Working Wonders

by Jenny Colgan

  ‘Unlucky, eh Art?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Arthur, as if yearning for nothing more than to be banging a sad-looking fifty-year-old woman on top of a coffee machine. Every time he let Ross call him Art, he reflected, a little bit of his soul died. He suspected (correctly) that Ross knew this. ‘I was doing alright until you came along.’

  ‘Oh!’ Cathy blushed again and waved her hands. This was possibly the most wonderful time she’d had in years.

  ‘Never mind, eh, pet?’ Ross leaned in chummily. ‘If you get made redundant today we’ll just go and cruise round the world, eh?’

  Cathy smiled happily. Arthur shut his eyes. This was awful. Why didn’t he just punch him? He’d seen the picture of the ex-page-three model Ross claimed to be going out with, and she didn’t share much in common with Cathy apart from a certain look of resignation around the eyes. He should defend Cathy and punch Ross and … thrust a sword through his heart.

  He opened his eyes. A sword? That was a bit much, surely. Offensive weapons weren’t really his style: he was a Labour voter and an inveterate spider freer.

  ‘Worried, Art?’ said Ross.

  ‘No,’ said Arthur, panicking.

  Ross sniffed, looked as if he knew something the others didn’t, and walked away.

  Can I feel my blood pressure rise? thought Arthur. Ooh. If I had a heart attack I’d get three months off to recover. Then: I am thirty-two years old and wishing for a heart attack. That cannot be good. Perhaps a mildly painless form of cancer, that got lots of sympathy. Or if he jumped out of the window here, made it look like an accident …

  He wandered back to his desk, ostentatiously holding his nose as he passed Sven. ‘You’ve got mail!’ said a smarmy American voice. Arthur was surprised to see he’d automatically turned on his computer. Oh God. This, as well as a tendency to dial ‘nine’ before making a phone call at home was starting to make him think that his brain was gradually melding with the office. Soon, he would have no independent thoughts left of his own. His computer would beep ‘You’ve got thoughts!’ and then proceed to delete them, one by one.

  Eighteen messages, almost all involving the project he was currently working on – the mooted bid for a new hypermarket near the town centre which involved knocking down substantial bits of old houses and creating a six-hundred-space multi-storey car park which would obscure the view of the marshland. It would also create fifteen hundred jobs and, on the whole, people tended to like handy hypermarkets. As a government worker charged with reviewing the viability of such projects, he often figured it would, in the long run, be quicker for him just to pull down his trousers and pull open his butt cheeks for the mega-grocers.

  The e-mail he was looking for, however, was about a third of the way down the screen.

  re: Strategic review job reassessment schedule.

  In his head, he heard them mispronounce ‘schedule’.

  Please report to conference room B at 10.10 a.m …

  Ah hah, he thought. Not even doing it in half-hour cycles. They must already know who they wanted in or out.

  … for your psychometric testing.

  Oh crap. The last time Arthur had done any psychometric testing, it had recommended he join the army. Although, on balance, how could that possibly be any worse than what he was doing now? Well, he could be shot to death, he supposed.

  I would like to remind all staff that this is simply a cost-benefit-efficiency exercise devised to see how we can get the best out of all public service environments – a goal with which we’re all in agreement!

  Yes, thought Arthur. I would gladly let my family starve and my house get repossessed if it benefited public service environments.

  So, don’t worry and you never know – you might even enjoy taking the test!

  Yours, Ross.

  Cathy leaned over from the next booth, twisting her brooch nervously.

  ‘I get three twenty-five,’ she said. ‘You know, I’m not sure if I will enjoy taking the test.’

  Arthur wanted to be reassuring, but couldn’t think of a way. ‘I’m not so sure, either. Otherwise they’d call it a “party”. Although not one of our Christmas parties. Which are also misleadingly titled.’

  Cathy’s face fell even further. ‘I organize those.’

  ‘Of course you do! Just being …’ he groped for a word. ‘Um, “wacky”.’

