Authors: Jonathan Coe
‘Bit of all right, this, isn’t it?’ said Roy, nudging Bill fiercely in the ribs as they studied the menus in their red leather wallets. They had adjourned, by now, to a Berni Inn on the Stratford Road.
‘Don’t wet yourself, Slater,’ said Bill, taking out his reading glasses. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch in this business, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘On this occasion,’ said Jack, ‘that’s exactly where you’re wrong. You’re all here as my guests, and you can order anything you like. The tab for this is being picked up by the British Leyland Motor Corporation, so expense is no object. Go for it, chaps. Let your imaginations run wild.’
Roy ordered fillet steak and chips, Colin ordered fillet steak and chips, Bill ordered fillet steak, chips and peas and Jack, who went to the South of France for his holidays, ordered fillet steak with chips, peas and mushrooms on the side, a touch of sophistication that was not lost on the others. As they waited for the food to arrive, Jack tried to instigate a discussion about the marital prospects of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, but it failed to catch fire. Roy seemed to have no strong views on the subject, Bill wasn’t interested (‘Bread and circuses, Jack, bread and circuses’) and Colin’s attention was beginning to wander. He stared out at the night, beyond the car park, into the charcoal distance, the cars winking past on the Stratford Road, and it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Worrying about Ben, and his school nickname? Missing Sheila, and the hiss of the coal-effect fire? Or perhaps longing to go back to those days in the design room, before he had taken this job, this stupid job that had looked like a step up the ladder but turned out to be a nightmare of human complication.
‘You know, this won’t work, Jack,’ Bill was saying, his tone friendly but combative, his fifth pint of Brew now having a decidedly mellowing influence. ‘You can’t wipe out social injustice by taking the enemy out for steak and chips every so often.’
‘Oh, this is nothing, Bill. This is just the beginning. In a couple of years’ time, employee participation is going to be codified. It’s going to be government policy.’
‘Which government?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. I’m telling you, we’re going to be entering a whole new phase. Management and workers – elected representatives, that is – are going to sit around the table and take decisions
together.
Looking at the forward plans of the company
together.
Mutual interests. Common ground. That’s what we’re looking for. And it’s got to happen because at the moment confrontation is crippling the industry.’
‘This,’ said Slater, suddenly and irrelevantly, ‘is a bloody good steak.’ His meal had arrived first, and he hadn’t waited for the others before starting. ‘Give me something like this every day of the week and we might be talking, do you know what I’m saying?’
Bill ignored him. ‘The point is, Jack, that it’s not confrontation for the sake of it. That’s what you people never seem to understand. There are grievances, you see. Real, proper grievances.’
‘And they’ll be addressed.’
Bill paused for a while, sipping his beer, his eyes narrowed. A waitress arrived with their food and he was distracted, momentarily, by the sight of his steak and then, more extensively, by the sight of her calves and slender thighs encased in sheer nylon, the promise of an untried body insinuated by the fall of her white blouse. The old habit. Never shaken. He forced his gaze away from her and towards Jack, coating his chips with salt and tomato ketchup as if there were no tomorrow. Bill cut off a wedge of steak, chewed on it with undeniable relish (you didn’t get this at home) and said:
‘Of course, I can see where this is leading.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s the usual tactic, isn’t it? Divide and rule. Take a few shop stewards, invite them upstairs, sit them round the conference table, make them feel important. Let them in on a few secrets – nothing too sensitive, mind, just a few little titbits to make them think they’re in the know. And suddenly they’re feeling very full of themselves, suddenly they’re beginning to see things from the management’s point of view, and as for their members… Well, they’re beginning to wonder why these guys are spending half the day up in the boardroom, why they’re not around on the shop floor any more when there’s a problem to solve. Isn’t that the way it’ll be, Jack?’
Incredulous, Jack Forrest laid down his cutlery and said to Colin, ‘Do you hear that, though? Do you hear the kind of thing we’re up against? That typical trade-union paranoid mentality.’
‘Look, mate,’ said Roy to Bill, speaking indistinctly through a mouthful of chips, ‘if these two gentlemen want to treat us to a nice dinner every now and again, put their point of view across, what’s the problem, eh? You’ve got to take what you can in this life, mate. It’s every man for himself as far as I can see.’
‘Spoken like a true pillar of the Labour movement,’ said Bill.
