

Playing Truant

or

In the Bar of the Grand Hotel

or

To do it Today is Never too Late

By

John Eider

Copyright 2014 John Eider

Smashwords Edition

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PART ONE – GOING MISSING – WEDNESDAY

Chapter 1 – A Liquid Lunch

'You wouldn't credit it though, would you?' began Finn, sat amongst colleagues in the hotel bar.

'Credit what?' answered Sylvie, not really listening, concentrating instead on the barman who had just come on shift.

'That this course is costing them four-hundred pounds each to put us through.'

'Well, that includes our night's stay at the hotel too, remember,' reminded the third of their party, Jemima.

'But what's it really teaching us?' went on Finn.

'It doesn't matter what it's teaching you,' answered Jem. 'It's so that you can say that you've attended. Don't you want that on your CV?'

'I'm not sure I want people knowing I was ever even in this industry.'

Jemima shook her head playfully, having heard it all before from him.

The bar was the best part of the place, Sylvie and Finn had decided. It was situated in the basement, and so quite separate from the hotel above. It had become a hidey-hole, a refuge from the part-seminar, part-conference, part-training course going on around them. Along one side of the oblong room was the bar itself. Along the opposite side were leather-seated booths – it was in one of these booths that they now sat.

Along the wall above the booths were curtained mirrors to stand in for windows. At one end of the room was a dark and purposeful space that led off to the staff's access to the bar and another room they used. At the other end though, deepest beneath the building, was a raised area for games. It was accessed by steps and separated by waist high railings. Up there were a pool table and a table football machine.

Also up there, within an ornate marble porch, was the entrance to the staircase that took you up to the hotel foyer. Around this raised portion, which for the sports was brighter-lit, were framed glazed pictures of the city in the past, distraction for the person not taking their shot.

That lunchtime, Finn could see his party were not the only ones finding sanctuary in the hotel bar. He recognised at least five other delegates drinking in their lunch hour. (Although he felt the existence of an unspoken pact across the room that none would tell.)

Meanwhile, Sylvie had earlier nudged him in the ribs to point-without-pointing to a couple in a corner booth. The man had almost fallen off their sofa as much as fallen onto his companion, while she slithered accommodatingly beside him in a silky dress. The man was older, rounder. 'Maybe her boss,' thought Finn. Or perhaps they were just a couple who kept the fires burning with nights in hotels?

Finn knew that Sylvie sometimes talked herself up as being something of a seductress herself. He guessed she might have been admiring this other woman's technique. For all the obvious human interest though, Finn had other things on his mind. He hadn't even noticed the less-showy, but for all that really quite attractive, female delegate drinking sparkling water with her colleagues by the bar. Or that on occasion she had even been looking their way. For on that lunch-hour, Finn was a man distracted.

Sylvie hadn't missed the woman at the bar though. Just as she hadn't missed that woman's tall, besuited colleague. Or that the woman was really very pretty, and had no ring on her finger. Or that her male colleague was moving in that bit too close, even as the object of his attentions had only eyes for Finn. Sylvie could read their dynamic, and knew that if it went on it would be messy. She found it safer instead to focus on her barman, bursting into Finn and Jemima's conversation with,

'But most importantly, who wants another drink? I'll go up.'

'Good call,' answered Finn, holding up his glass.

'I don't think we have time though,' noted Jemima. Despite herself, she was always the sensible one. It was as though in her mind was a clock-face with a huge second-hand ever ticking towards her next appointment. 'We've already been here fifty minutes, and this afternoon's session's an important one... What?' she asked, noticing her friends' sudden grump.

'Oh, nothing,' replied Sylvie as she supped up and went to leave with the others. Although she silently hoped that the barman would still be on duty by the evening.

'Breath mints all around, is it?' greeted the fourth of their party, Jasper, at the door of the hotel's conference suite. It had occurred to Finn that of the five of their group, including their Team Leader Mitch, Jasper was perhaps the only one of them who really wanted to be there. Even Jemima, with her dutiful time-keeping and immaculately divided Hello Kitty folder, was there more through pragmatism than love of subject. And who could love their subject, stranded as they were at the sharpest end of the Financial Sector? Only someone like Jasper, 'The Pragmatist personified,' thought Finn.

But this was an important one, Finn remembered Jem saying. He looked at the sign on the display board beside the double doors:

'Foreclosure with Forbearance'

Christ on the Cross, how was he going to make it through those next three hours? He could already feel the warm glow of alcohol seeping through him, and knew the lulling voices on the podium would only assist in carrying him off to sleep. He looked to Sylvie, and was reassured by her identical look back at him in return – you needed a friend in a situation like this. And at least after 'Foreclosure with Forbearance' it would all be over...

Chapter 2 – The Journey Up

Finn could scarcely believe it had been only yesterday morning that he had gotten himself to the steps of their office at seven a.m., to meet the others and the driver of their minibus. An hour-and-a-half later along the motorway and there they were, left on the pavement with their overnight bags. They were in a different city, but surrounded by the impressive old buildings you found in any settlement of substance. Although the one in front of them really was impressive: The Grand Hotel, Sommerhill.

The conversation in the minibus on the way up had gone something like this,

Sylvie, bored at the scenery they were passing, was asking: 'So, is this place really so Grand, or is it just called it?'

Mitch, their Team leader, answered: 'No, it really is.'

Sylvie: 'Then why are they sending the likes of us there?'

Mitch: 'Because it has the best conference facilities.'

Sylvie: 'Okay, I get that the seminar is there. But why have us stay there too? Why not save money and book us into a Travelodge along the road?'

Mitch: 'Because everyone else had the same idea. The Grand was the only hotel with rooms left.'

Sylvie, who, the group were discovering on long journeys, had the patience of a five-year-old: 'But why go all the way to Sommerhill anyway?'

Mitch, with a distracted air: 'Because that's where the event is held.'

Sylvie: 'But I thought you said these seminars revolved?'

Mitch: 'They do, but not this conference and not our town, not this year.'

Sylvie: 'So where did you do your training?'

Mitch: 'At the Imperial, back home.'

Sylvie: 'How come?'

Mitch: 'Because that's where it was held when I was your age.'

Sylvie, throwing herself back into her seat: 'Just my luck! To be born of the wrong generation.'

Jemima, with irony: 'Cursed.'

Jasper, leafing through papers: 'Jinxed.'

Finn, watching farmland from the window: 'Singled out by fate.'

Geed up by her friend, Jemima offered: 'At least we have a night in Sommerhill.'

Sylvie though was inconsolable: 'And do what?'

Jemima: 'I don't know, see a few different places.'

Sylvie: 'But Sommerhill. Honestly, could they have a picked a worse place to dump us in?'

Finn entered the fray: 'Sommerhill's not that bad.'

Sylvie: 'And you'd know, would you?'

Finn: 'You've never been there.'

Sylvie: 'I don't need to.'

Finn: 'Look, lay off the place, will you. Everywhere's someone's home.'

He hadn't wanted to get caught up in the conversation, but hadn't been able to stop himself.

Sylvie came back at him, with renewed good spirits: 'I've always wondered about your accent, Finn. You're a Sommie!'

Finn: 'Someone has to be,' he added, instantly regretting his dismissive tone.

Sylvie: 'Honestly, how long have we known each other? And you've only told me now? Well, well, a man of mystery.'

Jasper, not quite following the mood, chipped in with: 'It doesn't change the fact. There's still nothing to do there.'

Jemima: 'Oh, everyone stop being so down on the place. I'm sure we'll find somewhere to have a nice meal.'

Mitch stepped in with: 'Finn's right. Don't worry Jem, there are plenty of good places.'

Sylvie: 'Well I won't be with you; I'll be off getting wrecked.'

Mitch: 'And that's precisely what I'm there to stop you from doing.'

Sylvie though was full of smiles: 'Oh, Boss, you know I'm only joking.'

Cue general laughter. All apart from Mitch, who only smiled wryly, knowing his wily charge all too well.

'Born of the wrong generation,' Sylvie had said while hamming it up on the minibus. How old was she exactly, wondered Finn? No age had ever featured on the birthday collections he'd seen go around the office. But then they didn't always, did they, for women? She was of a type he recognised from the clubs and bars he sometimes found himself in: who from their late teens were quite keen to prove themselves no longer a girl; who dressed quite stylishly, socialised quite visibly, and flirted slightly too overtly. Such a woman, he surmised, was ever eager to impress their full-bodied maturity upon the world, making the point that here was a real female, in her prime, fecund. Yet, without marriage coming to move her on a stage, such a woman could find herself occupying that station almost indefinitely.

Sylvie's actual age though? Though he would guess slightly older, Finn didn't think she'd own past twenty-eight. As for the others, he knew Jemima, for all her practicality, was the younger of the women. He guessed at a full-figured twenty-four. Next up was Jasper. He was quick to learn and quick to rise, but Finn knew him to already have a wasted decade in a first career behind him. Jasper was starting almost from scratch in their business, but wasn't under thirty.

Mitch, they all knew, had recently hit the big four-oh. The news had been greeted by his eighteen-year-old trainees as though to reach such an age almost defied medical science. 'Had they never met anyone that old?' thought Finn. He'd watched them decorate his desk as if for one not long for this planet. Still, such comparisons were not too far off the mark – surviving twenty years in their game could age a man, and leave him with the wisdom of Solomon. Finn had narrowly resisted adding 'Happy Birthday Methuselah' to the card when it came around.

As for Finn, he kept his own age deliberately vague, even from himself – he tried his best to forget it. However, he was the closest to their Team Leader by some margin. Yet Finn didn't know if it was unusual that he had never felt mature – even with his job, flat, and current account he sensed that he would always feel like a boy playing at grown-up. Sylvie saw this in him, he suspected. She didn't see him as a man, and so in some subconscious way considered him sexless. Hence her never focusing her amorous charms in his direction. At least that was Finn's theory.

'Come on then, sleepyhead. You're not going to nod off on me, are you?'

This was Mitch now joining them at the conference suite doors, and catching Finn in one of his not-uncommon 'drifting off' moments. Finn looked around suddenly to see his Team Leader smiling, displaying the infinite patience Finn most admired in him. This was the result of two decades working his way up through the supervisorial chain, faced each day with every aspect of human nature – breakdowns, pregnancies, redundancies. Life held few secrets from such a man.

'He can't help drifting off,' explained Sylvie. 'You're the creative type, aren't you, Finn.'

To this Finn gave her his own glare, she knowing so many of his confided thoughts in that direction. But he knew that she would never give away his secrets. He was though still replaying yesterday's minibus discussion in his head – for he liked going over conversations. He sometimes even saved them in his diary.

Chapter 3 – The Wrong Job

The day-and-a-half that Finn had spent in Sommerhill had felt more like a fortnight. That was perhaps not so surprising, for time could seem to stretch for him when filled with activity. More tellingly though, was that it was still only eight weeks since that stop-start, ladder-jumping, sideways/downwards/upwards-moving career of his had undergone its latest convulsion. That fact he found much harder to believe.

It had been a dirty trick, of that there was now no confusion. The background to it though was clear. For eight years, he – and for the latter part of that time Sylvie – had worked at a town centre office of a well-known international financial institution. To call it merely a bank or investment house or insurers, or any one of several other things, did it a disservice. Vast and far reaching were this fiscal creature's tentacles, intertwined with the daily life of its host nation – 'too big to fail' didn't begin to come into it.

It was a truism that 'getting your foot in the door' at such a company offered an employee vast opportunities for future movement within it. But it was also true – and lesser-realised – that it afforded the company as much scope for moving you. And that was how it had happened.

The start had been at that year's 'Focusing Event', held in the foyer of an art gallery a short coach journey from their office. After staff from every team had mingled, admired the sculptures, and been served glasses of wine, then presentations had been made from the glass-and-steel dais by various rare-seen personages of their organisation.

And it was there, among much talk of 'change' and 'innovation' and 'better ways of working', that were first mentioned what would become known as 'the cuts'. These moves were 'good housekeeping' and were 'prudent at a time of uncertainty', advised the various high-ups speaking that day. Anyway, they said with comforting voices, any staff losses this caused would likely be absorbed by voluntary redundancy. However, the announcement did serve to open the debate on the issue, and have the staff aware of changes occurring. This paved the way for what followed.

Voluntary redundancy was offered very quickly. Yet even before the staff who'd taken packages had said their farewells, other changes were confirmed. The most drastic in Sylvie and Finn's world was the announcement that the workforce of their floor was being reduced by ten-percent.

Their team back then were Household Claims. It was there that the pair had plugged away for getting on for a couple of years – if not happily, then certainly not unhappily. Their role was the filing and collating of photographic and other evidence for the transacting of those household claims. So the announcement of the ten-percent cut worried Finn. He had already lost a work mentor there, who'd chosen to take a redundancy package at only fifty-five. The further cuts would be a blow.

On a floor of roughly one hundred staff, loosely set in groups of ten, then ten to lose was a number carefully judged. Only one loss per team, so went the managerial thinking – who couldn't absorb such a number? Also, management had allowed Chinese-whispers to go around beforehand, of the cuts involving anything up to three or four members per team. Fear had been instilled in the workforce by then. So by the time the program was officially announced, the staff were only glad the figure turned out to be so low.

Canteen gossip proved that other floors had not escaped. All was panic and confusion. There were huddles around the lunchtime tables, and many whispered corridor conversations. Had Macbeth been in attendance just then, it would not have been a dagger that he saw before him, but an axe imagined hanging over all of their heads.

And then came yet another announcement. It was carefully timed to arrive just as Sylvie, Finn and those around them were wondering who the 'one in tens' might be. The new news was that vacancies had arisen in another branch of the company. Furthermore, as holders of 'endangered posts', Household Claims staff would be given first opportunity to apply. What's more, these jobs would see a rise in pay grade, and due to urgent need could be put in for without any of the usual process. In fact, little more was needed than to speak to your team leader for them to put your name forward.

An end to the uncertainty... The prospect of a wage hike, when household costs were rising over inflation... The chance to be a part of something new, when the old was falling down around their ears... Geed up by each other's enthusiasm, the two workmates applied. And although coming from the same team, both were rubber-stamped.

Interviews were the next day and all at once, held in a different building in the city centre. 'Something in Mortgages' had been the best that Finn could get out of anybody when asking of the new roles. 'Processing claims', 'dealing with customers', and other such generic job-prospectus terms. New candidates kept arriving, and after their interviews were held behind in the same room to fill out forms. Finn recognised a lot of them, nodding to some current colleagues. No one was too friendly though, wary of giving an inch to the enemy.

However, when Sylvie's and Finn's interviews came around, they were little more than chats, discussing shift patterns, holiday entitlements, probationary periods. Whatever criteria the selectors were judging the candidates against, by the end of the day it seemed apparent that all applicants had been selected. They were told that they would start the next week.

It was then that the company pulled the dirty trick.

Chapter 4 – The Realisation

'They've stuffed us, Finn,' said Sylvie at the canteen table midway through their third day.

'I know, Sylv.'

'There's no way back?'

'I shouldn't think they'd make it easy.'

By then the nature of their new roles had been made clear, and the work had already begun. They'd learnt a word on their first day: it was Foreclosure. It had been one word amid a blizzard of them coming their way, and easy to lose sight of in that early rush of information. Yet now it stood out in Finn's mind as if emboldened or italicised, each time he heard it said by an instructor or read it in their training notes. It was a word the company would have had to teach the staff at some point, though prudence seemed to have suggested that it should be once the new roles were filled and the holders had no way back.

On one of those first evenings back home from his new job, Finn had looked the word up in the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary. He had somehow ended up with the family edition as a kind of living heirloom. Chambers, in plain English, had the word thus:

'Foreclose – verb, to preclude: to prevent: to bar the right of redeeming.'

Fair enough, and brutal enough. But it was the noun form below this that better caught Finn's new professional understanding:

'Foreclosure – a foreclosing: the process by which a mortgagor [i.e. the homeowner], failing to repay the money lent on the security of an estate, is compelled to forfeit his right to redeem the estate (law).'

That seemed closer to the mark in terms of what his new work involved, though still hardly tapped the deep emotional sense in which he was coming to recognise it. Beneath these English definitions though were what he took to be the root words (for he found the abbreviations and italics in dictionaries baffling). Here the term revealed itself to have originated in the French word foreclore, meaning 'to exclude', itself formed of foris – 'outside', and claudere or clausum – 'to shut'.

And that was what his working life now entailed: the shutting of people outside.

Sat in the canteen that day then, Finn was feeling pretty maudlin, telling Sylvie,

'I was so desperate for change that I let myself get duped. And worse, I encouraged you.'

'We encouraged each other. I'm a big girl, Finn. I got myself into this. I'm just not sure now how to get myself out.'

But her friend was becoming despondent,

'What really hurts,' he continued, 'is that I honestly believed they were helping us, finding us other jobs when ours were threatened. Instead they...'

'...rushed us into roles that no one in their right mind would apply for?' Sylvie put her hand on Finn's, for they were sat close together. 'You're such a sweetheart, aren't you? Never been tough enough for the world.' She gave him the best smile she could muster, and they sat there awhile, before returning to their desks.

Chapter 5 – Team F

The team structure of the floor on which they found themselves followed a naming convention. It was such an open secret that when Sylvie first heard others talk of it, she wondered whether it was even meant to be a secret at all. And if not, then why not just advertise it, with signs on the walls or hanging from the ceiling?

The floor itself was called simply Mortgages. Taking up the middle of the floor was Team S. Team S made up the rump of the staff, and the S was commonly understood to stand for Sales. Elsewhere was Team U for Underwriting, Team C for Contracts, and Team R for Resolutions (customer relations). There were also three partitioned offices together in one quiet corner for the various floor managers.

At the end of the floor with the best views of the city from their floor-to-ceiling windows, were Team A, A for Acquisitions. Sylvie knew that this would be the team that Finn – and most male staff – would work on through choice, if they had to work on any of the teams. For Team A were the poster boys, the Royal Air Force of the Mortgages floor. The job of Acquisitions was the snaffling of customers from other firms in mortgage transfer deals, offering lower rates or better benefits, and so robbing their competitors of custom.

With its high-pressure, high bonus, low-return-to-high-callrate culture, these men and women (for there were women there, and successfully so) would stay late and miss their lunches. And they would be allowed to do so by supervisors who fed the workaholism of their staff, all in the hope of each making only one or two 'steals' a day. For the commission on these would almost double the staff member's (and their supervisor's) take-home pay.

(There was also the spiteful pleasure taken among Acquisitions staff of knowing the copious amount of paperwork their competitor would have to prepare for the new mortgage provider.)

Of course, even those in Team A knew that their purpose was ultimately futile. For the rates they had to offer customers to lure them, and the costs of transferring contracts, meant they hardly broke even on these acquired accounts. It was also well-understood that the firm's competitors each had teams doing exactly the same to them.

In fact, the whole Acquisitions area of the industry was an expensive folly, a power trip for managers, a flexing of the corporate muscles; and with the bill being picked up across the board by customers. Finn had the mental image of large city office buildings growing arms with boxing gloves, fighting each other across the town centre, each blow sending glass shattering down onto the pavement. Old heavyweights proving they were still in the fight.

Yet, if it was possible for any area of their industry to have glamour, then Acquisitions had it. Their staff were the objects of envy and admiration among the Sales and other teams. And having a friend on the A Team was itself a boastable 'acquisition', an asset in your after-working socialising (for there was a lot of that). And there was no shortage of people wanting to work there. For if you had to work for pirates, then you'd at least want to be riding at the bow of the ship with your cutlass in hand, rather than be stuck below deck slaving in the galley.

Around the corner from these other teams though, by the staircase entrance and the lift door, was Team F. Their location meant the whole staff passed them at least four times a day – as if to warn them all that that was where they could end up. Of course it didn't take a genius to work out what the F stood for. The word that couldn't have been more ubiquitous in Finn's recent life had it been written backwards across his old T-shirt, so that he saw it every morning in the bathroom mirror – Foreclosure.

However, among the others on the floor, in their private snidey conversations, the team was known as nothing less than 'Team Failure'. This was as accepted by the occupants of that administrative gulag as by those walking past it – and there were forever people walking past, they looking on mournfully as if whispering, 'There but for the grace of God go I...'

Sylvie already had a friend in Sales, and so knew a little of the Mortgages floor. She had hoped that her friend's team was where their sped-up recruitment process would land them. It wasn't her dream job, and she knew how much her friend could grumble about it. But with the threat of redundancies hanging over them, Sales would've seemed like heaven.

Sales was something like Acquisitions-light, with less tension, more successes, lower bonuses and pay – but with just as manic managers. Here was the land of the flipchart at the end of the desks ruling all. Of each week a different cartoon felt-pen representation of each team member and their successes relative to each other, and relative to the management's expected standards.

At least Team F would be spared this pressure, you might think. But no, for they were learning that they had targets too: of the number of case files prepared each day, to post on to the solicitors who would instigate the unmentionable process that gave their team its initial.

Chapter 6 – A Line in the Sand

Finn hadn't ever kept his home town a secret as such. Indeed, he had no idea that people hadn't known he was from Sommerhill. Or that anyone who didn't know would have any deep thoughts on the issue. He hadn't even suffered much of a reaction to the news that the seminar would take him back there.

However, his unexpected confirmation of his home town on the minibus, and Sylvie's exclaimed ignorance of his origins, now left the matter at the centre of his thoughts. Sommerhill, that outpost of industry, forgotten landmark of the provinces, a joke among metropolitans of where-not-to-go. A place he was proud of, but which he'd known he'd have to leave to look back and see clearly. Or at least leave his part of it, the suburbs that smothered in a freezing-mist embrace.

It wasn't easy, for the suburbs seduced him in that same clutch. And ever since he had returned there in his thoughts, to those lampposts in the darkness, to the hedgerows, to the homes beyond their drives...

But Finn put such thoughts aside suddenly, realising that his mind was distracting him with images, hiding him in memory. For here he was now, not in the city he had fled to, where he now called home, but far away from there, in a different city. Indeed the place he'd left with such determination, the place he was recalling so vividly now.

And nor was he back in his home town as part of some grand return, a healing of the wounds that had had him leave – or of those other wounds created by tearing himself away. But instead he was back in an utterly meaningless capacity, merely as a small cog in a corporate wheel. He was part of a financial world that neither knew nor would understand the inner current now rushing through him.

Finn was not back there for any reason to do with mood or sense or history or memory, but to attend a conference for mortgage industry workers. He was about to enter a hall to hear a talk on 'Foreclosure with Forbearance'. He wasn't even certain of exactly what 'Forbearance' meant – perhaps he should have looked that up in his dictionary also. But he had a feeling it was to do with time, patience, taking care with people. And so the talk would be an attempt to square the circle, of somehow claiming it was possible to put families out on the street with kindness.

Finn gasped at the sinking-in horror of it, and had one of those moments of seeing yourself as if from outside yourself. At what point, at any stage of his life up to that moment, had he wished such an existence? Had he ever seen himself in such a role? Had he ever imagined he would have allowed himself, whatever the circumstances, to be corralled into such a fetid field?

'What had my dreams been?'

He shocked himself by realising he had said that out loud, in the corridor, though thankfully with no one overhearing. And then he became slightly sad at no one overhearing, as he was quite proud of his subconscious statement, and wanted it witnessed and recorded.

Finn continued his train of thought internally now, it hardly under his control. He saw himself half-a-lifetime ago, at seventeen or eighteen: with no idea of what he'd like to be, or of what he'd like to do. He only knew it wasn't to occupy any one of the half-a-dozen designated roles that life seemed to offer him.

Who were his heroes? The fiercest artists, writers and musicians. What did they advise, what could he take from them? Only to be yourself, be what you felt inside, and not to let the world shape you. They seemed to suggest that this right attitude was all it took to belong to an alternative society, where things were differently-aligned and infinitely more exciting. He hadn't realised at that age how effortless true talent seemed, or how those in the public eye often spun their own narratives. Or how for most of those scrabbling around on the planet's surface, unendowed with an illuminating genius, the best option was often to buckle up, try your best, and hope to get out of life alive.

'Are you going in?' asked a female delegate. Finn realised he was standing in the flow of traffic, blocking the door. He moved to one side, and gestured with his arms for her to pass. He left her question unanswered though – his current thoughts were too important to let the hateful parade ahead of him get in their way. Where was all this stuff coming from, about his hopes, his youth? What in God's mercy was the purpose of it coming out now?

As the moments leading up to the mortgage presentation ticked by, so Finn began to notice that the stream of people going in around him was thinning. In fact it had almost stopped, and most of the attendees must have been inside by then. The doors were wedged open, and inside he could see maybe a hundred of them, waiting for the speaker to emerge.

What were these people's hopes? Had they once dreamed? Had they possessed youth? Finn could scarcely believe it. He saw a room of Jaspers, all intent with their clipboards and eager to learn, no moral qualms pertaining to the nature of their work. And then he caught sight of Jemima's hair.

That morning she had styled it in a bun and knotted it with a chiffon scarf, and so it was quite unmistakable. There at last in that sea of anonymity was someone Finn had experienced as an individual, and so could credit with human feelings. He knew Jemima disliked the work, perhaps as much as he and Sylvie did. However, by her nature, she found that dislike locked in battle with good sense. He watched her look down at her notepad, and then keenly up at the stage. And as Finn saw her at that moment, he thought that good sense was winning, that Jemima would endure those three hours as a dutiful employee, and give absolutely no sign of her turmoil as her insides rotted.

Chapter 7 – Even Frank?

A further memory emerged then, as if Finn wasn't juggling enough of them already. It was of yet another staff training event, one from a good few years ago now and entitled 'Perceptions'. The principle at issue that day had been that looking at your business from a new angle, as an artist might look at their work, would allow you to see the nature of it differently.

Younger and less cynical then, Finn had earnestly struggled to believe that the principles of Modernist sculpture could be applied to the doings of an insurance department. Yet he was floundering, and looked to Sylvie, so often his co-conspirator, who had already written on her notepad,

'Is there one person in the room who buys this?'

Finn leaned over to write, 'Only Frank'. For they had earlier noted the resemblance of the speaker to Frank Bough.

But it was what Sylvie then wrote beneath that that had stuck in Finn's mind, and which came back to him now,

'EVEN Frank???'

In questioning whether even the speaker believed what he was speaking, Sylvie had out-cynicised her friend, and left him with another of these moments of realisation – which was why he was remembering it now. For with one deft tug, Sylvie had that day pulled not only the last veil from before Finn's eyes, but also the rug from under Frank... Finn would not be able to look at him straight for the rest of the talk.

It was a chill feeling he was left with, but a truthful one, and Finn was glad to have it. As 'Perceptions' rumbled on, breaking out into group exercises and workshops, Finn could only look around the hall, detached, and saying in his head, 'Every one of us is lying, there is not one person being truthful in this room.'

At one point he fixed Frank in such a perfect glare that Finn considered that he must have punctured the spell. But only for a moment, before a startled Frank rebooted himself, and turned to talk to others about 'what they'd learned'. Afterwards, at home that evening, Finn had suffered a bout of such guilt and depression that he remembered it still.

Back in the corridor outside 'Foreclosure with Forbearance', Finn looked down at the plush carpet, but wasn't fooled – this floor was as bare as that on which Frank had stood after Sylvie had whipped his rug away. Since then Finn had felt that feeling in all kinds of places, and it scared him. Such as whenever a politician made a defiant speech on the television news. 'All that bravado,' Finn would think, 'but who are you trying to convince? Us or yourself?'

Or at each Armistice Day, when the case for war and sacrifice were re-made. When Britain's recent wars had been bloody and without result, then wasn't there just as strong a case to say those deaths had been needless? Who'd admit it? Who would want to? Yet without their iron moral certainty, the ruling class would have wilted during those long years of battle. And this left a question: How could you trust a race of people, even one you belonged to, who with big words and haughty manner could sell any lie to themselves, even a lie that killed?

