Chapter Three: Fluent in Corporate Nothing

---

By Wednesday the rant had stopped belonging to Poppy.

She had written it in one furious sitting, on her back, in a football shirt, and now it was walking around the building without her. People quoted it in the lift. Someone in Finance had set "circle back" as the ringtone on his work phone and been asked to stop by three different colleagues, two of whom were laughing. The tuna line had made its way to the sixth floor, then the ninth, and by lunchtime a woman Poppy had never met stopped her by the post trays to say, quite solemnly, that she would never again be able to smell fish at a desk without thinking of a confident man being told no.

The mugs arrived that morning.

Samir from IT had ordered them on Friday afternoon, before the building had been told she was staying, and he had ordered forty-three, which he said was the minimum the printer would do and which she suspected was a number he had simply liked. They were plain white. Across the front, in neat black capitals, they said FLUENT IN CORPORATE NOTHING. On the back, in type so small you had to turn the mug in your hands and squint, was a second line: Let's circle back.

They were gone before eleven. A solicitor from Legal offered Samir twenty pounds for the last one, and Samir, who was nineteen and spoke about fairness the way other boys his age spoke about football, said it wasn't for sale, it was for solidarity, and gave it to the solicitor anyway.

Poppy took all of this in the way you take in weather after being let out of a hospital. She had come to the fortieth floor on Tuesday morning with her laptop and her black notebook and a general conviction that someone would arrive within the hour to tell her there had been a clerical error. Instead there was a desk. It had a window beside it and a lamp that worked and a small, healthy plant in a yellow pot, left by somebody who had clearly decided she deserved a plant. She sat down in the chair and did not touch anything for twenty minutes.

At nine on the dot Barbara from Accounts appeared in the doorway holding a plate of shortbread with both hands, like a woman bringing an offering to a shrine.

"Thirty-one years," said Barbara. She put the plate down. "I've worked here thirty-one years. Five managing directors, two mergers, and an incident with a fax machine we do not discuss. In all that time I have never once heard a person say out loud what the rest of us were thinking." She straightened a biscuit. "So Accounts has voted. You're not to pay for your own tea. Not now, not ever, not while I'm alive."

"Barbara, you can't just—"

"There was a show of hands. I minuted it."

She patted Poppy twice on the cheek, the way you might test a loaf, and left. Poppy sat looking at the shortbread. She had the odd feeling of having been made a mascot by a small, fierce army that had never asked her permission.

---

Three floors down, the army's enemy was having what Imogen Pryce would afterwards call, with open relish, the Conversation About Names.

Poppy was not in the room. She heard about it from so many people, in so many versions, that by Friday she could have performed it. It happened on Monday afternoon in Theo's untidy office and lasted fifty-one minutes, and the account that stuck came from Imogen, who maintained she had not been listening and had simply needed, at that exact hour, to reorganise a filing cabinet that stood about a yard from the door.

Theo had said almost nothing to begin with. He had pointed Gregory to the stiff leather chair. Then he had slid a sheet of paper across the desk. On it, in his slanting hand, was a list of fourteen names going down the page.

Penny. Polly. Pippa. The new girl. Poppy-or-whatever. Pam.

"Pam," Imogen told Barbara in the fourth-floor kitchen on Tuesday, in the voice of a woman reporting a death in the royal family. "He had Pam on there. I don't know where he got Pam. He may have asked Mrs Hendry in the post room. And Mr Ellison said, very quietly, 'Gregory, who wrote Hello, Tomorrow?' And Gregory said, 'Well, naturally it was a collaborative effort,' and Mr Ellison said, 'That isn't what I asked you.'"

"Oh, lovely," said Barbara.

"And he couldn't say it. He sat there with his mouth open and he could not produce her name."

The kitchen went quiet. Somebody's spoon hit the floor.

The result was a formal written warning, a compulsory course called Respectful Leadership, and a new rule that anything Gregory presented had to be countersigned by everyone who had worked on it. He was not sacked. Nobody had expected him to be. Barbara said men like Gregory were like damp: you could treat them, but you couldn't talk them out of the walls. He had friends on the board. He laughed at the right moments. He had come through three restructures and one karaoke night that people still referred to as the Incident With The Abba.

