Kitabı oku: «The Park Bench Test», sayfa 2

CHAPTER THREE

Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under my feet;

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven', W.B. Yeats

Bollocks.

It’s Monday morning. Quite how it can be is beyond me. It only feels like five minutes since I switched off my computer and dumped my dirty mug in the office sink.

I contemplate phoning in sick. This is not a first. I contemplate phoning in sick every Monday morning. The possibilities are endless – I could put a peg on my nose and pretend I have the flu. I could tie a scarf tightly around my neck, cut the air supply to my vocal chords and pretend I have tonsillitis. I could come out with complete gibberish and pretend I’m hallucinating – though I tend to come out with complete gibberish a lot of the time, so this probably wouldn’t be terribly convincing.

I never actually do phone in sick. Not because my excuses are not entirely plausible, but because I like to think of myself as a conscientious employee, persevering with the rest of the rat race in the face of sheer boredom.

I used to be depressed when I woke up on a Sunday morning because I knew I was going back to work the next day. Now I’m depressed when I wake up on a Saturday morning, because I know that the next time I wake up I will be going back to work the next day. I spend Monday to Friday wishing my life away for the weekend, and Saturday and Sunday depressed that the weekend is almost over. Which, if you think about it, leaves only Friday available for not being miserable, when I’m too stressed out after a whole week in the office to really appreciate it.

I must get out more.

I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.

This is not a statement of fact, by the way, merely a mantra I am trying out.

I’m saying it to myself every morning as I make my way into Penand Inc’s head office in the misguided hope that it might eventually come true.

It’s not working.

I have a terribly glamorous job, you know.

I sell pencils. No, really, I do. I sell pencils. Okay, so I’m selling myself short. I also sell pens. And pencil sharpeners. And Post-It notes. In fact – take a look around your desk – anything you can see, the chances are I sell it. Or, at least, I work for the people who sell it.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. I never intended to sell pencils for a living. No, in actual fact, I was meant to be the next Carrie Bradshaw. Not necessarily being paid to write about sex, but being paid to write at least – being paid to do what I love. It doesn’t have to be Carrie, of course. I’d settle for Kate Hudson’s character in How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days.

How To Give Up Your Dream Job And Sell Pencils Instead.

How To Convince The Bride-To-Be That Peach Only Suits A Peach.

How To Tell Your Boyfriend You’re Not Sure He’s The One…

The plan was to move back home and look for a journalism job in London after my finals. But then Alex got a great job up here with a high profile law firm. And I wanted to be with him, so I stayed too. I got a temporary job. It was meant to be a short term thing. Just until I had paid off some of my (rather hefty) student debts. Just until I began pursuing my ‘real’ career by pestering unsuspecting editors of local newspapers to give me a job.

That was five years ago.

I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I chant as I walk through the automatic doors, smile sweetly at Marie on reception and swipe my ID card to let me through the security door.

I often wonder why they make it so damned difficult to get into this building. We’re really not that keen on getting in, after all. It would make far more sense to make it harder for us to get out, if you ask me – getting out is much more popular.

I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I continue up the stairs to the second floor. It was my New Year’s resolution never to take the lift, on account of the fact that I’m supposed to be on a diet. Because I’ve just been asked to be bridesmaid. And because I ate far more than my fair share of a Christmas kilogram tub of Cadbury’s Miniature Heroes.

Not that I’m a fatty or anything. But I could do with losing a pound or two, because I’m sure peach looks even less attractive when you’re wearing a spare tyre underneath it.

Anyway, it’s the second week in January and I haven’t succumbed yet. Apart from the day after the office Christmas party (held on January sixth for reasons I will never understand) when I was feeling particularly hungover. But that doesn’t count, because it was a Christmas party, and so technically still December. Okay, so I’m a cheat. I hold my hands up. But everyone knows that New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken.

My heart sinks when I see my desk. Plummets, in fact. I don’t know why I’m even vaguely surprised. What did I expect – that Mary Poppins would pop in over the weekend, click her fingers and magic everything into its correct folder, drawer and filing tray (not that I actually have any filing trays to speak of)?

I’m surprised I’m not forever being disciplined over the state of my desk. You could actually grow things in the mugs that have, on occasion, been found on my desk. They say mould produces penicillin, don’t they? If that’s right then I’m pretty sure that the contents of a mug that was (allegedly) found on my desk last week could probably have saved a small community from the bubonic plague.

I don’t know what happened really. I was such a tidy child. I would spend hours tidying my already immaculate bedroom. All my cassettes were neatly filed in alphabetical order in their wall-mounted plastic storage cases, my white pants were kept separate from my coloured ones, my socks separate from my tights, and all my games were stacked neatly on top of the wardrobe in size-order – Game of Life and Monopoly at the bottom, Yahtzee at the top. If I ever found a loose playing piece I’d painstakingly slide out the relevant game, open it up and put the piece away in its proper place before returning the game to its correct position.

