Chapter 13

Andrew often thought about, and was very conscious of, living his life in a bubble. A middle class existence growing up, with his parents scraping the money together to send him to private school. While at school after his recovery from cancer, he embraced his inner nerd and studied furiously all the time. And as a result of that studying getting into Cambridge, perhaps the ultimate bubble. But Andrew had also done a variety of things to try and live life outside the bubble. Going all the way back to the very first summer working when he was still only 12, the shy scrawny runt of a kid helping at the shop and also with Archie’s moving company. His part in the photography business and his own modelling were the most obvious and prominent visible aspect of it right now. But everything to do with the Army was outside the bubble. Sure, the Combined Cadet Force at school was private school kids playing soldiers, but from that first Sappers camp where he got into the fight, the bubble had been poked and prodded constantly. Bassingbourn the previous year had perhaps been the biggest eye-opener of them all. Worthy Down was another sharp needle to Andrew’s privileged existence.

Waterloo to Winchester was barely an hour and going against the flow meant the train was quiet. The three mile cab ride out of Winchester deposited him at Worthy Down Barracks in rural Hampshire. Andrew presented his orders at the guard house and was allowed onto the base and followed the directions he was given. When he got to his destination there was no doubt as to his status. The looks of incredulity first at his uniform and then at his orders were ubiquitous; most people looked at him with a face saying ‘what the fuck are you doing here?’ while some people just came right out and asked it.

OTC cadets were normally part of a group undertaking the training. And they tended to be with training staff, or regulars, who were expecting them and although they may have thought all the cadets were a waste of space, at least they made an effort to hide that opinion. This was the first time Andrew was a cadet on his own, attending training without the safety in numbers of other OTC cadets. Oh, and he was Scottish and 6’5”. The biggest, tallest nail on the base and there were a lot of hammers.

The slagging off lasted about 15 minutes and once everyone had it out of their system he was ignored. Just another waste of oxygen from the OTC. It was humbling and most of it was not about him as the individual, it was rather the universally held view by regular soldiers that the OTC cadets were the biggest bunch of tossers to ever walk the earth. This should have been the real recruitment test, never mind running a mile and a half in nine minutes or whatever the standard was. Spend an hour with any randomly assembled collection of regular soldiers and if you can survive that abuse then there might be hope for you. Andrew knew there was some dramatic license in his idle musings, but it was pretty close to the truth. He was sure that most of the cadets didn’t really know how little they were respected by regular soldiers.

Andrew was pretty sure about one thing though. Nobody suspected him of being a summer student employee of the Ministry of Defence Police. The first week was dull as shit. Possibly duller. He was not a clerk in the Army and had no interest in being a clerk in the Army so going through 40 hours of Army regulations and how they were to be applied to the new circumstances was not the most exciting week of his life. But he paid attention for he was nothing if not a keener.

Computer communication was in its infancy. The internet had not yet been developed from its military predecessor and communication extended as far as physical cabling allowed. Modem speeds were still glacial and so Worthy Down sat isolated in the Hampshire countryside. Changes made to records, pay levels, promotions, everything to do with a soldier’s life in the Army were processed there. But to get that information paper moved in vast quantities. When he realised how much information was sent there every day, from around the world, it did make sense to explore ways to reduce this admin burden. And he was also reminded that this was just the Army system, the Navy and the Air Force also had their own separate systems at two other separate bases.

So Andrew could understand why everyone was looking at ways to streamline any part of the process. But within the first three days it was clear that they were doing it arse backwards. All of the armed forces are scattered all over the world, in the case of the Navy on patrol in the oceans, not even at a fixed base. And the three processing locations were all in southern England. One of the things that he came to realise from his pre-course reading and again during that first week is that there were precious few ‘standard’ soldiers. There were ranks, pay levels within ranks, there was additional pay for all sorts of specialist training, there was something called the ‘x-factor’ to take into account separation, danger, things like that. The matrix of what soldiers could get paid was mind-boggling.

So the Army had a scattered workforce with thousands of permutations of pay, allowances and bonuses. Keeping all that up to date and accurate, and paying the soldiers promptly, involved this mountain of paperwork. What all these clerks were being trained on was cutting down on the paper part of the paperwork but not the work part. Rather than filling in forms manually and sending them off to Worthy Down they were now being trained in filling the forms in on a computer, saving the resulting file to a disk and sending the disk to Worthy Down. There was no such thing as a network and so it was computerising the paperwork but the saving and sending was no different than before. Rather than piles of paper, Worthy Down was instead getting piles of disks. Andrew sat back from thinking about the pointlessness of the process and thought about the point he had discussed with Vestie and Sergeant Sutton; how could someone game this system and steal money?

If the disks were not being checked then there was a chance someone could get away with something, if only for a short while. But all the disks were being checked, if anything the processing there seemed to be slower due to extra checks as everyone got up to speed. At the end of the first week Andrew was no further forward in discovering how computers could aid a payroll fraud, any kind of fraud.

