Indigo Marshmallow

Prologue

It wasn’t going to be an ordinary board meeting. The room was dark, except for a glass-topped, massive round table, coldly illuminated by white ceiling lights. There were no corporate achievement reminders or ornate photo frames to break the monotony of tiled walls. The only noise breaking the bleached silence was the clinking of chains binding the legs of five miserable souls, who were trembling and fidgeting in attentive despair. Five bewildered shadows quivered in suspended fright. Indigo’s Chairman, Stéphane de Castille, deathly pale, stared into space with terror visibly etched on his face. His lean, proudly straight torso belied the indescribable inner torment. Indigo’s Human Resources Director, Olivier Dauphin, lanky and sweaty, sat with his white-knuckled hands buried in facial growth so very much not his usual, clean-shaven appearance of a proud corporate prince. Hélène Verrières, the company’s Current Affairs Director was perched on her chair, frozen in suicidal dread. Without makeup, her straggly hair in a tangled mess, she was horrified for a lot of reasons, not least because her haggard face more than implied her age and mileage. The fourth prisoner, Louis Mollet, Indigo’s small-boned Operations Director sat upright, suspended in silent prayer. There was a permanently pained expression ingrained into the grooves of Alain Fragonard’s delicate features. He was almost beardless, having lasered off the remnants of his growth at the insistence of his husband. His naturally exuberant homosexuality lost all the glamour of the quondam, sartorially superior Financial Officer of the brand. He was even more petrified than his fellow hostages.

The turbid silence was heckled by leg chains rattling with futile attempts to communicate. The chairs they sat on were solidly bolted to the unyielding floor. They learned quickly that all attempts to resist or escape were pointless. They lost all track of time. The five prisoners were desperately trying to pass desperate messages to each other by a Morse code of noisy tugs, which were immediately and instinctively answered but not understood; one tug to bait, two tugs to say how are you, three to answer I’m in the same state as you, a long shake to say can you free me and a sequence of quick rattles to say what are we doing here, what’s going on?

Just before being led to the common room they were fed inside their windowless cells and instructed to shower in the open plan, white-tiled bathrooms, clinically equipped with solidly encased washbasins and bare toilet bowls. They wore white cotton zip-up jumpsuits, the only item of clothing that accompanied their pitiful existence. As usual, the zip-ups were deposited through the cell door trap fresh, smelling of lavender fabric conditioner. Despite the omnipresent fear, they remained fairly calm over the long months. They learned to be calm as noise was invariably rewarded by jets of freezing water gushing from the waist-level spouts. One-minute soaking was followed by two if they continued to scream and shout. The jets were strong and there was no way to escape the penetrating, glacial punishment; lights were turned off as soon as the water started racing towards them. Their cells were air conditioned; the temperature was kept at a steady twenty degrees Celsius. The freezing water would take it down to ten and the central siphon was opened only after their wailing subsided. They all screamed and yelled during the early days of captivity. Learning to avoid the fierce cold jets was a gradual process; initially all five screamed through the numbing flow, hoping to attract outside attention. No screams were heard after a few days. Their identical cells were tiled in a frigid mat. They imagined what they looked like by touching their faces, but couldn’t see the damage done by the solitary confinement. Various instructions came in the form of messages that appeared on flat screens, set on the wall above their rocklike beds behind toughened plate glass. Orders to put blackout hoods on and orders to reach forward with both hands and present their legs, feet together, to be shackled before the dreaded interventions. Food came once a day, silently. They could only guess if they were fed during daytime as the lights were switched on and off at random, depriving them of any notion of time. Various check-ups were systematically carried out; their nails were trimmed and major body functions verified by silent guards, who systematically wore surgical rubber gloves. Blackout hoods were always securely tightened below chin. They were warned not to talk during those visits by a message on the screen. If they tried to strike a conversation, the guards would leave and the water would come. They learned quickly to avoid the freezing water. There was a break-safe, touch keyboard below the screen. It could be lowered by pressing the top of the frame; it slotted back into its flush wall fitting by exerting pressure on its bottom part. It stayed blocked in its stainless steel casing, resisting repeated attempts to break it off the wall. They knew that their typed narratives were read, although the screen remained mostly blank, except for notices of oncoming interventions or a bizarre succession of strange images. If they balked at the announced intervention, not presenting their hands and feet to be bound, the freezing water would come. They learned quickly to avoid the freezing water. The stills appearing on the screen provided no clues, mostly showing a puzzling succession of pictures of events and people from recent history. They would appear and stay on for a short time and then the screen went back to black. Images on the screen didn’t have any outward association with their plight and their sequence seemed insanely aimless; Hammer Horror’s Count Dracula would bare his bloody canines after a field of poppies. Rivers, lakes and pine and beech forests filled the screen with vivid spring colours, only to be replaced by massive ships slowly rolling into ports, past War of the Worlds inspired container cranes lining grey, dystopian concrete quays. Bruce Lee filled the screen frozen in his sinewy fighting stance, followed by a couple of ballet dancers suspended in an amorous pas de deux, awaiting the next note in mid-flight. Images of dead politicians were mixed with photos of children, marching troops followed flower arrangements and photos of wine cellars filled with bottles ready to be turned, re-corked, labelled, put in boxes and shipped to the permanently thirsty corporate dipsomaniacs, compounded their utter despair.