But something in him had altered, and Poppy noticed it from forty floors of safe distance whenever they crossed paths. He had started using her name. He used it constantly, and with enormous care, the way a man might handle something he'd been told was fragile and valuable and possibly a trap. "Morning, Poppy," he'd say, showing every tooth. "You're looking well, Poppy. How are the little spreadsheets, Poppy? Do give Theo my best." She would almost have preferred Penny. There is nothing worse than an enemy who has finally learned how to spell you and is saving it.

---

So the Honest Feedback Project began, and it was a great deal harder than it sounded.

A company isn't a document. You can't open it and read what's wrong. It keeps its injuries out of sight and talks about them in code, and for three days, in a small glass meeting room with a pot of tea and a recorder she kept forgetting how to switch on, Poppy got nothing at all.

"Everything's marvellous," said a man from Operations, sitting so straight he seemed to have been fitted with a rod. "We love it here. Very strong culture." He looked round the room. "Is there a camera in this chair?"

"There isn't."

"I'd like it on record that I'm happy."

He left after eleven minutes. Poppy wrote recorded: happy in her notebook and underlined it, and then sat and thought about it for a long while. Nobody was lying, exactly. They were frightened. In this glass tower, over years, people had learned that the truth was something you couldn't afford to spend, so they'd kept it folded small in their pockets and carried it home every evening.

On Thursday she tried a different way in. She stopped asking and went first.

A young designer named Meera had come in holding a paper cup with both hands, the way you hold something at a funeral. She was the one who had sent Dee the screenshot of the rant that night, and she looked as though she expected to be told off for it. Poppy poured her tea and said, "Last week I sent something rude to the whole company by accident. I lay on my bedroom floor and cried. And then somebody gave me a desk and a plant. So, the worst thing has already happened to me, and I'm still here, and it was okay. If nothing could happen to you, what would you tell the chief executive?"

Meera looked at her for a long moment. Then she put the cup down.

"That the design team hasn't had a day off in eleven weeks," she said, quickly, as if something behind her had given way. "That we're not allowed to say so. That someone cried in the stairwell last month and then went straight back to their desk like nothing had happened."

After that it came in a rush. By Friday afternoon Poppy had forty-one pages of notes and a headache.

There is a particular kind of loneliness in finding out that a great many people have hurt in exactly the way you have, and that none of you ever said. It was heavy, and it was also oddly exciting, like finding a light switch in a room you'd lived in for years. She began staying late. The fortieth floor emptied at six, then seven, and by eight she was alone with the air conditioning and a window full of lights, sorting forty-one pages of other people's misery into colours.

---

It was ten past midnight, the second Thursday of the project, when she heard the kitchen door.

She went to look with her emergency Hobnob held out in front of her like a truncheon. At the end of the corridor, in the narrow staff kitchen, the fridge door stood open and its light fell across a pair of bare feet. Above them was the chief executive of Lumen & Crane in a creased shirt and a loosened tie, eating cereal out of a mug.

He saw her. She saw him. Neither moved.

"I'm not wearing shoes," said Theo, with great dignity.

"I noticed."

"They're under my desk. I took them off at nine."

"Is that Cheerios?"

"I keep a box up here. The kitchen on seven is full of people who judge me." He looked down. The mug in his hand said FLUENT IN CORPORATE NOTHING. "I took this one too. Please don't tell Samir. He's a boy of principle."

Poppy started to laugh and found she couldn't stop. She had to hold on to the counter. After a moment he was laughing too, and the two of them stood in a steel-lit kitchen at midnight, helpless, until he wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and held out the box.

"There's one bowl," he said. "I'll stick with the mug."

They ended up on the floor, because the chairs were across the room and the lino was warm from the dishwasher. They ate in a silence that wasn't awkward. He asked about the project and she told him: the designers, the stairwell, eleven weeks without a day off. He listened with his whole face and asked short, exact questions that showed he'd heard every word. When she got to the man from Operations and the chair with the camera, Theo put down the mug and said, very quietly, "I made that chair."

"I'm sorry?"