He was glad to be heading back to London. After the first morning of abuse he had been ignored. Most of the attendees radiated a ‘fuck off and don’t think about talking to me’ vibe. So Andrew was once again on his own, stuck in a Barracks in the middle of nowhere. So in the evenings he read a novel for the first time in a very long time. Some blood and thunder thing that he picked up at the train station. Thank goodness he thought of it and having finished it would need another one for the following week. When he got back to Jim and Freya’s on Friday night he was ready for some company. He phoned and left messages for Navya, again, and for Helena, fortunately with her mother rather than her father. After cleaning up he headed off into town, ending up at the Marquee Club. They tended to have more rock bands there, so on nights where he was taking a flyer it was where he ended up. The first time he been at a gig there he realised that he had been past it a couple of years earlier on the trip through Soho with Judy. It wasn’t like he was having a conversation with a bunch of people but it was nice to escape the tedium of Worthy Down.

The following morning it was a long run followed by a long swim, just getting back into a routine. As he walked back to the flat it felt like the summer was passing him by. One of the great things about 2^nd year at Cambridge had been the frequency of sex. Helena and Andrew had fucked two or three times a week since the turn of the year, and during third term even more frequently than that. But since the end of term the tap had been turned off. He wasn’t at the stage of booking a hotel room as he had with Rupashi but he would be lying to say the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. When he got back to the flat Freya was on the phone.

“Here he is. Quick Andrew.”

The rush was that Helena was at Frimley station about to board a train for Waterloo. The day brightened up substantially. An hour later he was being cut off for the second time. Andrew could tell as soon as Helena saw him.

“Hello Andrew.”

There was no hug and he didn’t offer one of his own.

“You can tell already. Shit.”

Helena pulled him out of the stream of passengers and faced him.

“I met someone Andrew. I know that we talked about just doing this on the phone but I wanted to tell you in person. I really didn’t think that this was going to happen but it did. He is the son of a friend of Dad. I met him when I went to collect Dad after too many beers at the Golf Club. He was doing the same for his father.”

Andrew didn’t need to hear the reasons. He and Helena were very good friends but it was pretty clear there was no long term future. When, as was inevitable, this guy dumped her or cheated on her, then Helena would be back at the door to his room looking for some comfort. And that was okay, it was not as if he was in any position to judge her. They were friends who fucked, and they should stop trying to see if it was anything else. He smiled a resigned smile to Helena.

“Last summer you scuttled off to see Navya and Abi. What do you want to do now?”

“Walk and talk, grab a bite to eat for lunch and then head back. I am not going to dump you, shit it is not even dumping yet it feels like it, and then run off. Again. Come on, tell me about the last six weeks.”

Helena made the effort and they chatted away passing the morning. She was again working in the city for colleagues of her father at Lloyds. Simple office work covering for the summer. Nothing very exciting but it got her out of the house and made some money. In turn Andrew talked about annual camp and a somewhat true story about his time at the Ministry of Defence.

“They are implementing a lot of computerisation. It is nothing like the degree I have but I am working with computers all day. A lot of the staff are very leery of them, so I have been busy. It is not very exciting though.”

“You always want to be busy, and this doesn’t seem to be doing it for you.”

“True. If all summer is like this then I think I will pass on this job next year. I think the Department encourages the students to get engineering experience so I will be off at a building site somewhere instead. I am not sure it sounds any better.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t sound it. I am wondering if I should have tried to get some kind of writing job rather than just take the easy job at Dad’s office. This time next year I will have graduated and will need to find a job if I want to get my own place.”

“How was Abi when you went down to see her?”

“She was fine Andrew. She is out of sorts as well, I think she misses Cambridge. Not the work but the friendships. Are you going to go and see her?”

“I don’t know. I left her a message so maybe. We were more at arm’s length last term, not as close as we were earlier in the year.”

Another ex-lover who was moving on. At lunch Andrew told Helena about leaving a couple of messages with Navya’s mother but hadn’t heard anything.

“Navya is having a hard time. I don’t know if she let something slip but her mother is convinced there is a man, and probably not Indian. Her mother is watching her constantly.”

Andrew kept his face unmoved but inwardly was laughing at what Navya’s mother’s reaction would be if she knew about him and Rupashi. Lunch was over quickly and he walked Helena back to Waterloo. Neither of them mentioned meeting again that summer and when they parted he had no expectations of seeing Helena again until October. After leaving the station Andrew crossed the Thames and as one of the small pleasure ferries slipped under the bridge it seemed like a good idea for a way to do some mindless thinking. He ended up heading back to Greenwich, the same trip that he had done with Abi and Navya, as well as Suzanne, the previous summer. The city drifting passed let him think, he was in a world of his own. He was bored and lonely, isolated was a better description, around people but apart from them. Something needed to change, Andrew couldn’t cope with seven more weeks of this. He wasn’t going to bring a one night stand to Jim and Freya’s place but it was what he needed. A night of fucking with someone he was never going to see again. Shake things up.