Finn had lost track of time and space again. He was still outside the double doors. He didn't know how long he'd been there. He had to go in now. Any longer and the doors would be closed, and he'd make a scene interrupting the introductions. Yet he could not move. Suddenly his thoughts became panic, with the realisation that his simply standing still and not entering the hall was creating a situation for himself, if not yet for others.

His thoughts though were distracted then by voices, as the sound of footsteps approached along the carpeted corridor. A man was asking,

'So, is this the same presentation you gave in Nottingham last year?'

'Essentially so,' a woman answered, 'though I've revised it based on what they responded to.'

The pair spoke in quiet, professional tones. She continued,

'I noticed how they loved the bit about the "circle of trust".'

'Oh yes, of how a customer will still respect an agent's honesty, even when they don't like what they're being told by them?'

'Yes, and so I've expanded it. Meanwhile, softening the later insistence on managers to enforce professional attitudes in their teams.'

'More carrot, less stick?'

'It seems to work,' she concurred.

'We'll be starting soon.'

Finn was startled to realise that the man was addressing him directly, as he had been deliberately avoiding eye-contact with the pair.

'Oh, yes, I'll be there in a minute,' stammered Finn in reply, before moving a bit away from them along the corridor. There he played with his mobile phone awhile, as if sending or receiving an important message. Whether this satisfied the man, Finn couldn't tell. Although after a pause the two of them resumed their talking. She went into a whisper Finn could hardly catch,

'Of course, it's as much about making the staff feel better about themselves as anything else. Employee fall-off's massive in this sector, and employers are looking for us to bring results. You have to remember,' she confided, 'that these are staff hearing anything up to two-dozen family sob-stories a day. They have the same stresses and frustrations as the rest of us. And anything that they can use to justify excessive sick leave, poor work-rate, bad attitude, or a dispute with their line-manager, they will.'

'It's difficult for supervisors.'

'It is, and that's what our companies report to us. What they want from us is a kind of psychological massaging.' The woman spoke even quieter now, as if even between the pair of them this was top secret, 'They want employees whose job might involve turning a young family out onto the street to have no higher stress levels than those arranging bank account transfers or third-party car repairs. I swear, they'll want the moon on a stick next.'

'Well, if anyone can do it, you can, Gail. Good luck.'

'Cheers, Chris. I need it.'

'Er, hello? We really are going in now.'

Finn knew this was for him again. He turned around with not a notion of how he would respond. The need to do so was taken out of his hands though, with the sight of Sylvie rushing out through the double doors.

Chapter 8 – This Far and No Further

'Finn, here you are,' said Sylvie. 'What are you..?' She looked around quickly at the talking business couple, who just as quickly looked away. She looked back to her friend, who said to her,

'I can't do it, Sylv.'

'What d'you mean, you can't do it?'

'I can't go in.'

Sylvie had questioned Finn with all the expected insistency. However, had he been himself he might have noticed that at hearing his answer she bore an odd air, as if wanting only to break into a smile.

He repeated, 'I can't do it. I can't set foot in that hall.'

Finn looked past Sylvie's shoulder to the pair of event organisers. They looked back in his and Sylvie's direction, then away again, then to their watches. But anything they were about to say was interrupted by Jemima's just-as-sudden arrival from the hall,

'Sylvie, you didn't come back... Finn! Here you are.'

Even as she said these words, Jemima seemed aware of something deeper going on. And this, and the running, and the sense of importance she had been placing on the seminar, all then had a collective effect on her. She moved to the wall to lean her back against it, before sliding down into a sitting foetal position, her knees up in front of her.

Finn was startled, though Sylvie was controlled,

'It's okay, sometimes she hyperventilates,' said Sylvie, kneeling with her. 'I can sort this.'

But just then Jasper came through the doors also,

'Where did you all get to? Jem!' He moved quickly to the woman by the wall.

'It's okay,' Sylvie reassured him as he got there. 'She's just lost her breath.'

'Is she all right?' asked the male event organiser. He was asking his partner as much as the people rushing around in front of him.

'It looks like some sort of panic attack,' answered his colleague. She was not without compassion though, asking,

'Can we help?'

'It all right, we've got her,' answered Jasper quickly, now kneeling and holding Jemima. He breathed slowly in time with her to calm her down.

'So... there's nothing you need us to..?'

'No. She's quite all right.'

The man whispered after a moment, 'We have a room full of people waiting, we can't...'

'I can run to reception?' offered the woman. 'Fetch a doctor? The hotel has one on call.'

'It's okay, we've got it,' said Jasper more insistently now. All his attention needed to be on Jemima.

'Okay, well if you're sure she's..?'

'Yes, yes.'

The man said, 'Then we really should be getting in there. Are you coming?' Quite reasonably, he looked to Finn and Sylvie, now standing out of Jasper's way. Sylvie didn't answer him though, instead asking Finn,

'Have you courage for both of us?'

Finn answered, 'This isn't courage, it's fear.'

'Then have you enough of that?'

The man gave Finn a disapproving look at this, as if asking, 'What are you crazy kids up to?' Before saying with renewed finality,

'Well, we'll be starting in a minute. We really do have to...'

'Then sod off and give us some space.' This was Jasper, tired of the distractions as he calmed his passing-out friend. To which the organisers responded by taking their leave and entering the hall. With an angry push, the doors behind them closed.

'What do we do?' asked Sylvie, looking at the doors.

'I think we've just done it,' answered Finn. He looked to her, then to Jemima sat against the wall, now breathing quietly.

'Should we get a doctor?' Sylvie asked Jasper. All were amazed with the sudden revelation of his caring side.

'I don't think she needs one,' he considered. 'She's calming down now.'

'I'll get one anyway,' answered Sylvie. She was glad of anything that stopped her thinking of what they'd just done.

Finn went with her, the pair jogging to reception.

'She'll be fine, she's done it before,' she said as they neared the front desk. 'Hello, my friend's having trouble breathing.'

'What room's she in?' asked the attendant. Her job clearly left her unruffled in an emergency.

'She isn't in a room, she's downstairs, outside the conference room.'

Without another detail needing to be asked, the attendant had already picked up a phone and pressed a single button to reach someone,

'Hello, yes, this is the Grand. We've a patient with breathing difficulties. They're on the ground floor, come to reception.

'They'll be here in two minutes.'

Yet it was less than one before a medic from whatever facility the hotel had a hotline to had arrived, young, flushed and eager to help.

Within that time though, with Jasper's arm around her, the patient had met her party in reception. With her consort, she was now on her way outside for some air. The leaving pair was almost at the revolving doors when the doctor came through them, missing them entirely.

The receptionist was distracted with a phone call, and for a moment not at her station. The doctor looked around, saw only Finn and Sylvie by the desk, and so asked,

'I'm a doctor. Do you know of a guest with breathing difficulties?'

They were alone in the large reception room. Life was going on in the street outside, but inside the hotel there was no one else to see them. With Jemima evidently fine, some demonic spirit grabbed Finn, and had him say,

'The patient's name is Chris. He's on stage in the main hall. It's his heart. Palpitations. He insisted he go on.'

'Oh my, I'd better get in there,' the doctor answered, turning to run.

'It's just along the corridor, on your left.'

No sooner had Finn somehow straight-facedly got this out, the woman with him somehow not laughed, and the confused doctor gone to find his patient, than the Evil Twins and a much-recovered Jemima, herself on the verge of hysterical giggles, looked to each other, then to the door; before looking to Jasper... and bolting for it.

PART TWO – THE HOPE OF ROMANCE

Chapter 9 – To do it Today is Never too Late, or The First Time I Felt Alive, or Adult Truant, or Our Day Out

Mindful of Jemima's frail state, their desperate dash took them only through the revolving doors and around the corner of the large building. There they stood, their backs pressed against the wall like outlaws in a gunfight. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that Jasper had come with them after barely a second's pause.

'Hold up,' he'd called, once they were around the corner. Before adding, once they'd come to a stop, 'That was stupid, when Jem's just been ill.'

'I'm fine now, Jasper,' she countered. 'They could see that.'

'It's not for you to decide that you're fine. That doctor was for you.'

'You didn't think I needed one.'

'How do you feel?' Sylvie asked her.

'I feel alive.'

'No,' said Jasper, 'you're feeling light-headed. Keep breathing slowly.'

The argument petered out into heavy-breathed silence, underscored by muffled traffic hum. Jemima though, like Sylvie and Finn, seemed only giddy with excitement, which seemed to have put the colour back in her cheeks.

Out in the pavement, beneath the bright grey sky, the remnants of the mid-day rush-hour occupied their senses. Travellers on foot that early afternoon were brushing past them. Sylvie gasped for breath – more through shock than through their short burst of action – and said simply,

'I can't believe we did that.'

'Me neither,' echoed Finn. For the duration of their run he had been unable to stop smiling, but now he wore a look of careworn exhaustion.

'Wow, that was so exciting,' concurred Jemima. 'I haven't felt like that since school.'

'It's left us in a mess though, hasn't it,' said Jasper, which riled Sylvie.

'Just go back in then,' she told him. 'Make your apologies, sit at the back.'

'What, after that farrago? I'll never show my face in that room again. You dragged me out of there.'

'Did we hell!'

Jemima though just laughed, 'That really was brilliant, Finn. The funniest thing ever.'

'Yeah,' retorted their more sensible colleague. 'It'll be hilarious when we catch up with Mitch and he tells us all about it.'

'Oh God, he was still in the conference hall,' realised Jemima, before laughing again.

To which Sylvie declared, 'That confirms it. We can never go back! We're outcasts forever! But you.' She looked to Finn, holding his face in her hands. 'Oh, look at you. You're in an awful state, aren't you.'

For something, even after this short time, was telling on Finn. Perhaps nothing more than the knowledge that, had his trick with the doctor been played on him, he'd have felt so embarrassed, and would have shuddered at the memory ever afterwards...

'So what do we do the rest of today?' asked Jemima, calming down, as they all were.

'Well, we can't go back in there while the conference is on,' repeated Jasper. 'Not after that stunt you pulled with the doctor.'

'You stood there and watched us do it,' reasoned Jemima.

Though it was Sylvie who gave the more defining answer,

'God, how repressed are you, Jasper? You saw us having fun, and some part of you couldn't bear not being involved. You're just as silly and immature as the rest of us; you just can't bring yourself to admit it.'

'Well, thank you, Doctor Freud,' countered Jasper, as much in dark jest as in avoiding giving a proper response. 'Remind me to cancel those therapy sessions I had booked, now I've got you to analyse me.'

Frustrations and flaring panic aired, they again lapsed into silence.

'Can we go for a walk?' asked Finn then.

'They're not going to come out and get us,' Sylvie attempted to joke.

'Don't be so sure,' quipped Jasper. He was keen to get going somewhere, anywhere, himself.

'I just don't like standing around here,' explained a sallow Finn. 'Can't we go somewhere else?'

'He's right,' said Jemima. 'Let's go for a walk.'

To which all their feet concurred.

'It can't do any harm anyway,' muttered Jasper en route. 'The damage is done.'

'Give over, Jasper,' snapped Sylvie. 'Don't you think Finn feels bad enough about it all as it is?'

'No one asked you to come,' concurred Jemima, though her sweet voice could no more issue insult than blasphemy. 'Where are we going anyway?'

'I just need to clear my head,' explained Finn.

And clear their heads they did do, for nearly three quarters of an hour, getting themselves good and lost in a city none of them claimed to know well. Although they never quite lost the centre, never found themselves in among the factory estates and ring-roads and nightmare tower blocks that ring Britain's, perhaps the world's, metropoli.

And then, just when they needed it, they saw the perfect Victorian hostelry emerge before them, its edifice towering over a public square like a galleon on a flat sea. Sylvie remembered then that for one of them this wasn't quite unknown territory,

'Of course, you knew this was here, Finn. You're a local! This is your homeland.'

'Try hinterland.'

Chapter 10 – Pub Life in Albion

For Finn, the transition from youth to adulthood could have been summed up in the single word: pub. For there seemed no trip, no visit, no event or day out since the age of seventeen that had not involved one.

A memory came to him then: of on one bright Saturday morning years ago meeting with an old schoolfriend in the city centre. Just before he left his home town, this must have been. Finn had envisaged them engaging in a nostalgic trawl around the places of their youth: record shops, markets, chip shops, local landmarks. And other places of boyhood interest, like mysterious alleyways, stairways that led nowhere, and dodgy shop signs that made them laugh like drains – for they were not of an age yet for high culture.

What a shock then for that friend to lead them both, in their first moments of meeting, instead to the nearest bar – just as either would do on any other occasion when they now met. It had only been the fact of it being their first weekend morning meeting since their school days that had triggered the bizarre expectation in Finn that time – on Saturday mornings at least – could have stood still.

In fact, so persuasive was the influence of the public house now on Finn's social activities, that at his more sarcastic moments he had declared to friends that the sum total of his life's sightseeing were the views of Britain's cities through various barroom windows. (For he did have a couple of friends beyond Sylvie, fellow jaded hacks who could think beyond the office.) Yet for all his moaning, he conceded that the public house offered a perfect default. For where else were men supposed to go off-duty? What was the world to do with them?

The pub was like your living room out of doors. They were how Continental café culture might have developed had it been nippy enough on the boulevards of Paris or in the public squares of Rome for them to want to pull the door-to and put the two-bar fire on. Finn conceded the many hundreds of happy hours he and his compatriots had spent in these warm places. He was only thankful that he had never acquired the taste for drinking on his own – for he feared the removal of that last social barrier might have seen him in there morning, noon and night.

It also meant a bar was obviously where he and the others would end up going in such a situation as this one. The taproom they'd found was brass-ornamented, picture-hung and high-ceilinged. Its tall windows were full of sky from the square outside. It was half-empty after the lunchtime rush, and its tables were still being cleared of the remnants of the mealtime trade.

Once they were sat down with their drinks, each of the party in their own way conceded the truth of Jasper's statement: that what was done was done, and so for the time being the lot of them really had nowhere else better to be. It was also Jasper who'd bought the round. Although not even he could understand why he'd declared it 'The least I could do'. From their table they had views of the town, the enormous windows giving the impression of inside and outside being the same space. Each was cast in that same diffused sunlight.

'But what was it all about?' asked Jasper, calmer now but still having little idea. 'I just saw you all leaving the conference hall, and thought that something was going on outside.'

'You couldn't go in, could you, love?' Again Sylvie took hold of some tactile part of Finn, this time his hands. 'Your feet were rooted to the spot.'

'That was it?' asked Jasper. 'No big emergency?'

'How big an emergency would you have liked, Jasper?' she exclaimed. 'Finn dropping dead outside the conference room?'

'And I was ill right after in the corridor,' reminded Jemima.

'Of course you were, love,' counselled Sylvie. She took her hands from Finn's to translate them to Jemima's. 'And it's only that you amazed us all with your recovery that we've already forgotten about it.'

'You hyperventilated, it looked like?' Jasper, their inquisitor, summarised.

'Yes,' answered Jemima a little sheepishly.

'And what caused it for you?'

'Overexcitement, I think. At everything that was going on, people rushing around.'

'But why did you leave in the first place?' Jasper asked her.

'Because Sylvie didn't come back.'

'And so why did you leave?' Sylvie asked Jasper.

'Because Jemima didn't come back.'

'Well, what a pretty pickle.'

Chapter 11 – A Friendly Visitor

'Well, what a pretty pickle.'

This was said by a fifth voice, and one the other four didn't know. It came from the table behind them.

Due to their positions, each table gave the impression of isolation, while leaving members of neighbouring parties sitting back-to-back with only the width of a sofa back-panel between them. Perhaps in the evening or during a busy lunchtime this was sufficient to leave one table's conversation quite secret from the other. But on a quiet almost-empty mid-afternoon...

'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to overhear,' the fifth voice continued. 'But I've been sitting here looking for almost anything to distract me from this impossibly uninteresting text I'm due to be tested on in a matter of hours. When here I am presented with this remarkable case study. Sorry, I should introduce myself. Jude Marks, student of medicine.' He put out his hand to shake, which Sylvie, being the nearest took up.

He went on, 'So, you see I've taken oaths and everything. It's all really quite confidential: between a doctor and their patient a secret isn't something you tell even one other person. Now, none of you have punched me yet, so I'll take it you're intrigued for diagnosis? Okay, then allow me to summarise from the little I've heard. Step in if I get anything wrong.

'Now, you are four people who are meant to be somewhere else right now?'

The table murmured in unison, as they would at each right point.

'Somewhere calling for smart but uninspiring workwear, from what I note the men are wearing. Ladies, meanwhile, I commend you on your flair. Now, at least one of you, for your own reasons, could not set a foot inside the venue. Right?'

'Right,' they murmured again.

'Now, this refusal was all it took for another of you to find, in your colleague's absence, an excuse for yourself to leave?'

Sylvie nodded.

'And this in turn for the third of you to leave?'

Jemima nodded.

'And in turn the fourth?'

Jasper nodded.

'During which time, one of you suffered something like hysterical paralysis, and another of you a breathless panic attack? Resulting in a situation where not one of you – evidently – felt able to return inside, even those among you protesting otherwise?'

Even Jasper didn't argue this point.

'And so what does all of that suggest to you?'

Sylvie answered for them, 'That we all went looking for each other. I'm not sure that any one of us caused the situation.'

'How like life! But what does that all add up to? Do you know what I think?'

The table sat expectant.

'Some might speak of group psychosis, but I'd term it mild mass hysteria.'

Sylvie didn't like the sound of that second term very much better than the first. Jude, noting her and the others' alarm, explained,

'Mental health's one of those things we only tend to talk about when something goes wrong. It's as if we're ashamed of having minds, or of thinking about how they work – thinking about thinking, if you like. But mass hysteria's no more unusual than a man who wouldn't dream of bursting into wild screams alone in the street then doing so in a football crowd. He goes there because it's what a part of him wants to do. And while in the street he'd probably be approached by an officer of the law and given a strong talking to, in the football ground it's an accepted norm. It's nothing more psychological than that.'

The student continued, 'Mass hysteria sometimes seems to me like people only wanting to generate a new social norm for themselves, one in which they can act out their inner-need. Now, the person could just go off on an emotional tangent of their own. But is there ever anything more reassuring than the presence of others who feel the same?

'Outside of wherever it was that the four of you couldn't go into, you were like a little football crowd for those moments – you all wished nothing more than for the others among you to bolster your own inner-wish to act differently to what the world expected. At some deep level not one of you wanted to go in there. You sought this need out in each other, and used it for mutual encouragement in thinking the unthinkable – not going in!'

'So not going in became our social norm?' asked Jemima.

'Among your group, yes.'

'Tommyrot!'

The rest of the table groaned at Jasper, who didn't follow up his outburst.

'Well, it's only a theory,' conceded Jude, apparently untroubled at it being shot down in flames. 'But you are here, aren't you? And not there, wherever there is. Purely out of interest, where is it that you're meant to be?'

'A seminar on mortgages.'

'Mortgages? Boring enough,' the student agreed, 'but surely not enough so to warrant your reacting so strongly..?'

'Mortgage foreclosure,' added Sylvie guiltily.

'Ah, well there you go. You'd have to a repressed sadist to enjoy that work.'

'Rubbish!' At last Jasper's dam fully broke. 'I'm not a sadist. I didn't want to leave, and I wished I could have gone back in.'

Jude remained unruffled,

'No, sir, you're not a sadist. But you'd never love your work. You'd do it for the good it brought your career and your family finances. But tell me if, in your heart, you urgently, desperately wanted, needed to attend that conference?'

'Yes, I did.'

'Then I bow to your superior judgement. And on that note, I must leave you, for I too have somewhere else that the world at large considers I ought to be. Thank you again for the mental stimulation – and remember, trust in your subconscious, it always knows best. And don't worry, for it's never quite the worst thing that happens.'

The student left in a flurry of goodbyes, gathered books and thrown scarves.

Chapter 12 – The Dreaded Phone Ringing

'Well, can this day get any weirder?' asked Sylvie.

'I don't know how it can hope not to,' answered Jasper. 'We've still Mitch to face at some point.'

'I asked weirder, not worser.'

Finn sank into his jacket.

'Take that off, for God's sake,' said Jasper. 'You're indoors now; you won't feel the benefit later.'

'Leave him alone,' snapped back Sylvie, acting the carer.

'Well, I just mean... we're like a bunch of bloody kids here. It's embarrassing.'

'You drank single malt as a kid, did you?'

To which Jasper gave a contemptuous gulp and rose to buy himself another.

'Sit down,' she said. 'It's my round. I think we could all use it.'

Jemima, who'd hardly touched her Coke, hadn't time to say she didn't need another. Meanwhile Finn quickly drained his pint. Jasper didn't sit down, but instead followed Sylvie to the bar to offer a hand. Once there he whispered,

'Are that pair all right?'

'Jemima's fine now.'

'And Finn?'

She shook her head, 'I don't know. You should have seen him in that corridor, Jay. He was like a statue.'

'Maybe we're not the people he needs right now?'

'Oh no, I'm sure it's not that bad. He just needs friendly faces. I think it's all too much, all coming at once. And him being back home too – I didn't even know till we were on the coach.'

'Okay, you know him better than I do. But as soon as six o'clock comes, we get right back there and find Mitch – if we want to save our jobs.'

'Why six?' asked Jemima, when this decision was relayed to the table. 'I thought the talk finished at four?'

'It does,' explained Jasper. 'But then there's closing drinks till five, before the rest of them clear off. And I'm not showing my face in there until it's clear.'

At that point Sylvie's phone buzzed on the table.

'Mitch,' she read off the screen.

'Speak of the devil,' uttered Jasper. 'Why did he call you and not me?'

'Because he knows I'm Jemima's friend?' she supposed. 'Because someone told him that a girl had fainted?

'I have to leave to take this,' said Sylvie scooping up the phone. Before throwing it back down – 'I can't answer it.'

'Oh, give it here.'

Jasper grabbed at the phone and slid the screen to answer. He gulped,

'Hi Boss... Sylvie? She's just away from the table... Yes, we're all here... Just somewhere quiet, a big place on the square, we'll be back by... Yes, Jem's fine, it was nothing, just... No, that thing with the doctor was all a confusion... Was it really, Boss? I'm sorry... When will we be back? Well, we wanted to wait till...'

From nowhere, Finn leaned in and took the phone,

'Boss, it's Finn... We're sorry for the trouble we caused, but we can't come back yet... I have to see my neighbourhood. This is my home town, you know. I can't be back here without visiting, I'm sure you understand...'

'When?' Mitch must have asked.

'Tonight.'

'What time tonight?'

'Not late, not late. I'll call you when we're back.'

At this Finn hung up, and put the phone back on the table.

'What the hell..?' asked Jasper.

'Finn, what are you doing?' asked Sylvie.

'Just what I said.'

The others seemed to need to get their breath back before further questioning. Sylvie asked for the group,

'So?'

'So what?'

'So what did he say?'

'He said, "Okay."'

'Just that?'

'He said, "Okay, I'll see you later then."'

'Was it a statement or a question though?' asked Jasper. And then another phone started buzzing, this time Jasper's own. Though he didn't move,

'You've gone and bloody done it again, haven't you?' he said to Finn directly. 'You've got me into something else. How can I answer this now?' Jasper couldn't quite say what was stopping him, but all understood. He left his phone out in front of him, leaving it to squirm along the table as it buzzed, and wishing only that it would stop ringing.

When it did stop, all were silent, before it made another, shorter noise.

'He's left a message,' Jasper exclaimed as he took the phone and listened to the voicemail, before he summarised,

'He's in the mid-session break, about to go back in. He says we needn't come back.'

The others gasped.

'...before eight o'clock.'

They breathed again.

'Eight?' asked Sylvie.

'So what do we do till then?' asked Jem.

None had an exact answer, they not knowing beforehand that they would have these hours to spend. It was commonly agreed though, after they'd all had another drink, that they couldn't stay in the bar any longer. It was as if Mitch, with Jasper's directions of 'a big place on the square', could track them down there. There was a general move to drink up and get their coats on, those who'd taken them off to begin with.

'Where do we go then?' asked Jasper.

'Finn's going home,' said Jemima.

They turned to him, 'Then it looks like we're coming with you.'

PART THREE – THE SOUND OF THE SUBURBS

Chapter 13 – Pitch and Yaw

Running out of the conference had felt like making a break-for-it, a mad dash to freedom. Yet the stabbing panic of that moment was nothing compared to the slow, considered undulations of the bus as it carried them out further, and still further, from the city centre. At least earlier, they had been near the Grand Hotel still, only just in hiding – they were able to return at a moment's notice, should they have wanted to. Now physical distance was underlining the psychological.

It had been an act of will, and not of 'group psychosis', to find the bus stop. It was not where Finn had remembered it. It had taken all the group's patience to wait, to board the lumbering vehicle, and now to sit, rocking to and fro as it encountered traffic lights, speed bumps, and rutted tarmac. It didn't matter that Mitch had gifted them these hours – it was a journey that was settling no one's nerves.

'This is your bus route?' asked Sylvie in the form of a statement, after they'd been travelling for twenty-five minutes.

'It used to be.'

'This is the longest bus I've ever been on. Does this town ever end?'

'No, it goes on forever, covering the globe,' said Finn, not even acknowledging his mordant tone.

'It feels like it,' was all she offered in response.

By the time they'd left the pub, the first workers were leaving early shifts. And as the pub had filled so the bus-stops had too. It was also getting darker now. Though there was no sign of rain, the dampness in the air no longer had the day's warmth to counter it. With the bus's heater on full, and more passengers boarding at each stop, the atmosphere within was soon like that of a swimming-baths changing-room. All windows bar the windscreen were misting up. If nothing else, this offered passengers the abstract spectacle of streetlights, shop-signs and Belisha beacons flaring in the formless night beyond. It would be another twenty minutes before they reached their stop.

The group disembarked onto an empty street corner.

'When's the last one back?' asked Jasper. He watched their warm lit room head off without them, further into the darkening evening.

'On a main route like this they run till midnight,' answered Finn.

'This is a main route?' countered Jasper, incredulous. 'And they haven't widened the roads or fixed those potholes?'

'And half those houses should have been knocked down,' added Jemima. 'I can't believe anyone lives in them.'

The area they were stood in now was rather different though. The houses were semi-detached more often than terraced or blocked, with trees and strips of greenery around them. Their well-kept gardens disappeared into encroaching night.

'You have this journey to town and back?' asked Jasper, still not getting it. 'Every time you want to go shopping or meet a mate? No wonder you're so isolated, Finn. Growing up here you probably hardly ever had the time to go anywhere.'

'It's just a big city,' said the local.

But Jasper's thoughts weren't finished,

'In my home town the longest journey's fifteen minutes. Twenty has you out on the moors. Hell, you can walk it in half-an-hour.'

Stood at the bus-stop, how did Finn feel to be back? The area had always left him with the feeling of being both surrounded by houses and standing at the end of the world. There had been a survey done in a newspaper once, Finn remembered to himself. It was to highlight the difficulties of rural life. It rated different isolated regions on the criteria of how far their populations lived from a Council Office, Job Centre, hospital, cinema, playhouse, music venue, and popular stores like Smiths, Boots, HMV, Waterstones, etcetera.

After reading the article, Finn had applied the same rules to his outer-suburb. And had calculated that even there, on the edge of a large industrious city, he was fifty minutes from a single one of those locations listed. His travel times were comparable to those of districts classed as 'culturally disadvantaged'.

'So, where are your folks, or whoever?' asked Jasper.

But Finn shook his head, 'They don't live around here anymore. They moved away. We'd have to catch another bus.'

'Then we'll head over that way.'

But Finn shook his head again, 'I don't think we've time. I'll see them at Christmas. It would just confuse things to go there now.'

