THE TRICK OF marketing is to spread a wide net, the wider the better. If it could be cast right across the Face of the World, why that would be ideal. No knowing how many fish might be trawled up in such a capacious maw.
Teasel Marchmont had begun his entrepreneurial career in a wayward boyhood that tended to an idleness which avoided school and a home life best avoided too. Thus he ran about his neighbourhood and learned to be in more than one place at the same time. This he discovered created an interesting outcome. People in one street knew the doings of people in another, but those in a third, slightly farther off, were completely unaware of Dinty Squit's new hat or that Harris Mood was obliged through consideration to marry his neighbour's daughter Fudgee in a sudden and unavoidable love match.
'It's all true,' he remembered telling the cornershop lady two blocks away from the Mood home. 'I'll get you an invite to the wedding if you like.'
'Better'n that, my lad,' the lady said, 'here's my terms for a bespoke wedding cake. They just might like the prices and I can do 'em quick, two tiered or three on request.' The lady ran a cake shop on the corner, all pink and sweet it was, making Teasel linger for a taste, but he took the card and raced back along the relevant street and when no one was looking slipped the card into a mail slot, making a whooping noise as he did so by way of signal.
Not long after he could be seen slapping sticky posters on all sorts of surfaces, walls, gates, windows and the occasional moving vehicle whenever it slowed enough to let the paste dry. Of course he was not the originator of these advertising slips, merely the messenger, the spreader of good news, even if sometimes such posterings more resembled a plague that darkened windows with thick layers of gooey paper.
'You need, my son,' a man in black, from hat to shoes, accosted the youngster as he dodged traffic while regaling outraged drivers with pie filling selections in colourful prints, 'a regular vocation.'
'A cycle?' the boy said, not heeding the words spoken clearly as he plastered three shop adverts on the same omnibus, obliterating a rival pie shop with his endeavours. He was well aware of the cut and thrust of competition in the world of marketing from a very young age.
'No, a vocation. I, Theon Silk, can offer you this,' and he held his hand to his heart in imitation of an oath.
The boy stood there, one fist full of unused posters, and the other with a squeeze tube of quick-drying paste, panting for all he was worth.
'You mean, a job? A regular pay by the week job?'
'Something like that, only more a pay on performance kind of thing,' Theon Silk assured his young auditor. 'My card.'
And so Teasel entered the hallowed precincts of 'Silk and Cell, Business Opportunities on the Fly.'
He did get that bicycle he dreamed of, but it served no purpose by this time to race through familiar streets to scatter the good news about bargains to be had in Racy Miggins's 'Second Hand Scrap Store' or the 'Used Fruit Purveyors' annual summer bruised peach purge.
For he had an Area.
He had been assigned Districts.
He had grown into a man with land to conquer, settlements to invade and customers to ensnare. Effectively speaking 'Silk and Cell' had assigned him a circuit, a box of brochures and a map of targets in the grassy east full of widespread homesteads overflowing with dreams of possible riches just waiting to be hinted at.
'Mind you merely hint, my boy,' Theon advised his new recruit. 'They don't like to be told what to do out there so to avoid a good pitchforking, merely suggest possibilities, sugarcoated of course, with malted barley for afters.'
That was three years ago and following wise advice the boy had raced through the Winding Stream area, delivering brochures stealthily in the light of a summer moon before cycling rapidly on to the next settlement before anyone knew he had been there.
But they did know of course, for the brochures were bright and glossy and sugarcoated as required and Falter Macree found them sticky too, for they clung to him night and day, followed him around out in the fields and during his favourite whittling time, until he made that fatal decision to relocate. A peaceful life ended then, and toil, stress and neglected toys became his neverending future. Along with a sense of fatality.