Read the book: «Working Wonders»

Chapter One

‘Stop kicking me.’

Arthur had been dreaming of thundering hooves, when suddenly the hooves came to life. Fay hadn’t been dreaming of anything, and redoubled her efforts.

‘I have to keep kicking you! Otherwise you don’t get up and go make the tea.’

‘Why don’t you use the energy you’re expending on hurting my legs to get up and go make the tea?’

‘What are you, a time and motion expert?’

‘Yes, actually!’

Arthur sighed. An argumentative approach to mornings with Fay had never benefited him before and seemed unlikely to start now. He rolled out of bed, wincing. Outside it was still dark.

‘There’s no milk!’

There was no reply, either. Fay had rolled over and grabbed the pillow, luxuriating in a few extra seconds of warmth – his warmth, Arthur thought crossly.

‘Do you want juice, water or ketchup on your cornflakes?’

Fay eyed him balefully. ‘I want you to remember to buy milk.’

Arthur moved into the bathroom impatiently, as usual knocking over several of the ornamental starfish and candles with which Fay insisted on cluttering up the place. The house was a boring estate semi in Coventry, not a New England beach house. No-one would ever, ever walk into their little bathroom and think – ah! Grooved wood! Perhaps I have been magically transported to a world of fresh lobster and windswept sands. Arthur had never been to New England. He briefly wished himself there, if only because the time difference would give him another five hours of delicious sleep.

Groaning, he stared sticky-eyed into the mirror and splashed water on his face. It was normally a nice affable face, although right now it looked cross and tired. He looked at his hair and resisted the urge to measure it. His floppy brown hair was one of his favourite things about himself and he was terrified of the day it would finally desert him, although it was bearing up all right (his forehead was just getting a bit longer, that was all). At thirty-two years old, the confused vertical groove line between his eyes was becoming permanent but his smile was lovely, which he would have known if he ever smiled at the mirror or in photographs, which he never did.

‘Hurry up in the bathroom!’

For God’s sake!

‘You’re not allowed to hurry someone out of the bathroom and still be functionally asleep, okay?’

He took off his pyjamas to get in the shower. When had he started wearing pyjamas? When had he and Fay stopped diving into bed naked as piglets all the time?

He briefly considered a quick Kevin Spacey in the shower but he had to get to work … oh, Christ, work. Arthur hit the plain white tiling with his fist. He’d forgotten.

‘Shit. SHIT!’

‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Fay, wandering past the shower curtain. She was wearing a hideous dressing gown. When you thought about it, he supposed, all dressing gowns were hideous. Why had he never noticed that before? The pattern had not yet been invented that didn’t render them staggeringly unattractive. Nighties were sexy and nudie was beautiful, but dressing gowns were like dating a sausage roll.

‘Why don’t you take off your dressing gown and get in the shower with me?’ he said impulsively. He suddenly wanted to do something cute and fun and detract from the fact that he had just remembered that today he was due to be interviewed about his job by some people who had the power to take it away.

‘I thought you were busy with all the tile hitting and cursing,’ said Fay, brushing her teeth.

‘I was, then I saw you, a vision of loveliness in acrylic.’

‘Uh huh. Well, personnel issues won’t just sort themselves out, you know.’

I bet they would, thought Arthur mutinously to himself. He’d been with Fay for five years and still wasn’t a lot closer to understanding what a recruitment adviser did now than when they first got together.

‘And don’t you have that survey thing?’

He groaned again. ‘Please, don’t remind me. And it’s not just a survey, it’s a total strategic review of our entire function.’

‘What, playing Sim City?’

‘Yes, that’s right, Fay. That’s what I do. I play computer games all day and deliberately make the traffic go slowly.’

He felt her raising her eyebrows at him.

‘Well, you’re incredibly successful at that. Anyway, the condoms are downstairs.’

Arthur stood in the shower and let the water cascade over him. This was new. He had a sneaking suspicion Fay wanted to throw away the contraception and get on with the business of having babies. She was thirty-one. He thought that might be it. Anyway, she’d taken to hiding the condoms in unconventional places, possibly in the hope that he’d be so carried away he would say not to bother. It wasn’t working, particularly not when she was wearing a dressing gown that rendered her nicely curvy body practically bovine.

He closed his eyes, wondering whether to risk shaving in the warmth (which would earn him a lecture and a bottle of Cif shoved into his hands). Suddenly he got a strong sense again of last night’s dream. The hoofbeats were pounding on snow. He could almost remember the smell of the sweating body of the mare … That was odd. How did he know it was a mare? Well, dreams were the most peculiar things; he’d never met a horse in his life.

‘Can you ride a horse?’ he asked Fay downstairs. She was now unattractively done out in a purple business suit with accenting scarf.

‘Why, would it be quicker getting me to work than the Mondeo? Is this your new scheme for the town centre?’

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘What are we doing this weekend?’

