The Life of Lee (33 page)

I rolled the scenario over in my head. I’m loosening my tie and a butler hands me a gin and tonic. ‘Thanks, Jeeves.’ Heather is standing in a negligee next to a live leopard. I raise an eyebrow and strike a pose. ‘Sorry I’m late, darling. I’ve been at a very important sales conference.’ Nice.

Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t knock anyway, as I couldn’t lift my arm. In fact, the only thing I could do was slide my hand on to the door handle and enter. It was tight, but I managed to squeeze my hand along in front of me. By now the noise was really getting up some speed. The chanting was a lot louder – it sounded like some kind of religious cult carrying out a spiritual exorcism. ‘Out with the old, in with the new!’ they chanted. ‘Out with the old, in with the new!’

I turned the handle and the door swung open. I stumbled into the room and found myself standing in front of a smartly dressed crowd of about fifty or sixty people. They were all sizes, shapes and colours. They all had their arms reaching up to the heavens, as a tall, boyish man with blond wavy hair, blue eyes and the sharpest pinstripe three-piece suit I have ever seen paced up and down encouraging them. His shiny Italian shoes gliding along the thin grey office carpet, he was prancing around in front of a white board that stretched along the entire wall. On it, Pinstripe Boy had written slogans such as,
‘Screw the fuckers into the ground,’ and ‘Don’t even let them breathe.’ He kept hitting the air in front of him like there was an imaginary punchbag and shouting angrily at the crowd: ‘Out with the old, in with the new! Come on, you bastards, let’s hear it.’

The man in the pinstripe suit – clearly, the leader of this sales cult – suddenly noticed me and shouted over as the crowd in front of him carried on their chanting. ‘Why are you here?’

I couldn’t quite hear him at first because of the racket in the room. ‘Sorry?’ I asked, volunteering my ear.

He shouted at me again, more forcefully this time. ‘I said, why the fuck are you here?’ I held up the paper and was just about to tell him it was about the advert when he cut me off. ‘Are you here to make some money?’ I was confused. I was there for the job, but I was now thinking I might have the wrong place. He came closer and bellowed in my face. ‘You don’t like yourself!’

‘What?’ It was difficult to know what was going on. Maybe, I thought, I have the right place and this is part of what it’s all about. After all, everyone else in the room was a bit lively, so I decided to play along. I shouted back in my best Kirk-Douglas-we’ve-got-to-build-a-long-boat-right-now rallying cry. ‘Yes, I don’t like myself!’

I thought that would do it. I smiled at the crowd who, noticing that the man in the pinstripe was shouting at an odd-looking scruffbag in a clown’s suit with out-of-control fuzzy hair, suddenly become less enthusiastic about their chanting. It began to fade out until eventually they stood staring at me with bemusement.

I was also bewildered by Pinstripe Guy, who was now
circling me as if he were a lion just about to pounce on a vulnerable antelope, which just happened to be wearing a comedy suit. He started shouting at me again. Fuck me, I thought. What the fuck have I done to this bloke? ‘You hate yourself, don’t you?’ he shrieked. ‘And you’re here to make some money. Am I right?’

Now I felt uncomfortable. ‘You fucking hate yourself, don’t you, fuzzy boy?’

That made me jump, and I reacted by shouting back angrily, ‘Yes, I do.’

He smiled. He knew he had me. In his mind, he had cracked me, and so he went in for the kill. ‘You are a pile of dog’s shit, a useless piece of human waste. What are you?’ He waited for my answer, and the crowd watched this rather one-sided game of verbal tennis with interest.

I shouted back, ‘Dog shit!’ This time I slapped my forehead hard with the palms of my hands for effect, hoping if I showed a bit more anguish he would stop shouting at me, but he kept going.

‘What are you?’ he roared again.

I thought perhaps I’d got the last one wrong, so I tried another one. ‘Human waste?’ I stared at him to see if I’d got it right, then realized I hadn’t done the slapping of my forehead bit, so I smacked my brow again, harder this time. But it was too late now and must have appeared out of context. Mr Pinstripe simply shook his head.

His ritual humiliation of me now over, he grabbed a plastic folder from the top of a cabinet, held it in front of my face and tapped on it with his finger as he spoke. ‘This is your sales kit. Look after it, it is your friend.’

