For the Love of Money Read online

  But even then, failures to sell far exceeded successes, and that’s why it’s a numbers game. Knock on a hundred doors and maybe just one sale will be achieved – but that can be enough to become a Tiger. But to get up and get out and get through a hundred pitches, demands great inner strength and resilience. And only a very few, day after relentless day, can sustain the high failure rate, the constant ridicule and rejection and the sustained attack on self-esteem that was the lot of the double-glazing salesman. Sure-Thing Tigers, and perhaps Jehovah’s Witnesses, are among the few.

  Of course the Witnesses have their faith to sustain them. But what sustains the Tiger, the Eagle and the Ferret? Miller was about to find out.

  The first fifteen minutes of the conference was product-oriented, and explained how the great scientific and engineering minds at Sure-Thing had freed the world from lock lubrication; how impenetrable locks had actually cut nationwide burglaries and how insulating glazing could make a greater contribution to reducing global warming than banning aeroplane flights. This was followed by a video parade of satisfied Sure-Thing customers, who were enormously pleased and proud of their installations, and how grateful they were to have been persuaded to buy.

  Thus it was established that Sure-Thing’s products and benefits amounted to a high and worthy cause. But still, the big question for salesmen remained unanswered: What’s in it for me?

  The Jehovah’s Witness gets infinity in paradise, but what does the Sure-Thing Tiger get? The answer was about to come. A voice-over on the speaker system boomed: “Sure-Thing delegates. Last year he sold twenty-three million pounds’ worth of our great products, more than anyone else in the entire history of our company. He’s a winner, a champion, a conqueror. Loved by our customers and loathed by our competitors, please welcome Sure-Thing’s number one, the King of the Tigers, Andrew Althorpe!”

  Miller perked up as Althorpe strode towards the podium. Althorpe’s shoes and suit were even shinier than Stephen Thomas’s. And his hair was also smoother, his teeth straighter and whiter, and his suntan deeper. He was over six feet tall and slim, and every inch, perfect. Never once, Miller thought, would such a wonderful specimen cough up phlegm into a hankie, or dribble a single spot of piss onto his underpants, or ever need to squeeze a blackhead on his nose.

  “Good morning,” Althorpe began, “last year I earned over three million pounds, a lot more than even our company chairman. I now have over ten million pounds in the bank.”

  A moment of stunned silence followed; and seconds later, it was broken by the eruption of loud clapping. And then the audience stood and cheered. Even Miller, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, stood and clapped, well aware he was under the eye of the zealous Thomas.

  What followed was a eulogy to money.

  Andrew J. Althorpe began by listing all the most wonderful things he owned; all the exciting places he’d been to; all the important people he’d mixed with and to cap it all, every one of the very worthy charities to which he had donated.

  Miller could see the delegates hanging on very word, mesmerised as the Messiah spoke. Somehow, on this audience at least, Althorpe seemed to carry all the charisma of John Kennedy, all the oratorial skill of Martin Luther King and all the hypnotic power of Adolf Hitler. But Miller himself was unmoved. The Satan from Sure-Thing was pretty obnoxious even to his cynical senses. In fact he felt an inner glow of superiority as he listened to the King of the Philistines preaching to his salivating tribe.

  Then it came.

  “But don’t think for one moment that spending money is the best or most important part of it,” Althorpe continued. “No,” he added, “the really important thing is just having it.

  “Having it means you’ve got choices – and not just about which Porsche to buy, because in fact it’s perfectly bearable not to have a prestige car, when you know that it’s your choice not to do so. Not having a Porsche is fine, but it’s not having the choice to have a Porsche that’s the real pisser.

  “With money, you can control most of what happens to you. Without money, someone else does it. Money is freedom. Poverty is prison.”

  Miller suddenly began to feel himself drawn into the logic of the shiny man, and was sufficiently engaged to debate it with himself. Yeah, that’s true up to a point, he thought. But what about health… and inner contentment… and love?

  And right then, with spooky timing, Althorpe asked his audience, “What about love then?

  “Well, some get lucky,” he continued, “especially in the movies and books; and no doubt there’s a Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights sitting among you right now, with little more on your mind than some sweet Catherine Earnshaw. But remember, even that was a doomed romance, as most are.

  “Half of all marriages in the UK end in divorce. But that number would be a hell of a lot higher if people could afford the financial consequences. Be honest: how many of you are faced with either the prospect of a life shackled to a rat-faced woman who niggles the shit out of you every day, or a life spent in a tiny bed-sit, chained to alimony payments? Well, in fact, it’s at least a third of you.”

  This guy gets worse by the minute, Miller mused. But, uncomfortable though it was, he had to admit there was a grain of truth in Althorpe’s discourse.

  Then the Sure-Thing guru quipped, “Anyway, rich guys fall in love too, very often in fact. And of course love just happens, it isn’t a choice thing is it? Or is it? After all, it just so happens that poor guys fall in love and marry fat, ugly, boring older women, whilst most rich guys fall in love and marry slim, attractive and exciting young ones. A coincidence perhaps? Yeah, sure! And remember, although everybody falls in love sometime, everybody only gets to meet about one ten-millionth of the world’s population. So meeting a true love is very far from being a one and only shot. The fact is, there are approximately ten million equally well-suited or even better prospects for your love: women you simply don’t get to meet and choose from. Pity eh? After all, it’s quite possible and very nice to fall in love many times more than once in a lifetime.