  Cathy, not normally a good judge of wacky behaviour (eg: having more than two piercings would count as wacky, as did being gay; filling your house full of china dolls bought on a monthly payment plan however would have crossed her radar as perfectly normal), narrowed her eyes at this travesty of the Trade Descriptions Act.

  ‘It’ll be a piece of piss,’ said Sven, standing up for his twice-hourly trip to the vending machine. He normally timed them for whenever his phone was ringing, which drove everybody crazy. ‘Just tell them you’re not doing it!’

  ‘Yes, well, the only way someone could get away with that,’ said Arthur, realizing he was sounding peevish and exactly like his father, ‘would be to do a job so incomprehensible that no-one understands it, so they can’t fire you. Or your dog.’

  Sven nodded with satisfaction, taking the compliment. His phone started to ring. He ignored it and walked away.

  ‘Yeah. I’m so happy I’m not some generic paper pusher – ooh, sorry,’ was his parting shot.

  ‘I am NOT …’ Arthur took a deep breath, conscious that Sven was always trying to rile him and that it always worked. Also, that whoever the evil consultants might be, they would probably choose a good moment to walk past while he was getting involved in a yelling match. And also, that it was true.

  He sighed and turned back to his computer. Sven came back slopping coffee, and took an enormous bite out of his second roll, spluttering crumbs all over Arthur’s in-tray. Management had discouraged the habit of going out to lunch by situating the offices seventeen miles from the nearest conurbation, so the entire room had a patina of other people’s pot noodles and Marmite.

  Arthur sat in purgatory for the next forty minutes, unable to concentrate. How had he got here, struggling to hold on to a shitty job he didn’t want, on a wet Tuesday in Coventry? School had been alright, hadn’t it? College – fine, fun. Geography, the world’s easiest option in the days when universities had still been fairly exclusive organizations that didn’t include degrees in Star Trek and Cutlery. And, ‘There’ll always be a need for town planners,’ his dad had said, pointing out with unarguable logic that people did, indeed, continue to be born. And now he was thirty-two and wanted to kill someone for accidentally spilling small pieces of bread into a black plastic container that didn’t belong to him, filled with crappy bits of paper he didn’t give a flying rat’s fart about. Hmm.

  At four minutes past ten, he got up as casually as he dared without pondering too much on the fact that if he was absolutely spot-on for time, this could mean something on the psychometric testing. Cathy looked up at him with wide-eyed fear.

  ‘I’ll write the answers down on the back of my hand for you,’ he said.

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘No right answers, mate,’ said Sven. ‘Ooh no. Just wrong ones. Then they escort you out of the building and lock you up for life.’

  ‘He’s kidding,’ said Arthur. ‘Leave her alone.’

  ‘Woo, back off Sir Galahad.’

  Cathy giggled and blushed again. Arthur wondered how much he would mind starting his working life all over again as a lonely shepherd on a hillside.

  ‘Sheep is to shepherd as goats are to … banker-shepherd-goatherd-banana.’

  Arthur sighed and ploughed on with his pen. These were unbelievably crap, but he knew in the way of these things that they might suddenly get really hard in about fifteen seconds. At this point they were still checking his ability to read, which didn’t exactly reflect well on their hiring strategies in the first place.

  ‘Pig is to sty as dog is to … house-sty-kennel-banana.’

  What was the fascin
ation with farm animals, anyway? Was it an additional measure of stress, to conjure up bucolic fantasies whilst being held prisoner in a room without any windows? Arthur suddenly felt a desire to draw one of those adolescent penises, with enormous teardrops coming out the top, all over the paper.

  ‘Monkey is to banana as polar bear is to bamboo-banana-fish-asteroid.’

  Hmm. Perhaps being a town planner was marginally better than being the guy who had to make up questions about polar bears.

  ‘Sword is to truth as horses are to … loyalty-dreams-journeys-bananas.’

  Arthur started and sat back from the table. He looked at the question again and remembered his dream suddenly. Well, that was a strange one. Horses again. Then he ticked ‘journeys’, even though it wasn’t the least bit the same at all.

