to be left alone.
At that point, a new page emerged: “What sort of emergency meeting?”
“Whole of branch,” he wrote on the reverse side, thinking that she was enquiring about who was gathering in the tea room.
Out came her response: “No. What sort of emergency?”
He could almost hear her frustration.
“Unspecified,” he wrote.
“‘Unspecified’ as in ‘general?’” she enquired.
“As in ‘not yet known’,” he sent back.
He looked at his watch. It was 9:04. As he waited for Lorrae’s next response, the newest member of the Committee Support Section, Barbara Best, a willowy red head, loped towards him. “Car problems,” she announced, as was her custom on Monday mornings.
“Everyone’s at an emergency meeting in the tea room,” Alan whispered.
“I’ll head straight there,” Barbara said, looking at the door of the section head she’d never met.
“So, we have an emergency,” the next slip from Lorrae read, “but no one knows what sort it is.”
Alan didn’t want to be unduly difficult but did think himself obliged to point out the deficiency in her thinking.
“With respect, someone must know,” he wrote, “or the emergency wouldn’t have been designated as such.”
“But you don’t know that the alleged emergency is, in fact, an emergency, do you?”
“I don’t,” Alan conceded.
“Or what type of emergency it is.”
“True, once again.”
Alan sensed that the exchange was nearly over and had not seen his communication skills used to best effect. Another piece of paper was disgorged.
“Anything else?”
Alan couldn’t think of anything that needed saying. “No,” he wrote.
“Then, too busy (for alleged and non-specific emergencies),” came the reply with the capitalised word “END” at the very bottom.
He pushed the note back under the door, as required by his instructions, and hurried away.
Chapter 3
Meetings in the department inevitably began eight minutes after the appointed hour with an announcement that the most senior of expected attendees had been detained by more important persons or by more pressing business. By the time Alan arrived at the tea room, he was seven and three-quarter minutes late, yet fifteen seconds early.
The branch head, Marcus “Miserable” Mecklenburg ─ a thin, pallid, worried man who’d been senior media adviser to a succession of disgraced government ministers ─ followed Alan into the room. After announcing that Brian Gulliver, their new first assistant secretary, had been ‘unfortunately delayed’, Mecklenburg wasted no time on additional preliminaries.
“It is my melancholy duty to inform you,” he announced, “that, quite separately from any targeted savings which may yet be required of the department, this branch is to be abolished at the close of business on 24 December.”
Alan’s heart raced and gasps could be heard from all corners of the room. Peaches Trefusis, Mecklenburg’s executive assistant, burst into tears and was led away by a first-aid officer.
“People who are on contracts will finish up on Christmas Eve. Ongoing staff will presumably be subject to the customary redeployment arrangements, enabling them to trade positions with officers in secure jobs who are happy to transfer to our branch and be made redundant.”
All the permanent staff, except for Miserable, himself, did mental calculation of how much their redundancies would be worth, using the standard formula.
“The relevant unions have been informed,” said Mecklenburg, “that there are unlikely to be, at this stage, any forced separations of permanent staff.”
The mention of forced separations stilled the hands of those whose journalistic instincts had been awakened by the press-conference-like circumstances.
“Because I don’t know anything more than what I’ve just told you, there is no point in asking me any questions. I’ll tell you more when I know more.”
A number of the journalists’ hands shot up, anyway. Miserable ignored them all. “Thank you for coming,” he said, as he headed out the door.
For the longest three seconds after his departure, the eighty people remaining behind stared at each other in mute disbelief. When the silence broke, though, there were as many questions and exclamations as there were persons present (minus, perhaps, one).
While some asked how it could be that a whole branch was to be summarily dispatched, others speculated about the particular acts of commission and omission which might have caused the new government to abolish them. Others – mostly contractors – voiced more personal concerns, wondering how they’d pay the rent, meet their child support payments or pay for their leased motor vehicles.
If Alan hadn’t been in a state of standing shock, he’d have heard Miserable blamed for the course of events because “things always ended up badly with him”, “because he was bad karma/juju/news/medicine,” and “because he knew where the skeletons were buried.” Other explanations he might have noted were ones to the effect that the journalists comprising most of the branch had done too good a job of talking up the department’s achievements under the previous government (not thought to have much substance), that they'd done too poor a job (again, not thought to have much substance) and that the new ministerial advisers had seen the names of too many one-time critics and detractors on the branch phone list (thought to have a great deal of substance).
“Or it’s about none of that,” said a grizzled old drunk who’d once been a press gallery bureau chief, “and it’s to do with the page 3 girls.”
“The page 3 girls,” said another old hack, glumly.
Opinions were fiercely divided on the extent to which the swimsuit-less models whose chests had once diverted attention from any newsworthy content in the rest of the newspaper, were to blame for declining community respect for the fourth estate – more to blame than, say, articles about cross-dressing clergy, peculating politicians and celebrity amours.
One thing led, as usual, to another, and attendees were soon embroiled in argument about the plummeting standards of modern journalism and whether the media had a role in shaping public expectations or were simply required to provide a low-brow readership with the philistine content it required (with or without a triple D brassiere).
While the debate raged around him, Alan thought about the advisory committee whose bi-monthly deliberations he had dutifully recorded and “improved” over the previous nine years. It seemed to him that all the effort he’d made to instil in committee members a respect for procedure, an understanding of ‘the possible’ and a sense of the sensible, had been a waste. Nine years of his life
