The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  That reminded him; he’d really meant to ask someone at some stage exactly what it was that J.W. Wells and Co. actually did, but so far there hadn’t really been a suitable cue. He thought about asking Christine, but decided not to.

  “Here we are,” Christine announced suddenly, in the middle of a detailed account of the system for numbering closed files. “Your new home from home.”

  She pushed open the door and bustled in. Paul, however, stopped dead on the threshold and stood absolutely still, as if he’d just been switched off at the mains.

  The cause of this extreme reaction wasn’t the room itself; it was just a roughly square space enclosed by four white-emulsioned walls, a rather dusty Artex ceiling and a very old carpet-tiled floor, containing a bare plywood desk, a scratched green filing cabinet and two plain wooden chairs. It was what was on one of the chairs that got to him.

  “This is Sophie,” Christine went on, apparently not aware that Paul was standing in the doorway doing waxwork impressions. “She managed to get here on time,” she added. “You two just hang on here, someone’ll be along any minute now to tell you what you’ll be doing next. We have a fire drill the first Wednesday in each month, there’s a notice on the door that tells you where to go.”

  Paul managed to get out of the way as she bustled out of the room. The doorknob hit him in the small of the back, but he hardly noticed.

  “You,” said the thin girl.

  Say something, Paul ordered himself. “Yes,” he said.

  There’s two ways I can play this, Paul decided. I can carry on standing here like a deep-frozen Ent, or I can sit down. He stayed where he was.

  “You’re still wearing your overcoat,” the thin girl said.

  “Am I? Oh, right.” He struggled out of the coat, which had somehow grown far more mechanically complex than he remembered. A button came loose, bounced off his toecap and skittered away under the desk. He dumped the coat on the floor, then bent down, picked it up again, and tried to drape it over the back of the chair. It slid off. He let it lie.

  “You got the job, then?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Me too.” All right, he promised himself, I’ll shut up now.

  There was a long, brittle silence, during which his left foot went to sleep. Paul wondered briefly if there was actually anything to stop him walking straight out of the building (apart from the pins and needles, of course) and never coming anywhere near this part of London ever again. He’d signed a contract, of course, but would they really bother to take him to court? Almost certainly not.

  “Did you see Mr Tanner?” he asked. Yes, I know, he told himself, I promised. But ten seconds more of this ghastly silence and my brain’ll boil out through my ears.

  The thin girl nodded. “He’s horrible,” she said.

  “Did he tell you what they actually do here?”

  This time she shook her head. “Did you ask him?”

  “No.”

  “You should’ve asked him.”

  “I expect we’ll find out, sooner or later.”

  She frowned. “I hope so,” she said. “Otherwise we’re going to look very stupid.”

  The pins and needles had spread to his right foot too. He rested one hand on the desk for balance and tried to keep absolutely still.

  She was sitting slightly forward in her chair, tiny hands folded in her lap. For some reason, she reminded him of a picture he’d once seen of a man who’d been on Death Row in some American prison for twenty years. Somewhere, in the distance, a telephone was ringing. It carried on, unanswered, for a very long time.

  “Big place, this,” he said.

  “Mm.”

  “The Polish bloke said he’d send me down a map,” Paul went on. “I hope he does. I got really badly lost just trying to find Tanner’s office.”

  She looked at him with mild contempt. “Did you?” she said.

  “But then,” he continued, “I never did have much of a sense of direction. My mum says I could get lost in a shoebox.”

  “Really.”

  His feet tingled sharply, making him wince. “So,” he said, “have you got any brothers or sisters?”

  “Yes.”

  Something like a thousand years passed. Then she frowned at him and said, “Why don’t you sit down, instead of standing there?”

  “I—.” No, he thought, don’t even try explaining, just get your bum parked. He sat down, yelping very slightly as his left foot brushed the chair leg. He looked round for a window to stare out of, but there wasn’t one.

  “Did they tell you why you got the job?” the thin girl asked suddenly.

  “No,” Paul replied. “How about you?”

  “No.”

