If it is your life (26 page)

I had to confess. The quicker the better. This ties in with the situation that obtained. She was no longer smiling but perusing my details on the computer and it was as if I had not existed, me personally: she had me conceptualized on a flat screen and was neglecting the very being that gave rise to the conceptualization.

I interrupted her when I spoke. But I had to. My memory is not great but it does work. I need to apologize, I said, because of last Tuesday.

She studied the screen as though I had not spoken.

I was trying hard to keep that appointment and I just failed. It was for a probable job of work and I want such a job, especially one that offers a pay. I need to clear off my debts and return to the fold. I require to get back on my feet and that job would have been ideal.

Now she replied: You gave me to understand that you would be here. I didnt expect you to let me down.

But I didnt let you down.

You didnt return.

Yes but I didnt let you down.

To not return is to let me down. For two days I kept this job alive. Others might have conceded but I thought
it suitable for you, for you alone. The Office Manager spoke to me about it, she called me into Central Office. It was by way of a reprimand. I said you would be here and you were not.

She looked at me when she spoke. I found that difficult, and to distinguish her verbal utterances required a concentration beyond my own.

I was not used to being looked at. I dont want to be unfair to people of the female gender but this is my personal experience.

She was talking to me again. What in God’s name was she saying? She was a forthright lady. Aged thirty-three. I knew she was. Thirty-three is an age I regard positively. She had a small face. Women I go for usually dont have small faces although I have got nothing against them, it is circumstances. But it may operate in reverse, that women who dont have small faces tend to be more interested in me. I am as putty in their hands. Women with small faces tend to go for other fellows, they go for obvious lookers. I am not an obvious looker. I would say for most women I am barely on the planet until if ever there comes a time, when that time arrives I shall be everywhere; look into my eyes and quiver ye lowly mortals. I shall have passed over but this is a form of transcendence and not a metaphorical reference to death man when I refer to death I make no bones and although I am being facetious that is truly what I believe, I hate all that fucking stuff; let us be honest between people, and more especially ones to whom we are attracted, and that includes male to male, I would never
be exclusive about matters existentially crucial. It is what I am talking about.

She had finished and was waiting for me to respond. I nodded. What happened is I was actually robbed, I said. I had my bag, I said, it was the day after I left here. I was walking up by Roebuck Terrace and that little park they have there, they use it as an occasional music venue.

She frowned.

You dont like it there? I do. It is quiet; office workers and shop workers take in their sandwiches at lunch-time. Some feed the birds. They see the birds flying off into the blue sky and they have to return to the office. I was in the little park and I sat down on a bench, man I was tired, it was a while since I had slept. You know my circumstances. I think you do.

I waited for a comment. Instead she resumed from where she left off the last time.

That took me by surprise: I hadnt finished what I was going to say about how I hoisted up the old legs and fell asleep on that damn bench, so that is how the robbery took place, when I was asleep the dirty cowardly scoundrels: at least do the loathsome deed face to face etcetera etcetera. Except if the robber had been some poor bastard down on his luck, I suppose you could make a case for him. How was he to know I was in a bad way? in an even worse way than him. He would not have known. Why the hell didnt he ask! Especially if I was sleeping on a bench. Benches are not hotels. Then too the apparel, one tries to keep up but fashion tends
to pass one fucking bye bye, the old catwalk and so on. Then if music is playing, music seems to play at important stages of my existence; at these times I am doing my utmost to concentrate on moments unconcerned with music, with non-musical moments, and there is a tension in this struggle, and this tension appears to impact psychologically. Normally I hear big extrovert symphonies. Schubert’s Ninth. That is me, that is a day in my life. One actual day! It is like a whole world of human experience, it is just like goodness me!

Instead of me saying all that the bureaucrat woman stole the initiative and was doing the talking in her upper English accent. Maybe she was related to the Queen of Britain. Some of the Queen’s relations are required to earn a crust in blue-chip defence ventures. She referred to important clients. On one’s behalf a client was kept waiting for a period of three hours.

Who was this client?

She tapped the keyboard and I glimpsed a light flickering on my details, imprisoned forever. Certain phrases shimmered upward from the hard drive. I tried to read them before they vanished: clients are impressed by qualifications; promotional opportunities arise; salary scales are pleasing.

I shook my head in wonder. I was observed doing so. Would you be interested in less attractive options? she said, as though these existed. She did not wait for an answer but smiled remotely, tapping the keyboard and studying the screen. Here is one, she said. This is a provisional position. Opportunities for advancement
do not exist, which is normal practice. Do you understand that?

Yes, I said, where I come from we take early steps in life.

Even should you indicate a willingness to learn and improve your all-round workskills superiors will not waive normal practice.

We dont begin with giant strides.

She stared at me. I smiled. I was not being sarcastic. My language, however, was a challenge. People use language of this nature rarely. Not unless they themselves are in an advantageous position. Advantageous.

When I left school I attended night classes and was fortunate that one class featured the place of linguistics in theories of economic psychology, being a grey area loosely associated with traditional philosophy: Celtic Continental as opposed to Roman. Roman forms are by nature imperialistic, especially at the personal level where ‘the negation of the other’ is the key to survival if not the ability to learn. The class was an aid to intellectual life and this had a negative impact on my capacity to serve and thereby earn a living in this country where non-thinking automata have been the vogue for for

For nothing. Since the dawn of the Holy Empire, that deadening blanket of wrong reasoning, governed governed and governed again.

I thought the bureaucrat woman intriguing and hoped it was mutual. She gave me the address and interview card, advised me of the bus I could take to get to
this place of provisional employment. I stared at this card which was a pale green; lined, numbered and strongly luminal. I brought out my wallet, crushed the moths and blew off the dust, inserted the card into a compartment.

Then it was interview ended.

