A World of Good - Chapter One

A single message can be written in many minds, but there'll always be those who can't read their own handwriting.
One morning, in a small but important corner of England, the silence was taut and in need of soothing. No one had ever counted the offices of Associated PLC, a company with a slight mythical quality, as if it were a vast steel structure seen through a heat haze. Each office was open-plan, paper-free and noiseless to a fault, ensuring a hundred keen listeners could enjoy a one-sided conversation.
In the past, Paul Wyeman had enjoyed the deference of his clients, who were the sort of people who’d apologise if you bumped into them in the street. Mr Tyler, however, was of a new breed, and knew his rights, and reminded Paul of the Associated PLC Mission Statement:
CUSTOMER FIRST, CUSTOMER SECOND
The reminder was unnecessary; Paul got the message on mouse-mats, mugs, plaques and posters, the words spun in golden thread upon their navy-blue Associated polo-shirts. Paul never thought he’d be considered subversive for wearing a suit.
‘I’m sorry, I’m it won’t happen again,’ said Paul. ‘I can consolidate your investments under one fund; you should see steadier growth in the future.’
‘Prefer a quick burst of growth, me,’ said Chris Naylor, as he shouldered open the glass door. A hundred heads turned in his direction; in one, Mr Tyler continued his tirade, demanding particular attention for his private investment. All or nothing, this is what Mr Tyler believed should happen now, all, all for himself.
‘Hello stranger,’ said Elaine. ‘I’ve saved you a place.’
Elaine preened her scoured bob cut and winked; a murder of crow’s feet stretched their talons.
‘You know what?’ said Chris. ‘You’re all right for a married bird.’
Chris walked his balling, gunslinger’s walk, arms too far from his flanks, legs slightly too apart from dignity, to the workstation next to Elaine, rapping a rolled-up newspaper against the side of his knee.
‘Now I’m here,’ said Chris, sitting down, ‘how about breaking a few vows for me?’
‘Ooh, Chris,’ cooed Elaine. ‘You can’t say that now.’
As Chris passed Paul, the smell of stale cigarette smoke replaced that of contracted cleanliness. This smell attached itself to Mr Tyler, who twice gave Paul an unrepeatable promise that he’d be keeping a close eye on things from now on. Paul was obliged to thank Mr Tyler before he closed the call. Chris looked at Paul from across the office. And so Paul, of all people, called the client a name and hoped that he’d die.
‘Whoa there tiger,’ said Chris. ‘Don’t let the halo slip and choke you.’
Chris’s fans guffawed readily, grateful for the excuse. The laughter fed the joke in Paul’s mind, where Mr Tyler played on, with a commentary by Paul’s father, criticising his son’s motivation, each comment ringed with smoke from a Craven ‘A’. For one awful moment, Paul feared he was going to be sick, allowing his colleagues the opportunity to consult his entrails. To distract himself, Paul attended to the begonia on the windowsill, a gift from his manager twenty years after leaving university angry at the state of the rainforests. The terracotta pot was chipped and stained, in need of replacement. Paul pressed the loose soil down with his thumbs, kneading the goodness.
‘They’ve cancelled Sunday overtime,’ announced Chris, from behind the newspaper. ‘Just thought I’d share that with you. Can’t get out of that bloody access meeting now. I’m sick of watching rhinos shagging at that zoo. Reminds me of why I’ve got access in the first place.’
‘I would’ve thought one of the leading lights of Sales & Marketing would recognise bad publicity when he saw it,’ said Paul. ‘You stand to upset a lot of new-found sensibilities.’
‘It won’t last. You won’t have it all your way for long, Paul-o.’
Paul returned to his station and the anonymous man to Paul’s left handed him a brown A4 envelope, fat with money, a collection for those in need. Checking the exchange rate for guilt, Paul contributed a crinkled ten pound note and carried the envelope to Chris, who sat obscured by a double front-page spread of a stock picture of Earth from space, a tilted Africa and a cloudless Arabia, the world fringed by a photo-shopped sun, peering from behind like a party-goer spoiling a family portrait. A new age was proclaimed, pages 2 to 12, 14 to 27. Paul slipped the envelope under the newspaper.
‘Begins at home, mate,’ said Chris, as always. Paul coughed so pertinently it hurt. ‘Oh yeah. Right.’
Chris dug out a crisp new fiver from his pocket.
‘Not much happened yesterday,’ said Chris, with all the enthusiasm of a man looking for a Smith in the phone directory. ‘The paper’s full of it. I bet the coppers were bored stupid.’
‘I don’t like the sound of bored policemen,’ said Paul.
‘It’s the sleeping ones I hate. And those bloody speed cameras.’
‘They’re there for a perfectly good reason.’
‘Yeah, you’re holding an envelope full of it.’
