Halting State

ELAINE: Death or Coffee

It’s a Friday morning in a North London suburb, and you haven’t won the lottery yet, and nobody’s drafted you for the King’s Musketeers, so it’s off to work you go. (Actually, you don’t buy lottery tickets in the first place. You ran the figures back when you were seventeen and, wishful thinking or no, you’re not that stupid. But that’s not the point, is it?) It’s a Friday morning, you’re on the job, and Chris left an email on your mobile about a 10 A.M. crisis meeting. Crisis, what crisis? There was none on the horizon when you left work yesterday evening. Hopefully it’s just HMRC querying the executive bizjet account consolidation file again.

You check out your shoulder in the bathroom mirror. That’s quite some bruise Mike landed on you at the club. The pint and a half of Budvar in the Frog and Tourettes afterwards let you sleep without noticing it, but it’s stiffening up now, and you’re going to have to work that shoulder carefully for the next few days. So it’s the black blouse and the grey suit today. Which will need washing by the end of the week because the Tube seats are filthy these days. TfL can’t afford to clean them because they’re in crunch mode, buying their way out of their Infraco PPPs to avoid bankruptcy. The mess defederalization has left the country in has really come home to roost this decade: What the cooked books give, the cooked books taketh away. Isn’t that the way the world works?

Breakfast is a hastily munched Kellogg’s bar washed down with a glass of organic apple juice. You grab the latest copy of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability and stuff it in your briefcase, along with the usual: pen, iPod, your father’s antique pocket calculator, and a dog-eared copy of Tobler’s manual of sword-fighting that you borrowed from Matthew. You visit the bathroom briefly for a smear of lipstick and eyeliner, then you’re out the door.

Early May used to be the chilly tail-end of spring, according to Mum. And it certainly used to be cooler. Now the savage summer kicks in weeks earlier, and everyone who can afford it is fitting air-conditioning. (Which in turn is doing no good for the country’s ECB stability pact compliance—no, cut that out! They’re not paying you to daydream fiscal policy risk analyses on the commute time, are they?)

Harrow is its usual sweaty, smelly self, cramped and cluttered with cars that seem to get bigger every year, in a weird race with the price of petrol: Look who can afford to fill the bigger Chelsea tractor. It’s already five to eight, and the Tube’s in full-on rush hour mode. You manage to elbow your way into a carriage at West Harrow and, miracle of miracles, there’s a seat edge to perch on all the way to Baker Street (by which time the temperature has got to be pushing thirty degrees and there’s a solid wall of bodies between you and the door—good thing you’re not claustrophobic). Then it’s another half hour on the Hammersmith and City line, rattling and breathlessly hot all the way across London to Whitechapel, and finally fifteen minutes strap-hanging on the DLR south towards Wapping, through the weirdly cyberpunk landscape of geodesic glass dildo-shaped skyscrapers alternating with decaying left-over Olympic infrastructure and cookie-cutter housing developments. You’ve got it timed down to the nearest minute, and it still takes you ninety, minimum, to do the door-to-door. Count the working days lost—you spend fifteen hours a week commuting, seven hundred and fifty hours a year draining down the sump hole of the capital’s crap transport infrastructure. If you could afford to move east you would, but the bits you can afford are all doomed: You’ve seen the flood maps for the Thames Gateway suburbs and know which insurance firms are whistling past the graveyard…

Because you’re dead good at your job. Now if only you had a life, too, eh?

The office opens its doors and swallows you off the street. Once upon a time it started life as an unassuming Georgian town house; but today, the garden is overgrown with Foster Associates geodesics, the roof is covered in solar tiles, and the door scanned your RFIDs and worked out who you were while you were still halfway up the street. The HQ of Dietrich-Brunner Associates is probably worth more than some Third World countries. You hole up in the ladies’ for a minute to freshen up, then it’s up the lift to the third floor, where the junior associates swelter under the low eaves.

