Short fiction: A Question of Character

Pity the nation...

“It’s a question of character,” said Gordon.

“Character?” said Barry. He was smiling a little and lounging back in his seat. The afternoon sun streamed into the office and caught his Rolex. “Really, Gordon, isn’t that a little old-fashioned?”

“No,” said Gordon. He was pacing up and down between the meeting table and the window.

The CEO sat upright behind his desk, his hands steepled; he was frowning. “Barry, you are very insistent that the Regional Director post go to Giles,” he said. “Since Gordon clearly objects, perhaps we should hear your reasons.”

“Of course.” Barry sat a little straighter and held his hands out in front of him. Why is everything this clown does somehow theatrical, thought Gordon. “I want him because he understands the modern way of doing business. We are a company providing services. Or we purport to. The client’s shareholders will be told that they have implemented X or Y when in fact what they have actually done is contract us to do it for them. The shareholders will not look too closely at what we have actually done. Giles knows this and will not waste resources in implementation.”

“But that is dishonest and you know it,” said Gordon. “It is because he behaves like that that I question his character. If you endorse that behaviour I must question yours.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” said Barry. “You’ve been reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays again, haven’t you.” His smile got a little broader. “Or did you really want to be a barrister?” He stuck his thumbs in his lapels and stuck his chin out. “I submit, m’lud, that the witness is of poor character.”

“That’s enough, Barry,” snapped the CEO. Barry looked at him, surprised. “Will you leave us, please? I would like to discuss some matters with Gordon and they do not all concern you.”

Barry frowned.

“I need Giles’s appointment finalised as soon as possible,” he said.

“I’ll talk to you about it later,” said the CEO.

He watched Barry’s back as the latter left the office, pulling the door closed rather sharply behind him.

Gordon was still pacing up and down.

“Gordon, do stop prowling around me like that,” said the CEO. “I am not a vildebeest.”

Gordon stopped, smiled suddenly and chuckled. He pulled a high-backed leather chair from the conference table and placed it in front of the CEO’s desk. The CEO looked at him. “How long have I known you?” he asked.

“Fifteen years,” said Gordon.

“Indeed. Now tell me what you are not telling me.”

“About Giles?”

“No, about Screaming Lord Sutch. Yes, about Giles.”

“Barry is sleeping with his wife,” said Gordon.

“Oh.”

“Giles put a spy camera in their bedroom and has taped evidence,” Gordon went on. “He threatened to divorce her and name Barry in his suit. Barry’s own wife would have been – well, displeased. They have four children. That’s a lot of alimony for Barry to pay. And she’d likely get the house. But Giles told him a nice promotion would make it go away.”

“For Christ’s sake. Are you sure? How do you know this?”

“Giles’s wife went on a hen night with Mary who works in my office. They got horrendously pissed over curry and she told her everything while she was retching into the toilet bowl in the ladies.”

“Good God,” said the CEO. “What were they doing in the loo together?”

“Women do go and powder their noses together at social events,” said Gordon. “Or so I believe. Anyway, she started vomiting suddenly so Mary held her face above the toilet bowl.”

“Your staff are very professional,” said the CEO.

“Just being helpful. It’s a bit unpleasant if you  plunge into your discarded vindaloo.”

“I suppose so. The spices. They’d sting your eyes horribly.”

“Well, yes. And imagine how it’d mess up your hair.”

“Good Lord, yes,” said the CEO. “Most inconvenient. So that’s why you won’t have Giles as Regional Manager.”

“A question of character,” said Gordon.

“Yes.”

“But Barry wasn’t wrong, was he?” said Gordon. “About us, I mean. About what we do.”

“No.”

“For the Ministry for instance. And Metrobank of Surrey. The market forecasts. We just wrote a report that told them what their own staff had told us.”

“Yes.”

“And the HR guidelines Barry drew up for Spatterfield Capital. He got them from an Australian company. He just changed the wording a bit. He was right; the client knew and didn’t care. They promised their shareholders they’d update their HR guidelines after those women staff sued them, and they could tell the AGM they’d spent £500,000 on a consultant to do it so they wouldn’t get sued again. Yes they could have done it themselves in half an hour. But that wasn’t the point, was it?”

