Free Glow by Ned Beauman Page B

Fourpetal into his office and explained that in the next round of recession-related redundancies the company was going to have to wave goodbye to five trainees, two receptionists, and one account manager. That account manager was, of course, Fourpetal. Drummers said this with an expression of such tremulant ecstasy that Fourpetal genuinely wondered if he might have been masturbating under his desk.
    Afterwards, looking for another job, Fourpetal found that Drummers wasn’t the only one with a Fourpetal story. Everyone, evidently, had a Fourpetal story. Sometimes even Fourpetal himself wasn’t sure quite how he’d found the time to fuck over that many people in little more than a decade. Nonetheless, he knew his reputation was unfair. Like a valet who beats his wife every night in loyal imitation of his master, the London financial PR industry had hurried to adopt the special ruthlessness of the investment banks it serviced even though it had none of the same salary incentives. Fourpetal didn’t believe for a second he was worse than all the others. Rather, he had become a scapegoat, and that was why every door in London had been shut in his face. For a while he thought about going to America, but he knew that in a recession he’d never find a company to sponsor him for an employment visa. And he didn’t like the sound of Hong Kong or Doha. So he decided he’d just have to move out of financial PR into a sector where nobody knew him. The other advantage would be that he wouldn’t so often find himself in meetings with people he remembered from boarding school.
    He applied for about twenty jobs, hoping to find a company that wouldn’t check his references too closely. In the interview with Lacebark Mining, he had expected to talk about copper and gems, but in fact they asked him how much he knew about EBB’s work for Kazakhstan or Poxham Toller’s work for Zimbabwe, so he bluffed his way through that instead. And in his first week, he discovered he wasn’t really going to be doing European PR for Lacebark. He was going to be doing European PR for Burma.
    In the past, the Burmese regime itself had employed several different agencies, but no one would work for them any more because they always reneged on their fees. Lacebark was willing to step in, however, because it was getting more and more awkward for the company and its investors that the landlord of its Gandayaw mine was basically perceived as a more bumbling version of Nazi Germany. A coordinated media and lobbying strategy could punch a few big airholes in the tight lid of their trading conditions. The atmosphere in the corporate communications department in London was strange, because you were obliged to make the occasional wry joke about Burma’s mad generals, otherwise you seemed like a pushover, but you weren’t supposed to bring up the 1988 massacres or the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, otherwise you got a lot of resentful looks. And of course you had to remember to say ‘Myanmar’ instead of ‘Burma’ (although for some reason never ‘Myanmarese’). Fourpetal’s first assignment was to find a human-rights organisation working in south-east Asia that would take a grant from Lacebark and then put out a press release about it, which took longer than it was probably worth.
    One drizzly afternoon at the beginning of April, Fourpetal came back from lunch and slumped down at his desk, feeling as if all these greasy plastics that nuzzled him day after day – the grey acrylonitrile of his mouse pad, the blue polypropylene of his telephone earpiece, the black polyurethane of his (legendary) swivel chair – might as well just be stitched together into a gimp suit into which he could be zipped up for good. That morning, he’d emailed an executive called Jim Pankhead, who worked at Lacebark’s headquarters in North Carolina, to see if he had the latest draft of the statement Lacebark was going to make about the environmental impact of its operations in