The second issue went more smoothly than the first. People were beginning to find their stride, and a certain rhythm was developing within the office. Janice was proving to be a real asset: she had everything within the editorial department working so smoothly - press releases sorted, diaries co-ordinated, messages taken and passed on - that Bernice soon left the whole of this area in her hands. The only worrying thing was that she seemed so tired, with dark bags under her eyes. When Bernice tackled her on these she simply said that with all the excitement in the office she was having trouble sleeping. But once or twice Bernice could have sworn that underneath some particularly heavy make-up there were bruises as well as rings. She found herself pondering the manager's eternal quandary of when a member of staff's personal problems became yours.
Chris was starting to produce more copy, but she noted that Kate's huffing and puffing seemed to increase noticeably when she was subbing it - though it was hard to tell with Kate whether this was normal or not. Bernice was, on the other hand, surprised when Kate said - to her, not to Mowley - how good Dave's copy was, and that it was a pity that it was always late and never to length. It was true: reading his articles when they were finally produced, usually way past deadline and nearly impossibly so, she found them brilliantly perceptive and fluently written. Unfortunately, as she knew only too well, even writing of genius is useless if it arrives too late to be printed.
The December issue would have been almost easy - certainly in comparison with the delirium of the launch issue - had it not been for one of those events which always seemed to crop up to throw a spanner in the works just when things were starting to go more smoothly. In October, right in the middle of their third copy cycle, there was the International Business Exhibition, the main event in the exhibition calendar for their sector. In some ways this was perfect timing: the printers were rushing early copies of the second issue to the show, and so they would have something to shout about to the public. But the last thing Bernice needed was her entire editorial team out of the office for two days. Well, almost all of it: Pete was unwilling to leave his family, so stayed down in Southdon to 'hold the fort'. But everyone else - including Wobs and production - was going up to Birmingham, where the show was being held at the National Exhibition Centre, to 'fly the flag' as Martin put it.
Normally, Bernice hated trade shows. As a journalist she found them exhausting and not particularly productive. She knew that some of her colleagues disagreed, though perhaps they were not talking about the same kind of productivity. And the idea of helping to man a stand - and why couldn't she woman it? she wondered - sounded pretty appalling. But when she found herself on the train surrounded by her team, she was filled with a sense of something that she could only call joy, something not even British Rail's grubby and inefficient trains could dim.
Ridiculously she felt as if she were heading a specialist team of crack journalists - the SAS of their profession - on some secret mission deep into the enemy heartland. The fact that they were simply going to Birmingham for 36 hours seemed irrelevant. Once more she felt absurdly lucky to be doing the job she was doing, especially at this particular moment when the business world was humming along nicely, to say nothing of the amazing events in the outside world - she thought again of the recent election of the relatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev as President of the USSR, and wondered whether the hopes he represented would be fulfilled. She found that she was reading her Guardian with more interest these days: so much was happening, and of such importance, that she could barely wait to read the next instalment of what seemed to be the unfolding of the greatest suspense novel ever written.
For all its faults - and it had many - at least the Birmingham NEC was relatively easy to get to by train. They arrived only slightly late, but since the show was not due to open for another hour or more, there was no hurry. They were arriving early so that they could help organise the stand which Martin had taken for the show.
In fact when they arrived at the hall, after walking what seemed halfway back to London, they were amazed to see just the bare shell of a stand. Bernice was even more amazed - shocked, almost - to see Martin in his shirtsleeves, and without a tie, desperately ordering around people from marketing and from the external contractors who were sawing this, hammering that and wiring up the other in a race against time.
Martin had known in his heart of hearts that this would happen, and yet it still came as a rude surprise to see the half-built stand when he arrived that morning, with only two hours to go before opening. He had therefore stripped down for action, so to speak; luckily unlike the rest of the contingent from Wright's who were stuck out in a hotel called The Dales some miles from the NEC, he was staying at the nearby Metropole, and so could pop back to change once they had finished. He was relieved to see Bernice and her crew - partly because he was always pleased to see her, even though she seemed indifferent about seeing him, and partly because he could use them for helping to move things around.
Bernice was not very enamoured of this idea. They were journalists, not gophers. However, she recognised that it was difficult to take the high ground with Martin mucking in so visibly, so with ill-grace she and her team began helping out - though she drew the line at humping boxes around, which she considered dangerous for women.
