what did he know, he asked himself, about his branch head’s upbringing, schooling, and extra-mural activities? There were likely to be, he consequently concluded, numerous things known to him that were not known to the other man … and vice versa.
He looked up. The branch head was staring at him as though he’d committed some mad, inexplicable act. Perhaps he’d spent too much time thinking about an appropriate response to the question which had been put to him. Perhaps, he thought to himself, he’d been over-complicating the matter.
“You must know something,” said Mecklenburg, getting up to refill his coffee mug from the drip filter machine.
This statement, by seeming to require Alan’s further consideration of his own store of knowledge, persuaded him that he’d been on the right path when thinking about the things he knew which others were unlikely to. It was, however, not an easy task to select a single fact or even an area of scholarship which encapsulated the most significant differences in what he and Mecklenburg were likely to have learned. And if he was only to nominate one “something” as representative of the differences in the knowledge the two of them had acquired during their four or so decades, what was it to be?
“Anything?” asked the branch head.
The idea of providing the first fact that came into his head – perhaps that actors had been banned, like gravediggers and ex-gladiators, from the Colosseum, owing to their low social status, or that George W McGill had invented the stapler or even that the Spotted Quail-thrush fans its tail in flight to reveal white tips – filled Alan with horror. Information of this sort wouldn’t or couldn’t be indicative or illustrative of the range of facts – arcane, recondite and esoteric, though some of them possibly were – he had acquired in the course of his years.
Yes, the problem was clearly one requiring more thought.
“So, nothing at all,” said the branch head.
“I probably need a little more time,” Alan at last replied.
“But you’re not refusing to tell me what you know?”
“Most certainly not, although it may take a while.”
“To tell?”
“To decide.”
“I see,” said Mecklenburg. “Do you think you’ll have made a decision by, I don’t know… tomorrow?”
“I’ll do my best,” said Alan.
“Time is of the essence.”
“Yes,” said Alan, even though he couldn’t see why.
“Then I’ll have Peaches organise for us to meet, again, in the afternoon.”
“Thank you for your patience,” Alan said.
“Meeting concluded,” said Miserable Mecklenburg turning to the coffee machine.
As Alan walked away, the question busying his synapses was one to do with timing: “Why, of all times, was it now that Miserable wanted to know what he (Alan) knew?” He could only suppose that, with redundancies in prospect, the time for leisurely enquiry had passed.
Chapter 4
There was no one in the bay occupied by the Committee Support Section when Alan returned to it.
“They’ve all gone to a union meeting,” said a woman behind Alan.
Azure Faraday, the most junior member of the Business Management Unit, was walking along the corridor with a can of soft drink in her hand.
“If you’re quick,” she said, “you’ll still catch them.”
The black T-shirt and jeans she was wearing would have been unthinkable office attire only a decade earlier but standards had declined so much, since Alan’s first day as a public servant, that he more often expected to be vexed by the bizarre than comforted by the appropriate.
“In the tea room,” Azure added.
“Thank you,” said Alan. He saw no reason to be impolite to a young woman, simply because the sides of her head were shaved and the remaining hair had been plumped and gelled into an erect black strip strangely reminiscent of a cassowary’s casque. “I don’t suppose you’d like to join us … in the cause of workplace harmony?”
Azure’s refusal to join the clerical workers’ union had been a source of disquiet since her very first day in the branch. Union membership may have been steadily falling in other departments but in Multifarious, Extraneous and Artistic Affairs, all the ancient tricks were in use to keep the numbers high.
“You know I’m only moonlighting, until things pick up, musically” she replied in a faint, abbreviated echo of her usual assertions to the effect that membership of the clerks’ union shouldn’t be imposed on minstrels whose public sector employment was intended to be of the briefest duration (and who were, in any event, financial members of the musicians’ combine).
This “only moonlighting” declaration sat uneasily with Alan – not because he saw any special merit in compulsory unionism or because he knew the bureaucracy to be filled with creative types who’d only intended to stay ‘until things picked up’. No, the statement disturbed him because he couldn’t understand how anyone, once exposed to the vitality and excitement of day-to-day public administration, could regard the bureaucratic calling as a lesser or secondary avocation. How such persons could persist with other aspirations or ambitions was beyond him.
And how an activity largely carried out in daylight hours, albeit under supplementary fluorescent illumination, could be described as ‘moonlighting’, was no less bewildering.
“No offence, dude,” said Azure, probably mistaking Alan’s puzzlement for dismay. “You’re a cool guy, in your own way.”
No one had previously described Alan as “cool” or as being of a temperature other than “tepid”, and he abhorred being referred to as “dude”, even though he’d have freely admitted to knowing nothing about cow poking (except that it was the principal activity of prairie herdsman and a pastime quite unrelated to the love that dare not bleat its name).
For all that, he bore Azure no ill will.
“I’ll do my best for you at the meeting,” he said, in anticipation of the usual motions to have the young woman declared a “bourgeois individualist” (despite her membership of a musical ensemble), “a despiser of the masses” (despite her desire to be idolized by the very same multitudes), and a “Trotskyite wrecker” (despite the fact that her guitar was the only thing she was clearly committed to destroying … and then only at the very end of a performance à la Messrs Hendrix, Townshend et al, once she was sufficiently rich and famous to afford a ready supply of replacements).
“We’ll catch up when I return,” said Alan, hurrying away.
For the second time that day he arrived for a meeting almost eight minutes late and a little early. Nearly thirty of his colleagues from the Publicity and Advisory Branch – most seated in the body of the room, some standing at the sides – were chatting to each other in twos and threes. At the front, facing the attendees, sat Escher Burgoyne, the senior clerks’ union delegate
