Chapter 3A

It was about a week after Carla's return to California. I was beginning to feel a bit like the coal miner who, on being elected as an MP, turned up at the pit for his next shift because no-one had told him any different. In my case, I was supposed to be developing some sort of human centred approach to global corporate consultancy but actually I was spending a lot of time hanging around at home, cooking stuff, playing with computers, sometimes wishing I had a cat. Or some other excuse for being distracted and unable to concentrate.

Basically, I was in limbo. Carla had blown in, blown out (pun, sadly, intended) and subsequently I'd had a couple or three e-mails from her: Home safe, thanks for your hospitality, things moving on, will be in contact. Nothing remotely precise, though, and no hint as to where future untold riches were coming from. Or when.

In theory, therefore, I was COO of a significantly capitalised consultancy and software development agency. In fact, the company had no saleable product and no plan and I was sitting in a tiny rented flat in North London with not a lot to do. Looking back, I know this to have been a classic case of the need to be careful about what one wishes for. It may have been a frustrating period, but things were about to change extremely rapidly. And not immediately for the better.

Inevitably, too, things moved on at precisely the wrong moment. I had actually just agreed to spend a few weeks working through a reconfiguration programme with CareSpan, a major UK charity - which is what I did in real life - when Carla got back in touch With Instructions. OK, I'd got to know C quite a bit better than when she first pissed me off with a peremptory e-mail - for a start, I now knew her to be a brilliant and beautiful woman - but even so I was taken aback by the tone of this message. OK, too, it was written at about 3am, California time, so maybe she'd been having a bad day.

Nonetheless, I was somewhat less than happy at simply being starkly told that funding was in place, corporate structures agreed (by and with whom, I wondered?) and that I should therefore get on with recruiting people and porting code from Linux to Windows. 'You what?', I thought. How do I do that, exactly? Where would I put anyone I did recruit, and why would they want to work for someone who had no way of paying them in the first place? And shouldn't we be talking to some customers about what the details of what they wanted the code to do before we started actually rewriting it?

I started to write a stroppy e-mail back but some vestige of good sense stopped me. Actually, I paused for a calming cup of coffee and this was just enough time for me to remember some of the good times I'd had with Carla when she was briefly in London - and to remind myself that I'd never quite believed her when she described me as indispensable for the current project. Not wishing to shoot the auriferous goose, then, I went for a more emollient line. Actually, I went for a slightly pathetic wheedling tone, which I suspect was completely the wrong approach, but, hell, I never claimed to be competent at this sort of stuff.

What I got back, an hour or two later, was an e-mail from someone called Zhu Lui, signing him / herself as "Executive Specialist", whatever that might be, and bullet pointing in a brusque but presumably business-like fashion some stuff I was presumable supposed to have known. Or maybe just intuitively guessed. Specifically, that funds were held by PCW - or our "corporate partners" as they now appeared to be - and that said organisation would also be handling the legal bits around establishing the new business as a legal entity in the UK and EU. Finally, office space would be made available for me to use in the interim in their offices, the e-mail also giving me a contact in one Deborah Jensen who would apparently act as my liaison with "our partners". Even if partners seemed a slightly euphemistic description of a group who appeared to be in control of pretty much everything.

I decided that it would be a good idea to think about this a bit before replying and in any case had agreed to a preliminary chat with the good folks at CareSpan which I was in danger of being late for. So I set off in the tube, again, and once again my thoughts were more of ways to fake suicide and run away rather than any vaguely constructive ideas on how to make it all work. Actually, by the time I emerged onto the street, I'd got to the stage of thinking that I should just save all the buggering about and top myself for real. I thought I knew just enough about the corporate world to know that I didn't fit and frankly didn't even want to try to do so.

