Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?
Clambering through your bedroom window at midnight with a knife between my teeth.
Cycling, cycling, wheels spinning, wheels within wheels, the tides and seasons, the stars and planets in the sky, the circulation of the blood through his veins and atoms round the nucleus and a ghost himself in all this endlessly spinning matter. Head down, Nick, plough on. A full day’s work ahead, his backpack bulging with an assortment of
Cranalia
, the contents of the shoebox Vernon left him, some other odds and ends. Alex Hargreaves has been messaging him, determined to get down today and get his hands on whatever he thinks Nick has to offer him. Nick’s promised him the writing and notebooks, the tapes and CDs to this Graeme Ferris guy.
Funny that suddenly someone’s showing an interest. Be good to finally get rid of this stuff.
Along the coast, taking a slightly less direct route to make the most of the morning sun, he had a memory of his first crush when he was a kid, very young, about six or seven. He was down on the beach with his friend David when a girl he had a thing for approached. He used to walk past her house everyday when he was a kid, hoping she would come out and see him, register his presence. Tracey, wasn’t it, that was her name; they were in the same class. She came running over to them and it was immediately clear to him from the look on her face that David was the one she wanted to see; her eyes were fixed on him, her smile was his, he understood why, David was a handsome boy, everyone commented on it and he understood that at that moment in a sense he didn’t exist, that he was peripheral, that the real drama and the real intensities, the happy mutualities went on elsewhere. And somehow on that bright day with its picture-book golden sand, bottle-green sea and huge refulgent dome of azure high summer sky, one little boy in an instant winked out of existence and then re-entered the world, rearranged.
This coming in and out of existence, until one day.
Work’s done and he’s out by seven, after a few apologetic texts to Alex Hargreaves for being late. In the pub he is half tempted to have a beer but resists; he will only pay the price in terms of concentration and energy levels tomorrow, and they have another phalanx of Giveback defaulters that need processing over the weekend. No, he needs to stay on top of things.
So what’s the interest in Vernon? He asks Alex Hargreaves, genuinely bemused.
Well, Alex says, sipping a bottle of Stella and looking faintly uncomfortable, keeping his voice down low. There is this big market for lost classics, y’ know.
The Groom
,
Ten Thousand Times the Man
, all that reissued Hanusen stuff. I think Vernon’s stuff could maybe fit into that kind of category. The music’s quite remarkable.
Yeah, Nick nods, yeah it was. How he got those sounds out of that technology we never quite figured out. It was a very basic set up.
Sometimes the limitations create the originality.
Is originality important do you think? Vernon was obsessed with it. Everything always sounded too much like something else to him. I think he was tortured by it.
Alex smiles.
All that stuff is a little bit beyond me. Nick smiles back. I did Engineering. If we hadn’t ended up sharing a flat in halls … I sort of got carried along by it all.
But you DJed right?
Only because I was straight enough to. He laughs. Vernon was. Well he took it to the limit. And anyway, DJing is kind of a technical problem really, it suited me I think. None of that creative stuff for me.
Who’s this Graeme Ferris guy?
Brother of an acquaintance of mine, we have got a little retro-rave going on down here next week,
Return to Dreamland
. One of the organisers got in touch, asked me if I’d like to get involved. His brother’s a collector. We’ve agreed to go seventy-thirty on anything he can get for it. I mean I just don’t have the time.
Can you get me his email?
Sure, I’ll ask if I can pass it along.
Do you mind? Alex gestures to the DictaPhone app.
No, no, Nick says.
His own phone suddenly buzzes a message at him.
Your children would like to hear from their father before they go to bed. Or shall I just explain to them again that he pretends to give a shit but he is too wrapped up in his own life to bother with you.
He smiles tightly at Alex Hargreaves. Sorry. Give me a sec, what’s the time? Fuck, late. He has agreed to ring them every night at 8.45 to say night night and it is 8:49. He heads for the door, can imagine Theresa already boiling with rage and when she answers the phone, for a second after he says
it’s me
, she simply doesn’t answer.