Jasper bit his tongue, only asking,

'So where's the town centre?'

'I don't think we really have one.' We – Finn had been back less than a minute, and already the collective spirit had him.

'Well, a café? A bar?'

'I don't know if we want to drink any more,' noted Jemima.

'Don't worry,' answered Jasper, 'I'll buy you a coffee. But we can't stand here all night.'

Sylvie, who'd been looking around her, not really taking notice, happened to ask,

'Where are those voices? Behind the trees?'

'That's our old local,' answered Finn, not even needing to look.

'Then there we go,' said Jasper with determination.

'I can't,' blurted the local boy. 'I might know someone there.'

Jasper's temper broke, 'For God's sake, first you want to go somewhere, then you don't. What did you bring us here for?'

'To see the place,' was Finn's answer; so deceptively simple that it disarmed his questioner, who only responded,

'Well, have a good look around. You coming, girls?'

'I think we should stick together,' worried Jemima.

'It's not the wilds,' snapped Jasper. Though even as he said this, he wondered if he'd find his way back after turning a corner or two? Nor could he take any comfort from the sodium-lights above them, that only seemed to run along those streets in order to entice him into getting lost along them. He concluded these thoughts with,

'Pub it is then.'

Jemima wasn't happy,

'Drink, drink, drink. Is that all men do?'

'That's my experience,' answered Sylvie, noting her friend's mood. Both men stayed silent. Before Jasper said finally,

'Standing here we look like Japanese tourists.'

Sylvie took Finn's arm, 'It'll be all right.'

In part reluctantly, the group began the short walk to the bar.

Chapter 14 – Suburban Ennui

'Look, it's happened now,' whispered Jemima to Jasper as they made their way. 'Think of it as a bit of an adventure.'

The place set Jasper's teeth on edge. It was the set-back houses, the low orange lighting, and the trees that seemed to loom out of their own personal pools of mist. 'No wonder Finn turned out the way he did,' thought Jasper again – coming from an area like this, where every journey after dark must have been like walking through a John Carpenter horror movie set.

And Jasper could imagine too what such a suburb would be like by day – silent but for muffled motorway noise, hardly a soul about; the trees permanently present, the ground beneath them damp; the houses seeming somehow alive but staying silent, contemplative, planning their move. Had Jasper voiced these impressions though, he might have learnt that these atmospheres were what Finn had always loved about the place.

Their walk took the group around a corner where there was no pavement. A strip of trees had been allowed to remain there on their own. Their job was now to bar a row of detached houses from the traffic passing in front of them.

'We're better off crossing the road,' suggested Finn as the ground turned soft underfoot. And this suggestion was swiftly followed up.

Along the way they met another bus stop. At it was a young girl – Sylvie judged her fifteen – dressed in the Gothic style. Sylvie offered her a smile as they passed, and got one in return. And this cheered Sylvie, for in the girl she saw herself at that age – not dressed that way, but always getting onto buses as others were getting off them; out as late as allowed and on every night that she could afford to be.

By now the voices carried on the air were quite loud. So it was no surprise when the group rounded the wall of the last house on the road, and found themselves at the carpark of The Singing Sparrow. It was the kind of pub planned into its neighbourhood, given a prominent spot on a junction, and with lawns and parking spaces spread around it.

Its arch-topped windows were as warming as an open fire. The lights inside cast a pinky-orange glow over the drinkers on the covered terrace, which ran around the whole of the outside of the building. 'It must have been popular,' thought Jemima, for even on as chill an evening as that one, there were as many people outside as in.

They weren't even all smokers, she noticed. She often pitied those poor tobacco-bound souls (she being lucky enough not to have an addictive personality herself). Yet even the smokers on view at The Singing Sparrow seemed to be outside because they enjoyed it. Jemima found this fascinating, when there was warmth and seating available inside.

'Everyone good?' asked Jasper. Without stopping to wait for answers, he led the way through the heavy doors. The whoomph of warmth and noise that hit them was as inviting to some as it was inhibiting to others. Finn and Sylvie were the last to enter, now with her arm held firmly through his.

'What's everyone having?'

'No, Jasper. It's my turn,' said Jemima. 'I haven't bought a round yet.'

'But you're only drinking Cokes,' he answered. His complaints over the nature of their day had not stretched to affecting his chivalry at the bar.

'Then let me give you something toward them.'

'No, this is mine.' Finn surprised them all by moving to the bar and quite decisively gesturing to the woman serving. He requested the same order they'd been placing in town. 'And one for yourself,' he added with the brio of someone with a weight lifted off them.

'I don't mind if I do,' the barmaid answered. 'I'll have a rum and black, if you please.'

Finn's cognitive functions were now firing on all cylinders. There had been a recent tendency, he'd noticed, for bar staff in this situation to only allow themselves a soft drink. Or to instead keep the money back and say, 'I'll have one when my shift's over.' But Finn was glad to see this barmaid engaging the optics there and then, and sipping from the straight glass before leaving it on the back bar.

'The last of the big spenders,' laughed another woman, as she carried off her own round.

'Are you feeling all right?' asked Sylvie, who felt her job that night was to monitor everything her friend did.

'It's okay though,' answered Finn. 'It's okay.' The group moved to a clear spot by the fruit machines, for every table had at least one person on it. Music played, people laughed, the world was right. Finn felt okay. Suddenly he couldn't stop talking,

'I was worried, you see. I was sure I'd see people I once knew, people from school, or wherever. I haven't had the years here to see these people age, to grow, to get used to them as adults – it felt as if to come back here would be a portal right back to then, to when we were all young. It would have been like being back there.'

Jasper said nothing, though he struggled to remember the last time he'd met or spoken to anyone he'd known in his younger life.

'I thought the bar staff would be the same ones,' continued Finn. 'But they probably have a new lot every six months. I thought I'd see wall-to-wall old faces. But I hardly know a soul, and certainly no one I'd known well. And even if they still lived nearby, would they be in here every minute of every night?'

The bus journey had taken them the best part of an hour, and the evening was well under way. Jasper guessed the drinkers were a mix of the pre- and post-teatime, of early and late work-finishers. They would come and go throughout the session, the numbers peaking sometime around eight and petering out before time was called at half-past-ten – for it was a work night after all. Conversations would rage, darts would be played, and football matches would be watched on the big TV.

Finn sipped his drink, and had the sense again of time foreshortening: it seemed as though their running from the conference suite had been both minutes and days ago.

Chapter 15 – Where Somebody Knows Your Name

At every face he saw that wasn't known, Finn relaxed a little more.

Finn sometimes wondered whether more-outward-looking people understood themselves as their exterior, and not like him as that swirling pool of thoughts somewhere inside it. This would explain others' fascination with, and their falling prey to, modes of fashion; as how they looked would be, in an obvious sense, who they were. This would also explain how others felt so comfortable within their environment: for weren't we all at one level just an object in the landscape, and with no need to feel any less a part of it than a lamppost or a hat-stand?

Considering ourselves as our exterior also explained how, when you achieved a status or became something in life, you were instantly that thing. For as Finn had already been thinking lately, he often felt himself still the same person he had been as a younger man, a teen, a child even. And although his exterior may have grown and become what it was that day, to pretend that the entity that inhabited that body was not the same as had inhabited it at earlier stages of his life seemed somehow a fraud. (Was this connected also to the way he couldn't help thinking of the future? For surely those stages of development were as unavoidable as those he had already lived through.)

Finn concluded though that others, while obviously having memories of their earlier life, could see the people filling these scenes as somehow other, not themselves now, separated by time. Meanwhile, Finn often felt himself to be all his past and future at once, and this leaving the present hardly getting a look in. He concluded his bout of philosophising, and not for the first time, with the thought that sharing even one-tenth of his mental activity would surely see him committed. And he was only half-joking.

A table had come free beside them, and they had moved to it. Around Finn, Jemima and Jasper had fallen into conversation. Meanwhile Sylvie was looking at her watch and remarking at how late it was – and asking where had the afternoon gone? At the digital jukebox, a man was busily pumping in coins. This would leave them for the next half-an-hour with the hits of Paul Weller, The Jam and The Style Council. A noisy conversation went on to one side of the table, while at the other a man was working at the fruit machine. His urgent pressing of the buttons was bringing whoops and giddy noises from the machine, as if it were being tickled.

'You alright?' he asked.

The man's hands didn't break from ramming their palms into the row of flat square buttons. Yet his eyes looked away from the machine toward Finn as he spoke, and with a smile that signified something other than casual pub conversation. He added,

'Haven't seen you in here for a while.'

'Paul.'

Finn stood to speak to the man he now couldn't believe he hadn't recognised. How amazing, the flood of memories brought by a face that moments earlier triggered nothing,

'I honestly didn't recognise you.'

'What, have I grown a new head?'

Finn stood where he'd been sitting; no need to move for the man was only a foot away. He answered,

'No, no. I've been away.'

'We didn't see you at the reunion. You were the only one who didn't come.'

'Reunion? When? I didn't hear of one.' Finn wasn't sure he would have come back anyway, but this much was true.

'Oh, years ago, a few months after we broke up.'

Finn remembered now: he had known about it, had known of others of their Sixth Form class who went, but did not attend himself, despite still living in town then.

'Couldn't you make it?' asked Paul.

'I... don't remember.'

'Doesn't matter. Shame you missed it though. What you up to now?'

Finn halted. This wasn't the first time he'd been ashamed to answer that question. He had no choice; he gave the firm's name, but not his new job. Instead he gave his old one,

'Insurance.'

'You screwed my brother right over,' replied Paul, but then laughed. 'He didn't get back half of what his car was worth. You fellows know how to turn a profit, don't you?' Yet Paul was laughing, even half-admiring the firm's profit-motive.

'I'm in retail' said Paul after a pause. Finn realised he had forgotten to ask after Paul's activities in return.

'Oh yes. Weren't you at a clothes store?' he suddenly remembered.

'Oh that! Nah, that was summer job when I was a student. No, we sell electricals, wholesale. We supply direct to shops.'

'Sounds good,' said Finn encouragingly.

'Not really, it's not paying.' Again there was no sadness in Paul at his situation – he could have been living in the ruins of his house after it had fallen down, considered Finn, and still be chuckling away.

Paul asked, 'There's no jobs going at your place? Where's your office?'

'I'm not in Sommerhill now, I left town. But we have an office here. I suppose you could contact them.'

'You don't have a name of someone? No, I don't suppose you would, if it's not your building.'

Finn wasn't sure he had a name of anyone even at his own office. Recruitment didn't work like that anymore. You couldn't get your kids or brothers in with you like you used to. Personnel had to be deliberately aloof, impartial, give a fair crack to everyone. Staff had to be unfavourable even to people they already knew outside of work.

'Would it suit you though?' asked Finn, not wanting to get the fellow's hopes up.

'What? You're saying I couldn't scrub up for an office?'

'Would you enjoy the work though? When you're used to being out in the van?'

'You'd have to get used to it wouldn't you, if that's where the money was.'

Finn didn't like to tell Paul that it had been a while since anyone had considered Insurance a well-paying industry. Perhaps he'd suit the sales teams though, where someone with native charm and the gift of the gab might excel?

But before Finn could get on to being encouraging, Paul had already changed the topic. The idea of a career in Insurance had been forgotten as quickly as it had been conceived. The van may not be paying, Paul went on to explain, but he seemed to suffer no great fear for his career. Something would turn up, something always did. Meanwhile, he'd evidently enough cash in his pockets to pour it down the throat of the fruit machine in midweek drinking sessions. Paul put another pound in – and whether the machine's noises were happy or sad ones, they seemed to make no difference to the man's mood.

There were two mind-sets here, Finn decided. What was that Larkin line? – 'No one actually starves'. Though even he hadn't given up the library, had he. You either had job-fear or you didn't; and those without would never know to pity those with.

Chapter 16 – Alright, Jack

Paul turned imperceptibly from conversation with Finn, and said to a third figure,

'Alright, Jack. Look who's here.'

Someone had joined them in the glow of the fruit machine's flashing lights. Another face from the past, though one of a different order in the gallery of Finn's life and times. Paul seemed to acknowledge this, as he made his excuses and retreated to the bar, leaving the pair to speak.

'Finn. How are you?'

'Jack. You drink here?'

'Not often. Paul called me, said he'd seen you across the bar.'

Finn realised that this must have been before Paul came over to speak to him himself.

'He knew I'd want to say hello,' continued Jack. 'He said he'd keep you here till I turned up.

'Wow. Good work, Paul.'

'So, Finn. What brings you back?'

'Work. We're at a conference at the Grand.'

'Very swish. You know how to treat yourselves. And while you were in town you couldn't resist having a look at the old neighbourhood?'

'Something like that.' In fact it was exactly that.

'You could've told us you were coming.'

'Oh, have I walked into something?' said Finn, suddenly panicked.

It took Jack a moment to get a grip back on the conversation, 'Bloody hell, Finn. I don't mean that you've picked an inconvenient moment. I mean that we'd have put on a spread. We're glad to see you. She'll be glad to see you. Were you even going to look us up?'

'Well...' Finn was floundering.

It was Sylvie, rising from the table, who answered,

'It was all very last minute, and we can't stay for long. I'm sure he'd have got in touch if he'd had the chance.'

Neither man immediately responded. Finn was as glad at Sylvie's intervention as Jack seemed surprised by it; leaving her to ask,

'So, meeting old friends, Finn?'

Finn introduced, 'Colleague Sylvie, this is schoolfriend Jack.'

'Pleased to meet you.' She put her hand to shake.

'Not as pleased as I am to meet you,' answered Jack, taking her hand and lifting it to kiss it in mock-romantic pose. He had been caught off-guard, but was making up for it now.

'Well, I'm sure I don't know what to say,' she answered.

'I hadn't realised you were the same party,' asked Jack, looking to the table she'd been sitting at.

'Yes, we work together.'

'So, you're in town for the conference too?' the man continued. 'Was Finn supposed to be showing you the bright lights tonight?'

'That was the plan.'

'And you somehow ended up here?'

She smiled her coyest smile, in what was a near-automatic flirt-response.

Yet Finn had heard another person referred to, asking Jack,

'How is she?'

'Fine, good. If you've got half hour, you could pop over.'

'Is... she still at the house then?'

'Of course. Not all of us skipped town, you know.'

Finn had no idea how to take this line, instead changing the topic,

'And you're looking well,' he said to Jack, as the latter lingered letting go of Sylvie's hand.

'You mean, after everything I've been through?'

'I knew you'd been ill,' answered Finn.

'I know you did.'

'I always meant to come and see you, back then.'

'I know. But you'd have been busy with work, making your way in the world. It's okay, Finn.' Jack paused, before asking, 'This isn't what's been keeping you away all these years since though, is it? Because I understand. It's all right.'

This sudden lurch toward the personal – and in Sylvie's case, the incomprehensible – was punctuated by Jack suddenly clapping, and asking,

'Well, are you pair coming to visit, or what?'

'We might not have long,' cautioned Finn. 'We need to get back this evening.'

'Don't worry, we can give you a lift.'

'And there's four of us,' said Sylvie, gesturing to the other pair, who were lost in conversation at the table.

'They look like they're getting on well enough without us,' answered Jack. And looking at them, Sylvie considered he was right.

'Don't worry, we'll pick 'em up on the way back.'

Sylvie had to speak to them first though, re-engaging the table,

'Guys, we're going to see a friend of Finn's.'

'Oh, okay,' was all Jemima said, transfixed by the conversation she'd been having.

'Are you coming back?' asked Jasper.

'Yes, and we can all get a lift into town.'

With nothing more forthcoming, Sylvie withdrew to let the pair continue down whatever road they'd started on.

Chapter 17 – The Corner House

Waiting at the fruit machine, Finn's old friend gave Sylvie a look with his twinkling eye before concluding,

'Shall we be off then?'

As Jack bounded for the lounge room door though, Sylvie took Finn's arm and held him back a moment, whispering,

'Is he trying it on with me?'

She was hoping for a definite answer. But Finn only replied to say, 'He can be like that with everyone.' Sylvie was relieved, for all the romantic disappointment this may have caused another woman. For there was something slightly off about Finn's friend and his over-familiar manner. She asked Finn,

'And what was that you were saying, about him looking well?'

But Finn hushed her, seeing the object of their conversation holding the door for them. They rushed along to catch him up. While at the same time, as security from undesired advances, Sylvie hugged her arm around Finn's even tighter than before.

Back on the street, the evening bit them. While above their heads the sodium lighting fought off the darkness. Finn thought the end result looked like swirls of orange in dark chocolate. Sylvie thought about Jemima and Jasper. They'd have the same initials if they married, she considered; before remembering that Jasper was already hitched. Short of extending their arms toward each other across the table though, their body language couldn't have been clearer. And Sylvie knew about these things, for she had been there herself.

Who had been her own affairs? Could she remember them all? Sylvie wasn't sure that she could, off the top of her head. Was that terrible? Or no worse than for any young woman with a surfeit of affection? She felt now though that those times were ending, that she didn't want them anymore. She hadn't for a while, if honest. If only any of her dalliances – such a dainty word – could have been made to stick... Or perhaps she'd picked men who she knew couldn't possibly have stayed?

And so what did she think now about Jemima? Had she any right to judge? Not morally, but Sylvie still had a right to worry for her, to hope she wasn't hurt. It could happen so easily: a pair who'd worked together for months or years, taken out of the office and suddenly seeing each other in a different light. It had happened quite quickly too, in the minutes they'd been left alone in The Singing Sparrow. But something would happen between the pair, Sylvie now felt certain.

And what of Jasper's wife? Well, if she'd eyes then she'd know by now that her man was a strayer. So went Sylvie's logic. If he was wandering now, then he had done so before. His wife would know the game. She would just have to work that bit harder to get his attention back. But Sylvie slumped inside: she might once have told herself such things and believed them, but tonight they sounded only so much cant, and brought her no comfort.

And did the evening's mysteries stop there?

For not only had Finn not explained why he was so glad to see Jack well, but who was this woman they were headed to meet? So far Sylvie had only heard her referred to in the feminine pronoun, as though her real name were sacred, or in any case unnecessary. Someone previous in Finn's life. Someone personal. And judging by the sort who caught his eye in the magazines he read in the canteen at lunchtime, Sylvie wondered if this was to be one of those women in tartan miniskirts who played in punk rock bands?

Jack led them back along the road they'd earlier come down – Sylvie was relieved to see the girl no longer waiting at the bus stop – before turning off down other similar streets. These all bore identical houses, photostat moods. Soon though the group arrived at a big house on a corner plot. It had trees along one side and a glazed outbuilding on the other, giving it its own imposing space. It would have been quite exposed though, being passed by cars from four directions.

'Here we are,' said Jack, 'the house of all that is holy.'

Finn was instantly back there. The exterior was unchanged since he had known it. They approached and rang the bell, and it was answered – as he knew it would be – by the lady of the house. Mother, not daughter.

'My dear boy,' she said with apparently little surprise, and came onto the outside step to hug Finn. 'And this must be your friend.' The woman broke from Finn to take Sylvie's hands in hers. 'Hello, my dear. Come on in.'

Jack had been playing on his phone all the way there, Finn had noticed. He had clearly been text-heralding their arrival.

Inside too, the house looked little altered in Finn's eyes. A new piece of furniture here, a wall repainted there. But still the same phone on the same hall table, the same ornaments on the sill of the window over the stairs.

And down those stairs then came the one they'd travelled there to see. She appeared in sequence, first as a pair of stockinged feet, then woollen skirt, then harlequin tank-top over puff-armed blouse. And finally the beaming face; and a fall of chestnut hair that Sylvie considered only a woman who hadn't coloured, treated or thinned it since school could have maintained.

The daughter hugged her old ally as her mother had,

'Finn. I can't believe you'd just come back like this. And this is your friend?'

'Sylvie,' the friend volunteered. 'We work together.'

'They're in town for a conference,' added Jack. 'At the Grand, no less.'

'I'd have thought that place would have been rather distracting?' she asked Finn. Then turned to Sylvie, 'I'm Belinda. Come up.'

Chapter 18 – Belinda's Secrets

It was the hair that transfixed Sylvie... who had shortened her own a few years year ago, and had been growing it back ever since. Finn's thoughts at that moment were rather different though, for this meeting was the ultimate result of his experiment to visit home. He had made no conscious effort to be there, had not searched for old friends – they had found him. But now he was there, he knew he'd wanted it so badly.

It could have been so different: no one in the area might have recognised him. Jack might have been working away. Belinda might have been on holiday that week... or been gone for half-a-lifetime. It would have been the same difference.

Had any of these things been the case then Finn would still have visited his old streets, soaked up their ambience, and left – possibly for ever – without this meeting occurring. And without knowing what he'd missed.

Finn was taking it all in. This was a house where little had changed except for that which couldn't be avoided. Whereas her mother had grown into late middle-age, so Belinda had matured, filled out, was nearing her prime. Biology though was harsher than aesthetics, and Finn knew that if she hadn't children already then she wouldn't have forever to think about it.

Belinda's mother had disappeared to leave the young people to their evening. Out of forgotten learnt behaviour, Sylvie slipped her shoes off as she went upstairs.

'I can't remember the last time I went up to a friend's bedroom,' she whispered to Finn – not since her teens had her friends not had their own flats and houses.

'It's exactly the same,' he answered, less with social awareness than simple amazement.

Belinda ran in and jumped on the bed, to face her guests as they entered. The room was large, the main back bedroom, and scattered with furniture: television cabinet, pot plant, wardrobe, dressing table, clothes rail, bedroom unit serving as a sideboard, and computer desk – at which Finn sat for want of space on the two-seat sofa. The pop posters he half-remembered were gone, replaced by frameless art prints. Yet the room was still in the spirit of those late-teenage bedrooms that become their own small apartment, a true bed-sitting room. At the computer desk however were binders and paperwork, professional-looking and full of numbers. Finn realised that the desk was no video game or social networking hub, but a place of serious work.

Still bouncing as she settled on the large bed – she'd always had a double-bed – Belinda began,

'You know Finn, I did wonder if we'd ever see you again.'

'I...'

She continued, 'I know, I know. It is quite possible to always intend to come back some time... but always tomorrow, eh?'

Finn nodded, but wasn't sure he had ever intended to come back 'tomorrow' or any other day.

'I always knew you would though, deep down. I always knew you would.'

At this point the door clanked open, and Belinda's mother entered with a tray of tea things,

'Oh, Mum, you shouldn't have.'

'Don't be silly, dear. It's not every day an old friend calls.' She beamed Finn the broadest of smiles. Mother and daughter then faffed around setting the tea tray on Belinda's magazine-strewn unit.

'Well, I'll leave you young people to your evening,' the mother said eventually. This left her daughter free to pour and hand out the cups. Not that Belinda let this interrupt her questions,

'So, Finn, what have you been doing with yourself?'

'What, since leaving?'

'Of course since leaving.'

'Well, I don't know what to say. I found a flat and a job, and then another job, and then I ended up here.'

'Honestly, you men.' She looked to Sylvie momentarily for sisterly understanding. Before looking back at Finn, 'Is that all you have to say for fifteen years?'

It might have even been longer than that, thought Finn. But he would allow her to shorten the span of separation if it helped her to feel the absence less, or the years passed fewer.

He fumbled, 'Well, what do you want to know?'

'Details, anything,' she asked. 'Just something of what you were up to.'

Sylvie understood exactly where Belinda was coming from: for she remembered reading in a magazine how women thought in terms of situations, men in terms of acts. Men spoke of what they did, but not the why, when, where, or what they were feeling at the time. As Finn was amply demonstrating.

Chapter 19 – Working Histories

Finn was trying, but was in one of those situations where an emotional weight could find no words to express itself, and so remained there in the background, acknowledged by all. He ploughed on as best he could,

'Okay, well my first job was at a bank, at the counter window. But I found it hard to concentrate on every customer in turn, and you don't get a minute to yourself. Some staff loved it though, the human contact, the hundred life-stories a day. But back then I needed time to think, and so I moved to the back office. That was fine for a time, it gave me space. But later I did need people around me, so I found a job in Insurance. Working on claims, dealing with customers, you know?'

Belinda didn't; but Finn continued,

'Anyway, I've moved around the floor a few times, shuffled among teams – it's how it goes in big offices – until this latest one...'

'And how long were you in each of these jobs?'

'Longer than I care to remember.'

'Oh, don't say that.'

Finn had noticed before how his self-depreciating humour could upset people, and over time had tried to rein it in. But with all that day's distraction, he had forgotten his own rule.

Jack helped him out though, saying to Bel,

'I guess we all feel a little like that after a few years in the workplace.' He smiled then, as if to say, 'Don't worry about Finn, he's fine'.

Reassured, Belinda continued, 'And this latest job, that's the one you're in town for?'

'Yes.'

'And it's at work where you two met?' Bel's eyes flickered then between her visitors.

'A few jobs before this one, yes,' answered Sylvie.

Although not a part of the reunion, Sylvie felt herself to be a source of fascination for their hostess, who kept giving her inquisitive looks. And so she settled in, determined to learn all she could from the encounter. She was sat next to Jack on the two-seat sofa, though was relieved to find him making no incursions in her direction.

'And you moved jobs together?' continued Bel in her information gathering. 'That's so sweet.'

'Well, it was more an office reorganisation,' answered Finn, flinching.

'And what is this new job? It sounds mysterious.' At this Belinda wore a Nancy Drew expression of excited enquiry.

Sylvie jumped in, 'Well, we're not sure we're going to stay in it.'

Finn turned to Sylvie as much with pleasure as surprise. For all her recent sympathy, he had hardly dared count on her support. At root she was a practical person, always the one to say, 'You need to find a new job before you leave the old one,' or 'We ought to be thankful we have a job at all, when some people don't even have a roof over their heads.' And then it occurred to Finn that even with all their recent work-woes he hadn't heard Sylvie use that last line. And of course she couldn't, for their job was now to take the roofs from over people's heads.

'You don't enjoy it?' asked Bel, baffled.

'We've hardly even started it!' answered Sylvie.

'Well, what on God's earth is it?'

'Financial services.'

'Loans?'

'Mortgages.'

'Helping people buy homes?'

'More like taking them away.'

'Oh, no.' Bel shook her head. 'I don't think I'd like to do that.'

Chapter 20 – Women's Talk

The conversation broke down for a while. The wealth of what needed saying remained unsaid, with people instead fussing over tea and biscuits.

Sylvie looked around the spot-lit abode. She spotted vases, paintings, Buddhas, brass and glass-work in every available space around the large, full room,

'You have lovely things.'

'Thank you,' answered Bel. 'In another world I'd have my own place and could fill a whole house with it. But for now I'm content with my little treasure trove up here.'

'I'll tell you what,' said Jack, putting his cup down and getting up from the sofa. 'Let's have a proper drink, toast Finn's return!'

'We can't, we're driving,' cautioned Bel, jumping up to speak to him as he walked out onto the landing.

'Well, just for our guests then,' he answered. 'No, I'll get them. You talk to Finn – you don't know when you'll have another chance.'

'But you need to talk to him too.'

'But you've more to cover.'

'You don't mind if I use the Little Boys Room?' asked Finn. All the drinking he'd been doing had suddenly caught up with him.

'Not at all. You remember where it is?' Which of course he did.

Left alone with Sylvie, Belinda moved to join her in admiring the artwork hung above the bed: a low-lit Vettriano print of a woman being gazed at by her man.

'So, what do you think?' asked Bel.

'He seems to be enjoying it,' answered Sylvie, in appreciation of the effect the woman's half-off evening dress and black stockings were having on her suitor. 'Do you ever dress like that for Jack?'

'You've guessed that we're together?'

'He walks around like he owns the place.'

'Yes, I suppose it's obvious. The thing is, we were really trying not to make too big a thing of it.'

'For Finn?'