The king of the pinstripes, who, I later discovered, was
called Dan, handed it to me. ‘It will earn you a lot of money, fuzzy head.’ Then he shouted at me again. ‘Go and sit down. Join the winners, you loser.’ Then he began rallying the crowd again by pointing randomly at various people and shouting at them, ‘Darryl, how much did you earn this week?’

‘Five hundred pounds.’

‘Five hundred pounds? You’re a winner, Darryl. Calvin, how much?’

From there on in, I was paired off with a mentor. He was a black lad named Joe. He took one look at me and burst out laughing. He did that a lot; he laughed at everything and everyone. He led me away from the rest of the group into an adjoining room. There we sat at a small desk for the rest of the day until it got dark as Joe took me through the plastic folder’s pages of illustrations, diagrams, graphs and newspaper cuttings highlighting the benefits of unit trusts. The folder underlined how unit trusts performed compared with other similar offerings. It also explained interest rates, APR figures and a load of other financial jargon that made my head spin.

It contained all that was needed to make you sound just like a proper financial adviser. Then there was a dummy form that Joe took me through as if I were a customer. He showed me his trick of how to get the punters, as he called them, to sign it just by offering them the pen, looking them right in the eye and just waiting, not saying a word. Joe demonstrated that, but then he started laughing again, saying he couldn’t look me in the eye as I made him crack up. All the same, he assured me that the tactic worked every time.

I couldn’t make head nor tail of it all, but Joe kept drilling me. ‘Learn it, geez,’ he said, clicking his fingers. Then he would bounce around the room laughing. ‘You’re gonna make a mint, right, geez?’

I liked Joe a lot. He had patience with me. He knew I was an idiot, and he knew I wasn’t a salesman, but he could tell just by looking at me that I was desperate. He himself had gone through the same process. This was the only job going, and I really needed it. Heather and I had no money.

Joe just wanted to try and help – plus, it was in his interest, as whatever I made, he would get a cut of it. I worked for him now so he was very keen to get me to sell. ‘The unit-trusts financial package, unlike other insurance policies, is diversified across the entire stock market. So all your money isn’t in the same basket, but is spread by our expert teams across only the most successful companies.’ That was the sort of sales jargon I had to learn parrot -fashion from the plastic pages of my sales kit.

Joe told me to go home and learn it off by heart, as tomorrow we would be going out selling. ‘I need you, bruv,’ he said as I left for home, shutting the purple door behind me. I could hear his loud laugh as, by now completely exhausted, I walked down the stairs. But I would find out I needed Joe a lot more than he needed me where we were going.

I got back to our house very late in the evening, and Heather quickly forgot her anger about my tardiness as I explained that I’d actually managed to find a job. However, her enthusiasm quickly waned when I told her what it was. But if there’s one thing she always falls for, it is my
perpetual positivity, and so I soon had her back on my side.

She sat on the camp bed giggling at me, as I strutted around our tiny cramped bedroom pretending I was Gordon Gekko. I must have looked such an idiot in my Oxfam Poncho the Clown suit with extra large lapels and strategically missing trouser turn-ups.

Heather said she had some good news herself. She had been looking in the
Southend Evening Echo
and had found a flat that she thought just right for us. ‘We have to act fast,’ she buzzed away, ‘as it was the cheapest one there and could easily be snapped up if we don’t show interest very soon.’ That brought me crashing back to reality. Heather always does that. I’m forever doing my ‘I have a dream’ speech, and she will be the voice of reason, of authority and of reality in our relationship.

It’s a good job she wasn’t married to Martin Luther King or any of those other people who do great things. ‘I have a dream –’

‘Oh blimey, ’ere he goes with his “I have a dream” malarkey again. Sit down, you great walloping buffoon.’

‘Ask not what your country can do for you –’

‘You can do something for me – you can put that shelf up in the back bedroom.’

‘One giant step for man, one –’

‘You can stop leaping all over the place, for a start. What’s the matter with you?’

I knew she was right, of course. We needed to get somewhere proper to live as we had a baby on the way. So not wanting to crush her hopes, I told her that we should make the effort and go to see the flat, but secretly I was
concerned. I just couldn’t see any way we could afford it, but Heather was adamant that she wanted somewhere other than just one room to live in with a baby. She eagerly explained she could just about do it on her wages, and if it meant going without, then that’s what we’d have to do.

