In Praise of Savagery. Warwick Cairns

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СКАЧАТЬ liability’ making them both personally liable for all debts on the account, whoever caused them.

      They’d keep the account ticking over, quietly and in credit, for a year or more, putting in requests for a new cheque-book every now and then, until they were good and ready, when, all of a sudden, there’d be twenty cheques issued in a single day, and more the next, and the next, and they’d be drawn out to off-licences and clothes shops and casinos, and the account would go tens, hundreds and thousands of pounds overdrawn in the space of a single week. You’d phone the account holder, send letters, but there would be no reply. And so you’d bounce the cheques, and brace yourself for the wave of angry phone calls from outraged creditors and even-more-outraged co-account holders.

      There was a correct response to these calls, which was, ‘I’m very sorry sir/madam, but I am not at liberty to discuss this person’s account. Or their whereabouts, I’m afraid’, to which I’d add sometimes that the address I really, really wasn’t allowed to tell them was number 11, Ferndene; or that the phone number that I was not, unfortunately, at liberty to divulge, might have been 673562, if I’d been allowed to say so, but since I wasn’t, they’d have to look elsewhere to find it out. That tended to stir things up a bit, I found. Particularly if the voice at the end of the line sounded like someone who intended to take the matter somewhat further to recover their money.

      ‘Golf,’ said the under-manager.

      ‘I’m sorry?’

      I think I must have drifted off somewhere, off into my thoughts. I had a tendency to do that. I have a tendency to do it still. I was, I think, sitting at the foreign exchange till at the time. It was a quiet afternoon, on a hot summer’s day, and there were no customers in that section, had been none for a while.

      ‘Golf,’ he said. ‘Do you play it?’

      ‘Er … no. Not exactly. It’s not something I’ve got round to doing yet.’

      ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, never mind. There are plenty of people who’ve managed to go quite a long way in banking without ever playing golf. Now, your suit …’

      ‘My suit?’

      ‘Ye-es. Your suit. What’s it made of?’

      ‘I’ll have to have a look.’

      The label said 75 per cent cotton, 25 per cent linen. I’d bought it for the weather, for the summer.

      ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Disco suit. Don’t wear it again.’

      In the backrooms there were fans on the desks, beige oscillating fans that swayed from side to side and caught the stray unweighted papers of the unsuspecting, lifting them up and sending them seesawing gently down to the worn brown carpet.

      In the restroom where we took our morning and afternoon tea-breaks there were no fans, but there we were allowed to remove our jackets and to roll up our sleeves.

      Brian, a middle-aged clerk with a close-cropped sandy beard, never rolled up his sleeves, no matter how hot or still the air in the restroom. He was a middle-ranking clerk, quite old for his position, and he had been at the same level for many years now, far longer than most. I was never quite sure whether it was for golf reasons or for the quality or fabric of his suitage or for some other cause that he had never progressed, but he had not done so, nor did it seem to bother him, particularly.

      One day we were sitting together in the restroom sipping vending-machine coffee from plastic cups when I asked him about his sleeves and why he never rolled them up.

      ‘Do you really want to know?’ he said.

      I said that I did; and with this he put down his cup and beckoned me to follow him outside, into the corridor. There, after checking in both directions, he undid both cuff-buttons; then, looking me in the eye, he pulled back first one sleeve and then the other.

      ‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

      His arms, both of them, right down to the wrist, were covered, with barely a patch of flesh to spare, in blue-green tattoos. Mostly they were of skulls and motorcycles, and skulls in Second World War-German-Army-style motorcycle helmets, and motorcyclists with fleshless skulls for heads. There were also the logos of the old British motorcycle manufacturers surmounted by skulls, or just in the general vicinity of skulls. And, on one arm, a naked lady wreathed in a large snake.

      ‘Gosh!’ I said, or words to that effect.

      ‘I’m a Hell’s Angel,’ he said.

      And thereafter he would tell me, when we were alone together, about his weekends with the Chapter, and about motorcycles and how to customise them to make them just so, and why, when a big petrol tank meant that you could ride for longer and make fewer stops, it was a good thing to replace it with a smaller one, from the point of view of just looking hardcore.

      All of which made sense to me then and seemed only right and natural.

      I was twenty-three years old, or thereabouts. I saw the world of work, then, as what people had to go through, to pay for what they wanted to do in their ‘real’ time, the time that mattered. And all the business reports on the television talking about the FT-100 Share Index and whatnot, and the copies of the Financial Times in the newsagents, and in the bookshops the shelves upon shelves of books with titles like Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple, The Ten Habits of Successful Business Leaders and The Corporate Warrior: Your Road Map to Success, I thought, then, that they were what people had to read because of their jobs, and what they had to put themselves through to earn their living. But that beyond these, I thought there were other things that meant more to them: I don’t know—golf, say, even, or motorcycles, or tennis or something. Now, I don’t know so much. Now, I’m not so sure. There are people, I have seen, who every day when lunchtime comes, stay at their desks. There are people who, every day when home-time comes, don’t go home, but instead stay on at work for hours. There are people who, though they have holiday allocation, don’t take it all, or even much more than a fraction of it; and who, when they do leave the office, take with them the concerns of their company, take them on as their own and carry their work around in their heads with them, and when they talk, they talk about work, or else they constantly check mobile electronic devices for messages to do with work. There are people who earn the most extraordinary sums of money working in offices, but who do not know what their own children like to eat. There are television programmes about work, too, game-shows in which the contestants vie to be the best shopkeeper or salesman or distributor or wholesaler, and for whom the prize, should they win, is a job in an office in a provincial retail park.

      I shared a taxi, years later, with a businesswoman I had been working with, a senior executive with a multinational company who had lived, for a year or two at a time, in more countries than she could remember, who regularly attended breakfast meetings before work and evening functions with business colleagues and contacts after work, and who said goodnight to her children, most nights, by telephone as the nanny tucked them in; and as we drove, by way of conversation, I asked about her husband and what he did.

      ‘He’s an entrepreneur,’ she said.

      And indeed he seemed to be a successful one, for between them they had an expensive house in a sought-after part of London and a second home elsewhere, and several expensive cars. They both had their clothes made for them by tailors, and had all of the things and did all of the things that successful people have and do.

      ‘And what are his hobbies?’ I asked.

      It СКАЧАТЬ