Free Burial by Neil Cross Page A

wedding.
    Nathan
    told them he had no sales experience, and that he had no particular interest in greetings cards. Nor had he ever stopped to consider the profound part greetings cards had to play in observing British rites of passage - birth, marriage, illness and death.
    But I've certainly been thinking about it over the weekend,' he said, and the interviewers laughed. From one of the women there was even a little flirtatious pen-playing.
    When the chuckles had died down, he said, 'The truth is, when times were good, working with Mark taught me about working under pressure. And when times were bad, it taught me a lot about loyalty.'
    When he'd done talking about Mark Derbyshire, a certain gloom settled on the room.
    They thanked Nathan for coming along. He shook their hands one by one - and thanked them, and left, and went directly to the pub. He sat in the garden. The sun shone so bright he could barely read his newspaper.
    Hermes Cards called back the next day: they wanted to see him again next Tuesday.
    He bought a new tie, a raincoat and a folding umbrella, in case it was raining on the day. He wondered how the person who wore these clothes related to that lost man in Greece, in his Gap cargo shorts and Nike sandals; and how that man related to the wired madman in the Paul Smith suit, scrabbling with bleeding nails at the cold, wet earth. He could draw no line of connection between them.
    He was a series of disconnected dots, a Morse code.
    The second interview took place in a different room. This time, they sat round a shiny oval table, and Nathan knew before anyone spoke that he'd got the job.
    He was to start on the 1st of July, which gave him ten days of nervousness.
    He had no idea how to go about doing a proper job.
    He went to the Business section of his local bookshop and spent seventy pounds on titles that promised to make him a more effective communicator -- but none of these books seemed to tell him anything that was not already perfectly obvious.
    During the sleepless nights he lay in his bed, clamped between the past and the future. In the morning he lay listening to the children play.
    And then the day came, and he went to work.
    At reception, he introduced himself, saying: 'I'm the new boy.'
    The receptionist said, 'If you'd like to take a seat, Roy will be down in a moment.'
    Nathan had no idea who Roy might be. He sat with his briefcase on his lap, and waited.
    Behind the reception desk was a wall-to-wall, ceiling-high, hardwood bookcase. Ranked on it were hundreds of greetings cards.
    There were bawdy cartoons; floral tributes to the sick and the bereaved; congratulations for new parents and new graduates. Blank inside, they were rich with the passage of lives yet to be lived.
    The receptionist saw him, scanning their ranks.
    Nathan said, 'Is there a Congratulations on your new job ?'
    She swivelled in her chair. 'There must be one up there, somewhere.'
    He
    smiled, then turned to the ping of an elevator door. A man he took to be Roy came striding towards him. Roy was trim and sprightly, not far from retirement; his handshake nearly pulverized Nathan's finger bones.
    'You must be Nathan.'
    Roy put an arm round Nathan's shoulder. Nathan had not been touched by another human being in many months; he tried to relax into Roy's paternal grip, as Roy said, 'I've heard a lot about you.'
    'Okay,' said Nathan. 'Good.'
    Roy led him to the lift. Nathan stared at his reflection as they whispered up two floors. Then Roy led him past what he described as the glass boardroom then through a set of double doors into the office building's working interior.
    The floor was open-plan, lined with small, glass-fronted offices in which imprisoned executives and managers spoke into telephones or listened to telephones or hunched over laptop computers.
    'This is sales and marketing,' said Roy. 'Welcome home. You'll soon get to know it.'
    He wasn't wrong. When he wasn't on the road to Swindon or Edinburgh or Birmingham or