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Stretch, 29
O’Hare’s is a brilliant idea if, as so many of my friends seem to think, ‘brilliant ideas’ make large amounts of money for those who have them. It is hard to determine whether the success of the idea was down to luck or judgement. Bart, whose full name was Graham Barton, was the owner and prime mover. He used to work in advertising where, he had told me, he was one of the old guard, up from secondary modem in Poplar and into the postroom rather than skimmed off from the milk round. This background had made him tougher and more devious than his college-boy competitors, and he made it pay. Leonard’s, the agency he ran for five years, was old-fashioned, overstaffed and financially imprecise, but had a powerful heritage, still just about marketable, from the early years of commercial television. With this provenance, and a heavily played English Gentleman card, he and the other crooks in charge flogged it to a Japanese agency for a hugely inflated sum in the year of Lawson, 1988. The front page of that week’s Campaign is framed in the bog at the Battersea O’Hare’s: MIEKKO NETS LEONARD’S – AT A PRICE. He once told me that he personally walked out with three times what the place was worth, and he only had fifteen per cent.
With the money he went on holiday for two years, came back and started O’Hare’s. The brilliant idea was this: Rip off FUCCERS. What is a FUCCER? Fresh from University, Credit Card, Extremely Rich. Developing this acronym, I believe, had cost Graham at least one sleepless night. ‘Fuck’ was the unstressed spine of his lexicon. It was as if he couldn’t bear to be parted from it, whatever the circumstances. ‘Would you like a fucking Jaffa Cake?’ was Graham on his elevenses best behaviour. Graham’s insight was that to try and open a fashionable restaurant was too fraught with risk – expensive staff and premises, fashionableness giving way to unfashionableness in the blinking of an eye, the need for London-competitive food, which could be anything from Andean peasant to Tex/Belge. So, in classic adman style, he chose his target audience and gave them exactly what they wanted: dark wood, consistency, old film posters, stodgy food, a place to make a noise, a late bar. Bingo. A brilliant idea. After four years he had five restaurants strategically cited in all areas of Part-Qualified Accountant and Articled Clerk Land: Battersea, Wandsworth, Clapham, Fulham and Shepherd’s Bush, with another two on the way in Highgate and Hammersmith. He had made himself well versed in the desires of the young and dull in then Gardenia-painted maisonettes, with their Monet prints and complete works of Phil Collins on DAT. After a dusty, we’ve-just-moved-in-together shag on the Habitat kilim they would crave charred protein and find themselves in one of Bart’s joints, revealing their detailed knowledge of the IKEA spring catalogue over buffalo wings and a bottle of Australian Cab Sauv: ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely to have a friendly little neighbourhood restaurant at the end of the road? No, I think we should definitely have curtains in the bathroom.’
Bart had probably made at least another couple of million out of these dreary Fuccers over the years. Eventually they would grow out of his stodgy, expensive baby food and start eating in places that didn’t play The Eurythmics’ greatest hits on a loop. Bart didn’t give a toss, though, because just as one batch moved on, in would come the next, the boys in their M&S crewnecks and chinos, the girls in jeans and blue button downs, positively gagging to be fleeced by their friendly neighbourhood fat bastard. All he did was change the tape: Enya, Mariah Carey, Riverdance, gloop music and gloop food for gloop lives.
For a boorish mudhopper from the wetlands of Essex he was doing all right, was Graham. He drove a gunmetal V12 Mercedes S Class with blacked-out windows and the word GRAZER on the numberplate. He sat high up and well back on the creamy hide with his fat baguette forefinger hooked round the base of the steering wheel with no regard whatsoever for speed cameras or pedestrians, constantly growling threats and insults at his managers over the digital carphone. When he wasn’t in the Benz, he was in the casino, toying with a couple of grand from the till at O’Hare’s.
He carried his twenty stone quite well and wore Ralph Lauren polo shirts, tight old Levi’s and whiter-than-white ‘Boks in the manner of a Hollywood film director. He liked Rod Stewart. He was so cash, so chrome-and-smoked-glass, so soft-porn, so seventies.
Fat, vulgar, and rich, he felt he could do no wrong, and by his own simplistic standards, he never did. He had a flat in Cadogan Square, a place in Berkshire which he called Hefner House after his hero, and paraded his ethnically diverse sexual conquests with Sultanic arrogance. He apparently had no friends, apart from his oddjob, Brian the Bat, and spent most of the day staring at a roulette wheel when he wasn’t paying unannounced visits to his obscenely profitable restaurants with his latest Sumatran, Geordie or Jap. Having spent his forty-five years on the planet in a constant state of angry pleasure, he was in no mood to stop now. His scores were humblingy good:
68. Good darts, big fella. His score may come as a surprise to some, but not to those who know the extent to which he adores himself. Christ, he thinks he’s marvellous. Every little piece of him, from desiccated collar-length hairdo to clean chubby toes, from bloated Merc to tigerskin bedspread, is a constant source of delight to him. With a love like that, you know you should be glad.
