As the fire safety video entered its thirty-ninth minute, Brian started to reassess the meeting room they’d been in all day. It had a high corniced ceiling, walls a pale buff colour, and plenty of space all round for the purposes of the training session. Brian thought about where the room was, in a converted townhouse, on a street in the middle of Spitalfields. Altogether it was much less drab than he’d thought it would be, which led him on to their facilitator.
The facilitator was a flash and bright young man called Wyn, W-y-n, which Brian knew to be spelt so as it had appeared in the first slide of the morning’s presentation. Wyn: he’d typed it out in big purple Comic Sans for their benefit. Brian initially guessed he’d done this just to deal with any doubt or indeed merriment they might have harboured on the peculiarities of his name, but at lunchtime, as Brian had sat in the sunshine, he had realised that it was Wyn’s way of poking fun at the fact that everyone went into these training days expecting them to be horrendously corporate and dull. In Wyn’s hands, the day’s programme had become this weird, self-loathing thing. When going through his flipchart of statistics, Wyn forewarned that this was the part where he’d bombard them with meaningless facts and figures; and when bulletpointing the fire evacuation procedures essential to every workplace, he’d said he hoped they were listening at the back, or else they’d have to do some role-play to liven things up. This was met with titters, or at least good-natured exhalations, though in reality there was no back. It was just the four members of the sales department, all sat around the oval table: Carl, Sunita, Brian, and Liz, who was head of department.
‘…I know what you’re thinking at this point,’ said the presenter in the video in his dour, Estuary way. He was fiftysomething, smart-suited and tieless and with salt-and-pepper hair across his head and chest. The top three buttons of his shirt were wide open. The video’s subtitles had introduced him as Grant Neasden, Media & Entertainment Personality. Brian wasn’t good with names, but better with faces, and almost certain he’d never seen him before.
'…Fires, surely they’re just something that happens to other people at other workplaces, right?’ Course that’s what you’re thinking, because that’s what everybody thinks.’ A sombre pause. ‘Right up until it happens to them.’
Grant Neasden, Brian noted, kept referring to himself in the script. ‘I want you to…’ ‘…so keep that in mind for me,’ and suchlike. It made Brian think about Liz, and how she delegated tasks in the department. It was known as the three-faceted approach. When giving instructions, she would explain 1) who the task was for, 2) why it needed doing, and 3) how it would benefit their shared workplace. Liz also tailored the way she spoke to each individual in the department. Brian had been observing this for months. Girlish camaraderie with Sunita; a kind of familiarity—not flirtation, at least not a discernible flirtation that might reflect badly on her—with Carl. And with Brian, Liz reserved a respect particular to him and only him. She had a habit of ccing him into emails that he really didn’t need to be cced into. He’d concluded some time ago this was her way of saying, ‘I value your experience, which is of course far greater than mine.’
Brian flashbacked to his last catch-up with Carol from HR, when she’d asked him how he’d found his (then) new line manager. What he’d done, without any premeditation, was tap a hand down on Carol’s desk, and make an emphatic point about what a fantastic manager Liz was. Carol had nodded eagerly. In fairness to Brian it was hardly a lie. Everyone knew Liz was good with her staff, something her predecessor Gordon certainly hadn’t been, which was why Gordon had been got rid of, and she’d been promoted. Liz didn’t hide in her office or insult people like Gordon. Liz was a people person. She knew how to handle people, how to motivate them, how to direct them, how to reprimand (but only when necessary, which was hardly at all with ‘her fabulous lot’), how to address issues, and how to focus on key zones of potential development in each of them. Even after the 2009 Christmas party, when she drank too much, kicked off her shoes, and danced across the three tables they’d all pushed together in the corner of the Pitcher & Piano at four in the afternoon; the way she openly discussed her antics the next day, and joined in with everyone’s mirth in the staffroom—
A stray cough led Brian back to his colleagues, who were all watching the DVD. Carl was leant back, and had given in to his habit of opening his mouth, baring his teeth in a weird animalistic freeze-frame, and using his tongue to prod at each tooth in what seemed to be an order meaningful to Carl alone. Molar, canine, molar, incisor, incisor. Carl’s tongue tapped at them like piano keys. For reasons unknown, Brian’s imagination was hearing the five-note melody from Close Encounters. Bah-bah-bah-baah-baaah. Sunita was chewing her hair. This, she always did, but having now absolved herself of all self-consciousness she’d worked enough of it into her mouth that it ran taut along her jaw. As she did this she also pulled her necklace around her chin. The little locket at the end twitched beneath her lower lip. Liz had her jotterpad out, and was writing page after page of notes. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, like Brian’s father had done in the Sixties. He registered the seat she’d chosen, the one closest to Wyn—and saw Wyn was looking straight at him. Brian pretended he hadn’t seen, and went back to the DVD.
Grant Neasden was now in conversation with a woman of forty or thereabouts. As the camera closed in on her face, Brian’s first assumption was that she was a burns victim. Then he felt bad, as he realised she simply possessed the shapeless, waxy features of an obese person struggling under the heat of a studio lamp. The subtitles reappeared, reading Valerie Gough, Workplace Fire Survivor.
