers for what seemed like a month. Then he looked at them from under his craggy eyebrows.

‘Well, I don’t approve … but I don’t know how we can back out now. I’ve told all my friends at the – well, yes, you don’t need to know about that.’ He plumped up the papers on his desk, slightly embarrassed. ‘Of course, it won’t be happening again, you understand? Or even anything like it. I don’t know what all this modern fuss is with photocopiers, anyway. Just get a couple of the boys to copy them out by hand. Keeps them quiet and out of mischief.’

Arthur could have wept with relief. ‘I’ll try and stay away from all heavy office equipment, sir.’

‘I’m going to put someone in place to watch out for you. In fact, my nephew is looking for a job. He can come and cast an eye over your figures, what?’

He looked rather dodgily at Gwyneth for a second, who effortlessly ignored him. ‘Yes, yes, I’ll send Rafe along to you. Heard he’s the best man for the job, what.’ He turned to his PA. ‘Right, right, next? And do hurry it along – it’s venison for lunch.’

‘Rafe? Who the hell is Rafe?’ said Arthur, once they’d got back to his office. ‘It sounds like Sir Eglamore’s helping out the local orphanage! Who asked him to interfere, anyway?’

Gwyneth shrugged. ‘No clue,’ she said. ‘Presumably one of Sir Bufton Tufton’s useless inbred Cyclops children.’

‘Yeah,’ said Arthur. ‘He’ll be a complete burden. And anyway …’ He knew this much from countless boring personnel conference evenings with Fay. ‘We can’t just take someone on. We have to advertise it and then interview all the one-legged people who apply or something.’

‘No, really? God, yeah. I forget this is a public service organization.’

‘That’s cos we hate serving the public and what we do is actually invisible.’

‘And what’s he going to do?’

Arthur scratched his head. ‘Well, now we’ve got our money back, I’m sure we’ll find something … yes?’

Marcus put his head round the crack in the door. ‘It’s here!’ he said excitedly.

‘What?’

‘What are we waiting for?’ said Gwyneth.

‘I don’t know – what’s up, Marcus? Have they just announced that they want all the accounting in base thirteen?’

‘No, no, look.’

He entered the room, and brought out from behind his back a long roll of paper. ‘The mighty scroll,’ he announced with some reverence and placed it in front of them on the table.

‘The what?’ said Arthur and Gwyneth, simultaneously.

Marcus looked around. ‘Um, I mean the official European application form.’ He looked slightly embarrassed. ‘It just came by fax. So I just thought it would be – you know, more fun – if I delivered it in the form of a mighty scroll.’

‘It’s okay.’ Arthur picked up the scroll and unrolled it flat. It covered the entire length of the table and dropped onto the floor. ‘We already know your job is boring.’

Gwyneth looked over his shoulder. ‘Good God, it’s immense.’

‘That’s because it’s in fifteen different languages.’

‘God, so it is. Look, it’s in Welsh! Who on earth thinks Swansea would be made European City of Culture?’

‘I’m from Wales,’ said Gwyneth.

‘Most beautiful countryside in the world, isn’t it?’ said Arthur hurriedly.

‘Wow, this goes to the European Parliament,’ said Marcus, reading the small print.

‘That’s the least exciting parliament ever, though,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s like the Saturday superstore of parliaments.’

‘This is going to take a lot of serious work, even just in English,’ said Gwyneth, looking worriedly at it.

‘I don’t think putting porn plugs in park benches is going to pass for the required “Three Major Cultural Events”, do you?’

‘Just the one,’ said Marcus.

‘No, none.’

Marcus looked at it again. ‘Ooh, look, we have to support and develop creative work, which is an essential element in any cultural policy. Like, Sven’s expenses.’

‘Is that someone taking our name in vain?’ asked Sven, walking in eating a hot dog with Sandwiches at his heels.

‘Can’t you knock?’ said Arthur, still sitting slumped in his chair.

‘Cool down, el power-crazed Nazio.’

Sandwiches, meanwhile, had scrambled in ungainly fashion onto the meeting table and was clacking across it, looking for custard cream traces.

‘You should get that dog’s toenails trimmed,’ observed Gwyneth.

‘What? What?’ Arthur turned round to look at her. ‘Is that really your first reaction? Maybe you should have been a vet. Why didn’t you say, you should get that dog out of the office – or, you shouldn’t let your dog onto other people’s tables …’

‘Or, you shouldn’t let your dog eat the mighty scroll,’ said Marcus in horror, staring at where Sandwiches was happily tearing away at the edges. Drool advanced down the paper.

‘Nooo!’ Arthur lunged for it, causing Sandwiches to slide backwards across the polished wood and disappear, ears last, over the end, giving an anguished yelp.

Sven rushed to his aid and Sandwiches – wounded only in pride – hid his head in Sven’s meaty armpit. Rather him than me, Arthur found himself thinking.