The stand consisted of a square site, reasonably well-positioned near the main entrance to the hall. In format it was a cube with two of its sides open to the public, and the other corner used as a hospitality area with a separate door. There was also a small storeroom where the new issues were to be stored once they arrived. Needless to say they were not there yet. In addition, here were kept all the other vital paraphernalia of exhibitions like balloons, plastic bags with 'I'm doing The Business' printed on both sides, and copious supplies of drink, crisps and peanuts. These were for the 'guests': potential advertisers and their advertising agencies - in other words the same lot who had turned up or not for the free eats and booze at the launch party.
As the barely discernible announcement came over the PA system that the doors were about to be opened, and the hordes flood in, the stand was at last presentable. Bernice had had a chance to glance round the other companies' stands, and found that most of them were in a similar state of incompletion. It was strange passing through the hall which was filled with these isolated blocks, mostly garish and over-the-top in their design and colour schemes. Various flags, banners and helium-filled balloons festooned the stands and the walls of the hall. It put Bernice in mind of some huge gathering of the clans, each displaying their ceremonial totems.
As the visitors started arriving those 'manning' the stands - men in double-breasted suits, and heavily-made up young women in very short skirts - were transformed. As if with a switch, they turned on their artificial smiles and adjusted their body language, both aimed at enticing the passers-by on to the stand and into the machinations of the sales pitch. For everyone there had something to sell, even if it was only a presence, a brand, a concept. Everyone there was after leads and contacts, which were to be found hidden in the flood of visitors now entering the hall.
These were just as bizarre as those waiting to entrap them with their wiles. All humanity was there: not just the obvious business men in their tired suits, not just the businesswomen in the various attempts at defining an equivalent anonymous uniform of corporate power, but also Mr and Mrs Average, old age pensioners, spotty youths in anoraks, even overseas tourists, who must surely have turned up by mistake. Why did they all come? wondered Bernice as she watched them, fascinated. What were they after, what secret desires were they hoping to fulfil? All they seemed to do for the most part was circle slowly round the halls, collecting carrier bags, accepting the free leaflets about things they were almost certainly not interested in, buying plastic food from the cafés dotted around the place and frequenting the necessarily vast toilets. Then they would go home - to do what? Pore over the fliers, mull over their purchasing decisions? Exhibitions, she decided, were obviously some quaint ritual surviving from millennia ago, carried on rather like Morris dancing, without a real understanding of the original impulses, simply something that you did because you and your forebears always had, and viewed now as a pleasant enough way of wasting your life.
Bernice wished that the same could have been said for her attitude to shows. She had sent the rest of her team to wander the halls. It was strange to see Kate and Terence dressed so formally - the only other occasions had been at the launch and during Tel's interview. Even Wobs had dug out his 'Doing The Business' T-shirt - the first time she'd seen him wear the same one twice - so as to be more business-like. As her team spread out into the hall, she felt like a proud mother sending her smartly-dressed children off to school. And in a sense they were there to be educated, and to allow some of them - the newcomers and the production department in particular - to get a feel for the living, breathing, sweating reality of the market. The show was aimed quite closely at their target audience, so it would be interesting for them to see some of the products, services - and readers - made actual in this way.
In the meantime she stayed on the stand, helping the girls as they were rather insultingly called by everyone, including themselves, handle the public. The Great British Public was pretty awful, she discovered, at close quarters. It generally wanted something for nothing - magazines, for example - and it preferred to pretend that those running the stand were not human beings but the exhibition equivalent of the automatic hole in the wall bank machines, and could be dealt with just as impersonally. But at least these visitors were in some sense human. She was not sure as much could be said for the 'guests' that had started turning up in the hospitality suite.
This area was largely the responsibility of Bob Percival, who was even more obnoxious here than in the office. He seemed to be surrounded by like-minded - and like-bodied - cronies, all of whom were smoking and drinking heavily, even though it was still well before midday. Some of them were genuine advertisers or potential advertisers, it turned out. Others were simply old mates of Bob's who survived on the periphery of the advertising industry, or who perhaps survived only by going round trade fairs eating and drinking as much as they could cadge off old mates. She felt sorry for Martin who was also in there, trying to humour some of these specimens.
