Читать книгу The Earlier Trials of Alan Mewling - A.C. Bland - Страница 11

In the Committee Support bay, the Christmas lights were on and O’Kane was doing single-handed push-ups on the floor. Hemingway was eating a pastry while reading a fashion magazine. Morton was preparing to leave for lunch. It was 12:25.

“You survived section heads’, then,” said O’Kane, changing hands.

“I’ve been up with Brian,” said Alan.

“Are you any the wiser?” Morton enquired.

“I gather everybody is still in the dark,” said Alan, regretting his words as soon as they were out. They seemed to be both subversive and likely to encourage one of Morton’s favourite metaphorical excursions on the shared experience of public servants and edible fungi. “But there seems to be no suggestion that the committee meeting shouldn’t go ahead.”

“One last chance for us to influence affairs of state,” said Morton, “before we fade away and committee members get their “services no longer required” letters.”

“No one seems to be talking about dissolving the committee,’ said Alan.

“So, they’ll make us all redundant,” said O’Kane, ascending on his left arm, “even though the committee will continue.”

“And how did you go with the social committee?” Alan asked Morton.

“Low scores for futility and boredom – I rated both of them at just 2 – but there was quite a bit of nastiness and finger pointing, so I gave it an overall score of 5.”

“… making it one of your better meetings of the year,” said Trevithick.

“And the party arrangements, themselves?” Alan asked.

“All good re solids and pay-as-consumed beverages,” Morton replied, “but not so good with the secret Santa.”

“How so?” asked Alan.

“Up by a single vote, with the meeting dividing strictly along gender lines: women unanimously in favour, men unanimously against.”

“And the third-party livestock?”

“In the final vote, narrowly avoided.”

Alan breathed a sigh of relief. “That only leaves the sharp objects, the personal hygiene products and so forth.”

“Also very close, but regrettably, lost again by a single vote.”

“How unfortunate,” Alan said.

“The women were determined to have their moment of Christmas danger,” said Morton.

For the second time that day, Alan recalled the humiliation of “Rhonda the Reliever”.

“I know you did your best,” he said. He knew that Morton would have delivered a carefully reasoned, persuasive speech in favour of the sensible position on each issue. “And I’m grateful.”

“What about you?” Morton asked. “Is there really no explanation for what's happening to us?”

“No one around here appears to know anything,” said O’Kane, breathing heavily while descending on his right arm.

“Nothing material,” said Alan, “but I’ll sum things up at 2:15.”

The weekly section meeting took place at 2:15 pm on Mondays.

“Then I’ll get some lunch,” said Morton, leaving.

Alan turned to his cubicle and noticed a casserole defrosting on top of a file, something wrapped in a handkerchief on his keyboard and nothing at all in the two in-trays (one for Lorrae’s incoming mail and one for his own).

“We’ve had our first nude walker,” said O’Kane changing hands.

“So soon,” Alan exclaimed.

Hemingway shot Alan a look which indicated that the sight had not been an attractive one, even when viewed from a cyclopean perspective.

“Some flabby old guy, from Accounts,” O’Kane added.

“How awful,” said Alan. “And he probably won’t be our last.”

“There’s usually a spike in the first few days,” said O’Kane.

This statement seemed to raise Hemingway’s spirits but the ex-milliner refrained from comment in the presence of his supervisor.

“And the self-effacing one went home, sick,” O’Kane continued, referring to Barbara Best.

“Because of the … the person from Accounts?’ said Alan, recalling a time when the nudity of strangers in a workplace would have been deeply troubling for a well brought up young woman.

“Gone well before that.”

“Is she all right?” Alan enquired.

O’Kane answered with a raised eyebrow, indicating that the question wasn’t a sensible one. Alan surmised this was because Best had departed in a sulk, following the exchange she’d had with members of the section about higher duties.

“It hasn’t been an easy transition for her,” he said, thinking about the poor attendance of Best’s putative supervisor, Debbie Dapin-Clappin-Cloppers, about Lorrae Spaul’s reclusiveness and about the morning’s announcements.

“She chose to come to the front line of public administration,” said O’Kane, rising to his feet. “Nobody forced her to leave her ivory tower.”

“Not that we know of,” added Hemingway.

