Gears of Brass

by Jordan Elizabeth

  I ran to work, although running made it harder to dodge droppings from the hanging parks that line that part of the Thames. I had to keep to the faster, pavement route because the network of high walkways gets choked up at rush hour, and I couldn’t be late. The sun had risen higher in the sky. Time was not on my side.

  As the Institute loomed into view and I geared myself up for the last sprint, there was a hiss and the pavement opened up. I’d been going far too fast to see the steam cleaner rise from its slot in the gutter. Pistons slammed home. Foamy steam frothed at my ankles. I hopped onto the nearest platform, almost toppling a young boy teetering on the crowded grille. My timing was wrong. Now I’d have to wait within sight of my building, the most imposing structure on Lambs Conduit Street while the clock ticked on. Torture. There was my office window, twinkling at me from the fifth floor. Four minutes passed. Five. Six. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I jumped down, glad of my boots, and followed the jets of steam as the cleaner rolled excruciatingly slowly toward Russell Square.

  I arrived ten minutes late and slipped into my department carrying a batch of letters, having intercepted a messenger and rolled my coat up under my arm. To anyone who might have liked to discredit me, it looked as if I’d been in the post room. My shaking limbs weren’t visible. Neither were my shallow breathing and manic heart rate. In the corridor, the sickly fusion of pipe smoke, ink, paper, and warm machinery subsumed me into work-pace immediately, and I tried to let my training take over. The school chant filled my head: morning-time, work-pace, keep-up, next-job is my-job, work-pace is the best-pace.

  I’d chanted two verses when I saw them: Personnel Officers, roaming the far end of the corridor in a loose pack. I’d never seen more than one at once before. I quickly put on my most studious expression, heart thudding, hoping my time-keeping hadn’t been noted, because that was likely. One of them always did a round at eight forty-five. This part of the building has sloping floors. You have to angle yourself to the left to stop slipping, which gave the Personnel Officers an even more menacing appearance. I darted down one of the many sets of back staircases, hearing my own heels click-clacking far too loudly on the wooden treads, then skated across the shiny, polished floor of the silent, expectant conference room. I listened. Nobody followed, so I bolted up the matching staircase on the other side. There’s another, smaller entrance to Dr. Holmgren’s office at the top of those stairs.

  In his office, almost crying with relief, I went straight to the cylinder player and started his Bach, the same concerto he’d listened to yesterday, and the day before. Friday was changeover day.

  My scalp itched with sweat. Normally the mathematical music soothed me, but not today. I’d heard the same passages yesterday when my father was still living. Next, I had the post to hide—not all of it was for Dr. Holmgren—not to mention my coat. His back was turned, and I was in luck because within seconds, the vibration of his new projector muffled my movements and I crept back to the door. I balanced the letters on the ether-shuttle and put my coat on the floor.

  Even for a man in Dr. Holmgren’s position, the room is grand. He hosts visits from government dignitaries, so it’s vast with meeting table, reclining couches, drinks cabinets, and a gleaming parquet floor. Sliding the coffee pot onto the steamer plate, I studied the rising bubbles. In my peripheral vision, Dr. Holmgren crossed the room and sat at his desk by the window.

  Only when his coffee was ready and I’d carried it over to his desk on his silver tray did I say, “Good morning, Dr. Holmgren.” I’m not allowed to say good morning into silence. He must have Bach first, always.

  Dr. Holmgren lit his pipe. “Thank you.”

  I watched the pipe smoke separate into two streams—some trick of the tongue I’ve never seen in anybody else—then curl over his head and drift upward, finally forming a thin cloud below the high ceiling. He didn’t look up from his work as he gave me my instructions for the morning. I know how to do my job. Haven’t I been educated in just this one field and no other from the age of eight? Hasn’t everybody? But we go through this procedure every day. I began transcribing the meetings and tasks from his diary to a day sheet while he muttered his usual grumbles about the academic’s lot, the failings of the politician he had to liaise with that morning, and his wasted breath and effort as they rarely accepted his policy recommendations. He keeps a rolling boil of fury just beneath the surface, constantly. I’ve always thought one could pop that surface with a very insignificant pin.