  “If you remember, I was absolutely convinced the Dog Boy was going to get it,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “There was a bloke at the interview who looked like a dog.”

  “Was there?”

  Please, he thought, please can someone turn up with some work or something, and rescue me from this? I don’t think I can stand—“I’m sorry,” the thin girl said. “What?”

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated, gazing down at her closely chewed fingernails. “I’m afraid I’m not really a very nice person.”

  Unanswerable. To his credit, Paul didn’t even try. In fact, he said to himself, the hell with it. I can keep my face shut as well as anybody on earth. Just watch me. We’ll see who fossilises first. And besides, he consoled himself, every second I spend in here, I’m getting paid for. All the other times I’ve sat in stony silence with girls were on my own time. That’s got to be progress, hasn’t it?

  (And the cruel irony of it was, he realised, that this was almost, but not quite, the scenario he’d daydreamed about so often, the one where he’d got the job and found himself working side by side with a girl. A nice, jolly girl, of course, quite nice-looking but not beautiful or anything like that, because that’d mean she’d already have a boyfriend, and that’d be no good. A mere fortnight ago, if a wise old gypsy woman had gazed into her crystal ball and told him she’d seen him sitting in an office with a girl he was going to be working with for the indefinite future, he’d have whooped with joy; because a fortnight ago, the hardest thing in the whole world had been finding his way into a situation like this; because for one thing, you never get girls on their own, either they’re with their friends or some bloke, always further away than the Pleiades or Orion’s Belt. Just give me a chance, he’d implored heaven; just let me be alone with one for five minutes, and I’ll be able to give it my best shot; not really a lot to ask, surely. But I should have guessed, he told himself; it’s the same as with this bloody horrible job. The worst punishment there is for wanting the wrong thing is getting it.)

  He glanced up. She was looking at him sideways, and to his horror he knew, somehow, that she could see what he was thinking. Not fair, he thought, then hastily tried to wipe it out of his mind, on the off chance that she hadn’t seen that too. Not that it matters, he lied to himself.

  At last, mercifully, the door opened, and through it came a little vole-like woman with large spectacles. She had a big pile of green folders in her arms. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Julie.” She didn’t sound happy about it. “I’m Mr Wells’s secretary.”

  Paul felt like he should stand up or something. Instead he said, “Hello.” The thin girl didn’t move.

  “I’ve got a job for you two,” Julie went on, dumping the folders on the table between them. “You’re to go through this lot, putting them in date order. There’s no particular hurry,” she added sadly, “so take your time, and if there’s anything you don’t understand, come and ask me.”

  She left without giving Paul a chance to say anything, not that he had anything to say. He looked across the desk at the thin girl; she was already dividing the folders into two piles.

  Inside the folders were thick wodges of printed-out computer spreadsheets: a jumble of tabulated columns of figures, with a d
ate in the top right-hand corner. They were all out of sequence, needless to say. Paul riffled through the contents of the first folder he came to, looking for some clue as to what the spreadsheets were actually about, and wondering what would be the best way of tackling the job. When he looked up, he saw that the thin girl had already established five or six neat piles, and was dealing the spreadsheets out like playing cards from the heap on her lap.

  “It’s easy,” she said without looking up. “Each pile is a month. Once you’ve sorted them into months, you can sort each month into date order. Then you just collate them and put them back.” Oh, Paul thought. Yes, that’s not a bad way of doing it. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll try it your way.”

  “You do what you like,” she replied.

  It was certainly an improvement on silent sitting. Even so, it was frustrating, not being able to figure out what any of it was about. The spreadsheets could have been timesheets or accounts, or spectrographic analyses of mineral samples, or invoices or radio telescope readings or the Retail Price Index or unusually sophisticated betting slips; or maybe it was some entirely meaningless, manufactured task, an intelligence test designed to help assess their numeracy and efficiency. Not that he gave a damn, but for some reason it bugged him. The strong smell of stale cigar smoke suggested that, whatever they were, they had at some stage passed through Mr Tanner’s hands, but that didn’t really help much.