‘No-one has a licence to break the law.’
They were at it again, Paul and Chris, Chris and Paul. The others smiled and took comfort.
‘Ooh, read my horoscope Chris,’ squawked Elaine, fingering her charm bracelet. ‘I’m cancer.’
As Chris read as much of the romantic prospects of the common crab as he could without recourse to an 0898 number, Paul considered Chris and wondered why he didn’t dislike him more. After all, Chris sported a goatee beard in imitation of a six-packed Hollywood actor who appeared in films so dumb Paul could hear them halfway across town, yet also took pride in what was becoming a bonny bouncing beer belly. Paul opposed Chris, yet lingered dumbly at him as if in a confused adolescent crush.
Paul concentrated; the noise level had increased since Mr Tyler's call. And so the second morning of the New Age passed by.

Chris returned from an early lunch with a carrier bag full of confectionary.
‘Help yourselves, kids! A treat now we’re all in the know.’
‘Sainsbury’s?’ asked Paul. ‘It must help having an ex behind the counter.’
‘Will you shut your trap if I give you a toffee apple?’
‘Country of origin?’
‘What’s got into you today? Not getting any? Just eat the thing and have a word with yourself.’
Paul attempted to lecture on the toffee apple’s iniquitous human rights record, but Chris already had their colleagues eating out of his hand, rotting their teeth as he made them smile. It was hard for Paul not to smile - but he managed. A young girl with an inviting, uncertain expression emerged from the periphery. Chris grinned and gave her the glint of a crown.
‘Here you go sweetheart, you can have Grumpy’s toffee apple, fresh-picked from a toffee-apple tree.’
‘Fresh from a deep-freeze, more like,’ she retorted, crossing her arms. ‘Shops fuck around with fruit to make it look nice, then mess with your head to get you to buy it. We did consumer psychology last term. Haven’t you read The Power of the Super Market?’
The girl pushed back her narrow, rectangular glasses; her eyelashes brushed against the lenses. To Paul, she brought to mind Western girls as depicted in Japanese comics, wide-eyed and button-nosed, triangular shards of hair, limbs thin but welcoming. In the way she wore her straight and graceful lines, her collarbone a coat-hanger, eyebrows the tick of a teacher’s pen, the girl bore a refreshing futurism, offset by a childish quality quite unlike Chris’s juvenile vulgarity.
‘Bloody hell, not another one,’ griped Chris. ‘You lot kept quiet yesterday, didn’t you?’
‘You weren’t offering free sweets yesterday.’
‘How long til you go back to school?’
‘I go back to university in a week and a half.’
‘Too clever by half, I reckon. By the time I was your age, I’d been a work for five years, at four different offices, gone through three company cars – ‘
‘– two broken engagements and one brief but fruitful marriage,’ added Paul. ‘And forget about the book, Chris can’t read.’
Chris scowled, but the girl laughed in the mildly startled fashion of someone winning a lucky dip. The girl’s trouser pocket buzzed and faster than the speed of innuendo, she pulled out her mobile.
‘It’s a text from my Dad. Good grief, Mum’s off on one again. She was in floods over breakfast. Talking of which – ‘
With a ‘yoink’, the girl nabbed the toffee apple from Chris and stuffed it into her Dunlop holdall, which bounced against her flat backside as she left the office. Chris gestured towards the swinging door with a half-eaten Snickers bar.
‘Puts the temp into tempting, that one,’ said Chris, with a nod of self-approval. ‘I hope no-one’s got in there first. Posh ones are always the dirtiest, they think it’s how common birds act.’
‘By ‘posh’, I presume you mean intelligent, in which case I’m sure she wouldn’t be interested in you.’
‘You needn’t get so cocky. Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking of just how dirty she could be.’
‘You can’t say that sort of thing anymore.’
‘No? Then nor can you, eh? You least of all. How is the missus?’ asked Chris. ‘Still in the back of beyond?’
‘All I meant was – well, you said yourself, you can never trust a girl who wears glasses.’
‘Yeah. They’re hiding something. Anyway, her lot will be using it as an excuse to keep their knickers on. My eldest brother was at Tech when Band Aid was going off. Couldn’t get a sniff, reckons the birds were all No Sex Please, We’re Ethiopians. Stuff that. The posh will get posher, the dirty will get dirtier, you’ll see.’
As with supermarket apples, Chris was so many varieties of tasteless, Paul couldn’t decide which to pick out. Instead, he returned to the day’s workstation and took out a picture from his wallet. Husband and father, he thought. They were good titles to have, superior to Chris’s succession of anonymous darlings and sweethearts. Mr Tyler broke off from his rant to point out to Paul that if this were the 1960s, ‘Paul’ and ‘Chris’ would be the other way around. Paul rubbed his throat, wanting to say how much he loved his family.