And indeed, Martin soon made his escape, and joined Bernice outside.
"Come out for some fresh air?" she asked conspiratorially.
"Yes, quite," he said, glad of this easy intimacy. She was, as ever, looking stunning, and he noted the admiring glances from the punters - although perhaps leers were nearer the mark for some of them who seemed to regard any bit of female flesh on a stand as there simply for their delectation, and who were certainly oblivious of any subtle distinctions between bosses and workers. Martin felt ashamed for his sex. He wondered too whether the fact that he had both Bernice and Bob working for him represented a kind of cosmic balance of good and bad in the universe, but decided that this was an unpublisher-like attitude to take. For the moment he was content to be standing close to Bernice, handing out copies of the first issue - the second one had still not turned up - sorting out people's queries, and generally gathering information.
When the issues finally turned up that afternoon as a kind of dessert after the overpriced sandwiches that had arrived for lunch, there was the usual cry of "Bastards!" from Kate, who immediately had one of her turns, and an instant post-mortem by the rest of the team. Bernice encouraged them to keep their comments for marked-up issues and their more formal discussions. Flicking through it herself she was pleased to see that the November issue looked far stronger editorially, far more a unified magazine than just an assortment of articles - but that the advertisements were as unimpressive as ever, and certainly no more numerous than in the first issue.
The rest of that day was spent taking turns on the stand and wandering the hall. Bernice had the opportunity to meet a few old friends in the industry, and to make some fresh contacts. She was naively rather pleased by the compliments she received on the first issue of The Business since rather like a mother and her child, it never occurred to her that she was meant to be flattered and that many of the comments were reflex actions and had all the depth of a coat of paint. She knew that The Business was good, and therefore deserved its praise, even if she conveniently ignored the fact that many of those giving it were not qualified to do so, or had ulterior motives.
Finally, towards six o'clock, the first day of the show began to wind down. The air in the hall felt old and used. Those manning the stands slumped in exhaustion after giving the same pitch hundreds of times. On their stand, Martin and his team had given out thousands of the launch issue, though had been less successful in selling copies of the latest issue: people expected things to be free at shows, and even at a special price of 99p instead of £1.95, not many were biting. Martin decided that they would have to be even more generous for the last two days of the show. He could hear his bottom line saying 'ouch'.
For Bernice the show had been useful if not fascinating. Yasmeen, of course, made the most of the opportunities, and was busily building up her contacts which she kept in a small blue notebook divided up alphabetically; for her The Book was as vital as The Board was to Kate. Chris enjoyed the chance to meet people and found that exhibitions rather played to his strengths. In particular his good looks and natural ease proved a boon on the stand, though Bernice was less impressed with the way he flirted with the 'girls' there - local women brought in specially to help out front.
Terence hated the show, as did Kate, but that was to be expected. George said he was getting too old for this sort of thing, and Bernice could only agree with him: like so many other aspects of their industry, exhibitions were for the young who had the stamina and physical strength to survive the long days in the hot and stuffy atmosphere. Wobs floated around the exhibition, head in earphones as if it were all some kind of weird vision, which it was in a way. Dave was a surprise: although not very efficient at gathering hot news stories, he seemed to find the show useful for talking to people about some of the deeper issues that lay behind all the surface froth the show represented. And at least Janice seemed to be enjoying herself as she chatted with the other women on the stand, even though she had been initially reluctant to stay away from home. They were all sleeping at The Dales that night, and would go back to London at the end of the second day, leaving Martin and the others there on the third day to mop up any exhibition stragglers.
Bernice and her team had decided to go into central Birmingham to eat that evening. This proved a mistake. They not unreasonably thought that strolling around the centre of Britain's Second City they would find something suitable, but after half an hour of wandering through a concrete jungle lit by the harsh glare of sodium lights they gave up and settled for the convenience of a pizza. Perhaps because of this disheartening experience, or because they were tired, the conversation was rather sparse during the meal lacked its usual spark. All the more surprising, then, was Chris's suggestion once they had finished.
"Who fancies going down the disco, then?"
Various pairs of eyes stared at him with disbelief at the this unexpected question.
"Yes, why not?" said Yasmeen.