After being fired from The Post, I had given up on journalism. I temped around for a while, doing nothing in particular, and then pitched up in the Battersea branch of O’Hare’s. Bart interviewed me in his car as he lumbered between the Wandsworth branch and the casino. He asked me to start that evening and chucked me out on the Fulham Road, told me to make my own way back over the river, and that was that. I started as a waiter, and had endured many uncomfortable evenings serving people I knew from college.
‘Frank, what are you doing here?’ i.e., where did your wheels come off, you sad fucker. Illiterate dullards they may have been, but they knew how to load straight questions with subtext. Especially the men. Thankfully, my contemporaries had largely passed through their O’Hare’s phase by the time I got there, and I no longer needed to tell whoppers about how well the screenplay was coming on. I had been promoted to manager about six months previously. Hurroo. All this meant was that I did the count and was in charge of throwing people out when they got too raucous. On a Saturday night, particularly after a rugby international, the choruses of ‘Sweet Chariot’ and ‘Jerusalem’ would commence. I’d leave them to it and try to look harassed but amused. But at the point when the boys started slapping their dicks in the dessert, as the manager I had to intervene and chuck the imbeciles out. I’ll say two things for Fuccers, though: they never get violent, and they always pay their bill. The English middle-class upbringing can apparently countenance public immersion of undercarriage in the chocolate mousse, but scrapping with the staff and doing a runner? It’s just not done.
I stayed because I had no option. Firstly, because to move on it would be necessary to ponder the Great Big Question that bored me so much. ‘When are you going to do something with your life?’ and all that other girlfriend/mother stuff. I didn’t feel ready for that type of question. When I did start to tiptoe round such thorny subjects, a voice within me would object like a teenage virgin: not yet, not now, not here, let’s wait till later. The Lottery would set me right, or love would come crashing in from stage left in a white Ferrari. Ah, then Frank Stretch would be free and would do something with his life.
Secondly, I had accustomed myself to the ritual of working there. It was what I did. As I got older, it became increasingly less tenable to make out that I was biding my time until my ambitions had come to fruition. When I had started there it had been simple to say that it was merely a stop-gap. After three years, the thought of being interviewed by Tom’s dad for a job on Emporium in some ways filled me with dread. I couldn’t bear the notion of giving up my routine.
In fact, when I pitched up that night, in spite of the hangover and head trauma, I snapped into action with some crispness. I was feeling backslappy and chatty, but mostly I was feeling safe. I knew how to do this, for God’s sake. Within a minute of me arriving, tables were being reset more to my liking, the blackboard menu was being rechalked for aesthetic effect and clarity and I decided to run a mini-promotion on some noxious Chilean Merlot we’d overstocked. God, I was good, why should I want to leave?
Oh, and anyway, I couldn’t leave, because I owed Bart some money.
The whole process had been quite moving in a way, if you’re moved by bank manager stories. He had always been a decent, generous man, Mr Frost, and the initial letter he wrote me was suffused with a tone of genuine regret. My account was still held at the Oxford branch, as I’d never been in a position to move it closer to home. He ‘suggested’ in the letter, in a manner that brooked no refusal, that I go to meet him for A Consultation. When I turned up, I noticed that the place had been transformed into a McDonald’s. All the old attempts at gravitas and intimidation had gone. The staff were no longer divided from the punters (sorry, Clients) with bullet-proof glass, but sat in the middle of the floor behind teak-effect desks wearing nylon neckerchiefs and stewardess smiles.
Across the dustless grey chamber strode Frost. He greeted me with a real pumper of a handshake and ‘suggested’ that we have a chat in the consultation room. I asked him what had happened to his office.
‘Everything’s open plan now. We’re all moving towards flatter structures.’
‘What, relocating to a bungalow?’ Weak humour is a classic Stretch-is-Nervous stratagem.
‘No, no. Flatter management structures. Shorter chains of command.’
So, if a teller wanted to order some new paper clips they no longer had to chew up a valuable two seconds of management time by knocking on his door. I didn’t say this. The flatter structures seemed to be getting him down.
The consultation room was the size of a toilet cubicle. We both sat down at the tiny desk, our knees rubbing together awkwardly.
Frost was a mid-30s type of guy. His breakdown looks like this:
Summary: £30K and a good pension; ‘happily married’; decreasingly satisfied in his job; arid, bookless Beazer home; Mondeo/Vectra/downscale Rover 6; whippy little body (kept in trim by lunchtime squash?); Social life revolving around the bank (work friends score half points); a nice if dullish fish; and a
The only real area for debate was the
He wasn’t his usual self that day. The familiar tone of ironic indulgence had been replaced by tortuous over-formal politeness. He started to address me as if I was a waxwork.