Alan turned to his in-trays. “Has Cyril not been?”

Cyril was the ancient clerical assistant who, at a snail’s pace and with help from delivery recipients, distributed the morning and afternoon mail.

“There’s a message about rationalised delivery arrangements on your computer,” said O’Kane, picking up his gym bag.

Alan gasped. As far as he was concerned, any reduction in the frequency of mail deliveries struck at the procedural foundations of the organisation.

“I’m off to lunch,” said O’Kane, meaning, in fact, that he was heading to a sporting field, gymnasium or swimming pool to engage in activities even more masochistic and more debilitating than his morning run.

Alan moved the defrosting casserole off the file it was dripping on, wiped up the moisture with a piece of paper towel, applied antibacterial spray and wiped a second time. Only he and Ernest Hemingway now remained in the bay.

“We’re to get a single delivery each day, commencing today,” said Hemingway, once satisfied that O’Kane wasn’t returning. “It seems demand has dropped off since we got our computers.”

“Dear, oh dear,” said Alan, thinking that his own demand for Cyril’s services hadn’t fallen away at all. If, though, the underpinnings of sound public administration – like the morning and afternoon deliveries of paper materials – were to be gradually weakened and fragmented by a slavish adherence to modernity and streamlining, it mightn’t be such a bad thing, making a friend of change, before the whole edifice came crashing down.

“Today’s casserole,” said Hemingway, “is allegedly eggplant and parmesan.”

Alan loathed eggplant and the smell of Parmesan always reminded him of sick.

“From Morton?” he enquired.

“From the head fire warden,” Hemingway replied, without lowering his magazine: “the Gosling-thingummy woman.”

Alan supposed that most of the people with whom he worked would over time, come to know about his changed domestic circumstances but it surprised him that people as distant from him in functional and geographic terms as Tina Fox-Gosling could have heard of Eleanor Mewling’s departure so soon. It said more than he cared to know about the reach and efficiency of the department's gossip networks.

“I believe she’s going to send you a message, on your computer.”

“Dreadful,” said Alan. That someone would use the official email system to send him a personal communication was a most discomforting prospect.

“And you missed out on a morning tea,” said Hemingway, “so, I made a gold coin donation on your behalf and secured you some of the least revolting items. They’re on your keyboard.”

Alan cast a glance at the handkerchief-wrapped bundle.

“You must be famished, you poor love,” said Hemingway.

Alan blushed at the reference to himself as a “poor love” and wondered why Hemingway should suddenly be so concerned about his welfare. By way of distraction, he flipped open the cloth parcel with a pencil to reveal a piece of fairy bread, a chocolate brownie and a cold cocktail frankfurt.

“That was most kind of you,” he remarked, noting with revulsion the proximity of the miniature sausage to the other items.

“Tuck in, my dear” said Hemingway.

Being addressed in such a familiar yet unfamiliar way caused Alan to blush a second time.

“We’re beyond caring about our figures, aren’t we?” Hemingway added.

“I don’t know where to begin,” said Alan thinking that each of the items, having sat in the humid mini-environment of the folded cloth (which doubtless harboured all sorts of residual nasal organisms) was bound to be a bacterial haven. “I’ll have something after I’ve looked at my emails.”

He switched on his machine.

“Retarded pets,” said Hemingway, returning to his magazine.

Alan desperately hoped this was a reference to the recipients of the money raised at the morning tea, rather than to the origins of the cocktail frankfurt.

“A good cause, certainly,” he said, rejecting the ‘mystery meat’ theory.

He surreptitiously pulled a tissue from his pocket and wrapped it around the fairy bread to prevent 'hundreds and thousands' from thundering over the crustless edge onto the desktop as he secreted the item into his waste paper basket.

“How is your eye?” he asked, when the task was accomplished.

“So-so,” said Hemingway, not looking up.

“No one has remarked on it?”

“I’m saying “accidents will happen” and “there’s no point in completing a pink form.”

The vast amount of detail required by the department’s new “notification of work-related injury” pro forma was widely thought to be the single most important cause of the decline in compensation claims in the previous months. Mentioning the form was an undeniably clever method of steering discussion away from the injury, itself; everyone liked to complain about the amount of information required.