After the understandably tumultuous beginnings, it is now a mostly peaceful, albeit psychotic confinement. There are large, rectangular, two metres long and one-metre-wide traps in the middle of each room, headed by thick stainless steel hoops on one end and a mushroom shaped, shower-type drain marking the middle. The drains are operated from outside, making the punishing cold water disappear with burps and gurgles. The traps are tiled within their steel frames and refuse to budge under painful barefoot jumps or yield under strenuous yanking of the hoops. Two surveillance cameras stare from the ceiling; one from the left hand corner above the door and the other from the diagonally opposite corner. Raised concrete slabs, tiled in mat white and covered with plastic mattresses solidly fixed from below, serve as their backbreaking beds. They’re positioned away from the door and double as a place to sit below the screen, while awaiting instructions. All four typed a lot; besides orders to do so it was their sole occupation. There were no books or newspapers. They all tried to count the passing days, but with no tools to score the walls, their tallies were soon forgotten. Lights were switched on and stayed on for a time; sometimes short and sometimes long and to make the confusion complete, music and animal noises were played loud at different times, both with lights on and off. After some time, day and night lost their natural sequence; dogs would bark in the morning (was it morning?) and Beethoven’s ninth would sound the vespers in, only to disappointingly break up mid-tempo. Ravel’s Bolero would be interrupted by a gentle birdsong halfway through the crescendo then riotously reprised at fortissimo possibile just as the soothing common nightingale falsetto began to calm their shattered nerves. They could stick their fingers in their ears, alas to no effect as the volume would only increase, saturating the confined space. Their jailers’ musical taste was as irrational as it was eclectic; it was clearly designed to add pathos to the unbearable torture. Unfathomable Ummagumma blared out either as a joke or maybe as a sick innuendo. Undead, the master performance album, recorded live at the Klooks Kleek, a small London jazz club, in May sixty-eight, was played often. Maybe as a tribute to the genre or as an invitation to exercise by dancing to the sounds. The poignantly ironic and frantically executed I’m going home was followed by the lazy Spider in my web, with Alvin Lee making languorous love to the fretboard, celebrating his Gibson 335. Maybe it was the jailors’ top twenty favourite. Classical themes introduced their mystical notes; Swan Lake snaked out its delicate, tragic transformation of Odette into a swan, Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune hauntingly fluted out its otherworldly notes, beguiling the five tormented souls, only to be interrupted mid-movement by Boston’s bombastic More than a Feeling. They didn’t recognise the artists and couldn’t tie the mostly English lyrics to the reason behind their imprisonment. Peaches in Regalia blasted out its uptempo joy, leaving them perfectly baffled, not knowing nor caring who Frank Zappa was. Prefab Sprout’s Cars and Girls and its timeless eighties message would lighten their moribund mood, just before the momentum was deconstructed by Lemmy and his Ace of Spades. There was a hint of Clockwork Orange in the hectic and haphazard succession of melodies, making their nightmarish existence even harder to tolerate. If there was a hidden message in the music, any intended symbolism was completely lost on them. Was it linked to the images or just a sick way to make them feel even more scared and confused? God only knows and He resolutely refused to appear on the screen.

Other distractions punctuated the hours; an order could light up the screen at any time, urging them to type. The epidermal politeness of the command, always ending with a s’il vous plait, shortened into SVP, its digital age trigram, was misleading. Lack of instant reaction or prolonged hesitation were unfailingly followed by the freezing deluge, proportional in strength and duration to the slowness of replies or their defiant vagueness. The musical inferno would suddenly stop and new instructions were introduced by the all too familiar notes that punctuate commuter misery on train stations all over France; four metallic notes that cheerfully precede the raging, collective disappointment. Trains are cancelled and no train would leave the station for several hours. Procedures deployed to treat the increasingly frequent suburban rush hour suicides demand that all body fragments, scattered on the tracks over the length of the train and splattered on the locomotive’s windscreen, have to be located and assembled by the forensic railway police. During the short, dark afternoons between November and February, the procedure, irrelevant to what was left of the dismembered martyr to the existential carnage, would take ages to complete. The freaked out five recognised the four notes of the suburban railway funeral march as a symbol of despair; not being able to get to the nursery on time or the anguish of seeing all mobile networks saturate within seconds of the dreaded announcement. A macabre souvenir musical postcard from France and the world outside.

