Am I Being Followed? Read online

  “You mean in Church work?” I asked hopefully.

  “Of course. Church work.”

  I thought, and hoped for some reason, that I could detect a note of impatience in her answer. But I knew I had to change the subject, in case I said the wrong thing.

  “Would you like another coffee?” was the best I could manage and then, “Can I give you a run home?” I asked, before she had time to answer the first question. I wasn’t handling this very well at all.

  *

  I drew up outside the Manse and turned in my seat to face her. Pushing open the car door she hesitated, as if about to say something.

  “I really am sorry that I never came to see you before I left,” I said, repeating my apology.

  “You didn’t really owe me an explanation, John.”

  “I still feel bad about it, Linda.”

  “Why should you?”

  Her face was expressionless. Like her tone of voice, it gave nothing away to guide me in my answer. Did this mean that she saw nothing important enough for me to regret, or was her question posed, as I hoped, to get me to define what I thought the relationship had been?

  “If I had left in a sensible fashion we could have kept in touch,” I said at last.

  “You wanted to keep in touch?”

  “Was I wrong” I asked, unintentionally being too bold.

  “Wrong?”

  “I mean, should we have kept in touch?”

  “I’m not sure it should be up to me to answer a question like that” she said unexpectedly, throwing me completely off balance.

  “Have I said the wrong thing?”

  “In a way, maybe,” she returned.

  Her words were almost enough for me. In a way ‘I hadn’t said the wrong thing’ was what they meant too.

  “Would you have liked me to write to you?” I asked her, pressing on hopefully.

  “Of course I would,” she said firmly.

  “You would have been genuinely pleased to hear from me?”

  “Of course I would,” she repeated.

  Was this, at last, what I had come all this way to hear? She would have been genuinely pleased to hear from me. On the other hand, was I putting too much emphasis on the word ‘genuine’?

  ‘Genuinely pleased, Linda?” I enquired, trying to keep calm.

  “All right. Are you asking me if I missed you? I missed you,” she told me, raising her voice slightly.

  Did she mean she missed me in the sense that friends miss each other, or even colleagues? I asked myself. I didn’t think she did. But I was asking too many questions. Surely enough had been said to make my journey worthwhile. She hadn’t rebuffed me. Her response confirmed that she was willing to consider taking up the relationship again, and that these friendly conversations I had had with her, after the services, had meant something to her, too. She hadn’t seen me merely as an acquaintance with a common interest in the Church. But to what extent did her feelings for me actually go beyond this?

  As she pushed on the car door I caught her arm.

  “Have you got to go in? I was thinking we might go for a drive.”

  “I have to help with the lunch,” she answered, apologetically.

  My spirits fell at this. How easy it would still be for her to get rid of me.

  “Could you come to the Bible Study this evening?” she asked. “Or maybe we could go for a drive some other time,” she suggested.

  “Could you give me your current phone number?” I asked, my hopes revived.

  I drove off in good spirits, leaving the slip of paper with her phone number on it lying on the passenger seat as evidence of the success of the visit.

  chapter eight

  I parked in a street which had row upon row of small shops on each side. Although I lacked conviction, and experience, I didn’t feel incapable. But was I capable enough? This particular job wasn’t like anything I had ever had to do at the Food Importers and I wished I didn’t have to do it. But Sears had insisted and, anyway, I very much needed the commission.

  To walk in, uninvited, and try to sell someone a fire extinguisher, or anything else for that matter, was known as ‘cold calling’. For this you had to be sensitive, so that you could detect a buying signal, and insensitive, so that you wouldn’t be too upset when people were rude to you or otherwise unmoved by your sales overture.

  The opposite of ‘cold calling’ was when someone came to you with the idea of buying already in their mind. Although this wasn’t referred to as ‘hot calling’, it was hotly pursued, by a certain kind of salesmen, as a congenial way of making a sale. Real salesmen were said to hold anyone in contempt who tried to claim the credit for making a sale through ‘hot calling’. Taking an order, which was all it was, according to them, didn’t make you a salesman and if they were right my sense of identity was under serious threat again, and I had some hard work ahead of me.

  Sears had set the minimum target for this endeavour at two extinguishers a day. For once he had got it right. If I could sell two models worth £200, five days a week, at ten percent commission, plus what I made in the office, it would bring my earnings up to just about what I needed to make ends meet.

  I got out of the car, overcoming the temptation to remain sitting there behind the wheel, in that sheltered little world in which I could feel that my strength was adequate, and my integrity intact.

  “Don’t need any,” the sales prospect behind the counter in the first shop told me.

  If there was a difference, as it said in the Sales Manual, between what was needed, and what was wanted, the man’s harsh tone of voice and challenging look blurred the distinction. But his meaning was clear.

  At the next shop, an elderly woman gave me a better reception.

  “Sorry, but we bought one last month.”

  I warmed to her smile. Some people were better than others at delivering bad news, I thought gratefully.

