Why did he take so long to leave her? Because he was scared? Because that would have been a breaking point and the breaking point with her was a life and death affair, madness would ensue, real and terrible transgressions, and it was better to delay that moment any way he could.
Was he a coward? More that he felt a sense of responsibility, he had done this after all, he had kissed her as they sat shivering on a bench on a bright, cold autumn afternoon, though he wasn’t sure what had motivated him to do it, certainly not lust and her tentative response and then the nervous half smiles as the kiss broke peremptorily off and she said, oh, that was a nice surprise with her eyes down suggesting that was hardly a motive of hers either. Nick went in to kiss her again. A kiss that was, in truth, as wooden as the bench they sat on, their lips together, their tongue and teeth knocking dryly about, both their noses cold and sniffly, the sun too bright, the smell of chips, her bright red ears and watery eyes, his hand lying like a dead bird in her lap.
And from this, kids, and ten years of their lives gone.
He tries not to think about it and just enjoy the brief cycle ride from his flat to the office to allow himself an empty, thoughtless fifteen minutes before the day’s tumult begins. He has had a bowl of muesli and a protein shake for breakfast, and two cups of green tea. If there has been one overridingly good thing about his relationship with Theresa it is that he has sorted his diet out, stopped snacking on crisps and chocolate, eating high-fat high-sugar foods. He feels better for it and he’s lost weight. Next year he thinks he will do a half marathon if he can just get enough free time to train.
He is listening to music on his iPod as he cycles,
VIP Riders
by Rufige Kru, a little joke, a female voice repeating again and again:
Everyday of my life, Everyday of my life
. He closes his eyes for a second on a straight, clear stretch of road and feels the speed and the wind in his face, the drums settling and surging, hurtling him into the unknown for a glorious second before he opens them again, pulled almost into keeping them closed for longer than would strictly be safe, and sees the Town Hall ahead of him, coasts up to the curb, dismounts, takes off his helmet, locks up his bike. Up the steps, in through the door, the lift, the keys out for his office, greets co-workers, slips off his coat, grabs a coffee, powers up the desktop.
Monday morning, Monday afternoon, and then the evening gone and Tuesday. He grips the handlebars, his wheels whir on the road, the wind whips past his ears.
Days gone, weeks gone, months gone, years gone.
He has his annual review and
CPD
session in ten day’s time.
It could certainly be said that in his job every day brings new challenges, new surprises. In the shower he inventories the grimness. His line manager, Jo, spirited away overnight, a meeting at head office then a week on emergency leave and all enquiries stonewalled, followed by an announcement that she had moved on to pastures new, gone off just like that without working out her notice, to pursue other opportunities. A week of chaos in which everyone was required to up their game and take on even more responsibility ensued. Judy, stepping in to be an interim manager until a replacement, now nicknamed The Clone, was parachuted in by
USG
. She discovered that over the previous week 4,000 urgent emails had accumulated in her inbox, 76% of which contained attachments on updates to policies and implementation strategies. The mercilessly accreting mountain of paperwork growing steeper and more exhausting until one day you collapsed and were carted away, gross misconduct, 4,000 emails unanswered, your reluctance to pull a 25 hour day, seven days a week for stagnant pay disqualifying you as a fully desirable
USG
colleague, what with your residual expectations of public sector ease and inefficiency.
49 years old, sacked, on the scrapheap, mortgage to pay, one child at University, the other doing A-levels, debts no doubt, no option now but to take any job that’s offered you, shelf stacking for your benefits, figuring out how you can downsize, praying that house prices stay high.
CPD looming for them all. They have been asking each other the question in the office for a bit of light relief. Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?
He sent a tentative email to the HR department at
USG
just yesterday suggesting that the workload and the extra responsibilities that had devolved to him were more than he could reasonably manage even pulling an eighty-hour week, and received a message back in which the HR person mentioned to him that when she had worked in Carphone Warehouse they had an acronym:
J.F.G.