At first, the five prisoners tried to resist. But the cold water would come quickly, freezing their rapidly waning resolve. Stubborn reluctance was progressively replaced by wordy stalling; elusive, factless and impersonal prose filled the screens. Someone must be reading carefully as the water would take time to surge, only to shoot out of the chromed spouts at double the previous force without warning. They soon assumed the pressure must be proportional to the anger at the calculated vagueness of their writing, a cruel incentive to be more personal, precise and factual. After much wet and freezing testing, all five understood that false admissions of guilt, feeble excuses, aloof explanations, haughty justifications and patronizing diatribes only make it wetter and colder. It took time, but their narratives became more and more candid. As time went by, their winding tales became increasingly backed by detailed, comprehensive descriptions and contained only a light sprinkling of woeful pleadings.

Stéphane

My name is Stéphane de Castille. I am the Managing Director of Indigo, France’s biggest online retailer. Indigo grew from my garage, where I stocked antiques and curiosities uncovered and selectively acquired at village sales, known in France as Vide Grenier. They are colourful bazaars, organized all year round on Sundays all over the country, where ordinary citizens try to get rid of unwanted stuff, such as, inter alia, furniture inherited when granny was moved into a home, vinyl records and players bought in the seventies and discarded by the new generation, unable to fathom the workings of a diamond-tipped stylus at the end of an elegant tone arm, toys and babygros religiously stored by mothers longing for the bygone era of cuddles, burps and tears and all sorts of mostly worthless junk. When empty your attic sales first appeared, they were seen as an excuse for villagers to get together, exchange news and views and celebrate the wonders of country life. The mayor, always looking for an opportunity to caress the rosy cheeks of his voters’ babies, would distribute croissants to the eager stallholders getting ready for the day’s trade; children’s faces became sticky with pink candy floss and friendly barter carried carefree laughter across the surrounding fields. Lots exchanged hands at vastly deflated prices and everyone enjoyed the lazy Sunday attitude.

Slowly but surely, professional antique hunters started cashing in. They seized the opportunity to get interesting pieces to add to their collections and resell at ten times the purchase price at the Porte de Clignancourt market, after doing an hour’s worth of spit and polish or writing a few seductive bargain, priced to sell, a steal type catchphrases on their stalls. They swooped like vultures on unsuspecting amateur traders. It soon became a serious and vastly overcrowded business. I was there before the vultures. I pounced on family spreads armed with sweet, fiendishly forked tongue and my cavalier exuberance. I flaunted my sartorial ingenuity, passing through the main street with wads of borrowed cash, greedily eyed by aunties chasing punters willing to believe that the three-legged grandfather buffet is a late Empire, circa 1815 witness of the splendour of Napoleon and his much-regretted, imperialist achievements. I bargained and brought the price down with my swanky charm and my crispy notes. I too spat and polished but never bargained when selling my treasures to then still confidential community of Internet-savvy, digital era pioneers. Indigo was my web name, a posh sounding colour between midnight and violet, with a mysterious sprinkle of oriental spice. Turnover was brisk and I soon had enough clout to leave my well-rewarded nine am to eight pm job in the city and move on to bigger things, namely an old carpet warehouse, with what the previous lessees called office, perched on a steel mezzanine, in the deep left hand corner of a morbidly decrepit industrial estate. But that was just a front, or back office as it were, for much of the selling was done through my initially drab website. I should have made my numeric transition before. Even though it was already 1995, there was still enough room for Indigo. Fortunately, foreign sites didn’t understand the intricate Gallic retail aspirations. I soon needed more storage space; suburban bargain hunts produced an army of greedy, self-declared antique experts, who were doing their rounds before sunrise, picking up what was immediately sellable and making the business shady and less lucrative. So I doubled the number of employees and extended my range, buying previous year’s job lots directly from the manufacturers of domestic appliances. My exponential evolution came at a time when in order to sell from high street showrooms, all fashionable consumer devices had to be relooked every six months. Inside it was the same old washing machine with the same old drum and scientifically programmed life expectancy, but outside it was the latest spacecraft lights and sounds, reporting noisily on the cycle currently in high pitch spin phase. Then I started listening to the music, both the one composed of the ebb and flow of everyday people singing advertising jingles about their dream household equipment on the television and pop music burned onto plastic Cds. Why waste time and pay for the décor of a high street shop front? I had my virtual showroom ambience conceptualised by spotty graphic designers and made funky, with trendy sounds put together by the nascent tribe of web-oriented DJs. My shop windows were dressed by Windows and the rent consisting of a stabilised Internet connection was a pittance. The pendulum swung my way until I became big in France and seriously emerging elsewhere in Europe. Indigo was selling an ever-growing array of merchandise, updated weekly according to algorithmic rhythms, delivered by superfast post to local pick-up points. I became the guru of modern shopping, the most important human activity since the invention of group sex. Spending time on Indigo’s website was like reading the Bible, only that a pocketbook, digest edition of the Holy Book was cheaper bought from Indigo than from any other Godforsaken theological shoppe. As the girls’ banter goes:

Went shopping last Saturday?