Belinda nodded.

'He doesn't know you're together?' guessed Sylvie.

'Oh no, I think he must do – it was me who wrote to him about Jack's illness. It's just...'

'What?'

'He's never said?' asked Belinda.

'I've never heard a word of you people before tonight!'

'God, he could always be so secretive.' Belinda said this with infinite sadness. 'It was always his downfall. Well, as it's you I trust you not to slap me... You see, Finn asked me out. A long time ago. And I turned him down, flat, just like that.'

'For Jack?'

'No, no. I hardly knew Jack then. In fact, I don't think Finn remembers that Jack and I weren't friends when we were kids, we only knew each other through him.'

'Is that why Finn left?' asked Sylvie.

'I've always thought so. We couldn't go back to how we'd been. I grew up with him, remember,' added Belinda, again assuming Sylvie knew their lives. 'But anyway, all water under the bridge. Think of the good times.'

Belinda looked to the painting, and then to Sylvie's charcoal dress,

'So, what about you? Is this you dressed up for Finn?'

'We haven't gotten that far yet.'

'No, I didn't think so.' Belinda spoke in a motherly tone and with a hand on Sylvie's arm. 'Though don't go leaving it forever, will you.'

Chapter 21 – Sylvie's Thoughts

'We haven't gotten that far yet.'

The words had popped out from nowhere, yet Sylvie found she was glad she'd said them. For in saying them she was broaching a psychological threshold: that she and Finn could be a couple, or at least soon might be. She was learning that a relationship could happen, and that she would let it. For something had happened that strange day that had changed the way she thought about the pair of them. Something which she didn't yet fully understand. Sylvie took a moment to enjoy this feeling, and then made conversation,

'This charcoal dress is me dressed up for a meeting we didn't get to – long story.'

'How long have you worked together again?'

But then Finn burst into the room to make unexpected eye-contact with Belinda.

'You pair need to talk,' said Sylvie. 'I'm in the way.'

'No, no, no,' answered Belinda with genuine warmth. 'I won't hear of it. And anyway, I want to get to know you too. In fact, I've got something to show you both.' Belinda leaned over from where she was sitting, to open a draw beneath the mirror of her dressing table. She rummaged among the contests for a moment, before pulling out a small transparent key-fob that held a single photo-booth snap. She passed it first to Finn, 'Remember this?'

'The Post Office,' he recalled, 'when you were getting your Young Person's Railcard.'

'And you jumped in for the fourth picture.'

'Look at my hair,' he remarked.

'Your hair was lovely, you should grow it back.'

'But a centre-parting...'

The image was passed around to Sylvie, who saw the playful, squashed-together teenage versions of the people sitting before her: Finn with his floppy hair and denim jacket, Belinda's hair exactly the same – she knew it! – and in a white blouse. Sylvie looked at Finn's expression in the photo – had she ever seen him so carefree? It suddenly seemed her life's mission to one day make him so again.

At the sound of another clanking coming up the stairs, Belinda got up to move the tea things for Jack to place the ice box.

'You know that they're a couple, right?' Sylvie asked Finn in a whisper in the seconds they had alone.

'So that's what you were talking about when I was out of the room?'

'Don't be mad,' she asked him. 'It's good I know, I can help you through it.'

Finn shook his head, but not in disagreement,

'There's nothing to help through. I've known for years that they were together. I don't know what they're worrying about. I mean, they're not even sitting by each other.' Finn uttered this with utter bewilderment. As if saying that if it was hard for a woman to map the undercurrents of this present ocean, then how could a poor simple-souled man possibly manage?

'A toast to Finn's return.' From across the room, Jack cracked open the first bottle of beer, before being shushed by Belinda. The visitors pretended not to hear their hosts whispering.

'They're not together,' began Bel.

'I told you they weren't,' answered Jack.

'And I told you that no one brings a woman to a friend's house who they're not at least interested in.'

'You're only worried I'll flirt with her.'

'Well, don't go thinking this gives you permission.'

'I've told you, it's just how I am – I'm a sensual guy, I get off on a woman's touch.'

'You're sure it's not you touching them?'

Sylvie wasn't sure if she'd developed feline hearing some time that evening, or whether their hosts were aiming at being overheard. But even as she was speaking to Finn she was still catching every word the other pair said to each other, no matter how far she tried to remove herself from hearing. In their own parallel conversation on their side the room, Finn asked Sylvie,

'Are they arguing?'

'Some couples do.'

He observed, 'Well, they always were an odd couple.'

'How so?' asked Sylvie.

'Well, I mean, Jack was a mate and all, and I loved him, as you do with your mates. I would have died for him. But now I look back, he was horrible to girls.'

'A lot of lads are.'

'He'd mess them about, break their hearts, send them fake Valentines, all for a laugh. And back in school we thought he was a hero. We loved it, we couldn't get enough of it, we laughed our heads off.'

'Cruel boys,' she uttered jokingly.

'If there's a mystery here, it's only that I've always been amazed that they're together.'

'Sylvie, a drink for you.' Jack approached her with a bottle. Finn had half expected it to be one of the stubby little Bavarian ones he and Jack would buy by the dozen from the German discount supermarket. But in a sign of more cosmopolitan times, this beer was Indian and in larger, thick-necked bottles. 'And one for you, Finn.'

Chapter 22 – Disassociation

As if outside himself, taking his beer, Finn looked at the four of them there in the large back bedroom – he and Sylvie with their drinks; Jack managing the icebox with the proud bearing of a dad at a barbecue; Belinda looking upward to the ceiling with a distracted air. And Finn saw them, whether this impression was fair or even accurate, as overgrown children the lot of them, holding on with gripping fingers to teenage freedom.

This freedom didn't save them from the jobs he and Sylvie had to do, or from whatever Bel was up to with those folders on her desk, (meanwhile Jack's current occupation remained a mystery). Nor did it save them from the weekly shop, the cost of gas, of rent, or the need to follow the news and keep up with the world. But what it bought them, it seemed to Finn at that moment, was the ability to hold off deciding what they wanted to do with their lives, way beyond the age when any previous generation could have put-off those decisions.

Being back in this bedroom with Belinda, where they'd played so much as kids, worked on projects in the Sixth Form, played Connect Four on the floor, Finn couldn't help but go back to 'the old days'. How old were their parents now? How old had they been then? He could clearly remember his father's fortieth birthday party; and knew that at the rate the years were flying then his own would not be too far off. His parents had always seemed so grown-up – of course they had, he had only known them so. Yet Finn could not pretend that something hadn't happened between their time and his.

On a coffee table by Belinda's little sofa, between a quarterly on the arts and a bi-monthly on antique furniture, was a nature magazine. Finn could appreciate the others, but it was this one that caught his attention. The cover was a deep gloss photo of a zebra on the African savannah. And Finn was gripped then with a yearning envy for the animals and their freedom. Just as he always was when birds flew over him on a bright blue day. He longed for the liberty to move, to run, to fly, to occupy such easy and open arenas. And accompanying this yearning was its familiar fellow feeling, that of asking himself how humans, in their drive for progress and civilisation, had conspired to rob themselves of the freedom of the African plains?

Meanwhile, the open skies were for the most part still beyond humans, hanging over their gridlocked roads and earthbound offices like a cruel taunt. It had been a long-held fantasy of Finn's to just raise his arms and move bird-like into that blue yonder. To swoop and swerve as if a swift, and rest on thermal currents like a bird of prey.

As a child Finn had once dreamt that he had flown down the stairs, righting himself to land at their base in the hall. He had been so young when he'd had this dream that for years he'd thought it had actually happened, before becoming old enough to know that it couldn't possibly have done. It was quite a common dream apparently, flying, though not one his mind had ever repeated.

Remembering his own childhood made Finn think of those people whose ambition was their children. People who, perhaps with a yearning in themselves but no idea where to place it, instead raised families and put their hopes and belief into their own kids. Teaching them that they were amazing and could reach for the stars; and in so doing become amazing people themselves. This was a kind of time-bomb, Finn had always thought – potential stored up for a future generation.

'Grown-up', he realised now, boiled down to the big three commitments of marriage, mortgage and mouths to feed. And any of these could sound to Finn like the prison doors closing at the start of _Porridge_. But why? Were any of them bad things, when he knew that they were all that many people dreamt of? A part of him yearned for a family and a home of his own. But how could he embrace them, give his partner or his child the time they so deserved, when he was yet to be free?

Finn felt something similar when it came to those friends, colleagues and neighbours who wanted only to help him fill every waking hour between leaving the office and going back to it, with leisure and activity. Time is short, he found himself thinking. Do you want it crammed with distraction? Can't we make an effort to savour it?

Yet he despaired in memory of his efforts at trying to explain these real and sincere feelings to even those he knew quite well. 'Don't you want to do more with your evenings and weekends?' they would be asking, and Finn knew that he would sound mad to them. And so he made excuses, and kept it to himself. For though he loved his activities, Finn also took equal pleasure in the prospect of having time coming up where, if he wished it, he could do absolutely nothing at all. That was the deal he made with life.

He had read a story on a news website recently, of volunteers punching a series of air-holes through the Arctic ice sheets to free a school of whales trapped beneath. Each air-hole was near enough to the one before it to be taken with one giant whale-breath.

When Finn thought of his free hours now, he saw them as cubes of air spaced out before him, stretching off into the near future. And he knew that too many days ahead without a clear space and he would began to feel panic, claustrophobia. He would be like a prisoner not allowed out of his cell to visit the recreation ground – was it true that there were men inside who hadn't felt rain in twenty years?

The volunteers had saved two of the whales, another grew too weak. And so Finn knew a whale could die beneath the Arctic ice for want of an air-hole – even calling this image to mind brought a tightening in his chest as real as if a belt was being pulled around him.

Finn had his pleasures though, and spent a good part of his time studying the lives of high achievers and those who had done something unique. He took what lessons he could from their lives – the library was filled with biographies, so he couldn't be alone in this pursuit.

Ferruccio Lamborghini, for instance, didn't even think to build sports cars until he was already making tractors. So should he, Finn, then just get on with making tractors, so to speak, and let the sports cars take care of themselves? That metaphor rather seemed to suggest though that he go back to slugging it away at the mortgage office, until Destiny came calling. When surely Destiny, if she was to call at all, at least needed a door to knock at?

Finn didn't want to go back there, he really didn't want to. He felt that if he did, then any glinting nugget of potential he held would be forever delayed in being revealed. Finn didn't want that, he'd never wanted it: he only wanted to play his own small part in the drama of life. He just hadn't had the call yet from the casting director.

For there needed to be a few odd people who didn't do as all else did, who stepped sideways from society with all its cloying overbearingness, and reported back on the view from outside. Was there not then a bravery in the person who kept a clear mind, and their options open? But to Finn it felt impossible; he could see no way out.

He couldn't quite find the words to express all this rushing through his head now. And it certainly wasn't simply about wanting extended leisure time or an easier life – though, Lord knows he found it no easier than anyone else. It might just be that a good long weekend-morning with his journal was required. He needed his diary. He needed an hour with his diary.

All this fear of encroaching pressure and of life trying to rob him of his vigour came, Finn knew, from his own ill-realised ambitions. The fact that, nearing middle-age, they remained unfulfilled. He spent as long trying to understand them as pursue them. For he only knew that he wanted to do something, with no idea what it was. And how long had he got left?

And then he realised how brief a generation was, and how quickly the next had to follow on its heels. A population then, a nation, was a precarious thing – it could be taken out with one illness, one disease, an infertility plague, and they wouldn't make it out of the next century. 'Oh God,' he realised, the negative thoughts were coming back. 'Get positive,' he thought, 'get positive.'

But how now to express all of these thoughts? His yearning? Where could he be free? Finn didn't know, he only longed again for his diary, to add to that private archive of tens, hundreds of thousands of words; where all he was could be poured out, and every hope and fear absolved and forgiven in the simple act of writing them down; panic and stress and confusion released in the movement of pen on paper.

Life could be stifling; and a need for air to breathe was the hardest thing to justify in a world full of danger and protection. Though perhaps they would just muddle on though, like humanity always had always done before. Just like the Romans had when the Barbarians came calling...

'Finn?'

He was distracted from his train of thought by Belinda calling.

'You in your own little world there?'

'He's had a lot on his mind lately,' explained Sylvie, his de facto carer.

'"The Absent-Minded Professor", my dear Dad used to call him,' remembered Bel.

'Never quite clever enough for that,' muttered Finn beneath his breath.

Chapter 23 – Back in the Room

'Is your Dad..?' asked Sylvie.

Bel nodded.

'I'm sorry to hear that.'

'Oh don't be, it was back when Finn was still here.'

'He was a good man,' remembered Finn.

'The best.'

From there they settled into a relaxed conversation, beers passed around, the seriousness of earlier for now forgotten. Yet their talk had barely resumed and Finn hardly started his drink before that easy-going portion of the evening was over.

'Lord, look at the time,' declared Bel. 'How has it gotten so late?'

Sylvie looked to the clock on the Belinda's wall – wonderfully, it was still one of those oversized wristwatches that hung five feet down from the coving. This was a teenage detail that Belinda had evidently wished to hold on to. It read only seven-fifteen. 'Still early,' thought Sylvie; and then she remembered their own schedule.

'Don't worry, I'll have this later,' said Jack, palming the cap back onto Finn's bottle.

'We'll pick up your friends, and drive you back to town,' instructed Bel. 'Right, I'd better get my coat and shoes on.' She jumped up to go downstairs.

'I'll start the van up,' said Jack. 'She was a bit sticky last night.' And then he stopped, remembering something. 'Finn, you haven't seen the Beemer, have you.'

Finn had to shake his head.

'Come on then, it's in the garage.' Jack jumped up to lead him, forgetting to keep up any pretence that he didn't spend half his life at the house. Finn followed him out.

'She's nice,' whispered Belinda to Finn as they met on the stairs. 'And Finn, I hope you find a way to be happy.' She placed a hand on his arm. 'You know, don't you, that that's all I ever wanted for you.'

Finn felt the things he could have said at that moment. And so he held his tongue – for he knew that in her mind Belinda truly believed that.

These quick departures gave Sylvie a chance to breathe perhaps. But they also left her alone. Alone in the room of the woman who she was certain must once have had Finn's heart stashed with her other keepsakes in that secret drawer beneath the dressing table mirror.

Being around Finn in his recent mood was making her too inward, considered Sylvie. And she didn't like it – she was an outward person, who moved in the real world, not in a mental landscape. Perhaps this was a necessary phase, but that made it no more comfortable. For all the snugness of the bedroom, Sylvie wished she wasn't there. She wished she wasn't even in that city.

'You ready?' called Belinda up the stairs. Coming down to meet their hostess, Sylvie saw her stood below in wide-lapelled sheepskin coat and furry boots. Sylvie pulled her own check coat tight around her.

And then Sylvie remembered something. She quickly asked Belinda about it on the stairs,

'What was that you said when we got here, about the Grand Hotel being distracting?'

To which Bel snickered, before answering in a tone of feminine conspiracy,

'We used to think that that was where the men went with their mistresses.'

Sylvie remembered the scene of canoodling she'd witnessed in the hotel bar, and said,

'I think it is.'

PART FOUR – SOMMERHILL ARTICULATE

Chapter 24 – Champions

Beside the house on its corner were an odd arrangement of garages. As the women arrived outside, so they saw the men at one of these with its doors open, stood before the square-angled nose of a German saloon.

'Isn't she a beauty?' Jack was asking. 'Best year they ever produced. Stay there, Finn. I'll turn the engine over for you.'

'We don't have time,' called Bel; to which Jack grudgingly concurred,

'At least you got to see her anyway.'

On a broad drive in front of the garages, was the small white van. It had side-windows, so was really more of a minibus. Across its back and both sides was borne the legend SUPERCLEAN CHAMPIONS. Beside the words were an image of a bucket and mop, and a mobile phone number.

Unlocking, Belinda hopped up into the high driver's seat.

'I didn't think you drove?' asked Finn. As he asked, Belinda slid the side-door open for them from the inside.

'I had to learn for this job.'

'Only three accidents this year,' noted Jack as he climbed into the passenger seat.

'Only one of those was an accident, thank you,' smiled Belinda. 'The other two were... parking indiscretions.'

'Well, I'd believe you, millions wouldn't.'

'Oh damn, I've not brought the log book with me. Where was it last?'

Belinda jumped out to go back into the house to find it. When she didn't return after a minute, Jack went after her to help. Left alone in the middle row of seats, Sylvie asked Finn,

'Did you..?'

'What?'

'Fancy her?'

'Who wouldn't?'

'Did you get silly over her?'

'I don't care to remember.'

'Did it spoil things?'

'Kind-of.'

'That can happen sometimes.'

The host couple clambered back in. And with a cheery, 'Found it. Everybody strapped in?' they left for the forecourt of the pub.

The night was dark now, and the roads were free of traffic.

'I'll go and fetch the others,' offered Sylvie as they pulled up on the carpark. Though this was more to have a chance to speak to Jemima than out of philanthropy.

Having fetched them from the same barroom table, Sylvie delayed her friend a moment, leaving a bemused Jasper to climb into the van alone.

Stood outside with Jemima, Sylvie asked her,

'Everything okay?'

'Why shouldn't it be?'

Sylvie hadn't time for niceties, and might not have another chance,

'You know he's married? And has a family?'

'Honestly,' was all Jemima answered.

'What?'

'You think every meeting with a man's about sex?'

'Well, tell me this one isn't?'

'Gah! I can't believe you, Sylvie.'

'Well, what's that supposed to mean?'

'It means, don't judge everyone by your standards. You think you're the World's Expert in men. But look at you, you're thirty and single and no-one on the horizon.'

Each woman was as shocked as the other that the preceding exchange had just taken place. Jemima quickly scrambled into the van, leaving Sylvie to say to herself,

'I don't know what's gotten into everybody – one night out of town and we're falling apart!'

Chapter 25 – Associated Something

'Everything all right?' asked Belinda once the group were boarded. Now, there was a woman, Sylvie felt, whose enthusiasm for every little thing might after a while become slightly wearing.

'In fact,' their hostess then declared, 'I've just had a brilliant idea. Finn, there's something you've got to see.'

ASSOCIATED STYLISTS

Such was the name spelt out in large metal letters across the first floor brickwork of the building that Belinda had parked outside. A stone's throw from the Sommerhill Grand, Jasper and Jemima had since left to make their way back to the hotel. But Bel had brought the party to this spot especially, and now Finn and Sylvie stood with Jack and her outside.

Above the lettering on the building's wall were the first-floor strip windows of the architects' office itself. Through these the visitors could see the looming corners of four-metre-square drawing boards. The ground floor was a floor-to-ceiling glass foyer. Through those windows they saw large-scale card and plastic models of the firm's current projects displayed for visitors and passers-by. Finn moved closer to the glass to see these in more detail,

'This one's a train station, I reckon.'

'No, it's a shop. See the displays?' spotted Sylvie.

'Look at the little cars in the street outside,' he noted with awe at their craft.

'I think this one's a church,' she guessed.

'Don't be daft, they don't make new churches any more,' he muttered with distain.

'No, it really is one,' confirmed Bel with a confidence that hinted at secret knowledge, and so which beguiled her returned friend.

Finn knew why Bel had brought them here. As Sixth Form students, working on a Business Studies project, he and Belinda had played a silly game. Asked to come up with a mock-business plan, they had then spent more time coming up with their new firm's name and logo, than in consideration of what their business would trade in. Finn had been quite proud to come up with title Oration Corp, whose principle Bel then took to form her Imie Ltd. They had settled though, in the inexplicable humour of youth and to the mystification of their tutor, on the trading name Associated Something.

The details of the business plan Finn could not now recall. However, he remembered how as a young worker in town, during those months of turmoil that would soon see his self-imposed exile from the only city he knew, he would walk past the building they were now stood in front of. And every time he saw the sign he would recall their made up name.

'You remember?' asked Bel.

'Of course.' He smiled.

Bel amazed them then by producing the keys with which she unlocked the foyer's front door, and invited them all in. Jack then let himself behind the receptionist's desk, to open a panel there and type numbers into a flashing alarm console.

'He has to do it – I can never remember the combination,' laughed Belinda. 'Come on then.'

She led them through another security-locked door and up the stairs. At the first-floor landing they met a man in a blue polo shirt bearing the same name and logo as written on the minivan, SUPERCLEAN CHAMPIONS.

'All done?' Belinda asked the man.

He nodded sagely and silently.

'Right, gather them up then, and go to the van.'

'Yes, Miss.'

His accent was African. Nor had he been in Britain long, Finn guessed. Without the man having to do very much gathering, from the door onto the landing trickled a steady stream of others in blue polo shirts, carrying polish, chamois and rolls of binbags. One woman, so fair that her hair and skin seemed almost translucent, paused to roll two mop-and-bucket appliances into a cupboard on the landing, and lock it closed.

'And they're all still wearing the old shirts,' noted Belinda to her underling. 'Why aren't they wearing the black shirts?'

'They don't like the new colour,' answered the African man. 'They like the brighter colour.'

'But the bright ones show up too much dirt. I told you, we can't have you walking around covered in dirt.'

'The dirt is always there, Miss,' he offered philosophically.

Though this didn't confound Belinda for long,

'Right then, chop chop. All off to Brown's,' she instructed. The workers and their kind-of supervisor left with Jack, to be carried away in the vehicle Finn and Sylvie had just been brought there in.

Chapter 26 – At the Architects' Office

Finn watched the workers file out. When he recalled this moment in the future, he would remember them as seeming downcast, oppressed. Yet he could never be sure how accurate that image had been, and how much of it was his impression imposing on the memory. He watched the scene feeling like a Government inspector visiting a colony in the days of Empire. It left him feeling dirty, and he wondered how the British – and other nationalities – back then had felt the right to walk into someone else's country and expect the locals to start fetching their drinks?

Belinda held the door to the architects' office open, and Sylvie and Finn walked through onto the open-plan floor. Still fully-lit, Finn felt exposed before the wall of windows. At night, and with the lights in the buildings beside them snuffed out, the plates of glass seemed like obsidian reliefs or flawless black marble.

'What a life for the cleaners though,' thought Sylvie as she moved through the spotless office – for they'd done a fine job regardless. Entering the palaces of finance and power and art, but only when the real occupants weren't there to see them. The superclean champions were not allowed to be there in their own right, but only to clean up after those who were. 'What a life,' she repeated to herself, drifting apart from the others to look at what was on the drawing boards.

Amid the boards was a break-out area: two sofas by a whiteboard, at which Bel bid Finn to sit by her.

'Superclean Champions,' he muttered. 'So that's what you do?'

'Well, not personally!' she laughed. 'I'm not Mrs Mop.'

'But it's your business?'

'It's a franchise; we own this city's branch.'

So odd was all of this that Finn could not quite settle.

'Relax, Finn,' Belinda told him, noticing this. 'The floor is ours for the evening. Jack will be back once he's dropped them off at Brown's.'

Brown's was a department store, Finn remembered. Nowadays it was part of a national chain. However, in name only it was one of Sommerhill's oldest businesses. For Belinda to have that contract must've meant that things were going well.

'Where do you find them?'

'Who? The workers? The Jobcentre mostly, word-of-mouth or ads in the paper.'

'Where are they from?'

'Kenya, Somalia, Romania. Anywhere really where they don't speak very good English or have qualifications they can use here.'

'And that African man. Is he their supervisor?'

'If you want to call him that. He's kind of group leader. Lord knows what he did back home, he was probably a witch doctor. He gives me the creeps.'

'You say group leader. So how many groups?'

'Three as it stands.'

'All somewhere in the city?'

'Even as we speak. We also have another assistant; he does most of the driving between sites. Jack and I try to give ourselves as little to do in the evenings as possible now.'

'And it doesn't all feel a little..?'

'What?'

The fact that Belinda had not a clue of what he was referring to was all the proof Finn needed that the girl who'd been his best friend, who had shared his mind, who had known what he was thinking even before he thought it, and vice versa, was that girl no longer. Indeed, she had become her own boss, as they had both often dreamed of being. Only this was in a rather different line of business to that which they'd imagined.

He heard his own thoughts – 'the girl who'd shared his mind' – how teenage it all felt. Yet Finn had learnt that this was what could happen when you met people (or perhaps even read a book or heard a song) not encountered for decades.

Finn looked at the room around him – he wasn't sure if he was more alienated by the cold clinical office they were sat in, or by the strange human display he had just witnessed. At this point he was prepared to drop it, smile along until his freedom came. He could feel sad about Belinda later. But she had clocked on by then, and answered,

'Exploitative? Is that what I should feel?'

'Well, I only mean.'

'Is it perfect? No. Do I feel great about it? Is it what I dreamt I'd be doing? Does it match the record stores and fashion houses we dreamt of? Never in a million years. But it's real, Finn. And life is tough, and we're lucky to have this.'

'But the workers...'

'What about them? No thanks that we're helping immigrants who've just arrived here? That we're giving them the only jobs they're qualified to do? Did they look mistreated? Did they look unhappy?'

'Well, they were hardly leaping for joy, were they?'

'Well, neither have you been this evening. You think I've changed, Finn? Have you seen yourself lately?'

Chapter 27 – Air-Holes for Orcas

Since arriving, Sylvie had been drifting around the architects' floor: looking at the city from the windows, and at the miniature versions of those buildings on the architects' desks. Yet, from across the silent office she had been unable to avoid overhearing the others' conversation. She didn't like to eavesdrop – it made her feel a snoop. Yet she had nowhere to go to avoid their carried voices. Nor could she join them, as they obviously needed to talk.

Now, from the far end of the office, Sylvie's hearing caught Belinda asking Finn that last question. On that point the women would agree – Finn hadn't been himself. But what did Sylvie make of those other half-heard snatches of conversation? Such as the young hopes of Bel and Finn's shared past? A past that pre-dated hers and Finn's. And what of those ambitions she'd never heard him talk of: his dreams of record stores?

The pair on the sofas though were scrapping. Finn launched in with,

'Don't you moralise me to make your own choices feel acceptable.'

Belinda countered, 'You criticise my business; but did you ever try it? Have you a clue of how tough it's been for us? And you thought that running a shop would be easy!'

'I just can't help feeling a little...'

'Disappointed?'

'Yes.'

'How dare you. How could you?' she accused.

'What?' he answered. 'Be disappointed to come back and find you running a chain gang? Why don't you take them out onto the State Highway, Bel, and have them dig you a few miles of service trench?'

She let out an exasperated gasp that seemed to shake her entire body, then said,

'I'd forgotten just what a piece of work you can be.'

'What?'

'Finn, you are the single most cynical, judgemental, fault-finding, vain, unaware...'

'Don't hold back there, Bel.'

She paused again, before asking, 'Did it ever occur to you, when you went away, that some of us might have thought that it was you who were the one going on to better things?'

It hadn't occurred to him.

'Finn, it was you who broke the shackles and got to live the dream. The example to us all, who we could pin our hopes on and could say, "Well, we're stuck here by chance and circumstance, but not Finn. He left it all behind, he flew the nest, he went off chasing the sun. I wonder what he got to do?"'

She concluded, 'And yet, of all the things in the world you could have done, you left us to become an insurance salesman? And now you're putting families out on the street to boot!'

He squirmed, 'You know I can't do that job. That's why I'm in the mess I'm in.'

'But still.'

'You feel let down,' he summarised.

'And haven't I the right to be? At least to feel as disappointed in you as you are in me?'

At this Belinda cried. Sylvie, who hadn't even wanted to be listening, knew she had to risk going over and interrupting. But before she'd gotten very far, Bel had composed herself, leaving Sylvie at safe distance.

Finn hadn't realised his absence had built up a mythology. Without him there to offer the reality, others could imagine him living the life they'd only dreamt of.

