Seeing the Wires

‘It’s sort of fashionable to have doors and windows,’ said Darren.

Spin explained, by use of gestures, that it was traditional to have doors set into buildings so that people could enter and leave them.

‘That’s the thing,’ explained Mr Link. ‘If it was a decent building, they wouldn’t want to leave.’

Spin explained, by use of gestures, that he had thought of something else he could be doing. Darren and I went with him, leaving Mr Link looking at our latest construction – a theme pub on the main road between Stourbridge and Wolverley – and thinking how nice it would look without the windows spoiling the purity of the architectural line.

One morning, the building society sent me a letter including a monthly balance. There was a note of congratulation enclosed, signed by Mr Fallow. My account had become positive for several days. It had since become negative again, of course.

They charged me £15 for the congratulatory note.

The next month, there were more positive days. My account went from red to black, like an infected wound. I no longer needed to work on building sites to pay off my overdraft. I was able, instead, to look for a less well-paying graduate job.

I said a farewell to Mr Link and the gang on a Friday at the end of a bright and cold February. We went to the pub.

‘I knew you’d be going,’ said Mr Link. ‘You’ve been even less use than usual these last couple of months.’

I waited for him to say something good about my trench-digging abilities. He sipped his stout instead. Then he looked up.

‘I’m always sorry to see a good worker go,’ he said, ‘and I’m seeing one go now.’

I was startled and grateful. He caught my expression.

‘Bloody hell, not you,’ he said. ‘Our Spin here is leaving today. Got a job with local radio.’

Seemed about right, I thought. Spin had always had this thing about receiving signals.

VII

I left the building trade and got a job with the local council. I can’t say which one, because they’ll sue. I worked in the banking section. This made me think of heavily defended vaults and leather-topped desks, for reasons known only to my subconscious. The reality was less impressive. In a large open-plan office – much like the interior of one of the buildings I used to dig foundations for – rows of desks were set regular distances apart. The distances had been chosen to minimize what the team leaders had learned to call Unauthorized Human Interaction, which is to say chatting. There was a lunch hour which it was mandatory to take but which, it was hinted, might better be used for working in. There was an agreeable overtime rate for which no one qualified. A shift system meant that you always had to get up too early and always got home too late. At Christmas a certain amount of jollity would be tolerated: a few strands of sparse tinsel stapled to the ceiling tiles for twelve days.

I would get in at 7.30 AM, regardless of which shift I was on, because I couldn’t afford a car and the bus service was unreliable. I would switch on my computer so that the people in IT would know I was there.

IT was housed on the top floor in a chaotic office full of dangling wires and tangled cables and parts of things that had become dislodged. IT was not subject to the same rules as other departments. IT had a different timescale. They would say, I’ll be there in five minutes. They would arrive in anything up to a month. Everyone wanted to work in IT but there was no way to get there without having arcane and detailed knowledge of Babylon 5.

After logging in, I would look out of a window until nine when a few other people would start to trickle in. I would open up a spreadsheet or two and mess about with figures.

I would do that for eight hours. Then I would go home.

I once asked the man at the next desk to mine – a breach of council policy but I was in a daredevil sort of a mood – what happened to all of the figures we put into spreadsheets.

‘Well,’ he said, pushing his spectacles onto his nose, ‘when we finish each sheet they are amalgamated into another spreadsheet and ratified against a third spreadsheet held at head office. If they match, they are themselves amalgamated into another spreadsheet. Each of these transactions is logged on a fifth spreadsheet. This fifth spreadsheet is checked against the performance timetable laid down in the spreadsheet kept at area headquarters, and then the results of all of these cross-checks are entered into a spreadsheet.’

‘And then?’

‘Then they bin it and we start all over again.’

‘Why?’

He looked at me. His spectacles – the perennially unfashionable type with a heavy black frame – began their descent to the end of his nose.

‘What?’ he asked, confused.

‘Why? Why do we do all of this work just to have it thrown away?’

He looked at me some more.

‘Because they pay us to,’ he said, and never spoke to me again.

