Read by Nathaniel Ashley (second story in the podcast, here)
The boardroom has been prepared tastefully, for the session with three representatives of what we refer to only as the State.
Lilies in vases either side of a large wall-mounted TV at one end of the room. The conference table, dark wood with a pleasing grain. Top-tier glassware. The room smells faintly of the lilies and nothing else. Behind us the floor-to-ceiling window displays London in high resolution — there to be coveted. The clients sit facing the skyline. We have been extensively prepped on choreography this morning; the way we would deftly suggest where the clients should sit, without telling them where to sit, and with nothing so gauche as place settings.
The trio of clients, all men, all wear navy suits. They are friendly, in the empty magnanimous way of a winning tennis player, projecting this feeling with a high degree of technical skill but no warmth. They are clearly capable of warmth because when Francesca arrives they are all over her, this dynamic slash of lime green and gold, who headhunted us all.
The meeting begins with introductions, and again we’ve been schooled on exactly how to describe ourselves, and our roles, for maximum utility and blandness – worth paying for, but completely unmemorable. A phalanx. But still, someone must rise above. Look at Francesca. She was once, unimaginably, one of many.
On the TV, a message from the leader of the State, a man we refer to only as the Patron, the nickname used in his country by a grateful people. His voice is sonorous and light and sombre and playful, the voice of God or the voice your favourite pet would have if they could speak. No accent. The content is platitudinous, the value of our trusted partnership et cetera. He never references human rights violations for example, only ever alluding to international perception.
The words are secondary to the image because the first thing you notice about the Patron is that he is handsome. Approachably so, friendly. Ethnically, he is white if you want him to be, brown if you want him to be, like Jesus. He is dressed in a dove grey suit and a pair of white trainers, in a comfortable chair in a home that looks like it was carved from a single piece of marble. His hair shines. His smile shines too, easy, boyish. Underneath the suit you will find no fat whatsoever. It is hard to believe troubling reports from the region looking at that face. It is hard to believe Amnesty International when he smiles that smile. He is beautiful and has no idiosyncrasies. Your best-looking mate, not a monolithic figure capable of carrying legend and infamy across a dark century.
No tiny moustache, for example.
The image fades out and we all look at each other and assume expressions of barely contained secular awe that we all practised in a mirror this morning. Then our colleague Oliver, rail-thin from a training regime that involves a trapeze, stands and introduces the first cut of a promotional video we’ve been working on.
Smiling children, welcoming uniformed staff, paddle boarders, silhouetted workers in straw hats, wizened hands reverently holding raw produce of some kind, sweeping drone shots of gleaming towers surrounded by striated blue water, young people with painted faces, culturally non-specific dancing, torches at dusk, satisfied faces illuminated by a crackling fire, clinking glasses, a couple with their back to the camera on a balcony looking out over a glittering cityscape as the man puts his arm around the woman’s waist, a schoolroom of white-shirted kids, a smiling doctor, a smiling dust-covered construction worker, a smiling businesswoman in heels and carrying a briefcase so you know she’s a businesswoman.
Francesca is still.
The clients sit, pale in the blue glow.
Momentum. A racing car hurtles. A footballer volleys. A boxer throws a knockout punch. A cruise ship cuts through more beautiful blue water, leaving a wake you could describe, and we have in the edit suite, as classy. A helicopter banks, filmed from another helicopter. Images, one after another, quick kisses, over a soundtrack that conforms to western concepts of musical progression but with a placeless ethnic quality that evokes nowhere specific but everywhere that isn’t here.
Horse racing is happening, paragliding and quad-biking and haggling is happening, wearing bikinis and big sunglasses and drinking cocktails on the netting of a catamaran is happening.
Francesca speaks in the ear of the nearest client, a man with a beard. So close to his ear.
*
When I first joined the account I’d voiced some tentative reservations about the State, things I’d read about in The Guardian. The Patron had seized power in a coup d’état. Hangings in the square, sort of thing. People fed into vans feet-first by serious men with neutered morals and, never a good sign, mirrored aviator shades. People made to kneel. Francesca liked to say that the coup was bloodless in terms of infrastructure, if not in terms of actual blood.
“Right, fair enough,” Oliver had said. “In the east of the country there were allegedly some areas of the conflict where nerve agent was used. And so, yeah, apparently they’re seeing kids being born with no limbs. That sounds really, you know, not on. But I don’t see how kids born without arms and legs have any relevance when we’re talking about whether or not the resort has world leading spa facilities. Because it does. It’s got amazing spa facilities. So what do you want us to do, put a kid with no limbs in the ad? We can’t be putting a kid with no limbs in a jacuzzi. He’d sink.”