  On and on he droned. I’m not allowed to sit until he says so, and sometimes, if he forgets altogether, the whole morning sees me standing there, bending to write, to reach into cupboards and even, sometimes, standing while I type.

  The room now smelt of the heath. Dad had taken me there to collect moss and firewood years ago when I was little and we lived in Hampstead. From the smell of the moss to the smell of the preserving salve this morning, I was reminded that my father was really gone. Most of my energy had drained away with him. By the day’s end, the very last of it would surely seep right out of me. I felt hollow. In the later stages of emphysema, the chest barrels. My father had looked as if someone had inflated a balloon in his chest. When I caught myself in Dr. Holmgren’s great mantle mirror, I half-expected to see a similar hollowing beginning around my own torso.

  Dr. Holmgren looked up at me. “Seal these, please. And afterward, if you would be kind enough to take these few items for the outgoing mail.”

  Where else would I take them? Perhaps I lifted them a little more briskly than usual. I warmed up the seal that never leaves his desk and stamped his envelopes, aware of him watching me. How was I going to slip away home to let the undertakers in? Professor Masters had asked me to run one of his many outside errands, hadn’t he? I could embellish the timescale of that job. I’d be vague in case Professor Masters was questioned.

  The last envelope was finished. I picked up the pile ready to go, but not soon enough. Dr. Holmgren raised one of his long, pale, unsettling fingers high into the air between us and our eyes met over it.

  “So. Your demeanour today, girl.” He frowned and stroked his neat brown beard. “I trust it will have improved by the time Sir Richardson arrives.”

  There was nothing shocking about this statement. I knew I was not myself. But before I could muster a polite reply, he said, “You ground the coffee too finely last night. It tells, you know. It ruins the texture.”

  I sighed silently. The day before yesterday I’d ground it too coarsely. “Forgive me, sir. My father died in the night.”

  There was a pause during which he averted his eyes. I did the same.

  “I see. My condolences.” He tapped the stem of his pipe against the base of his desk lamp, which meant he’d finished with me for the present.

  Tears came before I reached the door, and there was no stopping them. My hand shot to cover my nose and mouth as my face crumpled, and by the time I reached the post room, I was sobbing.

  In the main office, I tried to ease myself behind my desk without catching anyone’s eye, but I knew my colleagues watched me like vultures. Gaynor, making a meal of scraping out the grit at the bottom of her inkwell. Boris, jangling the keys on his belt and pursing his fleshy lips. Gretta’s eagle-eyes flitting backward and forward from the clock on the wall to my desk, my shoes, my typewriter.

  I’d hardly started my first task when two Personnel Officers from the gang swooped into the room and headed for my desk, trailing a stranger in their wake like flotsam from a hurricane. My thumping heart shrank from them as my mind tore through the possibilities. Not lateness? Surely I’d covered my tracks? Perhaps there had been a complaint.

  The stranger was a short, tired-looking girl with black hair, olive skin, and a beautifully pressed white shirt beneath her black office apron. She looked as if she might be of Greek descent.

  “Good morning, Elisabeth Bell.” The Personnel Officer’s intimidatory civility was like a spit in the eye. “Elisabeth, this is Anthie Janz. Ant
hie, Elisabeth will show you how to perform your duties. Anthie is to assist Dr. Holmgren while you are serving at next week’s conference.” The other Personnel Officer was a whiskery woman. Would she never speak?

  They swept out, leaving a feeling of dread in my gut.

  I smiled at Anthie and pointed to a spare stool. “I’ll just be one moment.”

  I caught up with them in the corridor. “Where’s she from?” I asked. “What’s her experience?” I’ll admit, I’m usually much more on the sly side with the hierarchy. I can act the part, show them what they want to see. That’s how I keep my job. But there was none of that in me on this day.