  Still; puzzling over what the wretched things actually were helped take Paul’s mind off the tedium of the exercise, and it didn’t seem long before he realised he’d finished. He put the papers carefully back in their folders and looked up. The thin girl was still only about a third of the way through her half of the pile. That surprised him.

  “Can I help you with your lot?” he asked.

  “No, thanks,” she replied, “I can manage.”

  And that’s me told, he thought. But it didn’t seem worth picking a fight over, so he nodded and turned back to the first pile he came to. At the back of his mind a conclusion about those damned spreadsheets was struggling to be born, like a weakling chick trying to peck its way out of a titanium eggshell.

  Cohere, he ordered himself; now, then. He began with the obvious. The earliest printout was six months old, the most recent was dated yesterday. There were five piles in front of him, and the thin girl had five piles as well. He was too scared to check with her, but the odds were that neither of them had any printouts for October. There could be any number of reasons for that, starting with a computer crash that’d wiped out the system for four weeks or had lost all the October figures. The numbers themselves: they ranged from tiddly (0.84) to huge (4,667.863.87), which probably ruled out rain-gauge readings or petty-cash requisitions; if they stood for money, it was big money. There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern to them; he compared the printouts for the seventeenth of each month, but he couldn’t see that they had anything in common (but then, what he knew about statistics and maths in general could probably be memorised by a small frog). Each day had several printouts, some one or two, others as many as twenty. But no one day in any month seemed busier than any other, which didn’t help much. All in all, it looked to be one of those problems that gets harder the more you think about it. He frowned. Coded messages, maybe? If each number somehow represented a letter of the alphabet—Julie came in, without knocking; she had another armful of folders. “Finished?” she said.

  The thin girl looked up at her guiltily. “No,” she said. “It’s my fault. I’m not much good at this.”

  Julie didn’t seem bothered. “Well,” she said, “here’s another lot to be going on with. Like I said, no real hurry. Take your time.”

  Of course, Julie would know what these rotten bits of paper actually were. Probably she wouldn’t mind a bit if he asked her, and if she did the worst that could happen would be that he’d get the sack, and would that be such a terrible disaster? But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it, and she’d gone before he had a chance to search down the back of his moral sofa for his mislaid courage. Also, before he could stop her, the thin girl had partitioned the new pile and added half of it to her existing backlog. Working with her was going to be a riot, he could see that. Still—“Here,” he said, “I don’t mind doing a few more. Why don’t we—?”

  She gave him a look you could have sliced bacon with. “No, thanks,” she said. “I may be slow and stupid, but I’ll manage.”

  He didn’t say anything, in more or less the same way that people don’t try and shake hands with grizzly bears, and pulled a sheaf of papers towards him. Blessed, therapeutic tedium washed over him like water in the desert. He had work to do. He got on with it.

  When Julie brought in the fourth batch, she announced in a singularly mournful voice that they could stop for their coffee break if they liked. Apparently, neither of them liked; the thin girl was now almost invisible behind a barricade of paper, and was clearly determined not to rest until she’d caught up, while Paul thought of the coffee room, packed with secretaries, some of them undoubtedly terrifyingly pretty, and the moment of dead silence that’d inevitably follow as soon as he walked in, and came to the conclusion that he didn’t want any coffee. At 12:57, Julie brought in the tenth batch (still nothing for October) and reminded them that lunch was one till two. They’d be locking the door at one minute past one, she said, so if either of them did want to go out—(From the way she said it, she might have been addressing Captain Scott and Captain Oates.)

  “Thanks,” Paul said, and stood up.

  He made it through the labyrinth to the front office with seconds to spare; Karen the receptionist was just about to shoot back a bolt the size of a young tree. It was just starting to rain and he’d left his coat in the office, but there were worse things than getting wet. He slipped through the front door feeling like the last man off the Titanic, and set off down the street at a brisk trot.

  Now what? Pubs, cafés and sandwich bars were pretty well out of the question, at least until he got paid.

