‘Big day today,’ he says. ‘But nothing to worry about. I’m sure we’ll have you up and working within weeks.’
He said that years ago.
When I first came here.
As he speaks, the security guys come towards me.
The ones with the specialist training.
The rest of the Job Place goes quiet, watching, as they strap the tag to my ankle. As they set the timer running, as they hook up the needle, as they fill the vial connected to the tag with a painless but fatal poison, one that will be released into my bloodstream at the end of a three-month period if I am not employed by then.
The clock is ticking on my existence.
Time to get out there and find work.
***
Funny thing is . . .
I supported the scheme when they first brought it out.
‘They’ being the newly elected Government Earth, fresh into power and keen to make their mark on things. Which they did first of all by attempting to tackle the country’s crippling unemployment problem.
Well, they called it a problem . . . but to most of the people claiming Job Hunt Allowance, their work-free status was anything but a problem. I saw them, hanging out on the street and getting drunk without a care in the world, and like the rest of the luckily employed I resented the taxes that I was paying to keep them in booze.
But life moves on.
Things change.
People become unemployed.
And I was one of them.
So yeah, it’s pretty easy to support a scheme that will kill people when you’re exempt from the death list.
Not so easy when there’s a poison injection strapped to your leg.
Funny, that.
***
The guy with the gun is gone when I emerge from the Job Place. But I don’t need to see him to know I will never turn out like him. I won’t give up.
But my housemate, Terry, is less optimistic.
‘You know the percentage of long-term unemployed that go on to find work?’ he asks me. Then brings up the data he’s referring to on the computer before him.
I stare into my box of personal belongings as he speaks.
Stare at the wedding ring I once wore.
Thinking, a job’s not all you lose, when you lose a job.
‘Tell me,’ I say. ‘Cheer me up.’
‘It’s a low one.’
‘I thought it might be, Terry.’
‘Twenty five per cent.’
‘That’s a quarter.’ I shrug. ‘That’s not so bad.’
What is bad is our living together in the first place. But that wasn’t through choice, believe me. After Rhonda left, after all the arguments which culminated in her throwing her ring into my face, I tried to hang onto the house in which we’d lived together. But that was about as pointless as trying to hang onto the memories we’d shared. So I’d gone looking for a place to rent, thinking I’d go it alone, but new government legislation said that I had to share with another Job Hunter, the thinking behind that being you would motivate each other into work.
‘Can I see it?’
I look up at him. ‘See what?’
He points at me.
More specifically, at the tag around my ankle.
I already want to be rid of the damn thing. But, of course, it’s all monitored via a Job Place computer system. The moment it stops detecting skin next to it, an alarm goes off. Worst of all, I’ll miss out on that week’s benefit. And how am I going to find a job with no money to go looking?
‘How does it feel?’ Terry asks.
This is such a ridiculous question that for a few seconds I’m tempted to take on a new, self-given role: that of murderer. But it’s hard to stay mad at Terry. I’m too busy being mad at myself for ending up in this situation.
‘You’ll find out for yourself soon enough,’ I say, and leave him to stew on that one.
***
Next time I see Brian, he has a black eye.
Not all Job Hunters are as placid as I am.
‘Trouble, Brian?’ I ask.
‘Never mind that,’ he says, and his irritated tone makes me smile. ‘How’s the Job Hunt going?’
‘Fine,’ I tell him, and for once I’m not lying.
See, I have an interview tomorrow.
It’s a job in Customer Services, and I know I have the experience for it. But I also know, because Terry told me, that according to government statistics an average of fifty people show up for a single vacancy nowadays.
Still, I pass this news on to Brian. And then I decide to push my luck by asking for a clothing allowance.
Remarkably, he agrees.
I must have caught him on a good day. Either that, or the punch that provided his black eye has done something to his mind.
He comes back with a voucher – they stopped handing out money to people when they realised just how much of it ended up being sprayed against alley walls – and tells me all the clothing stores in which I can use it. Then, just to prove that the punch didn’t do too much damage, he adds, ‘and don’t forget to bring back the receipts!’
I probably will forget, just to get him in trouble.
Such is the complicated relationship between advisor and claimant.
***
I hit the clothing stores, and it’s been so long since I’ve had extra cash, even in the form of a paper voucher, that I’m momentarily overwhelmed by choice. Of course, I don’t have a choice, not really; this voucher is to get nice clothes for an interview, not to splash out on one of those nice Hawaiian shirts they have in the window. Still, it’s nice to look.
After much perusal, I eventually pick out a nice suit.
