Lee
"Budgie" Barnett is a writer of comedy and of comic books. He first
broke into the business with three stories in Imperium Comics' TRAILER PARK
OF TERROR, before getting his first big break with Marvel in X-MEN UNLIMITED
#4, which hit the shelves in August 2004. Well known in the UK Comics industry
for the annual Hypotheticals panel
he devised and presents with Dave Gibbons at the UK Comics Festival, he's been
described as being to accountancy what Indiana Jones is to archaeology. He currently
writes GOING CHEEP at the Pulse.
At Doncaster and Monkton, the senior directors of the company were in crisis management mode. The whole company knew it, but didn’t know why. Rumours spread around the building with a rapidity that would have impressed an Olympic sprinter, and as always, less than a tenth of them came close to the truth... and those were the ones, of course, that weren’t believed. Equally inevitably, it was the personal assistants that bore the brunt of the questioning. The junior staff, it was rationalised, wouldn’t know anything and the senior staff wouldn’t talk. It was only a pity that this time, the personal assistants neither knew what was going on, nor could talk about it.
It was approaching the end of the day and Patt had been like a bear with a sore head all day. His personal assistant, Joe Colclough, a young man with long black hair (and occasionally fingernails to match), was, for the eighteenth time that day, considering whether or not to look for a new job. Long used to making excuses for his boss, today he’d given up trying to explain Patt’s foul mood and hair trigger temper and was now reduced to saying simply that he was unavailable. It didn’t help matters when, just as he was passing this message on over the telephone, everyone in the office could hear Patt shouting at the top of his voice, screaming at someone or other down the corridors.
Colclough had worked for Patt since Patt had joined the agency and he was well used to the man’s foibles and eccentricities. He was also semi-aware of Patt’s previous career, and there was little, he thought, that Patt could do to surprise him.
It could, one supposes, be looked on philosophically that a day is wasted when something new isn’t learned. And today certainly wasn’t that day for Joe Colclough, who realised that while he’d seen Patt in various moods, he’d never seen him either scared or needlessly offensive. The former he realised when he’d seen just how much coffee his boss had been drinking, the latter he realised when Patt swore at him with a skill and vocabulary that simply had to be admired. Colclough’s computer beeped at him, disturbing his reverie and a flashing icon alerted him to the appointment system, that in precisely five minutes, Patt was due at the senior director’s meeting. Colclough grimaced, believing quite accurately that he was in a no-win situation, and he was not looking forward to reminding Patt of the meeting.
Despite the warm, cordial and businesslike relationship he usually had with Patt, the senior man was never averse to reminding him exactly who worked for who. All of which might explain why it was with some trepidation that Colclough knocked on Patt’s door. There was a brief noise, which might have been a start of surprise, from behind the door and then it opened. To anyone else, Patt may have looked as if there was nothing concerning him. To the assistant, Patt looked like he’d lost a million pounds, found it again in bundles of notes and then realised that the new notes were forgeries.
“Yes?” Patt snapped out, as if he didn’t give a damn what the interruption was for. Which was, more or less, actually the case.
“You’re due to meet with Mr Monkton and Mr Williams in…” Colclough checked his watch, “three minutes.”
“What?” asked Patt, pulling his mind back to the present. “What did you say?”
“I said,” the assistant responded, “that you’re due in…”
He got no further as Patt interrupted him with a brief “Yes, yes, yes… I know.” He walked back into his office, grabbed his jacket from the hanger and shrugged his way into it. He left the office, walking hurriedly.
Colclough stood in the doorway and glanced at Patt’s desk. It looked dishevelled, but that was nothing new. He saw the object on the desk, made a quick calculation and then started counting. Quietly, but regularly, the numbers left his mouth. “One… two… three… four… five… six… seven… EIGHT!”
As the final number was spoken, Patt appeared again, as if on cue, giving his assistant a baleful glare. “Where the hell are my briefing notes?” he asked belligerently.
