Heliopolis (6 page)

‘Chocolate’s firing on all cylinders since the peanut limited editions, but my spies tell me we can expect retaliation before the end of this quarter. As for cereal, you know as well as I do that it’s a dirty fight, but the new guidelines on salt intake for the preteens should work in our favour.’

Just as it was for the boy in the square, confidence is the key. Oscar decides I’m in control of the situation and switches off before I’ve even finished the chocolate assessment. It’s one less thing for him to worry about, so he can zone out of the conversation.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Well done, Ludo. And I believe I’m seeing you for a briefing in ten minutes. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten.’

With that, he breezes out of the lift before my prepared speech has run half its course. I know how quickly consumers make their purchasing decisions, and buying into people is the same: it happens in seconds. And today, Oscar was a buyer—though things would have been different if he’d been in a bad mood.

The Rolexed arm shoots back in. The doors jerk open apologetically.

‘One more thing, Ludo—I have a job for you. There’s a guy in town called Dennis Pinto. Smart cookie. Been running detergent all over the Pacific Rim. He’s half-Australian—left here with his mother as a teenager—but he’s thinking of moving back, and he’s over here for a few weeks to check us out. From the sound of him I think he’d be an asset.’ The lift doors try closing again but Oscar’s arm punches out once more. ‘His father’s an old friend of mine, and I’m supposed to meet him for drinks at his hotel tonight to make him feel at home. But perhaps it would be better if you two hotshots hung out together. I’m sure he would rather meet up with someone closer to his own age than an old blowfish like me. You should have plenty of energy after your lie-in, so make sure you show him a good time. I’ll cover your expenses. OK? He’s staying at the Windsor. See you in nine minutes.’

The lift doors snip off my reply like scissors. It doesn’t matter. He’ll be metres of carpet away by now, ruining somebody else’s morning.

He knows exactly what he’s doing, the bastard. He doesn’t like this cocky business chat following straight on from my boasts about how hungover I am. Most of all, he doesn’t like the fact that when he first met me, I was nothing but the son of the cook at Zé’s weekend
fazenda
– and now I’m snapping at his heels. And because, inexplicably, his old friend Zé has actually adopted me, he can’t even fire me.
All right
, he’s saying.
Stick your head over the parapet if you dare, but I will shoot it off
. He can’t fire me, but that doesn’t mean he has to respect me. To him I will always be that farm boy in the kitchen. Nothing more.

In its relentless effort to teeter as close to the cutting edge as possible, the agency recently relocated to one of the city’s grimmest frontiers, a district of hastily constructed high-rises, shabby tenements, and, on all the available patches of wasteland, favelas. Big or small, under every bridge, behind every rusty fence, you’ll find them: improvised burrows of wood, cardboard and brick. Washing on the line. A plant pot here and there. Mongrels rolling in the dust. The shanty towns in this city are sedimentary—not brashly spilling down hillsides, as they do elsewhere—and many of them are far out of town, out of sight. They can be vast, but they can just as easily grow in crevices and forgotten corners—wherever there is a gap, like silt.

Everyone calls our office the Beehive, though it is no longer a squat. The term is usually applied to high-rise slums, or other fallen buildings colonised by the needy, where multiple families share one toilet and sleep four or five to a room. The building is therefore on its third and most confusing life yet. (It used to be said that the economy was like a bumblebee, because somehow it worked though logically it shouldn’t have been able to get off the ground. The inhabitants of beehives and favelas are similarly paradoxical: they shouldn’t, in theory, be able to survive, but they do.)

Until we took it over, our office was abandoned and condemned, and inhabited by ghosts who made it their own. Usually, the fate of a building like this is to be razed to make way for new, sanctioned accommodation. But the agency stepped in. To the bafflement of the authorities, when all the ‘marginals’ had been moved on, the company bought the doomed building as well as the site. They strengthened the floors and fumigated it for pests. Then they sprayed clear epoxy resin over every surface to fix it before bringing in the chrome chairs, the bleeping terminals, that eye-catching piece of war memorabilia. And now we hammer out flimsy approximations of the global strategies handed down to us by our brand overlords surrounded by frozen graffiti: impulsive obscenities, disposable ideas, cartoon art, and the ominous tags of a local gang known as the Shadow Command.

