Fat Charlie was a man who preferred to be working. He regarded lying on a sofa watching Countdown as a reminder of his interludes as a member of the unemployed. He decided that the sensible thing to do would be to go back to work a day early. In the Aldwych offices of the Grahame Coats Agency, up on the fifth and topmost floor, he would feel part of the swim of things. There would be interesting conversation with his fellow workers in the tearoom. The whole panoply of life would unfold before him, majestic in its tapestry, implacable and relentless in its industry. People would be pleased to see him.
“You’re not back until tomorrow,” said Annie the receptionist, when Fat Charlie walked in. “I told people you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. When they phoned.” She was not amused.
“Couldn’t keep away,” said Fat Charlie.
“Obviously not,” she said, with a sniff. “You should phone Maeve Livingstone back. She’s been calling every day.”
“I thought she was one of Grahame Coats’s people.”
“Well, he wants you to talk to her. Hang on.” She picked up the phone.
Grahame Coats came with both names. Not Mister Coats. Never just Grahame. It was his agency, and it represented people, and took a percentage of what they earned for the right to have represented them.
Fat Charlie went back to his office, which was a tiny room he shared with a number of filing cabinets. There was a yellow Post-it note stuck to his computer screen with “See me. GC” on it, so he went down the hall to Grahame Coats’s enormous office. The door was closed. He knocked and then, unsure if he had heard anyone say anything or not, opened the door and put his head inside.
The room was empty. There was nobody there. “Um, hello?” said Fat Charlie, not very loudly. There was no reply. There was a certain amount of disarrangement in the room, however: the bookcase was sticking out of the wall at a peculiar angle, and from the space behind it he could hear a thumping sound that might have been hammering.
He closed the door as quietly as he could and went back to his desk.
His telephone rang. He picked it up.
“Grahame Coats here. Come and see me.”
This time Grahame Coats was sitting behind his desk, and the bookcase was flat against the wall. He did not invite Fat Charlie to sit down. He was a middle-aged white man with receding, very fair hair. If you happened to see Grahame Coats and immediately found yourself thinking of an albino ferret in an expensive suit, you would not be the first.
“You’re back with us, I see,” said Grahame Coats. “As it were.”
“Yes,” said Fat Charlie. Then, because Grahame Coats did not seem particularly pleased with Fat Charlie’s early return, he added, “Sorry.”
Grahame Coats pinched his lips together, looked down at a paper on his desk, looked up again. “I was given to understand that you were not, in fact, returning until tomorrow. Bit early, aren’t we?”
“We—I mean, I—got in this morning. From Florida. I thought I’d come in. Lots to do. Show willing. If that’s all right.”
“Absa-tively,” said Grahame Coats. The word—a car crash between absolutely and positively—always set Fat Charlie’s teeth on edge. “It’s your funeral.”
“My father’s, actually.”
A ferretlike neck twist. “You’re still using one of your sick days.”
“Right.”
“Maeve Livingstone. Worried widow of Morris. Needs reassurance. Fair words and fine promises. Rome was not built in a day. The actual business of sorting out Morris Livingstone’s estate and getting money to her continues unabated. Phones me practically daily for handholding. Meanwhilst, I turn the task over to you.”
“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “So, um. No rest for the wicked.”
“Another day, another dollar,” said Grahame Coats, with a wag of his finger.
“Nose to the grindstone?” suggested Fat Charlie.
“Shoulder to the wheel,” said Grahame Coats. “Well, delightful chatting with you. B
ut we both have much work to do.”
There was something about being in the vicinity of Grahame Coats that always made Fat Charlie (a) speak in cliches and (b) begin to daydream about huge black helicopters first opening fire upon, then dropping buckets of flaming napalm onto the offices of the Grahame Coats Agency. Fat Charlie would not be in the office in those daydreams. He would be sitting in a chair outside a little café on the other side of the Aldwych, sipping a frothy coffee and occasionally cheering at an exceptionally well-flung bucket of napalm.
From this you would presume that there is little you need to know about Fat Charlie’s employment, save that he was unhappy in it, and, in the main, you would be right. Fat Charlie had a facility for figures which kept him in work, and an awkwardness and a diffidence which kept him from pointing out to people what it was that he actually did, and how much he actually did. All about him, Fat Charlie would see people ascending implacably to their levels of incompetence, while he remained in entry-level positions, performing essential functions until the day he rejoined the ranks of the unemployed and started watching daytime television again. He was never out of a job for long, but it had happened far too often in the last decade for Fat Charlie to feel particularly comfortable in any position. He did not, however, take it personally.
He telephoned Maeve Livingstone, widow of Morris Livingstone, once the most famous short Yorkshire comedian in Britain and a longtime client of the Grahame Coats Agency. “Hullo,” he said. “This is Charles Nancy, from the accounts department of the Grahame Coats Agency.”