‘What do you think, Colin?’
Colin glanced at his boss nervously. He had a hatred of confrontation, an undoubted drawback for someone saddled with a job in industrial relations.
‘It’s the strikes that are holding this company back,’ he said at last, talking into his plate, giving voice, reluctantly, to a firm conviction that nevertheless had to be dredged up from somewhere remote and unvisited, in his profoundest depths. ‘I don’t know if this is the way to stop them, but they’ve got to be stopped somehow. It doesn’t happen in Germany or Italy or Japan. Only here.’
Bill stopped eating, and held Colin in a thoughtful, penetrating gaze. Of all the things he could have said, he chose only: ‘I wonder what your son and my son talk about on the bus home.’
Jack saw the chance to inject a note of levity. ‘Girls and pop music, I expect,’ he said, and after that Bill gave up, turning his attention to the food and his sixth pint of Brew. A steak was a steak, after all.
Bill and Roy, their paths lying in the same direction, were obliged to share a minicab home. Roy pulled a face when he saw the turbaned driver sitting behind the wheel, and turned to his companion, ready to share some blokey, insulting witticism. But Bill wasn’t having any of it. He let Roy get into the back and then pointedly made for the passenger seat, where he chatted to the driver for most of the twenty-minute journey. He learned that he and his wife were second-generation immigrants, living in Small Heath; that they liked Birmingham because it was full of parks and you didn’t have to drive far to get out into the hills; that his eldest son was training to be a doctor, but the youngest was having trouble with bullies at school.
Overhearing this last fragment, and sensing a lull in the conversation, Roy leaned forward and said to Bill:
‘That thing you said to Trotter, about your kids talking on the bus home: what was that about?’
‘It was just a comment, that’s all,’ Bill answered.
‘Your kids go to the same school, then? Is that it?’
‘What’s it to you, Slater?’
‘Trotter’s boy goes to King William’s, doesn’t he? That fucking… toffs’ academy in Edgbaston.’
Bill snorted. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. We don’t pay anything for him to go there. It’s a direct-grant school. He’s a bright lad and he passed the exam. All I’m doing is giving him the best start in life.’
Roy didn’t reply to this, but sat back, satisfied, believing apparently that he had located some chink in his colleague’s armour. They said nothing more to each other that night, apart from the most cursory goodbyes.
When Bill got home he found that Irene had already gone to bed. He scowled at the heap of paperwork waiting for him on the dining-room table and decided that he would leave it for another day. It was almost midnight. But he took the cheque out of his jacket pocket one more time and examined it again by the light of his reading lamp.
It continued to puzzle him. A cheque for #145, drawn on the Charity Committee account, made out to a name he didn’t even recognize. Signed not by Harry, the chairman, or by Miriam, the highly fanciable secretary (and was it his imagination, by the way, or had she been staring at him through most of the meeting the other night?) but by himself. And yet he could remember nothing about it. What was more, the bank had returned this cheque because the amount had only been written out in words, not figures: again, a mistake he was very unlikely to make. Unless he was cracking up. Unless the pressure was getting to him.
He filed the cheque away in his bureau and poured himself one more beer before going to bed.
*
Jack Forrest and Colin had said goodnight in the restaurant car park. Jack seemed ambivalent about the evening, not sure that it had been worthwhile. ‘Was that a success, d’you reckon?’ His breath was cloudy in the winter air. There would be frost before morning.
‘I think so,’ said Colin, who always wanted everything to be for the best. ‘I think it was, well…’
‘Constructive?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘Good. Yes, I think you’re right. I think it was constructive.’ He rubbed his hands, clicked back the knuckles of his long fingers. ‘There’s a nip in the air tonight, though, isn’t there? Hope the wife’s remembered to put the blanket on.’
They shook hands and parted. Their cars were on opposite sides of the car park. Colin tutted, then allowed himself a few mild swear words as he wrestled with the lock of his brown Austin 1800, struggling to free the obstinate catch he had personally designed, a few years ago, with such confidence.
3
On Wednesday afternoons they had double English, taken by a Scotsman called Mr Fletcher who slurred his words and whose accent was hard enough to understand in the first place and who they all suspected of being an alcoholic. Most of them were frightened of Mr Fletcher, because he shouted whenever he lost his temper and lost his temper every lesson, sometimes twice or even three or four times. The only person who never seemed to be frightened of him was Harding. But then everybody – especially Benjamin – had been known to wonder exactly what it would take to frighten Harding.