Yet what cruel twist had come to pass, that on his return he came only to represent the suggestion that there was no mythical escape, that all roads led back to the same place, just under a different postcode? This was not what others had hoped to learn from Finn on his return from El Dorado. Yet it was this that he symbolised. It felt to him now, that had he merely stayed in Sommerhill and plugged away in dull jobs, then he couldn't possibly have done so much harm.

Bel spoke again to Finn, quieter now,

'Do you know how hard I work? How much this cleaning business takes of me? And how little of what I make from it is left for me at the end?'

He answered, 'But you live at home. How much can that be costing you?'

She let out a slow, tired breath, before answering,

'Finn, I own that house now. The mortgage is mine; sold to me three years ago by someone just like you. Someone who can't wait to nab the lot back off me the moment I slip up with the repayments.'

Finn took that slight on the chin. Though he found the next one harder,

'An insurance salesman...'

I'm not in sales, he wanted to say. But it would have been a moot point.

'An insurance salesman. To think that's all you are, Finn. You'd have done better staying away and not telling me. Why did you leave just for that? And jobs in banks?'

Bel was clearly on a roll. Finn accepted it, knowing she needed it saying. His role in the discussion for those few minutes was purely to accept.

She continued, 'I saw the way you looked down at my things, my ornaments. You thought them passé, what any middle-aged woman would have in her house. That's how you see me, isn't it? Just a fat old housewife.'

'A lot of men dream of a fat housewife.'

'Stop trying to be funny, Finn. It never suited you.'

'I only meant to...'

Stop talking, Finn.'

'Why.'

She caught her breath, 'Because... every time I hear you speak, I think of the words that used to spill out of you. And it makes me sad to think you did nothing with them.'

Chapter 28 – Countering with Joy

Finn paused, but couldn't help himself, saying to Bel,

'Then you won't want to hear that I loved your room, and that it brought a smile to my face. And you won't want to hear what I think of you now?'

'Which is?'

'That you're more beautiful than ever, that you're the woman I knew the girl would become.'

He paused, suddenly embarrassed. She answered,

'You're right; I didn't want to hear it. But thanks.'

'You know I could never help praising you.'

'And my curse that I could never accept it.'

Once absolutely sure that their old understanding was still in place, she placed her hand on his, saying,

'I'm sorry. I don't mean to shout. And you are kind; and you're not yourself. When did you last feel joy, Finn?'

'This morning, actually.' He surprised himself to realise this, remembering running out of the conference.

'And the time before that?'

'I don't know.'

'Jack's had depression; he was in treatment for years.'

'I know.'

'I know you know. Because we told you how bad he was, and you never came. It was the last letter I sent you. I suppose you're on online or whatever now. I've meant to look for you, but it's difficult when you think you've been...'

'...rejected?'

'...left behind. You think the other person's moved on, that they wouldn't want the past dragging around their ankles.'

'It was good we had the distance.'

'It was. But look at us now, neither of us happy with the way that the other has turned out – how amazing that we had such high hopes for each other.'

'Till life caught us.'

'Like a tar pit. Is this all we'll ever be, Finn?'

'I don't know.'

'Then what was the point of all our dreams? Just to be burnt off like dew in the morning sun?'

The sitting area in the office was less cosy than Belinda's own room. It had black leather sofas, and a coffee table of metal and smoked glass. Yet upon that table, among others, was another copy of that same nature magazine. Cover price eight pounds. This though was a different issue with a different animal. Instead of zebras, it offered a deep-gloss photo of a bright blue sky over Arctic plains. The nose of a killer whale was protruding from a crude opening in the ice. It looked to Finn like it was smiling. Did Orcas smile?

'Air-Holes for the Ice-Bound,' read Bel.

'It's broken my daydream,' muttered Finn.

'I bet its smiling because it's just eaten a sea-lion, or some other poor creature. You always loved predatory animals, Finn, I remember now. You found them exciting. You weren't worried if they killed something cute and furry.'

'Well, animals aren't humans.'

'But still, for someone who claimed to love the little guy... You're not a sea-lion, Finn. You're an Orca – you'd eat a bear cub for breakfast. You may still be one, inside. You never admitted your ambition to yourself; that was your problem. You placed it all on me, wanted me to change your world for you. You saw me as this goddess.'

'You were.'

'It was all too much pressure – I could never have lived up to it.'

'And there was I thinking you were holding out for something better.'

She drew a deep intake of breath. He went on,

'You had your own dreams too, Bel, with yourself cast as queen. You just didn't see me as your king.'

'That's harsh, Finn. That's harsh. And doubly so as you see me now. For he hardly came along, did he, my king? I'm hardly in Camelot.'

She caught herself. 'No, that's not fair though. I do love Jack, in his way.' She said this effortlessly breaking her secret, which was a relief to her.

'Just not in a grand-passion way?' asked Finn.

'No, not the way I dreamt I'd love. But then perhaps we love differently when we're older?'

'Lesser?'

'No, deeper, less like excitement.'

'And more like..?'

'Kindness. Acceptance. Forgiveness.'

'Sounds nice.'

'Yes,' she said, with the air of one only realising it that moment. 'I think it is.'

It all made sense now to the listening Sylvie, how a couple, who had been such good friends and had shared the same dreams, had detonated themselves. She could see it now: Finn would have pledged his troth like a knight of old to his queen: and there could have been no middle ground, only acceptance of devotion, or rejection to exile.

And what had been the reason for that rejection? What was there in Finn's make-up that did not fit with Belinda's ideal? His kookiness? His idiosyncrasy? His difference? (In short, the very things that Sylvie had always liked about him?)

For it was undeniable that Jack was a more conventional sort, at least in his broad-shouldered appearance and easy manner in the pub. (There was still the matter of this illness though. What had Belinda said: depression? An illness Sylvie knew little of, except for how badly it affected people. There was a colleague she remembered, who was off work for months. If only she knew more about this – she would have to try and ask.)

How awful for the boy Finn though, she considered, to have got so close to his image of perfection and then been rejected by it. He must have doubted he would ever come so close again. Well, Sylvie was determined now to show him that something like happiness was possible.

Lost in thought, Sylvie had missed out on what the pair said next. She was not by nature an eavesdropper. Yet she was trapped down the far end of the room, with no way to leave without disturbing their one chance to talk. Also, the things Sylvie was learning seemed vital to know, and given Finn's secrecy it might be years before she found them out herself. But Sylvie didn't like it or want it. She determined to lose herself in the designs on the drawing boards.

Chapter 29 – The Future yet Unbuilt

Yet even as Sylvie re-focused on the pictures, she was offered a way out. Bel was saying,

'...And talking of Sylvie, where is she? Oh look at me, the worst hostess in the world. Sylvie? Sylvie?'

'I'm over here,' answered the unhappy eavesdropper.

'I thought we'd lost you!' Bel came to stand next to Sylvie at the window. Together they looked along the street below and to the square of rustling trees beyond it. Behind the trees were shadowed buildings with postage stamp lights.

'I often come up here at night to think,' recalled Bel. 'I have the run of the place, you see. And in this job you keep such odd hours.'

'Have we confused things coming here?'

'You heard our raised voices?'

'Only echoes,' lied Sylvie.

'No, you haven't confused anything. In fact it's nice to get it said. I've missed him.'

'I've been looking at the pictures,' said Sylvie, turning to the nearest drafting board. 'Look at this cross-section of a building, it's fantastic.'

'It is,' concurred Bel.

'I used to draw a bit myself,' confessed Sylvie.

'You should get back into it.'

'I was no good at it. Not like these guys.'

Yet Belinda was not the type to let an argument like that get in her way. She said to Sylvie,

'But look at all the help they have – rulers, set squares, French curves. They're probably no good either left alone with a piece of paper.'

Sylvie nodded, glad of the encouragement – the other woman seemed so powerful to her now, after hearing how she'd spoken to Finn. Such a presence, hardly a woman at all, as Sylvie understood herself. She wondered what kind of man could bear her. Would he either be henpecked, or exhausted by the effort of always having to stand up to her? Jack seemed quite relaxed though – perhaps he just ignored Bel when she reached a certain pitch?

'Come on, let's get a drink.'

Leading on to a door in the wall of the office, Bel opened it to reveal a coffee-making area. Leaning down to a small fridge, she opened it to take out three tiny bottles of lager. On a shelf beside the fridge Sylvie saw a bottle of champagne.

'For closing business meetings,' explained Bel. 'Don't worry, I'll replace these tomorrow. They won't miss them in the meantime.'

Bel opened the first bottle and passed it to Sylvie, but she shook her head,

'I won't, thank you. I might get back. It's been a long day.'

'And no sign of it getting any shorter.'

'I'm okay to go out by myself?'

'Yes, just make sure the doors lock behind you.'

'Then, thank you for showing us around today.'

'No, please you're very welcome.'

The pair smiled, before Belinda asked,

'What will you pair do?'

'I don't know. Find other jobs, I hope.'

'And will that make him happy?'

'I don't think he knows what would make him happy.'

Bel looked back in Finn's direction,

'You're sure you won't come over?'

But Sylvie shook her head,

'You need to talk. Go back to him. He needs you.'

'Then it's been lovely to meet you.'

'And you too.'

Bel smiled, and left with their bottles.

Meanwhile, Sylvie skipped down the unlit staircase, and whispered to herself,

'You still love her.' It made a lot of sense though. Consumed by the ghost of the one who had rejected him years before. Sylvie shook her head, 'Finn, you poor devil.'

Chapter 30 – The Old Team

Belinda came back to Finn with the bottles,

'Sylvie was looking at the pictures on the drawing boards.'

'Yes, she likes art.'

'She's a bright one.'

'She doesn't miss much,' agreed Finn.

'And you don't want to miss her.'

'It's not like that,' he said.

'Then maybe you need to make it?'

Finn didn't answer, and Belinda changed the topic,

'It was Jack who found out you were here. Paul rang earlier.'

'Yes, he told us. Was Jack at the house?'

'As it happened, in between drop-offs. It gave me time to prepare myself. Emotionally, I mean.'

'I know.'

'Jack remembered how you'd felt about me. I think he'd heard a lot of it from you.'

'He had.'

'Jack and I met properly when he was ill. He got in touch with me to get in touch with you; but we found each other. I could help him, and later he helped me.'

'He's big-hearted.'

'Yes.'

'And a flirt.'

'You underestimate his charm,' she said, as one who clearly didn't.

'Well, I'm glad you had somebody.'

'There were a few actually – does that shock you?'

'I'm not a puritan.'

'And I'm not a nun.'

'No.'

'So what about you?' she asked.

'What?'

'Have you been getting much?'

'No.'

'No, I didn't think you would. Or is it insensitive me asking with Sylvie in town?'

Finn let the question hang.

Sat with their drinks now, Bel was saying,

'And I did move out, you know. I was married, for three years. It's a good job my Mum kept my room. I wasn't in a position to look after myself at that time.'

'I didn't know.'

'No, there's a lot you don't.'

'Who was he?'

'A design student. He might even be doing something like this now.' She gestured with her arm across the rows of drawing boards, large computer screens, and artists' models. 'I really thought it would work – that I'd support him while he studied, then he'd keep me once famous; which I was certain he would be.'

'Only he never was?'

'I never found out – he didn't hang around long enough. I don't know why he married me, actually. The world and his wife – especially his wife – were full of advice afterwards. "Oh, you should have found someone more stable, in a more-secure job." I think that put me off trying again more than the divorce did.'

'So, what's Jack?'

'Jack makes me laugh. He's warm, funny.'

'I can imagine.'

'So what's Sylvie to you?'

'She's nothing...'

...were the words that hung in Finn's ears, as if they had been spoken by another person. He heard them carry across the empty office, in his shock stumbling mid-sentence. But time hadn't stopped, Finn was continuing, fumbling his words; and soon he knew he'd got it wrong...

'...She's not... not like that, I mean. She's a friend.'

'A good one?'

'The best.'

'She seems it,' struck Belinda.

'She is.'

'Better than you deserve.'

'In that one respect, I have a habit of punching above my weight.'

'God, you put things in the strangest way.'

'It's just how my mind works.'

'All these little quirks of yours I'd forgotten,' said Belinda in playful tone. 'Well, I suppose I was your friend once, so I should take that as a compliment.'

'You still are.'

Yet inside Finn was reeling. For he had realised something: that Sylvie was anything but nothing.

Chapter 31 – Sylvie Stood Outside

Even as she jogged down the staircase, Sylvie began to relax. The new-found freedom nearly had her scurrying out onto the pavement and straight back to the hotel. Released from her awkward situation, she no longer had to fear the ultimate reward of an eavesdropper: that of hearing herself spoken of in terms she wouldn't value.

Sylvie came out through reception and pushed the security door shut – and welcomed the cool of evening. There she stood awhile, unnoticed by the odd late-night shopper or passing bus.

Upstairs, she had watched the tops of those buses go past. On the leather sofas still, the pair would be rumbling on in their reminiscences. Yet, in the quiet street, Sylvie had a chance to question her own feelings:

Had this odd visit, and the shake-up it had caused, and Finn's... well, bravery in not going into the hated conference room... Had it had her imagining she had feelings for him?

There were certainly maternal feelings, the clear need he had for someone to look out for him... And then it clicked. The reason Sylvie had been so glad to leave the room, was that she didn't want to hear that she wasn't loved.

Anything but that.

How ridiculous. The moment of realising this felt like being shot. For if she didn't love him, then why did she fear his words so badly?

Sylvie breathed. Maybe it was nothing very much worse than being brought around to her senses? Though Finn had been a great friend, she had never fancied him. He had never filled her image of a man; at least the image of a man she wanted in that way. Yet he had been brave, quite extraordinarily so in fact. The only one of perhaps a hundred delegates to have both the humanity to find the conference room repellent, and the courage – or perhaps just mortal fear – not to be able to go in. That was a moment she would always treasure, and it made her breathing quicken just to think of it.

Sylvie's thoughts turned to their hosts. Did Jack love Bel, or she him? Sylvie wasn't sure, yet she envied them, envied any pair she saw together. There seemed only one true love among the four of them, and that was what Finn had once held – and had instantly rekindled – for Bel. Who was it who had said that everyone has the right to feel love once in a lifetime, but not the right to not get hurt by it?

Pity, kindness, friendship – Sylvie felt all these things for Finn. But now, in his single act of saying no, he had challenged her assumptions of what her life could be. He had opened up the possibility of her days being more than just holding onto the best role she could hope for in the office she found herself bound to. Again, her breathing quickened – she was a sensual woman, and she had the right to feel this.

But it only brought her back to her central question. She had known her share of men, yet sensed the next would be her 'keeper'. If it was love she felt now, then it was in a different way to with any other man she'd known.

He had no confidence, she realised. That was the issue. A man without confidence was like an engine without steam, a balloon without hot air – he simply didn't work. And it was the quality of him owning the room he was in, and of him sweeping her along with him, that was what Sylvie loved about a man. As she thought this she imagined such a figure, imagined him holding her. She held the mental image, let it pause, rewind and replay in her mind.

She had never before been with a man without brio. Indeed, it was her first requirement, for it was – or had been – her iron rule to never make the first move. If a man had not the nerve to come over and approach her, even after offering him the signs, then the encounter simply wouldn't ever happen.

Yet Finn had no confidence, was lost in the world. How could she feel her usual passion for a man she was virtually nursing, as she had been that day? Sylvie wasn't sure if she was asking herself the question or telling herself the answer.

There was something there, and it would take her time to figure it out. But it was all too uncertain and confusing, and a part of her only wanted to nip it in the bud the first chance she had. At least for the time being, until she understood it better.

Chapter 32 – First and Fondest Loves

Back in the break-out area, with a beer so cold that he could hardly drink it, Finn was remembering his dreams,

'Record shops are the last bastion of civilisation.'

'The Net would have done for you by now,' speculated Bel.

'Not if you'd done it properly. Not if you'd made the shop itself a place to want to visit, to be seen in.'

'We used to say that fashion shops and record shops and book shops were the last acceptable faces of capitalism,' she remembered. 'The only businesses the outsider and the outcast could support.'

'We were right,' he said.

Bel tried to bring those thoughts up to date,

'But for that reason the world is stuffed with them, and most are scratching around for corn, in low-rent sectors and making one sale a day. To think of that as your future is to be lost inside your record collection.'

'It's following a dream,' he answered, suddenly finding himself defending the point.

'It's staving off extinction,' she countered. 'It's living in the past. It's not becoming an adult.'

He gasped. She continued,

'We can't live in dreams, Finn. That's the danger that I'm holding you back from.' She caught herself then, as she'd a habit of doing, for she had gone far too far,

'I'm sorry, I didn't want to shout. Forgive me, Finn. Don't let us part on bad terms again for another who-knows-how-many years.'

'We won't, we won't,' he assured her. 'But these were your dreams too, Bel, and it hurts to hear you slate them.'

'But that's because they didn't come true. I tried them, Finn. I ran a fashion outlet, and it went to the wall.'

'I hadn't known.'

'What do you think I was doing here all these years? You left me to do it on my own, Finn, and I failed. You think Superclean Champions was ever my first choice?'

'So much has happened, and I've missed it.'

'You don't know the half of it, Mister,' she muttered, but left her words unclarified. 'I love book shops and record shops and all the other things you loved. You know I do.'

And Finn knew she did. Here was his friend again, and how he'd missed her. He leant across and hugged her,

'Do you remember our bands?'

She nodded. 'Do you still listen to them?'

'Off and on, I've still got my old CDs.'

'And the magazines we used to read!' It all came back to her then. 'I even had my favourite writers; they were like heroes and heroines to me.'

'I wonder where they are now?' he asked.

'Where do you think they are?' began Belinda. 'They grew up, had kids, stopped being perpetual adolescents. They started writing for proper newspapers, writing about what proper people are concerned about. Important joyless stuff like tax rates and house prices and mortgages – sorry to mention that subject – and what the judges on TV talent contests are wearing that week. They "put away childish things", those first and fondest loves. They left you and me behind, kid. And don't you feel the fool for it?'

'And how wonderful for them,' he took up her theme, 'for those first loves to be so easily put-asideable. Don't you wonder sometimes, Bel, if you're the only sucker left with a soul? The only one who can't make the cynical decisions? And then wonder just how much your life has been put back for this "lack"?'

'God, Finn, look at us talking like we haven't been apart for five minutes.'

'You're not embarrassed of being too friendly then?' he asked. 'Worried I'll fall for you all over again? That was what killed us the first time.'

'Yes it was, wasn't it? I'd quite forgotten. What must it have been like for you all those years with that unforgetting memory of yours? Every disappointment and mistake kept in Technicolor?'

'So you're not embarrassed?' he asked again.

'No, that's not going to happen again now, is it. I'm not the apple of anybody's eye these days.'

'Just Jack's.'

'He doesn't fancy me, not properly. You fancied me because I was cute, not for anything else.'

'I fancied you because you were cute and everything else.'

She tried to flinch away her smile, replying,

'You say the nicest things – what a shame your Casanova gene was wasted on the rest of you. You weren't ever built right, were you?'

'No.'

'It must be difficult.'

'Sometimes.'

'And no, I'm not embarrassed,' she said. 'For it will never happen, for a hundred different reasons.' Bel kissed him on the forehead, then hesitated,

'Look, however it works out with your job... Well, you'll never go penniless. You'll always have a job here.'

'Cleaning?'

'It's all we could offer. Sorry. I don't mean to offend you. I only mean as a last resort.'

Finn was suddenly aware the hypocrisy of his position, fighting a gut-reaction that he was better than the jobs of those cleaners, who he was minutes before defending as good and noble people.

'Yes, I know. Thank you.'

'Look, it's better than the streets. That's all I meant.'

And he understood; and it bought him some assurance... and an understanding of how desperate he had become.

'I'll get us another drink.'

But before Finn could say he didn't need one, Bel had paused, standing by the sofas, and said,

'There comes a time when we catch ourselves in the mirror, and we see that we're no longer the looker we once fancied we were.'

'Bel...'

'No, Finn. Let me say this... And it's then that we know our chances have been missed, and are not sure to be repeated.'

What a woman. A feeling washed over Finn then. It was pride in the strength of his old feelings, and how long they'd taken to fade. Along with that haunting sense of, 'If only I had done something differently...'

But they lasted only a moment; and the sound of an engine outside brought him back to his old self.

Chapter 33 – A Man in a Van

The perfect distraction for Sylvie came in the shape of the SUPERCLEAN CHAMPIONS transporter approaching. She heard it first of all, pulling up onto the pavement and bouncing over uneven slabs. She turned to see Jack waving from the cabin.

'What are you doing out here?' he asked her as he got out.

'Just taking in the night air before we go back.'

'Are the others still up there?'

'Are you going to get them?'

'No, I'll give them five minutes if they're still talking.'

Finn and Belinda – God, what a couple they'd have been with names like that, the Richard Burton and Liz Taylor of the Sommerhill second-hand records scene. They'd be leaving soon, and Sylvie saw her last chance to ask Jack a question,

'Tell me about your illness, and why Finn didn't visit.'

It was a hard question asked bluntly, but Jack seemed good for it,

'Well, you'd have to ask Finn the second part. But the illness was depression, so they call it, but the word doesn't begin to do the thing justice.'

'What, feeling blue? Feeling down?'

To which he gave a knowing smirk,

'If that's all you think it is, then I thank heaven for the fact you've evidently never known it.'

That he'd seemingly dismissed her saddest times with a brush of the arm, Sylvie put to one side and listened.

'You want to know how I understood it?' Jack went on. 'Imagine emotion passing through you like waves, as though you're being pulled by the currents of an ocean. And everywhere you look you see each person's loss, feel every object's sadness, approach the world as if witnessing its passing, knowing that every bit of it will someday end. To see a carefree family, and worry only over their eventual parting. See a happy home, and imagine it instead one day stood empty. Old photographs, old buildings catching your attention and you can't look away.'

'Sounds awful.'

Jack looked down as he lit a cigarette,

'You smoke?'

Sylvie shook her head. He continued,

'It was like I hadn't felt for years, and it had all backed up. The funny thing was that it was beautiful, like being trapped in the best film ever made, the saddest song. Everything was brittle and fragile and could be lost in a moment.'

'Wow.'

'But when you have that every minute, every hour, for days. God, I'd have let them commit me by then if they'd have told me that would end it.'

'What did end it?'

'Rest, and letting go of everything, even my job. And talking, endless talking, like you're the vainest person in the world. Never shutting up about yourself, as people sit by you jotting in notebooks.'

'And you had Bel?'

'I asked her to find Finn – I guessed they were still in touch.'

'And she stuck around?'

'She stuck around.'

And then Jack smirked a warm smirk again, whispering,

'She's worried that I'm flirting with you.'

'From what I've heard, she's right to be.'

'You know you'd love it,' said Jack, before walking back to the van to honk the horn.

And Sylvie really didn't know if he was joking.

'You might never have a chance to find out,' she whispered to herself, wondering whether they would ever see each other again.

Chapter 34 – Goodbyes

As the car horn sounded, Bel craned her neck to look down to the street below. Finn followed her gaze and saw the roof of a white van. A further musical beeping of the horn confirmed that it was Jack.

'That's my ride,' she said. 'I'm afraid I'm going to have to cast you out.'

Finn took one last look outside, before turning to leave himself, saying,

'There's not much out there now.'

'No,' answered Bel. 'Only buses and taxis, the odd executive off home late. Fridays are busier, but you see it all from up here.'

'I'll bet you do,' he whispered. He was so close to the glass that is steamed.

It was cold outside on the pavement. Finn hadn't noticed how warm they'd become inside. Jack had gotten out of the cab and was smoking by the building's door, leaning back on the cold glass. And beside him was Sylvie. Bel observed,

'Look at you pair, smoking behind the bike-sheds. How long have you been back here?'

'Only five minutes,' answered Jack.

'So you say.'

'Well, you don't let me smoke in the house.'

Sylvie and Finn shared a look to say, God, they're at it again.

'So what are your plans?' Belinda asked them on the pavement.

'Back to the hotel,' answered Finn.

'And after that?'

'Off home I suppose.'

'Home where?'

'Where I live now, I mean.'

'I knew what you meant,' said Bel smiling. 'But you haven't told us anything about your new life.' She followed Finn to the van after locking the building door.

'And will we see you again?'

'I don't know,' was all Finn could say.

'No, you wouldn't know. How could you know?' she asked rhetorically.

Was Bel being antsy? Finn couldn't judge. Their tour guide went back into performance-mode, looking up at the windows of the room they'd just been in,

'I would have trusted you pair to lock up after yourselves, if you'd wanted to hang around up there awhile. But the insurance contract demands that "the keys remain in the possession of a company employee at all times". I can't tell you the times I've rolled over them in bed.'

At which the women giggled.

'Is this where we leave you?' asked Bel

'Yes, the hotel's just over there,' answered Finn.

'Then we'll offer our goodbyes.'

'It was good to see you, Finn.' Jack took his hand.

'You too,' he answered as they shook with no hard feelings.

'Look after him,' Jack called to Sylvie.

'He's not mine to...'

But before Sylvie could finish the sentence, Belinda had her in her arms, smothering her in her sheepskin coat,

'My dear, it's been a pleasure to meet you.' While embracing Sylvie, she whispered, 'Don't break his heart – you don't want it on your conscience, as told by one who knows.'

But before Sylvie could respond to that, Bel had concluded their bear hug, and had transferred her grappling arms to Finn,

'And as for you, you hopeless, loveable man.'

She squeezed, and then she whispered, with a note of the alcohol they'd been drinking on her breath,

'Is it possible for someone to have made the worst mistake?'

But just as quickly she had broken off that second hug, and was back at Jack's side, evidently waiting for the visitors to leave before they got in the van.

'Now go. Don't get into any more trouble. Go to your hotel, I command you.'

And they obeyed.

As they parted, Finn looked back and saw Bel watching them walk away; before Jack finally stamped out his cigarette and they got into cab. Finn had seen her again, Belinda. He could hardly believe it. She had not fulfilled her dreams, and nor had he. But was that hardly unexpected? For they had hoped for so much from life in some young and undefined way, that to have achieved it, to have become the people they envisaged themselves becoming, would have been almost supernatural.

Finn watched their heads bobbing in the cab; the vehicle starting and its lights turning on. Bel's hair shone in the interior light for a moment, before Jack's door closed and they became silhouettes. And Finn realised that for all the modern Bel's hard work and business nous, he saw her now as an enchanted princess, a younger Miss Haversham; somehow doomed, held in suspended animation, trapped in a fantasy.

Finn gave the pair one last look, before turning to face his destination.

PART FIVE – IN THE BAR OF THE GRAND HOTEL

Chapter 35 – Being Contradictory

'She's being contradictory,' said Finn, as they walked.

'She's probably not thinking straight,' answered Sylvie blithely. 'That's what you've done to her, coming back so suddenly.'

'But people can get themselves upset about things, can't they? Can imagine things that aren't true?'

She stopped him then, asking, 'What is it?'

'Bel's just asked me if she "made the worst mistake?" That's what she said to me.'

'And did she? "Make the worst mistake", I mean?'

He considered, 'For years I wanted only for her to write to me, or turn up out of the blue saying she was sorry, that she was wrong, that we would be perfect for each other. Now it feels like a reprieve.'

'You've had a glimpse of what it might have been like?'

'I loved her force of personality. But now I don't know how I'd have coped.'

'You are allowed to make life easy,' she advised him. 'It doesn't have to be a trial.'

They started walking again, after a while Sylvie asking,

'And what was she thinking, saying that?'

'I think she meant it.'

'I only mean, that half-hopes and whispered wishes aren't enough to break a couple, are they, really.'

'No, I suppose not.'

Sylvie went on, 'What did she want you to do, come and take her off Jack? Do that to your best friend? And all for someone as... hard to read as Bel? I mean, you couldn't know she wouldn't let you down again.'

