The Pickle

By William Acre

How does Matthew Pope know why he should get out of bed? What should he have for breakfast? Why does he continue to go on living? He knows logically he might as well, caught in the spider's web of other people and routines. This is the story of a person searching

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Marston
• Release date: Oct 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781802277159

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Copyright © 2022 by William Acre

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

First paperback edition 2022

Book design by PublishingPush

978-1-80227-714-2 (Paperback)

978-1-80227-715-9 (eBook)

For Jennifer and Jill.

Thank you for all the love and

support that made this book possible.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

All together now! The shop keepers, factory workers, solicitors, mothers, those on the dole, teachers, local politicians, girls and boys and the nearly dead.

"We do not presume to come to this your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your abundant and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table; but you are the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.

Amen."

Chapter 1

Eve opened a single eye and there was a beginning; the world emerged before her. There followed shame and then the breaking experience of pain. Both eyes open, the world was overwhelming, startling and sore. As the scales rained from her face, beautiful malicious dreams sprang up amongst her feet.

Laura was furiously crashing around in the kitchen; cupboard doors were being slammed and the cutlery jangled in the drawer. You said there would be four, now, there is six! I wish you would tell me these things! Who else have you invited?

Keith Harris and Orville, he replied coyly.

Great! And what exactly is the duck going to eat? The phone rang. I bet that’s the national Welsh male voice choir, with a list of gluten-intolerant members! To his relief, it wasn’t the phone; it was his alarm clock and he was not, in fact, in trouble.

Matthew walked more slowly than the train of commuters in the ancient city streets. He was from the countryside and attributed his slow progress to a time and place where there was nothing worth rushing for. Gritty, dusty, mushroom pavements merged and climbed into glinty woodlouse towers. An early morning sun was expressed in the vividness of the shadows. A pale blue sky housed a faraway, thin white moon. Matthew always looked. In fact, it was this proclivity that brought about his placement on these streets, so far from home. A place not to look; a place to live on rails.

Outside the National Bank of Thailand, through a grate in the pavement, a flower had grown. Matthew recognised it; Love in The Mist. His grandmother grew them in swathes in her garden. Exquisitely delicate, determined frilly green stalks and leaves. A chalky, striking blue, that developed papery domes once fertilised. Juxtaposed with the English Marigolds, which intensified and reflected sunbeams with perfect orange in early June, Love in The Mist was summer and childhood and happiness.

The flower had probably been sown accidentally and mindlessly spewed from a complicated sandwich, assembled at a smart, Euro-staffed, city sandwich bar. It was a white flower; therefore, was likely to have come from a culinary Nigella seed. Rather than experiencing this floral encounter as a gift and a happiness, Matthew felt a weight of melancholy. The flower had taken its space faithfully, to be ignored, trampled on, littered with cigarette butts and chewing gum, unrequited by a bee. He walked on, feeling like he’d just dropped off a loving pet dog at a picnic site, intending to abandon it. This was totally the wrong mentality to start the day. Especially when some of his contemporaries had, no doubt, begun with cocaine.

He entered his office building and trudged past the unattended reception desk, light-coloured maple, curved, with a trace of transparent Perspex floating over it as an unconvincing counter. The turn-of-the-century millennial vibe was augmented with spotlights embedded in the ceiling. The air was chill, perfumed by lilies in a large, opaque, inky-blue vase. There was artwork, twentieth-centuryish, brushed steel-effect framed prints along the corridor. Matthew pressed six on the lift. It was an old building, gutted and refitted, all set for the twenty-first century. The lift had to remain small, but now it spoke in an American accent.

Floor six was the international headquarters of Silverman Search and Selection. The building also housed a law firm, insurance broker, marine broker, an accountancy practice, an empty office and a firm called Treaclemans, whose business was a mystery.