  “And it’s surprising how, the more money you’ve got, the more attractive the women you meet are. Money can’t buy you love all the time, but it can buy you a hell of a lot more chances and a hell of a lot more choices. In fact, money can make that fantastic once-in-a-lifetime falling in love experience… a bi-annual event.”

  The delegates sat in complete and enthralled silence as Althorpe got even more into his stride.

  “Money can’t buy you health either can it?” he said. “No, it’s just a coincidence that rich people usually live much longer. The fact that the rich worry less, get the best doctors, the safest and best-built cars, the finest orthopaedic mattresses and so on and so on, maybe that’s all beside the point. But there again, in this cruel, unfair world, the rich cripple, with the six grand wheelchair and expert home nursing round the clock, gets the best deal.”

  At this point, Miller had to admit to himself that Althorpe, despite his richly politically incorrect rhetoric, had quite a knack of demolishing the notion that loving money was the road to ruin. And even more uncomfortable and resonating points were yet to be delivered as the speaker gathered pace.

  “Now some people like to think I’m just a shallow flash tosser,” he continued. “Indeed I was once told by a poor bloke that money doesn’t buy dignity or respect. Funny that. Most people hate their jobs. And at some point, most find themselves working for a boss for whom they have minimum respect and maximum loathing. But they nonetheless stay in the dreaded job and lick the arse of the dreaded boss. Of course most such people have their pride and dignity. The only problem is they can’t afford much of it.

  “When the poor go to the public health service surgery, they wait long and gratefully after the bossy receptionist finds a convenient time for their inconvenient illness to be attended to. They are just one amongst a needy multitude which goes under the collective name,
‘The Public’. They don’t like it much, but have no other choice. But when the rich go to their doctor, they get all the attention and respect that goes with the much more individual title, ‘Customer’. Because customers have choice. They can go elsewhere. The poor bloke’s about as individual as the millionth wildebeest running with the herd. But the rich bloke sits and watches. He’s a tiger.”

  Althorpe then paused for breath, as the audience bathed in his presence. He stared silently back for several pregnant seconds before continuing.

  “In Sure-Thing Double Glazing we all work in a numbers game. If you work hard, get your numbers up, stick at it, and just keep going, nothing will stop you from moving on from Ferret to Eagle and from Eagle to Tiger. Just keep going. Because you know that when you are a guy with the Tiger badge, you are a guy with choices. You don’t have to buy a car at all, but you can buy three if you want. You don’t have to lick the boss’s arse, but you can easily. You can do it easily, because it really is your choice. Choosing to do so is quite different from having to do so.”

  By this point, Miller sensed that at last, Adolf J. Althorpe, with his Mein Kampf-esque ode to money, had virtually won him over. Then came the close…

  “Dignity can’t be bought?” Althorpe boomed quizzically. “Well, you tell me – what’s the difference between an old man and an elderly gentleman?

  “It’s money!”

  The audience rose and cheered, and Miller raised his arm straight and high to salute the on-screen image of the pound note. And he resolved, there and then, he would make ten million of them.

  TWO

  “Thank you, Mr King,” the girl chirped as she handed over the boarding pass. “The flight leaves at gate twenty and should be on time.”

  Bill King sighed deeply, and then turned to his companion and murmured quietly, “Right then, Norman, old mate, off we go again.” Norman did not reply – because Norman was a black wheelie bag.

  The close relationship between man and bag had grown intimate over many years of enforced travel from London to the Far East and India. There are few more people-crowded places than airports, few more compressed with humanity than aeroplanes, and few cities more populated than Shanghai or Mumbai. And yet there are few experiences more lonely than long-haul business travel.

  Norman was eight years old, but was very high mileage, and was more likely ninety-eight years old in ‘bag years’. But his wheels still spun, he was able to hold a week’s worth of clothes, and he still had eight serviceable zipper pockets for shavers, plugs, wash bags, papers and assorted paraphernalia. What’s more, Norman was lucky. Not once, whilst flying many hundreds of thousands of miles with Norman, had King experienced engine failure, aviation fuel leakage, cabin air pressure loss, or even as much as a burst tyre. King knew it was irrational, but he had become convinced that one trip without Norman would be his last. As King was frisked and Norman x-rayed through security, King wondered how many times he’d been there before. A hundred? Two hundred? Or more? Whatever, he thought, as he exuded another deep sigh, it’s ten times more than enough.

  King was aged forty-two and not in entirely bad shape for a smoker and drinker, whose main form of exercise was running off Boeing 747s to beat the queues at immigration desks. He’d got a sizeable flaky-skinned bald patch on his head, which somehow had never become hardened to the Asian sun – and a fragile back, which niggled a lot when he sat on plane seats for twelve-hour flights. But fortunately, he wasn’t overweight and enjoyed a good, if neglected, constitution.