  Walking the streets in the rain didn’t appeal, somehow. That didn’t leave many choices, in a district rather lacking in shops where you could mooch about and browse without actually spending money. There was also the small matter of hunger; he’d brought a cheese-and-stale-bread sandwich, but it was in his coat pocket. He could always go home and never come back, but he wasn’t quite at that point yet.

  “It’s Paul, isn’t it?” He recognised the voice without turning round, though of course he couldn’t put a name to it; as far as he was concerned, the owner of the voice was the tennis champion (or the 1970s pop star, depending on personal choice). Bugger, he thought, and turned round slowly.

  “Your first day, yes?” Today, the tennis champion was wearing a pale grey Armani suit over a white polo neck; the claw necklace was still there. “Join me for lunch. There’s a little Uzbek place just round the corner; just peasant food, but they do a passable kovurma palov.”

  Motorway-hedgehog syndrome; the mind goes blank, the motor functions shut down, and although the survival instinct is screaming, No, no, get out of there!, it’s wasting its breath. “Thanks,” Paul muttered, thinking of the five pounds and seventeen pence he had in his pocket. Well, he thought, look on the bright side. Either this lunatic was going to buy him lunch, which meant he’d be one free meal to the good; or else he was going to spend the afternoon washing dishes with a lot of expatriate Uzbeks, which would almost certainly be an improvement on shuffling paper with the thin girl. Who knew, maybe they’d take him on full time.

  The little Uzbek place was very little indeed, so it was awkward that the entire population of central London seemed to be trying to get into it. For a blissful moment Paul thought he’d been saved; but a waiter materialised at the tennis champion’s side and led them through the crush to a table tucked away in a corner. The tennis champion muttered something, presumably in Uzbek, and the waiter nodded gravely and vanished.

  “Hope you won’t mind,” the tennis ch
ampion said, “I ordered for both of us. I think you’ll like kovurma palov. I’m going to be boring and stick to moshkichiri.”

  Paul mumbled something about that being fine by him. A heartbeat later the waiter was back with two enormous platefuls of yellow rice with bits in, and a cauldron of steaming green tea. The tennis champion said something to him, and he roared with laughter before vanishing again. It occurred to Paul that he had only a very sketchy idea of where Uzbekistan actually was; somewhere in Russia, he’d always thought, but the food looked like curry.

  “Dig in,” said the tennis champion. “Of course, this isn’t kovurma palov like you get in Samarkand, but it’s a reasonable imitation, even if the barberries are grown under glass. Have some tea.”

  “Thanks,” Paul said, as the tennis champion filled his cup. At the next table, seven Japanese businessmen were comparing ties. “This is very kind of you,” he said.

  The tennis champion smiled. “My name,” he said, “is Dietrich Wurmtoter, but please call me Rick, everyone does. So, how are you settling in?”

  “Oh, fine, great,” Paul said. “It’s very…” He had no idea what to say next, but the tennis champion was busy shovelling rice with bits in through his mouth like a steamboat stoker trying to win a race. He was very good at it, not so much as a grain of rice or a raisin going astray, but the general impression was distinctly alarming. Paul guessed it was because they had to hurry so as to be back in the office at two sharp, and stuck his fork into the yellow mountain in front of him. Actually, it wasn’t bad; in fact, it was scrummy, and he wished he was in a fit state to enjoy it.

  “So what’s Julie got you doing?” said the tennis champion, with his mouth full.

  Paul swallowed, and said, “Urn.”

  “Something with lots of bits of paper, I expect,” the tennis champion said. “That’s one thing I don’t like about our little firm, all the bits of paper. Green forms and pink forms and blue forms and miles and miles of computer stuff.” He glugged down a whole cup of tea; Paul’s cup was so hot he hadn’t dared touch it. The tennis champion obviously didn’t feel pain. “Still, it’s not all like that, I promise you. In six months or so, a year maybe, you’ll find out what we’re really about. Depending on what you decide to specialise in, of course. I mean, it’s up to you, you’ve got to go where your talents lead you. That’s the good thing with this business, there’s so much scope.”