Authors: Graham Swift
Do I begin to give the impression that something is
wrong
in our department?
When I first started in our office I must have accepted these anomalies, frustrating, baffling as they were, as part, nonetheless, of a ‘system’ – the way things had always been done and continued to be done, which it wasn’t mine to question. Or perhaps it was true that when I first started things really were done in a more logical and sensible manner, which I have forgotten, and
these peculiarities were a later development. I can’t remember when I first began to find them unsettling. But I’m sure now, at any rate, that they are not part of any system. They are part of Quinn. They are part of that old bastard’s obstinacy, mania, malice – whatever it is.
How can I best describe Quinn to you? I could say, in the manner of police descriptions, that he is shortish, about five-six; on the plump side; in his early sixties; balding; with spectacles and with a slight limp in his right leg. That he likes grey or dark blue suits; that his chubby face is often ruddy and cherubic (let’s skip the police language); that his grey, soft hair is quite thick and glossy where it has not receded; and that his black-rimmed glasses are as much a means of hiding his eyes as of helping him to see. All this would be unexceptional. It might even suggest a podgy, harmless, quite benign little man. And that would be true. Quinn
does
look bumbly and benign. He has the sort of kindly, dimpled face which might be used in TV adverts to promote the ‘home-made’ qualities of some manufactured biscuit or pie. But it is precisely Quinn’s apparent benignity and geniality which heighten his real coldness, his severity, his ruthlessness. Could I be wrong? Could I have mistaken and perverted some quite innocuous truth? Could I have exaggerated my boss’s vindictiveness because I have set my sights (I don’t deny it) on one day having his job? That is a common enough story. But I don’t think so. When a man sets you difficult or impossible tasks and then summarily blames you when you fail to complete them – that is vindictiveness.
And it’s not as if I haven’t tried the sympathetic view. Could Quinn be ill in some way? Could he be suffering some kind of breakdown? (I have had some experience of breakdowns – but I will come to that later.) Could he be
going off the rails from overwork? The answer to that question is: yes – and no. Quinn does work extremely hard. He often stays in his office late into the night – his light shining purposefully through the glass panel when you yourself are winding up a late day. But I get the distinct impression that this extra work Quinn does is more by choice and design than obligation. And when you enter his office on some fleeting and innocent errand – merely to bring him a routine document he has asked for – the picture you get, as you wait for him to raise his head, is of a man happily – I repeat, happily – and earnestly engaged in his tasks. A man pleased with his efforts and sure of their usefulness. It is only when he looks up and says, with a scowl, ‘What is it?’ – as if you have encroached on his contentment – that any discord enters the scene. And then it seems that you are to blame for it.
So, if that picture – of Quinn contentedly beavering away in his leather chair while outside the cherry tree waves at his window – does not capture his true malice, what does? I will tell you. It is when, at moments during the day, he gets up from his desk and – sometimes for minutes on end – looks down at us through his glass partition. If you look up then, as you only dare do for a brief, disguised instant, you see him framed in the rectangular panel. He stares at us with the air of a scientist surveying some delicate experiment. His face is stern and gloating. He rests his hands against the glass, and the tips of his fingers and the balls of his thumbs go white. It is then that I know that Quinn is evil – I hate him. It is then that I know too, most clearly, that I envy him.
And let me tell you just two or three things that have been puzzling me – and still are – despite Quinn’s almost incredible remarks yesterday about my promotion.
Firstly, those lists of file-items which Quinn gives me to investigate – they are getting remarkably long. It is rare for any one case to involve more than two or three files, but Quinn sometimes has me scouring through five or six – and in some instances I cannot find
any
relation between the material in one file and the next. Secondly, those missing files which I assume Quinn is working on himself (it would explain those late nights of his) do not reappear. I have watched. Even after weeks they are not back in their places. Thirdly, none of the other assistants says anything – only the usual quiet passing complaints about ‘bloody Quinn’. I am beginning to think that it’s only me Quinn is playing games with.
