YOUNG PROFESSIONALS — an extract

Chapter 1

“Kill him in his sleep,” says Kent Richmond of Richmond Technological Industries, self-made man, entrepreneur, and occupant of his own private floor at the top of a Downtown Los Angeles Skyscraper.

“Kill him in his sleep,” says Kent Richmond, who leaves you waiting in the reception room, among the chandeliers and Greek statues, the framed pictures of yachts and racehorses, and the bathroom that lets you shoot water jets up your anus while staring at what looks like a Rothko.

“Kill him in his sleep,” says Kent Richmond after keeping you in his gaudy lobby for a solid hour, after ordering you into a chair half the size of his, after monologuing for a solid hour about his ‘rags-to-riches’ life story and why he wakes up at 6am every morning and the virtues of old-fashioned American grit.

“Kill him in his sleep,” says Kent Richmond, and stares down on the employees funnelling into the building that bears his name: executives and middle-managers and kids straight out of university, straining their necks upwards to catch a glimpse of his private floor with the cavernous offices and the gold-plated reception room and the piss-flecked Rothko.

I pull up at a traffic light. The red circle glares from its black box, bright and oversaturated. It jerks me back to the present. Away from Kent Richmond. That endlessly looping conversation. It’s half-surprising to find myself in a car, even though I know I just stopped at the traffic light. I blink hard, trying to reboot my mind.

The car’s interior feels almost as though I’m seeing it for the first time. The sharp Tesla 'T' adorns the coffee and black surfaces: the wood-effect dashboard, the flat air-vents, the touchscreen interface. A personal bubble of clean aestheticism. Calming. Peaceful. Congruent. Except that on the passenger seat there sits a roll of gaffa tape, bright blue, otherworldly and garish on the soft synthetic leather. I reach over and knock it to the floor. Out of sight.

It doesn’t take a medical professional to figure out my blood pressure is up. There’s a pounding in my ear like the blood has coagulated into a fist. My chest is tight too, and the ulcer on my tongue feels raw and angry. A nosebleed is coming. My doctor would call this a ‘hypertensive crisis’. But I’m not about to fall down dead. Probably. Not if I can just calm down.

The wood-effect dashboard seems to whisper to me.

Just calm down

I close my eyes and inhale the lavender and patchouli essential oils mix air freshener.

A car honks. A Jeep large enough to have a basement looms behind me. It has a curved metal grill that looks designed to deflect children and household pets. It honks again, louder. The light has turned green. My hand instinctively reaches for a gear-stick, not hard-wired for an automatic. I return it to the wheel. Step on the brake pedal. Twist the selector to drive. Pull out.

“Relax,” I say to myself softly, my hand again sliding over nothing as it looks for second gear. The Tesla buzzes quietly as it passes under the traffic light.

My doctor tells me I have a problem with stress. I think he says this to everyone. But he might still be right. He looks stressed himself—frayed fingernails, twitching eye, etc.—so he probably knows what he’s talking about. I find his sweaty palms reassuring. With the way the world’s falling apart, you can’t really trust anyone unless they’ve at least been prescribed antidepressants.

I slow to allow the Jeep to pass. It has a custom paint job where flames spit from the wheel arches, as if the thick rubber tyres have been set alight. The driver extends his arm in my direction and raises his middle finger.

“Relax,” I say to the sleek coffee and black interiors. They silently agree with the sentiment.

Relax

I angle down the rear-view mirror. The view is somehow comforting. The freshly shaven man with sun-darkened skin. Not that I’d expected to see anybody else. But it’s another shake back to life. This is me. Emmanuel. Same face as yesterday. Not bad looking either. You could see that guy as an extra on Grey’s Anatomy. Maybe a passing resemblance to Michael B Jordan. If he grew up with an NHS dentist.

I release my hold on the steering wheel. Flex my fingers. Watch the indentations on the synthetic leather smooth themselves out. Watch the colour drain back into my knuckles. On the back of my right hand, a large tattoo runs down to my wrist, dancing around a metacarpal. It instructs me in neat lettering.

Find the sunny side

Yes. Find the sunny side. That’s what my doctor would say. Shape your own reality. Of course you feel hopeless, overwhelmed, conflicted. There's a whole universe full of problems waiting outside your front door. Let them all in and they’ll knock you clean off your feet. Better to keep that door shut. You can’t change the world—you’ll drive yourself crazy trying—but you might manage to make it through the day. So forget about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Start at home. What does Emmanuel need right now?