Making sure, of course, that the trouser leg fits around the ticking time bomb on my ankle.
They considered using actual bombs, by the way, instead of poison. But they thought there might be too much collateral damage – i.e. bad publicity – if a particularly vindictive Job Hunter with only seconds remaining decided to go boom-boom in public.
Maybe they were right.
Would I choose to go out that way?
But I don’t want to think about that. So instead I pay for my suit, and I flirt with the woman behind the counter, and it’s going pretty well until I have to hand over the voucher. That’s when she sees the Job Place stamp, and she’s suddenly all business again.
One more reason to get a job, I think. I can’t wait to be the one doing the sneering, not the one being sneered at.
So I go home without the girl’s number but at least I have a nice suit. Though that’s little comfort when I realise that Terry is planning on killing himself.
***
And he’s not alone.
Which surprises me.
I didn’t realise he had friends.
But here they are, in our house, a bunch of sad-eyed losers, and you don’t need the worthless degree I’ve got to suss out that they’re the long-term unemployed. Although, I realise as they look to my tag and gasp in awe, they’re not quite long-term enough.
Their reaction to my imminent death gives this whole scene a borderline surrealism. But it doesn’t quite veer off into actual madness until Terry walks into the room with a balaclava over his head.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask. Not, I’m sure you agree, an unreasonable question.
‘Jack!’ he says. ‘Good to see you. Guess what?’
These two words are normally a precursor to a torrent of government data. Today, though, I sense something even worse coming down the chute.
I’m right.
‘We’re planning,’ he says, ‘on robbing the Job Place.’
I hope I’ve misheard him. ‘What?’
Turns out, he goes on to tell me, that he’s been in contact with this group fo
r a while. ‘This group,’ of course, being the people currently standing with us in this house. He’s been talking to them online, because that’s how he talks to everyone other than me, and they’ve all decided that they can’t take the Job Hunt anymore, and they also can’t wait the time it takes to get their tags. So they’re going to break into the Job Place and take the poison for themselves.
I listen to all of this patiently.
Rationally.
And then, and only then, do I drag Terry into the next room.
A room that, before I’d left the house earlier, you would have called ‘the kitchen.’ Now, though, I’m not sure what you’d call it. See, Terry has been busy with his statistics again, and it seems he has hooked the printer up to the machine, too. Because there are print-outs of Government Earth statistics covering every inch of each wall.
Looking up at them, seeming to take strength from them, he says, ‘you know the odds against us ever working again?’
‘A little bit more than you do, sunshine,’ I reply, and bump my tag against his leg.
He spreads his arms wide. ‘So what’s the point, Jack?’ Then his tone turns petulant as he adds, ‘I mean, it’s okay for you – you already have your tag.’
‘What,’ I snarl, ‘you think I want this? You think I want this thing on me?’
He looks down at the tag and there’s so much lust in his eyes, lust coupled with a complete lack of hope, that I know he would swap places with me.
In a heartbeat.
And, God help me, I’d let him.
But I can’t.
So he’s doing the next best thing.
‘They must keep a supply of the poison on-site,’ he says. ‘We’re going to take it. And then take it.’
I make one last attempt, saying, ‘think they’ll just keep it out, where anyone can get it?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’ll be locked away in a safe. But I’ve found a guy that’s good with safes.’
Then he does something he’s never done before.
He holds out his hand to me.
Requesting a farewell shake.
And I wish I had the words to make him hold on, to make him believe that brighter days, working days, are just around the corner. The words that Rhonda had once said, then shouted, to me. But his ears would be as deaf now as mine were then.
So all I can do is take his hand.
And watch him walk out of my life.
***
With an interview tomorrow I probably shouldn’t do it but what the hell.
I get drunk.
Terry will either be stupid enough to kill himself on the Job Place premises or wise enough to do it someplace else, but his disappearance will eventually be noticed. Maybe not until he misses his appointment with his advisor, but it will be noticed all the same.
What’ll that mean for me?
And will it stop me getting a job?
Funny, how quickly that question becomes the only thing that matters. It was for me, even before the tag. I guess Rhonda sensed that. She always knew she wasn’t as important to me as getting a payslip for a hard day’s work. No wonder she left me.
And here we go with the self-loathing, right?
Better take another drink.
I remember the Head of Government Earth, the day they’d brought in the Unemployment Death Act. We’d all cheered at that, Bill, Chester, Arnold and me. My friends. The guys I’d worked with. Drinking then, too, down the pub, and laughing at the lousy jobless bum counting out his Job Hunt Allowance pennies to pay for the cheapest drink on the menu at the bar. We’d laughed and I’d said, ‘he’d be better off dead,’ and you know something?
