Abruptly, the boardroom lights come back on and the video has stopped. I shield my eyes from the brightness and stash my phone as quickly as humanly possible.
“Right, then.” Amy gets to her feet and stretches out her legs. No one else is offered the privilege. “Does anyone have any questions?”
“What does Oakham Industries do, and why is it suddenly Oakham Industries and not Oakham Exports?” I say.
“Orlando, please raise your hand if you have a question. We don’t want everybody talking over each other constantly,” she says, her face devoid of emotion.
I glance around the room. Are people really okay with being spoken to like this? It’s like being back at school. I shoot my hand into the air, but speak before Amy can call on me. “I still don’t understand what Oakham Industries does.”
Amy lets out an exasperated little sigh and begins pacing. “If you’d paid attention to the video, you would know. Oakham Industries is the parent company. Oakham Exports is a subsidiary. Imagine OI as a huge oak tree. There are many branches of the family, and OE is one of them.”
Yet more jargon.
“Okay. And what does the huge oak tree actually do? How does it make money?”
I know Amy is looking at me and thinking why haven’t I ever had this discussion with my father, but I’d like to see her pin down a man who regrets her entire existence and spends every available second avoiding her, then ask him mind-numbingly trivial questions about his everyday work life.
“We provide managerial and logistical solutions for international transport requirements, both internally within OI and externally through outsourcing,” she says, as though reading a script.
“But what does that even mean?!”
Amy doesn’t answer me. Instead, she irons the wrinkles on her forehead with her fingers and stares out the window at the pigeons that’ve finished fucking and are now hunkering down on a ledge, their feathers all fluffed up from the wind.
“Let me show you guys where the cafeteria is, and we’ll stop for a twenty-minute break,” she says. She whispers her next words, but I still catch them. “I need a ciggie.”
For such a sprawling and populous building, the feeding pen of Oakham Industries has a disappointingly limited range of dairy-free options. The septum-pierced guy behind the counter found a carton of almond milk in the stockroom, but it had expired three weeks ago. He promised me he’d order a wide variety of milkless products for later in the week, so of course we swapped numbers. He’s far too nice and helpful to be anyone I’d fuck with. Still, italways helps to have backups in case I’m in a pickle and need a pick me up. I forgot to take his name, though.
There are at least twelve minutes left of the break, so I decide to explore the building. It takes me less than two of those to locate my father’s office, which is situated on the fifth floor at the end of a long corridor of smaller offices with open-plan desks floating in the middle. It’s like walking down the central aisle of a shitty cathedral, one whose pews are made from MDF and whose holy lighting is a collection of complexion-bleaching fluorescent bulbs.
The lights are on inside his office, and the door is ajar. I’m about to push it open all the way and find out what kind of workspace he keeps for himself at the Swindon branch, but a voice stops me. My father’s voice. So he’s been here all along and hasn’t bothered to come and see me? Standard.
“Well, no, that’s the thing. We can’t move forward with the Weston project until Patrick clears it with the local council,” he says. There’s a tinny, detached quality to his speech.
“I’ll send him another reminder,” says Amy, who must be standing right next to the door because her words are clear and sharp. I hear a pen scratching over paper.
“Anyway, Aims, that’s not why you called, is it?” my father says. It takes my brain a few seconds to put meaning to those words.
I push the door open a fraction more. Amy is sitting at a desk in the corner of the room with her back to me. It’s not the central grand mahogany desk, which obviously belongs to Pops, but it’s a nice-looking piece of furniture made from similar wood, only much, much smaller. The computer screen shows a slightly blurred image of the one and only Warwick Oakham II himself. He’s wearing a grey shirt and is most definitely not in the Swindon branch. So much for his eight a.m. landing at Heathrow.
“How’s Orlando getting on?” he asks.
There’s silence. It stretches out in front of us like a rubber band, wrapping itself around my airways, suffocating me. I’m holding my breath, and I realise I don’t know what I want Amy to say.
She’ll tell him the truth, because she has to, it’s her job, and then I’ll be free of this place. But I can’t decide whether I’ll feel relief that it’s all over and I won’t have to come to this stupid office any longer . . . or will it be fear that I feel? I’ll have to find myself work, make my own way, earn my own money.
Where would I even start to look?
The stress is getting too much, and my abdomen cramps forebodingly. My body’s physiological air-raid siren goes off, warning me of imminent bombs dropping.
The silence stretches. My stomach gurgles louder, with more violence, and more insistence. Cool, cool, cool, I’m about to shit myself in the open-plan space just outside my father’s office on my first day of work, and I haven’t even eaten any dairy yet.
“He’s doing . . .”
Jesus, it hurts. I clench my asshole as tight as I can, and scan my surroundings for the closest bathroom.
“Great, actually. Orlando’s settling in well,” Amy finishes.
What the hell?