I did, but the crowds drove me mad and we got a second parking ticket while trying to get off paying the first one!

What did you buy?

I got a lovely pair of trousers but my husband says they make my bum look huge. So I have to bloody go back next flipping Saturday, get another massive anxiety attack, which I always do when pushed about by the madding hordes invading the overheated boutiques, staffed by anorexic cows looking down on my orange peel. One of these days I will probably murder one of them if she says Can I help you Madam or large sizes are at the back.

Silly twat, I bought the preview version of their catalogue in twenty minutes flat at my member’s discount, with an added 10% off the autumn collection, without worrying that my bingo wings might knock the dainty ornaments from the anorexic cow’s authentic just out of bed hairdo as I pick and choose. All this without moving from the couch in front of the telly, well only once to get me another Ben & Jerry’s Glastonberry. Reminds me of the summer breeze, it does. And if any of the gear’s too small, I’ll send it back and get my favourite size 16 slut skirt ready for the Friday night’s booze-up. I swear I’ll go commando as well. That’ll show them who’s got balls

You will? God, what if you get pissed and do a Sharon Stone on the bar stool?

Got me a Brazilian to go with the new gear I got on Indigo’s site, without the shame of having to get your kit off in the hammam, steam bloody changing room and flashing your excess flesh to all and sundry.

You’re shopping on your computer? They take cash?

It’s called progress; got your credit card, got your account, your personal space and your thigh size stored in a memory box in downtown Tirana.

The rest is history.

This is how I like it; deep, meaningful exchanges on trending fashion, leading to massive retail-oriented logins. Indigo was transformed from an ordinary consumer’s paradise into retail heaven soon enough; shoppers were segregated according to plastic power, postcode punch and credit vulnerability, as specified by our mind-bending algorithms. We’d parameter what they like and stick it right under their noses, using the digital invasion energy of push, unmark the square to opt out, premier membership, family card and personalized invitations to the chat room, populated by kindred Indigo fashionistas. We’d pay professional bloggers to mention where they got the stuff that absolutely changed their lives. We moved fast and Indigo stayed on top.

Mustn’t brag though, it’s hard work and margins are small. The unpleasant part of my business is having staff, personnel, employees, team-members. Call them what you will. To earn a decent amount of corporate moolah, you really need to know how to recruit them, how to get rid of them, pay them as little as the current labour laws allow and reward those who make sure that others are not. Modern day management architecture at its best, as Hélène would put it. Indigo’s biggest market is domestic. Robots do their part without any embarrassing wage demands, but we still need humans to look after the essential tasks, such as packing multi-choice parcels and placing them on the conveyor belts, crisscrossing our massive warehouses. We’ve outsourced the client service to Moldavia, we’ve outsourced the sourcing to the manufacturers, we have even outsourced the outsourcing department to Romania; I am led to believe the land of thieves has outsourced it further down the line to outer Mongolia. Yes, at Indigo’s regional warehouses around France we do have humans on CDI, otherwise known as the full, unlimited in time and mutually, punishingly binding work contract. According to a legend, it was penned by Lavrenti Pavlovitch Beria on a bad day, at the pinnacle of his bloodthirsty reign.

The initial recruitment at Indigo is loosely based on the following, strict and totally illegal rules regarding the candidates:

Up to 25 years of age, as it’s been proved that older workers strive not only to stay on but move up the ladder of the inner sanctum, both notions not being part of the company’s employment policy,

No criminal record, at least not for theft, shoplifting or aggravated necrophilia,

No aversion to uniforms, daily marathons at 8 km/hour or military-style shift work including weekend nights,

Total aversion to trade unions; we tolerate them if their representatives can be bought,

Dedication beyond the call of duty during sales and festive periods, such as Christmas, back-to-school September rush of Black Friday, the new, collective customer insanity fest.

French employment market is full of jobless graduates and we do like clever unemployables. Grandes Ecoles de Commerce alumni are the privileged choice, but applicants with useless university degrees are also welcome. We know that they’ll spend every waking moment trying to get out to find work in their field and become Indigo’s clients in a decade or two, when student loans and overdrafts get paid off by their parents. The ongoing employment crisis gives us between three to four years before they dare to give notice, which is fine. They get the hang of Indigo’s trading advantages after 18 months and unless they are gym fanatics and fervent long distance runners, they risk the Tom Courtenay syndrome after no more than three years; they tend stop or slow down to show defiance, physically drained and ready to jump. Business might suffer. Clients might be short-changed on delivery dates or worse, pleasantly surprised by mistakenly upgraded contents. Remember; wrong item returns are free until further notice and expensive blunders never come back. Actually, we don’t pay for them either; our suppliers do. Thus, if a Sorbonne molecular biology graduate slaving at one of our depots requests an interview with our relatively human resources at our touchingly modest Parisian headquarters, we do try to be large:

I’ve asked to see you because I have a job interview and need next Tuesday morning off.

