him on a fundamental level. The original idea and impetus for the party had been Olivia’s, several weeks ago, and dates had been bandied about. But since Olivia and he had finally split he’d re-resolved, at Albert’s instigation, to ask everyone else he knew round to his house to get drunk, and possibly, though improbably, get laid. That plan had shrunk somewhat. Danny had then e-mailed about ten friends a week ago telling them that he might be having some people round next Friday and maybe they’d call by. If they were free. Now he had to reconfirm. He opened a new e-mail on the screen, clicked on the appropriate recipients: Dinger, Tippy, Thunderclap Jenkins, The Elephant King of Sodom, Fisbboy, Tuzza, Rollson, Renault Minivan, Little Turk, and Simon. Most of these were colleagues, exercising the small freedoms of setting e-mail nicknames. Those were the same recipients who’d received the initial e-mail. Danny then went through the rest of his address book and clicked on random names: five university friends he hadn’t seen for months, three law school mates he saw solely to take drugs with, his friend James who’d dropped out of law school and now lived in Guildford, selling rubbish compactors (or compactors of rubbish, as James would correct him), and Clyde, his oddest cousin, who worked as an environmental health inspector in Hounslow.
He wrote:
Party. No exclamation marks. It’s my birthday on Wednesday. I’ll be receiving guests from 9ish tomorrow night. If you have nothing better to do, please call in. Bring your own whatever.
After opening another Internet window and typing in the address roadmap.co.uk, he brought up Sofia Road, copied the link and pasted it into the e-mail.
Click here for the map: www.roadmap.co.uk/mxccsofia/n16. It’s No.23. The blue door. Get off at Dalston Kingsland Overland on the Silverlink and turn left. Or get the no.73, 112, 43 buses. Many thanks, kind regards, Admiral Sojourner Watkins
He always signed off with an assumed name. It wasn’t meant to be funny, at least not any more. It was a way of articulating the other lives he could have tried and which were slowly closing up elsewhere. He clicked on Send. Danny thought how if someone transcribed the twenty-five years or so of his speech they would be hard pressed to justify ever using an exclamation mark. When he answered the phone, even at work, people invariably asked him whether they’d woken him up. He never understood why everyone else was so excited by life. He was either bemused or enraged at their effortless joy. Three Out of Office messages pipped into his inbox.
He called Rollson to tell him how lovely Ellen was in person. Rollson groaned and pretended to choke on his pain au chocolat in a jealous fury. Albert was working on a settlement agreement, something to do with fourwheel drive jeeps which hadn’t yet been made, and which he’d worked on ‘til three the night before. He was on course for another late one, waiting for New York to wake up and send him comments on his last draft. He’d been on a conference call all morning and now wanted to chat. Danny agreed to nip round for five minutes.
Rollson’s room was like a show office for the ethical employer, or, more precisely, the employer who is worried about being sued for RSI. He had the desk raised on four wooden blocks for some odd reason, odd given that he was five foot five, and therefore also had a specially high chair, one which Danny called the Wimbledon Judge Seat. The chair raised and lowered itself by levers and Rollson would, as a distraction, frequently drop himself a foot or so in the middle of an argument if he felt like he was losing. The chair also had a special lumbar support fitted, and his keyboard was the new-fangled angled kind allowing maximal access for the wrists to rest on their own special pad. His VDU had a transparent screen fitted on it to reduce glare and even Rollson’s mouse was economically designed and different to every other lawyer’s. It had three buttons and was about twice the normal size: more canine than rodent. His mouse pad contained a further wrist rest, one which Rollson, in his over-enthusiasm at receiving another toy from the company’s full-time physiotherapist, had upsettingly described as feeling like a thirteen-year-old girl’s breast. It should be clarified that overall Albert Rollson wasn’t a particularly sick or delicate or querulous man. He was just very very bored, and had found that the best way to counter the ennui was to exercise all of the poindess opportunities offered by an enormous company. He had them change the pictures on his walls every six weeks. He attended training seminars on using a Dictaphone. He attended a two-day course in Northampton on speed-reading at which the tutor had said ‘the main trick to it is just to read faster’ and they had all lowered their heads and obediently tried. He visited the in-house doctor at least once a month and though the doctor had prescribed him a variety of beta-blockers and anti-depressants, he hadn’t yet suggested that maybe Albert should change his job.
Danny stood in the doorway but didn’t go in. Something was different.
‘Mate, why is your room reminding me of the Blue Grotto?’
‘I know, the fluorescent light was making a buzzing noise so I rang down to Business Services and got them to send a man up to change it, but they’ve installed a blue one. It’s like sitting in a brothel.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. It is. Aside from the lack of hookers.’ Albert did a newsreader shuffle of the papers he was looking at and set them aside. He did look wrecked, and unusually for Rollson, his clothes were a little rumpled. His Windsor knotted red silk tie was still on but the top button of his white shirt was open. A stray hair curled out from the gap and his dark brown eyes were underlined for emphasis by thick black lines of sleeplessness.
‘You have to ask her to your party tomorrow night.’
‘Ellen?’
‘Yes, Ellen. You just rambled on about how amazing she is. You have to ask her.’
‘She’s working for me. It’d be weird.’
‘No, it wouldn’t. And she’s working with you, not for you. It would be weirder not to mention it. Just casually throw it into the conversation. Who else’ve you invited?’
‘You saw the e-mail. That lot plus Geordie.’
‘Who is this guy?’
‘I’ll tell you about it at lunch. He’s an old mate from school.’
You haven’t mentioned him before. Where’d he spring from?’
After Danny and Ellen had spoken on the conference call to John Freeman, the Corporate partner overseeing the Ulster Water bid, it became apparent that there would be no lunch. Freeman was a short and angry man. The anger was obvious. The shortness Danny inferred from his photo on the firm’s intranet. He was shiny-pated, overweight, and had tiny black perforations for eyes which were looking upwards to the camera. He looked like a malevolent medieval abbot. After Freeman’s secretary had patched the two of them into the call, Freeman launched into the conference without giving Danny time to introduce Ellen. There appeared to be several accountants and clients on the line, aside from the whole Corporate team, presumably down on the second floor, hunched in anticipation round Freeman’s speaker phone. As always, Danny found it difficult to focus at times like these. His ability to concentrate decreased in proportion to how important it was that he did. He could, for example, intimately describe someone he had sat opposite on the tube several days before but couldn’t tell, when asked directly, whether or not he’d sent a holding letter to the lawyers on the other side or indexed a file of documents. As the voices coming from the speaker phone on his desk discussed logistics Danny, sitting opposite Ellen, felt himself unwind, as if the speaker phone was a radio and he was lolling in the bath. She was really quite something, this girl. Absolutely remarkable. Danny found himself staring at her breasts and quickly shifted his eyes onto the pad she was scrawling on.
‘Will