‘The Hunters on Friday night and some cheese and wine thing on Saturday.’

His face fell. ‘But the Hunters are very very boring.’

‘Well, they live in our street. And, you know. So are we.’

She pecked him on the cheek and disappeared out of the door, shutting it a little too forcefully.

The clouds were as heavy over Arthur’s head as the bedclothes had been. The traffic was a heaving mass stretching out in front of him as far as he could see. When the system had been designed by Arthur’s office in the 1960s, the concept of even every house having a car was completely ridiculous. Now everyone felt it was their basic human right to keep two, though it meant that, in practice, nobody could move. And at least half of the cars were as large as vans and fitted out so that if you had to take a quick detour through the jungle, they’d be ready. Mind you, driving via the jungle and up through Borneo might be quicker than most trips on the A405 to Coventry. But this morning, the A405 suited Arthur fine. Anything that kept him as far away from work as possible whilst letting him listen to Radio 2 was a good thing as far as he was concerned.

The man in the white jeep next to him managed to pick his nose, scream into his mobile and make a rude gesture at a lorry simultaneously. Arthur shook his head. Days like this had been getting more frequent recently. He might be only thirty-two, but he felt fifty-five. When he looked ahead, he didn’t seem to see anything – just more of the same, with less hair. This is just Tuesday mornings, he thought to himself. The grey road and the grey horizon and the long monotonous journey ahead were conspiring to make him maudlin. This wasn’t new. And today’s forthcoming inquisition was merely serving to remind him that he’d been feeling this way for a long time.

Fay slammed the door on the way out of the house that morning, then winced at herself. Very mature, she thought, that will definitely make him love you. Of course, he wouldn’t have noticed – probably wouldn’t even have cared if he had.

She got into the little Peugeot and slumped forward onto the wheel, wincing as she felt the roll of fat press over the waistband of her skirt. It was just … God, Arthur. What was it going to take? He seemed to be going directly from student to mid-life crisis with no intermittent period of, you know, adulthood. She loved him so much. And it felt that she just got nothing, absolutely nothing in return. She couldn’t leave him. She loved him. And did she really want to be single again? And not twenty-five-and-living-in-London single – thirty-one-and-buried-in-Coventry single. That really didn’t bear thinking about. Prey to the cream of dandruffed middle management. And it would be divorcés or nothing and you’d get their horribly whiny brats with E-numbers smeared all over their greedy maws …

I want a horrible whiny brat, she thought to herself, pulling out into the already incredibly heavy traffic. Only mine would be sweet and interesting and well-behaved and only eat organic vegetables and actually like them.

Maybe I should just tell Arthur straight out. I do love him, and the timing is right. There’s never a good time to go for it. He’s never thought about it for a second, but if I just said, ‘Hey, why don’t we have a baby?’ then maybe he’d just say, ‘Oh yeah, wow. I never thought of that before. I love you, darling.’

Or he might not look up from Integrated Transport Today.

I really have to tell him tonight.

The large dingy lobby in the grim, low-rise public sector building – barely brightened by some amateur executive artwork depicting what might have been Lady Godiva or a camel and a bear having a fight – was humming. Arthur realized that subconsciously he had put on his smartest suit and tie.

‘Yo,’ said the temp on main reception. She had arrived as a temp – a particularly surly one – in about 1983 and never left. Unfortunately Arthur had never got around to learning her name and felt it was a little too late to ask now.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Some bunch of wankers turned up and took over the management offices.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘Wankers, I just told you.’

‘Scary wankers, or the normal sort?’

‘What, like you, you mean?’

‘Um, yeah.’

The temp pondered for a moment. ‘No, I would say they were more arseholey than you.’

Arthur smiled. ‘Do you know, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me for ages.’

She looked at him. ‘I could believe that.’

Arthur grimaced and sidled past her, into the open-plan space beyond. The office was cunningly done out in various shades of grey on grey which blended into the background outside, so that it rendered the world in black and white, punctuated occasionally by a particularly jolly stapler and purportedly humorous Garfield posters peeling from the walls.

His nearest colleague grunted, from behind his partition. Sven was a Neanderthal umbilically connected to his computer. He had convinced himself that in traffic patterns lay the ultimate sequence of truth: the perfect number, the end of pi and the key to universal harmony, or so he explained the hours a day he spent staring at the screen and plotting wildly complicated graphs in the further reaches of Excel.

Arthur could smell something. Part of it was Sven – if you’re looking for the ultimate sequence of truth, as Sven often pointed out, personal hygiene is not a priority. Also, Sven liked to think that really he worked in Silicon Valley in California, or Clerkenwell, which meant a surfeit of slogan t-shirts, trainers, and a diet consisting entirely of junk food, none of which helped the hygiene issue particularly.