It’s me, he says again.
I know, I know it’s you. I am waiting.
Waiting?
For an apology. Is that so difficult? To just apologise?
I am sorry.
Well me too, I am sorry that there is something more important than your children. Is it a woman?
No, it’s not a woman.
Really, really? Why don’t you explain to us then what is more important than your children?
Are we on speakerphone? Please let’s not have this conversation on speakerphone.
Ah, so you do have something to hide. He hears a small voice in the background say, Hello Daddy.
Hello, he says back. Let me speak to the kids.
There’s a silence and then his daughter’s voice is in his ear. I’m sorry I rang you late, he says. I was busy. Are we on speakerphone? Turn off the speakerphone.
The speakerphone stays on, Theresa says in the background. I like to hear your lies and excuses.
Why did you ring late?
I was talking to someone, a journalist, and I got carried away and I am only a little bit late. How’s school?
A journalist, Daddy?
Yes, remember Daddy used to be a DJ. That’s where all the records in the loft are from.
Were you famous?
No, no. But people are interested in the past that’s all.
They talk for a minute more before his son comes on excited, telling him about the impending launch of Rat Squad 4 and asking if he can get one for him on Saturday as Theresa says no, no, none of those violent games loudly in the background.
Nick stands with his hand over the phone to protect it from the light rain that has begun sifting down, darkening the pavement, choosing his words, knowing that Theresa will be listening and then coming on to criticise him for his lack of feeling, his lack of affection and spontaneity and he’ll say how can I when I know you are listening, I’m waiting for exactly this moment and she’ll say oh don’t kid yourself, I know you. You were always like that, always. Why do you pretend to care when you never have?
In the shower he reflects that he would have liked, he supposed, to have been free, a person who took things less seriously, but then he reminds himself of Vernon and Rob and feels resolute again, saying to himself, yes well, perhaps there were other types of freedom than that, than refusal and self-destruction. All that seems to him a slippery slope, to start following desires rather than your sense of duty, where will it end, how do you limit it, do you just keep going till you hit the point at which the body or brain collapses and then an inevitable limit is imposed? He scrubs at his head with Brushfire Hi Alert Shower Gel, and then gets his fingers gratifyingly deep into the folds of his ears. He relishes his morning shower, Nick, makes sure he is fully deodorised before his cycle ride to work so he won’t arrive sweaty and dishevelled.
But then, how to place a limit on duty either? Burnout. That seems to be what has happened to Rob, anyway. He went out somewhere and never quite came back. Vernon he was sure was dead, either suicide or an accident; he was malnourished, probably, collapsing somewhere on one of his pilgrimages and crawling off under a bush. Poor Vernon, if only he could have held out, held on a few more years they might be laughing and joking about it now. But, then, more realistically probably over twenty years they would all have gone their separate ways. They might not even know each other. Though it does seem in a way that all of them have had their troubles, their irregularities, that life has not settled down into a predictable pattern for any of that old crew.
Yes, yes, well. No doubt it’s the same really for everyone, from the outside everything looks normal, but on the inside, in the secret recesses of the heart, there are forces, tearing at things.
No doubt, no doubt. Best to keep busy, keep realistic; don’t start thinking, for example, about Paula Adonor.
Wasn’t she lovely? Lovely. She was just so, ah, well. Not to be, not to be. After she and Vernon split up he did think for a while that maybe, but there was never a right time to approach her, and then she was seeing Harvey, a good bloke, solid, the antithesis of Vernon really, which shows that despite the doubts he had at the time, that he was too dull, too normal, not magical enough, not a big enough personality, that ultimately she was looking for something a little bit more stable, more secure. So maybe, maybe, but not to be and pointless to dwell on all that now.
And besides, work. He has his
CPD
in five days.
