Grey Area (14 page)

As he walked, Simon-Arthur dwelt once again – as he had so many times before – on the crippling irony of his bringing his family to live in the country. He had done it because Henry had bad asthma – as he did himself. Their doctor in London was certain that it was pollution-related. About four months after they had taken up residence in the Brown House the fog moved in with them.

‘Oh Christ! Oh God, oh Jesus. Please come! Please help us. We are but clay, but dust . . .’ Simon-Arthur muttered this through his mask; and then, not quite knowing why, but feeling that if he wanted to pray aloud it was unseemly to do it with this ugly mask on, he took it off.

To his surprise the fog didn’t taste that bad, or catch in his throat. He took a few shallow, experimental breaths to check that he wasn’t mistaken. He wasn’t: the fog no longer oozed soupily into his constricted chest. He took some deeper breaths, and with a further shock felt his eustachian tubes clear – audibly popping as they did so – for the first time in years. Now he could hear cars moving along the road behind him with great clarity. He took a few more, deeper breaths. It was amazing, the fog must be clearing, he thought; the miasma must be departing from our lives!

Then he started to take in great gouts of air, savouring the cleanness of its taste. ‘At last, at last!’ he shouted out, and heard his voice reverberate the way it should do, not fall flat. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thankyou, thangyou, thangyu,’ he garbled. The fog was lifting, there was a bright light up ahead of him, beyond the fourth green of the half-constructed course. Simon-Arthur strode towards it, his legs feeling light and springy. He was an intensely religious man, and he crossed himself as he staggered forward; crossed himself and counted out a decade on the rosary in his pocket. He was prepared for Redemption.

They didn’t find the icon painter’s body until the following day. Jean-Drusilla had alerted the authorities after Simon-Arthur had been gone for forty minutes, but by then it was already getting dark and the fog was too thick for a search party, even with high-powered lights. As for radar, that too was useless, for there was a particularly high magnesium content building up in that evening’s opacity.

By chance Peter-Donald and Anthony-Anthony were in the party that found him. He was spread out, smeared even, on the muddy surface, in much the same posture that the cancerous pheasant had expired on the day before. Like the pheasant, a pool of blood and mucus had flowed out from his mouth and stained the ground. And, as before, the doctor knelt down and examined the white flecks in the stain.

‘Poor bugger,’ he said, ‘how strange, he had cancer as well. Never thought to give him an X-ray, because I felt certain that his asthma was going to get him first. He wasn’t well at all, you know.’

Peter-Donald was taking his ease on a shooting stick he’d pressed into the mud. ‘Well, at least the fellow had the decency not to die on the green, eh?’ It wasn’t that he was being disrespectful to Simon-Arthur’s memory, it was only that the times bred a certain coarseness of manner in some – just as they engendered extreme sensitivity in others.

‘Yes, well, he must have had the haemorrhage on the green, and then rolled into this bunker and died.’

‘Tidy, what?’

‘You could put it that way.’ The doctor stood up and indicated to the stretcher bearers who were with them that they should remove the body. ‘The peculiar thing is that he and I saw a pheasant die in just this fashion yesterday.’

‘What, of cancer?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Well, y’know, Anthony-Anthony, I can’t say I’m surprised in Simon-Arthur’s case. Not only was the fellow asthmatic, but I used to see him all over the shop without a scuba on. Bloody silly – foolhardy even.’

Without bothering further with the corpse, the two men turned and headed off back towards the manor. They were looking forward to a glass of linctus before lunch. Both of them had chronic bronchitis – and neither was as young as he used to be. For a while their conversation could be heard through the clouds of noxious dankness:

‘You know, Peter-Donald, I don’t believe the Dykeses can afford proper scubas. Hardly anyone in the area can, apart from yourself – I have one because of my job, you know.’

‘Really? Oh well, I suppose it stands to reason. Did you say that bird had cancer? D’you think I should get some special masks made for the pheasants? I shouldn’t want them all to get it – ‘

And then they too were swallowed up by the fog.