Find the sunny side

Ahead of me the road runs long and straight, fragmented and unbroken white lines guiding me forwards, keeping me secure. A yellow diamond limits the traffic to 35 miles per hour, but the letters of the Jeep’s Arizona number plate are already too small to make out.

Find the sunny side

Another car pulls up beside me. It’s filled with women in their early twenties wearing matching yellow t-shirts that say ‘Vancouver Cruisers Girls’ Trip’ above a picture of a moose wearing hot-pink lipstick. The woman in the passenger seat has stuck her slightly sunburnt head out the window with her tongue protruding like a dog. Her friends are laughing, pulling her back in.

Find the sunny side

I’m in California. I’m driving North out of LA, taking the Pacific Coast Highway, and it’s a summer day. The sun has punched an orange hole in a perfect blue sky and it’s all exactly what California looks like when you’re watching a TV show. Except that when you’re actually here you get to feel the warmth tickle the back of your forearms, breathe in the Pacific salt air, stare out at the casually frothing sea, or the flat-roofed multiple-balconied apartments, or the wild shrubs and grasses that cling to the hills above a road lined with glimmering caravans.  

A box flashes on the dashboard’s touch-screen display. ‘Low battery’. I slow to let the Vancouver Cruisers finish overtaking and hit the ‘Talk’ button on the side of the steering wheel.

“Could you give me a list of the nearest compatible charge points, please?”

My words appear one by one on the  screen, which blinks to show it’s understood. Data flies into cyberspace and bounces off a satellite as it processes the request.

“I have made you a list of the nearest charge points for electric vehicles,” says a robotic voice.

Plenty of choice. All the way up the highway. That’s California. If there’s a chance for me anywhere, it’s got to be here. The charging stations for electric vehicles. The Fair Trade coffee chains and locally sourced farmers’ markets. Even the ‘adult films’ are ethically produced and feature a feminist perspective. If change starts at home, it damn sure matters where you live. So why not try California? A hopeful vision of the future—fenced off into the South-West corner of the USA.

The sunny side. It’s getting closer.

I hit the ‘Talk’ button again.

“Thanks. Do any of those charge points have anywhere good to eat nearby?”

The car considers the request. It really is cosy in here with the gaffa tape out of view. The universe within this metal frame feels perfectly aligned. My personal bubble of mindful consumerism, perfectly designed for safety, efficiency, and ecological viability.

“I’ve made you a list of charge points for electric vehicles with highly recommended restaurants within a half mile radius.”

The Baja Coast Dining Experience provides ‘a variety of meals lovingly prepared with the spirit and passion of Northern Mexico fused with delicacies from all of humanity’s cultures’. It has 4.7 stars and lies 10 miles ahead, straight down the highway.

Beautiful.

I drum my fingers on the wheel. Sunshine pours in through the windshield. I throw on my aviators. Palm trees line the way ahead. Just like on TV.

Beautiful.

Fifteen minutes later I pull off the freeway. The restaurant’s cute. Soft salsa music drifts out to the car park and invites me towards an arched entranceway made from knotted wooden columns. There are wildflowers arranged into hearts and swordfish pinned to the exposed brick walls, and outside, on a decked balcony area, they have these cabanas with thatched roofs and cream-white sofas looking out over the Pacific. I’ve caught the spot between lunch and dinner, so the place is all but deserted.

"Hi, my name’s Carlos. I’ll be your server today.”

The waiter is wearing black trousers and a white shirt, which is unbuttoned to the chest and rolled to the elbow. He has a little mole by his nose that gives him the look of Blake Lively. If she were 22. And a man. And Latin.

Carlos leads me past the unoccupied white linen tables, each adorned with a vase holding a clutch of purple or blue blossoms and napkins folded into swans. We step out to the decking and he shows me to a cabana. I sit on the cream-white sofa and stretch out, the ambient temperature perfect in the shade.

“Any dietary requirements?” says Carlos.

“Do you have a vegan menu?” I say.

“Absolutely.” Carlos grins. He has excellent teeth. “I’ll be right back.”

The sea. The sand. The sun. Who can stay wound-up in California? Not me, that's for sure. Don't even try it. I’m great. Positively Zen. The Buddha under the Bodhi tree.

Carlos returns and hands me a thick, bound menu with further fresh flowers affixed to the cover. These are white and red and are neatly intertwined so that they spell out the letters B and C, above the restaurant’s name, ‘Baja Coast’.

