Better Than This (4 page)

“I’m on my way,” I said. “When you get there stall as long as you can.”

Relief flooded his tone. “How long do you think you’ll be?”

It was eight forty-six. Twenty minutes,” I said, though I was being optimistic.

“Twenty minutes?”

“Maybe twenty-five,” I said, thinking maybe forty. Marcus sounded doubtful again.

“Maybe I should wait for you.”

“You have to go in there,” I told him. “I’ll be there.”

“Right.” He hung up, and I had the feeling he had little faith in me any more.

I got off the freeway by Bell Park and headed up and past the Moscone Centre. Every light I hit was red as is always the way when you don’t want it to be. Each time I stopped to wait, I had to draw deep calming breaths and force myself not to look at the clock as it inched past nine. It was practically gridlock around the Financial District. Everybody was late and even more ill tempered than normal. In San Francisco there are never enough cabs and the BART trains don’t reach the outlying areas around the Bay where people are forced to move because nobody can afford to live near the city any more. An incredible amount of people and cars pour over the bridges every morning from points north and east, and from the peninsula like myself, creating daily havoc. The air was ringing with the sound of honking cars and the clamour of streetcar bells and a couple of blocks over a fire department siren wailed, echoing among the glass and concrete canyons formed by the skyscrapers. That morning I wasn’t the only one cursing officialdom at City Hall. I kept hoping though, that I’d still make it before the hammer fell. Jesus! Why did these lights take so long?

Then at last the parking building was ahead of me. I pulled in and stopped with a squeal of tyres. I could still make it by half past if I was lucky. I grabbed my laptop and ran for the street and at the end of the block I leapt recklessly into the streams of flowing traffic ignoring the honks and shouts around me. A cab almost bowled me over but I half rolled on the hood and was on my feet again, raising a hand of apology to the guy who yelled out that I was a dumb sonofabitch. And at nine twenty eight I passed through the main entrance of the bank, panting heavily and looking an odd enough sight to earn me a suspicious stare from a security guard. It took three more minutes to get an elevator to the fifteenth floor, and then a receptionist picked up her phone and at nine-thirty-one I was shown into the room where Marcus appeared chastened and already beaten into submission.

One look and I knew that it was bad.

It was a small nondescript room that contained a table and some chairs and a cheap print on the wall. There were two guys from the bank present, both wearing dark suits, both with their jackets hung on the backs of their chairs to signal they meant to get down to it. I knew one of them. His name was John Flynn. He was the officer who’d approved our original loan and with whom we’d had contact over the years. The other I didn’t know. I guessed the reports spread out on the table related to our business.

Marcus almost sighed with relief when he saw me, though the look he shot my way was laced with a good dose of resentment too. A sticky sheen of perspiration stuck to his forehead. I made my apologies for arriving late and Flynn did the introductions. “This is Scott Douglas, head of business loans.”

An unsmiling Douglas rose and we shook hands briefly before he got straight down to it. He gestured towards the set of figures our accountant had prepared which Marcus had let them see. It was a tactical mistake, since they had immediately focused on the bottom line, though on the positive side it meant Marcus hadn’t even had a chance to make our presentation.

“As we’ve been discussing with your partner, your current position falls considerably short of your forecast,” Douglas said. He settled a grim look on me. “You are of course aware that you had an obligation to inform the bank of any serious change in the circumstances affecting your business.”

“Those figures shouldn’t really be considered in isolation,” I began. I opened my laptop and started to bring up the first screen of my presentation. I wanted to get them away from the nuts and bolts which I had to admit didn’t look very good. “There are other factors that..

.”

“We’re not interested in any other factors,” Douglas cut in. “We’re a bank, Mr. Weston. We like to do business the old-fashioned way. Statements and balance sheets are what we understand.”