Grey Area

I was standing by the facsimile machine this afternoon, peering through the vertical, textured fabric louvres that cover every window in the Company’s offices and which are linked together with what look like lengths of cheap key-chain. I was waiting, because all too often the facsimile machine misfeeds and two sheets run through together. So, when I send a facsimile I always send the sheets through one by one. It’s time-consuming, but it leads to fewer mistakes. I have become so adept at this task that I can now perform it by sound rather than sight. When the sheets are feeding through correctly, the machine makes a whirring, chirruping noise, like a large insect feeding. When I push in the leading edge of a new sheet, there is a momentary hesitation, a predatory burr, then I feel the mandibles of nylon-brush clutch and nibble at it. When the entire document has been passed through the body of the facsimile machine, it clicks, then gives off a high-pitched peep.

This afternoon, just as the machine peeped, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned. I had noticed him a couple of times before. I don’t know his name, but I have an idea he works in personnel. I noticed him because there is something wrong with his clothing – or the way he wears it, the way it hangs on his body. His suits cling to him, his flies look like an appendicectomy scar, puckered and irregular. We grunted acknowledgements to each other. I tamped the sheets of paper into a neat stack. I moved past him, across the floor, and through the swing doors into the corridor that leads back to the Department.

The Department must always be capitalised when it is referred to by its members, in order to differentiate it from other departments. Of course, other departments must also be capitalised by their members. This makes the paperwork for inter-departmental meetings – for which I often have responsibility – complex to arrange. A different word-processed document is needed for each departmental representative.

The formats and protocols for all the Company’s communications were modified by the Head of Department, who’s my boss, when he took over about six months ago.

The document that set out these modifications was ring-bound and about seventy pages long. Nevertheless, he asked me to pull apart the plastic knuckles that gripped one of the copies, and attach the sheets in a long row to the bulletin board that runs the entire length of the Department’s main corridor. He said that this was so everyone in the Department would be certain to pay attention to them.

It must be as a result of initiatives such as these that my boss has enjoyed such a phenomenally quick rise through the hierarchy of the Company.

I had to walk right along this corridor to get back to my office, which is situated, opposite my boss’s, up a dog-leg of stairs at the far end. I can’t understand why we don’t have a facsimile machine in the Department. Every other department has at least one, and more often than not several. We have a networked computer system, modem links, numerous photocopiers, document-sorters and high-speed laserprinters, but no facsimile machine. I have never asked my boss why this is the case, because it was like this before he became Head of Department, and perhaps he, like me, has come to accept it as an aspect of the status quo.

I turned out of the long corridor that leads to the inter-departmental facsimile machine, and into the corridor that runs the length of the Department. This corridor is wide and low, with a line of strip lights along the ceiling. I usually keep my eyes fixed on these when I’m walking along the corridor, in order to avoid contact with my colleagues. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to them, it’s just that there’s always plenty of work to do and I like to keep a rhythm up throughout the day. I have a dread of getting behind.

In my office there is a desk, three filing cabinets, a stationery cupboard, a swivel chair, and a workstation that holds my computer and laserprinter. All of this furniture is a grey-beige colour, very neutral, very gentle on the eye. It helps to offset the rather aggressive carpet tiling, which is chequered in two distinct, but equally electric, shades of blue.

It’s a kind of carpet tiling that was advertised a few years ago on television in a gimmicky way. A stretch of tiling was laid down in a kind of test zone, a mocked-up section of an office corridor. Then a live rhinoceros was released from a cage and encouraged to tear up and down the fake corporate environment, snorting and ramping.

It was a startling image: the very embodiment of the rhinoceros, its astonishing combination of bulk and fluidity, imposing itself on the bland anonymity of the set. Then, at the very end of the sequence, the camera angle moved round from the side of the corridor to its end and the rhino charged towards the viewer. The image was so sharp that if you had frozen the frame you could have counted the individual bristles that made up its congealed horn, the wrinkled veins in its vinyl hide.