  Noting down the street number of each subsequent shop I visited, to monitor my progress or to avoid becoming disorientated, I wasn’t sure which, I at last, at the thirty-first shop, met with a response that raised my hopes.

  “Are you from the Fire Department?” the woman asked, when I told her the kind of free advice I was offering her about putting out fires.

  “We’re more or less the same,” I lied. “Anything to do with fire extinguishers is our speciality,” I added, sprinkling a dash of truth on the falsehood.

  “Could you take a look at this one? she asked.

  Peering at the extinguisher, I prodded and caressed it hoping that, in her eyes, my demeanour would transcend that of a mere salesman. I was a professional person, brim full of technical expertise.

  “It’s not in very good condition,” I pronounced.

  “Will it work?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “What should I do?”

  That she should get the extinguisher serviced was the right advice. For a mere twenty pounds or so it could be put back in good working order. To replace it with an absolutely new extinguisher would be an awful lot more than that.

  “If I were you, I would get rid of it,” I advised her, “and buy a new one.”

  “It’s definitely no good?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I lied again, looking about the shop as if assessing the fire risk but actually allaying my feelings of guilt.

  There was far more at stake for me in this encounter than there was for her, I thought, in an attempt to justify my dishonesty. Her livelihood wasn’t under threat, mine was.

  “I can let you have something with a very good discount,” I offered.

  “You mean a new one?”

  “One of the very best models.”

  “How much are they?”

  “£220 actually,” I said in a measured tone. “But, let me see, £200 after the intr
oductory discount has been applied.”

  “£200,” she gasped.

  “It’s the very best of equipment.”

  I knew what her answer was going to be. A pleasant-looking woman, she was staring at me sympathetically. If this had been the first shop, or even the twentieth, I might have put up some resistance to her refusal, definitely offered her a bigger discount, but at the thirty-first shop I was sick of he sound of my own voice.

  This job had nothing gong for it, I could see. In the Food Importers the current had seemed to flow in the right direction, the sales prospects had actually wanted what you were selling. In this job it was hard just to stay afloat. Being greeted by assistants who weren’t authorised to buy was as bad as being snubbed by owners who were determined not to. It all added up to the same thing, no sale.

  Feeling like a survivor heading for the fort, I hoped a long lunch hour in the car would aid my recovery. Trying to get people to buy was like changing the world in miniature, I thought, as I unwrapped my sandwiches. Most of these people neither needed nor wanted a fire extinguisher, and it would take a lot more than evangelistic fervour to get them to buy one. But a lot more what?

  I dozed for twenty minutes or so until I was wakened by the rain hammering on the roof of the car. My feet were cold and a strong wind was blowing. Looking across the street, the row of shops I was about to visit looked dull and uninviting.

  How many people who worked in sales were real salesmen? I reflected again, with ill-humour. Sitting in warm offices taking phone calls, or in showrooms greeting someone already thinking of buying, these sales people were lulled into thinking that they knew the name of the game. They didn’t.

  To close the sale was at the pinnacle of their endeavours, was what it was all about, they would proclaim, as would the pundits and the sales manuals.

  But they were all wrong. There was another kind of salesman, salesmen who were predators first, who had to prowl, stalk, and pursue, salesmen who had to do all this before the skills of persuasion necessary to closing the sale could even be brought into play.

  And yet, cold calling, which consisted of this aggressive and creative approach lacked prestige. The cold-caller, made in the mould of the explorer and the adventurer, was often employed and supervised by people of lesser stamp, who loved to lord it over them and pontificate on the difficulties encountered along the way, a job that they, themselves, shrunk from because they had neither the personality nor the stamina to do it. It looked as though I wasn’t going to be able to make the grade, either.

  I had visited thirty-one shops, pleaded with more or less thirty-one people, and I hadn’t sold a thing. As far as my quality of life was concerned, I felt like someone who had just begun a long prison sentence. But wasn’t I a kind of prisoner already? I asked myself.

  I needed something stronger than tea, at that point but, having to resist the urge, I reached for my flask. I was two extinguishers short of my target. How many shops was this going to take?

  The street had now become busy with shoppers, I noticed, their purpose so very different from mine. They wanted to buy and I wanted to sell. There wouldn’t be anyone here for the same reason that I was. I was in a kind of ‘solitary’.

  I was a prisoner to my thoughts too, filled with self-recrimination for getting into this situation. If only I could have lost my job at the Food Importers through redundancy and become an object of pity, a victim of some economic downturn, I would have felt better about things. If I had been a redundant ‘square tube fitter’ forced to learn new skills elsewhere as a ‘circular tubeless turner’, I would have felt no self-reproach in my plight, and a redundancy payment might have reduced my overdraft and raised my spirits.

  But to have been propelled into a situation like this by behaviour that was ill-timed and out of character, was bad. I hadn’t even been caught in the act. The boss at the Food Importers hadn’t walked into the ante room and caught her with her panties at her ankles. The situation, and her state of undress, certainly hadn’t gone nearly as far as that. And from what I had heard, his behaviour at the dance hadn’t been much better than mine. Could I honestly say that I deserved to be in this situation?

