After that first evening, the trainee booksellers never saw Nashville again. For the rest of the week they didn’t even leave the hotel, the sales course was so utterly relentless, and on top of the jet lag the effort required to learn how to sell encyclopaedia sets to people who hadn’t known they wanted them meant they felt far too exhausted to go out for the evening. Renée still felt disengaged, odd somehow. She had always dreamed of travelling eastwards before, to faraway places like Nepal or India or some remote Thai island, full of spiritualism and culture – but here their hotel was just a modern block next to the highway that might as well have been anywhere. America did make an impression on her though, mainly through its scale, the extremity of things: the two beds in their double room that could comfortably sleep three people each; the throaty clunking of the machine down the corridor that ejected fat glinting ice cubes, tumbling like coins from a jackpotting fruit machine; the tooth-ache temperature of the Cokes from the mini bar (she had never known drinks to be so cold); the improbable proportions of the cars on the freeway; the sleek gleefulness of the morning TV presenters with drawls so sassy they sounded put on; the enormity of the breakfasts and the people who ate them. America seemed souped-up to Renée, as though it had to be bigger, better, colder, hotter, cheerier, louder, just all-round ‘er’ than everywhere else. She found that she was homesick: for her student flat in Bristol, for her life before graduation, for her group of best friends, but mostly for Juliette.
The training course was attended by hundreds of students, mainly American: eager youths with springs in their steps and dollar signs in their eyes. On the first morning Renée sat near the front of the auditorium, slouched next to Sissy, unable to concentrate, surprisingly close to tears. She watched incredulously as a short puppyish man (hair neatly side-parted, dapper in handmade loafers and an Italian suit) bounced around the stage, drunk on life, telling his impressionable audience how after five wonderful summers with Tyler’s Books he was a paper millionaire, already, at just twenty-five. Greed wafted through the room, all-pervading, like cooking smells. As the presenter went on to explain to his audience that the volume of books they’d sell that summer would be directly proportional to their future life happiness, Renée wondered what on earth poor Sissy was making of it all – if she felt this bad then surely it was Sissy’s worst nightmare – but Sissy just seemed dazed by everything, almost as if she were trying to transport herself back to England, like if she let her eyes glaze over enough then she could pretend she wasn’t even there. Most of the other students seemed to love it though, hanging on the presenter’s every word, cheering in all the right places, loudly chanting mantras such as ‘I feel happy, healthy and terrific’ or ‘Hey there, beautiful, don’t you ever die’, which made Renée want to throw up. As the day wore on she even began to feel like maybe she’d landed in some crazy religious sect rather than onto a bookselling course – and when they did finally get a break she barely ate any lunch, which was unlike her.
Renée’s mood wasn’t helped by the presence of Stephen either. Although he’d apologised for his lecherous behaviour of the first night, and to give him his due had behaved like a perfect gentleman ever since, she still found him grating. In the afternoon session especially he seemed to lap everything up, appearing to love both the role plays (which he performed with sickening gusto with Melissa) and the motivational jingles, generally being loud and annoying. Surely he couldn’t really be into this stuff, Renée thought in disgust, as she watched him yelling, ‘I’m a fighter, not a quitter’ (the truth of which the students might need to remind themselves, if things ever got ‘a little tough’), but then she decided he must simply be thinking of the pay cheque at the end of the summer. That was far more likely, knowing Stephen.
Over the course of five torturous days the students were trained like monkeys, as they learned their scripts verbatim, developed their frighteningly positive mental attitude, practised religiously what they would say and how they would say it, with no word changed, no careless deviation, no single opportunity to let the customer off the hook. And the more they went over the knock, the wave, the cheery introduction, all delivered with impeccably fake sincerity, the more Sissy felt sick with nerves, and the more Renée wished she could have gone to Kerala instead.