Colclough merely pointed to the desk and Patt saw that the stack of briefing notes and papers were neatly piled in the corner of his desk, where he’d left them. He stalked across the room, picked up the papers and stopped in front of Colclough, as if to say something. And then, not trusting himself to say anything, he straightened up and with a grunt, marched away towards the meeting room.
For the nineteenth time, Colclough wondered whether or not he should get a new job. Quickly followed by the twentieth time as he heard Patt bellow at someone on his way to the meeting.
Colclough checked his diary when he got back to his desk. Twenty times in one day? That’s not bad, he thought. Lowest daily total since July.
At about the same time Patt was entering the meeting room, Docherty put down the telephone and ended the call that informed him that Grable was on her way up. He stood and walked to the coat stand, from where he retrieved his jacket. He was just putting it on when Grable opened his door and walked in, carrying a buff folder.
Docherty’s eyes found the office clock. “Excellent, Betty – you’re right on time.”
“Of course,” she replied, in a tone that showed she was wondering who on earth turned up late for meetings.
“OK,” said Docherty, taking her arm. “Did you bring the report with you?”
“Yes, it’s here,” Grable said, opening the buff folder, extracting a smaller clear binder with, Docherty could see, about twenty sheets of paper inside. “There’s a one page summary at the front, the ‘Janet and John’ bit.”
“Yeah,” he said, accepting the folder from her and skimming through the first page. “This is great. One thing though.”
She looked at him expectantly.
“Do me a favour, will you?” he asked. “Don’t call it that again. It’s an ‘executive briefing summary’, ok?” He’d said the last without lifting his eyes from the paper. He finished reading and then looked at her. And then he stared at her.
She looked fabulous.
The make-up she’d chosen set the natural green of her eyes off perfectly and the two piece outfit she wore flattered her figure. In short, she looked like she was going on the date of all dates. Dressed to kill, Docherty thought, wincing at the accompanying thought that the appearance was oddly appropriate, given the meeting they would shortly be attending.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Oh, are we leaving?” Grable asked, puzzled. Maybe, she thought, they were going to dinner. At least that was the hope. She genuinely wanted him not to think that she dressed like this just to deliver a report.
“We are,” said Docherty, not giving her a chance to query it. He almost pulled her out of the room, and down the corridors. Grable gave up trying to ask Docherty where they were going in such a hurry after the third attempt, when it dawned on her that he simply wasn’t going to answer her.
When he got downstairs, Docherty stuck his hand up in the air and a taxi pulled over almost immediately. As they were getting into the cab, Grable tried again and then stopped, thinking at least that when the address was given to the cab driver, she’d know it.
That was a fine plan; unfortunately at about the same time as she was thinking that the interior of the taxi was a lot cleaner than she was used to, she also realised that they were already moving, without Docherty having given the driver directions.
“He works for me,” Docherty said, in answer to Grable’s unanswered question. “And as for where we’re going, you’ll see in a minute. Sorry to do this to you, Betty, but you’re not just briefing me this evening. There’s going to be some other people there.”
“What other people?” she asked, noticing the cab was heading for Whitehall and wondering whether she was the only scientist involved. Hey, she thought, maybe that’s it – maybe he wants me to consult with others.
“Pardon?” asked Docherty.
“Will I know any of them?” she asked, wondering who from the science of mutagenics they could have drafted in.
Docherty half smothered a smile. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m pretty sure you’ll know one of them. By reputation at least.”
But Grable didn’t hear him. She was too busy gawping at the road sign on the wall as the cab turned into Downing Street. In the board-room of Monkton and Doncaster, voices were raised. That was only fitting since tempers were as well. Monkton and Patt had been shouting at each other for twenty minutes, Williams staying quiet throughout it all.
A passer-by, passing, well, ‘by’, and looking on, as onlookers tend to, would have thought that Williams had the enormous patience of a saint in being able to resist jumping into the argument. However, as he’d proved many times in the past, Williams was anything but a saint. He wouldn’t have even qualified for inclusion on any nomination list for that occupation, although he’d have made a superb Devil’s Advocate. His quiet demeanour owed less to virtuous patience than it did to the certain knowledge that any interruption would only add more heat to the discussion but no light.