I gently run my finger across the flowers. Carlos steps back and slips both hands into his back pockets. His attention flicks away from me. I watch his pretty face absorbed, his neat eyebrows furrowing to create a single wrinkle.

“Did you see this story?” he says.

A TV screen in the corner of the cabana silently plays a news channel, scrolling text across the bottom, well-dressed news anchors staring straight ahead.

“Today?” I say. “No, don’t think so.”

“Gregg Foster got killed,” says Carlos.

The face of a middle-aged white man with grey whiskers appears on the widescreen television. He’s surrounded by other middle-aged white men with grey whiskers. The man’s outfit morphs from black-tie to smart-casual to racing overalls, as a montage scene plays. The crowd around him remains middle-aged white men with grey whiskers.

“Should I know who that is?” I say.

“He’s the richest man in Los Angeles,” says Carlos. “He was, anyway.”

“What did he do?”

“God knows. A bunch of stuff. Retail mainly, I think. He got hit by a mail truck while driving his Porsche. Freak accident. At the racetrack not too far from here.”

On cue, the screen switches to a badly mangled race car, the roof caved in and the windows smashed, its go-faster stripe twisted into a lightning bolt. A bright red fire engine is winching the wreck off the tarmac. A mail van stands nearby, barely damaged, its sturdy frame straddling the racecourse’s finish line.

“Why would a mail van ever go on the racetrack?” I say.

“No idea. But it’s crazy, right? That someone that powerful can be killed by an ordinary mail-man.”

“Mail-person,” I say.

“I’m sorry?”

“Person, not man. Letter carrier is also OK. Or postal employee.”

“Oh right, I get you. Sorry. It was a man in the truck though. At least they think so. He disappeared right after. Nobody got a proper look at him.”

I check my menu. The richest person in Los Angeles has died; they probably won’t struggle to get a new one. This restaurant has a great range of salads. Quinoa and avocado. Apricot and kale. That postal employee would probably get fired. Poor guy, no wonder he ran. Grilled corn with tahini and crispy tortillas.

“Could I get the tofu and watermelon salad,” I say, “with a fresh guava juice, please?”

“Great choice,” says Carlos. “My uncle’s the cook. You’re going to love the way he does the tofu.”

“And would it be OK to turn off the TV? The News makes me anxious and I’m trying to relax.”

“Sure thing. You on vacation?”

It’s 30 degrees centigrade, and everybody is speaking in an accent different to my own, and I could walk for ten miles in any direction knocking on every door and not encounter a single person I know.

“Yes, I’m on holiday,” I say.

“Thought so,” says Carlos. “Welcome to the Golden State.”

He hits the power button and the rich dead man’s picture disappears. He takes my menu, removes the wine glasses, walks back past the empty tables adorned with swan-napkins, and disappears into the kitchen.

I watch the waves. Watch them crash into the land and fizzle away. What is it with waves? How are they so hypnotic? Simple and monotonous, and yet detailed, totally unique. No two waves die in the exact same way. A bit like humans. A lot like humans.

“Kill him in his sleep,” says Kent Richmond, which judging by his self-satisfied smirk is meant to impress me as some kind of great compassionate gesture, magnanimous and munificent, a real classy move.

“Kill him in his sleep,” says Kent Richmond, but he doesn’t actually care about the target, whether going in their sleep will be more comfortable, because all Kent Richmond cares about is proving he’s powerful, that he can demand things other people can’t, and that you’ll do what he says because that’s your job, and that’s how the system works, whether you like it or not.

 “Don’t start,” I mutter. “Do not start this again.”

But how do you stop yourself? All I need is the answer to that simple question. How do you switch off your brain? The answer exists. No doubt about that. You pass a thousand people a day who’ve figured it out. The activist flying long-haul to a conference on environmental sustainability. The union rep turning up to his boss’s picnic with potato salad. The college kid popping out her Apple AirPods to sign a petition against slavery. The ones who manage all this with a simple, steady smile. How? Why aren’t they relocating their life half-way across the globe? Speaking to a doctor twice a week? Taking beta blockers to try and bring their systolic blood pressure back below 140?

I scan the back of my hand, the clusters of fine hairs and the pin-prick moles. There it is, in plain Helvetica.

Find the sunny side

Wasn’t it supposed to be easier now? That’s why I was here. For the beautiful weather and the beautiful people and the beautiful atmosphere that gets breathed into your dull English lungs and regenerates you from the inside. Isn’t that how it works? Like osmosis or an enema or something. Inhale perfection and let it swim through your soul. Maybe I need to take bigger breaths.