I was, thus, not the happiest looking visitor when I got to CareSpan and got plonked into a reception area sofa. I had a few minutes to wait for my contact, a woman called May who I'd met briefly before but couldn't claim to know. I spent it staring into space and, well, wallowing in self pity which did not do much to improve things. In fact, I'd got into such an effective wallow that it took me some moments to notice that someone was standing in front of me, repeating my name in an amused tone of voice.

Looking up, I saw a pair of tan nylon covered legs, a knee length beige skirt, a grey knitted jumper and, finally, an intelligent, smiling face framed in a mass of curly grey hair. I got quickly to my feet, shook my head clear of preoccupations and shook her hand.

"I'm May Harris", she said, "and welcome to CareSpan. Or welcome back to the planet, perhaps I should say." I laughed, turned down the ritual offer of coffee and followed her through to the broom cupboard that she used as an office. I'm fairly sure that there was a PC on her desk, but it was hard to tell amidst the piles of paperwork. She shifted enough of this to find a couple of chairs, though, and we began to talk through the work she felt they needed done. Actually, it was fairly standard stuff except for the fact that she'd thought it through for herself a lot more astutely than most of my clients had on first meeting. As a result, within half an hour or so we had the beginnings of a plan, and had agreed that my involvement would not be as extensive as first suggested, though possibly of longer duration. She apologised for that and I had to explain a little of the situation with Carla, and in particular that it looked like it would have been difficult for me to actually commit full time to her organisation - as I liked to do in at least the early stages of a project - in the near future anyway.

Despite the main business of the day being done so quickly, I kept up the conversation for a while in the knowledge that she'd cleared three hours from her diary - and I know how busy charity Chief Executives always are - and that, anyway, I'd hardly made a brilliant first impression. After a while, though, we really had done all we could do so I arranged some dates to meet with some other key people in the organisation for initial chats, agreed a deadline for getting a more detailed plan to her and accepted a huge wodge of paperwork which she claimed would give me loads of background information on their work and people. I stood up to say my goodbyes and offered my hand for a parting handshake. To my surprise she also stood, picked up a jacket from behind her chair and her bag from the chaos on her desk and said that she'd come out with me.

"Enough for the day," she said, "I don't normally work Tuesdays, so I'm only here for this meeting and if I stay a moment longer people will imagine that they need me for stuff. So best if I sneak out with you. Then everyone will presume that we've gone to the pub to conspire and get really worried about you and your role..."

She smiled as she said this, making clear that it was a joke, that inducing paranoia was not one of her management strategies, and I apologised for ruining her day off. Not at all, she said, it had been interesting - and she was now curious to know more about this strange world of international business that I seemed to be getting into. So I offered to make the pub a reality, satisfy that curiosity over a drink. I really did need to talk to someone objective about it, I realised, and May seemed like a sensible person to bounce stuff off.

So we went to the pub, a tiny affair just round the corner from the CareSpan offices and we talked. Turned out that her ex ("very ex", as she put it)-husband had been a management accountant with one of the firms who merged to form PCW as is. She didn't have a very high opinion of their world, or more precisely their view of the world the rest of us lived in. We laughed a lot about that, swapping bad "suit" jokes and generally agreeing that she was far from the objective outsider that I thought I'd been looking for. Good company, though, so it was well after eight when we staggered back outside, both, I think having had a good time. I said as much and she suggested that we should do it again some time, just before leaving in something of a hurry to catch a half hourly train home. Ah, well, I thought, she has my number and I know where she works, so...

I only remembered that I'd switched my mobile off for our meeting as I was getting off the tube on my way home. Not expecting to have missed much, I promptly switched the thing back on again and discovered that I had two new voice mails and six texts ... the latter all from Carla, all variations on the theme of 'have read your e-mail, call me'. Once I'd got back onto the street I found the voice mails were from her, too, sounding tired and with fairly hectic bar sounds in the background; saying pretty much the same thing. I checked my watch, tried to work out the time in the States, decided to phone her anyway. Got her voice mail, of course, and left a similar sort of message of my own.