Stefan looked at the man, perplexed.
‘Nevermind,” said the interviewer, “you can get a temporary one while they sort that out.” The man put his application in a folder and closed it. “I think you’d make a great addition to the team. There are just a few final tests we have to complete to see if you’re the right fit for the Sprechen-Z Holdings Limited International Family of Companies.”
“Okay,” said Stefan, following the interviewer, humming “Consider Yourself at Home”. They walked into a small room containing one small desk.
“Could you please sit here?” asked the man. Stefan sat, and the man took out a large set of callipers. He measured the distance from Stefan’s head to the desk in front of him, the distance from his head to the back of his chair, and the angle of the bend in his legs. “Could you please reach for the papers in front of you?” Stefan did, and the man took precise measurements of each movement. “Right handed?” he asked. Stefan shook his head no, and held up his left. The man gave a look of consternation, but continued on, now using a tape measure.
He finished his calculations in a large binder. “This is just about perfect,” he said. “I think you’ll be a good fit in our organisation. Just one last test.” Stefan followed him to another room, even smaller, where the man sat him in front of a monitor flashing tiny orange characters and strapped an operator’s headset to his head. “There you go.”
“What am I supposed to do?” asked Stefan.
“Oh, nothing. Just stare at the screen.”
Stefan stared. The man left the room, and Stefan kept staring. His eyes glazed over, and his mind wandered back to the recording studio in Canada. He felt a pang for his days of high-paid, specialised work. It embarrassed him to go back into the workplace with no transferable skills.
The flashing orange figures on the screen had a mesmerising effect, and Stefan found himself drifting further backward through his life. He was eight years old again, in the kitchen with his mother. “Just keep studying,” she said, as she shut the door behind her. Men banged on the front door and shouted at her through it . “I’ll teach my own goddamned son if I want to!” she yelled back. “Just try to stop me!”
“Hello?” said the interviewer. Stefan snapped back to the present.
“How long have I been sitting here?”
“Three hours,” said the man, shining a light into his eyes and looking closely at them. “Excellent. No bleeding.” The man straightened up and extended his hand. “You’re hired. Welcome to the family.”
“Thank you,” said Stefan, shaking the man’s hand. “What exactly do you do here?”
“We run a mobile phone network.”
“Oh.” He was about to mention his difficulty with telephones, but thought better of it.
~
The next day, he woke up early and filled the tub using the shower head. The result was a tub filled with strata of hot and cold water, but it did the job. Stefan did his best to iron a shirt—not really knowing how—and managed to leave the house in time to catch the bus for work. The second floor of the bus was jammed with boys and girls in blazers and ties. He looked at them as he tried to figure out how to knot his own tie, ashamed to think that his mother had always done it for him.
He sniffed, conscious of smoke. He looked to the back of the bus, where a group of boys about twelve years old slouched down in their seats, smoking. Another held a lighter under a crinkled piece of foil, cooking something.
He spotted a familiar landmark outside and rang the bell. The driver stopped, and Stefan descended the stairs and got off the bus, realising once he did that he was still several blocks away from the office. The rest of the walk was a pleasant one, beside a small river with water the colour of ale, through a section of town that was a mix of chunky old buildings and featureless industrial blocks.
He reached his office five minutes late and rushed into the huge stone building, which looked like a cross between a church and a munitions building. He joined a large group of new employees with name-tags gathered in the lobby. A young woman in a business suit with a male counterpart raised her hands and addressed them. “Welcome,” she said, “to Orientation Day!” She turned and pointed ahead with both hands, and the recruits followed her.
In a large room, they were broken into teams, then given a small pad of paper covered in small blocks—a litany of personal particulars they were asked to provide about their work histories and education. Stefan had no answers to fit many of the questions, and had to leave their boxes blank.
One by one, they were called out of the room. When Stefan’s turn came, he was taken to a room where someone took his picture, rolled his fingers in ink then onto a sheet of paper, then scraped a small piece of skin from the inside of his mouth and put it into a plastic vial. Like the others, he returned to the conference room with a plastic ID card featuring his pale and surprised-looking face.
The next hour was devoted to games designed to teach them about the organisation’s structure (he did not do well), and show them the power of developing strong brand recognition. With a war cry of “Service first and last!”, the recruits were released to their various departments. Stefan was hired, he discovered, for the Outstanding Team. His initial pleasure at this evaporated when he realised that the term was a euphemism for “Collections Department”.
A trainer deposited him into the care of Jenny, his “line manager”. The supervisor, she told him, was away in Greece on holiday. If he had any questions, he was to ask her. She was about to leave, but he stopped her and asked what he was supposed to do.
“You mean they didn’t—?” she said, then snorted angrily. She looked up at him and shook her ginger bob of hair. “I don’t know why they spend all that money on that nonsense then send you down here without a clue about how to do the job we hired you for.”
“Sorry,” said Stefan.