I look down and realise a salad has been set on my placemat. I rub the sweat from my forehead and pick up the knife and fork.

Carlos is right about the tofu. It’s been fried perfectly: crisp, browned, flavourful but delicate. The chef knows what he’s doing. I carve another cube in half, set it onto my fork with a slice of watermelon and a basil leaf. I place it on my tongue, away from the ulcer. Life isn’t so bad.

I pay the bill and leave Carlos a thirty percent tip. Back in the car-park, I pause at the Tesla. The target address is perhaps another hour’s drive, and it’s only late afternoon. A stony path runs down the side of the restaurant’s car park towards the beach.

The geography here is different from LA. These aren’t the twenty metre deep blond sands of Venice Beach. There’s grit and stones mixed in. The wind whips harder. The sea falls less uniformly on the shore. But it’s just as foreign for me.

I take off my socks and shoes, placing the socks inside the shoes. The brownish-grey sand splays beneath my untanned toes. I draw closer to the water’s edge, feel the ground beneath me start to wet, to cave beneath my heels.

Saltwater permeates the air. Droplets splash against my torso, my face, my scalp. I close my eyes. There are moments in life where you don’t need to pretend. Moments when you are genuinely happy to be alive. Moments when there is no other spot on this whole planet that would provide a better home for your body. Or even if there is, you wouldn’t choose to be there, because you’re so caught up with the right now, that the idea would never occur. You can’t imagine being anywhere but right here, with your shoes and socks off, arms raised like a messiah to the wind.

I breathe in.

“Hey. I’m real sorry, but you can’t go there.”

Carlos stands at the top of the stony path. He’s waving me back.

“That’s a private beach,” he shouts.

I look around. It looks like a regular beach. Sand, water, rocks, a light ocean spray, probably some fish.

“Who owns it?” I call back.

“Some rich guy, I guess,” says Carlos. He flashes his perfect American teeth. “Just wanted to warn you.”

Next to Carlos stands a waist-high sign that reads, ‘Trespassers will be fined’. I scan the shoreline. Nobody’s present for a half-mile in either direction.

“There’s a security guard,” says Carlos, as the wind dies down. “He normally heads this way about now.”

“What harm am I doing by walking on an empty beach?”

“Beats me. Security guard’s a nice guy though. Not his fault, I guess. He’s just doing his job.”

“Aren’t we all?” I mumble.

I check the boot before driving off. It’s cluttered up with work stuff. A couple dozen tie-grips. An eighteen-inch cheese wire. A jerry can of gasoline and a few rags. The knuckledusters are starting to rust around the edges, despite the seller’s assurances that they were 100% brass.

The guns lay on a shelf towards the back of the black interior. Two semi-automatic long-range hunting rifles. A bolt-action slug shotgun I got as a Father’s Day Deal at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Several handguns, mostly pistols, a couple of revolvers.

I pull out the Ruger SR22. It’s a weak gun. Low velocity shells that bounce off bone instead of penetrating. Can take a whole clip to be certain of a fatality. But its recoil is low, which makes it a quiet operator. You wouldn’t hear the shots from a neighbouring building.

Next to the SR22 lies a brown A4 envelope. I tease out the document inside.

The first page comprises a picture of a man with a shaved head and angled eyebrows that make it seem as though his forehead is directing you towards his nose. Kind of like that bloke from that Narnia film and The Maze Runner. An unusual face. I memorise the picture.

The next page features a long list of information laid out neatly in a table:

Name: Erik Fischer

DOB: 14/04/94

Nationality: American (state of Louisiana)

Ethnicity: Caucasian

Eye colour: Green

Height: 6’1”

Weight: Approx. 190 lbs

Tattoos: 1—left shoulder blade reads ‘Monique RIP’

Other distinguishing marks: notably hairy upper body

And so on.

I flip to the next page.

Date of job: Sunday June 5

Time of job: Night (target should be asleep)

Address of target: 2590 Sapphire Court, Bakersfield, California

Floorplan of address: see Appendix A

And so on.

There’s everything here short of the guy’s star sign. That’s the trust they place in me. No autonomy. No faith in my professionalism. As if they’re so competent. They’re supposed to be a technology company and they’re giving me instructions on a printed hand out.

I stuff the papers back in the envelope and throw it into the boot. It skims off a selfie-stick and lands on top of my jacket, a black bomber made from recycled cotton fibres.

“Bakersfield,” I say under my breath.

Who’s ever heard of Bakersfield? They don’t even have a Real Housewives franchise.