Considering what they’d shared, Paul was singularly disinclined to concede his learned inclinations. The dynamism of caution and progress had served him well and Paul felt the only chickens a liberal should count were those enjoying free-range of the back garden. Complacency is a disease of order’s skeleton and Paul felt in his bones there was something to be wrong. There should be resistance he thought, an assertion of the independence of goodness.
What choice did he have?
Two maintenance operatives, clad in white boiler suits and protective facemasks, arrived to change a striplight, which they did with the nervous delicacy of a novice circus act under the watch of the ringmaster.
I wish I could phone Dad, thought Paul. Share this with him. Paul had waited last evening, only for Dad to keep Mum.
‘I’m slipping out,’ said Paul, who felt as if he were.
Again, Chris watched the door open and shut.

One of Paul’s favourite facts about head office was that it boasted some of the longest corridors in the country, with this one a kilometre in total length. Principles, an economic method of assuaging guilt, prevented Paul from taking the lift, and so he followed the gentle curve of the corridor. On his right, offices identical but less familiar; to his left, windows of blue sky, as opaque as purity. In its thick, white walls and tessellated floor pattern, the corridor gave a feeling of firm supremacy, as a man might enjoy while leafing through a leather-bound atlas. Mr Tyler kept Paul company, a voice near his shoulder reminding Paul that goodness means protecting the loathed as well as the loved, those within as well as those without.
Footsteps from beyond the apex. Paul quickened his pace, as if to hurry past his own doppelganger. The Temp turned the corner, her lips a lurid red from the toffee apple. They looked at each other in the same split second and in each others eyes they saw that it had happened, and during the night before last, every man, woman and child had dreamed alike, a dream which, for Paul, Chris, the Temp and millions of others around the world, had proved the existence of God.
‘Ah, hello again,’ said Paul. 'Er…how was your mother?’
The Temp brushed aside her brisk fringe. Paul noticed a spot on her neck, bright upon the emulsified skin.
‘Oh, she’ll be fine. She just needs to get used to the idea of being right. Her nose is out of joint from blowing it so much. Mum never really took much notice of dreams before.’ The pocket buzzed again. ‘I love getting calls; they make me feel wanted. Hold this?’
She handed the toffee-apple to Paul.
‘Yes, hello Mum.’ (‘Have a bite,’ she whispered.) Paul nibbled at the white flesh, drawing his front teeth along the Temp’s bite marks. The apple swivelled upon its stick, smearing toffee across Paul’s mouth. ‘Mum, take a breath, I can’t make you out. Why don’t you go for a walk with Dad or something? Enjoy the moment while it lasts. I mean – yes, I’m sorry. Got to go, there’s a big cheese waiting to talk to me. (She winked at Paul). Love you. Bye.’
Paul passed back the toffee-apple. For a moment, Paul’s fingertip stuck to one of the Temp’s.
‘Thanks. Mum says the Prime Minister’s been on the telly, appealing for calm. Mum’s the only person I know who isn’t. She’s waited for this all her life and now she’s scared to leave the house.’
Paul could think of nothing to say; he wanted to say everything.
‘Um, I’d better get back,’ said the Temp. ‘Got to fight the fight. Catch you later.’
She broke off, leaving Paul alone in the apex. Paul told himself not to look out of the window, but did so anyway, ten stories down at the ambling, shambling public he sought to help, but had themselves been saved by a special offer. Paul focussed on a child being dragged through the crowds by its mother, wearing a coat by its hood. The boy dropped a carton of French Fries and stooped to pick it up, only for the mother to yank the along child by his arm, anxious to join another queue for another pint of milk and loaf of bread. Don’t worry, thought Paul. I’m the Someone Else who’ll pick up your mess. I’m the Someone Else who worried about the future you don’t care about. Customer First, Customer Second and I’m contractually obliged to save one from the other. Mr Tyler’s voice grew louder. Paul's heart beat like the damned. All he had left was his heart and it was trying to kill him.
The child stumbled and lost its coat. At the end of the corridor, a door slammed shut. Mr Tyler’s voice turned into a deafening roar, a million shells pressed to Paul's ear. Down below, the public swarmed in hatred, bred with contempt, swelled in the weight of numbers, the number one, the numeral ‘I’, to claw at Paul’s leg, clammy hands covering his mind’s eye, these people he thanked for barging into him in the street, those who didn’t have to save for the future. Alone in a chasm of faces, a razor’s edge of light above his eyes, Paul cried out in silence and stumbled into a stock cupboard. As he fell, kneeling to darkness, Paul grabbed the nearest object to him, a pencil.
'I'm sorry,' he said.
Paul sank out of sight. The second afternoon since the Dream passed away.