‘Don’t shout at Sandwiches,’ said Sven.

‘I’m sorry, but I reserve the right to shout at anyone who eats the proposal guidelines,’ said Arthur.

‘It was only that we have to “exploit the historic heritage, urban architecture and … something about life in the city”,’ said Gwyneth, unravelling the slobbery bundle. ‘And by the way, how come I’ve only been here a fortnight and I’ve already become an expert in dog kablooie?’

Marcus and Sven started an argument about expenses as Gwyneth and Arthur bickered over who was going to pick up the scroll, and it took them a while to notice the shadow in the doorway.

The man standing there nearly filled the doorway. Tall and fine-boned, with a mop of long, curly blond hair, he looked, as the light fell upon him, like a pre-Raphaelite painting caught in a frame.

It was as if a spell had been cast over the room. As Gwyneth stared at him, Sven and Marcus fell quiet. Sandwiches dropped like a rock out of Sven’s arms and went over to explore.

‘Hey,’ said the man, smiling suddenly. It lit up his features and broke the mood immediately. He dropped a long arm to scratch the dog. ‘Is this Festival City?’

‘That depends,’ said Gwyneth. ‘Who are you?’

He looked around the room. ‘You know, you’re all so lucky.’

‘We’re what?’

‘I mean,’ he gestured to the scroll, ‘you’ve got this blank canvas, right? And this town … Man, anything you do to this town is going to make it better, isn’t it? You could put up a picture of this dog taking a leak and it would be more attractive than ninety-five per cent of the town centre.’

‘I like you,’ said Sven, coming forward.

‘But you could make it – God, absolutely fantastic! And that’s your job description, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got so much potential. So much fun! Fairs and parties, and celebrations and flowers and …’ He stopped and collected himself for a moment. ‘Sorry. I’m getting carried away.’

‘No, go on,’ said Gwyneth, finding herself doing something uncharacteristic. Smiling.

‘Well, you can basically plan for anything – one town had a new tram network. One place made an entire square blue – the stones, the walls, everything. You take the money you have and find out what you can do, then Brussels puts up some more money, then lots of people come and bring money into the town and it all works brilliantly …’

Arthur turned round slowly from the window. ‘Sorry, but – who are you?’

‘Oh, sorry, hi – I’m Rafe.’

Arthur couldn’t sleep that night. Something felt wrong. Something wrong in the world … Of course all insomnia is melodramatic, he thought, staring at the flashing LED of his alarm clock. Three thirty-two a.m. Insomnia makes you feel you are the only person awake in the entire world. Of course, he could have got up and phoned his half-brother Kay, who lived in Australia and would be more than happy to hear from him in the middle of the afternoon … but no. He felt pinned to the bed, and even thinking nice thoughts about Gwyneth wouldn’t help him drift off.

Finally, in a fit of exasperation, he threw the covers off, got up and stared out of the window. All the windows in the executive estate were dark, every single one. Somebody must be up, he thought. Somebody, anybody, doing something. No babies? No parties? Yet there was nothing but the sodium lights of the tall street-lamps, and the distant hum of the motorway. Nobody moved. Nobody stirred. Arthur looked up to the stars, and imagined the world this quiet a thousand years ago, with everyone asleep when it got dark and up with the sun.

He shivered in the early morning cold, but didn’t go back to bed – now he was up, he actually felt rather peaceful. He liked the idea of the world quiet; full of possibilities and opportunities. Everyone asleep, optimistic about tomorrow – or at least, optimistic enough to sleep. A thought struck him. This would be a good time to see the place, see the absolute raw material he was dealing with – what the streets looked like empty. If this was going to be his town he should go out, take a look around it, examine it from the beginning with no hordes of teenagers or gangs of lads getting in the way, and no cars to block the view across the road. The more he thought about it, the more he felt it was a good idea. Even if, he realized, somewhere not too far away, it sounded like something was howling.

Ten miles away in her mother’s house, Fay had felt pulled awake at the same time as Arthur. Her first day at work hadn’t gone so bad … well, Ross hadn’t groped her. As such. But this was all going to be worth it for the look on Arthur’s face when she and Ross won the bid and left him crying on the street. Yeah. Her face took on a grim satisfaction and she turned over again on the single bed and fell asleep.

The darkness was hinting at dawn. Arthur looked at his own reflection in the window. God, yeah. That really was something howling. It did it again. Arthur reminded himself that wolves no longer roamed the countryside.

Sounded bloody weird, though.

‘We’re all going out at what time in the morning?’ said Gwyneth.

‘No sodding way,’ said Sven.

‘Listen to me,’ said Arthur, then realized he was begging, and that he was trying to remember about this whole respect issue, and took a breath.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘This came to me last night. It’s a great idea. We’re going to go out into the city when there’s nobody else there, and take a good long look at it. See what we’ve got to work with. It’s the only time of day we can do it – after the drunks and before the milkman. Plus, it’ll be fun. Maybe. No, yes it will. It’ll be like an expedition.’

