Grey Area

by Will Self

  It must be as a result of initiatives such as these that my boss has enjoyed such a phenomenally quick rise through the hierarchy of the Company.

  I had to walk right along this corridor to get back to my office, which is situated, opposite my boss’s, up a dog-leg of stairs at the far end. I can’t understand why we don’t have a facsimile machine in the Department. Every other department has at least one, and more often than not several. We have a networked computer system, modem links, numerous photocopiers, document-sorters and high-speed laserprinters, but no facsimile machine. I have never asked my boss why this is the case, because it was like this before he became Head of Department, and perhaps he, like me, has come to accept it as an aspect of the status quo.

  I turned out of the long corridor that leads to the inter-departmental facsimile machine, and into the corridor that runs the length of the Department. This corridor is wide and low, with a line of strip lights along the ceiling. I usually keep my eyes fixed on these when I’m walking along the corridor, in order to avoid contact with my colleagues. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to them, it’s just that there’s always plenty of work to do and I like to keep a rhythm up throughout the day. I have a dread of getting behind.

  In my office there is a desk, three filing cabinets, a stationery cupboard, a swivel chair, and a workstation that holds my computer and laserprinter. All of this furniture is a grey-beige colour, very neutral, very gentle on the eye. It helps to offset the rather aggressive carpet tiling, which is chequered in two distinct, but equally electric, shades of blue.

  It’s a kind of carpet tiling that was advertised a few years ago on television in a gimmicky way. A stretch of tiling was laid down in a kind of test zone, a mocked-up section of an office corridor. Then a live rhinoceros was released from a cage and encouraged to tear up and down the fake corporate environment, snorting and ramping.

  It was a startling image: the very embodiment of the rhinoceros, its astonishing combination of bulk and fluidity, imposing itself on the bland anonymity of the set. Then, at the very end of the sequence, the camera angle moved round from the side of the corridor to its end and the rhino charged towards the viewer. The image was so sharp that if you had frozen the frame you could have counted the individual bristles that made up its congealed horn, the wrinkled veins in its vinyl hide.

  At the last moment before it came plunging through the screen into your living room, the beast turned tail and dumped a steaming heap of excrement right in the eye of the camera, which tracked down so as to catch it plummeting on to the carpet tiling. The voiceover intoned: ‘Rhinotile, tough enough for all the animals in your office!’

  I can’t get this advert out of my head. The punchline comes to me unbidden whenever I look at, or even think about, the carpet tiling.

  I haven’t done all that much to personalise my office – the walls are mostly taken up with a noticeboard, a calendar and an organisational chart.

  The organisational chart has been done on one of those magnetic whiteboards, to which metallic strips can be affixed, to express lines of command, the skeleton of the hierarchy; and coloured dots or squares, to indicate individuals and their functions.

  It’s my job to change the shape of the organisational chart as the Department metamorphoses from month to month. The Department doesn’t have an exceptionally high turnover of staff, but enough people come and go to make rearranging some strips and dots necessary every few weeks.

  I have never asked the Head of Department why it is that, despite my pivotal role in representing the structure of the Department, I have yet to be included in the organisational chart myself.

  I stapled the papers I had just faxed and deposited them in a tray for filing. I walked round behind my desk – which faces the door – and sat down. My office is organised so that the working surface is directly in front of me and if I swivel to the right I am sitting at the computer keyboard. This I did.

  I had to work on the presentation document for this week’s inter-departmental meeting. My boss had made handwritten corrections to the first draft, and these I now set on the document holder that sprouts from a Velcro pad, attached to the side of my monitor.

  The corrections were extensive and involved the re-keying of a number of paragraphs. I worked steadily and by five it was done and neatly formated. I hit the keystrokes necessary to activate the laserprinter and then tidied my desk.

  Desk tidying is quite an important ritual with me. I like to have every paper clip in its modular plastic container, every pencil, staple, rubber and label in its assigned position. I like my highlighting pens arranged in conformity with the spectrum. I like my blotter located in the exact centre of my desk. I like my mouse mat positioned precisely along the front edge of my workstation.

  When I first came to work at the Company I was a lot sloppier about this; my desk was tidy, but it wasn’t exact. Now it’s exact.

  Then I made a list, using the soft ‘scherluump-scherluump’ that the laserprinter was making as a counterpoint with which to order my thoughts. I always make a list at the end of the working day. They are essential if you want to maintain any kind of ordered working practice. I finished the list just as the presentation document finished printing. The icon came up on the VDU. It shows a smiling and satisfied little laserprinter, with underneath the legend: ‘Printing Completed’.

  I stacked the papers, punched them, bound them in a ring-binder with a plastic cover, and took the document across the corridor to my boss’s office.

  He was tipped far back on the rear wheels of his chair, so that his head was almost hidden between two of the vertical textured-fabric louvres that cover the windows of his office. The posture looked uncomfortable. The black head of the lamp was pulled low over the fan of papers on the wide expanse of his desk. His feet were propped on the desk top and the cuffs of his trousers had ridden up above his socks, exposing two or three inches of quite brown, but hairless ankle. He said, ‘Have you re-done the presentation document for the inter-departmental meeting?’