  In his younger life, he’d been a newspaper reporter, not for a grand publication, but a nonetheless prosperous local evening newspaper. And he was a good reporter too, with a keen nose for a story. In fact, King would probably still be a reporter, but for Angela. Angela had been his partner for ten years, though they hadn’t married, despite the fact that, much to King’s surprise, he not only loved her madly, but loved her even more madly as every year passed. Unfortunately, Angela’s affections were travelling gradually in the opposite direction. And, as weeks and months passed, King’s concern about her grew into panic.

  Then one day, he spent three months’ salary on a ring, another fortnight’s on a hotel booking, and began investing many hours preparing a marriage proposal speech, which he planned to deliver amidst flickering candles and sparkling champagne. At least forty times he played out the scene in his mind. He saw himself in a soft-focused movie frame, saying, “Angela, you are the most beautiful woman in the world. I love you; I want to have children with you; and I want to be with you for the rest of my life. Will you marry me?”

  “Er… um… no,” was not part of King’s imagined scene. But it was clearly part of Angela’s. So too was: “Er… Bill… er… I’m seeing someone else.”

  King was devastated. And, after making the mistake of subjecting Angela to a long and probing inquisition, he found the news that she was also shagging someone else, even more devastating. And what’s more, he knew the ‘someone else’ and did not like the smooth, good-looking rich sod at all. But sadly, he knew that to a woman’s eye, his rival was at least twice as desirable as he was.

  King then hit the bottle for three months. The consequential loss of his job was of little concern when set against the catastrophic loss of Angela. But slowly, very little every day, the pain began to dull. His outrage at the treachery took longer to forget, but that too at least faded. But he never entirely recovered from the fact that Angela, for a year or more, was having sex with another man, whilst living with him. His imagination was tortuous.

  However, as the three hazy, drunken months unfolded, and the gaping hole in his heart began to heal, his mind developed the comforting and compensating rationale that it was, all considered, better to be dumped for a good-looking rich rival than an ugly poor one. But even now, twelve years later, especially when his thoughts were invaded on long, endless aeroplane flights, he still squirmed whilst wondering if he had dipped into Angela’s honey pot just an hour or so after the bastard had soiled it.

  The experience had been sufficiently traumatic to cause King to change his life. His excessive drinking caused him to give up journalism and he changed his career. He moved to London, and took with him a lasting weariness with women which, though not preventing him from seeking their company at regular intervals, did keep him away from any serious emotional entanglement.

  And now, after a series of jobs, he had become a product sourcing manager for a small, but prosperous, company, which was one of Britain’s brand leaders. Unfortunately, it was not a leader in anything famous or glamorous like electronics, cosmetics, food or fashion, but in brass door-handles, knobs, latches and hinges. But hey ho, King thought, being the sourcing manager for Brassolve was fifty times better than being a metal basher in a brass door-fittings factory in China or India. He had often looked at them and thought they would need a great deal of imagination to seek solace from the old adage, ‘Oh well, there’s a lot worse off than me.’

  But King was bored with his job, and the long and wearying hours spent travelling didn’t help, providing, as it did, too much time and opportunity for him to take uncomfortable stock of himself. At forty-two, he hadn’t done much, and he felt it was rather late to try. Looking back, he hadn’t exactly climbed mountains, and with middle age now arrived, he wasn’t likely to in the future either. And the thought of sitting in the proverbial rocking chair with no achievements to boast about or gloat upon, was becoming increasingly scary. Perhaps he should take some opportunity, some slim chance, or even some bold gamble to break the dismal pattern? But what opportunity? And in any case, why gamble now, when his final salary pension was still in place? That pension was at least enough to buy a decent rocking chair, in a warm room, with modest supplies of malt whisky and a cigar. And a failed new career venture could cost him that modest, but comfortable, security.

  All these matters King debated with himself on his long and lonesome journeys.
He could hear his inner voice posing questions and passing judgements and debating with itself. And, on occasions, he invented a second imagined inner voice to converse with his own regular inner voice – perhaps thus creating a much-needed sense of companionship.

  The first voice would say, “Perhaps I should have gone to Beijing. I might have landed the big one? If you don’t go, you don’t know.” The second voice would then reply: “Nah… not worth it. Better the devil you know. Nice arse that stewardess.”

  And on one occasion, the first voice said, “Fuck me, who lives there?”, as King peered out of the window, and saw one solitary light shining either from the vast and dark Russian Steppe or the Gobi Desert. “Maybe somebody is looking up at the plane lights and asking, who the fuck’s up there?” The second voice responded, “No shops there. No pubs. No postman. Nothing.”

  Combating loneliness was also the likely reason why Norman had been given a name, was spoken to regularly, and was held in such high regard by King. Norman was far more than a good bag; he was a companion and a comrade in the great tedious trial of travel. King did think it was a little sad to have a bag as a friend, but not that unusual. Most frequently flying business travellers are much the same, he thought. They don’t have close first-name relationships with their luggage bags, but are welded to their laptop computers and phones and would be lost souls without them.

  Every major airport business lounge is always filled with people tapping incessantly into or talking on mobiles. And to King, nearly all the calls were predictable and devoid of much real purpose…