There are new sets of protocols to familiarise himself with, new forms of psychometric assessments, ways of assessing risk and assigning people to the most appropriate Giveback programmes. Just this Saturday he had lunch with one of his colleagues from the Dover branch, Chloe, a very pleasant girl in her late twenties who he met on a training course and immediately stuck up a friendship with, frontline at the local Claimant Centre and thoroughly demoralised.
She had spent the whole of the workshop on new assessment processes,
Claimants: Evaluating Mindsets and Mindtype
s with her jaw set tight, almost audibly grinding her teeth, bad body language, dead giveaway, Nick as usual, neutrally poised and alert, pen and pad at the ready. After a few role plays in which she seemed reluctant to participate and a long Prezi presentation on forms of psychological assessment that frontline staff would have to carry out on Claimants, in which such words as populate, migrate, colonise, terraform, deforest, and re-wild were used to describe the entry of figures and the deployment of ticks (not crosses) circles (not lines) and lines (not circles) on a new flotilla of forms, they retired to the kitchen to eat some Pret sandwiches and bond.
Now we have to make psychological assessments of Claimants. I am not trained to do that.
Well, Nick said with gentle irony, you will be after today’s three-hour lecture and the follow-up webinar.
She gazed out of the window. Our office now, she said, looks more like a detention centre, security guards on every floor, no phones, no computers for the Claimants to use, the slightest discrepancy and we sanction people, really complicated forms and jobsearch diaries to fill out, and if you don’t sanction people and it’s discovered you have been too lenient, then. I wish they would just make me redundant.
Nick nods. Every new government has to introduce…
Now I have to assess people’s … what? Their character, their mental health, their attitude, and assign them to motivational therapy or sanction them? She has the handouts rolled up into a baton, clenched tight in her fist. What does that mean, “systemic inability to act entrepreneurially”, “clear problems of dependency”, what does “psycho-social neoteny” mean?
That they haven’t grown up to–
I know, she snapped, I know what it means.
Nick paused, took a bite of salt beef and guacamole on seeded dark rye.
Don’t take it personally, he said. This is the new compliance regime, we will all comply, then it will all change again and again.
We need to take a stand at some point though. This is … This is people dying. Vulnerable people. I had someone last week. She breathes out heavily, shakes her head.
Well me too, we all have. If we don’t do it, someone else will. Better us than someone who relishes the role right?
Even if we are powerless to stop or change anything?
Well, within the limits imposed on us we can try and treat people with courtesy, with some recognition of their humanity, I mean.
The human face of an inhuman system? She said under her breath then glanced around nervously.
He shrugged and smiled. The humane element within it, maybe.
I used to be scared of being on the other side of the desk. Now I can’t see much difference.
USG
. Except the money.
How badly do you need the money?
I signed up to an agency, I work through BettaTemps.
Nick pulls a tight smile and nods. Ah.
I didn’t know that any future employer, they don’t make it clear to you, would have to buy me out of my contract with them. You know. When there’s so many people out there looking for work, why would a company take on that extra expense? I could buy myself out but it’s thousands of pounds and I am already…
I know it’s …
It’s indentured servitude, her voice trailed off as the programme organiser wandered towards them, his face a mask of bland solicitation.
Hi, he said, I am Tony and I just want to share with you my excitement about the prospect of us all working together to really get this project momentumised going forward. My digital door is always open so to speak; we really welcome your input. You are the key element, the client-facers, the implementators, the facilitationers.
Nick coughed on a rye crumb, half wished Jerome were there.
What exactly are the purposes of these tests that staff have to take? I don’t quite get it.
An older lady, a fellow trainee, had joined them now, discreetly removing a spot of crème fraiche from the side of her mouth with a napkin. Psychometric testing has been used in the corporate sector for years, Chloe, she said. This facility for remembering everyone’s name at a glance, something Nick still struggles with. It’s a way of ensuring that client-facers don’t have or aren’t developing a Claimant mentality themselves.
Empathy can be a powerful conduit for infection, Tony said.
So it’s a way of weeding out the compassionate ones, you mean? Chloe asked. Nick smiled. Aha! Well now she is going to get herself sacked.