‘Thank you for coming to see us, Mr Stretch. I hope our consultation proves fruitful to both parties and that all outstanding issues can be resolved to our mutual benefit.’
I peered at him in disbelief. ‘Is this conversation scripted?’
He looked sheepish.
‘Er, well sort of. All Terms of Account Renegotiation Consultations now start with an open and honest statement of objectives. It’s part of the bank’s Strategic Refocus on Meeting Client Needs.’
I must have looked amazed.
‘Oh, Needs and wants. Needs and wants. I always forget that last “wants”.’
I masked incredulity with insouciance. You should try it some time. ‘OK. I see. Now what was this about “Account Renegotiation”?’
For someone who was in the soup I was acting with some aplomb. He shuffled through a thick wad of papers he had brought in with him. Had he lost his script? Did he want a prompt? ‘You haven’t read the letters we’ve been sending?’
‘Err, yes, but I can’t remember all the details.’
He looked resigned.
‘Right then, I note that at close of business on Wednesday, your current account stood at a debit balance of …’ (dramatic pause) ‘one thousand two hundred and twenty-two pounds seventeen pence.’
‘That much. Ooh hell.’
‘I also note that the account has not passed into credit for seven months. And over your nine-year relationship with us, you have not been in credit for longer than three consecutive weeks.’
That seemed about right, but I was woefully underprepared, and hence had no means of counter-attack. Information is power in these situations. The word ‘relationship’ threw me a little as well. I fell back on vagueness.
‘But I never go over my overdraft limit. Usually.’
He could just about bring himself to look me in the eye. ‘Hm, usually. Anyway, there are some new directives that have been introduced by the bank that attempt to harmonise account servicing standards and charging structures across the client base.’
I was nodding with approval, trying to give the appearance of a man who was quite interested in hearing some details about these New Directives.
‘The new directives state that clients who do not achieve reasonable credit maintenance objectives may become subject to account review and renegotiation of terms, and in certain circumstances, amicable closure following settlement of outstanding debts. Client incapacity to comply with renegotiated terms in extreme circumstances can result in recourse to legal sanction.’
Whoever wrote this stuff could really pile on the agony.
‘I’m afraid you fall into this latter category, Mr Stretch.’
‘Last, not latter. There are more than two categories.’
‘Oh, are there?’ He looked in puzzlement at the piece of A4 that presumably contained this deathless prose. It occurred to me that if this grammatical solecism was corrected because I had pointed it out, I would have cost them thousands in re-printing charges. It was some comfort, but not much.
His gaze met mine again. I noticed that he looked very tired. Beneath the strangulating coils of management speak I could detect a decent bloke trying to communicate. He really didn’t want to say what was coming, but he forced it out somehow.
‘Simply put, Mr Stretch, unless you repay your overdraft within the month, we’re going to foreclose and take you to court. I’m really sorry.’ He looked about to break down. ‘Thirty days maximum.’
‘Oh God. It’s that bad, is it? Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world. I’ll sort it out.’
‘There’s not much I can do. It’s all gone upstairs.’
So there was an upstairs in this Flatter Structure, was there? I thought there might be.
He showed me out, right into the street, and instead of shaking my hand gave me a little pat on the shoulder.
‘Good luck. I can’t say how sorry I am about this.’ He raised his brows and looked at me with sorrowful eyes. I felt like giving him a big hug. How had the bastard managed to do this? Threatened to bankrupt me and then made me feel sorry for him? But I reasoned that it wasn’t him who was doing the threatening. Mr Big was elsewhere, in some airconned money mountain in EC2, stroking his jacquard silk tie and flexing his burgundy gut. Frost was just the unwilling kneecapper. He had been emasculated. All his old powers of discretion, the things that had made it possible for him to derive some satisfaction from his work, had been usurped by New Directives until he had become little more than a talking leaflet. On the coach home I imagined him sitting drunk in a hotel bar near Swindon on some infernal Client Service course, hopelessly railing against the new ways, or flopping himself down on his Dralon settee and whingeing at the wife all night about lost self-esteem. ‘What I don’t bloody understand is …’ How much time before the laptopped whizzkids at HQ switched from a Strategic Refocus on Customer Needs and Wants to a Strategic Refocus on Firing Half the Staff? Not long, I’ll be bound.
