Grey Area

Grey Area

I was standing by the facsimile machine this afternoon, peering through the vertical, textured fabric louvres that cover every window in the Company’s offices and which are linked together with what look like lengths of cheap key-chain. I was waiting, because all too often the facsimile machine misfeeds and two sheets run through together. So, when I send a facsimile I always send the sheets through one by one. It’s time-consuming, but it leads to fewer mistakes. I have become so adept at this task that I can now perform it by sound rather than sight. When the sheets are feeding through correctly, the machine makes a whirring, chirruping noise, like a large insect feeding. When I push in the leading edge of a new sheet, there is a momentary hesitation, a predatory burr, then I feel the mandibles of nylon-brush clutch and nibble at it. When the entire document has been passed through the body of the facsimile machine, it clicks, then gives off a high-pitched peep.

This afternoon, just as the machine peeped, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned. I had noticed him a couple of times before. I don’t know his name, but I have an idea he works in personnel. I noticed him because there is something wrong with his clothing — or the way he wears it, the way it hangs on his body. His suits cling to him, his flies look like an appendicectomy scar, puckered and irregular. We grunted acknowledgements to each other. I tamped the sheets of paper into a neat stack. I moved past him, across the floor, and through the swing doors into the corridor that leads back to the Department.

The Department must always be capitalised when it is referred to by its members, in order to differentiate it from other departments. Of course, other departments must also be capitalised by their members. This makes the paperwork for inter-departmental meetings — for which I often have responsibility — complex to arrange. A different word-processed document is needed for each departmental representative.

The formats and protocols for all the Company’s communications were modified by the Head of Department, who’s my boss, when he took over about six months ago.

The document that set out these modifications was ring-bound and about seventy pages long. Nevertheless, he asked me to pull apart the plastic knuckles that gripped one of the copies, and attach the sheets in a long row to the bulletin board that runs the entire length of the Department’s main corridor. He said that this was so everyone in the Department would be certain to pay attention to them.

It must be as a result of initiatives such as these that my boss has enjoyed such a phenomenally quick rise through the hierarchy of the Company.

I had to walk right along this corridor to get back to my office, which is situated, opposite my boss’s, up a dog-leg of stairs at the far end. I can’t understand why we don’t have a facsimile machine in the Department. Every other department has at least one, and more often than not several. We have a networked computer system, modem links, numerous photocopiers, document-sorters and high-speed laserprinters, but no facsimile machine. I have never asked my boss why this is the case, because it was like this before he became Head of Department, and perhaps he, like me, has come to accept it as an aspect of the status quo.

I turned out of the long corridor that leads to the inter-departmental facsimile machine, and into the corridor that runs the length of the Department. This corridor is wide and low, with a line of strip lights along the ceiling. I usually keep my eyes fixed on these when I’m walking along the corridor, in order to avoid contact with my colleagues. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to them, it’s just that there’s always plenty of work to do and I like to keep a rhythm up throughout the day. I have a dread of getting behind.

In my office there is a desk, three filing cabinets, a stationery cupboard, a swivel chair, and a workstation that holds my computer and laserprinter. All of this furniture is a grey-beige colour, very neutral, very gentle on the eye. It helps to offset the rather aggressive carpet tiling, which is chequered in two distinct, but equally electric, shades of blue.

It’s a kind of carpet tiling that was advertised a few years ago on television in a gimmicky way. A stretch of tiling was laid down in a kind of test zone, a mocked-up section of an office corridor. Then a live rhinoceros was released from a cage and encouraged to tear up and down the fake corporate environment, snorting and ramping.

It was a startling image: the very embodiment of the rhinoceros, its astonishing combination of bulk and fluidity, imposing itself on the bland anonymity of the set. Then, at the very end of the sequence, the camera angle moved round from the side of the corridor to its end and the rhino charged towards the viewer. The image was so sharp that if you had frozen the frame you could have counted the individual bristles that made up its congealed horn, the wrinkled veins in its vinyl hide.

At the last moment before it came plunging through the screen into your living room, the beast turned tail and dumped a steaming heap of excrement right in the eye of the camera, which tracked down so as to catch it plummeting on to the carpet tiling. The voiceover intoned: ‘Rhinotile, tough enough for all the animals in your office!’

I can’t get this advert out of my head. The punchline comes to me unbidden whenever I look at, or even think about, the carpet tiling.

I haven’t done all that much to personalise my office — the walls are mostly taken up with a noticeboard, a calendar and an organisational chart.

The organisational chart has been done on one of those magnetic whiteboards, to which metallic strips can be affixed, to express lines of command, the skeleton of the hierarchy; and coloured dots or squares, to indicate individuals and their functions.

It’s my job to change the shape of the organisational chart as the Department metamorphoses from month to month. The Department doesn’t have an exceptionally high turnover of staff, but enough people come and go to make rearranging some strips and dots necessary every few weeks.

I have never asked the Head of Department why it is that, despite my pivotal role in representing the structure of the Department, I have yet to be included in the organisational chart myself.

I stapled the papers I had just faxed and deposited them in a tray for filing. I walked round behind my desk — which faces the door — and sat down. My office is organised so that the working surface is directly in front of me and if I swivel to the right I am sitting at the computer keyboard. This I did.

I had to work on the presentation document for this week’s inter-departmental meeting. My boss had made handwritten corrections to the first draft, and these I now set on the document holder that sprouts from a Velcro pad, attached to the side of my monitor.