Alan retrieved two one-dollar coins from the purse in his top drawer and walked over to Hemingway. “I don’t want you to be out of pocket for the morning tea,” he said.

“There’s no need,” Hemingway replied. “We know things, you and I.”

In a general sense, this was an irrefutable truth – who didn’t know things? – and in relation to certain goings-on in the toilets that morning, it was also a statement of fact. Hemingway and Alan both knew, for example, that they’d engaged in discussion after and in relation to the flight of Quentin Quist. But if Hemingway meant to suggest that only he and Alan knew about Quentin Quist’s attack, that was patently untrue, for Quist, too, was aware of what had happened … and Alan’s knowledge, if it could be called that, was merely a creature of hearsay and deductive reasoning. Any notion of fraternity derived from shared secrets was consequently founded on an entirely false premise.

At the same time, though, Alan was relieved to be thought of as someone sharing in the cognisance of something, and not as the custodian of (currently unspecified) unshared or intentionally concealed knowledge.

He left the coins on the desktop and returned to his own cubicle where he placed more absorbent paper under the casserole, “snuck” the tissue-encased brownie into the bin and turned his attention to his emails.

There were screens full of unread messages, for these were times when it seemed safer to press “send”, if there was any doubt, rather than make a crucial omission. Alan had been obliged in the previous weeks to choose as never before, and even though the act of selecting which messages to read caused him near-constant anxiety, he was able, once choices were made, to not return to unopened missives, even if he found them impossible to delete.

He focused on an e-mail to all staff announcing a daily mail round, and on a revised circular about expenditure reporting procedures which seemed only to require the spelling of “Program” and “Programs” as “Programme” and “Programmes”, respectively. But such attention was only procrastinatory – an excuse not to read the email he’d earlier ignored from Tina Fox-Gosling, entitled “Food for the body and nurrishment for the wounded sole”.

He read a circular about executive appointments and promotions (which had no bearing on his day-to-day life), a message from Ministerial Communications Branch about a change to the spelling of the word “program” under the new government (for which his earlier reading of the expenditure reporting circular had, thankfully, prepared him) and a directive banning smoking outside departmental buildings.

There were many other emails which he could reasonably have opened and lingered over, including several efficiency suggestions from union members pursuant to the resolution of the morning meeting. However, he knew that he would have to deal with the most recent Fox-Gosling email sooner or later, so took a deep breath and clicked on it.

The message read: “You poor sweet darling man, who can tell how you have managed to go on you poor darling that ungrateful awful woman didn’t deserve a jewel as rare precious and exquisite as you, you WILL love again yes your poor broken heart will mend and when you do who knows you may yet find someone perhaps even someone already known to you who would cherish the REAL you and love you for the special sweet adorable darling man you really are. I am here for you until you’re ready, darling yummy eggplant casserole, it’s on your desk, cooked with love. Hugs and kisses; Your Teeny Weenie.”

This communication bothered Alan on several levels. It troubled him because there was something so terribly raw, breathless and intense about it. It disturbed him, too, because of the frequency with which it employed the words “poor” and “darling”– with a repetitiveness bordering on the battological. It further disturbed him because of the contempt it evinced for the rules of punctuation. Still further, it disturbed him because of the infantilism manifest in “Teeny Weenie” and because of the aversion he had to people altering their names – the ones their parents had seen fit to allocate them – without any thought for unintended irony; Tina Fox-Gosling was such a generously proportioned woman – so comprehensively and thoroughly ‘tuckshopped’ ─ that she could not have been accurately described as “teeny” or “weenie” (and never as both).

But the message disturbed him most of all because of the sinister ambiguity implicit in the statement “I am here until you are ready.” Where was “here”? With what expectations was she wherever “here” might yet be revealed to be? And what was he supposed to be ready for, once here (or there)?

He registered a sense of anxiety in keeping with the intimidating proportions of the woman. He then wondered why it was that oversized women (rather than ones who were a better match to his own slight physiognomy) were – of all the females conceivably attracted to him – the ones who were drawn with such frightening single-mindedness.

On the plus side, there was nothing about the message which indicated that anyone (apart from Alan) was yet aware of the most scandalous aspect of Eleanor’s departure: the lesbian dimension.