None of this indulgence was making me any richer, so I surveyed my options. Theft, prostitution, beggary, abscondment, prison, Bart. By the time I’d alighted at Victoria it was clear to me that Bart was the only way forward. I would rather be in thrall to a fat gangster than become a cat burglar, panhandler or rent boy. I phoned him on his mobile when I got back to O’Hare’s for the evening shift and acted in a manner so craven I yelp to remember it. I could hear the dull jabbering of croupiers and Hong Kong Chinese, so guessed he was at the roulette again. After two minutes of my timid greasing I realised that he had already agreed to my request. His only conditions were that it was a personal loan from him to me, and that I had to repay it in full, not in dribs and drabs. He didn’t even want any interest. His payment was that he had effectively put me in manacles to O’Hare’s for as long as I was unable to save twelve hundred quid. On the money he paid me that was likely to be a very long time.
That night, though, despite the sloughing hangover, the egg of pain on my forehead and a sense of regret, I couldn’t make myself care. I bossed everyone about and was dangerously charming to the customers. It was warm in there, nobody knew who I was, and I could do it falling off a log. Work was a kind of deeply provisional happiness. This is the effect a hand-addressed envelope and the prospect of a job interview could have on me. For a brief period of time, obviously.
£2.91
I remembered my job offer to Sadie. The thought brought me down a little. I genuinely couldn’t remember trying to get off with her, but I had no doubt that I had done. If she combined that example of my behaviour with my humiliation at the hands of Colin, she probably wasn’t currently holding her new boss in particularly high esteem. I think I’d told her to turn up at six-thirty-ish, which turned out to be lucky, because Paolo the chef told me that the witless girl I’d hired a week before had phoned in to say that she was quitting. She had been typical of the general standard. She was Irish, from Kerry, but she was so off the pace she could have been either from the Frozen North or the fourteenth century. She had spent all her time smoking crazily out by the bins and weeping softly into her apron. O’Hare’s had had them all in my time there: thieves, mutes, illiterates, screamers and truants. The rates Bart paid attracted people with such ineptitude with the English language and such scrofulous skin that McDonald’s would reject them out of hand. There was little chance of Sadie not being up to the job.
She turned up about ten minutes late in a dirty mac and tiny once-black mini skirt. I was standing by the bar putting white plastic flowers into vases.
‘Shite. Sorry I’m late, got lost in Clapham.’
She seemed breezily unconcerned that nineteen hours previously I had attempted to tongue her face.
‘That’s OK, get your coat off and I’ll tell you the deal.’
Her hair really was very red indeed. It wasn’t sandy or hint-of-mouse-y, it was bright orangey red. She had it pinned back to her scalp and gathered into a complicated curled bun, but you couldn’t tone down hair that colour so easily.
When she was ready, I took her over to an empty table and told her the deal: ‘Lunchtime shift eleven-thirty till five, evening shift five till eleven-thirty, read the specials off the blackboard, £2.91 an hour.’
Finis.
‘That’s outrageous.’
‘Plus tips, you could be clearing well over twenty quid a day.’
‘What does it say in my contract about my rights when the boss tries sexually assaulting me?’
‘Oh, come on, give me a break. I didn’t have to give you this job, you know.’ I was aware that this had hit the wrong note.
‘I don’t have to accept.’
‘OK, OK, OK. But try not to mention the … incident … again. I’m really sorry about it.’
‘Don’t be sorry, I was flattered.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, particularly the bit when you said you don’t normally go for gingers or people in the vocations, but I was worth making an exception for.’
‘I didn’t say that, did I?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘That’s bad.’
‘Yeah, but I’ll get over it. How’s your concussion?’
‘Better. It was more of a blackout, I think.’
‘And how’s the poetry coming along?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well. You were saying last night how you’re a great poet of the human soul, I was just wondering if you’d cranked out any stanzas today.’
By this stage my head was collapsed on to my forearm in grief. Sadie laughed. It was a filthy, masculine, merciless kind of laugh. ‘Right. There’s a customer. I’m off.’
Part of me had thought that Henry had been making it all up. I contemplated sticking my head in the pizza oven, but instead went out to the bins for a bifter. I didn’t speak much to Sadie for the next hour or so, but every time she went past me she said: ‘Ah, the Great Poet fixes a drink,’ or, ‘See how the bard polishes the side plate.’ I was beginning to warm to her, to be honest.
At eight, Bart dropped in with Brian. This was unusual. He would occasionally drop in early evening to put the wind up everyone but he wouldn’t dream of eating in one of his own restaurants. He sat at a table near the window looking agitated and summoned me over.
‘Stretch, how are we doing this week?’
‘Good. Ten grand easy already.’
‘How many shifts you done?’
‘Four so far. The normal.’
‘Fucking hell, Frank, why can’t you do me a few more? We take bigger when you’re on, guaranteed.’
‘Oh, you old softie. I can’t do any more. I’d go fucking mad. And you won’t pay me any extra. I’d have to be a nonce.’
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