“Ach,” she said, “it’s not your fault. Come on, I’ll get you started.” She then led him through a labyrinthine system for following up on overdue mobile accounts, which involved correlating various information stored on a machine with a small yellow monitor like a goldfish bowl in a frame, a wall of filing cabinet drawers, and a metal chest full of what looked like rifle rounds, but turned out to be microfilm. At the end of her description of the process, Stefan thanked her, and asked where the bathroom was. “Bathroom,” she laughed, “you want a bath? The toilets are over there.” He thanked her again, walked hurriedly to the toilet, locked himself in a cubicle, and threw up.
He hadn’t absorbed any of what the woman said. I’m a dummy, he thought, a total idiot. He felt nervous about going back to his desk, and felt his throat choking up. I won’t be able to pay my rent. I won’t be able to eat. I’m stupid and I’m going to die. A final plea popped into his mind—Mommy!—a word so repellent to him it drove him back onto his feet and out to the office.
“Jenny,” said Stefan, “I have no idea about any of what you said. Could you go through that again?”
“Oh,” she said, “sorry. I’ve been doing this for twenty years. I forget it’s complicated when you’re new. Let’s go over it again. In a week, you’ll be doing it in your sleep. God knows we do.” He laughed, relieved. “Would you like a chocolate?” she asked him, pointing to her desk. The half-dozen women in his section all had boxes of chocolate on their desks.
“No thanks,” said Stefan, “but do you have any gum?”
~
Over the next few weeks, life fell into a pattern. Stefan enjoyed the simplicity of it: he got up early in the morning, ironed a shirt while the bath filled, washed, made coffee, and read the newspaper on the bus to work. Mornings went quickly, then he ate his lunch alone in the canteen. Then he finished off the day and went home, ate, and went to bed.
The women in his section were friendly to him and eager to help him, but their pack was largely impenetrable, having developed over decades. People like him came and went, but they stayed. They moved together like a flock of bird
s, going outside to smoke, going to lunch, then leaving to go home to their families when five o’clock came. At the moment, they were away for a retirement lunch. Most of them resented the company, but were happy to eat and drink at its expense when another of them broke free.
Stefan slid his card through the punch-clock, finished his lunch break. He sat down at his desk, wading back into the set of files he’d left. The process of following up on overdue accounts was straightforward now. They issued letters which sometimes came back with payment, and just as often didn’t. Some customers contested their charges, some moved without remembering to update their mailing address, and others did their best to evade having to pay. But something about the file in front of Stefan perplexed him. The subscriber hadn’t made his payments for two months, but that was nothing unusual.
The name, he thought. Something about the name seemed familiar. He looked at the newspaper on his desk. The headline read “Police probe city developer’s death plunge”. The copy underneath elaborated, describing the inquiry into the death of a wealthy businessman involved in redeveloping parts of the city. The developer’s name, Reginald Mackenzie, was the same as the name on the invoice in front of him.
When the women returned from their lunch, wobbling back to their desks, Stefan approached his line manager. “Jenny,” he said, “what do we do if someone dies?”
“Depends,” she answered.
Stefan held up the newspaper.
“Oh no,” she said. “If it’s a suspicious death, the police get involved. Och, it’s such a hassle.” She stopped to think. “But that was back in June. They normally would have contacted us by now.”
“Yeah,” said Stefan, “here’s the funny thing: someone’s still making calls on the phone.”
“So the police—?”
“Didn’t find the phone on him. Someone else must have found it.”
“Oh help,” sighed Jenny.
“Can I take this case?” he asked. “My numbers are way up. I’ve processed enough cases for the next month.”
“Well,” said Jenny, “I don’t know. The supervisor’s away. You’d have to ask—” She stopped and shook her head. “I can’t.”
“What?”
“I’d have to go before the directors,” she said. “And I don’t want to do that.”
“I’ll do it,” said Stefan.
Jenny looked at him, surprised. “If you want to. But I can’t go with you.”
Stefan didn’t understand what the issue was. “Okay. Just tell me where to go.”
“I’ll take you,” she said, “but I won’t go in.”
He nodded, collected the file from his desk, and followed her. She led them down several halls, up a grand old staircase, then to a door.
“They’re up there,” she said.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen them myself. Few people have. I hear they brought them here when the company bought the property, and they’ve never been down from there since. Other people say they used to belong to the last company that was in this building. Nobody knows how old they are.”
“What do they do?”
“Nobody knows that, either. But it’s very important. It’s very expensive to keep them.”
“Okay,” said Stefan, straightening his tie and organising his files, “I’m going up.”
“Good luck,” said Jenny.
Stefan opened the door, revealing a small, narrow staircase. The stairs were old, worn wood, with a green carpet running up their middle. The door closed behind him, leaving him in the pale light of the oil lamps fixed to the walls. The air was cold. He climbed for what seemed like an especially long time. Eventually, he reached a thick wooden door covered in intricate carvings of stags, armour, crowns, unicorns, and twisting, snakelike creatures.
With effort, he opened the door and stepped into the semi-darkness of what he took for an attic or a chapel. He shivered, and squinted, trying to get his bearings. Something across the room moved slowly. A lone lamp lit, and a tall man with a long face and white hair turned a key to raise the flame slightly. He sat at a long, heavy wooden desk with eight other figures. Some were short, some average, others round and fat, but they all wore the same white hair and dusty grey clothes of no discernible age or fashion. Before them were opened huge books, and each had a pen beside him, rested in an inkwell.