“No.”

They were silent for a few minutes. Then the CEO said: “Swan Hunter. On the Tyne.”

“What about them?”

“Dad worked there.”

“You must have told me that at some time.”

“No, I’m not sure I ever have.”

“Oh,” said Gordon. He thought for a minute.

“Your bicycle came from Nottingham,” he said. “Your knives and forks from Sheffield. Your shoes from Northampton. Your car from Birmingham. Or Coventry.”

“Yes,” said the CEO.

Gordon got up.

“I shan’t approve the appointment,” said the CEO.

“No.” Gordon went to the door.

“A question of character,” said the CEO.

“Yes,” said Gordon. As he opened the door, he turned back. “Pity the Nation,” he said.

“What?”

“Kahlil Gibran.

"Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave,
eats a bread it does not harvest,
and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.”

 He nodded, and left, pulling the door to softly. The CEO stood and went to the window. It was October and the hour had just changed; it was getting dark outside. This will be a long winter, he thought. 

More short fiction from Mike here
Mike is now also on Substack here 

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

Follow Mike on Bluesky, Twitter and Facebook.

Short fiction: The End

 A gun on a brownstone roof

“It’s the end,” he said.

He decided to do it up on the roof; they’d always loved it up there. He’d bring a good bottle back from the wine store in 116th St; sometimes a Zinfandel – she had loved that – or on warm spring evenings, a buttery Californian Chardonnay; then they’d sit in the heavy teak chairs and watch the swallows flit in and out of the eaves of the other brownstones as the sky deepened to its richest blue. Sometimes they’d stay there really quite late. “I’ve got a pizza in the freezer,” she’d say, “there’s no hurry.” So they’d sit through sunset and into the blue hour, and the traffic from Seventh and Eighth Avenues was like a far-away tide that lapped round an island that was theirs alone.

“I’ll end it up there,” he said. “At six or seven on a spring evening. The time when we were happiest.”

He sat and wrote a note to his niece – they’d had no children – and slipped it into his breast pocket. He took his standard-issue Beretta from his desk drawer, wondering if it would still fire. “I shoulda turned it in more than 50 years ago,” he said. “I guess there’s a firearms officer somewhere still looking for it. Well, it’ll do me one last service. And I shan’t hurt anyone firing it up there, and there won’t be any mess.”

He went into the kitchen, where a bottle of Zinfandel was waiting on the sideboard. “You’re coming with me,” he muttered, and grasped it by the neck. He nearly forgot the corkscrew, but slipped a waiter’s friend into his breast pocket along with the note, then picked up one of their best crystal glasses. Then he took a last look around the living room, closed the front door behind him and climbed the stairs to the roof of the brownstone. It was May, and half-past six, and the sky was a brilliant blue. He sat down in one of the teak chairs, the Beretta in his trouser pocket, and poured a glass of Zinfandel. “To you, hon,” he said. “I shan’t be long.” He lifted the glass in the direction of the Stars and Stripes that flew from the Blockhouse in Central Park, just visible through the houses of the next two blocks. And he savoured the timbre of the wine and watched the swallows as they darted over the street.

After a while he felt it was time.

He was about to reach into his pocket for the Beretta when he became aware of a noise from the roof of the adjoining house. Like all the brownstones in the row, this was separated from its neighbours by only a low parapet, over which a child might step without difficulty; but no-one ever did so. The roof spaces were a jumble of deck furniture, planters, aircon compressors and in one case a row of beehives, which he had always viewed with suspicion. Something appeared to be moving on the roof next door. He realised it was the trapdoor that led from the house below; not all the houses had a companionway – some had a hatch that was reached by ladder and often very heavy. It clearly was in this case, as whoever was below was exerting considerable force to raise it.