Well of course, no problem, we’ll take a day off your holiday account.

But I only need the morning!

Sorry, we don’t do half days, we pay you per day. What are your chances of getting the job?

Pretty good I guess; the UN backed company I am applying to needs a molecular marine biologist for a desert aquifer project. It’s very exciting, they plan to do a kosher fish farm in Ein-Gedi and I am the only candidate!

OK, listen, do your best and your success will be reflected in your final pay packet.

You mean whether I get the job or not I’m fired?

With double the normal hourly rate for the current month, enough over the top for a salt beef sandwich with ritually proper trimmings!

Thank you VERY much, I’ll let you know the outcome.

I already know the outcome. Call or text if you’re taken on, if not come back to see me and we’ll do what’s in your best interests. Give you good references as a bonus and mention your ardent aversion to dogfish. Not kosher.

The current Human Resources Director, young Olivier’s been with us for almost four years. I trust him so far as he’s been consistently avoiding complicated employee contract terminations, paying out where the forced exit dossier was too hollow and rubbing it in where it hurt, in rare cases where sudden goodbyes were justified. At 40 years old he should be thinking about retirement, but training a new slave master is expensive so he’ll do for now. I have to point out that his generous stock options must have constituted a big fluffy cushion to comfortably lay his soon to be redundant head on. But at present, we enjoy a close working relationship, which allows me to have a precise, up to date appreciation of Indigo’s workforce. Fuck me, sometimes my platitudes stink worse than my cassoulet enhanced midnight farts.

What’s really been making our expansion rather laborious over the last four years, is the socialist power in place. It is led by the blancmange-faced marshmallow, whose deceitful electoral promise to get France back to work hypnotised the desperate voters. Draconian labour laws already offer more holidays, less working hours and double pay for Sundays and nightshifts. They swell and burst with putrid yellow pus every day. Olivier’s had his closest collaborators memorise all eight hundred pages of the Proustian French labour code, written in stone before the First World War. He can bend its contents at will, aided and abetted by the company’s talented legal team, driven by a grumpy albino bitch with sweaty palms.

Trading conditions have also proved challenging over the last few years; degraded not so much by the tail spin of the current financial crisis but by the constant, relentless demands to pay more corporate levies and workforce related taxes. All entrepreneurial attitude in France is rewarded by hefty taxes on labour; we estimate the true cost of each employee by doubling the salary and adding the myriad of taxes attached to all full and part time work contracts. Relentless lobbying in favour of zero hour contracts has not yielded any positive results so far. In a normal world, supply and demand are the key labour market factors. In France, we’re not allowed to lower rates of pay according to the surplus of available workforce or lack of consumer demand. Which everyone agrees is a shame, including Macaroon, the ex-Minister of Finance. No matter, his ultimate ambition is to snuff his mentor, take his place and induct his erstwhile teacher as the number one lady of the land.

Twelve long months separate us from the next national ballot. France is not governed during the run up to a presidential election; it can be invaded at any time between September and May preceding the crucial vote without a single shot being fired. There are two principal contenders for 2017, as was the case in 2012; the vertically challenged right wing pugilist who lost the last bout and subsequently vowed never to touch politics, only to emerge a year later as the only human being capable of stopping the socialist government from making this country the latrine of Europe. Married to a model and singer who used to shag both Mick and his slowhand mate and even humped the Trump, he feels that people need him as much as they do their daily baguette. The other one is a Gallic version of Blonde on Blonde. Their isolationist doctrine’s been transmitted by DNA and by the spirit of Jeanne d’Arc, the treasured Pucelle from Orléans burned by the British. Le Pen’s Girls are loved by a quarter of registered voters, which is understandable to a point but potentially disastrous for business. Daddy’s girls don’t like foreigners and loathe successful businesses such as ours. Indigo already pays massive amounts of tax, but being an evil creation of globalisation, controlled by godless hoarders such as yours truly, we’re in mortal danger, should The Devil’s Daughter or her mini-me niece become Killer Queen. The current title holder, Marshmallow, is already out for the count, even if he still loves himself enough to climax when farting his morning pony out in his Parisian palace john.

It’s a no-brainer as far as the future of business goes: the country will fade to grey if the marshmallow on the left continues, the man on the right is stir-crazy after five years of hedonistic self-confinement, aggravated by wife’s ghastly music, and if the Blonde on Blonde duo gets the top job, I shall be forced to move headquarters to Lausanne and suffer its non-existent nightlife, just to avoid sharing the fetid air of reactionary France.

