in Milan, a year in Germany and I’d done my masters in a Paris business school; I’d taken night classes to learn Dutch as a kind of a personal project but it was on a friend’s hen night in Madrid where I’d met the woman who would become my Spanish alibi. Despite my not having studied law like my father and Riley or medicine like Philip I think my father was marginally proud of my university accomplishments and my knowledge of languages, until I moved to this job and whatever little delight he had for me went out the window.
The first person in the office I met every morning was Nosy Bitch, but who was christened Louise by her parents. I shall name her Nosy in the interest of taste. She was the administrator, was getting married in twelve months’ time and had been planning her big day ever since Day One in the womb. When Fish Face, the boss, wasn’t around, she flicked through magazines and ripped out pictures to create mood boards of her perfect day. Not that I was a woman of absolute substance but I liked to think I possessed at least some and I was tired of her incessant chat about all things cosmetic, which would have been the same choices regardless of the man she married. Her inquiry into other people’s “special day” was endless. She wasn’t so much a magpie for information as a piranha because she devoured every word as soon as it was spoken. Conversations with her were interviews and I knew every question was designed to suit her making a decision about her own life but never out of courtesy to ask about mine. She would turn her nose up at things she didn’t like, and when she heard something that she found pleasing she would barely listen to the end of the sentence before scurrying back to her desk to document her new findings. I disliked her quite intensely and the fact that she wore tight T-shirts, with ridiculous logos, that failed to cover her love handles continued to annoy me more and more every day. It was the minutiae of any person that watered the seeds of dislike, though on the contrary the things I hated most about Blake, like his teeth grinding in his sleep, ended up being the very things I missed most about him. I wondered if Jenna the bitch minded his teeth grinding.
Today Nosy wore a blazer over a black T-shirt, which had a picture of Shakespeare and beneath read Prose before Hos. Sometimes I wondered if she even understood what they meant.
‘Good morning, Lucy.’
‘Morning, Louise.’ I smiled at her and waited for random question number one of the day.
‘Have you ever been to Egypt?’
I’d been there with Blake. We’d done the whole shebang: ridden camels in the Sahara, sat with the pharaohs, dived in the Red Sea, cruised the Nile. However, Nosy was asking for purely selfish purposes, not so she could float with me in my wonderful memory bubbles. ‘No, sorry,’ I said, and the hope on her face diminished. I went straight to my desk, threw my cappuccino cup in the bin, hung my coat up and headed off to make a fresh coffee. The rest of the team was squished inside the galley kitchen.
‘What’s this? A secret meeting?’
‘Good morning, princess,’ Graham the Cock greeted me. ‘Coffee?’
‘It’s okay, I’ll make it.’ I squeezed past him to get to the kettle. He leaned out from the counter a little so I had to rub against his crotch. I considered kneeing him. Graham was the office cock who had watched one too many episodes of Mad Men and was on the lookout for an office affair. Married with children, of course, he slicked back his hair in a greasy quiff in an effort to emulate his Madison Avenue advertising allies and wore so much aftershave you could tell that he’d arrived by the sweet stench that lingered in the air. I didn’t feel one bit complimented by his smarmy advances; I might have, if I’d wanted to spend a night with Pepé Le Pew and if his advances weren’t directed at every woman who so much as walked within a mile of his pong. To give him some credit, he might once upon a time have been attractive if his venture into a lifetime of commitment with the same human being who wanted to share everything with him including his soul, yet who would never understand the real him, hadn’t killed his internal spark.
I filled the kettle with water.
‘Did you hear?’ Mary the Mouse said in her voice that always seemed to be a decibel under a normal speaking tone. Mary’s eyes were almost twice the size of her head, an amazing miracle of nature. Her nose and lips were dots on her face, hence the nickname Mouse.
‘Hear what?’
‘Now, now, we don’t want to scare Lucy, she’s just walked in the door.’ That was Quentin, named Twitch because of his habit of blinking both eyes twice in twenty-second intervals which increased in meetings or when he was addressing a crowd. He was a nice man, if not a little boring, and I had no problems with him. He did the graphics for the manuals so he and I worked closely together.
‘We’re having a meeting in Edna’s office this morning,’ Mouse said, her little face still and her big eyes moving around like a frightened rodent.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Louise heard it from Brian in Marketing. Everybody’s section is having a meeting.’
‘Brian Murphy or Bryan Kelly?’ Steve the Sausage asked.
Explaining Steve’s nickname was simple. Steve, bless him, looked like a sausage.
‘What’s the difference?’ Mouse asked, eyes wide.
‘Brian Murphy spells Brian with an i and Bryan Kelly spells Bryan with a y,’ I said, knowing full well that’s not what she meant. I felt Cock’s breath on my neck as he laughed to himself and I was pleased. I was a laughter whore, I’d take it from anyone.
‘No, I mean why does it matter who told us?’ she asked timidly.
‘Because Brian Murphy is full of shit, and Bryan Kelly isn’t,’ Cock explained.
‘I’ve always found both of them to be reputable men,’ Twitch said respectfully.
Mouse pulled open the door. ‘Louise?’
Nosy joined us in the already crammed kitchen. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Was it Brian Murphy or Bryan Kelly who told you about the meeting?’
‘What does it matter?’
‘Because Bryan Kelly is full of shit,’ I said, deliberately mixing it up. Cock smiled again, the only one who noticed.
‘And apparently Brian Murphy isn’t,’ Mouse said. ‘So who said it?’
‘Which guy is Brian Murphy?’ Nosy asked. ‘Is he the redhead or the one with the bald patch?’
I rolled my eyes, made my coffee as quickly as possible and pushed my way through the group. ‘Either way it means more cuts, doesn’t it,’ I said to no one in particular. And no one in particular answered. Everyone just stared into the distance and retreated to their minds, thinking about the personal dangers ahead.
‘I’m sure everything is going to be fine,’ Twitch said. ‘Let’s not all worry.’
But they already were, so I returned to my desk to do my crossword and left them all at it.
Commonplace, lacking originality or wit.
I looked around.
Banal.
When