I’d believed it.
That was how much work meant to me back then.
It still does.
It means everything.
And Bill, Chester and Arnold?
Well, they’re not my friends anymore.
Why?
Answer’s easy.
They didn’t lose their jobs when I did.
Now I’m ‘friends’ with people like Terry. Terry who should be poisoning himself right about now. Terry who gave up . . .
I won’t be like him. Won’t be like the guy playing with the gun outside the Job Place. Won’t be a quitter.
Ever.
But I’m fighting off a hangover as I head for the interview.
***
For once, Terry’s stupid statistics were right.
‘Fifty applicants for a single vacancy,’ he’d said.
Looks about right.
But I’m not the last to arrive, thankfully, and I take a seat in a huge room with the rest of the would-be workers to await the start of proceedings.
We all sit in silence, all sizing each other up. Most of us trying to suss out who the competition is, but I’m doing something a bit more personal.
I’m looking for the ones that are tagged.
There are a few of us, and the rest of the applicants try to keep a distance from us, as if what we have is contagious.
Maybe it is.
I lock eyes with another of the tagged.
He nods slightly towards me.
Then the interviewers come out.
***
There’s a bunch of them, three guys and a woman, but there’s a clear pecking order between them, and it’s the oldest of the guys that says, ‘welcome to the interview. My name is Donald.’
You can tell from his demeanour that no one ever shortens it to ‘Don.’
‘This is a role working with the public,’ the woman chips in, ‘so anyone that we feel is unsuitable for that role, we will tap on the shoulder and they will have to leave the interview.’
Jesus. Something else to fear. The dreaded tap.
But I’m determined to get this job and as they stand us all in a semi-circle and then bring out a large beach ball I try to calm myself.
‘I’m going to throw this ball to one of you,’ Donald announces, ‘and when you catch it I want you to tell everyone your name, plus one interesting fact about yourself. Then throw it to someone else in the circle and they do the same. And so on, until we’re all introduced.’
This is more panic-inducing than it sounds. I’m not sure I can remember one interesting fact about myself. How can you be interesting when you haven’t got a job?
Luckily, though, it’s not me that gets the ball first.
It’s the tagged guy.
The one that nodded at me before.
‘My name is James,’ he says. ‘And if I don’t get this job, someone might die.’
The room goes silent.
No one knows quite what to say.
‘And that someone is . . .’
Again, he pauses.
Then grins.
And shows his tag.
‘Me.’
Everyone laughs then, but the sound has nothing to do with humour. It’s more the laughter you get when a tense moment has passed.
But I’m still irritated.
Jimmy-Boy just stole from me the one interesting fact I have to give.
***
‘No,’ I say, standing behind the counter. ‘We don’t serve giraffes here.’
Before you assume I’ve lost the plot, let me explain.
We’re doing a ‘roleplay’ here where you have to show both good and bad customer service to the rest of the group, and there are five words you have to use as part of it. One of them is ‘giraffe.’ Hence me barring a giraffe, played by another applicant called Janet, from my shop.
We put our roleplay together in four separate groups, each one watched by a different interviewer. We got Donald, the big man himself, so I went out of my way to show how vocal I was, how passionate. With the whole giraffe thing, I think I did pretty good.
Because he’s the competition.
I see that now.
Soon they whittle us down to just ten and we await the final outcome. But since there are only five roles to fill, they tell us they’ll need another day or two to decide.
They’ll be in touch.
James and I are the only tagged left, and I watch him warily as he comes towards me.
‘How much longer you got left?’ he asks.
‘More than “another day or two” – so don’t get your hopes up.’
He laughs at that.
And for some reason, I’m sure I can still hear him laughing behind me as I head on home.
Where I find the police waiting for me.
***
Seems that Terry pulled it off – him and the rest of his hopeless brigade.
I’m scared to see the law at my house, but they’re immediately at pains to stress they don’t suspect me of anything – I mean, why would they? No, this is all just routine stuff. ‘What was the state of his mind, did he leave a note,’ that kind of thing.
Plus they take his computer.
I’m glad to see the damn thing go.
But I’m also wondering what will happen to me.
If I get to keep this place, if they’ll move someone else. If I’ll get that damn job, or if James or someone else will beat me to it.
The police finally leave, and I step out of my suit and then try to relax with a shower – keeping, of course, my tag out of the water at all times. But the interview I’ve just attended runs through my head, and I find myself constantly picking apart everything I did, wondering if I’ve done enough to make me shine above everyone else.
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