The corrections were extensive and involved the re-keying of a number of paragraphs. I worked steadily and by five it was done and neatly formated. I hit the keystrokes necessary to activate the laserprinter and then tidied my desk.

Desk tidying is quite an important ritual with me. I like to have every paper clip in its modular plastic container, every pencil, staple, rubber and label in its assigned position. I like my highlighting pens arranged in conformity with the spectrum. I like my blotter located in the exact centre of my desk. I like my mouse mat positioned precisely along the front edge of my workstation.

When I first came to work at the Company I was a lot sloppier about this; my desk was tidy, but it wasn’t exact. Now it’s exact.

Then I made a list, using the soft ‘scherluump-scherluump’ that the laserprinter was making as a counterpoint with which to order my thoughts. I always make a list at the end of the working day. They are essential if you want to maintain any kind of ordered working practice. I finished the list just as the presentation document finished printing. The icon came up on the VDU. It shows a smiling and satisfied little laserprinter, with underneath the legend: ‘Printing Completed’.

I stacked the papers, punched them, bound them in a ring-binder with a plastic cover, and took the document across the corridor to my boss’s office.

He was tipped far back on the rear wheels of his chair, so that his head was almost hidden between two of the vertical textured-fabric louvres that cover the windows of his office. The posture looked uncomfortable. The black head of the lamp was pulled low over the fan of papers on the wide expanse of his desk. His feet were propped on the desk top and the cuffs of his trousers had ridden up above his socks, exposing two or three inches of quite brown, but hairless ankle. He said, ‘Have you re-done the presentation document for the inter-departmental meeting?’

I replied, ‘Yes, here it is.’

He said, ‘Good. Well, I’ll see you in the morning then.’

I turned and walked back across the corridor. I shut down my computer and then bent to turn off the laserprinter. Kneeling like this, with my face level with the lower platform of the workstation, I could see right underneath my desk. I could see the flexes of the computer, the laserprinter, the desk lamp and the telephone all join together and twist into a spiral stream of mushroom-coloured plastic that disappeared down an oblong cable-routing slot. There was nothing else to see under the desk, no errant rubber bands or propelling pencils gone astray.

The bottom of my workstation is shaped like an upside-down T, with a castor protruding from a rubber bung at either end of the crossbar. I rested my forehead on this bar for a while and let the coolness of the metal seep into me. When I opened my eyes again, I focused not on the distant prospect of the skirting board, but on my immediate vicinity: the beaten path that my varnished nail had cut for the rest of my finger, through the eighth-of-an-inch pile of nylon undergrowth. It was this that caught my attention — a really tiny event.

How small does an event have to be before it ceases to be an event? If you look very closely at the tip of your fingernail as it lies on a clear surface (preferably something white like a sheet of paper), so closely that you can see the tiny cracks in the varnish; and then push it towards some speck of dust, or tweak the end of a withered hair, or flick the corpse of a crumb still further into decay, is that as small as an event can be?

When I stood up I rapped my head on the underside of my workstation. Both it and my skull vibrated. I bit my lip. I stood like that for a few moments, concentrating hard on the angle of one of the flexible fronds in the stack of binders in my stationery cupboard. Then I shut the cupboard doors, snapped the switch that bathed my office in darkness, and left it.

I went down the first flight of stairs, past the plant that lives in the grey granules, down the second flight and along the corridor. The Department was already empty. I knew that, at five on the dot, the entire workforce would have risen up like a swarm, or a flock, and headed for the six big lifts that pinion the Company to the earth.

I also found myself on an empty platform, caught in the hiatus between two westbound trains. The platform’s dirty tongue unwound along the side of the tube, which was ribbed like a gullet with receding rings of be-grimed metal. A tired, flat wind, warm with minor ailments, gusted up my nose. The electronic sign above the platform kept on creating the word ‘Information’ out of an array of little dots of light; as if this in itself was some kind of important message. I listened to the sough and grind of the escalator belt.

Gradually the platform began to fill up with people. The minor-ailment smell was undercut with hamburger and onion, overwhelmed by processed cheese and honey-cured ham, encapsulated by tobacco. They stood in loose groups, bonded together by a mutual desire to try and avoid uniformity. Thus, blacks stood with whites, women with men, gays with the straight, middle class with working class, the ugly with the beautiful, the crippled with the whole, the homeless with the homeowners, the fashionable with the shabby. That so many people could believe themselves different from one another only made them — appear more the same.

To my left, clamped against the bilious tiling, was a strange machine. It wasn’t clear whether it was mechanical or electronic. It had a curved housing of green plastic. It was eight inches high, and bolted at top and bottom to brackets hammered into the grout. In the middle of the thing was a circular, venetian-blind-slatted plate. Underneath it was a small sign that proclaimed: ‘Speak Here’. I pressed my ear against the plate. and heard the faint rise and fall of what might have been a recording of outer space, or the depths of the sea.

When the train eventually came, I stood for a moment watching the people get off and get on. The two streams of shoving bodies folded into one another, like the fingers of two hands entwining deep in the lap of the ground.

And that was what my day was like — or at any rate the second half of it. Wherever I start from I will experience the same difficulties, so it might as well be this afternoon, when I sensed the man’s presence behind me as I fed the facsimile machine.