At the last moment before it came plunging through the screen into your living room, the beast turned tail and dumped a steaming heap of excrement right in the eye of the camera, which tracked down so as to catch it plummeting on to the carpet tiling. The voiceover intoned: ‘Rhinotile, tough enough for all the animals in your office!’

I can’t get this advert out of my head. The punchline comes to me unbidden whenever I look at, or even think about, the carpet tiling.

I haven’t done all that much to personalise my office – the walls are mostly taken up with a noticeboard, a calendar and an organisational chart.

The organisational chart has been done on one of those magnetic whiteboards, to which metallic strips can be affixed, to express lines of command, the skeleton of the hierarchy; and coloured dots or squares, to indicate individuals and their functions.

It’s my job to change the shape of the organisational chart as the Department metamorphoses from month to month. The Department doesn’t have an exceptionally high turnover of staff, but enough people come and go to make rearranging some strips and dots necessary every few weeks.

I have never asked the Head of Department why it is that, despite my pivotal role in representing the structure of the Department, I have yet to be included in the organisational chart myself.

I stapled the papers I had just faxed and deposited them in a tray for filing. I walked round behind my desk – which faces the door – and sat down. My office is organised so that the working surface is directly in front of me and if I swivel to the right I am sitting at the computer keyboard. This I did.

I had to work on the presentation document for this week’s inter-departmental meeting. My boss had made handwritten corrections to the first draft, and these I now set on the document holder that sprouts from a Velcro pad, attached to the side of my monitor.

The corrections were extensive and involved the re-keying of a number of paragraphs. I worked steadily and by five it was done and neatly formated. I hit the keystrokes necessary to activate the laserprinter and then tidied my desk.

Desk tidying is quite an important ritual with me. I like to have every paper clip in its modular plastic container, every pencil, staple, rubber and label in its assigned position. I like my highlighting pens arranged in conformity with the spectrum. I like my blotter located in the exact centre of my desk. I like my mouse mat positioned precisely along the front edge of my workstation.

When I first came to work at the Company I was a lot sloppier about this; my desk was tidy, but it wasn’t exact. Now it’s exact.

Then I made a list, using the soft ‘scherluump-scherluump’ that the laserprinter was making as a counterpoint with which to order my thoughts. I always make a list at the end of the working day. They are essential if you want to maintain any kind of ordered working practice. I finished the list just as the presentation document finished printing. The icon came up on the VDU. It shows a smiling and satisfied little laserprinter, with underneath the legend: ‘Printing Completed’.

I stacked the papers, punched them, bound them in a ring-binder with a plastic cover, and took the document across the corridor to my boss’s office.

He was tipped far back on the rear wheels of his chair, so that his head was almost hidden between two of the vertical textured-fabric louvres that cover the windows of his office. The posture looked uncomfortable. The black head of the lamp was pulled low over the fan of papers on the wide expanse of his desk. His feet were propped on the desk top and the cuffs of his trousers had ridden up above his socks, exposing two or three inches of quite brown, but hairless ankle. He said, ‘Have you re-done the presentation document for the inter-departmental meeting?’

I replied, ‘Yes, here it is.’

He said, ‘Good. Well, I’ll see you in the morning then.’

I turned and walked back across the corridor. I shut down my computer and then bent to turn off the laserprinter. Kneeling like this, with my face level with the lower platform of the workstation, I could see right underneath my desk. I could see the flexes of the computer, the laserprinter, the desk lamp and the telephone all join together and twist into a spiral stream of mushroom-coloured plastic that disappeared down an oblong cable-routing slot. There was nothing else to see under the desk, no errant rubber bands or propelling pencils gone astray.

The bottom of my workstation is shaped like an upside-down T, with a castor protruding from a rubber bung at either end of the crossbar. I rested my forehead on this bar for a while and let the coolness of the metal seep into me. When I opened my eyes again, I focused not on the distant prospect of the skirting board, but on my immediate vicinity: the beaten path that my varnished nail had cut for the rest of my finger, through the eighth-of-an-inch pile of nylon undergrowth. It was this that caught my attention – a really tiny event.