His tone was curt, and was meant to shake me, which it did. But I recovered a little and tried to go on. “I understand that. But what you’re looking at is just a snapshot view of how we stand right now, it might be helpful to put that into some kind of context

Douglas cut in again impatiently. “Maybe I should make something clear. You’re in advertising. In your business you deal with concepts. Your role if I understand it at all is to make people act on their emotions. You present a thing in such a way that people suddenly imagine they have to have it to make their lives complete. Am I right?”

I resented his patronizing tone and it was a crude summing up of what we were about, but I didn’t think this was an appropriate time to give a lecture on the finer points of advertising. “Broadly speaking,” I agreed.

He smiled thinly. “Well, in our business we like to deal with what we can see and touch. What’s real. We’re more comfortable that way. And right now all I can see is that you owe this bank a lot of money. The purpose of this meeting is to determine how you plan to repay that debt. That, Mr. Weston, is the only context in which we are interested. Is that clear?”

I saw why Marcus looked as if he’d been taken into a back room and worked over. I’d been expecting the bank to take a tough stance, but this was worse than I’d imagined. The message was loud and clear. Sit quietly, answer questions and don’t try to give us any bull because you are already in deep enough as it is. Having felt he’d made his point Douglas went on.

“What we don’t have here is a detailed breakdown of your company assets.” He shuffled through some papers. “Your cars are leased, as is the office space you occupy.”

“The assets on the balance sheet are the office furniture and our computers,” I pointed out, which Douglas already knew.

He punched some numbers into a calculator. “Let’s say all up they would fetch ten thousand. That’s quite a shortfall.”

“What do you mean they’d fetch ten thousand?”

Douglas looked up. “I mean that’s what the bank could sell them for.” He allowed a few moments for that to sink in before he went on. “You both signed personal guarantees when you took out this loan originally, putting up your houses as collateral. Of course we all know how values have risen over recent years, but you both have substantial mortgages. We’re going to need some current valuations on those.” He made a note on a sheet of paper and punched some more numbers into his calculator.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

“Yes?”

“You’re talking about shutting us down?”

“You sound aggrieved,” Douglas said with a thin smile. “What were you expecting? You currently owe the bank almost one million dollars and your cash flow is negative and has been for months. You’re spending more than you’re making, Mr. Weston. Your revenues are falling. What did you think was going to happen here today?”

“I thought we’d get a fair hearing,” I said.

“A fair hearing?” Douglas repeated my words and let them hang in the air. “Your current level of debt exceeds the agreed limit by almost a quarter of a million dollars, which it may surprise you to know we take a pretty dim view of. But perhaps you can explain how you consider your actions have been fair towards this bank?”

“I thought that’s why we were here, so that we could explain our situation.”

“You seem to be forgetting something, Mr. Weston. We’ve been trying to get you to do that for several weeks now.” He opened a page in a file and scanned its contents. “Daily phone calls to your accountant, and then to you personally. Faxes. E-mails. None of which were answered satisfactorily.”

I could feel the weight of Marcus staring at me though I didn’t look at him.

“I think you’ve brought this situation on yourself,” Douglas said.

There was brief silence while he waited for my reaction. I could get up and walk out, I thought. The hell with them. I had the feeling Douglas and Flynn were enjoying this. It seemed like they had made up their minds before either of us had even arrived and there was nothing I could do about it. I could feel Marcus silently telling me to do something. Get us out of this mess. I imagined going home to break the news to Sally that we were broke. No baby. No house or job. My dreams all fading, my whole life crumbling before my eyes. I figured I had nothing to lose so I may as well go down fighting.

“Fine,” I said. “Go ahead and shut us down. But that isn’t going to get the bank back its money. We’re an advertising agency. We are the assets. Us and the people who work for us. You can have a fire sale with the goddamn furniture and take our houses, but like you said, we both have heavy mortgages. What will you clear? Five hundred thousand maybe? That’s still half a million short of what we owe. But if that’s what you want, go ahead. We can’t stop you.”

“Fifty per cent is better than nothing at all,” Douglas said, unimpressed.

“How do you know you have to settle for fifty per cent?”

