only thing I wanted from her. I felt my temper welling up.
“Do you realize the power I have over you?” I asked her.
“You have no power over me, young man.”
She didn’t understand me. She thought I was just a scruffy hippy who had come to make a mess in her old boss’s office. She couldn’t know that I have a terrible character weakness, a temper that comes from nowhere and stuns even me with its ferocity and total unreasonableness.
She shouldn’t have spoken to me like that, but she wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t leave when I asked her to. I stood in my office and I asked the old bitch to leave. I asked her coolly and nicely and politely, but she continued to berate me.
I watched her mouth move. It became unreal. I had the 22 under my arm, and my feelings were not like the real world, they were hot and pleasurable and electrically intense.
It was rage.
She had just repeated herself. She had just said something about respect when I drew the pistol and shot her in the foot.
She stopped talking. I watched the red mark on her stockinged foot and thought how amazingly accurate I had been.
She sat on the floor with surprise and a slight grunt.
Barto came running through the door and I stood there with the gun in my hand feeling stupid.
Later the incident made me think about myself and what I wanted from life.
7.
The provincial city nearest the plant was a most unappealing place, catering to the tastes of farmers and factory hands. We devised, therefore, quarters of our own at the plant itself and managed to create a very pleasant island within the administration block.
Here a quite unique little society began to evolve, hidden from a hostile environment by dull red-brick walls. Here we devoted ourselves to the pursuit of good talk, fanciful ideas and the appreciation of good music.
We introduced fine old Baluchi rugs, rich in colour, others from Shiraz, Luristan, old Kilims, mellow and pleasant, glowing like jewels. Here we had huge couches and leather armchairs, soft and old and vibrating with the dying snores of retired soldiers, the suppleness of ancient leathers a delight to the senses. We had low, slow, yellow lights, as gentle as moonlight, and stereo equipment, its fidelity best evoked by considering the sound of Tibetan temple bells. The food, at first, was largely indifferent but the drugs and wine were always plentiful, of extraordinary variety and excellent quality.
In these conditions we marvelled at ourselves, that we, the sons of process workers and hotel-keepers, should live like this. We were still young enough to be so entranced by our success and Barto, whose father sold stolen goods in a series of hotels, was eager that a photograph be taken.
Barto seemed the most innocent of men. He approached life languidly, rarely rising before ten and never retiring before three. Ideas came from him in vast numbers and hardly ever appeared to be anything but wisps of smoke.
Lying on the great Baluchi saddle-bag, graceful as a cat in repose, he would begin by saying, “What if…” It was normally Bart who said “What if…” and normally me who said “yes” or “no”. His mind was relentless in its logic, yet fanciful in style, so the most circuitous and fanciful plans would always, on examination, be found to have cold hard bones within their diaphanous folds.
We were all-powerful. We only had to dream and the dream could be made real. We planned the most unlikely strategies and carried them out, whole plots as involved and chancy as movie scenarios. It was our most remarkable talent. For instance, we evolved a plan for keeping a defecting product manager faithful by getting him a three-bag smack habit and then supplying it.
Our character judgement was perfect. We were delighted by our astuteness.
The product manager stayed but unfortunately killed himself a few months later, so not everything worked out as perfectly as we would have hoped.
We saw ourselves anew, mirrored in the eyes of each new arrival and we preened ourselves before their gaze.
Thelma was the first to arrive. She came to be with Bart and was astounded, firstly by the ugliness of the plant, secondly by the beauty of our private world, and thirdly by the change she claimed had occurred in Bart. She found him obsessed with the business enterprise and unbearably arrogant about his part in it. This she blamed me for. She sat in a corner whispering with Bart and I fretted lest she persuade him to go away with her. She was slender and elegant and dark as a gypsy. She had little needle tracks on her arms, so later on I was able to do a deal with her whereby she agreed to go away for a while.
Ian arrived to take over the sales force and we delighted in his company. He thought our methods of enthusing the salesmen historically necessary but not the most productive in the long term. He took them fifteen miles into town and got drunk with them for two days. He had two fist fights and, somewhere along the line, lost the representative for southern country districts, a point he continued to remain vague about.
He was the perfect chameleon and won them over by becoming vulgar and loud-mouthed. He affected big cufflinks and changed his shirt twice a day. He had his hair cut perfectly and he looked handsome and macho with his smiling dark eyes.
The sales force loved him, having the mistaken idea that he was normal. Naturally he didn’t discuss his enthusiastic appetite for a substance called ACP, a veterinary tranquillizer normally administered to nervous horses which he took, rather ostentatiously, from a teaspoon marked “Souvenir of Anglesea”.
It was Ian who persuaded me to fly in Sergei from Hong Kong. With his arrival, a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders and I had more time to relax and enjoy the music and talk. Sergei was unknown to me and I found him, in some respects, alarming. It was as if he found nothing remarkable in our situation. He made no comment on the decor of our private quarters, our penchant for drugs, or the brilliance of our strategies. It was as if we stood before a mirror which reflected everything but ourselves. He made me nervous. I didn’t know how I stood with him.
Yet he was the most ordinary of men: short, slim, and dark, moving with a preciseness which I found comforting in such a skilled accountant. He was eccentric in his dress, choosing neatly pressed grey flannel trousers, very expensive knitted shirts, and slip-on shoes of the softest leather. Only the small silver earring on his left earlobe gave an indication that he was not totally straight.
Sergei talked little but went quietly about the business of wrestling with our cash flow. In the first week he completely reprogrammed our computer to give us a simpler and faster idea of our situation. Each week’s figures would be available on the Monday of the next week, which made life easier for all of us.
After three weeks I gave over the financial function almost completely to his care and tried to spend some time evolving a sensible long term strategy suited to the economic climate we were now likely to live in for some time. It is a curious fact that large companies are very slow to react to changes in the market place.
Whilst the unemployed continued to receive government assistance there would be a multimillion dollar business in satisfying their needs. Companies which should have had the sense to see this continued to ignore it. Obviously they viewed the present circumstances as some temporary aberration and were planning their long term strategies in the belief that we would shortly be returning to normal market conditions.
My view was that we were experiencing “normal” market conditions.
I instructed our new product development team to investigate the possibility of producing a range of very simple frozen meals which would be extremely filling, could be eaten cold when cooking facilities were not available, and would be lower in cost than anything comparable. I had a series of pie-like dishes in mind but I left the brief open. It seemed like a golden opportunity.
Whilst I was engaged in this, word came from Ian that they had had a highly successful sell-in of our existing lines of frozen meals. He had given the trade substantial discounts and we were operating on very low profit margins, hoping to achieve a very high volume turnover, and more importantly get our relationship with the trade back to a healthier state.