One last thing. This morning, as I have for the past fourteen mornings or so, I put a sanitary towel in my underpants. Tonight, when I stood in front of the mirror’s oblong and looked at the pouch between my legs, I felt certain that there would be blood absorbed into the quilted paper. Just a few dabs and blotches, together with a brown smear at the edge, denoting earlier bleeding.

But there was nothing. It was virgin territory. No period — period. I haven’t had sexual intercourse for over six months — I can’t be pregnant. I am normally as regular in my body as I am at work. And over the last two weeks I have felt the swelling feeling, accompanied by an odd sensation of vacuity, that always precedes my coming on; and the dusting of yellow and mauve pimples under the softening, water-retaining line of my jaw has appeared as it should. I’ve also felt irascible and unaccountably depressed. (Well, normally this depression is accountable, I just can’t account for it. Only now is it truly unaccountable.) But still there’s been no period. Only the feelings, straining me for day after day.

In the morning the radio woke me at seven-fifteen, as it always does. Outside the sky was limpid, void, without properties of colour or density. Was it light yet? There was no answer to this, it was as light as it was yesterday at this time — and the day before, and the day before that.

I got up and went over to my bureau, where I started flicking through my diary. I looked over the pages of the past six weeks or so. I seldom write anything in the diary but appointments, and there was a scattering of these, like mouse droppings, on the lined paper. I tried to think about those days that had gone, taking with them fading memories of dental appointments and dry-cleaning collection times.

The day my last period was due was marked in red. This is how my life resolves itself: into periods and the periods between periods.

But when I thought about it, summoned up the seven-fifteens of those last forty days, they returned to me decked in the same limpid, void garb as this morning. Could it be true? Could it be that it has been getting light at the same time for over a month now? It made no sense. This is the time of year when the seasons change rapidly, when we become aware of the world turning despite — and not because — of what we do. And yet there was this six-week period during which nothing had changed.

I dressed carefully. I tucked the sanitary towel into the gusset of my underpants, trying hard not to think of it as some magical act, some willing of the jammed wheel of my cycle. I selected a new pair of tights from the drawer, and unsnapped them from their cellophane confines. I put on my bra and a cream-coloured cotton blouse. I took a fawn, two-piece suit from the wardrobe. Stepping into the skirt I caught sight of myself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. It was only momentary, but looking at the slight, sharp-faced young woman I saw reflected there, I realised that while I was by no means indifferent to her, she was moving inexorably towards the periphery of my acquaintance.

When I was fully dressed I sat at my bureau and applied a little eyeliner and a smudge of foundation. I don’t wear lipstick as a rule. I knew that my boss would ask me to attend the inter-departmental meeting with him today, so that I could take minutes. Although he would never actually say anything to me about my appearance, I am conscious of the fact that he approves of the way I always make sure I am scrupulously neat, if we are in any context where we are representing the Department to the rest of the Company.

In the kitchen I examined the wash of pale light that fell across the draining board. Was it at precisely the same angle as yesterday? It seemed so. And my bath, gurgling away in a froth of bubbles and white water outside the kitchen window. Was it frothing in exactly the way that it did yesterday? Or was it only my perception of it? They certainly seemed familiar, those miniature cumuli, sparkling oily greens and blues.

In the middle of the afternoon, I found myself by the facsimile machine again. I was looking out through the vertical textured fabric louvres and trying to decide whether or not the sky was the same colour as at this time yesterday. How would it be possible to do this? I toyed idly with getting a colour chart from the local DIY shop and seeing if I could match the sky’s shade to any of its little squares. But the minute I hit upon this idea, I realised that it was absurd, that the sky wasn’t like some expanse of silk emulsion on which I could impose my taste.

Then I became aware of his presence again. It was much stronger today. I turned, but he wasn’t behind me; all I could see was an ear, poking around the jamb of the door. Its owner must have been talking to someone in the office to the immediate left of the recess where the inter-departmental facsimile machine is housed. I knew it was his ear intuitively. It was a thick, blunt ear, the edges folded over, squaring it off at the top and the side. I began to feel queasy looking at it. It was a typical ear — an ear that revealed what you always have suspected about ears, namely that they don’t possess nerves connecting them to any organ capable of apprehending their shape. I couldn’t believe that this ear was made from flesh and not some more ductile substance, like wax or putty, that had been moulded and then set.

Involuntarily I clutched at my own ear and kneaded it between my thumb and forefinger. I was jerked out of this nauseating brown study by the insistent peep of the facsimile machine — I had neglected to feed it with the next sheet and the connection was broken. By the time I redialled, fed the oblong maw, then turned to look once more, the ear had gone.

We were hosting the inter-departmental meeting this month. My boss always chooses to hold this in Conference Room 2. I have a suspicion that this is because he wishes to intimidate his fellow heads of department. Conference Room 1 is both more comfortable and more accessible.

Conference Room 2 is at the far end of the Department, further up the flight of stairs, past my office. It is perched on top of a wing of the building that projects out into a medium-sized abyss. Four storeys below the grimy windows of the room, a tangled collection of roofs, aerials, walls and skylights provides no fixed point for the eye to alight on.

Although the horizon is no further than before, the sense of Conference Room 2 being surrounded on three sides by space, and accessible on the fourth only by a dwarf entrance from the main building, makes it cut off and removed. This is heightened by the spectacle of a Portakabin that abuts the Conference Room, the end of which dangles over the edge of the local void.