  “She’s come from Gelenbank.” The Personnel Officers were already walking away. Were the rest of their number still prowling somewhere close? “She’ll work autonomously once she’s trained.”

  I stood there, frowning. “What will happen to her when my time downstairs finishes?”

  “That’s none of your concern.”

  Back at my desk, the new girl waited, smiling and standing to a fierce, intelligent attention despite the dark circles under her eyes. Those eyes wolfed everything in the room—she took a good look at me, too—but tension stiffened her smile. It struck me that neither of us would have planned a day like this.

  “We might as well get you started on some copying. Dr. Holmgren likes a record of everything he sends out.” I walked her over to the mimeograph in the simulacrum room. Boris, Gaynor, and Gretta stared after us. “Have you used one of these before?”

  She shook her head and the layers in her hair rippled. It looked as if she might spike it after work hours. She had that new look that was going around: sharp, kaleidoscopic, jazzy, like their music. I could see her in one of those musical troops wearing steel-toed boots and silver makeup and dabbling in sculpture. Even now, there was a silvery gleam about her cheeks.

  “It’s like a mangle,” I said. “You slot the photographic paper in here, then wind here.”

  “We had them at my last job,” she said, eyeing the mimeograph with a beady intensity, “but I was only ever allowed to do the post and coffee. And sometimes a little arithmetic.”

  My eyes widened. “Arithmetic?”

  “Only very simple matters.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. “Right. The oils go in here. You have to get them from Mrs. Cooper’s office and she’ll watch you like a hawk while you’re measuring. You’ll get used to her.”

  She grinned at me while I copied a page as an example. The usual sugary chemical smell gushed from the mimeograph, and she said, “Mrs. Cooper—oh yes, the one with the absurdly fat bustle. I mistook her for a Personnel Officer. Does nothing brighten her?”

  “Saffron and champagne pudding in the canteen might, perhaps.”

  I thought my father’s death would be the only event to mark that week, but now I see those first few minutes with Anthie as the watershed; everything changed afterward.

  “This is the archive room,” I said on our departmental tour. “We keep the filing cabinets you’ll use most in here.” I thought that this dusty place, my little haven, looked shocked, intruded upon, but then I saw Anthie’s appreciation of it: her tired eyes lit up. I felt like she was surely a kindred spirit because the archive room has always been my place of respite. It smells of old books and paper, ancient, ripened ink, and, inexplicably, a hint of turpentine. It’s windowless but for a tiny skylight too high to reach, but best of all, it’s one of the few places in the whole department without a camera obscura.

  She ran her hands along the wooden ladder attached to the shelves on a rolling rail. “This is like a miniature library,” she said, and then she asked a question that surprised me. “What time do most people leave the building?”

  “Well, we leave when all the work is done. That can be any time after six-thirty, but I’ve been here after eight. Dr. Holmgren’s letters are filed at the end of each day no matter how late he works.” There’s pleasure to be had in putting the files to rights. I suppose that’s what they must have seen in me at school—attraction to order, ability to tidy—so that when it came to categorising me, I was easy. And easy ones get an easier time. I frowned at her. “You know to never be late, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Lateness, in fact, being caught away from your post for any reason, means instant dismissal here.”

  Again, she nodded.

  “Wasn’t it so in your last job? Didn’t legions queue to take your place?”

  “Of course,” she said without hesitation. I frowned again. I couldn’t quite place why, but she puzzled me.

  Lunch in the canteen that first day with Anthie was probably just the tonic I needed. She scrutinised her butter bean soup before tasting it, pushing her spoon through it suspiciously. After the first taste, she screwed up her nose. “There’s something bitter in this soup.”

  “Pepper, perhaps?”

  Anthie shook her head.

  “How was the food in your last place?” I asked.

  “It was the same old so-so cheap group-fodder.” The disgust in her voice was quite forceful. “Thickened with hay.”

  I laughed. “Surely not!”

  “You’d be appalled by what goes into workers’ rations.”