'No, I suppose not.'

'Look at what she's done to you with half a dozen words.' Sylvie shook her head. 'After all these years. And after she'd as good as cast you away the first time.'

'It wasn't like that...' began Finn, but didn't finish. He thought for a moment, before concluding, 'Nothing's real here, is it?'

'I think the sooner we're out of this town the better.'

Sylvie here had to examine her own motives. Was she seeing this woman who Finn hadn't seen for years as a rival? But no, she wasn't, she was only worried for him, and what all this was doing to him.

'It's just the seven-year itch,' she continued, 'or however many years it is for them. They're good but not great; and then you come back from the past. And I don't think she really expects you to come and take her off Jack.'

Sylvie corrected herself, 'I don't mean that you wouldn't have the courage to if you wanted to.'

'I know. It's okay,' said Finn.

'But you know what I mean. Bel was only flexing old feelings, enjoying their sensation. She might be terrified if you actually took her up on them.'

'Get you, the analyst,' he said chirpily. 'You could set up shop in town, solving men's dilemmas and ladies' love-lives.'

'Get away.' Sylvie patted his shoulder. Yet the chat had clearly done him well. Quite where her words had all come from though she wasn't sure, a mix of homespun wisdom and remembered phrases from celebrity interviews.

Sylvie added,

'And they're comfortable – and it's easy to underestimate that.'

'Jack seems to suit her, doesn't he?' suggested Finn. 'He seems to blank out her worst traits, take no notice.'

'Whether she loves him though... and I think we've learnt that Jack thinks about the same of her.'

'You'll have the paw prints on you for days,' said Finn.

'Only verbal ones,' Sylvie answered. 'We weren't alone long enough.'

They were giggling again, like they used to in the works canteen. This was the old Finn, the one Sylvie hadn't seen for weeks. The one she wanted back.

'I've just thought,' she said. 'At the studio, we didn't see any security.'

'Maybe a firm looks in a few times a night?'

'It could be awkward then,' she said straight-facedly, 'if they ever caught Jack and Belinda up there.'

Like snickering children, her arm pulled tightly around his, they made their way along the near-deserted streets.

'Finn,' she asked as they walked.

'Yes?'

'Jack told me about his depression.'

'Yes.'

'I think that must be what you have.'

'You mean this weekend?'

'Well, maybe not only then. It's not the first time you've been blue.'

'No.'

'You've never looked into it?'

Finn answered, 'I've read a couple of books; but it never felt quite right.'

'Oh?'

He searched for the words,

'Well, I don't know if what I feel is depression so much as desperation.'

This made her laugh,

'Finn – a desperate man!'

'I don't make much of an outlaw, do I?'

'Not much.' She reaffirmed her hold on his arm.

'I'm not saying I don't have moments when I'm down, but mostly it's an active feeling, an urge to do something.'

'Like what?'

'I don't know. All I really want to do is write in my notebooks.'

'Then write something brilliant!'

'I wouldn't know where to start.'

'Jack said he didn't think the word "depression" did it justice.'

'Nor do I. I think it must be the worst-described illness ever.'

'Then what would you call it, Finn, you with all your phrases?'

He thought a moment, then said, 'Maybe it could have one of those modern acronymous names, like ADHD. Call it something like Over-Sensitivity to Sadness Syndrome, or Advanced Yearning Disorder.'

'We'll write a letter, suggest it to the Department of Health.'

'Only, if it is a disorder then it's an odd one. It can sometimes be wonderful, like feeling everything at once. You wonder why the whole world doesn't feel the same.'

They fell back into silence, before,

'Finn?'

'Yes.'

'It's none of my business, but...'

'Yes?'

'Jack said that they wrote to you.'

'Yes.'

'And that you didn't reply.'

He lowered his head in penance,

'Bel sent me a long letter. She told me how bad Jack was.'

'So why not answer them?' Sylvie still couldn't understand.

'Because, how could I reply to a letter about Jack's illness, without telling them I wasn't sure I'd been feeling much better myself?'

'Oh.'

'And it felt like a confession I couldn't make, even in as personal a form as a letter. And certainly not there at his bedside, taking the light off him. I could hardly go and see him and have kept it secret; yet I...'

'...weren't ready to tell anyone?'

'No. It was the last time she wrote to me. You can't blame her really.'

'I don't think Jack's upset with you. He just doesn't understand.'

'Someday. Someday I'll tell him.'

'Good. And then you pair would have so much to talk about. More than just cars at any rate.'

'Oh yes, the BMW. Did you see it? It's a beauty.'

But Finn was only being playful; and giving him a look, Sylvie urged him them on their walk.

'Finn?' she asked him then a third time.

'Yes.'

'While we're talking like this, can I ask you? We'll always trust each other, won't we? We'll always be friends, right? Good friends, best friends, die for each other friends?'

'All the way.'

She hugged him, his reward for saying he'd die for her; though he hoped it wouldn't come to that. Before she let go, she squeezed him again.

'And what was that one for?' he asked.

'For making me proud of you today. It was brilliant, the best thing ever.'

Chapter 36 – The Scene of the Crime

Before Sylvie even realised they were so close, they came around a corner and there was the hotel.

'It doesn't seem like only lunchtime since we ran out of those doors,' said Finn.

'Don't worry.' Sylvie reassured him, 'I'm sure the desk staff's changed since then.'

'I'm not even taking the risk.'

Finn led her straight past the front entrance, and then around the side of the building. At the back-corner was an anonymous-looking door, which he held open for her.

'Is this the service entrance?' asked Sylvie, his conspiratorial spirit catching.

'You'll see.'

At his gesturing, she went first down a short curved flight of stairs. At their foot though, she could hear the hubbub of the hotel bar, and knew that this was where he had led her,

'This is a secret door!'

'This is how you get to the bar from the street – we've only ever entered from the foyer.'

Suddenly the subterranean space enveloped them again in its mystery. Places like the big Victorian public house and the homely local had their roles to play – they were places of above-ground sociability. However, neither could compete with the hotel bar for secrecy, atmosphere and nocturnal presence.

The others were already there to meet them. Mitch called across before the pair reached the bar,

'Get a drink, and come and sit down.'

Which they dutifully did, together, so neither had to approach the table first.

Chapter 37 – End-Game

Mitch, Jemima and Jasper were sat at a round table in the low-lit room. Mitch was the focus of the group. Although there were no windows to let the night in, there was still a sense of evening over him,

'So you're back?' he asked the final two of his party to return. It was more statement than question, and offered in prosaic tone. 'You've got your drinks? Sit down,' he instructed. Again, he seemed calmer than that pair might have expected. He waited, not speaking until they'd done so. Finn sensed the group de-briefing had hardly started.

'Jemima and Jasper have just gotten here,' explained Mitch.

'Have they really?' wondered Sylvie. Then what could have delayed them? In the following days Sylvie would learn from Jemima that after leaving the minibus outside Associated Stylists, Jemima's and Jasper's conversation had started with him asking thus,

'You know I'm married?'

'Yes,' she had answered.

'Does it bother you?'

'No.'

Jemima would tell Sylvie that at that moment she had never felt so mature.

Back at the table...

Mitch was asking, 'I was just saying, you look well, Jemima?'

'Yes, Boss. I'm fine, thanks.'

'I'm glad. Finn, your family?'

'My family aren't in town, Boss. But they were fine last time I spoke to them, thank you.'

'I'm glad to hear it.'

'We met his friends,' blurted Sylvie. 'They run a cleaning company.'

'Extraordinary.' Still their Team Leader hardly looked up from his drink.

Jasper found the silence unbearable,

'Boss, look, we're really sorry...' but he was held back by a raised hand,

'Don't worry, any of you. There's nothing to be sorry for.' He paused. 'But you did lie to that doctor?'

'That was me, sir,' confessed Finn.

At last Mitch's expression broke, into the slightest grin,

'He bloody did it, you know, the doctor. He went in just as they were starting, asking for Chris. Chris was up on the dais, saying he was fine. But the doctor wasn't having it. They had to go out onto the corridor.' At this Mitch's face creased up. 'The doctor virtually had Chris's shirt off already, wanting to get his stethoscope on him... And Chris was trying to fight him off, the doctor saying, "Don't get agitated, it's bad for your blood pressure."'

Mitch let out a full bellow of laughter.

'The doctor wasn't having it,' he repeated, shaking his head at the memory. 'It was a full twenty minutes before Chris was let back on the podium.'

Mitch laughed again, more wistfully, before calming, smiling. 'It was quite funny, I concede. It was quite funny. That Chris is a blowhard, I didn't like him. He deserved to have a bit of the stuffing knocked out of him.'

Their manager didn't seem himself, Finn concluded, as he told the story. But Mitch only smiled,

'I can laugh about it now,' he chuckled, 'now that I know you're all alright. I knew it was you who'd caused it though, after you didn't come back.'

All listened to this amazed.

'Sir,' Jasper eventually ventured. 'I'm glad to see you're so... but... Look, Sir, you're killing us here. What are you going to say?'

Mitch quickly got his bearings back,

'To you? Nothing, I've said it.'

'But when we get back?'

'Oh, you mean to Digby?' Mitch finally cottoned on. (Digby was their floor manager – everyone used first names at the firm.) Mitch answered, 'I'll tell him that you all attended the course, thus fulfilling your duty to the company who paid for you to do so. You were obliging, you took notes, you heard every word; and got as such out of it as those who really did attend, which wasn't much, as for the most part it was only so much BS.'

'You're not going to tell?'

'And say what? Admit to my boss that I couldn't take four members of staff out of town for one night without losing the lot of them?'

All sunk an inch in their seats with this chastisement.

'I know you didn't do this to embarrass me, and so I won't let it. It stays around this table though, right?'

'Right,' murmured the collective.

'Then we'll toast to it. Ladies and gentlemen, charge your glasses. To bad jobs, and the wretches stuck doing them.'

They all murmured in time and clinked their glasses.

'Now, is everyone okay?'

Another collective murmur.

'Then all's well with the world.'

'Right, off to pack then,' said Sylvie, who always had a lot to pack.

But Mitch remained seated,

'You'll need to know that I made a mistake with the coach company. Half-past eight this evening was the latest the driver could get back home for, not the latest he could leave – he's needed for a Rotary Club outing somewhere. So instead he'll be here at ten tomorrow morning. I've called Sarah' (who all knew to be Digby's personal assistant) 'and she's extended our booking a night.'

'Here?' asked one of them.

'It turns out that midweek it's only twenty pounds more a room for two nights than for one. So don't worry, you'll all have a chance to sleep it off before you face reality again.'

'But, how will you explain it to the board?' asked another.

'"Costs arising from unforeseen circumstances" is the common term.'

'And they'll buy it?'

'Hotels for mistresses, taxis from Glasgow, flowers for forgotten wives on Valentine's Day. You wouldn't believe what's been paid for under "unforeseen circumstances" over the years.' Mitch continued, 'And it gets you all off work tomorrow too – Digby won't expect you to attend if you've been travelling back from company business that morning.'

'But we won't have been on company business,' cautioned Sylvie. 'We'll be coming home late entirely because we weren't on company business...'

Mitch counselled her, 'Don't worry. Management life is not Staff life. We cut each other slack; we know life isn't straight-lined. Digby didn't drop out of the sky yesterday. He knows that if it's "unforeseen circumstances" then there's a story behind it. But he trusts me, and if it only costs us a day then a part of him will be glad it wasn't any worse.'

'So we've earned a day's leave for... playing truant?'

'I was human once, you know.'

'We haven't lost our jobs then?' asked Sylvie.

'Gather your wits, girl. Do you think we could afford to lose you?'

Chapter 38 – Bad Jobs

No longer feeling in a rush for the bus allowed the group to relax and reflect, Jemima asking,

'You drank to "bad jobs", sir. It is a bad job, isn't it?'

'The worst, love.'

'So,' she ventured, 'maybe Finn..?'

Mitch became speculative, 'Maybe Finn's actions really weren't that odd? Maybe they showed us something that we've all been thinking?'

Jemima nodded, Mitch continued,

'Maybe then there is strength in weakness, in Finn's inability to set foot in that final room to complete the course. Indeed, is it even weakness when it is one part of yourself in conflict with another? Couldn't it be called strength to deny all logic and exterior forces to obey an impulse? An impulse, furthermore, that we might all have been feeling, but hadn't the courage to honour with action?'

'I didn't feel it,' urged Jasper, to stares from the women.

'Don't spoil the flow, Jay,' his boss instructed. 'I'm speaking rhetorically. Now, being here with you four, out of town, the conference over, then work feels a long way away. I'm quite confident in telling you that at times recently even I've been thinking of applying for other jobs. There have been days when there was nothing I wanted more than a phone-call from someone somewhere offering me a way out.

'Things are getting tougher out there, and the firm aren't becoming famous for showing much loyalty around the place just lately. That trick of rumouring job cuts and shunting people into teams they didn't want was deplorable. Even Digby knows that – the orders came from higher up, he assured me. And it hasn't even worked – I doubt that half of those we moved will stay there.' He refocused his attention on the group: 'I like you as people, and I want to be honest with you.'

All were floored by this, to have a manager who thought so deeply on their role. And who then had the respect for their employees to take time out to share it with them.

'But chaos brings opportunity,' said Jasper.

'It can, and perhaps some among you could clean up.' Mitch looked across the four faces. 'But I'm not sure you all want to, do you?'

The silence told its own tale, not even Jasper piping up this time.

All were hungry for the restaurant, but none had gotten up yet. Instead Mitch turned to his most troublesome charge, the most unlikely catalyst you could imagine. In fact, looking at him Mitch could hardly believe this small, slumped figure could have caused them so much trouble and discussion. Yet he had to ask,

'Now, Mr Finn, before we head for the restaurant, do we need to have a talk about you?'

'I don't know what to say, Boss.'

Although this was going to be a private chat with his Team Leader, Finn didn't mind the others being there. Indeed, after the day's shared experiences, it would have felt rude to have excluded them.

Mitch began,

'Okay, let's start in the corridor. Are you happy to go back there?'

Finn nodded.

'So what was it all about?'

How absurd of Finn to have thought he might have gotten away to his dinner without being asked this question. He answered honestly, for his answer was yet no surprise,

'It's like you said, Boss. I don't want to do the job.'

'No, I don't think any of us...'

'But no, Boss. It feels more than that.'

Mitch paused, interrupted, and waited for the answer.

'I don't want to do this job, I don't want to do any job, I never have. I've never wanted any job I've ever had.'

The response was quicker and more cheerful than he could ever have imagined,

'Then as soon as we're back we'll set ourselves the task of finding you the right...'

'No, Boss,' again Finn interrupted. 'You don't understand. I don't want "the right job" or any job. I don't want to work at all.'

Chapter 39 – The Right Not to Work

That had been rude, but Finn had just had to say it before Mitch went off along the wrong track. Allowing his boss to have been kind in a way that Finn couldn't have appreciated would have killed him. Now, though, the mood was ruined and his supervisor stumped.

But how odd for Finn to have at last said those words. After so many years, and without the bellowing hatred he had always feared would come in response. In saying them he was brazenly bucking the system that kept them all fed and with a roof over their heads – the system that those who lived within it lived in constant fear of falling in on them.

But he could say those words now, now there was nothing left to lose.

'So what are you? A Communist?' asked Jasper, on the cusp of frustration.

'"All them cornfields,"' whispered Finn, '"and ballet in the evening.""

'What?'

'Sorry, the words just came back to me.'

'Look, you're not even taking this seriously!'

Mitch calmed Jasper, 'I think Finn may be quoting from a film, Jasper. And Communists want to work, not not-work. They're "the worker's party".'

Jasper took this on board, as Mitch continued,

'And I think he's remembering these words because he feels free, right Finn? It's all said now, and you've never felt better.'

'Right, Boss.'

Mitch was right: Finn was remembering old film clips because he was free to, and speaking them because he was thrilled to have uttered, to have even thought, such blasphemy in the name of the working week – 'I don't want to work at all.'

As for Mitch, he sat there, despite his own frustrations trying his best to understand.

Not that Finn took such continued understanding for granted. From somewhere he remembered another line – where had he heard this? – the supposition that an unhappy truth may be received by someone firstly in bemusement, secondly in irritation, yet the third time in anger.

'But you have to do something,' gestured Mitch, still firmly in the bemusement-stage.

'Yes, yes.'

Finn was glad of the chance to acknowledge his eagerness to be useful; not just to come across as a negative element and an uncontributing refusenik. He didn't want to feel like an infection in an otherwise healthy system, the rot even he would cut out of a tree.

'You're an active fellow,' encouraged Mitch. 'You don't want to do nothing.'

'No.'

'So what do you want to do?'

'I just want a break. A chance to think.'

And then, seeing how the question weighed upon his reluctant charge, so deftly that no one noticed, Mitch removed them from the topic,

'Anyway, this whole conference, it's not the end of the world,' he said, turning his attention to the whole group. 'Far from it, in fact. As I mentioned back there, you might know that the firm's had the Devil's game holding onto staff in our new F-Teams – there are meant to be three units of us, and so far there're barely two. Across the offices we've seen fifty percent drop-offs, staff crying in the toilets, wanting to go back to their old jobs.'

'So how does what happened here help?' asked Sylvie.

'Because events like today might finally be making the management have to do something, when even the training for the job is making people ill.'

'Oh?'

'It might be that the F-Teams as we know them won't exist soon. And in your cases, well, let me just say that the jobs you're going back to might not be the ones you left. That's what I've heard, I know no more. Let me leave it at that.'

But that was enough, thought Sylvie. She felt the table's tension ease remarkably, even from those who'd been claiming they weren't feeling any.

'But the job itself – then why do we do it?' asked Finn, suddenly flustered. 'The job? Foreclosures?'

'Because somebody has to.'

'This isn't going to be "the circle of trust" again, is it?'

Mitch took this on the chin, 'No, Finn, just the fact that if you want to live in a society where people are allowed to own their own homes, then the rules allowing that to happen have to be written up. And somewhere in those rules must be the penalty for bucking them.'

'But must it be so brutal?'

'You already know the answer to that one, my friend. It's the same reason why our firm are so strict with time-off-sick – give one person one day's grace, and the rumours would fly around of how much "unofficial leave" everyone else might get away with.'

However, their boss digressed, 'Do you want to know what the word "mortgage" means? Literally? It means "death contract". For only death breaks it, and sees the property return to the lender. That's the gravity of what we're dealing with.'

'I'm not going to quit or anything,' reassured Jasper, starting a point.

'I'm glad to hear it.'

'But don't you think it would be better if we got to deal with all parts of the process: issuing mortgages, giving people homes, taking payments, and foreclosing only if they go wrong?'

'Well, you can blame Henry Ford for that one, Jay, or even Adam Smith. He's the first who had the idea to have his workers specialise, sticking to one task all day. The trouble comes when you're specialised into the worst task; that's the kicker.

'You know, Ford got the idea for his production line after one of his executives saw pigs in an abattoir being slaughtered on a conveyor belt.'

That image killed the conversation as conclusively as the abattoir did for the pigs in question. The group sat sipping drinks, until Jemima remembered a burning question,

'And the conference organisers... They're not going to do anything? About us disrupting things?'

Mitch let the subject change, answering,

'They haven't said a word. And what would they do anyway? Write me a stern letter? One thing you learn – and take it from one who knows, kids – is that we live our lives guarded by dogs with no teeth. Why do you think they have to make their bark so loud? You can walk away from anything, and what can they do to you? What harm can they possibly do to you?

Chapter 40 – Dogs Without Teeth

'You know,' Mitch said then, with a slight smile back on his lips and a faraway look in his eye, 'when you'd all gone missing, I went looking for you. I asked the receptionist if she'd seen you. And she leant over the counter, and asked, "Were they all right?" "How do you mean?" I asked back. And then she leaned in even closer and whispered, "I saw them as I came back to the front desk. And as they ran off, they were laughing..."

'I'll tell you a story. The other week I had to leave work early – I had a call from the school that my boy was in trouble. I met my wife there, and his teacher called us into the office. She told us that there had been a "disreputable incident" involving his class.

'Now, my lad's only ten. So what the hell had happened? His teacher only asked us to take him home, "To talk to him about what he's done."

'Anyway, we did take him home and he told us: His class were waiting outside the lunch hut – it's an old school with all these different buildings – and the boys had been held back for some reason. Probably they were messing around.

'Anyway, by the sounds of it the boys just went wild. "We started banging our lunch-boxes," my lad told me. "We were singing and shouting and jumping."

At this Mitch laughed again like earlier.

'It sounds like this went on for a while. Can you imagine it? They had to move the boys to one side to let the other classes past.'

'What happened to them?' asked Jemima, ever worried over stories of children's wellbeing.

'The teachers let them in, of course, once they'd quietened down. They had to let them have their sandwiches. But my boy said he was worried then that he'd get into trouble.'

'And did he?'

'Not from us! We went back to the school and told them he was right to stand up for himself; and that they should have let the boys in to have their dinners. And what could the school do? What had the boys done to anyone – cheered them up with a bit of lunchtime carnival? No fighting, no swearing, no spitting – they couldn't pin a thing on them. I told you, the dogs have no teeth.'

'Sounds like quite a day.'

'Doesn't it just. It made me wonder: what will his best days be? There'll be girls of course, and Cup Finals, and holidays, and nights out, and Christmas Parties. He'll have great days to come – but he'll remember this one, singing outside the lunch hut with his mates.'

Mitch continued, 'You see, I think everyone needs the odd moment of gleeful, pointless rebellion, just to remind ourselves we're human. And your moment,' he looked around the table, 'has somehow earned us all a day off. So be grateful for it. Take it as a chance to clear your heads. And in your case,' turning obviously to Finn, 'not to get fretting. Any troubles you've got we can talk about on Friday. Deal?'

'Deal,' they all concurred.

'And on that note.' He waved to the bar and made a circle gesture over their heads. 'A last drink on me; and if you're wise you'll bring them into the restaurant.'

At which Mitch paused before concluding,

'Only never do that again, will you. Not when we're back in town.'

He didn't need them to answer, it was understood.

'Okay. So go and relax, you've got a free evening. Your rooms buy you another meal token too, so get something substantial inside you, you're all as giddy as children.'

'Are you coming, Boss?' asked Sylvie as she rose. To which he only shook his head, as she and the other three left for the restaurant.

Chapter 41 – Later, In the Bar

It was evening now, reaching into night, and the hotel bar for all its permanent shadow was positively nocturnal. Honey-shaded lamps reflected in the mirrors that stood in for windows; and Finn could swear their faux-curtains had been pulled in a little since lunchtime, as if to keep out the cold of the fictional street outside.

Back there after eating, the four team-members were sat around a table.

'Mitch is a piece of work, isn't he,' offered Jasper admiringly, in a rare show of perception. 'He gathers us all around him; takes an age to tell us we're not in any trouble; has us all so relieved that we can hardly remember what we were running away from; and then – and only then – delivers his bombshell about the new jobs.'

'Possible new jobs,' cautioned Jemima.

'He wouldn't even mention it if it wasn't certain,' countered Jasper. (And the group all knew he was right.) 'What a piece of work. Even telling us he's shared our frustrations, and has had thoughts of leaving. When the world and his dog know he's Digby's heir apparent, and will be there till he gets his carriage clock.'

'But, if he's Digby's favourite,' asked Sylvie, 'then why was he given the F-Teams job?'

Jasper already had the answer to that,

'You've never read up on management theory? It's called the Jumbo Factor. You see, a pilot starts as a co-pilot, working all the way up to jumbo jets. But after that he has to go back to tiny planes as the main pilot, working all the way back up again. It's why the best men in any firm are sent out to run things in the sticks, the provinces, overseas, before being called back to take the top jobs at Head Office.'

'And what about the best women?' asked Sylvie.

'Well, they don't like the relocation; it takes them away from their families. That's why there's a glass ceiling.'

Sylvie sipped her drink. 'Well, thank you Jasper, at last it all makes sense.'

After a while, Jasper left to play pool, Jemima leaving with him. Sylvie sat with Finn, asked him,

'Do you want to go back to work?

'Not really.'

'Do you want to stay here?'

'I don't know.'

'Would your Mum put you up?'

'She might do.'

'You'd have a job with Belinda?'

'There's always that to fall back on.'

'What are you going to do, Finn?'

'I don't know.'

And there was something quite personal in her voice when she followed this up with,

'And will you be leaving with us in the morning?'

He didn't know.

Looking up, his eyes caught colourful motion above the bar, and Finn saw a flat-screened TV on the wall. It was the rolling news channel, muted and subtitled. On screen, a suited woman sat before a backdrop of the London skyline, talking about unemployment. The scene then cut to lines of miserable-looking men huddled outside a windswept factory, or foundry, or metalworks. It was the kind of image that watchers of the evening news became familiar with.

And yet, on this occasion, just for a moment, Finn lost his mind. And he imagined that the men were sad because they had to go back into the foundry, not sad because they weren't allowed to.

He thought, 'No wonder they're so glum, having to work in a place like that.'

And as he caught his mistake, Finn realised that throughout his life he had borne a double-feeling at stories of job losses. Indeed, on the subject of employment as a whole. For, looking at the Blakean hell-hole showing on the news, then who in their right mind would want to lose their days to it? Or to a featureless warehouse? Or a bright, controlling office? It was like choosing – and then applying for the privilege! – of a life sentence at an open prison; and in the case of factories, heavy labour.

And Finn was left then with the bleakest of his frequent thoughts – though he knew it wasn't true, that it was only his own opinion – the notion that civility and culture were only dreams and aspirations, sticking plasters over the cracks of a nation of people still striving, making bargains to survive, and scuttling around their patch of the planet's surface. And Finn sat there with his head down, for he hated mental images like that, for they could be so hard to shake.

It was his mood that was doing it. It was the compromise solution that Mitch was offering, and which Finn judged all the team were accepting. It was the fact that deep down he'd never wanted his job, had never wanted to be there.

At last the job had gotten so bad as to justify his decision to reject it. Now though, with Mitch's being nice about everything, and with Digby's rumoured reshuffling of the teams, Finn's This-far-and-no-further, We-shall-not-be-moved stance was becoming disproportionate to the situation, might be deemed unreasonable. He hadn't the strength to fight this new current; he was being drawn back in.

Finn worked in a building of five-hundred people. It had once occurred to him that every year it robbed a year of each of their lives. 'The office eats five-hundred years a year', he found himself whispering to no one in particular, as if quietly reciting a line of pentamatic poetry. Put those years together end-to-end, and you had a length of time that stretched back to the reign of Henry VIII. Finn had thought he would quite like to see the days of Henry VIII. He had tried to explain this thought to certain people, but none had understood what he was getting at.

Chapter 42 – Bar Games

Beyond the railing and the stairs, was the raised gaming area. There, the lights above the game tables caught the glass of picture frames. Jemima looked distractedly from one old photograph to another. She noticed a flowergirl here, an omnibus there. Before turning her attention back on the game of pool she was supposed to be playing.

'Are you going to take this shot?' asked Jasper, holding his cue as a staff.

'I thought that other guy you met was playing?'

'That was his last game. He's gone to bed, like most sensible people.'

'And where's Mitch?'

'He's gone to call his wife.'

'Of course, she must be missing him.'

'Well, it wasn't me who made us stay here another night.'

'I'm not a great player,' decided Jem. 'I'll get Finn to play. Where is he?' She saw him sat silent at the table with Sylvie.

'Yes, it needs to be a man really,' reflected Jasper as she left him temporarily alone.

Jemima approach her friends' table,

'Finn, are you coming up to play?' she asked.

'Go on, it will get you out of yourself,' said Sylvie.

With Jemima taking his unoffered arm, she moved Finn up the short stairs and to the games area; Jasper asking,

'You've played before? You know the rules?'

Finn hardly knew where he was.

