Flesh Wounds

by Christopher Fowler

  I had read enough magazine articles to know that offices had changed in the last few years, but my initial experience at DMK was heartening. Rooms were ‘open plan’, light and bright. Young executives were ‘power dressed’ and ‘groomed for management’, which simply meant they were ambitious and careful about their appearance, the same as we had been in my younger days. The general office work flow was faster and there was less waste, but much had remained constant; gossip in the coffee break, routine jealousies and rivalries, shows of strength as people tested the boundaries of their power. I was surprised by my own confidence and pleased to be part of the workforce again. And it was fun playing den mother to the young typists.

  If only it could have remained that simple.

  It wasn’t until the end of the first week that I noticed how differently most of the younger executives behaved from the rest. People like Mr Gould, Mr Nash and Miss Kidston, all in their twenties, seemed pleasant enough at first but kept a certain distance between themselves and the older employees. They dressed elegantly, worked late hours without complaint and performed their allotted tasks quickly but without rush. They were methodical and thorough, anxious to help the company achieve greater profits and rarely discussed anything but the work in hand. And yet it seemed to me that they lacked passion, the spark of enthusiastic imagination that stops a man from being mistaken for a piece of wood.

  Then there was the business of the biros.

  In my first week, I made a friend. Her name was Rose Tippet. She was a true Cockney, and she was three years younger than me. She had an alarming blue tint to her hair that she called a Wapping rinse and told the sort of jokes that made you throw your hand across your mouth, and the sadness that sometimes appeared in her eyes was explained by the fact that she had lost her own husband the previous year.

  We sat opposite each other, outside the offices of our respective bosses. My desk wasn’t the tidiest, but Rose’s appeared to have suffered a direct hit from a bomb. She always had at least two pencils in her hair and dozens beneath the paperwork, and Post-It notes were fanned across her work station. She seemed able to lay her hands on anything she needed, though, and was allowed to keep her own ‘system’ because she was extremely efficient.

  It was she who pointed out how the younger executives kept their biros. They each had six, three blue and three red, squared off neatly to the left-hand side of their terminals. Nothing odd in that, you’d think, but it was the exactness that seemed strange. Rose said you could measure their placement to a fraction of an inch and it never changed. And the coffees. They stood their coffee mugs with equal care, three inches in from their telephones. Coffee was always drunk at the same times, and the mugs always occupied the same spot.

  At first I thought Rose was being silly, but once my interest had been piqued I started to notice other things. For example, their handwriting was similar. Not identical – various flourishes and curlicues distinguished them – but it was as if they had all studied with the same teacher. I could tell that their extreme capability made some of the bosses feel uneasy and threatened. It wasn’t just that they were young and ambitious; when they presented their work to senior members of staff at the weekly strategy sessions, tension filled the air. They would tonelessly read reams of numerical data to Mr Franklin, the managing supervisor, who never caught their eye and seemed to agree to anything if it would help to conclude the meeting more quickly.

  Diane Kidston was the worst.

  She always made me feel untidy. She would stride past my desk in her charcoal-grey suit as she returned from the photocopying machine, squaring her documents neatly at the corners, and make some sharp remark about the seniors being inefficient or slow. Everything about her implied that she was more suited to the company than I, less likely to become obsolete. There’s a word for it now; ageist. I didn’t know it then.

  One morning I had trouble locating a copy of her status report, and she informed me with a blood-freezing smile that she had requested I be formally warned about the state of my desk. I knew that keeping a neat appearance would have no effect on my efficiency, but I cleaned up my act quickly enough. The job was too good to lose over a little mess. Rose managed to remain exempt from the order because her boss was capable of overriding any demands made by the younger executives. One day she had a shouting match with one of the juniors who had complained about her untidiness and came off the winner, much to Miss Kidston’s disgust. Oh, the Jacobean intrigue of office work!

  Computer classes were mandatory for all employees. Some of the senior staff still refused to change systems and made a great show of failing to appreciate the use of computers, so the tutors would set them up with simple puzzle programmes while they taught the rest of the staff, rather like giving children colouring books to shut them up. That way the senior executives could complete their computer literacy courses and go back to work without losing face in their departments. I didn’t have to do that. With my son’s help, I was ready for the future.

  The technology boom had certainly smartened companies up since my last bout of full-time employment. There was little need for paperwork now. All internal memos were passed on as E-mail. Of course, there were no ashtrays around, either. The few employees who still smoked had to leave the building and skulk about in the quadrangle below, puffing furtively. That part seemed a bit unnecessary to me, particularly when it was clear from investment reports that the company, which was owned by an American corporation, had links with the tobacco industry. But that, I concluded, was the modern business world for you; everyone is owned by someone else. Everyone’s hands are slightly soiled.

  Signing on with the company had meant reading through a sixty-page manual of do’s and don’ts. When I started work at sixteen in a tiny nicotine-coloured insurance office in Oxford Street, our bosses weren’t listless managers but enthusiastic owners. The typewriters we used were enormous steel machines that gave us sore fingers from hammering the keys, and we shared telephones three to one. Thinking about this, I put the distant attitude of the younger working generation down to the wide age gap between us (I remembered my own respectful horror of the elderly as a child) and forgot about it when I went home.