  I curled my hands around my bowl. “At least we get protein here.”

  She smiled wryly. “In this thin broth? About a quarter of an ounce, if that.”

  “Well, the toast is warm today, anyway.”

  After we’d eaten, I took Anthie up to the roof terrace. “We have five more minutes,” I said. “May as well get some fresh air.”

  Like me, she looked as if she breathed easier in the rooftop world. The institute dominates the street and even looms over the skyrail, which runs just below the terrace. I’ve always found comfort in its very particular, almost tuneful clatter, even if I can never afford to ride it. The sun-catchers on all the rooftops glinted at us like insect eyes in their groups of five, and Anthie began to ask lots of questions about Dr. Holmgren.

  “I was warned about the academics here,” she said. “Aren’t they incredibly fussy to work for? Don’t you worry about making mistakes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you get their dictation wrong, you might create a new law by accident. Isn’t psychological research the most worrying of the government departments? Doesn’t Dr. Holmgren check everything that leaves his desk?”

  “He’s more on the philosophical side. He deals in time.”

  She didn’t look as if she quite believed me. I found this amusing, even endearing. “He’s working with a team from Westminster. They’ve invented a way of beaming some kind of magnetic stream into the brain to create images of all our thoughts. He’ll be advising on the time aspect—how time is perceived by the brain, especially in moments of fright or struggle. It’s very important work.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” she said, then changed the subject with a jarring suddenness. “I’m getting out of this one day soon.”

  “That’s what we all say.”

  “No, I mean it. Another couple of years and I’m moving up.”

  “Well, editing’s still poorly paid.” It seems ridiculous now, but at the time I couldn’t think of any other level she’d be aspiring to. “And if even one space or comma is missing, you lose pay.”

  “I had aspirations too, once,” I said. “I dreamt of the grand study halls of inner Bloomsbury. That’s where I thought I’d like to end up.”

  She looked at me. “Thought? Why did you stop planning?”

  I shook my head. “They’d never let me go. And I’ll never afford to buy myself out.”

  A prickly silence slid between us.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m getting out of this.” She slapped her apron and leaned forward on the iron bench. I smiled. I told her Dr. Holmgren sometimes lets me edit his manuscripts and offered her a first draft one day, for practice, but she snorted.

  “Editing! They think
of the lower classes as unchangeably violent, crude, stupid. Their solution is to educate us into the niches they need service in and no other. Well, my grandfather was killed building a viaduct in the north, and I’m not going to stay in my slot.”

  Twelve thirty. Only two and a half hours before they came to collect my father, and I had to be there. If not, I’d be fined for failing to dispose of his body in a decent and timely manner. The report I was typing for Dr. Holmgren floated in and out of focus. His voice in my earpiece spoke of time slowing down near the point of death, and sent me right back to my father’s last moments, those endless minutes when he was able to breathe in, but not out again. My hands gripped the sides of my typewriter. Anthie was dipping some display paper in dye. I had to leave the room.

  “Just going to fetch more cadmium red,” I told her, and fled to the archive room.

  Anthie must have come to see why such a small task was taking me so long, and why I hadn’t waited until she’d finished the batch. I felt her arms around me. I wiped my tears and told her about my father.

  “How on earth did you manage?”

  “I dealt with the body, then went to register the death.”

  “Oh, Elisabeth,” she whispered. “How did you know what to do?”

  “I watched my father lay my mother out.” I blinked and bowed my head. “There wasn’t any money for the full ministrations of an undertaker then, either. They’re coming to collect his body this afternoon. They’ll cremate him with everyone else next Friday.” I hadn’t wanted to speak of any of this, much less think about where my father was really going. What was it about the way Anthie presented herself that so unfastened me?

  “Your mother?”

  I nodded. “Yes. We lost her to the meat epidemic.”

  Anthie shook her head. “You must feel so alone.” It was a simple sentence, but she manage to embed within it total understanding. “But Elisabeth—you said they are coming for his body this afternoon. Will you be allowed to leave work early?”