The office of course smelled the way it normally did – of ink, dirty computer keyboards, bad food and a general low-lying depression. Under that smell, though, there was something else – something different, Arthur thought. Something reminiscent of wet school blazers and drool. He navigated the last few identical grey desks – newcomers could often be found scurrying around here like panicking rats before they gave up and simply became resigned rats.

Oh God, this was all he needed. Sure enough, now he thought about it, he could hear the heavy panting. He stood up and peered over the partition. There was Sven in all his normal early-morning sweatiness, munching his way loudly through a breakfast bun, but today – yet again – with the help of Sandwiches, his small, droopy-eared, stubby-legged, dribbly, stinky basset/sausage/ God-knows-what of a dog.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Arthur, all the frustrations of the morning welling up. ‘Sven, I thought you were supposed to stop bringing that fucking dog in. Today of all days!’

Sven grunted, entirely unconcerned. ‘Are you my boss?’

‘That’s not the point. Your dog is so dirty he’s a fire hazard. It’s health and safety.’

‘It’s “Bring Your Dog to Work Day”, innit?’

‘It is not,’ said Arthur fiercely, although a faint glimmering of doubt crept into his mind. Was it?

‘Yeah, it is. It said so in the Guardian.’

‘What? What on earth could a dog possibly do in an office? Well, yours could lick all the stamps.’

Sven snorted. ‘Yeah. And he could probably do your job. With one paw tied behind his back.’

‘Oh, don’t start.’

‘Who started? You started, you doggist bigot.’

Sandwiches reached up and carefully ate the end of Sven’s malodorous bun.

‘And if you fed your dog properly he wouldn’t fart all over the place.’

‘He doesn’t fart all over the place!’

‘Yes, he does, actually. You just don’t notice because you, too, fart all over the place.’

‘Why are you so fucking grumpy this morning then? Not getting any?’

Arthur wondered if job stress might make him impotent for the rest of his life. ‘NO!’

‘I reckon Sandwiches gets more than you, and I chopped his bollocks off five years ago.’

‘Nyeaarrgh,’ said Sandwiches.

‘Coffee?! Anyone? Who wants coffee!?’

A woman in a bright pink mohair sweater popped her tidy, short-white-haired head round the other side of Sven’s desk. This was Cathy who administrated the planners, oiled the troubled waters, did far too much of everyone else’s boring jobs and gave off an aura of complete desperation. She had a horrible husband and two horrible teenage boys, and coming to work was just about the most fun she ever had. Arthur tried not to think about this too often.

Sven and Arthur stopped sparring for a moment and grunted back at Cathy. Sandwiches’s tail wagged sturdily: he was the only person in the office, and possibly the world, who loved her unconditionally.

In fact, Arthur didn’t mind fixing coffee in the morning: it deferred the ultimate computer switching-on moment when the jolly day’s crap would begin.

‘No, it’s okay, I’ll manage.’

‘Ooh, I’ll come with you. But we can’t be too long, or people will start to talk!’

Cathy tried to look flirtatiously at Sven, who gave a groan of disgust and ignored them.

‘Do you like my new brooch?’ Cathy showed off the diamanté panda bear incongruously fastened to where her nipple must be underneath her shapeless sweater. ‘It was a birthday present!’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Arthur. ‘From Ken?’

‘No.’ She looked at the floor, then jollied up again. ‘I got it for myself. Well, you know, the boys are soo forgetful. Which is actually better, you know, because I get to choose what I want!’

‘It is,’ said Arthur, trying to nod as if this were true.

‘So … it all starts today …’ Cathy offered tentatively as she pottered around the urn.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’ In fact, he reckoned mousey work-horses were almost always the first to go; they complained less about redundancy.

‘Is it really a good idea to make us reapply for our own jobs, do you think? I mean, management must be right, but …’

Arthur nodded. ‘Absolutely. The fact that we’re in these jobs to begin with, of course, must be sheer chance. I got mine through my lottery numbers, in fact.’

Cathy perked up as she spotted someone on the horizon.

Great, thought Arthur, as Ross, his Tosspot Boss, came striding towards them in his cheap suit, with a big grin on his face implying that, whatever might happen to the rest of them – destitution, poverty, depression – he, mate, was going to be just fine, alright, mate? Yeah.

‘Art. Cath.’ Ross the Tosspot Boss was a year younger than Arthur and liked to point it out. His shirts were always on the wrong side of shiny, his voice on the grating edge of bonhomie and his actions mean as a snake. Arthur half-suspected that this strategic review thing was his idea. It meant Ross got rid of people with no direct route to himself: the consultants made him do it. Perfect. Although on reflection, Ross would probably have absolutely no trouble telling people to go by himself. He’d like it, in fact. A lot.

‘What are you getting up to in here then, yeah? Hanky panky!’

Cathy grinned and blushed. She had a hopeless crush on Ross – she clearly had a type. ‘Oh no!’ she fluttered.

‘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 fascination 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.