‘We're a family business,’ said Valerie Gough. ‘Me. Me brother, Richard. Me dad. His brother Trevor...’
She spoke with a broad Lancashire accent. It was the sort of earthy, prepossessing burr that Southerners like Brian dearly wished they had because it would’ve made them sound more trustworthy, and in Brian’s case would probably have bagged him more accounts over the years. She also spoke in such a way that it seemed she’d never heard of conjunctional words such as ‘and’ or ‘with’ or ‘then.’ Was she incapable of stringing complete sentences together, he wondered? He felt guilty about thinking this, given that something tragic had happened to her, as she was no doubt about to explain. And he was feeling bad already about the burns victim thing anyway. The Northern accent, Brian thought, was probably only trumped by the Irish accent in terms of implicitly bestowing moral integrity upon its speaker. He then started to consider if he could categorise all the various Northern sub-accents in order of charm and insinuated decency.
After a half-minute of her backstory, the camera zoomed in on a still photograph of Valerie Gough and three men. They were all sat or stood in a cluttered Portakabin office, on whose wall a vinyl banner read GOUGH FAMILY FIXTURES & FITTINGS. Zooming in on a still photograph was a technique known as the Ken Burns effect. Brian had learnt this from watching the extra features on the DVD of Ken Burns’s documentary on the American Civil War his son had given him for his birthday. His thoughts ricocheted to the picture inside Sunita’s locket, which was of her twin sister, who’d died of leukaemia when they were twelve.
Brian came to the abrupt conclusion that the reason Grant Neasden kept referring to himself in the video was to suggest he (Grant) was personally invested in teaching them four of them about fire safety; that he wasn’t just an individual of alleged celebrity parachuted in to breathe life into a corporate video. This took Brian on the same mental segue into Liz’s delegation method. The reason he knew it was called the three-faceted approach was because they’d both gone to the same training day, when she hadn’t been head of department. He hadn’t been angry with Liz, when she’d got the job over him. He knew his age would either work for or against him, and, as it turned out, it worked against him.
Valerie Gough explained that an electrical fire had started on their premises in December 2006. They had overloaded a mains socket with an electrical heater, a paraffin heater, various computer cables, and the fairylights that ornamented their artificial Christmas tree. The fire spread across the carpeting, and reached some overalls draped over a chair that were soaked with oils and solvents… The crux of the story was that Valerie’s uncle Trevor had fallen asleep inside the Portakabin, and died of smoke and toxic fumes inhalation in his sleep, and Brian assumed that was the end of it, but—wait a second—Valerie explained that her brother Richard, returning his van to the yard, had dashed in to try and save his uncle. Richard Gough’s instinct had been to fill a bucket of water, and throw it over what had at that point been a small and localised fire. He electrocuted himself.
A sequence of blurry reconstructed scenes that Brian found hard to follow were overlaid by Valerie Gough’s strangled, clucking sobs. He felt bad a third time, because as her story progressed, and the more upset she became, he just grew more and more irritated. He knew that right now he was supposed to be feeling sorry for her because her brother and uncle were dead. But plugging three adaptors into one mains unit and leaving flammable material lying around was stupid. He knew that already. He hadn’t learnt it that day. He’d learnt it before that day. He didn’t need a crying woman in a video to tell him that. Brian balked at hearing his internal voice’s choice of ‘crying woman’ over ‘crying person,’ and suspected he was channelling all his ire towards Valerie Gough as it was now 5.04pm and she was obliquely responsible for the training running late.
Glancing to either side to see if anybody else might have looked irritated about running overtime, Brian became aware of a change in events, which had been nagging at him, but not consciously until now. It was the absence of the sound Liz’s fountain pen made as it moved across her pad. She’d stopped writing. And in the flesh visible between her revolting glasses and the corner of her mouth, Brian noticed a twitching spasm, like the aftertremors of a twanged elastic band; and as she closed a hand over her mouth, and searched for something out of sight beneath the table—a tissue from her bag—she started to cry. Not wanting to react, and reveal that he’d noticed, Brian kept his head motionless, and swivelled his eyes over to his other two colleagues, to watch a chain reaction in progress. By the time Liz was dabbing at her eyes and nose, in full snotty flow, tears were dribbling down Sunita’s cheeks, and she was sniffing and staunching them with her fingers so as not to smudge her mascara, whilst Carl, Carl didn’t seem to be actually weeping, but his face was pink and crumpled as though he were a little boy, his face arranged in such a way that Brian felt was something he oughtn’t ever to have seen, and Wyn had his arms crossed, hands tucked under armpits, expression fierce if simultaneously compassionate, as if to say, ‘They need to go through this.’ Brian now understood why all the flippancy earlier had been worth it, and why Wyn had left the video until the end of the day when everyone was tired and listless. The dilemma, he realised, was whether to ask Liz for a tissue and join in, or to make what he could only interpret as some kind of a stand, and not cry. But all he could do was vacillate, and return to the DVD, to find Grant Neasden nodding at nothing in particular.
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