We All Fall Down Read Free Page A

department.’
    â€˜We’re friends. Try to understand –’
    â€˜I do understand, Hugh. You try and understand. I’ve had a shocking day. Tim’s driving me demented. I’ve been asked round by friends for a relaxing drink, a bit of peace and quiet, and my husband’s saying he’s too busy comforting a bloody work colleague to come back and look after his own child. You work out your priorities.’
    â€˜I’ll have one quick drink and try and catch the 6.27.’ More like the 7.27 , he thought, being realistic .
    She slammed the phone down on him. He sighed, closing his eyes. He wondered how his wife equated his not being with the family with her going off to visit neighbours on a Friday evening.
    Already, the agency had fallen quiet. He could hear someone on the phone further down the corridor, but the voice was too indistinct to work out who it was. In the distance the lift doors opened and closed with decreasing frequency. Further away, on the other side of the building, he could hear a cleaner vacuuming. He sat at his desk, cut off from the rest of the office – seemingly, the rest of humanity – almost overwhelmed by a feeling of dread, as if he was lying at the bottom of a deserted swimming pool, only the muffled roar in his ears keeping the painful silence at bay.
    Companies possessed a fearsome ability to damage people, to inflict physical, mental or emotional pain, and they did this, it seemed to him, with increasing regularity. They fired people with no concern as to what might befall them, ignoring the contribution to the business they’d either made in the past or would make in the future. Employees were thrown out into the street to fend for themselves, to survive or to sink. Like some corporate air balloon rising skywards, the management crew cast human sandbags over the side in order to gain more height. Dismissing employees without a second thought was accepted business practice in the modern world, and that was what he found so unacceptable. It was the material cost of being dismissed that he was afraid of, being forced to enter the world of doing without, the world of not enough, the world inhabited by those people he was only dimly aware of, in railway stations or public parks, dirty, shadowy, with dead, drawn faces. It was a world he went out of his way to avoid because it made him feel too uncomfortable. These people reminded him of his childhood, of the world of unemployed coalminers, a Dickensian existence of poverty and hunger. Fiona’s dismissal forced Hugh to stare over this precipice, to look down into the abyss, to contemplate where he could one day end up. And the sight made him sick with apprehension.
    He went down to Fiona’s office. There was one large cardboard box by her desk. She hadn’t accumulated much in her eight years at The Alpha Agency. ‘I’m not a hoarder,’ she explained. ‘Irwin and Lee are going to drop it round to my place tomorrow. So now I’m ready.’
    As they went down in the lift, she said, ‘I don’t want to go to the local. That’s where everyone else will be.’
    They walked a couple of blocks to another hotel. After he’d bought the drinks and toasted her future, she said, ‘I think it’s been on the cards for a while.’
    â€˜What makes you say that?’
    â€˜You know what they say – that the day you join an agency, someone fires a gun and the bullet starts heading in your direction.’
    â€˜No, I’ve never heard that.’
    â€˜The bullet’s heading for you and one day it’s going to hit you. One day. You just don’t know which day. You don’t know how long it’ll take to reach you. That’s the fun bit, the waiting. Could be days, could be months, could be years. But nearly always it hits you when your back’s turned.’
    â€˜That’s a bit grim.’
    â€˜I’m too argumentative for