The likes of O-Dog, as he sometimes called himself, couldn’t tell you where the State was on a map. Eastern Europe? Middle East? Or one of those countries floating somewhere between Russia and China and Southeast Asia where men wrestle bears and the women break horses from a young age? Did it even matter? You get on a plane and sometime later you are there. You turn on the television and you are there. It’s not like anyone is asking you to walk it on foot, so who cares where it is, unless we get into a conversation about missile range?
“Look, it’s our job to sell the resort,” Oliver continued. “Money pumped into the resort will benefit the economy. Trickle down. Eventually this will mean that the kids without limbs will get some fucking awesome bionic shit that’s better than normal arms and legs anyway. I’m positive that I can believe that will happen.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed hard. “So if we don’t sell the resort to the best of our abilities we’re actually condemning those limbless kids to a life of painful drudgery, sitting there propped up with little cardboard signs they’ve drawn with a pen in their mouth. We’re doing it for them, dude. And if we don’t do it, someone else will.”
The Patron and the Prince of Wales went way back. School buddies.
The lesson he took – first you have to make them kneel, but eventually they’ll want to.
*
Through various digital and physical materials we present our vision, where every surface is white, or silvery grey. A place to meet someone, to visit with a new love, to come in a group defined by intermingled, incestuous fumbling. Heterosexual fumbling, obviously. Food that looks amazing in photographs and is reassuringly bland on the tastebuds. Cocktails with an emphasis on size, shape and colour, refracting light. A sea so bright and alive it’s like electricity crackling between two poles, and you can barely look at it as you dive in.
The O-Meister, as he also sometimes refers to himself, uses his Eton-and-Oxford education to point at these images and hit the pre-agreed talking points.
The clients seem pleased.
As he speaks, in that place he can’t point to on a map, people are dying. People dying in places that will soon be infinity pools, swim-up bars, tasteful Italian bistro-style cafes open twenty-four-seven for light refreshments, concierge desks. People dying where there will soon be big inflatable swans and ice buckets and bodies in shades of ochre, smelling faintly of chemicals.
Oliver keeps pointing. Glasses raised in cheers. Food entering a mouth through a white smile. Tactile groups around white linen. A hand reaching back to the camera beckoning you onwards to more pleasure, more relaxation, to what you deserve. Surrounded by others just like you and not having to see anyone who isn’t. To not have to know. As Francesca would say: “The truest luxury is to be completely oblivious.”
My turn.
Oliver gestures to me and the clients look at me and then Francesca finally looks at me and I am suddenly again aware of the scent of the lilies and my desire to reward her belief in me above all else.
Me. Above all else.
I cough because I need to cough but also because it feels like the thing to do. I close the laptop in front of me. I choose the client with the beard, but only because by looking at him I can see her too.
“The beheadings,” I say.
Oliver shifts in his chair next to me.
“Have you thought about selling tickets to the beheadings?”
Francesca remains impassive. O-Dog seems to be slowly and involuntarily expelling all the air from his body.
“People visit bullfights. I just figure, if everyone knows that you behead dissidents, instead of trying to cover it up or whatever, own it. Make it an event.”
No objection. I stand and pace, physically taking control of the room through movement, the way she taught us.
“It’s the kind of thing you could talk about at dinner parties, how you saw a bloke get his head chopped off. Or a woman stoned to death. Your friends might lecture you on how horrific it is, how barbaric, but you could sit back in your chair, smug, and chide your friends for not understanding the deep and ancient culture of a place they’ve never visited. It’s not for us to judge another culture and their traditions, you’d say.”
I stand by the window, then lean against it with one hand, owning all the space in the room and now all the space outside the room and all the people in it.
“Why stop there? There are many affluent professionals here in London that would pay to be the one who actually does the beheading. After all, if we don’t chop the heads off, someone else will. If you prefer to avoid personal responsibility then maybe you could just cast a stone at a woman along with twenty or so other tourists and go home convinced that it wasn’t your stone that actually killed her, or, vice versa. A revenue stream. A halo effect for the entire brand. An unapologetic cultural experience.”
I sit back down and take a long drink of water.
Francesca rises, walks around the table, stands behind me and places her hand on my shoulder. I can hear the smile in her voice as she says I am, “one of our brightest consultants. And our chief provocateur.”
The clients look above my head, at her. I don’t need to see her to know she is meeting their gaze, daring them to dissent. They are not the dissenting kind. And so she laughs, and the clients laugh, and so the rest of us laugh too.
She leans in close and breathes a few words into my ear.
“I’d do it,” Oliver says, over the laughter. “I killed a cow with a bazooka in Laos once. It was fucking awesome.”
(c) Richie Jones, 2023
Richie Jones was born in Birkenhead and lives in North London. A lot of his fiction is concerned, one way or another, with the gap between those two places. His first novel, People from Good Homes, is currently seeking representation.
Nathaniel Ashley has featured in productions including Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Black Comedy as well as part of the sketch company Edinburgh Revue at the Monkey Barrel. He has also done voice-over work, and read one of his own short stories at a City Writes event.
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