©2003 Julian Dobbins. - All Rights Reserved. Strictly No Copying

 

 

Harry Cornflower sat at a desk tapping a pen.  It was a large desk, topped with green leather, ringed with studs, set on heavy legs of dark, polished oak.  It was the sort of desk that meant you’d made it.  That where you sat mattered, and what you did while you sat there mattered too.  It said that the people who came to see you, to sit and look at you across it’s vast greenness, thought highly of the things you said, and were prepared to give you all the time you might care to take over saying those things.

 At least, that’s what it said to Harry, as he sat and stared at Cornelius Welsh’s colourless lips rising and falling on the tide of self-importance that flowed between them.

 Harry nodded.  Uh huh.  Really.  Yes.  Of course.  He nodded again, finger on the chin, like the fill-in piece on a TV interview, when the camera switches to the interviewer, just in case the viewer’s getting bored.

 Harry was bored.  And not just of Welsh’s relentless diatribe.  He didn’t want this job.  In fact, he not only didn't want this job, he didn’t want this job to have to be had.  By anyone.  It wasn’t a nice job.  It wasn’t the sort of job you’d write to your Mum and say, hey, guess what?  I’ve got a job doing… well, whatever.  It wasn’t that sort of job.

 “I never wanted to be wealthy, you know.”

 “Really?” said Harry, with a Roger Moore lift of the left eyebrow for the sake of sincerity.

Harry, on the other hand, did want to be wealthy.  Not frighteningly wealthy, so that people saw his money before they saw him.  Just wealthy enough so that he didn’t have to sit and listen to people describing jobs that needed doing, in the sure-fire knowledge that at the end of it (if such a thing should ever happen in the case of Cornelius Welsh), he’d say, yes, that’s absolutely fine, I’ve taken down all the details, and will get on to it right away…. 

Not that Harry actually spoke like that – he usually just said, yeah, not a problem, and left it at that.

But somewhere in the Private Detective’s Book of Customer Service it says thou shalt listen to the client until the last syllables of their last impassioned cry for help have faded to silence…, and the lips close, and the eyes lift to see if you’ll do it, if you’ll take the assignment, for them and from them, and leave behind, as you take your hat and shake their hand, a little more hope than they ever thought possible.

Or something like that.

Of course, it was all rubbish.  Harry wasn’t noble.  He wasn’t a slayer of dragons and a climber of ivory towers.  He didn’t aspire to any moral high-ground.  He’d just taken a wrong turning one day, a while back when it seemed the choices were still his to make, and years on, touching forty, fattening nicely into middle age, he didn’t seem to have an alternative way to look at things.  The paths he’d not taken, for fear of failure, or some misguided sense of loyalty to someone or something, they’d all grown thick with weeds and thorns, and snaked off into a wilderness he was destined never to explore…

Harry wasn’t bored.  He was lost.