  I replied, ‘Yes, here it is.’

  He said, ‘Good. Well, I’ll see you in the morning then.’

  I turned and walked back across the corridor. I shut down my computer and then bent to turn off the laserprinter. Kneeling like this, with my face level with the lower platform of the workstation, I could see right underneath my desk. I could see the flexes of the computer, the laserprinter, the desk lamp and the telephone all join together and twist into a spiral stream of mushroom-coloured plastic that disappeared down an oblong cable-routing slot. There was nothing else to see under the desk, no errant rubber bands or propelling pencils gone astray.

  The bottom of my workstation is shaped like an upside-down T, with a castor protruding from a rubber bung at either end of the crossbar. I rested my forehead on this bar for a while and let the coolness of the metal seep into me. When I opened my eyes again, I focused not on the distant prospect of the skirting board, but on my immediate vicinity: the beaten path that my varnished nail had cut for the rest of my finger, through the eighth-of-an-inch pile of nylon undergrowth. It was this that caught my attention – a really tiny event.

  How small does an event have to be before it ceases to be an event? If you look very closely at the tip of your fingernail as it lies on a clear surface (preferably something white like a sheet of paper), so closely that you can see the tiny cracks in the varnish; and then push it towards some speck of dust, or tweak the end of a withered hair, or flick the corpse of a crumb still further into decay, is that as small as an event can be?

  When I stood up I rapped my head on the underside of my workstation. Both it and my skull vibrated. I bit my lip. I stood like that for a few moments, concentrating hard on the angle of one of the flexible fronds in the stack of binders in my stationery cupboard. Then I shut the cupboard doors, snapped the switch that bathed my office in darkness, and left it.

  I went down the first flight of stairs, past the plant that lives in
the grey granules, down the second flight and along the corridor. The Department was already empty. I knew that, at five on the dot, the entire workforce would have risen up like a swarm, or a flock, and headed for the six big lifts that pinion the Company to the earth.

  I also found myself on an empty platform, caught in the hiatus between two westbound trains. The platform’s dirty tongue unwound along the side of the tube, which was ribbed like a gullet with receding rings of be-grimed metal. A tired, flat wind, warm with minor ailments, gusted up my nose. The electronic sign above the platform kept on creating the word ‘Information’ out of an array of little dots of light; as if this in itself was some kind of important message. I listened to the sough and grind of the escalator belt.

  Gradually the platform began to fill up with people. The minor-ailment smell was undercut with hamburger and onion, overwhelmed by processed cheese and honey-cured ham, encapsulated by tobacco. They stood in loose groups, bonded together by a mutual desire to try and avoid uniformity. Thus, blacks stood with whites, women with men, gays with the straight, middle class with working class, the ugly with the beautiful, the crippled with the whole, the homeless with the homeowners, the fashionable with the shabby. That so many people could believe themselves different from one another only made them – appear more the same.

  To my left, clamped against the bilious tiling, was a strange machine. It wasn’t clear whether it was mechanical or electronic. It had a curved housing of green plastic. It was eight inches high, and bolted at top and bottom to brackets hammered into the grout. In the middle of the thing was a circular, venetian-blind-slatted plate. Underneath it was a small sign that proclaimed: ‘Speak Here’. I pressed my ear against the plate. and heard the faint rise and fall of what might have been a recording of outer space, or the depths of the sea.

  When the train eventually came, I stood for a moment watching the people get off and get on. The two streams of shoving bodies folded into one another, like the fingers of two hands entwining deep in the lap of the ground.

  And that was what my day was like – or at any rate the second half of it. Wherever I start from I will experience the same difficulties, so it might as well be this afternoon, when I sensed the man’s presence behind me as I fed the facsimile machine.

  One last thing. This morning, as I have for the past fourteen mornings or so, I put a sanitary towel in my underpants. Tonight, when I stood in front of the mirror’s oblong and looked at the pouch between my legs, I felt certain that there would be blood absorbed into the quilted paper. Just a few dabs and blotches, together with a brown smear at the edge, denoting earlier bleeding.

  But there was nothing. It was virgin territory. No period – period. I haven’t had sexual intercourse for over six months – I can’t be pregnant. I am normally as regular in my body as I am at work. And over the last two weeks I have felt the swelling feeling, accompanied by an odd sensation of vacuity, that always precedes my coming on; and the dusting of yellow and mauve pimples under the softening, water-retaining line of my jaw has appeared as it should. I’ve also felt irascible and unaccountably depressed. (Well, normally this depression is accountable, I just can’t account for it. Only now is it truly unaccountable.) But still there’s been no period. Only the feelings, straining me for day after day.

  In the morning the radio woke me at seven-fifteen, as it always does. Outside the sky was limpid, void, without properties of colour or density. Was it light yet? There was no answer to this, it was as light as it was yesterday at this time – and the day before, and the day before that.

  I got up and went over to my bureau, where I started flicking through my diary. I looked over the pages of the past six weeks or so. I seldom write anything in the diary but appointments, and there was a scattering of these, like mouse droppings, on the lined paper. I tried to think about those days that had gone, taking with them fading memories of dental appointments and dry-cleaning collection times.

