Roy led him to the lift. Nathan stared at his reflection as they whispered up two floors. Then Roy led him past what he described as the glass boardroom then through a set of double doors into the office building's working interior.
The floor was open-plan, lined with small, glass-fronted offices in which imprisoned executives and managers spoke into telephones or listened to telephones or hunched over laptop computers.
'This is sales and marketing,' said Roy. 'Welcome home. You'll soon get to know it.'
He wasn't wrong. When he wasn't on the road to Swindon or Edinburgh or Birmingham or Cardiff, the modern sales executive spent a great deal of time on the telephone and the computer.
The modern sales executive also spent most of his time engaged in pursuits which didn't involve selling anything to anybody: Nathan found himself attending weekly marketing meetings, and weekly pre-marketing meetings, and weekly post-marketing meetings which, with grim and affected professionalism, were called 'postmortems'.
In
addition, there were quarterly, half-yearly and annual sales performance review meetings. There were monthly sales projections meetings. There were bi-monthly regional and national sales meetings.
There were two sales conferences. There were buyers to entertain. There were lunches and dinners and drinks without number. There was karaoke in Sheffield and go-karting in Swindon.
The sales department was structured in a way that Nathan didn't completely understand. There seemed to be four UK sales directors, three of whom were beaten and bitter men who reported to one, younger boss, whose job title was simply Director (UK
Sales).
In addition, sales shared an arcane crossover of responsibility with marketing, which meant each department was in a position to blame the other when budgets were overspent or financial targets hadn't been met, which was always. Thus, the relationship between sales and marketing was alternately cordial and hypothermic.
At first, Nathan enjoyed the inanity of it. He was paid an initially modest but increasingly handsome salary, plus theoretical bonuses, to sit round a table for hours, pretending to care about the late delivery of 5,000 New Line Easter cards to a godforsaken warehouse in East Anglia.
As the weeks bled into months, then years, Nathan would sometimes be struck by wonderment as he was cleaning his teeth in the morning - but by the time he was knotting his tie, the sense of affable farce would have deserted him and he'd be worrying that Norfolk (as the warehouse was simply and ominously known) would be unable to clear the late delivery of 55,000 New Line Eclipse cards that had arrived late from the printers.
Getting into his car, an Omega, he would be anxious that the proposed New Lines for Christmas-after-next would not correlate with what marketing had identified as the post-Millennial Mood; or that a leading chain of high- street stationers would not after all decide to retail the new, cartoon-Jesus Easter cards which had been enthusiastically endorsed, first by the board, then by every other department - and which would just as systematically be disowned if they failed.
He knew thinking about all this was a waste of time; but it was much, much better than thinking about anything else.
And then, during the Winter Sales Conference, 2001, he saw Elise's family on television. They were making an appeal for information that might lead to her return.
12
He'd spent a long, buttock-numbing day in an overheated hotel conference room, listening to inept presentations by senior management and non-executive members of the board.
Nathan was always frustrated by the Sales Conference; partly because he wasn't allowed to participate in the presentations, and partly because he was forced to share the complicit eye-rolls and watch glances of the stultified sales reps, who weren't listening to a word of it.
The day's session ended at 4.45 p.m. In the foyer, there were coffee and biscuits for the delegates, who would then enjoy an hour or two of free time before reconvening in the Boleyn Bar for the formal dinner.
Overheated and itchy with boredom -- except the senior management, each of whom glowed with the invigorating success of their talk on Seasonality: A Picture of Shift? Or Opportunity for Growth? -- the delegates filed into the lobby where little clumps began to form, like matter after the big bang.
The muttered conversation centred on how bored everyone was, how hot it was in there - and who was sitting with whom at that evening's Formal Conference Dinner.
Among the marketing department's regular triumphs was a fastidious seating plan for the formal dinner. This seating plan tacitly acknowledged the company's deep structural enmities; those who loathed each other were seated at different tables - as were those who were sleeping together, and those who were no longer sleeping together. Those who'd been passed over for promotion weren't seated next to the successful candidate. Despised graduate wunderkinder weren't seated by strawberry-nosed alcoholics still stewing over the loss of Christmas bonuses long past.
Ten days before every conference, this piece of work - known with unfeigned reverence as the Draft Seating Plan - would be submitted to the CEO and other members of the main board. The CEO and the main board would then ignore the draft seating plan until ninety minutes before the formal dinner, at which point they would reject it.
This caused the marketing department - six women and two handsome, diffident male graduate trainees wondering what the hell they were doing here - to hunker down, as in a military command centre, and descend into logistical, chain-smoking chaos.
The result of which was: nobody got to sit next to somebody they liked - nobody except the marketing department, who placed themselves, the art department and a select number of the brightest and funniest reps on two tables in the farthest and most private corner, where they would get drunk and tell jokes about the CEO and the board of directors until 3 a.m.
Like everyone else, Nathan hated the formal dinner - it never failed to achieve the opposite of what was intended; one could sense the nexus of resentment, neurosis and outright hatred, festering like bad wiring.
And worse, there was never any way to predict if this time he was in favour with the marketing department, and therefore chosen to sit with them.
So, as everyone in the foyer gathered in murmuring clusters, Nathan decided to avoid the stress of discussing it.
He stopped, patting himself down as if confused - perhaps looking for the expensive lighter that should be right there, in his pocket. With a scowl of consternation, he walked off, still patting his pockets as if expecting the lighter to weirdly materialize. Then he ducked to the right, and into a lift, and pressed UP.
Nathan liked hotel rooms. In them, he could pretend that he really was the person he'd made himself into. He liked the tautness of the bedding and the bright sterility of the bathroom; he liked the constant hum of air conditioning. He liked the unquestioned might of the Do Not Disturb sign. He liked turning it to read Please Make Up My Room when he left in the morning, straightening his t
Doing this, he fell into a doze with the remote control clasped in his hand. He woke with a jolt, glued to the bed by a line of spit that had dried to a fine, flaky crust on his chin.
He'd turned up the air conditioning too high: his legs were cold.
He drew into himself. It was dark outside. He had no idea what time - it was; he thumbed the volume on the remote control. The national six o'clock news was just beginning. So there was plenty of time to wake up properly, have a good shower and still be changed and ready for dinner.
He crawled under the covers and lay with his eyes closed, listening to the headlines, the usual catalogue of metropolitan calamity and international speculation. The thing in him that, long ago, had been moved and enraged and scared by the television news had long gone.
After the major headlines, he heard this: And, almost four years after her disappearance, the family of missing Elise Fox launch a new appeal for information. Nathan sat up.
In this unhaunted hotel room, the blue television light flicked and lashed at his face and naked body. At 6.15,
