as if yearning for nothing more than to be banging a sad-looking fifty-year-old woman on top of a coffee machine. Every time he let Ross call him Art, he reflected, a little bit of his soul died. He suspected (correctly) that Ross knew this. ‘I was doing alright until you came along.’
‘Oh!’ Cathy blushed again and waved her hands. This was possibly the most wonderful time she’d had in years.
‘Never mind, eh, pet?’ Ross leaned in chummily. ‘If you get made redundant today we’ll just go and cruise round the world, eh?’
Cathy smiled happily. Arthur shut his eyes. This was awful. Why didn’t he just punch him? He’d seen the picture of the ex-page-three model Ross claimed to be going out with, and she didn’t share much in common with Cathy apart from a certain look of resignation around the eyes. He should defend Cathy and punch Ross and … thrust a sword through his heart.
He opened his eyes. A sword? That was a bit much, surely. Offensive weapons weren’t really his style: he was a Labour voter and an inveterate spider freer.
‘Worried, Art?’ said Ross.
‘No,’ said Arthur, panicking.
Ross sniffed, looked as if he knew something the others didn’t, and walked away.
Can I feel my blood pressure rise? thought Arthur. Ooh. If I had a heart attack I’d get three months off to recover. Then: I am thirty-two years old and wishing for a heart attack. That cannot be good. Perhaps a mildly painless form of cancer, that got lots of sympathy. Or if he jumped out of the window here, made it look like an accident …
He wandered back to his desk, ostentatiously holding his nose as he passed Sven. ‘You’ve got mail!’ said a smarmy American voice. Arthur was surprised to see he’d automatically turned on his computer. Oh God. This, as well as a tendency to dial ‘nine’ before making a phone call at home was starting to make him think that his brain was gradually melding with the office. Soon, he would have no independent thoughts left of his own. His computer would beep ‘You’ve got thoughts!’ and then proceed to delete them, one by one.
Eighteen messages, almost all involving the project he was currently working on – the mooted bid for a new hypermarket near the town centre which involved knocking down substantial bits of old houses and creating a six-hundred-space multi-storey car park which would obscure the view of the marshland. It would also create fifteen hundred jobs and, on the whole, people tended to like handy hypermarkets. As a government worker charged with reviewing the viability of such projects, he often figured it would, in the long run, be quicker for him just to pull down his trousers and pull open his butt cheeks for the mega-grocers.
The e-mail he was looking for, however, was about a third of the way down the screen.
re: Strategic review job reassessment schedule.
In his head, he heard them mispronounce ‘schedule’.
Please report to conference room B at 10.10 a.m …
Ah hah, he thought. Not even doing it in half-hour cycles. They must already know who they wanted in or out.
… for your psychometric testing.
Oh crap. The last time Arthur had done any psychometric testing, it had recommended he join the army. Although, on balance, how could that possibly be any worse than what he was doing now? Well, he could be shot to death, he supposed.
I would like to remind all staff that this is simply a cost-benefit-efficiency exercise devised to see how we can get the best out of all public service environments – a goal with which we’re all in agreement!
Yes, thought Arthur. I would gladly let my family starve and my house get repossessed if it benefited public service environments.
So, don’t worry and you never know – you might even enjoy taking the test!
Yours, Ross.
Cathy leaned over from the next booth, twisting her brooch nervously.
‘I get three twenty-five,’ she said. ‘You know, I’m not sure if I will enjoy taking the test.’
Arthur wanted to be reassuring, but couldn’t think of a way. ‘I’m not so sure, either. Otherwise they’d call it a “party”. Although not one of our Christmas parties. Which are also misleadingly titled.’
Cathy’s face fell even further. ‘I organize those.’
‘Of course you do! Just being …’ he groped for a word. ‘Um, “wacky”.’
Cathy, not normally a good judge of wacky behaviour (eg: having more than two piercings would count as wacky, as did being gay; filling your house full of china dolls bought on a monthly payment plan however would have crossed her radar as perfectly normal), narrowed her eyes at this travesty of the Trade Descriptions Act.
‘It’ll be a piece of piss,’ said Sven, standing up for his twice-hourly trip to the vending machine. He normally timed them for whenever his phone was ringing, which drove everybody crazy. ‘Just tell them you’re not doing it!’
‘Yes, well, the only way someone could get away with that,’ said Arthur, realizing he was sounding peevish and exactly like his father, ‘would be to do a job so incomprehensible that no-one understands it, so they can’t fire you. Or your dog.’
Sven nodded with satisfaction, taking the compliment. His phone started to ring. He ignored it and walked away.
‘Yeah. I’m so happy I’m not some generic paper pusher – ooh, sorry,’ was his parting shot.
‘I am NOT …’ Arthur took a deep breath, conscious that Sven was always trying to rile him and that it always worked. Also, that whoever the evil consultants might be, they would probably choose a good moment to walk past while he was getting involved in a yelling match. And also, that it was true.
He sighed and turned back to his computer. Sven came back slopping coffee, and took an enormous bite out of his second roll, spluttering crumbs all over Arthur’s in-tray. Management had discouraged the habit of going out to lunch by situating the offices seventeen miles from the nearest conurbation, so the entire room had a patina of other people’s pot noodles and Marmite.
Arthur sat in purgatory for the next forty minutes, unable to concentrate. How had he got here, struggling to hold on to a shitty job he didn’t want, on a wet Tuesday in Coventry? School had been alright, hadn’t it? College – fine, fun. Geography, the world’s easiest option in the days when universities had still been fairly exclusive organizations that didn’t include degrees in Star Trek and Cutlery. And, ‘There’ll always be a need for town planners,’ his dad had said, pointing out with unarguable logic that people did, indeed, continue to be born. And now he was thirty-two and wanted to kill someone for accidentally spilling small pieces of bread into a black plastic container that didn’t belong to him, filled with crappy bits of paper he didn’t give a flying rat’s fart about. Hmm.
At four minutes past ten, he got up as casually as he dared without pondering too much on the fact that if he was absolutely spot-on for time, this could mean something on the psychometric testing. Cathy looked up at him with wide-eyed fear.
‘I’ll write the answers down on the back of my hand for