As with all flights of fancy the reality of a busy pleasure boat let that flutter away in the wind. The rest of the trip was spent in similar introspection. What he also realised was that he never made an effort. There were plenty of women about that he could talk to, locals and tourists alike. Andrew was lazy, although he hid behind the label of shy.

When Jim and Freya left for church the following morning he was so bored that he decided to call the French woman, Marilyn Gauthier, who had politely pestered Morag about him. She had left both work and home numbers so he tried the latter. He only hoped she spoke some English otherwise it was not going to go well. Luckily for him she spoke very good English, accented but understandable.

“I didn’t think you would return my call. Thank you.”

“You were polite, persistent but polite. You stood out from the others. My curiosity won out in the end, why do you want to speak to me?”

“The commercials have had an impact here in France, and elsewhere in Europe. There is the famous fashion model clearly having a fun time with you. The contrast to her usual demeanour was very noticeable. But the one that has made people really talk is the one where Chiara Zellicotti confronts being seen as old within the industry. Have you seen them?”

“I have.”

“What did you think?”

“I am pleased that Hermès found them to be in line with what they were trying to convey.”

“That is a very good non-answer. What did you think, personally?”

“I did my job and managed not to screw anything up. The client, director and other models were all happy.”

“You are not giving a lot away.”

“Marilyn, I don’t know who you are and I don’t know why you have called me. As the lady who answered the phone informed you I am working exclusively with Hermès for the next two years.”

Andrew heard stifled laughter down the phone.

“How humbling. I assumed you knew who I was. I am an agent and I have quit my previous employer and opened my own modelling agency where I hope to improve the professionalism of the business. It is the only female owned agency and I want to do business differently than how it has been done before.”

He waited to hear if there was more.

“Andrew, I have never heard of Shetland Models, no one here has. I have only tried to represent female models so far. But I liked what I saw in the three shoots that are out, as well as some of the magazine adverts. I would like to talk to you about representing you, even if you think you are only going to be working for Hermès.”

What an interesting way of phrasing that.

“Okay, I have your number if I decide to pursue this further.”

“Andrew Bressay, there is a buzz about you at present. You can establish yourself, enhance your career, you need to be taking advantage now.”

Andrew am sure Marilyn was getting frustrated that he wasn’t more excited. Buzz about him? Not really what he was expecting.

“I will be in Paris before the end of the summer, most likely in September. I will arrange to meet you the next time I am in the city.”

Andrew wrapped up the call and since he was running up Freya’s phone bill called Chiara on the off chance she was home.

“Andrew. How are you?”

“Good. Sorry for the sudden call but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Okay.”

“Have you heard of Marilyn Gauthier?”

The was an inelegant snort, quickly stifled.

“Of course. She is one of the most famous agents in France. She has just set up her own agency. Why?”

“I just got off the phone with her. She was being mildly pushy with me about representation. I wanted to see if she had a reputation.”

“You called her. On a Sunday?”

“Yes, she left her home number and asked that I call her back. She was very complimentary of your long commercial.”

The more Chiara went on the more Andrew came to understand that this woman was a big deal. He had no need for someone like her. Her assistant’s assistant could deal with him. Once Chiara had got the worst out of her system Andrew explained he had done nothing yet and may arrange to meet Gauthier in September.

“I know that you are not interested in modelling as a career but this, she, is a big deal.”

Having upset Chiara he promised to call or write soon as he needed to start to think about the September shoots. Andrew survived the long dull weekend and was almost ready to return to Worthy Down. That might have been an exaggeration but he was definitely in a bit of a funk. On the journey down the sense of ennui started to lift. He had packed two notebooks and as he sat in the empty carriage Andrew started thinking about his physics project from the final year at school and everything that he had learned so far at Cambridge. If he was serious about dealing with defensive structures, making buildings more bomb resistant then he started to make notes and think about possible projects. Now this project was still 15 months away but thinking about intellectual challenges like that always calmed him. Andrew made some notes on the materials, following on from the 6^th year project, as well as a lot of jottings on energy. The physics of an explosion, energy absorption, channelling, deflection. How buildings react to explosions, how the structure transmits, absorbs and dissipates the energy rather than crumble. He had no answers it was more a list of topics that he would need to flesh out and start to understand in much greater depth. But by the time he got off the train at Winchester Andrew was already feeling more engaged, his mind was more active. When he returned to London he would start doing some background reading on these subjects. As he sat in the cab on the short journey to the barracks he realised he was probably the saddest, geekiest man on the planet. But he was happy.

The material did not get any more interesting and Andrew still thought the course was a waste of time, not just for him, and it seemed unlikely that a significant fraud was going to come out of payroll processing. On Tuesday lunchtime everything changed. Guilty of not paying attention to the examples before lunch Andrew had in fact been thinking about materials and energy absorption. So when the course broke for lunch he stayed behind and jotted down his thoughts in one of his notebooks. If he didn’t write it down immediately there would be no way he would remember all of it later. As he got up to head over to grab some lunch he overheard a couple of guys talking as they walked past in the corridor.