No, she will wait until tomorrow. She’s too tired to start dealing with all that now. She gets into bed, can hear that he is on the phone to someone downstairs, hear somehow that he has opened another bottle of beer. She should wait until tomorrow. Wait perhaps, go along with it and wait and see, anticipating the problems that, who knows, might not come after all, no point pre-empting things. Dominic in love with her. What nonsense. She doesn’t even, well.
Under the quilt, saying to herself yes, yes, that’s the best thing to do, just be quiet, go along with it, prepare yourself for a disaster that may never come, a future that never arrives. How draining it is, having to live out all these possible lives here in the present. A voice, is it her own, is saying softly to her as sleep steals in, well, well that’s how it is, that’s how it is, one is obliged to live always ahead of oneself, with a soft moan, she fidgets, rolls over, kicks the quilt off her hot legs, always at the juncture of two worlds, two lives, two regimes.
The Council is officially “multilapping” and “hypermapping” with Universal Solutions Project Group in order to value-upscale and accelerate efficiency through a series of protocols, best practice standardisations, internal creativity revues, competitiveness rankings, and pre-emptive customer focusedness, though the take-home message Nick got from the presentation he had to attend in Canterbury three months ago was: all your jobs are on the line, under permanent review, subject to any number of radical changes effective immediately. You may, from one email to the next, find yourself promoted, demoted, relocated, shifted sideways into a completely different role, or dismissed only to be re-hired the next day. This is part of what the shiny young man with fabulous teeth, who took great pleasure in his surprising fact being that he actually had a PhD in Physics, told them was the Aleatory Approach to Management, shaking up ossified and sclerotic public sector institutions with bracing blasts of pure contingency, what he called “Black Swan thinking”. Some of you will rise to meet these challenges and true leaders will be born with new capacities to stay one step ahead, to surf uncertainty and to improvise dynamic new solutions in unfamiliar areas, he said. He ended with a clip from the movie
Fight Club
in which Brad Pitt urges the other actor to stop trying to control everything and allow his car to clip across the freeway and plunge down a hillside.
An apt metaphor for the country under the current Government, Jerome quipped as they waited at the station for the train back.
So far the only effect of all this on Nick has been a massive uptick in the amount of emails he receives and is cc’d into, an endless, seemingly unstaunchable flow, haemorrhaging into his monitor in great serried clots or dripping incrementally away 24/7. He regularly gets messages from
[email protected]
, his new line manager, that have been sent at 1.15 am and then updated and amended at 6.15, often followed thirty minutes later by a guardedly hostile follow-up email wondering when they can expect the clarification/confirmation previously requested/expected/required
ASAP
. For a while he got into the bad habit of checking his emails as soon as he woke up, flipping his snoozing laptop into life to see if there were any true emergencies and immediately being jolted into life by a surge of pure angst, more nerve-janglingly intense than his morning double Nespresso.
Who are these people who sleep for four hours and are emailing in bed a moment before they crash out, the second they wake up, sending messages as they walk to work, on the train, while they shave, shower, have a crap, make love, play football, give birth? These people would send you a status update from their own funeral, Jerome quipped, a touch of levity he could well afford as he had six months to retirement and was, he said, delighted to be leaving. Nick resolved after the first few weeks of panicked breakfasts, barely aware of what he was eating, that emails would have to wait till he got into work. Most mornings he manages it, and though he gets in at 7.30, a full ninety minutes before his contractually agreed workday actually starts, often after what seems to him a mere (though to others must perhaps seem an excessive, luxuriant, irresponsible, under-committed) nine hours since he left the office, he already has on average thirty ostensibly urgent emails to respond to. By nine the sluice gates are fully opened and he is awash with updates, revisions, calls for meetings, addendums, revocations, an endlessly ramifying, seemingly self-sustaining ecosystem of pure verbiage, the majority of it, as far as he can tell, irrelevant to the urgent logistical human need he is supposed to be addressing, the most basic need perhaps, other than that for love and food, and in equally short supply. Shelter.