  It was ten forty-five and he’d barely made a dent in the piles of paper. Now he was doing stupid maths questions along the lines of squares of things and whether or not two is a prime number, just because it really doesn’t look like one. He dispatched these quickly enough – one doesn’t become an expert on suburban bus ratios without being able to do long division – and reached the largest section of the test. Stretching, he realized how incredibly hot it was in the room. His shirt was sticking to his back.

  ‘There are no right or wrong answers on this test,’ it said at the top of the paper. Arthur snorted, then instinctively looked around for a security camera. ‘Please answer questions as quickly and honestly as you can and give the first answer that comes into your head.’ I would do, thought Arthur, if there was a box that said, ‘Augh! Christ, get me out of here!’

  Please tick whichever you feel most applies to you.

  I want everyone to like me

  I want to be successful

  I want time to read my book

  Hmm, thought Arthur. It’s like a haiku. And I want all of these things. Let me see: like me means weak, read my book means slacker – he ticked successful.

  I want to travel in my life

  I want to be successful

  I carefully finish projects

  Ooh, getting tricky. Let me see: slacker, successful, anal. Okay. If there was a ‘I want to be successful’ line in every question, then he was home free.

  Only your mother really knows what is best for you

  I want time to read my book

  I want to be the leader

  Okay. Hmm. Between all the successes and leaders, he was coming out a bit too type-A-heart-attacks-risk. The mother thing was a nightmare waiting to happen. Books are good.

  Four hundred identical ones of these later, Arthur was going stir-crazy. The same lines, repeated in seemingly infinite patterns of stupidity, designed to gradate just in whichever direction, given that you were already going to lie, you would prefer to lie. Would he rather come out as the teacher’s anal sneak or the crazed ambition seeker? The joiner-inner or the workaholic? What was more important – the good name of the company or getting every detail finished? Working yourself into an early grave or keeping up the good name of the company? Arthur groaned and let his head sink forward onto his arms, then pulled it up again in his ongoing hidden camera paranoia. He stared at the paper, distraught. This was meaningless. Useless. And if he didn’t pass … well, he was a town planner without much of a life and absolutely sod all he cared about. His body boiled with fury and he was very close to crumpling up the papers and storming out when the last question caught his eye.

  I was made to gallop through the trees

  I miss my sword

  This is not my time

  He stared at it, then swirled round in confusion as the door opened behind him. A tall, elegant-looking woman walked in.

  ‘Are you finished?’

  He looked at her. She was a very pale blonde, slender without being skinny, and had a high forehead and quite a long nose. Not exactly beautiful, but undeniably striking.

  ‘Um … Just about …’

  She swept the papers away from in front of him. ‘I’m afraid we have a strict time limit.’

  ‘Can I just see the last page …’

  ‘Sorry.’ She didn’t smile. ‘I’m Gwyneth Morgan. CFC consultancy.’

  ‘Ah, the Crazy Frightening Company,’ said Arthur, and immediately wished he hadn’t. ‘I’m joking. You know, I’m sure our excellent chief executive Sir Eglamore would agree that humour in the workplace and …’ He was starting to stammer.

  She stared at him coldly. ‘Yes, I take your point, except of course that humour is normally funny.’

  Arthur was stung. ‘Well, very little is funny when you’ve been chained to a desk in a windowless room for ninety minutes.’

  She raised her eyebrow. ‘Perhaps you’d rather be excluded from the process.’

  Arthur stood there for a minute, feeling the adrenalin rush through him. Suddenly, he felt furious. What the hell was he doing here and why was she treating him like this? Shaking, he pushed back his chair and stood up. She was offering to sack him and he was swallowing it like chocolate. He hated himself.

  ‘Am I done?’

  ‘For now.’

  He almost pushed past her into the corridor.

  Open-plan offices don’t have anywhere to hide. Well, the solitary cubicle in the men’s toilets, but that isn’t a pleasant place to be at the best of times and this was emphatically not the best of times. Unconsciously loosening his tie and wiping his forehead – Jesus, why couldn’t that bitch have given him two fucking minutes to read the last fucking question – he strode back to his rat hole, hot and furious.