Silverman’s core business (as they, and eventually to his chagrin, Matthew, referred to it,) was as close to bullshit as possible. They were busy hatching plots and narratives of the Y2K apocalypse that summer. They sold an idea of people; Silverman’s operatives sold the personal and professional attributes of people. Take, for example, a recently redundant Sarah. Sarah had a falling out with the new boss. She just needed a job to cover her mortgage payments. They might make claims that Sarah was extremely committed and had an in-depth knowledge of the CRM landscape. They would make these claims on the basis that this is how Sarah had broadly answered their questions. Sarah’s answers would be processed through the bullshit sausage machine of a recruitment consultant’s head and spat out as the type of words that would be agreeable to a hiring manager.

The job specification would be curated by the hiring manager to present the IT department as critical, central and relevant to the core business of the investment bank. This would be done with the hope of furthering the hiring manager’s profile so that the executive team would see him as a business person outside of the silo of the IT department. Sarah was not someone to optimise the CRM system; Sarah was the magic key for her boss, all the way to the executive toilet. Silverman’s weren’t selling people; they were selling dreams.

This was the adjunction of the teachings of Silverman’s sales director, Gareth Fitzwilliam, a tall, beefy, blond, crinkly-haired man, whose hint of mullet told of good times in a red Porsche in the eighties. Gareth would saunter up the aisle of the sales floor towards the director’s suite of offices just after nine, his suit jacket held loosely and trailing over his right shoulder. Gareth actually wore cowboy boots, purchased from his native Billericay.

Seen from space or the distance of time, Silverman’s was a parasite on a tick. This was not the time for perspective, however; with perspective, it just couldn’t happen.

Matthew could remember little of his official training from those times, save for two items: 1. Only buy shirts without pockets on the chest and cufflinks are mandatory. 2. On a visit to a client, always use the toilet facilities at the client’s office prior to meeting. You will secrete the odour of the client’s proprietary soap. This will subliminally build rapport with the client via their olfactory system. Matthew felt out of place, a bit ashamed, a bit embarrassed, a bit weird. He was completely at home with these feelings. Other people had been denting him since he was a child. This was how life was.

At eighteen months, we become aware that we are individuals, separate from our mothers. We learn the fateful truth that other people have feelings too. We begin by assuming they are all the same as ours and learn, through pain, that they are not. One day, aged about seven, Matthew walked through his neighbour’s back door to return his playmate’s toy from earlier in the day. His friend was at the dinner table with his family. He was told by his friend’s outraged mother that he couldn’t just walk into someone’s home uninvited. Matthew instantly saw how he had transgressed. Although part of his world, this was not his house and not his family. Matthew’s face grew hot and red. He knew exactly what to do; he covered himself in a blanket of shame and conceded that he was bad. He walked home, went to his room and sat on his bed. He began playing with a spaceship toy. He could still enjoy playing with the toy, inventing rules for a game and ignoring the feelings in his tummy. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to him, he didn’t excrete those feelings; they thinned out and grew and grew over the years like a layer of plaque.

Matthew grew up in a village and he grew up religious, or at least amid religion. His Mother was devout and he was duly enlisted as a choirboy. Laterally, he also dabbled in campanology. The choir was the cause of his greatest childhood compliance and rebellion.

When he grew up, he wanted to be a priest. He did everything right by his nascent priesthood, but couldn’t summon up faith. He let go of his calling as it would be an offence to God to be a lying priest. God wasn’t really dead, because he would always be part of the furniture of Matthew’s mind. Later, Matthew would let go, at least on an intellectual level, of the guilt of being faithless. His rebellion was the first time, aged fifteen, he swore in front of his mother. On the question of why he didn’t want to go to choir practice, he yelled, Because I’m fucked off with the choir! They called him the wild one.

Rather than the local senior school, Matthew travelled eight miles by bus to the church school. Entry to the school was based on holy points - weak points for being a Scout or Guide which is affiliated to the church; strong points for being a choirboy and having a good reference from the Parish priest. Matthew’s school was the most successful in the county at examination results. Perhaps it was no surprise it was successful. If you can’t sort by academic ability, recruiting from families with higher levels of deference and credulity is a win for secondary education.