Two weeks ago his line managers were down out of the blue to see where they could, in the words of one, “throw some invigorating chaos” into the dusty corners of their drab, provincial office life, as though Nick weren’t up to his neck in chaos all day, everyday as it was. They went out to lunch so the three of them could be informally scrutinised and so the sheer paucity of options and the sub-par quality of the food in the Bistro Nick had chosen could be sniffed at. One of them said how nice it would be and how necessary to have some breathing space at last in London. Living space perhaps you mean, Jerome quipped, but that pun luckily went by, though throughout the meal Jerome insisted on referring to the partner company as The
USG
, and when one of the latest ugly management neologisms “solutionize” turned up in reference to The
USG
’s rehousing and work program, Jerome inevitably asked, as in Final Solutionize? And received tight smiles, narrowed eyes, and quizzically inclined heads all round. Jerome and his gold-plated public sector pension just months away, the lucky old devil.
The day wasted being patronised by the people down from head office caused an immediate backlog of messages and claims and requests that had him working from home for most of the following weekend. He desperately needed help, an assistant of some kind, but there was no chance, nor it seemed was Jerome to be replaced, meaning what, he wasn’t sure, but less work, fewer responsibilities and more pay certainly weren’t on the horizon. Perhaps their strategy was to inundate him with more work than he could handle, find him lacking and dismiss him. He knew that broadly speaking he wasn’t regarded as quite the team player he should be, wasn’t perceived as being entirely on board or on side, not due to any direct expression of hostility or scepticism, not due to any real complaints, but more to a failure of enthusiasm, he was perhaps, as one of the People Down From London seemed to imply, incapable of making the shift from pro-active to PRE-active, heading off problems in the future by going back and altering the past, something which to Nick’s old-fashioned, in-the-box thinking sounded, in practical terms, like fraudulently altering paperwork and computer records. And of course there was his background, first in the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, then dealing with housing for Care in the Community, both non-private sector positions. Ideally, if
USG
could manage it, they would replace all the state sector partners with their own highly motivated, efficiency driven, revenue maximising staff, but as of yet the public sector people like Nick clung on.
Perhaps they are right, after any meeting he is filled more with
esprit de escalier
than
esprit de corps
. Perhaps losing his job would be a blessing in disguise. Except that he also, unavoidably, has obligations, debts, and outgoings with plenty more expenses pending, debts that have built up despite his careful, cautious planning, his limited indulgences, through the sheer mismatch between how much he earns and how much he needs to live, and the claims upon him, from Theresa, the kids. He’s given up his car, which he didn’t need anyway really in a town the size of Margate, he has the mortgage on the house, the mortgage on his flat, and for the moment no negative equity.
And when interest rates go up? He tries not to think about it. Jerome, who seems to know about these things, reassures him that in Japan they have had interest rates at zero for two decades plus, though as a soon-to-be pensioner he would love to see them go up. Another colleague who also seems to know about these things tells him Armageddon is coming, but Nick doesn’t believe it, more that a moderately paced, sustained unpicking of any kind of safety net is well underway, dystopia by stealth, slow-motion apocalypse.
He has his
CPD
review in two weeks.
Perhaps he could start again somewhere else. Sell up now before things collapsed. If he could get the asking price he would make fifty thousand on his flat all told. That could go a long way in some poorer, warmer part of the world. A wave of light and glittering ease laps at his dry mind, his dry mouth, his dry eyes, spreads like a honeyed balm over his brittle nerve ends. Yes, yes, get out. Take the money and run, live as carefully as you can for as long as you can. Who wants to be old here anyway? In twenty years’ time, what will this country look like? You are in the de-developing world anyway, Britain will be hitting the same levels of poverty and wealth stratification as rising Brazil or Thailand, but colder and darker, the rain, the grey faces, the deathly pallor, the weathered buildings, the rich in their citadels, everyone else piled up in rotting old hotels along the coast or in Giveback work-camps. What are you clinging on to?