The short flight of stairs that connects Conference Room 2 to the rest of the building has the ubiquitous corporate trappings: half-conical sconces on the uplights; the feral-animal-strength carpet tiling; the vertical textured-fabric louvres (proportionately tiny — to fit the tiny windows).

I entered Conference Room 2. The heads of department sat around the conference table, a blond wood lozenge. Each one was positioned in front of a representation of the corporate logo attached to the wall: an elephant (Indian), standing on a globe, but so stylised that it’s difficult to tell if that’s what it really is.

Southam was there, from marketing; Haines from purchasing; Thribble from sourcing; Andersen from accounting; Askey from data processing; Tenniel from personnel, and, of course, my boss, representing the Department.

‘Come and sit here.’ He clutched a bunch of his black hair in one hand. He was wearing one of those shirts where the collar and cuffs are white, while the rest is striped. This highlighted his brown hands and browner face, making him appear like some executive minstrel. The presentation document was open on the table in front of him, and I could see that he had been making notes in the margin. I got my dictaphone and notebook out and readied myself to take the minutes.

‘Gentlemen,’ my boss began, leaning forward in his chair, ‘as you may recall, last month when it was the turn of my department to host this meeting, I made some proposals regarding the final phase of our corporate restructuring. Since then, as you are all no doubt aware, we have had the Main Board’s approval to proceed with their implementation.

‘This month I have requested a report from each of you, as to how far you have proceeded with the programme. I’ll ask you, Terry, to begin — if you don’t mind?’

‘Not at all,’ said Southam, shifting forward in his seat so that he could pour himself a cup of coffee from the stainless-steel vacuum jug and I could see the puce skin of his tonsure. ‘I am happy to be able to report that since last month a further 37 per cent of our allocated spend has been redirected towards internal marketing. This means that as of today a total of’ — he consulted his own presentation document — ‘97 per cent of our budget is now dedicated to the internal market.’

There were a number of nods, and significant grunts, from the other heads of department. Southam went on to explain the new marketing plan his department had developed to cope with the changed situation. I took the minutes diligently, listening to what he was saying, but not troubling to comprehend it.

When he had finished speaking my boss turned to Haines from purchasing. Haines’s arms were crossed and with the inside edge of each middle finger he was methodically rubbing the nap of suiting stretched over either elbow. He spoke quietly and expressionlessly, with his eyes fixed on the corporate logo opposite him.

‘I think that purchasing can report a success almost exactly congruent with that of marketing. Since last month a further 37 per cent of our purchasing has been reconfigured so as to come from within the Company. This means that 97 per cent of the goods and services we now purchase are sourced from the Company itself.’

In due course, Thribble from sourcing confirmed these figures. The reporting process continued on round the table, in an anti-clockwise direction. I concentrated on the high-pitched ‘eek-eek’ my fibre-tipped pen made as it steeplechased along the narrow feint. I didn’t shut down my automatic dictation pilot until everyone had made their report. Then my boss turned to me and said, ‘I think it would be a good idea if, while we discuss the next item on the agenda, you type up the minutes you’ve taken so far. You can leave the dictaphone running and I’ll bring it down when we’ve finished. I think everyone present would like a copy of the minutes relating to the final phase of the corporate restructuring as quickly as possible.’

There was a scattering of grunted assents to this. I gathered up my pad and, nodding to my boss and the other heads of department, left Conference Room 2.

When I reached the stretch of corridor leading to my office, for no reason that I could think of, I parted two of the vertical textured-fabric louvres that cover the window by the door to my boss’s office. From this vantage I could see Conference Room 2 in its entirety, hovering up above me. The heads of the heads of department were outlined by the room’s windows. As I stood and watched, someone — I think it may have been Southam — rose from the table and walked around the room, pulling the lengths of chain that snapped the louvres shut.

I went into my office. I knelt down to switch on my laserprinter. As I had the previous afternoon, I leant my forehead against the crossbar of the workstation.

It was still there. The beaten path that my varnished nail had cut for the rest of my finger, through the eighth-of-an-inch pile of nylon undergrowth. I stared at it for some minutes in disbelief. Then I tried some experiments: I pushed my nails this way and that through the carpet-tile pile; now combing it, now ploughing it. Using one finger, or two, or the whole hand. These actions made streaks of crushed nylon filaments, but they soon sprang back up. Only the path I had created the day before — the really tiny event — remained a reality.

After a short while I grew bored with this. I stood up, turned on my computer, and made ready to type up the minutes of the inter-departmental meeting. I accessed the file with the previous month’s minutes in it, and created a new file; I set my pad on the stand and began to type: The meeting was called to order and the Chairman asked T. Southam, head of marketing, to present the results of the implementation of the last phase of corporate restructuring. T. Southam reported that since last month a further 37 per cent of the marketing department’s allocated spend had been redirected towards internal marketing. As of the 5th of this month a total of 97 per cent of the department’s total budget is now dedicated to the internal market. .

The pattering of my nails on the keys faltered and died away. I stared at the paragraph I had just typed. The cursor blinked at me from the VDU, the camplicit eye of a machine intelligence. Without analysing what I was doing I saved the file and reentered the file for last month’s minutes. The text scrolled down the green screen. I read: The meeting was called to order and the Chairman asked T. Southam, head of marketing, to present the results of the implementation of the last phase of corporate restructuring. T. Southam reported that since last month a further 37 per cent of the marketing department’s allocated spend had been redirected towards internal marketing. As of the 5th of this month a total of 97 per cent of the department’s total budget is now dedicated to the internal market. .