"Not literally. But I built whatever it was that made him think of it." He was looking at the floor. "My grandfather started this place in 1961 with a man called Walter Crane and a typewriter. He used to walk the floors at lunchtime. He knew everyone's name, and their dog's name. He died when I was twenty-two and left me his sofa and a company of three hundred, and I swore I'd be the same sort of man. Somewhere along the way I stopped walking." He made a vague gesture at the ceiling. "The place got bigger. I stayed in my office. After a while I only heard about the company from people who were paid to be pleasant, and I let them, because I was frightened of getting it wrong."

"That happens to lots of people," Poppy said.

"It shouldn't happen to me." He looked up. His grey eyes were very steady. "I have to tell you something. I ought to have said it on the first day."

She waited.

"I knew it was your campaign before Gregory opened his mouth."

Her spoon stopped halfway.

"The shared drive records who made every file," Theo said. "The deck was saved under P. Whitlock. I read it the night before, because I like to know what's going to the board. I got to the line about tomorrow and I remember thinking, who wrote this? It was good. It sounded like someone who loved what she was doing." He rubbed the back of his neck. "So when Gregory stood up and said Penny, I knew. I had every intention of saying something. But Margot Finch has spent years telling me not to take managers apart in front of the board, and I told myself it would be better to deal with it quietly, properly, afterwards. I told myself that was good leadership. And I sat there."

The lino was cool under her palms.

"You sat there," Poppy said, "while I cried on a bedroom floor." But there wasn't any heat in it.

"I sat there," said Theo. "And I've never been so ashamed of a pen."

She should have been angry. She would think about that later, in the long uncertain weeks that followed. But she looked at the tired man on the kitchen floor with his bare feet and his stolen mug, a man who had told her the worst thing about himself before she'd thought to ask, and what she felt wasn't anger. It was something loosening, like a hand slowly opening under her ribs.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I think the sofa's ugly too. But I like it."

He laughed, a low, surprised laugh. "You are, without any competition, the most dangerous person who has ever worked for me."

"That's what Gregory says."

"Gregory," said Theo, "has finally got something right."

When she stood up at last with her bowl, so did he, and for a second they were close enough that she could smell clean cotton. They said goodnight. It wasn't until she was back at her desk, staring at a spreadsheet she couldn't read, that she noticed she had been smiling for six minutes.

---

Dee came down from Manchester on the third Saturday in November with a bag of Haribo and a notebook of her own.

She took one look at the flat and one look at Poppy's face and said, "Right. Sit. Talk. Start with the kitchen."

"What kitchen?"

"The one you've been blushing about for forty minutes. Don't. I'm a trained professional. I watch people for a living."

Poppy told her. It took a lot of tea. When she got to the cereal, Dee put her notebook down and pressed both hands to her chest like a woman in the last scene of a very good film.

"He took his shoes off for you."

"He took his shoes off at nine o'clock. Before I got there. Not for me."

"He sat on a floor with you. A chief executive. On a floor."

"Dee, he's the CEO. They don't have relationship statuses. They have quarterly reports."

"Everyone has a relationship status."

"He's probably with someone glossy who does something in diplomacy. Or a Swiss skier. It's not mine to know. We have a professional relationship, and he's been very careful about it. He brings Margot to every meeting like a chaperone."

"And you haven't checked."

"Checked what?"

"Whether he's single, Poppy."

"I haven't, and I won't, and neither will you, because that would be—"

Dee already had her phone out.

"Dee. Dee. No. I forbid it."

"I'm only looking for a photo, I'm not hiring a detective—"

Poppy lunged across the sofa. What followed was brief and undignified and involved two cushions, a bag of sweets and a cat from the flat opposite, which had wandered in through the open window and now watched from the arm of the chair with open contempt. By the end the phone had been confiscated and Dee lay on the carpet with her arms in the air, wheezing.

"You like him," she gasped. "You like him so much you're scared of G****e."

Poppy sat back, flushed, her hair in a nest. "I do not," she said. "I'm an adult woman with a project."

She said it a little too fast. Dee, who had known her fifteen years, turned her head on the carpet and gave her a look of such patient, infuriating kindness that Poppy got up and went to put the kettle on.