  ‘How was it?’ asked Cathy anxiously.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, almost spitting the words out. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Why are you such a funny colour, then?’ Sven said, picking his nose behind a magazine.

  ‘I am not.’

  Sven looked over pointedly, still exploring with his finger. ‘Nah, you’re right. You look incredibly casual and relaxed.’

  Cathy stroked him on the sleeve. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

  Her pitying kindness was worse than Sven’s predictable indifference, and left Arthur shaking off her arm, half wanting to scream and half wanting to cry.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  Ross stopped past. ‘Hey guys!’ He smiled unconvincingly. ‘You know, just because it’s a special day doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done, hey?’

  Arthur briefly closed his eyes, as Sven’s phone started ringing. Sven ignored it for the eighteenth time that morning and Ross made himself scarce.

  ‘Sven, answer the phone.’

  ‘I can’t, I’m engaged in an important creative mission.’

  ‘ANSWER THE PHONE!’

  ‘You answer it! It’s two feet away.’

  This was true. Didn’t prisoners get ten feet by twelve?

  Ross may have moved on, but the other office monkeys looked up, sensing something interesting.

  ‘I am NOT answering your phone, Sven. It’ll be some Danish roofing contractor who wants to know British tiling serial numbers again.’

  ‘How? How can I create a city if I’m being constantly distracted?’

  ‘Answer the phone!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘ANSWER THE BLOODY PHONE!’

  ‘NO!’

  People who had blended in against the grey background and the aura of coffee breath were openly watching now; signs of animation and interest were showing in weary eyes long-sighted from reading consultancy proposals.

  Arthur unplugged the phone, picked it up and walked to the window of the office, which overlooked the business ‘park’. His mind a blank, he had only a very vague idea that he was planning on throwing it out when he got there. Of course, the windows weren’t designed to open, and he hurt his fingers tugging at them.

  ‘FUCK!’ he said, out loud. Somebody in the office – probably Cathy – gasped. Everyone was silent now.

  He put the phone down on the photocopier,
still clutching it furiously, his knuckles white with anger, blood flowing like acid through his veins. Suddenly, all he wanted to do was smash the window with the phone, sending it hurtling to the ground and sending Sven right after it.

  It’s only a phone, he thought to himself. Calm down. You’re having a bad day. What the hell are you doing? For fuck’s sake, it’s only a fucking phone. That was right. He couldn’t. He should pull himself together, walk back over to Sven’s desk and plug it back in. When it started ringing again he would calmly pick it up and say, ‘Sven isn’t here. He got a bit of a fright from a hole-punch this morning and accidentally crapped himself. He’s gone home and is never coming back again, the shame was so much. You wouldn’t believe how bad it still smells in …’

  And then Sven would grab the phone off him and everything would be okay.

  Instead, Arthur stepped back from the window, picked up the industrial-sized photocopier with the phone on top, and hurled with all his might.

  The photocopier flew through the air and broke through the bullet-proof glass like a flying hippopotamus, gracelessly soaring out onto the grass below. The phone bounced back off the window-frame and knocked him out.

  Chapter Two

  Arthur looked around. It felt like sun on his face. Where was he? What about a window? Was he outside? He risked opening an eye, and instantly staggered backwards. He was on the edge of a forest and there wasn’t another building in sight. It was dark and icy, and he caught a glimpse of something white through the trees. Then he woke up.

  He couldn’t tell where he was. His face was pointing upwards towards some light, which could either be good, as he wasn’t face down in a gutter, or bad, if he were dead. He realized how ironic this would be after wishing himself dead all morning, then realized that if he really were dead irony probably wouldn’t come into it. He tentatively opened his eyes.

  ‘Well, hello.’ A warm voice sounded in his head. He focused. He was lying on a sofa. A woman in her mid-fifties, with long grey hair tied back, was sitting opposite him, regarding him calmly. She was staring at him without blinking, and her eyes were an odd shade of yellowish hazel.