I felt sick — sick like vomiting sick. I got up from the workstation and walked to the window of my office. I adjusted the vertical textured-fabric louvres slightly, so that I could open the window and get some fresh air. I took deep breaths and stared down into the light well my window looks out on. I counted the paper cups that lay four storeys down, I counted the pigeons that were perched on the ledges four storeys up, I counted the fingers of one hand off on the fingers of the other, and then reversed the process.

I felt the swelling feeling, and the awful, tight vacuity, worse than ever before. I stood there for a long while, my hand lightly brushing the dusting of yellow and mauve pimples under the softening, water-retaining line of my jaw.

Then I went back to the computer, altered the date at the head of the minutes of last month’s inter-departmental meeting, and hit the keystrokes necessary to print out the document.

At five I finished up my work for the day. I had transcribed the tape of the latter half of the inter-departmental meeting and left a copy in my boss’s in-tray. I now made my list of tasks for the following day and then began to tidy my desk.

But halfway through ordering my pens and papers I had an idea. Instead of aligning everything just so, as usual, I would engage in a little exercise. Using my ruler to calculate the angles — so this would be precise — I shifted the computer keyboard, the desk blotter and the mouse mat out of alignment by two or three degrees. This alteration was so slight as to be barely perceptible to the naked eye, but I knew it was there.

Then I went home.

Tonight, eating a late supper in front of Newsnight on the television, it came to me, the expression I really needed to describe the man from personnel. VPL. There used to be an advert on television in which puckered bottom after puckered bottom would float across the screen. Buttock after buttock after buttock, all bobbling away and contained by stretchy cloth beneath the stretchy cloth. VPL–Visible Panty Line. That’s what they called it. If you bought their underwear you were free of it, but if you didn’t you were condemned to an elastic jail.

That’s what he has. Except that it isn’t just his bottom — it’s his whole body. Every limb and portion of the man from personnel’s body is contained in an elasticated pouch, the seams of which show up from under his implausible clothes. What has he got on under there? Some complicated harness that braces his entire body? Some sacred garment enjoined by the Latter Day Saints? Who knows.

The radio woke me at seven-fifteen this morning, and this time there was no doubt in my mind. I got up and stood, looking out of my bedroom window for a long time, marvelling at the limpidity, the utter voidness of the sky.

There was no blood last night and this morning there was no blood in the sleep-warmed sanitary towel either. I stood for quite some time in front of the mirror, scrunging the insides of my thighs; catching up painful bunches of my own flesh and feeling the individual pores between my pincering fingertips. Then I pressed down hard on my belly with both palms and pushed a wave of flesh down to my pudenda, as if I were a giant sponge and I could somehow squeeze the blood out of myself. I repeated this operation a number of times, not really expecting it to work, but thinking it was worth a try.

But I wasn’t frightened. Throughout this whole period I haven’t felt frightened at all. Perhaps I would feel less disturbed, if only I could get frightened. Perhaps I don’t really care that I’ve stopped menstruating, or that the days are unchanging, or that events tirelessly repeat themselves. Or perhaps I’ve simply adjusted — as people do.

In the kitchen I examined the wash of pale light that fell across the draining board. It was at precisely the same angle as yesterday. And my bath, gurgling away with a froth of bubbles and white water outside the kitchen window, was frothing in exactly the way that it did yesterday. I greeted the miniature cumuli, sparkling oily greens and blues, like old friends. Childlike, I allowed myself to imagine that I was weightless and miniscule, that I could roam and romp in this pretty, insubstantial gutterscape.

I had an errand to do on the way to work this morning which made me a little late. It was ten to nine before I mounted the wide concrete stairs that lead to the Company’s offices. At this hour there was a steady trickle of employees entering the building, but it hadn’t yet swelled into the cataract of personnel that flows through the turbine doors between five to and five past.

During those ten minutes at least 90 per cent of the Company’s workforce arrive: secretaries, clerks, canteen assistants, data processors, post-room operatives, maintenance men, as well as middle managers of all shapes and sizes; and, of course, executives. They all crowd in, anxious to be seen arriving on time. The subordinates in a hurry to be there before their bosses, and the bosses in a hurry to be there before their subordinates.

But even at ten to, the foot traffic was light enough for people to observe at least nominally the pleasantries of the morning. These consist not in salutations to colleagues, but in the greeting you give to the commissionaire, Cap’n Sidney.

Cap’n Sidney stands in a booth by the security turnstile. He wears a white peaked cap, and a black serge uniform. The epaulettes on his shoulders are blancoed beyond belief. He stands there erect, the awareness that he is the Company’s first line of defence written into every line of his face.

Young male employees flirt physically with Cap’n Sidney. They duck and weave as they show him their security passes. They want to give him a little action and so they wave their uncalloused hands in his face, saying things like, ‘Howzit going there, Sidders,’ and, ‘Mind out for the old one-two.’ Cap’n Sidney grins benignly and replies, ‘Now, Rocky Marciano — there was a boxer.’

Older male employees, perhaps believing that their M & S blazers remind Cap’n Sidney of the officers he served fifty years ago, will touch the tips of their fingers lightly to their foreheads as they pass through the turnstile. It is the merest feint, a tiny gesture towards the communality of the past; and Cap’n Sidney returns it in the same spirit, with a touch of his nicotine-mitted hand to the peak of his cap.

