Corporate Bodies – Simon Brett (1)

And when he actually came to look at Will, he saw that the writer was wearing much the same uniform. So, though Charles Paris still felt a prune, he was at least at a convention of prunes. Certainly Robin Pritchard made no indication of their having met before, even though Charles was introduced by the same name.

This was probably just professional discretion on the Product Manager’s part, though Charles couldn’t help wondering whether the suit transformed him so totally that it expunged all memory of his former forklift operator persona. Robin Pritchard started by saying how very big the new product was going to be, how huge its launch campaign would be, how global its likely outreach, and how massively it was going to increase Delmoleen’s brand share in that particular market. Charles Paris sat through all this looking properly executive, the neat briefcase Will had supplied beside him, trying to give the impression that its contents were something of more significance than his old clothes.

But his mind was wandering. He took in the expansive sparseness of the conference room, which was of a piece with the rest of the Delmoleen Head Office. The reception area and corridors were all light grey, with flecked grey carpets. Desks were of darker grey, while low sofas and armchairs were delicately pink, like the underside of a trout. A few discreetly expensive abstract paintings hung on the walls.

There was nothing about the place that obviously said Delmoleen. Compared to the Stenley Curton site with its huge logos, or Ken Colebourne’s office decorated with product pictures, the Knightsbridge premises were reticently anonymous. Only a small steel plate on their portico mentioned the Delmoleen name. They could have been the headquarters of an insurance company, an advertising agency, a merchant bank, a hotel chain, anything.

Presumably it was here that Brian Tressider had his office and spent most of his time. Charles wondered idly whether the Delmoleen video would include shooting at the London end. There wasn’t much chance of his being required if it did. The London-based executives were probably capable of speaking for themselves and, though he did now possess the right suit for a managerial role, his facial similarity to the speaking forklift operator might not pass undetected.

His mind came back to Dayna Richman’s murder—came back rather guiltily, it must be said. He had been trying not to think about it for the last few weeks. It wasn’t the memory of Trevor’s knee in his crotch that put him off, nor was he deferring in response to Ken Colebourne’s bribery—it was just that he didn’t know how to proceed on the case.

ONE OF THE REASONS why I became an actor, Charles Paris reflected wryly as he swung the wheel of the forklift truck, was to avoid tedious jobs like this. To avoid any job in fact with a predictability about it, any job for which you had to turn up at the same predictable hour every day, in which you had to climb a predictable career structure, in anticipation of a predictable retirement age and a predictable pension.

Actually, when he came to think about it, he wouldn’t have minded the predictable pension. Or the predictable salary, come to that. He’d survived more than thirty years of the actor’s fluctuating fortunes-long periods of ‘signing on’ enlivened by occasional bouts of work—but it was a kind of insecurity into which he’d never quite relaxed. As he got older, he did fantasise increasingly, with a slight wistfulness, about the idea of a regular income.

This shaming thought was not one that he’d have mentioned to a fellow-actor, but it was there, lurking. Maybe if he’d had a regular job, he conjectured, with regular hours, a regular salary and regular promotion, his life might have had more shape. Maybe his marriage might even have stayed together. Though it was difficult to envisage Frances in the role of a corporate wife. Everything might have been better, though. It was hard to be sure. On the other hand, it was extremely easy to be sure that any employment of that kind would have driven him mad with boredom.

Charles Paris was an actor, like it or not. Even when, as in some years, his earnings were too low to qualify for taxation; even when, as in slightly better years, the taxman had the nerve to hound him for a slice of the little he had; even when directors, blind to his obvious genius, callously turned him down for parts; even when critics advised him to take up market gardening (as The Financial Times once had); whatever disasters arose, Charles Paris’s mind couldn’t cope with the idea of being in any other profession.

And driving a forklift truck in the Delmoleen warehouse for a morning was quite fun. It was only the idea of having to do it every morning—and every afternoon, come to that—that was insufferably tedious. He looked across at Trevor, who actually did have to do it every day. The operator looked sullen. His bad temper, however, was not caused by the eternal tedium of his job, but by the fact that that particular morning Charles Paris was doing it.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 3c5431875a4ba0b9
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 573,972 bytes (0.547 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 183
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 282.48 minutes
• Total Words: 56,496
• Total Characters: 326,723
• Average Words per Page: 308.72
• Average Characters per Page: 1785.37

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