It felt all over for Sylvie. Their few hours of freedom were finished. And even those hours had been nearly wrecked with nerves and angst and uncertainty. It was as though, by some freak chance, they had been thrown clear of the great machine that they were bound to. Hurled up into the air, as if fired from a piston housing. For Sylvie imagined the machine like a huge car engine, chugging and pumping, and emitting smoke and flames from its vents and exhausts.

And for a moment, they had been suspended above this machine, in clear air, free to see all around them, free to move.

Yet they must have known that gravity was going to pull them back. And that when it did so, they would have no idea of what the landing would be like, what part of the machinery they would fall back into, whether they'd be minced up between cogs and gears and wheels.

All in all though, they'd gotten out of it with hardly a scratch.

After Mitch had made his announcement about their possible new jobs, Sylvie had looked straight to Finn. She and Jemima and even Jasper had breathed sighs of relief – Mitch had done enough to bring them back. Yet Finn had been unreadable, worse even than during the day. And talking to him since, he had been barely responsive. Sylvie hoped his chat with Mitch on Friday would help him; but he was lost to her, she hadn't gotten through.

Sat alone now, Sylvie looked at those around her: at another table were a smart young couple back from a meal out. In the booth next to hers were serious-looking men discussing business. She caught the odd quick word: returns, cashflow, capital.

On a corner sofa by the railings was another pair. Sylvie had seen them before: they were the copping couple from lunchtime – how many days ago lunchtime felt. They surely hadn't been at it all that time?

Now Sylvie saw them as the characters in Belinda's painting. And also as only one of the host of couples passing through this grand hotel, a place known by Bel as 'where the men went with their mistresses'.

Just one of a thousand couples.

Sylvie watched them, and for a moment caught the man's eye. Women could sometimes be labelled girlish, pondered Sylvie, with their love of Teddy bears and bright colours and fancy fripperies. The Disney belief in shining knights, that they could never quite dispel. Never getting out of the dressing-up box, she thought; and looking at her own scarf, hairband, bangles, there was some truth in that. But it was overgrown boys like that man – his face red with drink and glee – who at the slightest quickening of the blood revealed their rush back to adolescence.

'Man cannot bear very much reality', she half-remembered from somewhere, probably a film, or something Finn once told her – he was always coming out with daft things like that with little prompting.

Sylvie looked at the couple, and asked the bitter questions – Were they married? Were they boss and secretary? If so, then did his wife know? Had she known for years? Had she even given up trying to pretend she didn't know? Yet Sylvie hadn't the heart for it. And whether they should have been there or not, Sylvie could see that they were enjoying it. And who would want to rob them of that?

The man was nearly falling off the sofa again. His companion deftly held him up, in the same movement as pressing his hand against her stockinged thigh. Sylvie was still thinking of Belinda's painting, in fact she couldn't stop thinking of it.

Of course, what Sylvie felt was envy. All she saw were holding arms, pressing mitts, lifting clothing, and an urge to feel anything similar herself. How long had it been? Finn, she was sure, still thought her the Whore of Babylon. She had calmed down of late though. She wanted only a partner, and wasn't ashamed to admit it to herself. She couldn't help her biology, nor did she want to. 'Leave careers for the men, give me love,' she whispered. Even thinking it made her want to cry.

Jemima had summed it up outside the minibus – 'You're thirty and single and no-one on the horizon' – though Sylvie hadn't needed reminding.

'Your twenties are for fun, your thirties get serious,' she had once been told by a woman she worked with. Sylvie had tried that line out on Finn to judge his reaction, but had only got the response, 'But what if you didn't have any fun in your twenties?'

Chapter 43 – Kindness

Sylvie sat there at the table, confused, feeling her insides turn to dust. The drinkers around her were her compatriots for the night. The spirit of the place seemed to grip her, to hold her as if in a transparent fluid, as viscous as axle-grease, that made every action slow and in which every bright object gleamed.

The overheated couple she'd been watching were leaving now, though the bar was still buzzing. Here were people enjoying the experience of being away from home, and living in a building with a bar inside, where you only had to go downstairs to go to the pub.

One of a group of business-folk at the bar caught Sylvie in his sights. This was right on cue, though he'd probably been on the prowl all evening.

Come over, he gestured with his head. To which she demurred, shaking hers. In this situation any response at all was still a flashing neon 'Yes', and she thought she'd give this early bird a chance. Come on, he gestured again. Again she demurred. At this, he accepted the situation as it evidently was, and made his way over to the table,

'You're all alone?' he started. Sylvie sensed already that he was hardly Orson Wells when it came to repartee.

'No, I'm with my friends.'

'Are they imaginary then?' he asked, looking around her at the empty table.

Oh no, she'd made a bad choice here. She'd landed someone without subtlety, who'd make fun in his opening statements.

'They're over there,' said Sylvie, nodding toward the pool table. She moved her finger around the rim of her almost-empty glass, at which he at last took the hint.

'Can I get you one?' he asked.

To which she nodded, calling, 'Same again, please,' to the elderly barman who was already looking in her direction. (The younger barman she'd liked had not reappeared.)

As her suitor went to fetch her drink, and another for himself, Sylvie considered if she'd time to make a break for the stairs? He was drunk, and far too young, not even filling his suit – a suit that, by the way, was of an awful material, too shiny by half, and with a huge snag in one sleeve.

Sylvie looked up to Finn, staring out across the pool table as Jasper took his shot, and wanted to call out, 'I don't want the men in bars any more, Finn.' But she didn't call out, and knew that he was lost to her, was lost to everyone, buried under floods of confusion and compromise and God-knew-what else.

'Reasonability,' said Sylvie out loud. That was Finn's word, the way he thought about the business world (for she had heard it from him countless times): what was reasonable of bosses to expect their workers to accept, what was reasonable behaviour from the workers in return.

And a phrase she'd heard Finn use came back to her, one of those that could become his catchphrases in happier times, when he could be witty in his cynicism. Aphorisms like, 'Never explain, never apologise,' or, 'We're not here to enjoy ourselves,' or, when going into a particularly gruelling meeting, 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends...' she whispering,

'Be reasonable: demand the impossible.'

It made Sylvie chuckle even in her sadness, before the man came back with the drinks. Yet soon he had calmed down his nervous joking, and she her nervous silence. And soon each had relaxed into it, were having a nice time; and Sylvie felt that for five minutes on this blessed work trip she could let herself ease off. And that felt good, and she felt that she needed it.

Chapter 44 – Pool

Finn had made half-a-dozen shots across the table. None of them were any more accurate or resulting in a pocket than his past experience of the game had suggested they might be. And so he had turned his attention – as Sylvie had been doing – to the characters of the bar. He saw the holiday-makers and city-breakers enjoying a drink after their evening meal. He saw that same couple from earlier apparently forgetting they weren't already back in their room.

He saw young business people entertaining their drinking-culture evening rituals. And from that group a young man in a shiny suit, who emerged, wearing a perceptible look of excitement and expectation. He took two glasses from the bar, and headed back across the floor to... to Sylvie, at the table at which he himself had been sitting.

What did Finn think of this? Sure, a part of him had been reassured by Sylvie's outburst outside the hotel, the ten-year-old's playground confirmation that they would always be friends. But had that also been a subtle confirmation that they didn't have to worry about each other in any other way? He made no judgement if she appeared to be getting over the day's upheavals rather quicker than he. She had her own needs, he made no judgement.

They'd never been together outside of work as much as during those two days. There had only been the odd work evening, Christmas party, team birthday drinks. Was Finn growing used to having Sylvie around? At the very least, did he not want her going off with someone else? Was that enough though?

Was it a quickening of sensation, a sense of having to up his game too? One of those situations where to do nothing was not an option, where to stand still was to move backwards?

'Through his deeds shall we know him,' as someone somewhere had once said. It had once occurred to Finn that you could spend an hour in agonised internal debate over an issue, decide on balance it was best to do nothing, and yet to an observer appear to have given the same consideration to the matter as a person who had walked straight past and hadn't given a damn.

It was the lack of simple pleasure, he realised. As reminded by Belinda's question, so obvious that it was almost dumb,

'When did you last feel joy, Finn?'

Yes, Finn, he asked himself then. When did you last feel joy?

Electricity was essential to life, he knew. Had the first spark not fired among the soup of those primordial oceans, then would any of us be here? Yet Finn felt like an engine without spark plugs. Paul's fruit machine had displayed more animation. When we always feel the same, how can we tell what moves us? How can we make decisions when we have no joy?

Finn had thought about Sylvie, of course he had – what man wouldn't have, working beside her all that time? Yet whatever his daydreams of being with Sylvie, they had never gripped him as the need for Belinda had done. Was love then a need beyond conscious choice, something that hit you like a truck and did so regardless of consequence or whether the desire was requited?

That was what it had been for Bel. And even after meeting her again, Finn could remember those early years as a potent mix of that earliest desire and the heartbreak of it not happening, a kind of charged melancholy. He knew this combination as something to be searched for in books, films, music, and findable in his own diaries. But it was also a feeling to take sparingly, something to sometimes switch a song off for, or to leave a certain situation so to avoid feeling it any longer. Finn even wondered sometimes whether he enjoyed the doomed destruction of a thing more than the prospect of making it work.

He'd defined that feeling for himself once as a combination both of the presence of something wonderful and the acknowledgement that time would sweep it away. Like a character in a Philip K. Dick story, Finn could sometimes experience both the birth and death of something simultaneously. And people asked him to conduct a business career with so much going on in his mind?

Finn moved his gaze from Sylvie's table, lest hers caught him in return. Although there was an undeniable pang at seeing Sylvie entertaining that other fellow, Finn felt no ill will towards his rival – the best of luck to him. Finn felt that what was dying in him now were only daydreams, and that the practicalities of a relationship with her were likely impossible, no matter how enjoyable such a situation might have been to think about.

He sometimes found hit hard to pin down the feelings of women. They were so deft in concealment, and needing to protect themselves. Yet the conclusion Finn was forming was the same as Sylvie had declaimed in her outburst – that they were only friends. However well they got on, they did not share that God-given urgency of attraction, that could not be willed and which was the only authentic underpinning of a relationship. There was no thrill. But then, when was the last time that Finn had felt that over anything?

No, he concluded, deciding that this would be his last thought on the matter. Sylvie brought a soft warm feeling, not a quickening of the blood. This was neither her fault nor his, just the way it was. And did he have the right to ask her to commit with only this in his favour?

'Bloody hell, is anyone going to take this game seriously?'

Finn turned to face Jasper's words. He'd drifted off during the re-racking.

'Sorry mate.' Lifting the cue he had been holding the whole time, Finn leaned over the table to take aim.

'You're reds!' called Jasper just in time to stop Finn committing the foul.

'Sorry, I didn't know I'd potted anything yet.'

'You haven't, I've sunk three yellows so far.'

Refocussing on his own colour, Finn found a red nestling by a pocket at a distance that even he would have found hard not to nudge in. A second and harder pot brought a squeal and applause from Jemima. However, a hat-trick eluded him, and he withdrew to lean against the wall and watch Jasper step up.

'At last we have a game on,' cheered the opponent. Jasper though was evidently quite a player. He sunk two in a row of his own – a position from which Finn never recovered.

'Things are warming up. Another game, Finn?' Jasper eagerly pumped the pound coins into the slots. They played two more, Jasper winning all three, but Finn coming close in the second. This was a performance which Jasper commended in a show of sportsmanship.

Chapter 45 – Calling Time

'Lord, it's not ten already?' asked Jasper eventually.

'It sure is,' answered Jemima, who'd been enjoying the games more as an observer.

Jem and Jay had clearly made a pact, thought Finn: say nothing more about their tryst till they were alone that night.

Jasper racked his cue and stretched his arms, 'I'd better be getting off, old man, if I'm to be up bright and early for the journey tomorrow.'

'Me too,' concurred Jemima, with an innocence that no one not in-the-know would ever have doubted. 'You up?' she asked Finn.

'I'll be with you in a minute,' he answered. Finn instead took one last look at the bar, and at Sylvie's now-empty table. He had evidently had a couple of drinks, for he had so lost track of time and situation that he had forgotten to keep tabs on her progress. Finn wondered: had Sylvie cast sad eyes up at him to judge his reaction as she left? To see if he had any qualms with the scene as it was being played out? Only to find him absorbed in a silly game of pool? Before accepting the shiny man's urging to take it upstairs?

But Finn was only internalising again, creating fantasy situations. Doomed emotional scenes, resulting in missed opportunities and personal sadness to be taken away by the characters and brooded over.

'It looks like Sylv's been playing her own games,' said Jemima without judgment.

Finn silently concurred, only muttering under his breath, 'Enjoy it, fella, this is the luckiest night of your life.'

But as they left to join Jasper and go up, Finn paused, asking Jemima,

'Do you think we love less as we get older?'

'No, not at all. Why ask?'

'I felt it once, you know, years ago, and it nearly killed me. It felt like I was dying. Does that sound mad?'

Jemima giggled, 'You ought to read some of the books my Mum reads. She'd call that mild. Any affair that doesn't kill at least one of the couple isn't worth reading about.'

'But I've never felt it the same since.'

'Well, that's good, isn't it? I don't want to see you dropping dead.'

Finn turned and saw Jasper waiting impatiently at the door to the hotel stairs. Though he was obviously unable to say any more than, 'Are you pair coming then?'

Yet the conversation was too important to Finn. He asked Jem,

'But does that mean I'll never love again? Or do I even want to, if it's like that?'

'You're losing me, Finn.'

'Might it be a subtler feeling? Less obvious maybe?'

She took his hand, whispering,

'Is this about Sylvie?'

To which he could only answer, 'I don't know.'

Jasper broke in,

'And this woman you're not sure you like, is this the one you've had your mind on for the entire game? For you sure as hell weren't thinking about your pots. Lord, Finn. You'd think your way out of Heaven, you would. You know she's left with someone?'

To which Finn nodded.

'Well, it looks like you missed your chance for tonight, Bud.'

This situation evidently required no sympathy from Jasper, who grabbed Finn's cue and placed it back in the rack.

And it was left to Jemima to smile sadly, and to say,

'I think you know, somewhere, deep-down.'

Which was precisely what Finn had been trying to decipher all along.

She hugged his arm, and spoke brightly to break the conversation,

'Now come on. Things will seem clearer in the morning.'

Leading Finn to the door, the three went up to their floor.

Chapter 46 – Diary Thoughts

'Women could be amazing, couldn't they?' thought Finn. 'They share the world, but live a different life.'

While Finn was still with them in the corridor, Jemima and Jasper performed the play of turning to their own rooms. The third party closed his door, to what he thought might have been the faintest giggle of Jemima's. Then came the sound of feet skipping back past his door. Though they were not soft enough to be her feet. Always the woman's room, Finn observed, the man not wanting the messed-up bed any more than he wanted the emotional commitment; meanwhile telling her she'd feel more comfortable in her own space.

The whole world's getting it, thought Finn, except me.

He stood behind his door and kept silent, so as to put himself out of their thoughts. Yet the door was heavy, and he heard no more.

A thought niggled. It was a vague sense that, had he only conducted either of his conversations that evening with Bel or Sylvie differently, that somehow he wouldn't now be the only one among those he'd been with all day to be returning to their own room alone.

Yet this was nonsense and did not bear scrutiny. Finn knew himself well enough to recognise how a part of his mind fed off mystery. And it was this part that was now trying to form a new narrative, to tally up all it had felt that day into one saga. He was looking at two entirely separate intrigues, each concerning a different woman, neither forming a genuine missed chance, and trying to add them up to one larger, dead-cert lost opportunity. His mind was equating quantity with quality, so to speak, making the parallel series, which could not be done. Different chances could not be added to a sum total.

Yet Finn had no intention – or expectation – of allowing his mind to rest just yet. For he had one faithful partner for these nocturnal hours. And turning to his opened holdall, he pulled out the work notebook and pens that he'd bought along for the conference.

In the end, he'd written little in the lectures, and less that he'd ever look at again. Yet in the absence of his real journal, he found fresh pages in this notebook that he could later pull out and staple to the right volume.

Finn thought then of calling to reception for hotel notepaper, as he'd a feeling Stephen King had once done – or had it been George Orwell? – when the muse had gripped them.

Yet he decided to make do with these ripped-out leaves. Finn still wished he'd bought his real diary though. He hadn't thought he'd need it, only away for one night, and with hardly a minute left to himself throughout. So short a time without it had felt bearable. Yet as the holiday extended, so more was happening to record. Now he'd found this time to write, and could hardly bear not to.

As he sat down to begin, Finn had a sudden memory: had he really told Sylvie earlier that evening that he didn't know how to express himself? Or words to that effect. He thought of the bookshelf back at his flat; and how he sometimes feared that if someone were to see his collected notebooks and computer files and manuscripts, that they would think they look like Kevin Spacey's shelf of diaries in the movie Seven.

For even if Finn couldn't bring himself to admit it to others, maybe even fully to himself, he did know how to express himself, and it was through an endless flood of words. This was his dream, his drug, his 'profession' in a way that made him not one penny a year. It left him with two jobs, that when combined nearly killed him.

Sometimes, when he came to write, Finn wouldn't know what his theme would be, only that he had a need to journalise. Sometimes this was a subconscious urge, sometimes merely a tactile need: the feel of pen on paper, ink accruing into words. That evening though he thought he had an outline of what he wanted written. Doing so, he might explain it better to himself: the forming notion that the life he had been living had taught him to deny his own mind. What he wrote was less narrative than mission statement. He began, after the time, date, etcetera, in bold print:

THE POISON PARAGRAPHS

We insurance workers, we financial sector conscripts, we back-office serfs, we call-centre secondees... We quiet army rolled beneath the wheels of the Private Sector juggernaut, work in an industry whose relations are conducted in an atmosphere of inter-personal placidity. We could be foreclosing on someone's home, concluding their life as they know it, but are entitled on the phone to ask them not to raise their voice at us. Nor are we staff allowed to raise our voices, to be upset, to show any kind of 'unreasonable' emotion, however we are spoken to or treated.

We live under threat of job cuts and disciplinary actions. Our managers can threaten our livelihoods as we can those of our customers. Yet we must accept this in a way that leaves no weight on the shoulders of the manager enacting their policies. It is beyond the pale for a manager to have to live with any intense reaction toward the way they choose to treat us. As such they are scot free to undermine our self-esteem and rob us of any lingering sense of who we are – or at least of who we were, before falling under their influence.

The relationship between employer and employee, once pay is taken out of the equation, seems therefore one entirely of take and give. They can treat us how they like – move us, ask we take on any task – and expect us to accept it in 'a professional manner'. The phrase, the concept, of 'professionalism' has thus been degraded under these people's stewardship. It has gone from referring to a talented and dynamic figure, the craftsman, the artist leading their line of work, to instead representing the emotional equivalent of beige, an institutionalised non-responsiveness.

This is a manner of conduct and communication that, taken to the nth degree, leaves the only acceptable response to the news, 'You've been fired,' being, 'Thank you for taking the time to see me.'

(Presumably, meanwhile, the poor bereft desensitised soul leaves the building quietly, without a fuss, not causing a scene. They go to the cinema to cry in darkness, into the woods to scream at the sky; before heading home with their empty briefcase, to search for the whisky bottle and their grandfather's service revolver.)

And always ending with the tag line, 'It's just business'. Could these then be the three worst weasel-words in the language? How many ruinations of a father's pride, erosions of a family's wellbeing, massacres of a town's economy have been incited, instigated, advised of by a white-shirted corporate automaton, who afterward concluded, 'It's nothing personal. It's just business.'

In those three little words is granted licence for any act short of first-degree murder to be committed without the perpetrator having to expect any response to their actions beyond polite acceptance. And worse, for any response that breaks this code of polite acceptance to be branded 'unprofessional'.

For management want to have their cake and eat it, to treat their staff as they will but not have any consequences come back on them from it. They want to deny Newton's famous rule, to commit an action yet experience no equal and opposite reaction. They wish for the energy released in their office to be wholly soaked up by the foam partition walls and carpet tiles. They expect to play with others' lives, but not let it upset their dinner that evening.

This all gives rise to two effects, each reliant on the other, and each as dispiriting for anyone with any faith left in human nature to encounter. For these effects are each enacted to some degree a million times a day without conscience:

The first one I'd term something like 'professional disconnect', and which results in a workplace which displays itself to an outside observer as an environment populated by the lobotomised. A landscape apparently devoid of human feeling, response, emotion or genuine experience. A place in no way memorable, remarkable or desirable to anyone presumptuous enough to claim they have a soul.

The other effect we might term 'corporate blindness', and goes something like this: if the workers are trained into offering only bland, acceptable responses to even the most dramatic news, then a manager, should any consequence to a sacking or disciplinary action or whatever come back on them, could justifiably claim: 'How could I know they'd start a fight/get drunk/get arrested/smash the office/hit a policeman? They were fine when I spoke to them. I'd been given no impression that they were so upset.'

The manager could say this, and their words would be factually correct; and to a person with no conscience, that would be enough.

HERE ENDETH THE LESSON

PART SIX – VELVET MORNING – THURSDAY

Chapter 47 – Morning Feeling

Finn woke early and calm. Firstly he remembered his flurry of words the night before, which he judged not the worst ever penned by human hand. Then he remembered where he was, in life more than that morning, and his heart sank. It was a horrible sensation, and a sure sign that his recent life was wrong.

Yet Finn was no stranger to feeling certain dreads at certain points during the day. These were dreads as strong as anything he felt, and which amazed him both that he daily overcame them, and survived them with no obvious physical effects.

The first of these was less a dread than an extended internal groan, and occurred at the point of getting out of bed of a workday morning. This was always between five and eight minutes later than the target he set himself for rising; for although some deep part of him wished to stay there forever, a deeper part knew that any later and he'd miss the bus. It might be cold, it might be warm, he might be bursting for a slash, or for a cup of tea, or to brush away the taste of whatever he'd been eating or drinking the night before. It made no difference, that first act of emerging felt no less a 'little death' than the Pharaohs would have considered the sleep he'd just woken from.

The second feeling was less common and felt far from every day. Yet just recently it had become as routine as the 'waking groan', and it was the feeling of nausea that arose as his bus neared his place of work. The human mind was an odd thing, Finn considered: why not dread from the moment he embarked? The bus was never going to go a different way to every other day. Yet somehow he could deny his destination until he had the evidence of his own eyes through the bus's upstairs windows.

This day wasn't strictly speaking a work morning, and Finn wasn't needed till close to ten. Yet the 'waking groan' and the 'work groan' seemed both present right away. This was what it was then to live in his world at that moment, Finn thought to himself, his mind already fully-firing. A world where his emotional life was unrequired, was not acknowledged to exist, was not reflected in what he did for eight hours a day; and where, when his feelings did appear, they were judged a hindrance.

What time was breakfast? He couldn't quite remember. But it was a special day, so he gave himself a full half-hour's grace.

Meanwhile, in a room along the corridor...

The hotel seemed so bright: its windows were bright, its walls bright, the air she moved though as she sat up in bed all so bright.

Sylvie's first thought upon waking had been, I hadn't closed the curtains. Followed by, Are they my curtains? Followed by the relief of looking around her and seeing that she was in her own bed, and furthermore alone.

Had he been there last night? No, the room they'd been in had been a different size and shape. She'd left him there; she'd wanted to get back. She'd been conscious of her colleagues knocking for her in the morning. The memory returned of her creeping off along the corridor to her own suite, of doing all she could to stop him gigglingly following her, she shushing him, her shoes in hand.

'People are sleeping,' she'd whispered.

'Not in our rooms, they're not.'

Sylvie looked to the bedside table, and found she hadn't left her morning-self a glass of water. Straight away her throat felt dry. It was then, as she sat up in bed, that the brightness hit her. The time wasn't too bad, at least not on a day where they weren't travelling till ten o'clock. Yet already the day was producing that flat grey light that filled every space, diffused every shadow, and made each surface as bright as every other surface and the air they existed in.

It would stay like that till sundown she knew, during which it could be any time of the day or season of the year. She rolled back the duvet and herself out of bed, to find her phone and then the bathroom.

As for the previous night, what she felt was not remorse, nor even regret. But certainly a feeling that the layaround life was better suited to men, with their natural vitality and ability to forget. Not to women, with their weight of emotions to deal with. Odd, she thought, how such feelings crept up on you with age.

Ablutions to take care of, there was only the shower now to wash away the settled dust of nighttime. Sylvie raised her arm to turn the dial and saw a number on her forearm. It started 017, was his mobile, had been written laughingly in eyeliner pencil and then forgotten.

Where had he come from? She forgot the details, only that it had been a long way away. Furthermore, from certain words he'd used, she now judged he almost certainly had a girlfriend there. She looked again at the number. She turned the dial, and let the water fall and wash it away.

Composed and ready to face the world, Sylvie moved down the stairs to enter the restaurant. It being a little later in the morning, she thought the others might already be there to greet her. Would they know what she'd been up to the night before? They'd been absorbed in their pool game, hadn't they, hardly taking any notice of her. Nor could they think any less of her in the office than they already did, she felt, self-critically. And as for Jemima, her friend was no pot to call the kettle black.

Although the hotel was an old building, the facilities had been recently updated, so that the only old parts left were those bringing character. Anything out of date, in the way, or downright cranky had been expunged, smoothed out, replaced by painted plasterboard and fitted carpet and spot lighting. The effect was dazzling in the restaurant – always an important room in such a public establishment – where fine art hung on flawless walls, and where great stone frames held electrically assisted plate-glass doors.

As the latter opened for her, Sylvie saw the others. Oh no, there was an atmosphere, she instantly recognised it. Yet not to do with her, for the looks her way were looking to her for agreement, or understanding, not accusation – something else had happened that night, and it hadn't included her.

Sylvie had barely entered the room. Still, the first words directed to her were a question. Mitch caught her before she'd even made it to the self-service cereal and juice counter – hot dishes could be ordered at the table.

'Where were you last night?'

'Bit personal,' she stuttered, as if being asked by her Dad.

'We were knocking on your door. And don't tell me you're a heavy sleeper?'

But before she could voice her protest, Mitch explained,

'Jem had a bad night. We tried to find you.'

The table was placed at a corner, and leaning to look to see its hidden portion, Sylvie saw that no, Jemima was not there. Jasper was though, and looking as sheepish as anything.

'What did you do?' she asked Jay across the floor.

'Nothing!'

'Well, you were with her last night. You must have done something.'

Mitch answered, 'Well, that's exactly what we're trying to find out.'

Still no explanation. Nor did Finn's face give her any sign.

'No point asking Friend Finn,' bit Mitch. 'He slept through it too. Although it was going on right outside his door.'

'I was off as soon as my head hit the pillow,' he offered apologetically.

'What happened?' Sylvie asked the boss.

'It's okay, Jem's fine.'

'Where is she?'

'She's had hers in her room.'

Sylvie's breakfast would have to wait.

Chapter 48 – Jemima's Room

Back up the stairs, Sylvie knocked her friend's door, receiving a glum, 'Come in.' Yet as Sylvie entered, Jemima threw her food tray down on the bed and rushed to hug her.

It was a minute before they were sat on the bed and they could talk. Jemima had resumed her eating, and Sylvie still had no notion of what had occurred. Yet she had to bite down on her fears, for the telling would come at Jemima's speed. Still, it came to something when you were checking your friend in the morning for bruises.

'Hey, you okay?' started Sylvie.

'We knocked for you last night,' answered Jem between mouthfuls of egg on toast.

'I know, I'm sorry. If I'd known.'

'Known what?'

Sylvie still didn't know what.

'I suppose you were asleep,' said Jem.

'Yeah, I must have been,' answered Sylvie. However, looking at the bags beneath Jem's eyes, Sylvie didn't think she'd gotten much more sleep than her friend had.