Double periods were different. When the bell went after forty minutes you just had to sit there, as if nothing was happening. More often than not, the master would actually make a point of talking through it, as if to emphasize that this was nothing special, only a halfway point, but it was hard to hold the boys’ attention for those few minutes, with the corridors outside roaring beneath the impact of hundreds of youthful feet, as the rest of the school thundered from classroom to classroom. Slowly the rumble of footsteps, the banging of doors would fade away, silence would settle again, and you had no further excuses for not listening to the queasy fits and starts, the lurching monotone of Mr Fletcher’s voice.
‘That was a masterpiece, Spinks, a veritable masterpiece,’ he said, as three red-faced boys returned to their desks. Sarcasm, unleavened by humour or playfulness of tone, was a fixed habit of mind for Fletcher. ‘When Hollywood comes to make the inevitable film of
Catcher in the Rye,
you will undoubtedly be called upon to play Holden Caulfield. You’ve got him perfectly, right down to the Brummie accent. Peter Fonda won’t get a look-in. Right –’ he raised his voice to quell an upsurge of laughter which never materialized ‘– who’s next? Trotter, Harding, Anderton, Chase. Sounds like a bloody legal conglomerate. Solicitors and commissioners for oaths. What have you got for us?’
The three of them stood up (Harding had asked to be excused, a few minutes ago, and was expected back any moment) and Philip Chase, as unofficial spokesman, announced: ‘We’re doing the trial scene from
To Kill a Mockingbird,
sir. Dramatized by Trotter and I.’
‘Trotter and
me,
Chase. Trotter and me.’
‘Yes, sir. I play Atticus Finch, the defendant.’
‘The defence
lawyer,
not the defendant.’
‘Yes. Sorry, sir. Anderton is playing Mr Gilmer, the, er… the prosecuting lawyer. Trotter is going to play Judge Taylor, and Harding –’
At which point the door was flung open and Harding re-entered the classroom, to howls of laughter and delight.
‘– Harding plays Tom Robinson, sir.’
This explanation was already superfluous, for Harding’s make-up told its own story. His face was more or less unrecognizable beneath a black coating of ink. He must have hidden the bottle in his pocket when he went to the toilet. The effect was astonishing, not least because of the rings of translucent whiteness that circled his eyes, and because he had also, for some reason or other, failed to apply any ink at all to his nose, so that it now stood out preposterously like a little white punctuation mark. His classmates went berserk. The room ricocheted with trebly laughter, like an aviary at feeding time, until this gave way, after nearly half a deafening minute, to what sounded like a wall of machine-gun fire as twenty-two boys pounded the lids of their desks up and down in a frenzy of gobsmacked approbation. Fletcher, unsmiling, waited for the uproar to subside, his patience only running out when Harding lost his cool and began to surf the wave of his audience’s enthusiasm, parading back and forth in front of the blackboard with flapping hands and extended fingers in an impersonation which owed less to Al Jolson than to weekly viewings of
The Black and White Minstrel Show.
At which point the master stood up and thumped his desk imperiously.
‘Quiet!’
Afterwards, in conference at the bus stop, Chase, Trotter and Anderton agreed that this had probably been one of their friend’s sillier ideas, and they should never have let him attempt it. The joke had backfired on all of them, and they were now saddled with the task of writing six sides each on the subject of ‘racial stereotyping’, to be deposited in Fletcher’s pigeonhole by nine o’clock the next morning: a particular humiliation for Benjamin, who was famous for never incurring punishments of any kind. As for Harding himself, he had been put, inevitably, in Saturday-morning detention. They could see him now, waiting at the bus stop on the other side of the road (Harding lived to the north of Birmingham, in Sutton Coldfield), surrounded by fans and still bearing the battle scars of his adventure, for his face had been thoroughly scrubbed but retained a spectral residue of ocean blue. At least half of his audience was female, Benjamin noticed. King William’s School for Girls stood on the same site as its male counterpart, and while there was very little official contact between the schools – until you got to the sixth form, anyway – a good deal of nervy, spellbound fraternization would take place on the buses home, and Harding already had no shortage of female admirers. He looked gleefully unbowed, basking in the heat of his growing notoriety.