"I'm there," said Wobs, for whom the night had not even begun, and who was keen to sample a Birmingham club for what could only be called professional reasons.
"OK," said Bernice, partly out of duty, and partly to show these 'young' people that she could keep up with them.
"Terence?" asked Kate as if the production team took decisions as a unit.
"Well, I'm not really into these disco things, I must say," began Terence, "but once in a while won't hurt, will it?"
Janice was also keen, though George said that he was really very tired, and must be getting some shut-eye. He went off to find a taxi.
"Dave?" asked Chris as George left.
"Yeah, OK," Mowley said, as if making a grand concession.
They decided to work on the principle of cosmic balance that Martin had pondered earlier: since trusting to luck had given them an awful restaurant, they could surely expect it now to give them a decent disco if they looked around a little.
They found one nearby, though from the outside it was hard to tell what it was like. They decided to go in anyway, and found themselves in if not the best disco in Birmingham, at least a representative example of the genre.
Since it was still quite early, for discos, anyway, the place was relatively empty. As they descended into the bowels of the place there were just the usual sad clumps of predatory middle-aged men drinking at the bars, hoping that they might be able to pick something up this evening. The music was loud, but not so loud that they could not hear themselves talking over it. Lights swooped and gyrated over the small and largely unpopulated dance floor. The effect was melancholy rather than anything else.
Bernice was surprised to see Chris, Yasmeen and Janice leap straight into the dancing, not waiting for any music in particular, but content to follow the beat of whatever was playing. Wobs joined in, engaging in a strange and intense series of small movements that seemed to have little to do with any known style of dancing, but at the same time looked totally convincing. Bernice stirred herself.
"Are you coming, then?" she said to the others.
"OK," said Kate, "Tel?"
"I'll just watch, like," said Terence, conscious that moving his large frame on the dance floor would not be a pretty sight. Dave just pulled on his omnipresent cigarette.
None of those on the dance floor had drunk much, but gradually the music worked its magic, and they all felt themselves moving together even though their patterns were often quite disparate. Yasmeen swayed with her eyes closed, her firm young body moving gracefully; Janice was more agitated, and seemed almost to be losing herself in the essentially trivial but nonetheless effective music. Chris was bobbing around, quite unselfconsciously: he had learnt from many years' practice that women have a deep affinity with dancing, and that any man that refuses to participate in their enjoyment of it cuts himself off from a major sphere of their availability. Bernice and Kate were more sedate in their movements, but both were luxuriating in precisely this sense of physicality.
And so the evening wore on, with those on the dance floor grouping and re-grouping amongst themselves, with Wobs on another planet and Chris in heaven as he moved in and out of the various women, smiling now with one, responding now with his dancing to another. And yet through this there was a subtle link which kept him and Bernice bound together. The sense of unfinished business weighed on them both, and gradually they started dancing together in a way that in other less inhibited societies would have been considered a courtship ritual.
At some point there seemed to be a spontaneous decision that they had danced enough. They left the dance floor, now quite full with the usual calf-eyed couples and groups of young women dancing like temple maidens around the pile of sacred handbags laid on the floor, into whose midst the occasional optimistic middle-aged wolf tried to insert himself with exaggeratedly cheery body signals. They picked up the other two who were now chatting together quite freely, as Bernice noted with pleasure as she returned to level-headed manager mode, collected their coats and went out past the thug-like bouncer who was now on duty. Slightly superfluously, Bernice said the taxis were on her - which everyone had assumed anyway since they were on 'official' business - and they were soon on their way back to The Dales, driving through the monotonous sleeping city and out into the country.
Once they arrived at the hotel, Bernice invited them all back to her room for a drink. A raiding party was organised, and all of their minibars were emptied and the contents pooled in Bernice's room. The small bottles formed quite an attractive pile on the carpet.
Soon there were two smaller piles: empty and full bottles. People were really quite tired now, but happy: happy after an evening unexpectedly salvaged after a bad start, and happy to be with each other, to be young, to be working on The Business.
"Hey," said Terence, once they had settled down comfortably with a bottle or two, "you should have heard what young David here was saying about discos." Terence, like Bernice, had been rather impressed with one of Mowley's spontaneous dissertations, this time on the sociology of discos and related topics.