His stomach rumbled but he clicked on a new email from Peaches Trefusis which, no matter how incendiary and badly punctuated, could not have been as vexing as the one he’d just read.

His stomach rumbled again, causing Hemingway to put down his magazine. “I can hear your tum-tum calling for attention. It must be time to eat something.”

“I’ve had the sweet items.”

“Then it must be time for the frankfurt.”

“In just a minute,” said Alan, almost gagging at the prospect of placing in his mouth something that had rested in a cloth into which nasal secretions had once been expelled.

“It’s a bit naughty of you to have eaten your sweeties before your main,” said Hemingway.

It was too late for Alan to claim that he was a vegetarian, a vegan, or allergic to preserved meats. It was too late, also, to probe for clarification re the retarded pets. And he couldn't think of a polite way of explaining that he was incapable of fellatio-like ingestion in the presence of an out-of-the-closet colleague. He picked up the miniature frankfurt.

“You wouldn’t like it, yourself?”

“Goodness me, no. I’ve already eaten.”

At the instant his teeth broke through the red casing, causing thick, soupy juice to leak down his chin and onto the desktop, his eyes met Hemingway’s single functioning orb over the top of the magazine the ex-milliner was reading… and he knew that an event of some (as yet unknown) significance had transpired. Both men looked away and Alan secreted the greasy meat still in hand into a tissue and thence into the bin.

Peaches had sent an email list of the matters discussed after his departure from directors’ and Alan read it while he expelled the barely chewed flesh (which tasted strangely of hundreds and thousands and, in other parts, of chocolate brownie) into a second tissue, transferring it in further furtive stages to the waste paper basket.

The leftover matters from the morning meeting included cancellation of the branch Christmas party (owing to the abolition announcement) and postponement of the branch planning day (already postponed multiple times owing to the lack of a firm branch budget and the likelihood of a new government). Attached to the message were forms to be used for reporting on the antics of individuals taking extreme measures to improve their redundancy prospects.

The abandonment of the Christmas party was no bad thing, bearing in mind the dangerous decision to proceed with a secret Santa and the ways in which fear of the future might be magnified by alcohol. However, postponement of the planning day – no matter how brief the activity’s usual impress upon the actual conduct of affairs – sent a most undesirable message to the subordinate staff i.e. that things could chug along well enough without review, reconsideration or any thought for the longer game.

Even if timely planning was recognised as pointless by more experienced officers – because the priorities of government and the senior executive group were subject to constant change –the process itself provided a useful illusion of shared purpose for junior officers. The notion of an ordered, well-thought-through programme (or program) of work should not, to Alan’s way of thinking, have been so casually dispensed with. It seemed to him that, at the very time he was being discarded, so, too, were many of the traditions which had served the bureaucracy well over its history.

It was hard in such circumstances to summon the fortitude to carry on but he had, in the course of something resembling at least half a career, been swept up in numerous changes thought by others to herald the demise of effective public administration. And the service had not only survived these initiatives but flourished in the rich verbal diarrhoea that invariably accompanied their implementation.

There had been disappointments of a more personal nature, too. In the years following his great mistake he’d seen lesser men (and even women) promoted over him, and his talents and dedication ignored. He’d not only been the subject of derisory and disparaging remarks, but had heard his name employed as a synonym (or even eponym) for plodding ineptitude. Yet he’d not only survived the indignities, humiliation and scorn but had maintained the highest standards of record keeping, demonstrated the strictest possible compliance with the code of conduct and not once used Commonwealth assets (excluding, perhaps, ablutions areas) for private purposes. He had, in his own ‘not very special’ way, flourished.

And having endured so much without succumbing to bitterness, cynicism or clock-watching, he knew himself capable of doing all that might be required of him in a final fortnight of service, should the taxpayer have no further use of him after Christmas.

To that end he imagined himself at his assiduous, calm and confident best, and was so successful in thinking himself into a positive state that, when he heard the phone ringing, there was, once more, no crisis capable of discommoding him, no catastrophe with which he could not deal, and no cataclysm for which he was not ready.

“Would you like me to get that for you,” said Hemingway, peering over the top of his magazine, as though the device had been ringing, unattended to, for some time.

“I’ll deal with it,” said Alan, with renewed determination.

“Good-oh,” said the ex-milliner.