But I didn’t mean to talk about Quinn, or about my problems. I meant simply to tell you about my work. I’m not the only one who has a tiresome job or a difficult boss. And I don’t want to give the impression that because we work in a dungeon, we are prisoners. That we don’t emerge at lunch-time, like everyone else, and make for the pub on the corner (Quinn, by the way, works through lunch); that we can’t go through, more or less when we like, to our ancillary offices and typing pool, beyond the file rooms, and joke with the girls (there is a new one at the moment called Maureen with extremely thrusting breasts). There is nothing exceptional about our job.
But I hear you say, Yes, there is, and in an interesting, an exciting way. Something to do, you’re thinking, with the thrill of detective work. I used to think that too once, when I first began. I used to think of all those stories which no one ever knows about, all those buried secrets, hidden away in our files. It must have shown, because Quinn once said to me (here I go again about Quinn): ‘You’ve got a rich imagination, haven’t you, Prentis? A
lurid imagination. That doesn’t help, you know, in this job.’ It was the first personal remark I can remember him making, and he said it with a frosty look and a scowl, and I resented it. But it was true. You soon learn to forgo the thrill of detection in our department. To begin with, we are not detectives – that is somebody else’s job. We are only, as it were, specialized librarians. What blander job is there than a librarian’s? And then, as with any work, ours too is routine. Most of the time is spent in mundane chores like cataloguing and indexing. Real inquiries don’t come our way thick and fast (though they’ve been getting ever more frequent recently). And even here the law of routine applies. No matter how extraordinary the material you work with, it becomes, when it’s your daily business to deal with it – unextraordinary.
But then again, I’m wrong. It isn’t like that. I’m trying to say something, perhaps, that I don’t really feel at all. It’s in the nature of routine not so much to make things ordinary as to numb you against recognizing how remarkable they are. And you’d be surprised at some of the things contained in our files. You’d be appalled at the black and desperate picture of the world they sometimes offer. In certain corners of our office there are some gruesome little collections – which we have to consult quite often – which consist of police pathologists’ findings and coroners’ reports on cases in which there has been police interest. I have dipped into these files too many times to think much about them; and yet sometimes I am suddenly startled – the bubble of routine bursts around me – when I actually stop to contemplate some of the things that pass through my hands.
Here, for example, is a piece of ‘routine’ that I dealt with only last week. The police, of course, closed the case. The whole thing was handed over to psychiatrists –
and it’s a psychiatrist (psychiatrists are some of our most frequent customers) who wants to dig it out again now. It seems that a woman, who has since died, had to nurse her husband, at home, during an illness that eventually proved fatal. The husband had been – I shan’t mention names – a figure of some renown in his field. During the later stages of the illness the wife refused to have the husband admitted to hospital and, after a certain time, to allow any medical supervision whatsoever. As well as the husband and wife, there was a son, aged eleven. When the husband died, the wife not only failed to inform the authorities or to do anything with the corpse but adamantly believed that her husband was not, in fact, dead. Furthermore, she turned viciously against the son, accusing him of being responsible for what had happened to the father. Some days after the death, the wife locked the boy up with the corpse and told him he would not be let out until he had brought his father back to life again. What the boy
thought
, shut up like this with his dead father, is conjecture. What he
did
was clear enough when the matter came to light two days later. He found a penknife, belonging to the dead man, in one of the bedroom drawers, and with it – for reasons never established, though according to the boy himself, ‘to find out what his father was made of’ – systematically disfigured and mutilated his father’s body.
And all this you have to bring home to a wife who tends house-plants and two healthy kids whom you take out on the common at weekends to play with frisbees and cricket bats.