“Goddamit,” he muttered. “How is a man to kill himself without privacy?” He pushed the Beretta down into his pocket and watched as the trapdoor opened, slowly at first, then quickly as it fell back onto its hinges; there was a crash, and then the head and shoulders of a being emerged slowly and with curiosity, rather as an early vertebrate might have emerged from the sea into the Devonian period of the Paleozoic era some 375 million years earlier.

The vertebrate was a female juvenile of perhaps 18 or 19 years, clad in jeans and a tee-shirt with a gaudy design that appeared to celebrate Beethoven. Her fingernails and toenails were painted with a bright green varnish; her hair was mostly blonde but streaked with green and purple and she had a diamante nose jewel, and a dull steel stud through her cheek. In her hand she had a large portable Bluetooth speaker that she laid tenderly on the roof before easing her body through the aperture, pulling herself backwards and sliding on her rump onto the roof coating, her legs following a little awkwardly. Her feet were bare.

“Well, hi,” she said.

“Hello,” he replied. He checked the Beretta’s safety catch was on and found to his relief it was.

“We moved in next door,” she added.

“Oh.”

“I came up to listen to some music,” she went on. “I’m studying music. At Juillard.”

“Congratulations.”

“Do you live here? Do you have a family?” she asked.

“Yes. No,” he said, trying not to be abrupt. Jeez, he thought, can’t a man blow his brains out in peace.

“Are you single then?”

“No. My wife died last week.”

“I’m really sorry,” she said. She frowned. “Were you married long?”

“Yes. We were high-school sweethearts. Then I had to go to Vietnam.” He paused, then went on, not quite sure why. “When I came back I was kinda messed up. But she married me anyway.”

“Oh.” She looked down, then up again. ”I guess I shouldn’t ask questions like that, should I? Mom always says it’s inappropriate. She says it’s because I’m neurodivergent.”

Whatever that means, he thought. “Are you neurodivergent?” he asked.

“No, but I’m Canadian,” she said.

“Oh, that’s all right then.”

She didn’t say anything to this, so he said:

“Would you like to play your music?”

“Would you mind? It’s Schubert.”

“Schubert is good,” he said. He was surprised his voice was so gentle.

She held down the switch on the Bluetooth speaker then fiddled with her phone. A rich, tender sound flowed across the rooftops and seemed to billow down into the street below. He blinked.

“My goodness,” he said.

“It’s special, isn’t it. It’s the Credo from the Mass No 2 in G Major.” She smiled suddenly. “I don’t play this stuff in the apartment, you see. The others don’t get it. But you do, don’t you?”

I never have, he thought. Why do I now.

“I took my wife to the Lincoln Center,” he said. “Last fall. She’d just been diagnosed. She wanted to hear the Mozart Requiem. Towards the end she cried.” He looked up at the young woman. “She did things like that sometimes. Is that strange?”

“No.” She sat crosslegged and looked straight at him and he saw her eyes were a deep blue-grey. “No, I don’t think so. It’s the same with art sometimes. You see, this is what we’re on the planet for, isn’t it? It’s sort of the price we’re paid to make up for the pain of being human.”

“I never thought of it like that.”

“Hannah!” called someone from downstairs. “The pizza showed.”

“OK,” she called back.

“Was yours the deep-pan Margherita?”

“Yeah and I wanted fries.”

“You got it. Serving up.”

She stood up. “I guess I better go.”

“I’m sorry. I love this music,” he said. He did.

“You want I leave the speaker here? I can stream from my phone from downstairs. I’ll put the Mass on from the beginning,” she said.

He was about to say no, then nodded. “I’d like that very much,” he said.

She smiled. “I’ll pick up the speaker later. You take care, huh?”

“You too,” he said.

She wound her long legs back into the hatch and disappeared into the apartment. He sat back and listened to the Mass in G Major. The world slowed down; he didn’t move; the sun set and the blue hour arrived, then the moon rose above the chimneys.

Some time after that, he poured another glass of Zinfandel. Then he took the Beretta out, took the bullets out of the magazine and put it back in his pocket.

More short fiction from Mike here
Mike is now also on Substack here 

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

Follow Mike on Bluesky, Twitter and Facebook.