Going to a big special type of school from a village school was exciting. Amongst all the typical travails of big school, finding your way around the site and bringing the right books and games kit on the right day, Matthew was struck by a feeling of disquiet when watching and listening to his peers, especially the older ones. Matthew could not describe it at the time or understand it, but they were different to him in attitude and speech. What he did was what he would do for some time to come; he copied it.

What he had replicated was a type of confidence or what felt more like arrogance. Matthew was encountering the middle classes; not the real deal, but the parochial lower middle class in their natural environment. Most of them were tanned from holidays abroad. Few of them had their evening meal at tea time when they got home from school. Matthew felt like he had burst through his neighbour’s back door again. He soon dealt with that. His accent changed and became less rural, he learnt the right TV programmes to watch, and, even if he didn’t own them, he could expound on which trainers he would personally buy.

One day, Matthew would finish with the city, he would notice a group of fresh young men, dressed smartly in sharp suits, on a metro train. He made a promise to himself then never to wear a suit again. The suit and tie seemed the most absurd costume. In future, he couldn’t look at images of people from the city without seeing girls and boys dressing up and pretending to be grown-ups, pretending to know what was what. The suit represented a pernicious shorthand, utilised by hucksters, con artists and Matthew. He did, however, look good in a suit. Matthew used to take great pleasure in shopping in city shirt shops, with selections for town and country weekends. He enjoyed the masquerade of dressing up for business. It thrilled him to walk past famous landmarks and pass for someone who belonged there.

Matthew was well renumerated, but he paid for that dearly. His role at Silverman’s obliged him to have his soul slowly eaten by a geriatric, toothless rat sewn to his stomach and encased in a supermarket carrier bag. Firstly, he was required to spend the best part of every work day inside, even in summer. There was no It’s a lovely day, let’s go and read a story under a tree like in primary school. Matthew was required to work through a database of potential clients. It looked a bit like on the TV. He had a computer screen. (Some team leaders had wheedled themselves two screens to emphasise their productivity and status.) There was a telephone and the noisy buzz of a sales floor. The database screen was decked out in battleship grey, the office in more muted tones of dull and cream. Matthew had to contact prospective clients and cleave a recruitment opportunity from them. This would only be effective if there was a scarcity of the skills required from the recruiting client. If there was no scarcity, the hiring manager could flick off the recruiter like flies on cattle.

Matthew was supposed to visit the client, to build a relationship and seek exclusivity on the talent search in question. It was entirely possible to farm endless jobs, but if they were not exclusive, it was unlikely that a fee would be forthcoming. The method of building a relationship with a view of exclusivity was invariably to show a bit of leg. A meeting would involve fawning over the client as the most interesting and amusing person ever met. Once, later on in his career, he had duped a potential hiring manager so much that a fifty-year-old English man disclosed that he and his fiancé were having dance lessons, so they could wow the guests at their wedding with a choreographed first dance to Snow Patrol’s ‘Chasing Cars’. Matthew found that there is no correct social face to pull when processing that sort of information.

A recruiter should opine on the market in general to sound plausible and knowledgeable. The clincher was to ask the client about their career aspirations and provide anecdotes of the very organisation and position that would suit the client in their next role.

Once back at the office, advertise the job and trawl through the grey database. Talk to people who might be interested in the job. This requires highly repetitive conversations about a technology or business process that the recruiter does not understand. Present a shortlist to the client and wait to see if they bite and offer interviews. Prepare the candidates for interview, take feedback from a client and influence them, where possible, to hire. No one grows up aspiring to be a recruiter.

When a hire was confirmed, Silverman’s employees were encouraged to ring a handbell in the office. Matthew, to his muted disgust, actually liked to ring the bell. Along with the Pavlovian dopamine hit, however, often came the realisation that something was very wrong. He shushed himself though. His magic ability was shushing himself so stealthily that he didn’t even know he was shushed.

