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’