The tall man pursed his lips and took an eternity to wheeze the word “What?”
“I was working on my files this morning—I work on the Outstanding Team, I’m new here—and I came across this case,” said Stefan. His words felt like they were coming out at a hummingbird’s pace. “It might be a suicide. See, the police didn’t find the mob—”
The tall man held up his hand, and Stefan stopped speaking. The man turned his head to one side then the other, looking at the other directors, who returned his gaze. He turned back to Stefan. “Investigate,” the man articulated carefully.
“Myself? Thanks. I’ll let you know what I—”
The man raised his hand again. “Go.”
“Right,” said Stefan. “Thanks. I’ll, um, I’ll go now. Thanks.” He turned, slipping on the dusty floor, and exited through the door, which was still closing. He ran down the stairs, back to Jenny.
“They asked me to investigate!” he said.
“Look at you,” she said. “I’m proud. You’re one of those ambitious types. You won’t be in our section for long. So what are you going to do first?”
Stefan’s face fell. “I have to call the number.”
~
The next afternoon, Stefan still hadn’t made the call. He sat at his desk, looking at the phone in front of him. He’d managed not to make any calls so far, but now it was inevitable. He reached for the phone and noticed his hand shaking. He’d made telephone calls before. It was awkward, trying to hear and speak with the constant interruption of the second voice, and he was embarrassed that he came across badly, but he managed nonetheless. He wasn’t sure why he felt so nervous now.
He pulled his arm back, then lunged, picking up the handset. He looked at the number, which by now he’d memorised, and dialled it. He pressed the handset to his head, ready to listen carefully.
The line rang several times, and he exhaled. Perhaps there wouldn’t be an answer. Then he heard a click. “Hello?” he said.
“Hello?” said a voice.
One single voice.
“Hello?” he asked again.
“Hello,” replied the other voice. He knew the sound of it intimately. “It’s you,” he said. He was about to launch into all the questions he’d bottled up for years, but the phone started to buzz, then to feed back, until the sound became an unbearable screech. He had to slam the phone into its cradle to stop the noise.
~
On the weekend, Stefan grew restless. He was determined to make the best of a rare sunny day. He caught a bus to Portobello, and spent the afternoon walking along the shore of the Firth of Forth, an offshoot of the North Sea that jutted into Scotland’s east coast.
The days were getting shorter. The sun lowered, turning the water into molten bronze. Stefan left the shore, his face still warm and his lungs full of sea air, and walked back toward his bus stop. He detoured into a chippy next to the stop and ordered a fish supper. “Salt and sauce?” asked the man behind the counter. Stefan agreed, and the man slapped a large piece of fish like a battered tie onto a square of paper, shovelled chips onto it, waved a can-like salt shaker over the meal, then squirted vinegary brown sauce back and forth over it. He deftly wrapped the corners up, twisted them, made it all into a hot packet, and gave this to Stefan in exchange for a few pound coins.
Stefan carefully unwrapped part of the package and ate chips as he walked to the bus stop. As he waited, a group of young men walked into the chip shop. One of them talked animatedly, dominating the conversation. Stefan’s bus pulled up as the men left the shop again. He stepped onto the bus and dropped his coins
into the collection box, just as another of the men spoke. “No, no, no,” the man argued with the loud friend, “that’s not true. That wasn’t how it happened.” The voice from the phone. Stefan turned to look as the door closed behind him and caught a glimpse of the speaker—tall, slim, with a wild brush of black hair. Ask the driver to stop! he thought. But he hesitated, and they pulled away from the kerb. Stefan rushed to the back of the bus, balancing his supper in his hand, and watched the figures recede from sight. What if that was The One, he thought, and I just missed him?
That night, he lay awake in his small bed, waiting anxiously to get back to work.
Fourteen
Peter Hailes
Stefan wondered if showering would have any effect, he was doing it so quickly. Bubbles flew onto the tiles as he slicked the soap from his body. He jabbed his finger at the shower’s “On/Off” button and ripped his towel in half as he yanked it from the hook on the wall. Today, that didn’t bother him. He scrubbed himself with both halves as he walked through the flat, dropping them when he reached the clothes he’d thrown on his bed for today. His shirt was wrinkled terribly, so he held it over the kettle while it boiled, then dressed and poured half of the boiling water into a cup of instant coffee and the other half into a bowl of instant porridge.
He gave up on breakfast. This morning his stomach was not suited to food. It was a zoo’s butterfly room during mating season. He swung a tie over his neck (Did I wear this tie yesterday? Do I care?), cinched it tight, and headed out the door.
The bus arrived at glacial speed then stopped every four feet as it travelled. Stefan tried to be patient. He looked out the top floor windows. He looked around at the other riders. The children in blazers with posh accents didn’t intimidate him today. They weren’t smarter or more important than him, they just had accents. He spoke quietly to himself, finally having a hang of the sound of their voices. “Mummy, Mummy, my pony is dead!” The kids in the back seats with the rougher dialect measured drugs into bags for the day’s deals, and Stefan found it cute. Tomorrow’s entrepreneurs today.
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