  Until the matter of Mr Nash’s computer.

  One evening I agreed to stay late. Overtime pay was good, and I knew that the extra would come in handy for a new winter coat. We were opening a new delivery route to the Far East and there were feasibility studies to be typed and printed. Rose had offered to stay behind with me, but as I knew she was supposed to be babysitting her granddaughter I insisted she went home. The younger executives would often still be in the building at eight or nine o’clock, but on this particular night there was a company squash tournament, and they seemed to take their sports very seriously.

  I was watching the rain tacking across the windows while I waited for the machine to carry out a command. A beep drew my attention back to the screen. I had been loading old files onto a diskette but had run out of memory space. The DISK FULL sign winked back at me like a little neon hieroglyph. I searched my drawer for a fresh box of disks but couldn’t find any, so I went to Mr Nash’s terminal and borrowed one of his.

  I checked to see if it was correctly formatted and called up the file directory to ensure that it was blank. Instead of an empty column, I found myself looking at a special document that read like a staff list. One of the files was labelled Tippet, Rose. I couldn’t resist taking a peek and opened it. There, laid out across a spreadsheet, were all kinds of private details about Rose, medical and financial things that should only have been in the hands of a personnel manager. It got worse. Under Evaluation: Work Attitude it said Cantankerous. Beside Level Of Efficiency it read F***king Awful. Under Personal Habits it said Slovenly. I wondered; had times changed so radically that such insulting language could be used in an unprotected file? Below this I was shocked to read another line which said simply Course Of Action: Termination Of Employment. Mr Nash had no jurisdiction in this ar
ea. Hiring and firing was not his responsibility. Had I invaded his privacy by reading a note intended to be kept solely as a record of his personal frustrations? Eventually I decided that he must use private files to vent his spleen on employees for whom he did not care. What other explanation could there be? I returned the disk to its place in the box and for the next few days watched my colleague’s impassive features for signs of discomfort when he was drawn into conversation with Rose. If he really hated working with her, he certainly hid it very well. But that was the thing about the younger ones; you could never tell what they were really thinking. They never stopped being corporate.

  One Friday evening after work Rose and I went over to the local wine bar, imaginatively named Corks, and shared a bottle of plonk. Something had clearly been troubling my friend all day, and I waited patiently for her to come out with it.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last, running a finger around the rim of her glass. ‘I’ve been with DMK for four years now, and I’ve always enjoyed the work, but just lately –’ She stared into her drink.

  ‘Yes?’ I prompted gently.

  ‘They seem to be deliberately getting at me, Harriet.’

  ‘Who do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘The younger ones. People like Mr Gould. He keeps piling on typing just as I’m about to leave for the night, waiting for me to refuse to help him. And Miss Kidston – I was coming back from lunch the other day and I saw her deliberately knock a folder of papers from my desk into the bin. If I hadn’t seen them fall I might not have found them before the cleaners came around. There were signed cheques and all sorts of things. I would have lost my job.’

  ‘Are you sure she did it on purpose?’ I asked.

  ‘There are other oddities, too,’ she said, barely hearing me. ‘Have you noticed how quickly they talk to each other? And they use this funny code, so you can’t understand what they’re saying. I’m sure they talk about me behind my back.’

  ‘They’re much younger than you or I,’ I explained. ‘They have different tastes, go to places we’ve never heard of, lead faster lives. You know how the young evolve their own way of speaking. It just shows that we’re getting older. We don’t keep up with their private jokes – we used to have our own.’ I tried to make light of it, to stop her from looking so depressed. ‘Then again perhaps they’re aliens from outer space, planning to take over the planet. They’re going to enslave the human race, but first they have to commandeer the nation’s delivery systems.’

  Rose laughed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think they’re aliens. Miss Kidston’s from Leeds. They’re definitely a new breed, though, different to us.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ I replied. ‘Our generation made quite enough mistakes, thank you very much.’

  ‘We won a world war. I doubt we could do that again.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think Miss Kidston has enough moral fibre to lead a few regiments. But I hope we’ll never have to worry about such things.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure.’ She took a sip from her glass. ‘Perhaps there are other battles still to be won.’

  It was an odd thing to say, and I didn’t recall the remark until the following Thursday, when Rose failed to show up for work. It wasn’t until after lunch that we heard about the heart attack. Apparently it was severe and she was on the critical list. The hospital wouldn’t allow her to have any visitors. She was still unconscious.

  Rose lived alone. A neighbour had found her on the floor of her kitchen. As I typed my way through the afternoon’s correspondence, I looked up and saw that someone had placed a rose on the opposite empty desk. I remember thinking what an inappropriate gesture this was, because the rose is a symbol of silence. Then I recalled the note on Mr Nash’s file, the one about her termination of employment.

  Well, wouldn’t it seem like an odd sort of coincidence to you? I didn’t see how it could be anything else, and I imagined Mr Nash must have felt terrible when he heard, knowing what he’d written about her. The odd thing was, I’m sure I heard him mention Rose’s name to Mr Gould and laugh. Why would he do that?