How small does an event have to be before it ceases to be an event? If you look very closely at the tip of your fingernail as it lies on a clear surface (preferably something white like a sheet of paper), so closely that you can see the tiny cracks in the varnish; and then push it towards some speck of dust, or tweak the end of a withered hair, or flick the corpse of a crumb still further into decay, is that as small as an event can be?

When I stood up I rapped my head on the underside of my workstation. Both it and my skull vibrated. I bit my lip. I stood like that for a few moments, concentrating hard on the angle of one of the flexible fronds in the stack of binders in my stationery cupboard. Then I shut the cupboard doors, snapped the switch that bathed my office in darkness, and left it.

I went down the first flight of stairs, past the plant that lives in the grey granules, down the second flight and along the corridor. The Department was already empty. I knew that, at five on the dot, the entire workforce would have risen up like a swarm, or a flock, and headed for the six big lifts that pinion the Company to the earth.

I also found myself on an empty platform, caught in the hiatus between two westbound trains. The platform’s dirty tongue unwound along the side of the tube, which was ribbed like a gullet with receding rings of be-grimed metal. A tired, flat wind, warm with minor ailments, gusted up my nose. The electronic sign above the platform kept on creating the word ‘Information’ out of an array of little dots of light; as if this in itself was some kind of important message. I listened to the sough and grind of the escalator belt.

Gradually the platform began to fill up with people. The minor-ailment smell was undercut with hamburger and onion, overwhelmed by processed cheese and honey-cured ham, encapsulated by tobacco. They stood in loose groups, bonded together by a mutual desire to try and avoid uniformity. Thus, blacks stood with whites, women with men, gays with the straight, middle class with working class, the ugly with the beautiful, the crippled with the whole, the homeless with the homeowners, the fashionable with the shabby. That so many people could believe themselves different from one another only made them – appear more the same.

To my left, clamped against the bilious tiling, was a strange machine. It wasn’t clear whether it was mechanical or electronic. It had a curved housing of green plastic. It was eight inches high, and bolted at top and bottom to brackets hammered into the grout. In the middle of the thing was a circular, venetian-blind-slatted plate. Underneath it was a small sign that proclaimed: ‘Speak Here’. I pressed my ear against the plate. and heard the faint rise and fall of what might have been a recording of outer space, or the depths of the sea.

When the train eventually came, I stood for a moment watching the people get off and get on. The two streams of shoving bodies folded into one another, like the fingers of two hands entwining deep in the lap of the ground.

And that was what my day was like – or at any rate the second half of it. Wherever I start from I will experience the same difficulties, so it might as well be this afternoon, when I sensed the man’s presence behind me as I fed the facsimile machine.

One last thing. This morning, as I have for the past fourteen mornings or so, I put a sanitary towel in my underpants. Tonight, when I stood in front of the mirror’s oblong and looked at the pouch between my legs, I felt certain that there would be blood absorbed into the quilted paper. Just a few dabs and blotches, together with a brown smear at the edge, denoting earlier bleeding.

But there was nothing. It was virgin territory. No period – period. I haven’t had sexual intercourse for over six months – I can’t be pregnant. I am normally as regular in my body as I am at work. And over the last two weeks I have felt the swelling feeling, accompanied by an odd sensation of vacuity, that always precedes my coming on; and the dusting of yellow and mauve pimples under the softening, water-retaining line of my jaw has appeared as it should. I’ve also felt irascible and unaccountably depressed. (Well, normally this depression is accountable, I just can’t account for it. Only now is it truly unaccountable.) But still there’s been no period. Only the feelings, straining me for day after day.

In the morning the radio woke me at seven-fifteen, as it always does. Outside the sky was limpid, void, without properties of colour or density. Was it light yet? There was no answer to this, it was as light as it was yesterday at this time – and the day before, and the day before that.