As I said, in France, managing staff is the most unpleasant part of any endeavour. As I am the Chairman, I have to make employee-related speeches at various management meetings and functions. I used to write them myself but I always managed to either forget to thank some busybody for services rendered or salute the utter devotion to the cause of a model employee, who is currently busy looking for work. I would often praise a manager for the wonderful results he got, not knowing he was dismissed the day before for online dating searches and conversations during working hours, using his office computer and company supplied smartphone. Of course they all use their work computers and phones for private surfing, as meeting eligible peers can be challenging when you’re sleeping your nightshift off, but the gentleman in question got caught spunking on the screen over a picture of a steamy Tinder profile who posted a soaped-up shower selfie with a big black dildo in the steamed up back entrance. I was also advised that I tend to be patronizing; all too often my rhetoric verges on the dogmatic. Well, I am The Man and the man needs to remind others that he’s The Man. Respect is the weight-bearing pillar of efficient management. I admit I would sometimes succumb to the temptation of digging out an old, brilliant missive, composed for a similar occasion, full of handwritten aftermath annotations confirming the timely insertion of universally admired clichés, only to include it without prior confirmation of the expected attendance. I would obviously correct the situation seamlessly, but the next day’s employee popularity survey would be pointing towards the office carpet and labour inspectors were snooping through the keyholes, following employee complaints. Fortunately, I found a faithful scribe a few years back, a talented ghostwriter who is delighted to swallow. I give her the theme, the jist, the occasion, the leitmotif and the message. She writes what I say, then she blows me and gobbles my jist. I believe she outsources some of the writing but her blow jobs are the work of a true maven.

Besides the law-imposed need for parity, an age-old concept cherished by the French administration, made up almost exclusively of drooling old men, Hélène Verrières was hired for three sound reasons: her physical intelligence, her quick wit and because I’ve never met such a well-connected vixen. Her physical intelligence is matched by her office skills. She’s can blow me in less than three minutes, which is all the time I have between important calls and strategic corporate meetings. Hélène is a small, yet well-proportioned woman; dainty on top, wider at the bottom and virtually fathomless of orifices. She is capable of guessing the degree of my tension with a sleight of her bejewelled hand. Her boardroom talk’s permanently enhanced by intelligent phrases pinched from the managers under her military orders. She possesses an uncanny ability drop them at the right moment, to make her sound like a veteran corporate player. Also, she can turn on a pinhead; sweet greetings and genuinely sounding questions regarding your family, are only a prelude to nasty put downs, preferably done in public, as per the following:

Hello Dear George, how are you? Did you get home all right last night? That’s a pretty tie, it’s Hermès, isn’t it?

I’m OK thanks for asking, I got home late, the traffic was murder, and yes the tie is Hermès, glad you like it, you gave it to me for helping you to get rid of the….

What an arsehole, still looking for a job I hear. Morning policy meeting in my office in ten minutes, got the presentation ready?

I sent it to you last night when I finished, just before midnight. You’ll appreciate my review of our internet presence and the associated proposition; I believe I’ve created the ideal, visionary header for our new website.

I didn’t ask you for a header, I know how to do one better than you! I didn’t ask you to be visionary and the look of our new website is not your problem. You’re the content man, well the content person to be as vague as your personality. The Communications Director told you what he needs and you should have simply filled the gaps. We’re scheduled to go online in two weeks!!! I promised Stéphane a working draft for tomorrow, have you got it?

Well, actually, I sent it to you in a mail two days ago, as requested. I was waiting for your comments. I only did the header proposition as a moot point. I thought it might lighten up the otherwise dull home page.

Do you think I have the time to read mails? I was with Stéphane all afternoon. I must tell you, he’s not a happy man, he was dead against you getting a permanent secretary. I said that if you had one, the dismal quality of your work might improve. So you’re getting ugly Betty. Don’t disappoint me, I fought for you but I can’t defend you forever. Now, get the others to come into my office, be ready in 5 minutes!

That’s just a soft morning greeting. Things would get really dirty when the audience was ripe:

Hello everyone, I have an hour, I’m seeing Stéphaneat ten and need to know where you’re at with regards to the new website. As you know, the company’s survival on the top spot depends on new services and a resolutely corporate feel of the new website. I hope you’ve gone further than George. I am not sure he understood the importance of what I asked him to do, did you dear? Anyway, show us your visionary header; you agree it’s not the New Indigo spirit as we want it and as the boss sees it. We need to be magnificent; keep the sober side for our shareholders and the extra vibrant one for the freshly excited clients. You do see what I mean George? If you don’t, ask your colleagues, they understand my brief, don’t you dears?

Hélène’s is universally loved for her humane approach, so much so that when she goes to the corporate floor toilet, all present stop whatever they’re doing and leave in haste, skid marks decorating the slope. This is the way she likes it; she often has to powder her nose and rouge her lips in anticipation of our afternoon delight. But she’s always sweet and coy around me, gulping my words like holy water, with sheer ecstasy in her eyes, mouth tightly gripping my willy and head rhythmically nodding in an affectionate, gurgling agreement. Good listener, she’d write a phrase I’ve just coined in her special notebook, reserved for boardroom meetings, then spit it out as gospel at the next opportunity.