Matthew was given the title of Consultant for this activity. Silverman’s and Matthew were both clear-eyed that he didn’t deserve this title, but it looked convincing on a business card. Aged twenty-two. Matthew Pope – Consultant Business Architecture. The most egregious liberty, taken by his employer, was not being stuck inside a grey office with a bunch of cunts, doing boring, pointless and valueless work. The bile flooded into Matthew’s mouth because he had to pretend he wanted to do it. He had to fill out SMART objectives during his annual review. He had to work beyond his contractual hours. He was required to participate in meetings about how to best do recruiting with his team. Matthew had to go to work away days. Matthew had to occasionally spend time with his colleagues on a Friday evening. Matthew had to do business lunches. Matthew was twice prescribed mandatory networking evenings, and once, an excruciating and nauseating breakfast event.

The education system is much discussed, particularly the curriculum. There are questions about how the subjects studied prepare students appropriately for market readiness. Matthew felt his school prepared him extremely well. The curriculum was quite irrelevant. The regime was perfect; follow the rules and do your work. He was baffled by his classmates; not so much the girls, of course, they did the work. It was the boys, even the cool boys, who seemed to happily do their homework and receive good marks. How could they gladly, easily, and to the best of their ability answer questions with diligence about the machinery of the industrial revolution? Sitting at his desk at home facing writing a comprehension on a milk marketing advertisement or a set of long division sums would literally bring him to tears. Larkin referred to his childhood as long-forgotten boredom. For Matthew, it wasn’t the beginning, it was the slow graduation of work, as a huge boring chore. He wasn’t rebellious, just adrift, scrambling to keep up and avoid grief and never sure what was being asked of him or why.

The bile never really did hit his mouth, nor did he notice the rat at his stomach. Matthew didn’t notice any of his complaints. Matthew was plaque-building and placated. In return for a daily wafer-thin slice of his soul and life, Matthew was given meaning and purpose. Matthew had identity, brittle as it was. Matthew Pope, besuited and well-shod Consultant. Matthew Pope, City worker. Matthew Pope, here is my card. Matthew Pope, drinks every night.

Unfortunately, Matthew wasn’t terribly good at his job. He was a convincing liar and able to deceive candidates and clients. He was particularly good at deceiving his boss into believing that he cared about doing his job to the best of his ability. The result of going through the motions, however, is that you get found out in a competitive bell-ringing environment. Matthew’s performance would go through peaks and troughs: Peaks when he focused, when he found an angle to find work interesting. Troughs after any success and he sensed he could throttle down. Matthew had started at Silverman’s with a bang, and then steadily produced diminishing returns in fees. When who you are and your worth is invested in something arbitrary that you find boring and you are objectively failing in this investment, difficulty will inevitably ensue.

Matthew’s grandmother was dying. He left the city and went back to the countryside to be with her. She lay in a newly acquired bed, downstairs, soaked in morphine. He spent the week with his grandmother in a trippy live wake. She spoke of letting her wings unfurl and at the very end, her family were around her, holding her hand, telling her she was loved and she could let go. Midway through the week, his manager called to ask when he planned to return. He could have offered to put his manager on to his Nan, to confirm an ETA. Instead, he found this impertinent question a good enough excuse not to return.

Chapter 2

Matthew was moving down one of the busiest, most populous and gaudy shopping streets in the world; Oxford Street. This was a street that would typically invoke spiritual nausea and irritation. Today, the street was transformed by music. He was listening to the radio through his headphones. Serendipitously, that song was playing. It was a song that had struck him as a child and one he had purposely never bought, the result being that every time he heard it being played, it was a little blessing, like seeing a robin in the garden. The music, and his connection to it, bestowed the grubby street with a heightened reality and dignity. Perhaps it was the subliminal overlay of a movie score; the difference between looking at the world not curated and seeing it through a frame.

He was lifted, walking amongst mountains, standing on a cliff top, looking down on a stormy sea. Matthew became aware of an ambulance, lights flashing, moving past. Perhaps there was a dying person lying on a gurney, possibly being rushed to hopeless interventions. This consideration invoked no sadness; instead, it amplified his happiness. With the gentleness of the sea retreating before a tsunami, amongst the newly beached fishes, Matthew was standing in a new land. Matthew’s joy and the notion of a stranger’s death were joined, but not contingent. This moment would be amongst the most profound in his