,
Just Fucking Getonwithit
. He mentioned it in passing in the staff canteen waiting for his Sainsbury’s Katsu Curry to heat up and one of his
USG
colleagues, the Strategic Transformation Manager, told him, with a dull, exhilarated gleam in his eye, that when he had worked at Arthur Anderson they also had a slogan,
F.I.F.O.
Fit In or Fuck Off
. Always better to jump before you are pushed and they know you know that. No redundancy payments either. Win-win.
Where do you see yourself in five years’ time? Strapped to a treadmill being shoved down a flight of steps into a cellar filled with dung and corpses.
Later on he has meeting with the Regional Strategy Officer and Stuart Trafford, brought in from the financial services sector, still living up in London and, as far as Nick can tell, on several times the salary everyone else gets heading the Heritage Arbitrage section of the Redevelopment arm of the local council, now almost fully colonised by
USG
, whose mission is “unlocking the value” of all the old hotels along the coast up by the Marina. Their meeting last week was especially mind boggling, the two departments having been told, as far as Nick can make out, to do incompatible things: it is Stuart’s role to gentrify and regenerate the same street of hotels that they need to use as emergency accommodation, into which they are to decant the currently unallocated London overspill.
Initially he had imagined there was some misunderstanding over which streets and buildings were involved, though attempting to make anywhere around that area more aspirational, what with the increasing flow of bewildered decantees from South London and the furore among local pressure groups, the open hostility, the fist fights, the graffiti, the rocks through windows, the half-serious plots to firebomb places, and the increasing numbers of demos from far right and anti-fascist parties would certainly be impossible. Nick wants to explain: Look, well, the original set of Down From London’s twenty years ago was all white flight East End thugs and football racists who stood at bars swallowing pints in single gulps, talking about how London was a sewer now, and how at least down here it wasn’t full of Shwartzes and Yids, but instead he holds his tongue, amuses himself reflecting on the bafflement of the new crop of
DFL
’s looking for a nice big family home down on the coast and instead relocating into the toxic stew of resentment, racism, long term deprivation, displacement, and mental health issues that are swamping the area. Yes, the big shiny Turner centre and a cafe selling six quid bowls of quinoa porridge and a retro sweet shop in a dogshit smeared cobbled street behind the local Wetherspoon’s are not going to compensate for that.
These are the hotels we are using as stopgap accommodation for Giveback relocations, Nick said. I mean, these are the same streets that London mental health services have been using to dump their persistent cases into cheaper accommodation for two decades.
Hal smiled crisply. Significance?
I mean, well. It’s difficult to, he paused, should he mention that one of the guesthouses on Crofton Street was stuffed to the gills with schizophrenics and so understaffed because of the cuts that it had become virtually an autonomous zone? No one bothered or dared to go in there. It was a massive public health hazard that someone, somewhere was supposed to be keeping tabs on, and the inevitable chaos and anti social behaviour around the adjacent streets led to more and more calls to crack down, fuelled more and more local resentment, was funnelled into increasing right-wing rhetoric, and on and on in a vicious downward spiral. Don’t you see this? he wanted to ask. Instead he kept his mouth shut.
What’s the point here? What point are you making? That this is a challenge you don’t feel you can take on?
No, nothing, Nick said quickly.
So, why… speak? Hal asked with a generally puzzled look on his face before re-addressing Stuart who continued his informal presentation of the area’s transformation into a series of luxury, boutique, fully serviced holiday homes, leveraging Margate’s Victorian Bohemian Heritage to create A Pedigree Steampunk Crèchestination for affluent young Londoners with kids who want a high value staycation. Work to start immediately.
He had thought it was perhaps because they didn’t know the local area, and then he realised perhaps they didn’t care about the local area. They were caught up in a virtual world, business, management, the project, which proceeded according to its own fevered, surreal logic, its own laws, lore, arcana, rituals, a set of practices known only to initiates, specific topologies, histories; locales don’t matter.
He smiled at Nick, glint of knife-sharp malice in his eyes; already he was one, two, ten steps ahead.