'I don't want to talk about it,' began Jemima, before Sylvie had had a chance to ask.

'Okay.' Sylvie's body language was as open as she knew to make it.

'I didn't want to go down for breakfast.'

'You don't have to.'

'Will you stay?'

'Of course.'

Sylvie hoped her friend couldn't hear her stomach rumbling.

After a spell of quiet eating, Jemima said,

'I was with Jasper.'

'Yes.'

'In here.' She looked up and around the room.

'Okay.'

Jemima looked down then, and to one side. 'He had a phone-call from his wife. A picture flashed up of her holding a baby.'

'Oh.'

'After that, I didn't want to...'

'Did he get upset with you?'

But Jemima said no more.

'He didn't hurt you?'

'No, no, no.'

But that was all she'd say for now, looking back down at her cornflakes.

It would play out like this over the coming days, guessed Sylvie: a series of partial revelations, each feeling to Jemima like one step too far, each bringing the process to a stop. At some point there'd be tears, and Sylvie would be there.

Sylvie hoped it wouldn't turn out to have been any more than a row. There was certainly no evidence of worse. And then she remembered Jem hyperventilating in the hotel corridor. Sylvie tried to imagine a second scene, one taking place at nighttime: the phone call interrupting them mid-clinch. Jemima panicking, wanting away. Jasper not knowing what was going on at first, not able to change course quickly enough, turned instantly from fumbling; to calming; to even fearing being thought an attacker.

One of them must have gone to find Mitch, had knocked up Finn who wasn't answering. Sylvie thought of the nighttime panic this could generate in the hotel, and the whole hysterical horror of it all.

How had Sylvie missed it? Finn had missed it, and his room was only a couple of doors along. The walls in their wing must have been a foot thick, thought Sylvie. And the room she'd been in had been half the hotel away.

Jemima may not have wanted to talk. Yet as a friend, Sylvie had to counsel,

'He's going to be in the minibus all the way home.'

'I'm getting a train.'

'He's going to be on your team every day at work, Jem. We can't leave it like this.'

'We can. Mitch told me this morning. He spoke to Digby again; they've changed the desk plan.'

Sylvie wondered just how much she had missed.

'When's your train? I'll go with you?'

'There's an off-peak one at eleven – Mitch has already bought us tickets.'

Things had evidently started early.

'Okay. Of course I'd go with you.'

'He knew you would.'

This would mean they got home later, but it spared them the brooding masculine atmosphere of the minibus.

'And I am sorry I wasn't there last night.'

'You were only doing what I was.'

'You should have called me.'

'I didn't want to... interrupt.'

Fun though it had been, Sylvie wasn't sure that she'd even have noticed that very much was being interrupted.

Jem had finished eating. She said,

'I have to shower.'

After numerous assurances that she was fine, Sylvie left her to pack,

'I'll see you at half-ten then?'

'Okay.'

Sylvie closed the door softly behind her.

Chapter 49 – At the Breakfast Table

Not able to take the atmosphere any longer, Jasper had left the breakfast party to hide out in the hotel lounge. He grabbed a complimentary paper on the way, which he proceeded to look at without taking in a word.

This left Mitch holding court to a Round Table of one.

'He's not daft, Finn,' he was saying.

'Eh?'

'Digby. He's not daft.'

'No.'

Mitch thought aloud,

'I wonder how much longer this hotel bill will have to get before his secretary thinks he needs to see it.'

'Jem's room service?'

'And he'll be watching you guys like a hawk. And after last night...'

Finn imagined the scene outside Jem's room. His boss had been in attendance, and the calamity had evidently shaken him.

The Team Leader was still pondering,

'Well. Maybe it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease?'

'Sorry, Boss?'

'You! You four, you're the squeaky wheel. You've lucked-out, as the Yanks say. Only don't go on pushing it, Finn.'

'What d'you mean?' His boss's change of tone had startled him.

'I mean, that it's all very well being emotional, and having all these feelings. But carry on like it, and you're in danger of being thought pathetic.

'Not with me,' Mitch clarified to ease the shock he saw in Finn. 'I know it's just the way you are, and you've always worked well for me. I know this has been a stressful few days.'

'Few weeks.'

'And you're not alone in that. Just... don't carry on like this when we get back to the office, right?' Mitch went on, 'What happens in Sommerhill stays in Sommerhill. Digby wouldn't brook the kind of conversations we've been having for very long. You don't get to where he is by agonising over decisions. He'd call it "hand-wringing", but you didn't hear that from me.

'He's never been the sort to listen to feelings. Instincts maybe, but that's a very different thing; and in that there's no one better than Digby – he knew something was up here before I'd even told him, clearer than I knew it myself. But instinct's different isn't it; gut not heart, or something. Oh, who knows? Tell it to the birds, Finn, for all the good it's doing any of us here! I won't be sad to see the back of this place.'

All Finn could do was wait, before his senior continued,

'And he knows he messed up with the Foreclosure Team. I've only told Jem the details so far, but there won't be a Team F come next week. Everyone will share the work, and you're all being moved.'

'So it's certain?'

Mitch nodded.

Finn looked at him, incredulous,

'I know you mentioned something like it last night...'

'You'll probably end up on Sales. You've done it before?'

Finn nodded. He had done, once for a spell years ago.

'Good, 'cos we're running out of slack, Finn. We can't have any more dramas. We need quiet competence from the four of you for the foreseeable future – with the emphasis on quiet – if you don't want to be remembered as a troublemaker. And Digby's like an elephant, he never forgets.'

'Okay.'

'Jasper's lucked-out especially: he's landed Acquisitions.'

'What, even after last..?'

'Jemima doesn't want it going further, whatever it was. I've given her a woman's name in Personnel, if she wanted someone to speak to. There's nothing more I can do.'

'But Jasper, getting the top job after this..?'

'From what I've heard of that mob, he'll fit in fine.'

'And the girls? Are they Sales too?'

'Jem will be; Sylvie gets Resolutions.'

Finn's eyes widened.

'Yes, it's a good one, she'll learn a lot there. And she's bloody earned it too; she's been reliable these past few weeks. It isn't a promotion, but you might see it as such. I'm sure you don't begrudge her.'

'No.'

'And Finn, everything I've said here, it's because I trust you. You get that?'

'Yes. Word of what happened yesterday won't go any further once we get back.'

'No, I don't mean it like that; though thanks. But only... what I said just then, about you seeming weak. Well, it isn't my opinion. It's me looking out for you, warding you against future criticism. You get that?'

'Yes, Boss.'

'Good. Then put it all out of your mind. Have a last look around or whatever. Have a drink if you like, the bar's open. The minibus is at ten.'

Mitch got up, before concluding, 'I'm sorry. It's not you I should have been angry with there. It's Jasper; and not even him. It wasn't his fault she flipped out, nor hers. It's just this trip, this bloody trip.'

And with a hand slapped on the shoulder, Mitch was gone.

Chapter 50 – Taking the Air

Finn needed some air. And maybe Mitch was right, maybe he should have a last look around the town. It was a place with memories for him, yet which he might not see again for who-knew-how-long. As he left the restaurant though, Jasper appeared at the door to the lounge.

'Finn, glad to catch you.'

'Jasper.'

'Look, about last night...'

'Jasper, I've heard it all. There's nothing else you need to tell me.'

'But it was nothing very terrible, old man. I don't want you to think...'

Finn got it then,

'Oh no,' said the understanding colleague. 'I really don't think you tried to hurt her. If that's what you mean.'

'Thank you. I know how it ended up looking, I just... I wanted you to know, I'd never do that.'

'I know, Jasper. I really do.'

Jasper relaxed once he had Finn's trust back,

'It was my phone that did it. My wife had programmed it, you see, so that when she called me her picture popped up on screen. Her with the baby.'

'Oh.'

'Yes. I think Jem had another panic, that was all. And you can imagine the scene, halfway to paradise, so to speak.'

'Indeed.'

'She just wanted me out of there, before I even knew what was happening. It must have looked a right mess.'

Finn could imagine.

'She won't go any further with it though, once she's calmed down.'

'No, I'm sure.'

'And it's very good of you to be so reasonable, me being married and all.'

But the fact was that Finn was not being reasonable as such, merely hadn't the brain-space left available to consider the matter to any serious degree.

Finn smiled, 'I never judge.'

'And she a friend of yours too. It's decent of you.'

'Don't mention it.'

'Well, thanks anyway.'

Earning Finn another pat on the shoulder, Jasper smiled, and headed for the stairs. It was turning out to be a hell of a day.

Leaving Jemima's room, Sylvie hoped she still had time to grab a toasted sandwich before they closed the breakfast session. Coming down the stairs though, she saw Finn and Jasper. They were talking in the hallway, before heading off in different directions. Finn was leaving by the front door, and she knew she ought to talk to him. Once at ground level though, before she could follow him out, Mitch appeared, coming from the restaurant. Having seen her, there was no getting away.

Mitch muttered,

'Well, that just about puts a brass cap on a great few days away.'

So he wasn't superhuman after all, thought Sylvie. Even Mitch couldn't resist a slight remark at the increasingly bizarre situation.

'Where's Finn gone?' she asked her boss.

'To get some fresh air. How's Jem?'

'Okay, I think.'

'That's as good as we can hope for. She's told you what happened?'

'Not all of it. Though she doesn't seem hurt.'

'Thank God. Don't worry, I'll drag it out of Jasper when we're back, if it's the last thing I do. Which it will be in a way, as he won't be mine to manage come Monday.' Mitch shook his head, 'I swear, last night I was all set to wring his neck.'

'I think... I think they just had a fall out. I know Jem, she'd take it tough.'

'I know. And that does you credit. You're fine about the train?' he asked her then. 'I didn't have time to ask.'

'No worries.'

And Jem's told you about the seating plan at work?'

Sylvie nodded.

'It means tomorrow's a reorganising day, so wear jeans. And wish me luck – I'll be meeting Digby at eleven.'

Of course. If there was one thing they all knew about Digby, it was that he didn't 'do early'.

'I'd better get after Finn,' she said after a moment.

'If you see him, send him back here in time.'

Sylvie left Mitch, herself thinking: What an operator. What levers have you pulled? What discussions held? Was it your wife – or Digby – you were on the phone to all last night? And what price for these new jobs? Not even a final month's slog in the old ones? How have we gotten away with it?

All this was just about bearable, she felt. Indeed, it was quite exciting in its own way – but what a way to run a business. She wondered how the others on the Mortgages floor would feel about the F-Team work being drip-fed to them though. Would it work? And if not, how long before the next one of them broke?

Chapter 51 – At the Fountain

Sylvie looked out along the street in both directions. At first there was no sign of Finn in either. One direction seemed to lead to denser blocks of buildings, with public spaces hemmed in between them. Yet when she looked along the road the other way, she saw a larger space, as if the ground had fallen away beyond the late commuters and thronging buses. And there, at the very lip of that fall, she saw Finn through a break in the crowd.

Sylvie reached the same point herself, half-jogging along the edge of the pavement where it was clearer. She dodged between the flower tubs and the busy road. There, she caught sight of Finn again. She needn't have feared not catching him up, for the open space she had sensed was an odd-shaped public square, split over at least two levels. Through the middle of it rolled a waterfall, topped off by a fountain. Wide shallow flights of steps framed the waterworks on either side. And at the lip of the top pool, sat among statues and carved stone shapes, was Finn, taking in the morning.

Sylvie had got the weather wrong, and the cloud was breaking to let in early sun. She thought that it must have been nearly nine o'clock, for there to be so many people about. Yet, by the fountain, Finn was clear of the traffic, and could rest unjostled. Sylvie pulled her coat around her, and sat next to him on the damp stone.

'Beautiful morning,' she began. She watched the sun catch the tops of the buildings, their black flashing wet with dew.

'I used to sit here sometimes before starting work,' he answered, sat beside her on the low wall of the pool.

Above them were the town's great buildings. Below them were shops and bars and cafés, running off toward the centres of pleasure and conspicuous consumption.

'How's Jem?' asked Finn.

'Okay,' answered Sylvie, repeating the answer she gave Mitch.

'Well, that's something.'

'What's going to happen, Finn? What will Mitch do?'

'He doesn't think she'll want to take it further.'

'No,' she concurred.

'Puts it all in perspective really,' he suggested.

'It does that.'

'And congratulations,' he began, 'on Resolutions.'

'Sorry?'

'Oh Lord, you don't know? Well, you do now.'

'Our new team?'

'Yours. Jem and I are Sales.'

'Wow.'

'Jasper's Acquisitions,' added Finn, awaiting Sylvie's reaction.

'Well, he's lucky,' she mused. 'If the scene last night had happened back in town it might have kyboshed that.'

'Hmm, quite... But well done to you.'

'Cheers. Thanks.' She took a moment to compute her news, then went on more cautiously, 'Rather solves our troubles too, doesn't it.'

'Does it?'

'Well,' she went slowly, 'no more Foreclosures.'

'That's true.'

'It means we don't have to dread going back.'

'I suppose not.'

None of her statements had exactly been questions, but Finn didn't know whether to take them as such. He looked at Sylvie, she looking back at him with big eyes, and he whispered,

'But I don't want to go back.'

'Oh?'

'Even with the new jobs, I don't want it.'

She listened, and he spoke,

'This morning I've felt so guilty. They've made us these offers, and I can't accept them. Yet they've only made them because they'd nearly driven us away in the first place. And only want to keep us because they're losing staff hand-over-fist.'

Finn continued, 'They're trying to seem reasonable now, hoping we will be reasonable in return. And then everyone can go on burying themselves in reasonability, and never make another scene in a conference room corridor. But I don't want reasonability. I want to be unreasonable. I don't want to go back there.'

'Then we won't,' agreed Sylvie.

'Eh?'

Suddenly the free feeling of the previous day returned, for each of them. It was evidenced in Sylvie's beaming smile. Before she shocked Finn by hugging him, and saying,

'You've done it again, Finn. Twice in two days you've voiced what I was feeling. You've acted as my conscience. You've said what I could only keep to myself.'

She hugged him again, and then broke into tears.

Chapter 52 – A Proposition

Knowing from experience that no words could end a woman's weeping, Finn simply held Sylvie as she cried, and waited for whatever came next.

Eventually it subsided, Sylvie withdrawing from his hold to wipe her eyes and check herself in her compact mirror, declaring, 'I look such a mess.'

'Look, Finn,' she said at last. 'About last night.'

'You don't have to say.'

'I want to.'

'Yes?'

'You know what I did. You know I went off with some guy whose name I can't even remember, whose number I washed off my arm because I knew he'd be married, or with someone, and for me to call would just be... embarrassing. In fact, if he's remembered writing his number at all, then he's probably dreading the call right now...'

'You don't have to explain...'

'No, let me say this Finn. These few weeks, these few weeks I've been so unhappy. I've hated it so much, Finn. I don't tell my Mum what I do. I tell her that I work with mortgages, talk to people about mortgages. I don't say I take away their homes.

'Do you know what it's like to hate your work and hate yourself?' (Which of course he did.) 'And then, the way the management have treated us. The pressure we've been under, the number of files we've had to process. Family after family we've had to write to and call and speak to and tell them we're foreclosing. Telling them that their crying is for nothing, that there's nothing we can do. That we want it to happen, that we want them thrown out. I'm like a criminal. I want to ruin people's lives. And to have to do that, and to work for people who make me feel like that... I've never wanted it, Finn, never in my life.'

Sylvie paused to get her breath, before resuming,

'And then, for those few hours I thought we'd beaten it. We'd said no, you'd said no for us. It was like I could breathe again – didn't you feel that?'

He nodded, for he had.

'For those hours we were free. I was scared we'd lost our jobs, but I didn't care! Do you hear me? I didn't care! Not at all.'

'Yes, yes,' he nodded, holding her hand as she wiped her eyes again with the other.

'And then, we all went back to the hotel, fearing the worst. But Mitch was good to us, and the company were good to us, and promised us sweeties – hints of new jobs, everything forgiven. And I looked at you and thought that you'd accepted it, that we'd all accepted it, and that normal life had come back and covered everything over.

'There had been the tiniest spark in the darkness, Finn. And then it had gone out again. I saw how you looked last night, playing pool with Jasper, and you hardly knew where you were. You'd gone back to your safe place, buried underground, inside yourself, like you were in hibernation. You went back to your old comforts, and I went back to mine.

'But I want us to be partners,' she went on, 'and whatever we do, to do it together. Because we don't work alone, can't you see? You need me to gee you up, and I need you for inspiration.'

'Inspiration?' he gasped.

'Well, what else would you call it? You're the only one who knows, Finn. The only one who knows.'

'But what do we do?'

'We'll do whatever you want, your bookshop, anything. You leave the details to me.'

'They were just silly dreams, boyhood stuff.'

'I don't think they're silly.'

'But could we even support ourselves?'

'Of course we could. We'll live above the shop, only have one heating bill.' Sylvie wasn't even sure if this was correct, but enthusiasm was carrying her through. 'Why do you think you can't live as you want to? Life doesn't have to be this forced march, Finn. Where did you get the idea that it did?'

He blurted, 'Because it doesn't work that way, because we can't survive.'

Sylvie took Finn's shoulders in her hands, and spoke tenderly,

'You're still not thinking, are you. The world isn't the one you and Belinda dreamt in. Half of our shopping's online or out-of-town now. Town centre rents must be plummeting. All those pound shops, and Christmas shops, and sale outlets, and "Everything Under A Fiver" clothes stores, and mobile phone accessory places. How much do you think they're making to survive?'

Again, Sylvie was winging this, but somehow carrying it off; and in doing so perhaps realising some inner-resourcefulness she had not tapped into before.

Finn though was only finding inner-fears,

'But what if we don't make any money at all?'

'Then we'll sell something else.'

'And what if that doesn't make any money?'

'Then we'll muddle through – millions do, you know.'

'And what if we can't even afford to run the shop?'

'Then we'll open a stall if we have to. We could even start that way, travelling around markets and fairs,' she said. Before concluding sweetly, 'Doesn't that sound fun to you?'

Sylvie renewed her focus on him, the tiniest lines now appearing on her brow,

'This isn't a dream any more, Finn. It's a business proposition. So how about it, partner?'

She stuck out a hand, in what Finn first thought was a parody of a business handshake. Before realising it was deadly serious, and that his accepting of the handshake would be equally so. And he accepted.

Yet even as he did so, Finn knew that until they were actually living such a life then there was no way he could convince himself that it could happen.

Sylvie sensed his doubt, and wondered what there could be left for him to feel ambiguous about after hearing her statement?

'What is it?' she asked, as calmly as could be.

'You'd do all this for me?'

'For us, Finn. We're a team.'

'But I don't know what I can offer you in return.'

'I've told you. You just have to be my conscience, the man I can admire.'

'I,' he stammered. 'I've always wanted something like this.'

'Then why didn't you say?'

'I think I'd gotten used to not telling anyone anything. There was always the distance, always feeling trapped.'

'Well, we're not trapped now. We're free.'

Finn took a moment to consider this, as the notion had not occurred to him before.

Chapter 53 – Whatever you Want to Do

After 'geeing' Finn up for a walk around the square to stretch their legs, Sylvie broached another recent theme,

'And I'm glad we met Jack and Bel.'

'Really? I didn't think you liked her?'

'She spooked me a little last night, but I'd grow to her. And I am glad we met them.'

'So am I.'

'It must have been odd for you though.'

'Really not that bad.'

'And it's so sad that Jack was ill.'

Finn paused, gathering the words as if they were leaves on the pavement before their feet,

'Belinda wrote that when Jack got depressed it was as if he "felt the sadness of the entire world".'

'Those were her words?'

'I've still got the letter.'

'With you?'

'Not on me – I don't want that unlucky charm. She said he'd lost sight of who he was, where he was living, even what was real and what wasn't.'

Sylvie replied, 'Though Jack says he's never felt better since talking about it.'

'So I've heard people say.'

'And do you think you're ready for that yet?'

But Sylvie only held Finn's arm, and knew it might be a while.

'How d'you think they'll be?' she asked.

'They'll be okay.'

'I think Belinda's lonely though. For some reason, I can't imagine that she has many friends.'

'Some people don't.'

'She seems like the sort who would need someone to get her out of herself. It would be a kindness.'

'Maybe.'

'We'll come back and visit. We'll drive down.'

'Drive down in what?' he asked, neither of them having their own transport to his knowledge.

'Well, we're going to need a car, aren't we, to move stock. You're not going to carry it into town on your bare back?'

This was all so new. Finn would have to get used to it. A life of hauling books in boxes onto market stalls on misty mornings, cups of coffee hugged by gloved hands. They'd have to find a way to stop the paperbacks from wrinkling, he thought, when the air was damp on days like that. It all sounded quite exciting. He enjoyed it, that whole business of allowing yourself to hope.

Finn thought on Sylvie's phrase, 'Life doesn't have to be this forced march', and remembered that at times he had referred to his journals as his 'Campaign Diary'. He should have been with Monty in the desert, he'd always thought. At least it would have been warm. Finn sometimes had a sense of being a veteran of a war that had never ended, and which few knew was going on around them. From the creative centre of his brain then came a fully-formed character, as if off the pages of a novel. A grizzled soldier, still covered in North African sand, narrating, 'It's been a lonely war...'

'Things' had always been a struggle for Finn, and he could never know why. He had always wanted more than he knew how to ask for, more than he felt he had the right to. And yet it also seemed so very little to want, to be allowed some space, peace, the chance to do something worthwhile – were these impossible wishes?

That was how he felt it, but how to explain it? Only more Sixth Form ramblings...

Sylvie interrupted his thoughts, asking again,

'And you're not upset with me? About what I did last night?'

'Why should I be?'

'I just thought you might be. Mitch was.'

'He was only worried because he wanted you to sit with Jem.'

'So you think nothing about it?'

'I don't judge you.'

'But I want you to, Finn,' she wanted to say. 'I want it to mean something. I want you to react.' Instead Sylvie said,

'What are you thinking then? What's going on in that head of yours?'

'Oh, just working through some feelings.'

'More feelings,' she asked lightly. 'Haven't we had enough of those this week?'

To which he answered, 'It's just the way I work.'

'Okay,' and she left it at that, trusting that he knew himself best.

But Finn did know that sooner or later he'd have to do something with all those thoughts, that he'd have to put them into the world somehow.

Just then, a late-rising vagrant appeared from behind a bed of shrubs. His disguise of dirt was so complete that they hadn't even known he was there. Was he a portent, wondered Finn, a sign of where he himself might be headed? You needed a lot of energy to be a tramp, he remembered from an early Orwell book he'd read – kept on your feet all day, forever being moved on. And then Finn caught himself: God, had things gotten so bad that he was looking to tramps for lifestyle options, and then envying them their vigour?

Sylvie squirmed beside him.

'What's up,' he asked.

'They scare me, people like that.'

'Like what?'

'The kind who get left behind. I've seen them, Finn. Those lonely alcoholic women, and men who hang around street corners. I don't want that for us.'

And Finn could only share her fear.

'Let's talk about something cheerful,' said Sylvie then. 'You never told me of those dreams. The bookshops and all that.'

'I never meant not to,' explained Finn. 'They just belonged to the past. They weren't a part of who I was by the time I knew you. Can you understand that?'

'I think so,' she said.

'I'm sure you have girlish stuff you've never told me.'

'Yes. But I probably told Jem, or my Mum, or someone. That head of yours is like an attic room. How much is still locked up there?'

Finn didn't answer, but continued, looking around,

'I think of my time here a lot, you know. The Sixth Form, and those few months after, working in town.'

'But weren't you unhappy?' asked Sylvie. 'Wasn't than what you left to get away from?'

'Oh, it was horrible, I didn't know if I was coming or going. I couldn't tell you how unhappy I was; but I remember it now something like a golden age.'

She nudged him with her shoulder, 'Your head's a funny place to visit, buddy, but I wouldn't like to live there.'

She asked him,

'Have you had any breakfast yet?'

'A bit.'

'Sit with me while I have some?'

'Of course. You've got your meal token?'

She checked her watch,

'I don't think the hotel restaurant's still open.'

'Good, I don't want to get back there any sooner than I have to.'

'Me neither.'

'There's a café down that way,' he pointed past the fountain. 'At least, there used to be.'

Finn looked along the road that led their way,

'And if you're planning on opening a bookshop,' he continued, 'don't think about doing it on this street. The rents would be enormous; and there's a Waterstone's just along that avenue.' He pointed over to an arcade of yet more shops. 'And a Smith's just over there. They'll have this whole area stitched up.'

'You're always looking for sites still?'

'I don't even notice I'm doing it.'

Sylvie asked, 'And why didn't you get a job in Waterstone's or Smith's?'

'Because...'

Finn hated it when he hadn't words for something deeply held. He blurted out,

'Because they were the mainstream, and we had to be the alternative.'

'But aren't books themselves something special? The good bits of the mainstream? The bits you like?'

He had no answer to this point. Sylvie following quickly with,

'And haven't bookshops themselves become the alternative now? Aren't even the big chains struggling to survive? Wouldn't you even say that the small shops have a better chance than the big ones now, not carrying their weight?'

'I'd never thought of that.'

'There's just no space left up there sometimes, is there?' she asked, gently knocking at his temple, as if on the door of someone you didn't want to wake. 'Give us a hug.'

And he did so. And as they did so, so their cheeks brushed, and it felt like a kiss. And so he kissed her, just for a moment, and something settled in each of them, neither letting go, before falling back into their hold. And as they did so, so he felt years-old armour fall around him like scrap metal. And she nestled, like a creature in a new shape, never wanting to be moved.

They held each other, each knowing they could trust the other totally. And that though life may pull them hither and dither, it would never pull them apart – for the future that they could foresee, they were each other's. And this after already being tested, already seeing each other under duress, and so knowing each other in a way a brittle and fleeting and maybe instantly shattering new couple never could.

Sylvie found herself so grateful for this odd excursion, where a night out of town had let the world turn on its head. She almost pitied Jemima and Jasper (once their drama had died down, of course) for only coming out of it with better jobs; when it felt that she and Finn had earned the freedom of the world.

Of course, she knew it would be hard at first. She might have days where she would think differently, might wonder what the hell the pair of them had been thinking. There'd be times when Finn would slip, and she'd grow tired of understanding. But such sad moments would be grossly outweighed by incidences of pure joy.

'And there's so much more, Sylv,' Finn would tell her in the days to come. 'You haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg.' But she wasn't daft, and even in her current enthusiasm was aware of the places a mind as unhappy as his, and for so long, could have found itself. Maybe it had been the chat with Jack the night before, but she was not naive to this.

'Anyway,' she asked, smiling, 'I thought you were taking me to breakfast?'

Their walk had led them back to the fountain. They were at its foot now, and looking over at the other side of the square. From there, Sylvie saw the Town Hall clock, then checked her watch against it,

'Half an hour for you, Finn.'

'I know. I only need to grab my bag.'

'Walk me to the café first?'

'Come on then.'

Before they left the fountain though, she said,

'You know, all that about the book stall, it's only an idea.'

'I know,' he replied.

'We don't have to do it.'

But he hoped his smile in return told her that, even if not the book stall, then there would be something.

Sylvie asked him,

'Finn. When we get back, what are you going to do?'

'I don't know,' he answered. 'I don't know.'

But she was resolved, and trusted him as she did few others, this odd man with his head full of machinery even he couldn't fully work. She would put her faith in him, so as to let his flow to her.

'I don't know what I'll do,' he said again, though bolder now, not fearing the uncertainty.

'Well, neither do I, she said. 'But I do know, if you want me to, I'll do it too.'

The buildings were sombre in the morning stillness, the pigeons fluttering in the empty air between them. The first rays of sunlight were reaching over the Post Office now, to catch the water as it rippled in the pool. Together, the pair turned from the fountain and left the square.

The End