Well, the kids. They are the innocent party in the mess he has made of his life, and yet there’s also something more, something morbid, some half articulated sense of being unbreakably wedded to England. A kind of nationalism, a sense of duty to what he thought was best in the English; sentimental nationalism from a sentimental fool. A man with a sense of responsibility for and to the people around him. He wished he could say fuck it and go, or fuck them and climb the rungs to a higher income and a place at the big boy’s table, but he will stay instead where he is, burdened by his hope, stranded by his love, indebted in every part of his life.
It’s true too, that he has started having nightmares, waking up in the brittle early morning light to the sound of the sea gnawing away at the shore, the gulls wobbling stiffly in the southwest wind outside his fourth floor window. He dismisses them, of course, who doesn’t have nightmares? That’s what life is, a nightmare.
He would reflect on them more, perhaps as he cycled to work, if they weren’t of such staggering obviousness, daily battles so crudely, minimally, cloaked in the symbolic that he is almost embarrassed. That’s me, Nick thinks, even my dreams are stolid, meat and two veg, common sense dreams, though of course they are not really dreams at all, simply the intrusion of the working day into the night, the mind unable to let go of the routine, the motor reflex. When he was a kid, a student, back in the day, he had a summer job in a factory for a while, making up cardboard boxes in a warehouse, all day, every day, with a tape gun and flat packs of varying sizes, and then in bed at night drifting off to sleep he found his mind replaying the same action over and over so that in fact he scarcely had the time or space to dream at all, his dreams embossed and imprinted with the repetition of the day. His dreams now are dreams in which the capital and a few select enclaves in the South are physically breaking away from the rest of the country, raising themselves up on huge escarpments of rock, each one with its glittering tiara of steel and glass, the surplus populations spilling over the edges and plunging earthward, Nick rushing around, trying to find some way to catch them all as they come tumbling down toward him, a great bewildered avalanche.
Yes, if he gave himself time to think, to drift and dream, spent long days at the window, gazing out over Margate sands and letting the past sift through him, his thoughts would swirl in unbidden, intrusive, scraps and flashes of old desires, old losses, old wounds opening, he might see all kinds of connections, underpinnings, the unexamined assumptions that have patterned his days, given him his sense of the world, of himself. He might even remember that when he was a kid, November 13
th
1978, in a shop that has long ago closed down he played a video game, black and white, liquid crystal display in a moulded red plastic case, and how the purpose of the game was to save people leaping from a burning building, to control two stick-figure fireman holding a blanket and bounce the leapers to safety off the right hand edge of the screen. He would remember how much he wanted that game, how his father promised he would get him it for Christmas but never did and how the absence of the game, that first Christmas without his father, overturned his pleasure in everything he did receive.
The email from Alex Hargreaves asking to meet up arrived at a bad time, but there was no better time anyway, he supposed, and he was sure he could fit him in somewhere if he was interested enough to come down from London. Good to get a message from Paula too, though they had reconnected on Facebook a few years ago and left jokey comments or reminiscences on each other’s feed, liked photos of each other’s kids and, ultimately of course, sent messages of sympathy and support. Terrible what had happened to her son, terrible.
In fact he found himself, after her email, spending a while flicking through some of the photos she had uploaded and feeling wistful, lingering on her image, feeling vaguely guilty and panicked all the time, worried that Theresa would somehow catch him at it and launch into a tirade. How can she still be so jealous, five years after they have split up? He hopes she will find someone else, until she does he can’t be free, until she does he daren’t even approach the idea of a divorce. Still, even having got this far, having moved out, having got as far as Margate when she wanted him to get a place just around the corner in Broadstairs, was a battle, tears, threats and hysteria. On the other hand it just means that all the extra running around he has to do is even more time consuming.
When they divorce will she get to keep the house he is paying the mortgage on? He has broached the subject of her returning to work and each time she has become instantly distraught. He winces. The way her face crumples up and her knees sag as though whatever is being suggested is draining all the life out of her, the horrified, trapped darting of her eyes, the way her mouth pulls down at the corners, the tremendous violence of her attack. Ask anybody else about her, anyone who knew them slightly, and they would say she was shy, a timid little thing, other friends and family might say she was moody, controlling, easily offended, but only Nick knows, well Nick and the kids, the extremes of her behaviour, her tantrums, her endless demands and recriminations.