‘Fuck off, Maserov.’
That was the way Maserov had expected a very high proportion of the subjects to respond and that would have been the first response to the questions that HR had mandated he put to his colleagues had he approached anyone but the closest thing he had to a friend at Freely Savage.
Emery gazed up at Maserov with a look that was equal parts relief – because a non-threatening person who somewhat understood him was about to engage with and possibly even converse with him inside the building – and disbelief, tinged with the preter-rational fear that Maserov, who he thought had been killed by Hamilton, was now shuffling back onto this mortal coil forty-eight flights up, against very the laws of nature.
‘It’s okay,’ whispered Maserov, crouching beside Emery’s black plastic waste-paper basket. ‘I’m meant to be here talking to you. In fact, I’ve been told to.’
‘Been told to?’ Emery whispered fearfully. ‘Are you firing me?’
‘What? No, of course not! How can I be firing you? I’m a Second Year, like you,’ Maserov reminded him. But Emery’s vulnerability was ready for that.
‘Maybe they sent you, an advance guard sort of thing . . . I don’t know how it happens. You can’t know. A Fourth Year got walked out last week. Nobody knows . . . except them,’ Emery replied. Just imagining the trauma of getting fired was more than he could cope with.
‘Emery, that doesn’t make any sense at all.’
‘No but . . . you said they’re culling Second Years.’
‘They are but they’re not going to get me to do it. How does that make sense?’
‘I don’t know. How can you be here? That doesn’t make any sense either. How can you still be here? Hamilton’s out to get you. You know that,’ Emery replied. ‘Aren’t you on secondment to Torrent Industries anymore?’
‘Yes, I still am. I’m only back here to do something futile for HR, for Bradley Messenger.’
‘What?’ Emery asked, still unsure how scared to be.
‘HR is making me go around to a selection of Second Years to survey them about hot-desking.’
‘What does hot-desking mean? Making people move their workstations around all the time?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that kind of futile and counter-productive, time-consuming and generally conducive to disequilibrium among fee-earners?’
‘Yes, of course it is.’
Emery thought for a heartbeat. ‘Should I say I like it?’
‘Not sure it matters what you say.’
‘But if they do decide to introduce it and word gets round that I said I like it, people are going to hate me. They’ll blame me. So maybe it does matter,’ reasoned Emery.
‘No one’s going to believe your opinion mattered and, anyway, I don’t even know if they’re planning to bring it in.’
‘Then why are they asking you to ask us about it?’
‘I don’t know but it can’t be because they care what any of us think.’
‘Who else are you going to ask?’
‘I wasn’t sure.’
‘Ask Fleur Werd-Gelding. Then make my answer the same as hers.’
‘Why Fleur Werd-Gelding?’
‘She’s a beautiful, well-spoken, pedigreed, sweet-smelling, vicious junkyard dog, immune to self-doubt and bred for success. To emulate her in any way I can seems to me the safest thing to do in most situations.’
Maserov did as Emery had asked and that’s when it came, exactly as he’d expected.
‘Fuck off, Maserov.’
Fleur Werd-Gelding was, among other things, very reliable. Like the rattlesnake, she was born ready to attack.
Fleur Werd-Gelding had never engaged in small talk. She had absorbed the overwork mania of the WeWork generation and its celebration of her indentured exploitation by the partnership. She was strikingly attractive with blue eyes and thick lustrous hair the colour of cruelty. And she was no slouch intellectually. She had a razor-sharp mind that smothered self-doubt before it gestated and this, along with a relentless need to succeed, led to a first-class honours degree. She had grown up around floodlit infinity pools, wineries, cattle stations the size of Luxembourg, and beach houses bequeathed to her parents and their cousins by previous generations of Werds and Geldings. She had gone to an all-girl private school like her mother and her mother’s mother before her and, like them, she was expected to breed with a slightly older boy from the brother school and to share her genes with his in return for a share of his properties, shares and trust fund annuities. Maserov held no interest for her.
So when Fleur Werd-Gelding rolled her eyes at Maserov’s enquiry he replied, looking down at his notepad, ‘I’m going to take that as a “not in favour of hot-desking”.’
Maserov returned to Emery’s workstation, knelt down beside him and described Fleur Werd-Gelding’s response. Emery looked at him with unexpected admiration. It was as though, without saying anything, he was trying to take in the full measure of the man he had started out with some two years earlier. Then he exhaled wistfully and with a slight smile in bewildered admiration of the somehow better man, he shook his head at the strength of what he perceived as Maserov’s achievement.
‘She has contempt for you, Maserov,’ Emery whispered.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Me . . . She doesn’t even know I exist. But you . . . First this thing with Hamilton and Torrent Industries, which is incredible enough, and now . . . I mean, if I could just earn her contempt . . .’ Emery trailed off dolefully.
‘Don’t give up hope, Emery. As long as there’s life, there’s hope.’
‘You think?’
‘Why not? Don’t sell yourself short,’ Maserov offered compassionately.