VIII

I still work there. I’ve moved up, or rather across. Diagonally, really. I’ve moved diagonally. I now lead a team of six people. I know the names of four of them. I meet with other team leaders and we discuss our teams as though we were talking about badly behaved pets. I have been on courses designed to encourage bonding between staff, and I have not been in any way encouraged to bond with staff.

I’m like everyone else out there in the world of meaningless office jobs. It’s what I do in the daytime to pay for the rest of my life. It’s what I do to pay for what I do.

The rest of my life is far more interesting. For example, there’s my best friend, Jack who can’t go through those metal detectors in airports without bells going off and guns being drawn.

Chapter Two (#ulink_011f7cde-4ade-5c54-a320-64d90d9710df)

I

After working on building sites I was glad to have a job in an office. I wanted a job in an office. I also didn’t want one. I wanted to be unconventional, but I didn’t have the money for it. An office job would provide the money to be unconventional, but an office job was all about being conventional. I had to fit in to make enough money not to fit in.

Having an office job meant being unconventional in less exciting ways. I would put paper clips in the drawing pin box. I coloured in red sections of the year planner that should have been coloured yellow. This wasn’t the sort of anarchy I’d imagined when I listened to the Sex Pistols all those years ago. So an office job was conventional, I was right about that. I was only wrong about the money.

I must have got something wrong somewhere. I had less money than when I was a student earning nothing. In those days there had been more money to spend. Working on building sites the money turned up in envelopes and there was no mention of tax. Working in an office, the money didn’t turn up. Once a month I got a piece of paper explaining where most of my wages had gone and how much of them I could keep. Then the B&S Building Society kept the rest. I began to want to work on the building sites again, getting fat little envelopes at weekly intervals and telling B&S nothing about it.

I had outgoings. I had to pay the rent and buy groceries and bus passes and other non-frivolous items, like cigarettes. Cigarettes aren’t frivolous; the health warnings prove it. I don’t like smoking, but not being able to afford to smoke makes me want to smoke. It wasn’t as though I had money to burn. I didn’t even have money for firelighters. My wages belonged to everyone but me. Leaving little for entertainments. Once a week I’d go for a drink with Jack and get mildly confused. We usually went to the Messy Duck, a quiet pub which was situated down the road from the zoo, standing alone next to an area of ground designated unsuitable for buildings. I would look over the ground with my practised trench-digger’s eyes, spotting the greasy pools of rainbow-topped water, the cracks leading down to the mineshafts, the thrown bricks and the broken glass, the condoms.

I couldn’t understand that. There must have been better places. Even in Dudley.

The Messy Duck was a quiet pub. I’d been in louder monasteries. You often got the impression that you were keeping the landlord up. He was a thin man with sad eyes and an off-putting manner. At around ten he’d switch off the jukebox and unplug the fruit machine. Between ten and half past he’d yawn pointedly. After that he’d just turn off the lights and stand by the door, holding it open. I would feel uncomfortable and intrusive, but it didn’t bother Jack. He seemed to like being in uncomfortable situations. That helped to explain his hobby, I suppose. He would have to enjoy being uncomfortable. How else could you explain his piercings? They were all about discomfort. If they didn’t bother him, they bothered the people around him.

Jack was coloured and studded. I didn’t know the full extent of it – I didn’t want to know, there were parts of him I wouldn’t want to see in any condition, with or without rivets – but I knew that it was extensive. I imagined bolts and studs connected by chains. I imagined nails driven into areas of unnatural colour. I didn’t know what sort of tattoos he had. I doubted whether he went for the old-fashioned tigers and hearts with daggers. He’d prefer something more modern, like Celtic twiddles and spirals, or perhaps barcodes.

I could have been wrong. For all I knew he had a portrait of Britney across his pectorals and Made In England etched across his scalp. I found out what he actually had much later, under distressing circumstances.

We’ll get to that later.

‘Why?’ I once asked him. ‘Why go through all the pain and risk? All those stories you hear about people getting tattoos at little shops then going down with leprosy and melting into their cornflakes. Why not stick with jigsaws?’

‘It’s not that painful mate,’ he said. ‘Not as bad as going to the dentist.’

‘I thought you enjoyed going to the dentist.’

‘I do,’ he said, surprised. ‘Except the noise of the drill.’

‘So you like being hurt? It’s a masochism thing?’