Older female employees always say ‘Good morning’ to Cap’n Sidney with exaggerated care — as if he were an idiot or an imbecile. And he always says ‘Good morning’ back to them with exaggerated care — as if they were idiots or imbeciles.

Young female employees say ‘Good morning’ to Cap’n Sidney, and they touch him with their eyes. Cap’n Sidney is their talisman, their wise old uncle. He understands that, says ‘Good morning’ in reply and examines their breasts, as if they were security passes.

Cap’n Sidney never says ‘Good morning’ to me, no matter how early I arrive at work. When it comes to me Cap’n Sidney is oblivious. It’s not that he’s rude, or insensitive — after all he simply can’t salute every single Company employee, there are far too many of us. It’s just that we’ve never really met; and now, over thousands of mornings, a natural reserve has built up between us. It would be all right if some colleague of mine — whether a clerical-weight boxer, officer class, or the Right Breasts — were to introduce us, put us at ease with one another; then I too could become a warm, sincere, ten-second friend of Cap’n Sidney.

This is unlikely to happen.

The strangest of things, though; the last six weeks — which we may call the non-period for the sake of convenience — have marked an apparent shift in my lack-of-a-relationship with Cap’n Sidney. During this non-period, when I have approached his booth, pass held level at the convenient height, by the lobe of my right ear, Cap’n Sidney’s eyes have narrowed. And I have thought that, for the split-second my face was turned towards his, as I slid through the turnstile, his expression had a little more openness about it, that something writhed — ever so slightly — beneath his moustache.

The VPL man was in the lift. He smiled at me quite innocently, but as we ascended his presence there became somehow bound up with everything oppressive, everything crammed into the stippled, aluminium booth of my mind. It occurred to me too that the VPL man had only come into my life in the last six weeks or so — at any rate I could dredge up no earlier memory of him.

There is some linkage, some alliance, between my pre-menstrual tension and the VPL man’s VPL. He too has something bulging and constrained, yet vacuous, concealed beneath his clothing. These personalised voids, I imagined, were calling to one another, wailing the music of the empty spheres.

Between the third and the fourth floors I shifted tack. It might not be anything quite so nebulous between me and the VPL man. I now entertained the notion that the VPL man had somehow managed to impregnate me, without my knowledge. Perhaps he had crept into the women’s toilet midway down the departmental corridor, late one afternoon, when only the cleaners are about, and tossed himself off. There is more plausibility in this image: his puckered form in the formica cubicle, his salty dollop on the mushroom-shaped and mushroom-coloured toilet seat.

But there is someone else about. Me. And he knows that. As he strap-hangs his way home on the tube, he smiles enigmatically, his lips parted — because he knows that mine are parted; and at that very moment are sucking it up, his tadpole, his micro-construction robot, which burrows into me carrying the blueprints for the manufacture of more VPL men and VPL women.

By the time we reached the Department’s floor I was convinced of this. I was bearing the VPL man’s child, the chopped-ear-man’s child, the bastard offspring of he-who-lingers-by-the-facsimile-machine. It could be worse — the child will be a fine, healthy specimen, and grow up to do something undynamic but essential, like becoming a Communications Manager (since my boss took over the Department it has been mandatory for all job titles to be capitalised).

It didn’t even occur to me that our child might wish to work in his father’s department rather than my own.

I got out before Daddy, who barely looked up from the folded square of newsprint he was reading and re-reading.

A truly annoying morning was entirely dominated by a recurrent system error on my computer. I have a suspicion that we may have a virus in the departmental network. I said as much to my boss, when he poked his head into my office at around eleven. He asked me what was happening — and I explained that every time I exited from the network and tried to import files on to my own hard disc, the machine crashed.

He came round behind my desk to take a look. I pulled back from the workstation, allowing him the room to get at the keyboard. He was wearing one of his newer suits today; and positioned as I was, I found myself confronted by the seat and upper legs of his trousers. The suit is made from soft but durable fabric, and the designer had seen fit to create some miniature chaps of shiny chamois, which stretched a third of the way down my boss’s thighs. The chaps were mimicked by the distended epaulettes, which I had already seen flopping from the shoulders of the suit jacket, like the ears of a Basset hound.

‘See here?’ He flicked his hands over the surface of the keyboard, only occasionally grasping for the mouse, as if he were casting off a stitch. The cursor appeared here and there, in a whirl of shifts between applications and files. Instead of attempting to import the files directly, he went into them where they were stored, as if intent on doing some work on them. He then cut out the entire contents of each file and re-opened it under another application. Finally he imported the new application, and so sneaked around the lurking virus.

‘See?’ He was heading for the door, while an icon, somewhat like a triumphant Roadrunner, executed a frenzied jig on the VDU, and the tinny speaker cackled, ‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’

The Roadrunner may have known more than I did. At night, the cleaners long departed from the Department, the computer icon could have quit the screen and entered my world of static grey. ‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’ Something had been in my office during the night, something fervid but precise — like the Roadrunner icon, because this morning (‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’) the computer keyboard, the desk blotter and the mouse mat were all perfectly aligned once more. It wasn’t perceptible to the naked eye, but I checked it with my ruler.

At lunchtime I looked hard at the sky for more than five minutes. On the way into work I stopped by the DIY centre and picked up a colour chart. I had been doing comparisons at half-hour intervals all morning. Initially I was certain the shade the sky corresponded to was ‘pearl grey’, but latterly I made up my mind that it was really ‘mid-grey’. It was mid-grey for the rest of the morning.