The result is a workplace close enough to some of the city’s black holes to benefit from a perception of frontier danger, but not so unsafe that you’ll get knifed popping out for lunch. We gaze down from our sealed windows over the chaotic contours of a mid-sized favela, and never give it a second thought. We could be somewhere leafy and upmarket, surrounded by glittering designer brands, but we choose this instead: it has more cachet. This kind of self-conscious cool is a relatively recent development—and, as with other foreign imports, we sometimes go too far in our eagerness. Sensing a pose of ironic detachment to be important, we rushed to acquire one at the expense of all sensitivity. Even as they raise their eyebrows at how far we have taken things, our international clients find the place thrilling—and they love having their meetings on cantilevered Italian chairs while perusing the desperate scrawl of the unfortunates who used to live here.

Events sometimes burst the bubble. When the block was restored, a beautiful old avocado tree nearby was preserved and nourished, and now spreads out over the fortified guardhouse and beyond the office compound, covering the street with its canopy. Not long after we moved in to the building, a cyclone blew a huge branch into the street. So many people came out of the favela to harvest the bounty that there was almost a riot, and one of our security guards was forced to draw his gun.

But fixes of real life like that are rare. For the most part, we sit at our terminals like drones, waiting for strategies to blip in from London or New York: slick multimedia presentations of nonsense words devised to sum up the brand, to which we are invited to devote ourselves: Eatertainment; Funteraction. If they are meaningless even in English then how are they supposed to make sense in our language? But I’m not paid to ask questions. I exist to reassure my distant masters that their ideas work in this market: to provide local evidence in support of their conceited impositions, regardless of the truth.

My response to the realisation that my job is pointless has thus far been to worry as little as possible, to spend my office days how I like, and to do just enough to slip under the radar. I pass the time sleeping and reading in toilet cubicles converted from the last-resort hovels of those with more tenacity than I can imagine, and try to avoid the comparison between their lives and mine even as it stares me in the face. The occasional client pops in to the office to make sure we’re implementing his or her strategy, and they might have to be taken for lunch, but otherwise my days are spent staring at the terminal at my desk or organising meetings whose sole purpose is to fill the diaries of their attendees with reassuring appointments.

I remember the Windsor Hotel. In spite of the name it is, like several hotels in the downtown area, run by Italians. It looks old-fashioned now, but was once a beautiful place: thick carpets, dark marble, and a proper bar with a multicoloured array of backlit bottles. And it was the setting for a precious childhood experience.

For a week or two after I had left the farm but had yet to be enrolled at school in the city, nobody knew what to do with me, so Zé used to take me with him to work. I suspect he liked having the boy he had saved around as a PR asset. One day, he had a meeting in the Windsor Hotel, in one of its private rooms, and he took me down from the helipad to the ground floor and asked me to wait for him in a small, mirrored chamber off the main lobby.

‘I think you might find what I’m doing up there very boring, Ludo. Why don’t you stay down here and have some lunch while you wait—ever eaten a club sandwich?’

I shook my head. Hotel food wasn’t my mother’s style.

‘They’re good here. Sit down. I think you’ll like it.’

It was a typically smart move to leave me in that little alcove with such an exquisite and time-consuming new distraction. I was still reeling from the size of the city to which I’d been transplanted, but even in the grip of all the new sensation I remember the shock of realising that I had been denied something so pleasurable until now. This heavenly confection of lettuce, mayonnaise, grilled bacon, chicken breast and sweet tomato, that lasted so long due to the ingenious decision to use three slices of bread instead of two, and to toast them (but not too much)—what else had I been missing? Clever Zé. You have to hand it to him. He knew me well enough, even at fourteen, to know that no matter what the big, bad city had to offer—I could have wandered out on to the streets at any time—setting a triple-decker sandwich and a cold Coke down in front of me was all that was required to keep me occupied. When he came back, his business concluded, I had not moved. I was sitting back, listening to the music of the lobby and staring at myself in the mirrors, a plate with four neatly lined up cocktail sticks on it before me.