I did what I always do when I have to face the real world: I either make a joke of it or let it go over my head and carry on in the hope that it will eventually go away. I took the path of least resistance. I went along with Heather’s plan, adopting my customary I’ll-deal-with-it-when-it-happens attitude.

‘Blimey,’ I began sarcastically, ‘you give a woman everything she wants –’ I stood up and showed off the small cramped room with two camp beds squeezed into it – ‘and still she moans!’

I sat back down on the camp bed. ‘Right now, can I please be left alone for a minute as I need to learn what I’ve got to say tomorrow when I’m out with Joe?’ I stabbed my finger down on the bed as if to make a point. ‘A tycoon financial adviser’s work is never done.’ I then busied myself flicking through the pages of the plastic folder.

‘But, Lee, we need to talk about this flat!’ Heather protested. At that moment, she unexpectedly stood up. As soon as she did so, the other end of the camp bed flipped up and suddenly I was trapped between the camp bed and the wall.

From this awkward position, I said what I thought she wanted to hear. ‘Heath, you want that flat, right? Then I need to memorize all this stuff, so we can perhaps earn some money.’ She burst out laughing at my predicament,
which lightened the mood a little. But I could see that as far as she was concerned, I’d agreed.

Then I tried to read the folder, I really did, but it was damn hard when I was still wedged against the wall and in great discomfort.

Clearly, Poncho the Clown was going to struggle to sell financial services.

30. The Death of a Salesman

By the morning, I’d put all the distractions about flats firmly to the back of my small, but on this particular day, Getty-like brain. I had much more important things to worry about. After all, I mused, the world of finance waits for no man – money never sleeps. Today I was up’n’ at’em, jumping out of bed and executing my usual early-morning fitness regime of one and a half press-ups, done mostly by looking for one of my shoes that had been lost underneath the camp beds.

When I did find it, the shoe was a right mess. The three-hour journey on the train and the Tube to get to North London, followed by the long walk through Kilburn, had now worn out one of the puncture-repair-kit patches. The sole of my right shoe had begun to flap, so not only did I look like a clown, I was also starting to sound like one: SLAP, STEP, SLAP, STEP, SLAP.

But I was soon in the traps at the shabby Kilburn office, waiting for the off, sitting with all the salesmen I had seen the previous day. I have to say, they all looked a shadow of how they’d appeared the day before when they’d all been chanting like maniacs. Yesterday, it was like a religious meeting; today, it felt like I had stumbled into a funeral. They flopped around like deflated balloons.

By contrast, I was really up for it, believing that this
was my chance to shine. You only get one, maybe two at the most, so when an opportunity comes knocking, you have to grab it with both hands. By the look of this sorry lot, I thought, in a couple of hours I was going to be running rings round them. I was already pumping myself, telling myself, ‘I was born ready!’

At that moment, ‘Dynamic Dan’, the pinstripe guy from the day before, bounded into the room. He was followed by a smiling Joe and about five other sales managers, all of whom seemed to be buzzing with enthusiasm, whistling and clapping. Programmed to please, I clapped like mad back at them, stamping my feet and whooping a lot.

I suppose I got a bit carried away with it all. As I was cheering so much, I didn’t notice that the entire room had fallen silent. Everyone was now staring at me with a nonplussed expression on their faces. I gradually realized and began to taper it off a bit.

‘All right, Lee, for fuck’s sake!’ Dan barked at me. I was embarrassed, but still beaming away; too much, to be honest. I looked like I’d had a massive dose of an earlier version of Botox. But I didn’t want him to think I’d suddenly lost my vocal devotion to the cause.

Dan waved his hand at me to calm down. Then he stood on the spot and shook all his limbs out, like a triple jumper just about to start his run-up. He took a deep breath and concentrated on the rest of the class. ‘Right, you fucking losers, it’s too quiet in here. Let’s hear you,’ he shouted, as he began writing with a flurry on the whiteboard in big red lettering.

‘Screw them into the ground.’ That was met with a
resounding silence from everyone but me. I was right up there with Dan and Joe, clapping, shouting and repeating their mantra over and over: ‘Out with the old, in with the new!’ I’d got the sales bug big time.