In fact it grew more convincingly mid-grey the more I checked it, until at lunchtime it was no comparison at all; it was rather that the tiny rectangle on the chart was a miniature window, looking out on to another quadrant of the grey heavens. All it needed was its own vertical textured fabric louvres, to complete the marriage between sample and sky.

I went down to the café and bought my sandwiches, a can of Diet Coke and one of those giant, crumbly cookies.

In the park I sat with other office workers in a circle of benches that surrounds a sagging rotunda. This feature is built from red London bricks. It’s damp and destitute, long since re-pointed. The pillars resemble a demented loggia, which instead of moving forward has turned in on itself, forming a defensive corral. The pools of rusty water at the base of each pillar seem evidence of incontinence, a suitable indignity for wayward park furniture.

The office workers sat canted sideways on the benches. An occasional pigeon hopped up to one of these sandwich eaters, clearly shamed by its capacity to fly and doing its best to hide tattered wings. These exchanges between people and birds were embarrassing to watch. That’s the truth. We have now advanced so far into a zone of the genetically furtive, that office workers, contemplating these flying vermin, feel their own humanity compromised in some way. So they roll up bread pills, and averting their eyes, proffer them to the un-stuck craws.

All afternoon I sat in my office and worked. The straining in my belly grew, swelled, became even more pregnant. I was certain that I was on the verge of getting my period. My nipples were so sensitive that I could feel every bump and nodule on their aureoles, snagging against the cotton of my bra. The afternoon was also punctuated by a series of quite sharp abdominal pains. After every one of them I was convinced I would feel the familiar ultimate lancing. I was poised, ready to head for the toilet — the venue for my imagined impregnation by the VPL man — but no blood came.

Instead I occupied myself with the collation and binding of a series of management briefings that the Department was publishing for the greater edification of the Company as a whole.

Five o’clock found me bending the flexible prongs back on the clean sheets, to house them securely in their plastic covers. My boss hung his face around the doorjamb and grunted approval. I couldn’t see his ear — and this troubled me. I wanted to ask him to take a step into the room, so that I could check on his ear, check that it was still there and still his. But the idea of it was silly, a nitrous oxide thought that giggled in my head. To stop myself from smirking I concentrated on the odd, phallic intervention, made at waist-height, by the black-taped handle of his squash racket.

Then he left. I ordered my desk, and soon afterwards went home.

At home I ate and then had a bath, hoping that it would ease the pre-menstrual tension. It didn’t. I put on a dressing gown and wandered about my flat. Never before had it seemed so claustrophobic. The neat, space-saving arrangement of double-seater sofa and twin armchairs was a cell within a cell. The coffee table, with its stack of magazines and dish of pot-pourri, was part of a set for a chat show that never made it past the development stage. The images on the walls were tired, static, self-referential, each one a repository of forgotten insights, now incapable of arousing fresh interest.

I turned on the television, but couldn’t concentrate. I must have slept, squelched down amongst the foam-filled, polyester-covered cushions. Slid into sleep, the surfaces of my eyes grounding quickly on the salty, silty bottom of unconsciousness. There I floated, twisting slowly in the deceptive currents.

Assembled backwards. Quickly. Scherlupppp! The elements of my dream: I arrive for work and see that the organisational chart has been rearranged overnight. The strips, dots and squares have been manipulated so as to form a new configuration, which places a dot I haven’t seen before at the very apex of the Department’s hierarchy. I consult the legend, a small ring binder dangling from the rail at the bottom of the board by a length of twine, only to discover that the dot is me.

I realise that I will have to move across the corridor into my ex-boss’s office. I am relieved to see him coming through my door; cradled in his arms is his desk blotter and giant mouse mat. On top of these surfaces is a miscellany of objects he has culled from his desk: a Rotadex, a date-a-day diary, a dictaphone, and a collection of plastic beakers, joined at the root, brimming with pens, pencils and paper clips.

He finds it difficult to meet my eye, but I’m wholly unembarrassed. I gesture to the collation and binding exercise that I was undertaking the previous evening, and which is still spread out on my desk. I say, ‘Finish this off, will you?’ He nods, dumbly.

I cross the corridor to my new office. I go behind the broad, black slab of desk and sit down. My former boss has left one object behind on his desk top, an executive toy of some kind, saved from the era when these mini constructions of stainless steel and black plastic had a vogue.

This one takes the form of a Newton’s cradle. But in the place of ball bearings, there are tiny, humanoid figures hanging from the threads by their shiny aluminium hands. The figures are naked, and when I set the cradle in motion, they engage in dangerously athletic congress. There is silence, except for the sound of miniature, metal, intercrural activity.

Piled under the vertical textured-fabric louvres; tucked up against the vents under the storage heaters; squidged sideways to lie along the top of the cable-tracking conduit, which circles the office at knee height; stacked in loose bundles on every flat surface, bar the desk itself, are many many panty liners, tampons and sanitary towels. Staunchers, stemmers, cotton-wool barriers. There is so much plastic-backed absorbent material in my new office that, taken together with the fabric-covered walls and carpet-tiled floor, the effect is of a recording studio. The clicking of the Newton’s cradle has amazing clarity. The shadows of the figurines banging into one another are thrown into sharp relief against the whiteboard on the far wall. A cord of pain, running like a zipper up through the flesh from my vagina to my throat, threatens to undo me, to spill out my interior, like so much offal, or rhino shit, on the carpet tiles.