“Judging by your recent history I’d say we’re lucky to get that.”

I shook my head and spread my hands. “I don’t know why you needed us here for this. You’re not even prepared to listen.”

“Perhaps, Mr. Weston, that’s something you should have thought about before you put yourself in this position.”

He looked at me, and though his tone appeared unrelenting, I thought I detected a subtle expectation in his expression. I had “the feeling he was waiting for something. But what? And suddenly I saw what it was. The bank was pissed off with us, and before anything else could happen we had to show that we were suitably contrite. He was waiting for me to eat some humble pie, which I instantly recalled was my favourite dish. I fixed a contrite, beaten down look on my face.

“I guess you’re right,” I said heavily. “It is entirely our own fault that we’re in this position, and we realize that.”

I could almost feel Marcus bristle at the term ‘we’. As far as he was concerned we were here because of me. Period. Douglas, however, made the merest inclination of his head which I took as an invitation to continue.

“We made some mistakes, and the biggest of those was not admitting we were in trouble before now. What we should have done is come right to the bank before things got out of hand. I guess we thought we could trade our way out of it.” I paused. “Actually the shame of it is I still think we could.”

A muscle twitched in Douglas’s cheek. He was weighing me up, trying to decide if my humility was genuine or if I was just spinning a line. Perhaps the faint possibility that the bank might get all of its money back was too big a lure to let go without hearing me out, but he laid down the ground rules first.

“Okay, we’ll listen to what you have to say. But let’s be clear about a couple of things. This meeting was arranged at our insistence because you have repeatedly given this bank the run around. You owe us a lot of money. What we want to hear is how you intend to pay it back. If you have a proposal we’re going to want to see detailed forecasts and we’re going to go over them with due diligence.”

I resented his moralizing tone, and couldn’t resist a comeback, though I disguised it with a smile. “It’s funny how things change, there have been times when I’ve sat in this room and you people have practically begged us to extend our borrowing.” I looked at Flynn who at least dropped his gaze momentarily because he knew that in our early days when things were going well what I was saying was true.

Douglas wasn’t impressed. That’s what banks do, Mr. Weston. We lend our money to people who need it, so long as they can afford to repay it. It’s what makes the world go around. It’s the repayment part that is at issue here.”

Of course he was right and I knew it. It’s one of life’s ironies that banks are willing to throw vast amounts of money at you when you need it least, when business is good, but when you run into trouble and need it most, they have a knack of making you feel like a bum begging for nickels and dimes on street corners. What’s more, the money Douglas referred to as belonging to the bank in fact, more accurately, belonged to their depositors. The bank simply took it in with one hand and lent it out with the other and along the way they charged in interest more than they paid out and garnered a fortune for themselves. I thought about the fifty floor marble-clad building I was currently sitting in that bore the bank’s name, an imposing and opulent edifice by anybody’s standard, and how over the years Carpe Diem had played a small part in contributing to the cost of it.

“The point I’m making is that we have a good record with this bank,” I said. “Since we first started our growth has been steady and consistent.”

Douglas flipped through his records. “I’ll agree that was true until last year. But this isn’t the first time you’ve run into financial difficulties.”

“You’re referring to a situation last year that was beyond our control. We took on a client that went under owing us a lot of money.”

“But bad debts are a fact of life. The trick is limiting your exposure to them.”

“When Office Line failed it was at a time when any dot. com company had to practically fight off the investors who wanted to sink money into them. Winning that account was a big step up for us,” I argued, just as I had with Marcus when he’d been reluctant to commit so much of our resources into one account. “We should have made six hundred thousand in fees during the first year alone.”

“It’s not what should happen that counts, Mr. Weston. It’s what actually does. Otherwise we’d all be rich,” Douglas said with heavy condescension.

Fuck you, I thought, but I said, “Nobody could have predicted that the market would crash,” hearing again the echo of a thou sand arguments I’d had with Marcus over the same subject.