I give Hélène an illusion of importance. She has the keys to my office and four key directors under her command; two young upstarts with overgrown teeth scraping the corporate corridors of power, socially ignorant and ready to die for the cause and two old boys a few years older than I. I knew it meant permanent generational conflict, but surely one worth watching from the height of my executive chair. It was the only way to give her an orgasm, at least as far as I knew. Blood was shed from the outset. Even if you agreed with her and did what she wanted, she’d change her mind just to blast you out of your composure and put you on edge. Nevertheless, it is a mutually satisfying arrangement; she keeps the house and my nether regions in perfect running order.

I instructed Hélène to go out there and find new business, search for innovative ways of making shareholders loyal until testament time. I even gave her a few nebulous ideas about the up and coming consumer tendencies I got from our outsourced corporate advisers. Crisis? Growth stalling? Lack of clear perspective? Clients not happy with the gear they got last year? Credit cards over the limit? It’s time for a brand new client experience and deals that let you have the latest bits and pieces without any painful outlay. Leasing is the buzz word right now; three years of small weekly payments followed by a cash buyout agreed upfront and you’re the owner of a soon to be outdated Ultra HD television set at only 150% of its initial selling price! The new way to sell is to lease; stocks are huge and global production output cannot be absorbed. We give people what they dream of now, even if their subprime lives are maxed out! We are the saviours of the post-Maoist dream; Chinese peasants in the remote Xinjiang province, up over Tibet, where broadband is still used to tether your trusted mule, wake up assured that if they can produce it, Indigo can lease it. Of course, it’s not exactly a groundbreaking idea; we’ve been leasing consumer goods since the time Baird video cassette players were battling it out with Sony’s Betamax. The ancient cassette recorders were so complicated that if you were sober enough to programme an episode of Soap before your first Tequila slammer, you were considered a genius by your peers. Yet even upon mustering all your temperance to fight heroic skirmishes with the chemical contents inside the liquid regions of your brain, when you got back from clubbing with friends, say 4.30 am, no way you were able to activate replay. Simultaneous use of two fingers is a dying art, unless we’re talking about Hélène. The new era devices don’t even have user manuals. Pity, as part of the fun was playing Trivial Pursuit using the hilarious, western consumers oriented translations from Pekinese. As for Hélène, this particular lady’s brief is to reinvigorate, pump up the service pledge, find methods ingenious enough to entice our existing client base into regular buying and to bugger new clients painlessly. This is a personal skill she definitely has in spades, if I consider our office dalliance and the way her husband remains ignorant, up to the extent of thinking that her lack of amorous intent is purely hormonal.

Hélène is married, an advantage to our intense, office-hours sessions. Not the actual union as such, for she isn’t a firm believer in the initial promise, except when using her talents to secure financially comfortable positions of superior pecuniary value. I promise to love you as much as I love my credit card and not hold your ugly countenance against you if you promise to switch the lights off before you take the bag off your head is her nightly marital mantra.

Hélène’s unfortunate husband has the good fortune of working as chief editor of a respectable newspaper, a poor cousin of The Times, complete with a bluntly plagiarised salmon business section. For the price of few ads, not only would Indigo get an uplifting editorial when needed, in order to prop up shares or spread thinly veiled rumours about corporate manoeuvres, but the life (and not loves) of the managing quintet would be widely commented, adding glamour to the intrinsic value of my brand. Her mothering grades are proudly displayed in the form of strategically positioned photographs of smiling boys, next to piles of the company annual reports. We never speak about her family life. I believe the hours she puts in prevent her from being a full time, hands-on mother. She’s more of an iPhone mother. She stays late enough in her office to say goodnight to the nocturnal cleaning staff and the next day she’s there to welcome the morning shift and my morning shaft. Relaxing at home with her loved ones is far less glamourous than holding a late crisis meeting with her directors, discussing work to be presented at an early morning crisis meeting the next day. Who am I to complain? Besides the sweaty-palmed albino bitch, all other members of our legal team are petrified of Hélène’s yoyo moods. She barks orders using the linguistic finesse of Trainspotting and positively comments on the new dress a colleague’s almost wearing with her next breath. And if one legal dares to question her sanity, she’d find her cherished office Dracaena wilting with a deathly grin, a proof that Hélène’s either pissed in the pot, which is lethal even in small doses, or just told the poor plant that it’s terminally ugly. I made sure that her zombie vibes are kept in check by enlisting the services of another snake.