* * *

When I awake Newsnight is on the television. Peter Snow is running the world from his modular grey bunker of a studio. He’s sitting in front of oversized venetian-blind slat panels, and ignoring the micro-computer that has sunk at an oblique angle into the vinyl-veined console he’s sitting behind.

He is speaking with undue emphasis. It’s this undue emphasis that impinges on me first — but it occurs to me immediately afterwards that perhaps everything I have ever heard anyone say has been subjected to undue emphasis.

Snow is talking to two pop academics. I can tell this with some certainty, because one of them is too well dressed for a politician, and the other too badly. Like a dentist with mass appeal, Snow is getting down to extracting the truth from this duo. He cants himself towards the badly dressed, froggy-looking one.

‘Now, Dr Busner, haven’t we been hearing for years now — from you and others — about the possible effects of such a bottoming-out?’

‘Quite so,’ says the man called Busner, ‘although I’m not sure that “bottoming-out” is the right expression. What we have here is a condition of stasis. I’m not prepared to hazard any long-term predictions about its duration on the basis of the sanity quotient figures we currently have; but what I can say is that the Government’s response has been woefully inadequate — a case of too little, too late.’

He falls to rolling and unrolling the ragged strip of mohair tie that flows down over the soft folds of his belly. He does this extremely well, with one hand, the way a card sharp runs a coin through his fingers. Snow now cants himself towards the other man, a virile sixty year old, with intact and ungreying hair, wearing a sharp Italian suit with the narrowest of chalk stripes. ‘Professor Stein, a case of too little, too late?’

‘I think not.’ Stein steeples his fingers on top of the console. ‘Like Dr Busner, I would reserve the right to comment at some later date. The evidence we have at the moment is sketchy, incomplete. But that being noted, even if the conditions today’s report draws our attention to are fully realised, it only points towards the non-event I am certain will not occur.’

‘So, contrary to what you have said in the past, you now think something may well happen?’ Snow is delighted that he has caught Stein’s double-negative.

‘That’s not what I said,’ Stein fires right back at the lanky television presenter. ‘I appreciate the implications of this data. It is bizarre — to say the least — to have so many people apparently experiencing a lengthy period of climatic and seasonal stasis; but we must bear in mind that, as yet, this is a localised phenomenon, confined to a discrete area. It has only been this way for some six weeks — ‘

‘More like two months!’ Busner cuts in.

This gives Peter Snow the opportunity to try and knock the discussion down, so he can drag it somewhere else. ‘How-can-you-Doc-tor-Busner’ — he is in profile, Struwwelpeter-like, fingers splayed, elongated, nose sharp, rapping out the words in a dot-dash fashion, letting his pentameters beat up on each other — ‘be-so-o-certain-about-the-ex-act-time-the-stasis-began?’

‘Well, I admit’ — Busner, far from being cowed, is invigorated by Snow’s tongue-tapping — ‘it can be difficult to ascertain when nothing begins to happen.’ His plump lips twitch, he is sucking on the boiled irony, ‘But not, I think, impossible.

‘Take events — for example. How small does an event have to be before it ceases to be an event?’

‘Yes, yes, that is a very interesting question.’ This from Stein. The three of them are now all canted towards one another, forming a boyish huddle. ‘I myself am intrigued by small events, matters of the merest degree. Perhaps I might give an example?’

‘Please do.’ Peter Snow’s tone has softened, it’s clear that the idea interests him.

‘Can we have the camera in very tight on the surface of the console, please?’

‘Pull right in, please, camera 2.’ Snow makes a come-on-down gesture.

The camera zooms right down until the veins in the grey vinyl of the console are rift valleys. What must be the very tip of Stein’s fingernail comes into view. I can see the grain of it. It pokes a little at the vinyl, dislodging a speck of something. It could be dust or a fragment of skin, or mica. But the speck is both very small — less than a tenth of the width of Stein’s fingernail — and very grey; as grey as the console itself.

The camera zooms back out in. The three middle-aged men are beaming. ‘So there we have,’ says Peter Snow, addressing a portion of the nation, ‘a very small event. Thank you, Professor Stein, and you, Dr Busner.’ The two pop academics incline their heads, slightly.

The camera moves back in until Snow fills the screen. There are some fresh newspapers, interleaved by his elbow. ‘Well-that’s-about-it-for-tonight-except-for-a-quick-look-at-tomorrow’s-papers.’ His hands pull them out, one at a time, while he recites the headlines, ‘The-Times: “No-New-Developments-in-Stasis-Situation”, The Guardian: “Government-Ministers-Knew-that-Nothing-Had-Happened”. And-Today-with-the-rather-racier: “We’re-in-a-Grey-Area!”.

‘Jeremy-Paxman-will-be-here-tomorrow-night. But-for-now, this-is-Peter-Snow-wishing-you-good-night.’ The grey man on the screen smiles, picks up the pile of papers from the grey console in front of him, and shuffles them together, while the camera pulls up and away.

I pull up and away, and go next door to the bedroom. I take off my dressing gown and hang it on a hook behind the door. I take my nightie from beneath my pillow and put it on. I get a fresh pair of underpants from the chest of drawers and wriggle into them. I set the alarm clock for seven-fifteen. And I get a new sanitary towel and place it in the gusset of my underpants.

My period might start during the night.