  I started to imagine all sorts of conspiracies. Rose’s dirty coffee cup had inadvertently been left on her desk. As I started to wash it up I nearly wiped a thick white residue from the bottom of the mug and was already mentally accusing Mr Nash of poisoning her before I remembered how much sugar she always used to shovel in. Still, I returned the mug unwashed to my bottom drawer as a memento of our friendship. She’d been so nice to me. It didn’t seem fair.

  The next morning I called the hospital. Rose’s condition had stabilised, but she wasn’t up to seeing people yet. Her attack had been very serious and would leave some permanent damage. At the office I saw them huddled around Mr Nash’s desk, the young executives, talking quietly together. I moved a little closer and tried to hear, but they noticed me and suddenly dispersed, shooting their cuffs and straightening their skirts and ties, as guilty as school children caught with cigarettes.

  At the end of the day I arranged to take over some of Rose’s work until Mr Franklin could get Human Resources to provide a replacement. That meant working until late, after the others had gone. Well, I had to do something, if only to prove to myself that I wasn’t imagining some giant conspiracy against the older members of the company. I’d always had an overdeveloped imagination.

  Still, that night I decided to take another look at Nash’s file and make a copy of it for myself.

  The office was silent but for the humming of the air conditioners. I missed the sound of traffic. The fourth floor, where I worked, was empty but for the supervisor, Mr Franklin, who was working in his office with the door closed. I could see him bent over his desk through the smoked glass, never shifting his gaze from the oblongs of paper neatly arranged before him. I went over to Nash’s work station, removed his disk case and prepared to take another look at the file I had opened from the unmarked diskette.

  I clipped it into the IBM and accessed it, looking through the list of names. Everything was just as it had been before. It would take too long to read through the files now, so I decided to copy the relevant sections onto the hard disk of my machine. It was then that I noticed my own name. I couldn’t open the file while it was copying, and it had only just finished when Mr Franklin came out of his office to get a coffee. Panicking, I removed the diskette and hastily returned it to its rightful place in the box. My heart was thumping beneath my cardigan. Anyone would have thought that I’d done something highly illegal, and that’s how I felt, like a detective breaking and entering without a warrant. As soon as Mr Franklin was safely back in his office with the door shut, I opened the copied file and scrolled down the list. There it was, plain as eggs, my name, Harriet Sinclair. I decided to take a look at what Mr Nash really thought of me. Beneath a host of personal details about my financial state I found a category marked Evaluation: Work Attitude. Next to this it said Servile. Under Level Of Efficiency, it said Too Damned Slow. And under Course Of Action there was the awful phrase again, Termination Of Employment. I didn’t understand. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes and I didn’t want to cry, but I hated the idea that someone thought I was past the age of usefulness because I knew that I wasn’t. I saw how the other girls worked and I matched them easily. On some jobs I was much faster than them.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ boomed a sudden loud voice. Mr Franklin was staring over the top of my terminal, trying to look concerned. I hit SCREEN CLEAR faster than I’ve ever moved in my life.

  ‘I have hay fever,’ I said sharply. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute. I have some work to finish.’

  ‘You should go home, let one of the younger girls do it for you in the morning,’ he offered vaguely before returning to his office. Closing the file I switched off my machine and covered it. I felt alone and depressed.

  That night I looked in on Rose at the hospital. We were only allowed to speak briefly because the nurse didn’t want her tired. She asked me to collect h
er belongings from the office because she would not be returning to work. It seemed to me that there was something else on her mind, something she wished to speak of but found difficult to express. I filled the minutes with mundane office gossip, waiting for her to formulate the thought, but it eluded her. The medication wasn’t allowing her to think clearly. Tucking my hair beneath my hat, I rose and promised to return in a day or so. She seemed very sorry to see me go.

  When you live alone you sometimes find yourself dwelling on silly things, speculations you would dismiss from your mind if only you used your common sense or had someone to talk you out of it. I thought about the behaviour of the youngsters at the office, unable to decide whether or not there was any real cause for alarm. If William had still been alive I would have told him about Rose’s hospitalisation and Mr Nash’s file, and he would have dismissed the whole thing as a nonsensical coincidence. But I couldn’t do that by myself.

  So the next day I returned to the office a little warier than before, and I worked hard and stayed out of trouble. After the flurry of workload changes caused by my friend’s sudden illness, things quickly returned to normal. A week later Rose was released to recuperate at home, and I visited her with flowers and sincere-sounding Get Well cards from members of staff.

  That was when Danny joined the firm. I arrived one morning to find a tall ginger-haired boy sitting at Rose’s desk emptying out the drawers. He had a gold front tooth and freckles like you’d never seen, even on his eyelids.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked rather more sharply than I had intended.

  ‘The new temp,’ he explained with a smug grin. ‘I suppose you’re going to show me the ropes. Just don’t tell me you have to be crazy to work here.’

  I hadn’t expected them to employ a boy and tried not to look surprised. ‘Has someone shown you where everything is?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he replied, casually flicking on the computer, ‘I’ve handled secretarial work on every system they could throw at me, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, you name it. This should be a piece of piss.’