Louis Mollet, my Operations Director is a cunt. That’s not to say I don’t like him. Louis is pleasant on the outside, despite his rat-like appearance; bony and twisted inwards in his demeanour, the boy was taken aboard for two reasons: 1) to get rid of his predecessor, preferably in a violent, aggressive yet stealthy and totally legal but utterly degrading manner and 2) make sure that the marshmallow-headed government doesn’t increase the plethora of corporate tax laws or hike the percentage points on corporate levies. At present, our operating margin before costs hovers around market-respectable seventy percent. Louis’ personality’s to my liking; his love of plotting bloody corporate coups and his vampire need to fire people who least expect or deserve it, form the soft core of his otherwise nasty being. If bloodsucking was legal I’d promote him straight away. His acute inferiority complex is eating him from inside for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In between, his bile is thrown about, albeit in disguise, with the accuracy of a deranged spitting Cobra being poked during tantric copulation. Louis Mollet is the progeny of a former Prime Minister harbouring insane leftist views, perfectly tuned to marshmallow’s present socialist diarrhoea. His Daddy was in favour at the time when being in favour meant a safe prime-ministerial position. A respected thinker, or so he considers, he was also a serial womanizer, as one had to be when high up on the Gallic power ladder. Married thrice, all his offspring were naturally destined for nepotism-enhanced glory. Louis is a fairly bright boy, bound by birthright for professional success. It is inconceivable for him to be wrong. This is doubly useful as he’s able to piss off the coolest comrades by plotting with all and sundry to divide and infuse self-doubt:

Hello George. I spoke to your colleagues at the regional meeting last night in the downtown shithole; they’re unanimously underwhelmed by your way of doing things.

What do you mean, was I hired to impress the Provinces? Bow to the incult? Celebrate mediocrity and dust the oversized lapels of dodgy suits with a white-gloved hand?

Well, in a way yes. Provinces rely on you to bring solutions; they agree with the latest corporate trends coming from Paris, but don’t appreciate when you rattle their local lice infested bush. You need to be more sensitive, make the regions leap forward and respect longstanding local traditions at the same time. Do you think you can do that?

That’s exactly what I’m doing. I am the politest, politically correct and respectful bloke. Even if they have bad breath and insist on wearing winklepickers and kipper ties.

That’s not the echo I’m getting right now, you’ll need to look for ways to get your outfit together, make it sharp, make it tight, and make it a shining example of modern marketing skills that guide the game-changing progress, while staunchly defending the largely inane rural traditions.

What rural traditions? You talk like Khrushchev! You mean being droll in front of the illiterate oiks? There’s only one postgraduate at work in our suburban operations; one of her tits flopped out onto the biscuit tin during our first meeting. The outfit, it is tight and it is sharp. Modern marketing’s my game; you should respect people with skills you don’t have or fail to understand.

Respect? Skills I don’t have? Listen, I am just saying that the wage and bonus committee is meeting in a few days’ time and I’d like to give them a positive sign, show them you’re willing to learn. It’s cold out there right now, George.

Louis’ personality profile includes vicious and conniving. He’s a smarmy and ambitious nonce, with a sadistic penchant for arbitrary psychological abuse of those who do not instantly agree with him, sugar-coated by an epidermis of servant-like politeness. I praise his capacity to get rapid audiences with marshmallow’s top people. He types his family name in boldface at the bottom of emails, short and sharp as though the signature itself contained the essence of the message. If this doesn’t produce rapid results, he asks his genitor to remind the young and unconventionally foreign-born prime minister, Sancho Panza, that he started his political ascension by making tapas for his cabinet lunch and walking his darling Chihuahuas. Meetings are scheduled pronto and government secretaries’ ears are standing to attention dog-like. This is most convenient; Indigo needs to be left alone to fleece in peace. Marshmallow’s governance briefings include standing orders to think up new taxes every waking day and to painfully sodomise all dynamic business initiatives. His cabinet experiences collective orgasms at the very mention of a new way to put it deeply where it financially hurts the private enterprise most. Hiring and firing is a complex labyrinth of multi-layered, interdependent laws with a twist; firing an employee costs money, whatever the case. You hire someone and don’t like them after the first day, you pay. You tentatively engage a new employee only to find out that he lied about his skills and you write a large and fully unjustified cheque just to get rid of him. Marry a cuddly baby Koala, see it grow into a homicidal Grizzly that doesn’t fit in with the rest of your cloned Lemmings and you pay double for the right to cull. So, our boy Louis’ role is to make sure that any new laws, bent on making the poo even smellier, do not apply to such exemplary employers as Indigo. New tax laws can appear anytime; the government has a strong majority in the National Assembly and is perfectly capable of forcefully passing the dastardliest schemes through both houses, before you have the chance to declare that business headquarters will be moved to South Moldavia if they dare. Thus, I suffer Louis in relative silence and watch his appetite for bloody confrontation grow. I just ask him to wipe the walls clean. Anyway, individual talents do not make a slightest bit of difference to the size of Indigo’s turnover. There’s an army of desperate milfs addicted to spending money on our indispensable