The doors ping open on a nervous pack of blinking clients. Somehow that memory has taken me all the way back to the ground floor. I don’t want to look as if I can’t operate the lifts, so I emerge and make as if to leave the building. Then I go round the back of the wing of the American bomber, greet the receptionist, and open the doors to the back stairs. Hot air blasts my face as I leave the air-conditioned zone. The stairs stink of stale smoke, sweat and eucalyptus-scented cleaning fluid.

I start taking two steps at a time to get to the second floor, then realise that nobody is watching and I might as well waste some more of the day. The cleaner is tramping down the stairs dragging a green refuse sack, a tinny-sounding little radio hanging from her belt. I pick up my pace as I pass her, issuing a cheery ‘Good morning.’ She ignores me. She’s found me asleep on bathroom floors too often to take me seriously.

But I have something on her too. I know that she feasts on the uneaten food she clears from the meeting rooms. I caught her in the act. She looked stuck to the door, immobile, as I passed her in the Technicolor concrete corridor. Then I realised it was because she was trying to eat something off the side of the tray she was meant to be clearing. Halfway through the door, her urge for a leftover
empada
on the side of the plate had overwhelmed her, and she had bitten into it with the tray still in her arms.

‘Can I hold that for you?’ I said. ‘That way you could use your hands.’

I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic—I meant it—but she didn’t see it that way. She looked at me through frightened eyes, her mouth full, a guilty smear of sauce emerging from one side, then stomped off without a word. Her contemptuous looks when we pass each other in the corridor have been shot through with suspicion ever since. I suppose she fears I might report her to someone.

I only have to deal with two more corridor encounters before I reach the safety of my office: one brief exchange about football and an unsuccessful attempt at flirtation. Finally, I close the frosted glass door behind me and check the time. Twelve-fifteen: just in time for Oscar’s meeting. My associates will either assume that I’m arriving now because I’ve been out at a chocolate meeting, or else I will tell them my hangover story and in their desire to collude in my irreverence they will overlook the fact that I have missed a morning’s work. And so the days fly by. Practice your confidence tricks on the street and you risk getting shot by trigger-happy security guards; do it in the office and you get put on the board.

I am thinking how everyone in the building is a confidence trickster, that it’s
what we do
, when I look down at the phone on my desk to see a blinking red message light. Sweat springs in my palms and all that confidence is briskly annihilated.

Someone is leaving abusive messages on my work phone. It happens often enough to be unnerving, but not so often that I have bothered to do anything about it. It must be someone I know, because whoever it is insults me by name, and his tone projects real, targeted hatred. The words, when they come, are delivered in a rasping, guttural whisper, often separated by long periods of silence during which all I can make out are strange background noises: rushing water, machinery and, occasionally, what sounds like birdsong.

Sometimes there are no words at all. Other times I can’t understand them because the whisper is too quiet, the phrases too mumbled. But usually if I wait long enough, I’ll make something out, and get a taste of the venom. Insults. Warnings. Threats.

You’re in serious trouble, Ludo. I’ve found you out. I’ve

seen you.

What squalid hole are you hiding in tonight?

Change your life. Before I change it for you.

You better do something about this soon. You better.

Or else.

I have met the odd self-righteous madman with a cross to bear about the industry. They get almost evangelical about it, which is ridiculous—we aren’t Nazis, for God’s sake. So the first time it happened, I thought I had a lunatic. I congratulated myself on being big enough to have my own personal hater, and deleted the message without a second thought. But it keeps on happening. And now I’m almost used to it. Almost.

Who could hate me that much
? I thought at first. Then, after the arrival of the third message, it came to me.

If he knew more than I thought.