After you drop your briefcase you head straight for the coffee station. It’s turning half nine, and there’s a queue of thirsty associates, ordered by pecking order, waiting for Jessica or Esmé or whoever it is from Admin to quit fiddling with the cartridge and get out the way. A bunch of the associates are glassed-up and fiddling with spreadsheets or in ludic colloquia, but you didn’t think to strap your office to your face before you headed for your fix, which leaves you open to the kind of petty irritation that comes with being forced to stand and queue with no distractions. Your spirits droop: Then they droop further when you notice Adam Elliot (or he notices you). He’s the wrong kind of distraction. But something tells you that a couple of the other associates are logging everything. Certainly Margaret Harrison, up front in the queue, has her associate partner specs on but isn’t doing the in-meeting hand-dance. So maybe he’ll keep his needling to himself for once.

“Hi, Xena!” he chirps, “Killed any commuters today?” You try to ignore him: Being rude wouldn’t be constructive, and constructive counts for a lot around here. Adam fancies himself as a big swinging dick in risk analytics: Leave out the “big” and “swinging” and he’s right. But he won’t let go. “How did your quest turn out?”

You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots—it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously—but you haven’t had your double ristretto yet, so you muster up the coldest stare you can find and say as steadily as you can: “My private life is none of your business, Adam.” A minor imp of the perverse prompts you to add, “If you keep passing unwelcome comments, I’m going to have to consider logging these incidents for future action.”

“Hey, that’s not nice! I’m only kidding.” He turns passive-aggressive puppy-dog eyes on you. “You know it’s just fun, don’t you?”

“Why should she know that?” Margaret interrupts sharply. That gets his attention: She’s fortyish, formidable, and probably due to make full partner any month now. She sounds annoyed. “Go pick on someone your own size, Mr. Elliot. Or at least someone with a compatible sense of humour.”

“But I was just—”

“Making an idiot of yourself in front of the peanut gallery. Do yourself a favour? Find yourself something constructive to do with your time.” You cross your arms, and Adam slinks away empty-handed. If you ever decide to go postal in the workplace, you’ll be sure to start by showing him your first-class letter-opener: In the meantime, though, Margaret deserves some thanks. “What was that about?” she asks you.

You feel your cheeks heating. “Adam’s got some ideas about me, and he likes to needle.”

“Really?” She raises an eyebrow. “I’d never have guessed. What about, exactly? I may be able to help.”

Oh bugger. This is exactly what you didn’t want to happen, but there’s no polite way to put her off. “In my copious free time”—you make sure the ironic emphasis is obvious: if there’s one thing that shows disloyalty to the partnership, it’s spending your energy outside of work on something that isn’t constructive—“I have a hobby. I used to be into gaming, but I drifted sideways into historic re-enactment.”

“Gaming?” She raises an eyebrow. “Historic re-enactment?”

“Live-action real-time role-playing. Then sideways into mediaeval German sword-fighting,” you clarify. This is the point at which most people’s eyes glaze over, which is the reaction you’re hoping for. But Margaret doesn’t take the offered bait.

“Gaming? That’s interesting. Would you have played”—she pauses to twitch at a user interface that’s invisible to you—“Dungeons and Dragons at some point?”

Whoops. “Not really. I was heavily involved in SPOOKS at one time, but…” The woman from Admin finishes fiddling, there’s a clunk and clatter from the machine, and the queue moves forward. Margaret seems to have sacrificed her place at the head just so she can interrogate you. “It tried to eat my life, so I cut right back.”

“That’s useful to know.”

“It’s old news!” The queue moves forward in lockstep again as Eddie from Phone Support gets into place with a cup holder for the black gang downstairs.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound patronizing, I really meant it may be useful—are you on the facial Chris called?”

You nod.

“Good, I thought so. Look, all I know is that it has something to do with the Tiger Investments account. Chris said to be on the lookout for gamers because we’ll need them, God only knows why. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why your name came up.”

“Looking for gamers?” For the Tiger Investments account? Even through the haze of embarrassment—that bastard Adam has been talking behind the bike shed—it sounds bizarre. “That’s what the crisis group call is about?”

The queue ratchets forward again, bringing her to the front. She smiles patronizingly. “Look, terribly sorry, must fly. See you in half an hour?”

You force a brittle smile in return. You’ve got a feeling you’re going to need that caffeine.