  But did it matter whether I deserved it or not? I had let my guard drop and this is where it had got me, sitting here in the car contemplating endless rows of shops whose occupants lurked inside waiting to reject me.

  Reduced to my recollections centred on panties that I had never seen, far less removed, and faced with the prospect of an afternoon that would be much like the morning, I struggled to resist the despair that was overcoming me.

  What was I up against in this business?, I reflected bitterly. Judging from the number of fire extinguishers in the country, the small fires they were meant to put out seemed to pose a greater threat than Hell’s fire itself.

  If even one small fire was lit for every extinguisher that existed there’s no doubt the country would go up in flames. But the vast majority of them would be bought, installed and discarded without seeing any action. There were ten times more extinguishers in the land than there were six shooters in the Wild West. The country was infested with them. And yet I was expected to sell only two a day, three if I was good, and I couldn’t even sell one.

  And wasn’t there something undignified about forcing yourself on people in this way? And even if I did sell one, would it be enough to make any real difference to my overall situation?

  There would be something undignified about seeking help from my Great Aunt, too, I reflected dismally, but again, what real alternative did I have. I had to do something, whether I liked the idea or not. Things were going from bad to worse. She might be my last chance.

  chapter nine

  In the pub car park I took off my tie and pulled out the neck of my shirt so that it hung over the collar of my jacket, not sure if it would be enough to change my image, but determined to make the effort. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to at least look as if I belonged in the place.

  Karen was sitting by herself and greeted me, without a smile! unsurprisingly, of course, in view of the low point reached in our last conversation.

  “And what kind of work do you get up to?” I asked her, to dispel the awkward silence.

  “I work at the Casino,” she replied. “Mainly in the office.”

  “And you enjoy it?” I asked, wishing I could have thought of something impressive or exciting to say instead.

  “I like the money.”

  “I suppose casinos pay well?”

  “I suppose they do.”

  I was doing my best to reach her, but a series of questions, all mine, didn’t amount to the kind of conversation I wanted to have with her. She was Andy’s girl. I wanted to get along with her.

  “I can’t say the same about Fire Protection,” I told her. “Just the opposite, as far as the money goes.”

  “So I’ve heard,” she commented, turning to face me. “Did you know Andy before you came here?” she asked me unexpectedly. It was something I thought she would have known.

  “Only in Bartons.”

  “Well John, aren’t you going to buy me a drink?” she asked, pleasantly surprising me with the request, and with her use of my first name. On the other hand, she could hardly have addressed me as Mr Grant. Still, things seemed about to improve?

  “Of course I am,” I said hastily. “What would you like?”

  “Orange juice.”

  “Orange juice?” I repeated, not sure if she was serious.

  “Yes, with some gin in it, of course,” she added with a smile.

  There was something about the way her lip curled up at one side, even before she smiled, that made a strong impression on me. It wasn’t just the attractiveness of the feature that held my attention, it was its familiarity, and yet I had only met her once before. It was as if I had somehow known I was going to meet someone like her at some poin
t in my life. I couldn’t make too much of this, of course, because of Andy, but I found it hard to shake the idea.

  “I don’t think you feel at home in here, do you?” she asked pleasantly, fingering her glass.

  “I don’t?”

  “I think you feel you’re too good for the place,” she said, with a forthrightness that caught me completely unawares.

  “I do actually,” I stated, trying to look as if I meant it and seeing at once, from her puzzled look, that I had succeeded.

  “Don’t you agree?” I teased, further.

  “If you say so.”

  “You surely don’t think I’m serious,” I asked, worried that I might have gone too far.

  “I’m not quite sure what to think,” she replied, her features shaped in mock disapproval. And then, in a lighter tone, “But since you once told me to mind my own business…”

  “Surely I didn’t’ say that?” I protested. You must have misunderstood me.”

  “I was hurt about your mother’s maiden name too,” she stated, feigning a look of teenage petulance which I felt was significant. The ice was definitely melting.

  “Ask me anything you want to,” I told her. “What would you like to know?”

  “Mmm. Let me see,” she murmured. “Now that you’re volunteering the information, did you leave anyone behind when you came here?”

  “You mean family or …”

  “Not quite,” she broke in, raising her eyebrows knowingly.

  I liked the fact that at last the conversation was coming to life, but immediately felt uneasy about the direction in which it was going. What could I tell her about Linda? I wasn’t even sure if Linda was the answer to her question. I hadn’t left her behind, not in the way she meant.

  “There was someone,” I told her, against my better judgement.

  “Can I ask her name?”

  “Linda.”

  “Will I be likely to meet her?”

  “You might,” I lied. “Maybe not in here though.”

  I was glad to see Andy come in, hopeful that he might once more be bringing with him a change of subject.