How had that happened? One minute I was sniffing her perfume the next I was stepping out onto the pavement.

Such is life. I am just so fucking trusting an individual. I always was. There is that bottom line with bureaucrats and some of the tools of their trade are tricks of deception. They get us doing things of which we, as it were, are unconscious. We seem to be unconscious. Yet we walk about and act in the world of other humans. It is not so much depressing as something less so, less depressing. I would have said it was not depressing, not at all, when I left the Agency on this occasion.

And it was this occasion and I was going to have to remember it was this occasion. And not forget.

She had diverted my attention. She had.

Here I was outside the actual building, and I had had plans.

I never leave buildings unless all internal possibility is sealed off. One wanders corridors. One has a look here and there. One makes discoveries. Too late now.

One’s defences are there to be lowered. This problem is singular. It exists for all individuals. The bureaucrat woman and myself were of an age. I had reckoned on a kind of I dont know man honesty. From her.
Something. Is ‘solidarity’ too absurd a concept? Even using the word makes me turn my head a little, as though disguising my own naivety.

I shuffled along, then frowned and walked properly.

I felt like a think. There was a little grassy square with benches. I glanced to the sky then sat down.

One could only sigh.

Next thing I woke up! How long had I been sleeping! Who knows! No one. No one but God, and God is not a one, God is a all.

Still daylight. A bus; I spied it trundling round a far corner. On its near-side front window a sign read: ‘World Freedom From Exhaust Day’. Until midnight all bus travel was free. What luck! I took the address and interview card out of my wallet, then flung away the wallet!

Why did I do that. The current proceedings, they induced in me trauma, the nature of luck and divine providence.

I read the address. Yes. This bus was mine! I would ‘take it’. I would
take
this bus! Schubert’s Ninth. I would visit my future workplace.

There was no necessity of doing this but with time to kill and no money to do it why not make use of the free travel? Woa me hearties. I broke into a trot as the bus hove to.

Travel allows the chance to think, to think to think to think; consult with oneself. I relished the prospect.

The driver was a hopeless rascal, I should have known: a fellow of my age, and with someone else’s beard, not
so much Lenin as that elderly chap with the full head of the stuff, Morris or Kropotkin, Bakunin. One presumes characters such as he hold revolutionary-grounded politics similar to one’s own. Whenever I board their bus I give a conspiratorial twitch of the head. But it never works man it just never fucking works. An authoritarian right-wing arsehole; that is what he was, somebody who would rather lick the boots of the bosses than join a comrade in acts of liberation. As soon as I boarded the fucking bus he wanted to kick me off. It was no misunderstanding. All I did was seek directions allied to matters temporal. I had a sandwich. There are people in this world who exist in a state of siege. They construct a moat round themselves and are continually raising the drawbridge. He was one of them. Why be a bus driver if one refuses to answer questions concerning time and place? These should be matters of fact, not issues for debate.

One seethes.

Later I alighted. I located the place of provisional employment although it appeared deserted. It was an unprepossessing building altogether. I could not imagine being tethered within such a structure.

Nearby was a building site. It wasnt a massive operation but big enough for its own purposes. This would have suited me. Guys were strolling around with lengths of wood and assorted tools. Building sites were out in the open, unlike factories; desperate places wherein we humans might perish forever. I had been employed in the building industry before. Much the better option.
Perhaps there were vacancies. I could cross over the road to ascertain the likelihood. I was about to do this but recognized it as a psychological manoeuvre. Yet again I was trying to escape the true path. There was a path, why avoid it. Such was the mark of the coward. No, I would not run away. I would remain. I would confront the dark forces, perhaps foment a situation, take part in an epoch-changing strike.

The entrance gate into the parking area of the unprepossessing building lay ahead. Inside was a trailer but not much else. There were warning signs on Trespassing and Security. Suddenly a uniformed male appeared with a cup of tea or coffee in hand, a newspaper beneath his elbow, he yawned and spat to the ground. He had not seen me yet directed the spit towards the space into which I headed.

That boded ill. It meant he knew I was there. Probably he saw me from the trailer window and here he was keeping me at bay. I was tempted to return to the inner city. Mid to late afternoon. I would need a place soon. There was a cinema whose early evening entertainments provided a panacea for parties exhausted by life’s travels. Persons dotted themselves about the hall and might sleep. Management’s attitude was benign. When the programme ended the ushers roused individuals in a tentative – not to say sympathetic – manner. On one occasion one such usher panicked when unable to rouse me. I apologized for snoring. The usher apologized for wakening me. She had feared the worst, an inference drawn from the manner in which my head
lolled. That to me was appalling. A lolling head at my time of life. I was a mere boy. (Sometimes I dreamed I was a man.)

But you needed money for the cinema. During mid-evenings I had access to a secret hidey-hole but a snag existed therein. I had to not-snore. This hidey-hole though secret lay within earshot of ‘the existent other’.

Immediacy. Needs and necessity.

Meanwhile the uniformed male security stared in my direction. He knew I was there. I had a sandwich in my pocket. I could eat it while pondering a course of action.

A brainwave. What if I hoofed it back to the Agency? The bureaucrat woman probably worked until very late. I could invent a pretext to reenter the building and see her, then be dismissed by her. But this time I would concentrate very hard and not discover myself having exited the building. I would find a secure wee spot and bed down for the night. I didnt even need to see her, I could just secret my way into the building, maybe find a spare settee someplace.

Ah but this was the stuff of fantasy. I recognized it for the hollow ruse it was. I was about to lose myself in the subterranean depth of the subconscious. I had embarked on a shifty stratagem that would result in the bureaucrat woman mentioning her spare settee, that I might bunk there for the night and snuggle into her and be as one, we two, and raising myself onto my elbows, her below me, her eyes

*

It is amazing what our brains get up to.