"Well," said Yasmeen, rather drunker than she had ever been, even that night of the launch party in the Dog and Duck, "Come on then, Holy, don't be bashful."
"Oh, it was nothing very profound - y'know, the usual stuff about discos as meat markets, how ironic it is that we always put on a show at discos - presenting the best in terms of looks, dress, attitude that we have to our potential partners, a kind of PR exercise if you like, thus guaranteeing that what follows will always be worse once they start digging below the surface - like journalists. That sort of thing." Mowley hated having to repeat himself: once something had been said, understood, it was finished with as far as he was concerned. Which had made the rewriting of his article for the launch issue particularly hard.
"Yes, yes, but after that, the bit about pop music," said Terence insistently. Drink tended to make him even more dogged.
"Well, I was just watching the people round the room in the disco. Every so often, when the DJ chose a particularly song, various groups of people would leap up from their seats and onto the dance floor. I was just saying to Tel that this was obviously a case of 'our' song for many of them. That is, a pop song that is not just 'nice', not just one that you like, but one that bears a heavy emotional cargo. And I was saying that in some ways it is this that is the real power of pop music, over and above the excuse it provides for a bit of jigging around on a dance floor, over and above its omnipresence in our lives: its use as a kind of sonic clue that tries to tell us how to feel, how to act.
No," he continued, getting into his stride now as he tapped his cigarette on an ashtray, "its real strength is that it acts as a kind of emotional sponge. At a certain time of our lives, a certain piece of pop music is playing. We might have bought it ourselves, or it might be on the radio, in a club, whatever. At that same time, something important happens to us: we fall in love, we fall out of love, we find, we lose..." he paused, as if recalling something, "whatever. Humans being what they are, we associate that pop song with that emotion. When we hear the pop song, we feel an echo of the emotion, just like Pavlov's dogs and their bells.
And so you get this trail through your life, this pop punctuation, whereby certain songs call up certain key moments in your life - a kind of musical emotional calendar. Anyway, I'm sure you all know what I mean."
They certainly did. As Dave stopped speaking, they could all hear in the silence that ensued their own crucial pieces of music, those unforgettable tunes that we all carry with us, ready to take us back to that moment, that feeling, that we had when we first heard them all those years ago. All, that is, except Yasmeen, whose life so far had been remarkably untrammelled by such things, and whose acquaintance with pop music, other than the kind that assaults us daily in supermarkets and similar places, was limited. This was another area that she was becoming aware of as one where she lacked experience, and one where she resolved in the not too distant future to gain it.
And so it was Yasmeen that was able to break the spell the others had fallen under.
"Well, very interesting, Dave; but nonetheless I'm afraid I can't stay to hear more - I'm off to bed - too many exciting people to meet tomorrow," she said with a grimace. "Goodnight all - sleep well."
Almost involuntarily Chris and Bernice exchanged glances, as if to say, one down, four to go. And two of them, Kate and Terence soon did go, tired and not entirely unaware of the situation starting to develop between Chris and Bernice. Wobs and Dave, however, seemed quite unaware of it. Wobs assumed that everybody was staying up for another few hours at least, and so felt no awkwardness. Dave, too, was oblivious of the hour. He was now talking at great length and in what would in other circumstances have been a very interesting fashion about the pop music industry, and how it had grown as youth itself had grown in economic importance. He talked about the intriguing dynamics within the industry, the extent to which the young public got what it wanted or what it was given. And about the pop stars, those symbolic manifestations of youth and beauty that represent the audience's own fantasies.
All this and more, Dave said. Wobs thought it was fascinating, and pondered all he said deeply, never having analysed in this way something that he knew instinctively so well. In a sense it was precisely for this kind of perspective that he had joined The Business whose very name seemed to promise just such explanations. But eventually even he said goodnight: he wanted to go and find an exciting local club he had heard about. Now was the perfect time to turn up, just when things would really be humming. This left the three of them sitting in Bernice's room, with one pile of empty miniatures in the middle. Bernice and Chris were nodding off despite Dave's fluent discourse and their own desires. It was four o'clock in the morning, and they were now resigned to yet another failure, if only a failure to utilise a situation to the full to find out exactly what the potential for real success or failure was. That would have to wait until another time - preferably not this late.