‘Fine by me,’ said Cathy.

‘Great, that’s great!’ said Arthur. ‘Well done.’

‘I usually get up at that time to start the boys’ breakfast. And do the ironing, you know.’

‘I can’t, anyway,’ said Sven. ‘It would interfere with Sandwiches’ digestion.’

‘Yeah – might make it work,’ retorted Arthur.

‘Couldn’t you come without your dog?’ said Gwyneth.

‘No. He sleeps right across me.’

As if to demonstrate, Sandwiches crawled up and lay in the most ungainly fashion across Sven’s lap, a forlorn stubby pair of legs and a single ear hanging down either side.

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Gwyneth, committed vet.

‘I think it would be nice to have something to cuddle at night,’ said Cathy. Then everyone – including her – remembered she was actually married and already shared a bed with her husband and she blushed.

‘Yes, well,’ said Arthur briskly, ‘we’re going to take a look at a blank canvas; imagine what we could do if we set our minds to it. Too late for the drunks and too early for the milkman,’ he repeated. ‘Do milkmen still exist?’

‘You’re thinking of the bogeyman,’ said Gwyneth practically. ‘Milk, yes, bogeys, no.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Sven, with one finger up his nose.

Just then Rafe walked in, the only fresh-looking person in the room. Gwyneth had invited him along for the day to ‘see how the department works’ and he, amazingly, still seemed quite enthusiastic in the moments he could join them between hurrying to the toilet to cope with Cathy’s near-endless coffee provision.

Cathy looked at Rafe with that strange mixture of lust and motherly devotion only women teetering on the brink of menopause can conjure up for fresh-faced young men. ‘Hello, Rafe. More coffee?’

‘No, I’m fine thanks, Mrs P. What’s up?’

‘He’s trying to make us go out in the cold and dark.’

‘Why?’

Sven explained, and Arthur hovered in a corner feeling stupid. He’d planned to get them all whipped up with his enthusiastic oratory. Sven was making it sound as if he was transporting them all to prison ships. Rafe listened closely, nodding his head. The whole room was watching them. Finally, he straightened up.

‘Well – that’s a brilliant idea!’ he said. There was something about his open handsome face that made it look permanently smiling, and it was infectious.

Sven wrinkled up his nose in confusion. ‘Is it?’

‘Yes, don’t you see? Arthur, you’re absolutely right – we can get an idea of how the whole place could be. It will be mystical, magical – the city will be dead, but we – we can bring it alive, through knowing what people miss every day, through the power of our free imaginations – don’t you see?’

Arthur was half pleased, half slightly grumpy. ‘Well, yes – that’s exactly what I was …’

‘Ooh, and I can make soup,’ said Cathy.

‘Not potato soup,’ said Sven. ‘That’s rank.’

‘How rank can a potato be?’ asked Marcus. ‘It’s a potato. That’s like calling bread offensive.’

Arthur stood at the back of the room, quite amazed. Gwyneth looked over to him.

‘They’re arguing about the soup,’ said Arthur quietly to Gwyneth. ‘I think Rafe’s won on points.’

‘Well, it was your idea,’ said Gwyneth. ‘But, incidentally, he didn’t convince me. I don’t want to clatter about on my own in the pitch dark to meet you lot.’

‘Oh, please come,’ said Arthur, realizing suddenly that he was gazing at her.

Marcus, Sven and Cathy had gathered round Rafe, who was pointing things out on a map.

‘I mean,’ he was saying, ‘have you ever looked at the top of the high street? I mean, really looked at it?’

‘I’m usually too busy trying to avoid the syringes,’ said Gwyneth.

‘I’ll pick you up if you like,’ said Arthur.

Gwyneth glanced sideways to avoid his eyes. ‘Um … yeah. Okay.’

‘I mean, just, you know, in my car. You know, just to take you to this work thing!’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’ And she sounded as anxious to correct the misunderstanding as he was.

It was freezing. Properly, unbelievably freezing. After his broken sleep the night before, Arthur found tearing himself from his bed before four a.m. was a near impossibility, managed only by the warming thought of Gwyneth in bed – possibly naked – right now. Groaning, he stumbled into the kitchen, boiled some hot water and fumbled around for something to put into it. Let’s see – Marmite, toadstools (growing, sadly, rather than handwrapped) or an old bottle of Grand Marnier. His stomach rumbled warningly and he decided instead just to brush his teeth fifteen times.

Gwyneth’s house was actually rather charming – set back from the road, it formed the top two floors of one of Coventry’s not terribly widespread Edwardian villas. Arthur was just debating how much he cared about waking up the whole street by sounding the horn, as opposed to stepping out of the car and losing all feeling in his extremities, when the front door opened and a slight figure slipped out.

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