  The day my last period was due was marked in red. This is how my life resolves itself: into periods and the periods between periods.

  But when I thought about it, summoned up the seven-fifteens of those last forty days, they returned to me decked in the same limpid, void garb as this morning. Could it be true? Could it be that it has been getting light at the same time for over a month now? It made no sense. This is the time of year when the seasons change rapidly, when we become aware of the world turning despite – and not because – of what we do. And yet there was this six-week period during which nothing had changed.

  I dressed carefully. I tucked the sanitary towel into the gusset of my underpants, trying hard not to think of it as some magical act, some willing of the jammed wheel of my cycle. I selected a new pair of tights from the drawer, and unsnapped them from their cellophane confines. I put on my bra and a cream-coloured cotton blouse. I took a fawn, two-piece suit from the wardrobe. Stepping into the skirt I caught sight of myself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. It was only momentary, but looking at the slight, sharp-faced young woman I saw reflected there, I realised that while I was by no means indifferent to her, she was moving inexorably towards the periphery of my acquaintance.

  When I was fully dressed I sat at my bureau and applied a little eyeliner and a smudge of foundation. I don’t wear lipstick as a rule. I knew that my boss would ask me to attend the inter-departmental meeting with him today, so that I could take minutes. Although he would never actually say anything to me about my appearance, I am conscious of the fact that he approves of the way I always make sure I am scrupulously neat, if we are in any context where we are representing the Department to the rest of the Company.

  In the kitchen I examined the wash of pale light that fell across the draining board. Was it at precisely the same angle as yesterday? It seemed so. And my bath, gurgling away in a froth of bubbles and white water outside the kitchen window. Was it frothing in exactly the way that it did yesterday? Or was it only my perception of it? They certainly seemed familiar, those miniature cumuli, sparkling oily greens and blues.

  In the middle of the afternoon, I found myself by the facsimile machine again. I was looking out through the vertical textured fabric louvres and trying to decide whether or not the sky was the same colour as at this time yesterday. How would it be possible to do this? I toyed idly with getting a colour chart from the local DIY shop and seeing if I could match the sky’s shade to any of its little squares. But the minute I hit upon this idea, I realised that it was absurd, that the sky wasn’t like some expanse of silk emulsion on which I could impose my taste.

  Then I became aware of his presence again. It was much stronger today. I turned, but he wasn’t behind me; all I could see was an ear, poking around the jamb of the door. Its owner must have been talking to someone in the office to the immediate left of the recess where the inter-departmental facsimile machine is housed. I knew it was his ear intuitively. It was a thick, blunt ear, the edges folded over, squaring it off at the top and the side. I began to feel queasy looking at it. It was a typical ear – an ear that revealed what you always have suspected about ears, namely that they don’t possess nerves connecting them to any organ capable of apprehending their shape. I couldn’t believe that this ear was made from flesh and not some more ductile substance, like wax or putty, that had been moulded and then set.

  Involuntarily I clutched at my own ear and kneaded it between my thumb and forefinger. I was jerked out of this nauseating brown study by the insistent peep of the facsimile machine – I had neglected to feed it with the next sheet and the connection was broken. By the time I redialled, fed the oblong maw, then turned to look once more, the ear had gone.

  We were hosting the inter-departmental meeting this month. My boss always chooses to hold this in Conference Room 2. I have a suspicion that this is because he wishes to intimidate his fellow heads of department. Conference Room 1 is both more comfortable and more accessible.

  Conference Room 2 is at the far end of the Department, fur
ther up the flight of stairs, past my office. It is perched on top of a wing of the building that projects out into a medium-sized abyss. Four storeys below the grimy windows of the room, a tangled collection of roofs, aerials, walls and skylights provides no fixed point for the eye to alight on.

  Although the horizon is no further than before, the sense of Conference Room 2 being surrounded on three sides by space, and accessible on the fourth only by a dwarf entrance from the main building, makes it cut off and removed. This is heightened by the spectacle of a Portakabin that abuts the Conference Room, the end of which dangles over the edge of the local void.

  The short flight of stairs that connects Conference Room 2 to the rest of the building has the ubiquitous corporate trappings: half-conical sconces on the uplights; the feral-animal-strength carpet tiling; the vertical textured-fabric louvres (proportionately tiny – to fit the tiny windows).

  I entered Conference Room 2. The heads of department sat around the conference table, a blond wood lozenge. Each one was positioned in front of a representation of the corporate logo attached to the wall: an elephant (Indian), standing on a globe, but so stylised that it’s difficult to tell if that’s what it really is.

  Southam was there, from marketing; Haines from purchasing; Thribble from sourcing; Andersen from accounting; Askey from data processing; Tenniel from personnel, and, of course, my boss, representing the Department.

  ‘Come and sit here.’ He clutched a bunch of his black hair in one hand. He was wearing one of those shirts where the collar and cuffs are white, while the rest is striped. This highlighted his brown hands and browner face, making him appear like some executive minstrel. The presentation document was open on the table in front of him, and I could see that he had been making notes in the margin. I got my dictaphone and notebook out and readied myself to take the minutes.