However, enough was enough, and Williams had slowly but surely begun to get angry at what he heard. For a start, although Monkton had asked Patt to use his contacts to get someone in to look at the table, Williams was not naďve enough to assume that it would stop there. And Patt’s comments regarding the telephone call he’d had from Ross, and the contents thereof, worried him.
Moreover, he genuinely liked Davies, inasmuch as he genuinely liked anyone. The man was good at his work and as well as being conscientious and honest, was reliable. That last attribute counted more than all of the others combined, as far as Williams was concerned.
He wondered what he could say to command attention from the others. Williams had begun to suspect that as so often occurred when Patt and Monkton argued, they enjoyed the argument far more than they should have. He wondered, in fact, what would happen if one of them suddenly stooped, considered, and agred with the other. Williams fully expected that a heart attack would swiftly follow. That or a stroke. His eyes wandered around the room and fell upon the gap in the table where Davies had hit it. He struggled to keep a straight face as he considered whether or not to… and then went for it.
He wasn’t foolish enough to risk his hand though, so he stood and took a heavy book from the coffee table. He lifted it above the table and waited for a moment, but he knew that he could have run naked around the room and they wouldn’t have noticed. Well, maybe not. He let go of the book and it immediately fell to the table in such a manner that would have pleased Sir Isaac Newton greatly. It hit the table and the short sharp bang! surprised the other two into silence. The nearness of the sound to the missing segment of table didn’t escape them. They stared grudgingly at Williams who, completely unaffected by the looks, leaned forward, placing his hands on the table.
“What on earth are you two playing at?” he asked. He was curious to see how they reacted and if those reactions matched his silent predictions. Patt he expected to fall silent almost immediately. It would be Monkton who’d bluster.
Depressingly, his expectations were almost immediately met. Patt stared at the table and then sat. Curiously, Williams had the idea that Patt hadn’t been staring at the book, but at the hand sized gap. Williams sighed as Monkton started to complain loudly at the interruption. “What are we playing at? One might ask…”
That was as far as he got before Patt, quietly, said “Shut up, Peter.”
Monkton reacted by giving him a sharp look, and then he quietened. Williams revelled in the brief respite and then asked what he thought was the most apposite question: “Why?”
“Why what?” asked Patt in return.
“Look, Andrew, you say that you had a call from your nameless ex-colleague, and…”
“I never said he was an ex-colleague,” murmured Patt, who felt he should put up a token defence.
Williams, who thought that even a token defence was too much, started again. “You say that you had a call from your nameless ex-colleague, and he wanted to know why Davies hadn’t been suspended yet, yes?”
“Well, yes.”
“And you told him that Davies hadn’t turned up for work yet, right?”
“Yes…”
Williams let out an exasperated though guttural sound. “Then what’s the problem?”
Patt was about to tell Williams precisely what the problem was when there was a knock at the door.
He looked up and Colclough poked his head through. “Sorry to disturb, gentlemen, but there’s a telephone message for you.” He looked puzzled though, as if he wasn’t sure of the meaning of the message.
“Yes? Yes? What is it, man?” asked Monkton, taking out his frustration on Colclough.
“It just says ‘look out of the window’.” Colclough looked at the message again, and repeated it.
“Look out of the window?” asked Monkton. “What do you mean, ‘look out of the window’?”
“That’s all the message says, Mr Monkton,” said Colclough.
“Peter, Andrew. Would you join me, please?” asked Williams, who had gone to the window and was staring out of it. “Thank you, Joe,” he said in dismissal.
Patt and Monkton walked to the windows, puzzled, and then joined their colleague staring in disbelief at the sight they saw.
Outside the main boardroom window, fifty feet off the ground, hovered Ian Davies.
And he didn’t look happy, Williams realised. No, he didn’t look happy at all.
This week's artist: Dwight Williams Dwight Williams is a man of multiple talents. Co-author of the Daily Planet Guide to Gotham for West End Games, artist and co-creator of Evening Shift among other projects in the works, and courtroom artist for several years for TV news.