I travel home on the Tube. The Northern Line: seven stops to Clapham South. Up, out of the ground, and then down into it again. I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other’s arses and nuzzle each other’s fur. But animals do this innocently and – who knows? – with affection. What goes on in the Tube is done with suspicion and menace. It is as if everybody is trying to search out everybody else’s story, everybody else’s secret, and the assumption is that this secret will always be a weakness; it must be something unpleasant and shameful which will make it possible for its owner to be humiliated and degraded. The fact that I am making these observations makes it clear, of course, that I am guilty myself of the activity I am describing. But look at any group of people in an Underground train. You won’t see much laughter, smiling, or even talk. Not nearly as much, at least, as you’ll see in any bus or railway carriage travelling through the genial daylight. Ignore the people whose faces are conveniently sunk in books and magazines. Watch the eyes of the others. Am I right? Everyone is trying to strip everyone else bare, and everyone, at the same time, is trying not to be stripped bare himself. Oh yes, I know, in one sense,
this is almost literally true. Half the men in the carriage are mentally removing the clothes of the girls who are strap-hanging near the doors. They are titillated by their stretched arms, by the little ovals of sweat which appear at the armpits on their blouses. But, beyond this, something deeper, something darker, is going on. Am I right?
Now and then, when I travel on the Tube, I get this feeling that something terrible and inevitable is going to happen. All those bodies crammed together, all those furtive faces searching each other. All this mystification. And I can’t help thinking of the populations of animals which live in burrows – rats, lemmings – which (I read somewhere) exist in far greater concentrations than any human population. When I get out at Clapham South, up into the air, past the newsstand and the florist’s, I breathe a deep breath of relief. Opposite the station is the common – criss-crossed and encircled by incessant chains of ill-tempered traffic – but it is the common. It’s spring. There are daffodils nodding near the bowling-green on my walk home; the sticky-buds are opening on the chestnuts, and there are catkins on the silver birches. There is no doubt what commons are for. They are proof that, huddled as we are in cities, we couldn’t live without trees and grass, at the expense of no matter what urban convenience. And this need crops up in many ways. Marian, for example, as I’ve already mentioned, keeps indoor plants. In the winter, when the garden is dead and colourless, our house still sprouts with leaves. And whenever I am in one of my moods, Marian talks to her plants. It’s true. Going round with her plastic watering-can, she has whole conversations with them.
Have I described my wife? She is thirty-two. She has sandy-blond hair, straight and light so that when the wind catches it, it blows, in a rather clichéd but, for all
that, artless way across her face. She has a slender, supple and still provocative figure, even though she has been a mother for ten years. I am particularly grateful that she hasn’t slumped as some women do after they have had their children. You could say that my wife has her share of beauty. Why does that statement half catch me unawares? Her face is a little on the long side, but because her mouth is full and her eyes large (blue, with little chips of green in them), you wouldn’t notice this. She has a way of lowering her eyes and then raising them and suddenly opening them wide when someone speaks or when something claims her attention, as if she spends all her life far away, in a trance – which is not to say that she cannot be alert, even athletic. This blank, startled expression sometimes makes me feel (it is a strange thing to say, I admit) that she doesn’t know who I am. Before we were married and we had Martin and Peter she worked as a physiotherapist in a hospital. She likes pale colours, but I prefer her in dark ones. Her complexion is smooth, on the pale side, and is one of those complexions which never change very much with mood or emotion – which suggest passivity or concealment. But the thing I like most about Marian (excuse me again if this sounds odd) is her malleability, her pliancy; the feeling I get that I could mould and remodel her (she must have learnt a thing or two at that physiotherapy clinic), contort and distort her, parcel her up and stretch her into all kinds of shapes, but, just as you can work a piece of clay a thousand times but still have left the same piece of clay, she would still, at the end of it all, be Marian. Marian.
When Quinn called me in yesterday I should have taken my opportunity to confront him about the missing files. When he said, ‘We don’t want things to get mislaid, do we?’ and gave that knowing smile, that was surely a hint. I should have taken my cue and said, ‘Talking of mislaid files …’ What a cowardly man I am.