Our target demographic are fervent multiculturalists who are also nostalgic for and proud of a pre-multicultural Britain, who would like to move between these worlds, times, relationships, and who, while metropolitan liberals and broadly Labour voters when at home, are not necessarily opposed to the recent political developments in this area. They are political pluralists who can enjoy the positive sides of all kinds of ideological positions without becoming conflicted: in London I am a Liberal, in Thanet a Nationalist, in Sheffield a Socialist, and so on. The days of a unitary or committed political identity are long over and increasingly the aim is to enjoy as broad a spectrum of political positions as possible. They are cutting edge in regards to ideas about Regional autonomy and strong regional identities and are comfortable being Communists in Newcastle, One Nation Tories in Windsor, and English Patriots in Thanet.
They are high disposable income families who demand excellent quality services, adventurous when it comes to tradition. The Margate Project is part of course of a wider implementation strategy in which Heritage becomes specialised, brought to life. Want a 1900s experience? Head for the Southeast. The Edwardian age? The Southwest and so on. We have earmarked money offered through Government schemes for regional retro-generation, restoring the essential character of those areas that haven’t kept up, trying to fix their identity in place.
Nick nodded. Ah yes. Checking up on Stuart, his enemy, colleague, nemesis, he had looked at the website for his consultancy Reality Management and seen some of the retro-generation plans, including luxury accommodation tucked away behind the sooty facades of a full-time working pit village in Yorkshire. A news story that had popped up when he first searched and which had now been massaged away was about Goldthorpe’s residents protesting and the Revenue Optimisation Strategists suggesting that if the community genuinely did mourn the closure of the mine they should be delighted to have the opportunity to have it reopened again, but perhaps they preferred to remain as claimants. Anyway, soon enough that wouldn’t be an option for them anyway and they would be put to work in the occupations their grandfathers had undertaken, in order to bring back character to the areas. They were working with popular New Heritage Young British Artists to curate and recreate bygone communities and forms of life, some paying scrupulous fidelity to the past, some with hyper-stylized playfully postmodern renderings of past epochs.
Nick bit his tongue, thinking he may be missing some vital point somewhere. The same street must occupy two positions simultaneously as though they could split the fabric of the world apart and shunt the poor off into a different realm, to not be able to do so was a sackable offence. He has put too much faith in human rationality, allied it too closely to some basic sense of innate human decency, assumed that someone, somewhere with a greater understanding of things must be directing the world toward some benevolent end even if he can’t quite see the bigger picture himself, but instead now he worries that all of this is not about efficiency or growth or development, but is a kind of sadistic, lunatic gaming. He has a cold flash of insight, a gnostic, cruel universe and its tormenting powers who insist upon impossible tasks that will destroy the well-being of those allotted to carry them out, not even a disciplinary mechanism but an expression of malignance, a recognition perhaps there is no use or point to any of this and rather than be given time to breathe, to live and love and enjoy their short fragile few fleeting days, hours, seconds of life, instead they will harry us.
Perhaps he had never really seen it so starkly before, had never somehow lost his belief that there must be some higher logic or purpose to all this. He reflects on Crane for a second, poor old Vernon, who saw it all too clearly perhaps and chose to drift off into some other world, it’s better there for him, anywhere but here. Why was the world created? To drive us all mad.
Where do you see yourself in five year’s time?
In the loony-bin.
Sunday night, at the last meet-up before the big event, he expressed his incomprehension to Matty and Tobi, the guys organising
Return to Dreamland
. Tobi’s part of the Event Collective, one of the first groups to set up an art space in a derelict pub down in the Old Town, to which Nick offered his DJing Skillz.
Tobi sucked his teeth and nodded. Of course, that’s the technique, The Tournament, you are given impossible tasks, contradictory commands, and you must never acknowledge this but simply devote all your energies to undermining the other players in this particular game, a tournament defined by cunning, endurance, lateral strategising. Exalt Bad Faith, dwell in dissonance with a missionary zeal. Weaponise aporia.