Now I’d probably just lob the loose playing piece to the top of the wardrobe and hope it didn’t bounce back and hit me in the face; my bills are filed in the kitchen drawer, along with old freebie newspapers and menus for a dozen different takeaways; CDs are put away in whichever empty case happens to be close to hand – which is fine, until Alex goes to play his favourite Stereophonics album when he’s driving the lads to a footie match and my favourite Will Young CD blasts out of the car stereo instead; and the Sex & The City quiz cards are scooped up and put away back to front and out of order, giving the cheats among us the perfect opportunity for a sneaky glance at the answers while they are being sorted (I remain convinced this is how Katie beat both me and Emma hands down on their last visit).

I’m even worse at work. My desk is an embarrassment, to be honest. It is littered with coloured pens, enough Post-It notes to create my very own roll of Post-It-themed wallpaper and dozens of scraps of paper covered in illegible notes under the scribbled heading ‘to do’. Organised chaos, I call it. But there really is no excuse. I work for an office supplies company, after all, with unlimited pen pots, filing trays and notepads at my disposal.

I am one of eight account planners at Penand Inc who set up and manage new accounts after unsuspecting office managers have been hypnotised by our sweet-talking salesmen – and women – and their copies of our two-inch-thick glossy catalogue.

I’m really an admin assistant with a fancy title and a salary to match, which is probably why I have stayed for so long. You get used to earning decent money, don’t you? Especially after being a student when you are used to pooling your coppers for a loaf of bread to make cheese on toast after a night in the student union bar.

I work with the biggest bunch of knobs. Dickheads, all of them, except Felicity and Erin, who I share an office with. Between us we look after the big national companies. There were four of us but Hannah, the senior account planner, was sacked last month for stealing a bottle of Tippex. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t the Tippex that got her the sack. If they were that petty then I’d have been out on my ear long ago – I could open up my own branch of WHSmiths with all the pens and Post-It notes that have made their way home in my handbag over the years. The Tippex was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, shall we say, because Hannah didn’t just nick the odd pen or pencil, or pad of Post-Its, or bottle of Tippex. She nicked an entire office. Well, obviously not an office as such, but everything needed to equip one. Her boyfriend was starting up his own recruitment agency and Hannah thought it would save him a few quid if she got him a few bits from work. Like pens and pencils, and a ream of paper or two, for example. I’m sure she didn’t actually intend to put the flat-pack beech-effect corner desk with matching filing cabinet into the boot of her car. Or the traditional executive leather facing manager’s chair. Or the Canon C1492X printer scanner. Although, if she had stopped there then she may well have got away with it. But when she was spotted leaving the warehouse with a 12-pack of Tippex – there’s only so much Tippex a person can get through, even if your employers are paying for it – suspicions were aroused, and an investigation was launched. In other words, Hannah was summoned to personnel where she ‘fessed up and was promptly handed her P45.

Which has left Fliss, Erin and I holding the fort. And for some ludicrous reason the two of them have nominated me to be in charge of the team until a new senior account planner is appointed. Erin says she isn’t ‘boss material’ and Fliss says she’s past it.

But I’m a terrible leader. I hate telling other people what to do. I’d rather do something myself than have to ask somebody else to do it.

Fliss and Erin are very sweet though. They never take advantage of my complete inability to delegate. If the roles were reversed, I can’t promise I wouldn’t completely take the piss – come in late, take extra long lunch hours, leave early…

Come to think of it – I do all that already…

As if to prove my point, they are both already in as I survey the nuclear disaster that is my desk.

“Cup of tea, Becky love?” Fliss asks, illustrating one of the many reasons I totally adore her.

“That’d be fab, Fliss, thanks,” I reply, shrugging my coat off and draping it over the back of my chair.

Erin and Fliss are the perfect people to share an office with. Fliss makes a fabulous cup of tea, and Erin, despite being on a permanent diet, always has a well-stocked bucket of Maltesers hidden between the hanging files in her desk drawer.

Fliss is amazing. She has worked for Penand Inc her whole life. Well, almost. Thirty-eight years to be exact. Can you imagine that? Working for the same company for nearly forty years? If I’m still at Penand Inc when I’m forty, never mind sixty, someone please put me out of my misery.

Not that I’m knocking Fliss. It’s what you did in her day, isn’t it? You joined a company straight from school and stuck with them, getting your carriage clock after thirty years and a big retirement bash a decade or so later. Incidentally, why a carriage clock? Why not something more useful like an iPod, or a Kindle, or a weekend in Paris? A carriage clock, tick-tocking away on your mantelpiece, is surely just a brutal reminder of all the time you wasted working for a company that deems you worthy of nothing more than a carriage clock?

Fliss has had her carriage clock, but she has another few years to go before the big bash. She’s thinking about early retirement though. She should. She can afford to. Her husband Derek has just sold his veterinary practice. They’re loaded. But she says she’d miss Erin and I too much. She says we keep her young.

Despite that claim, Fliss has been doing her damndest to get rid of me for the last eighteen months. In the nicest possible way, of course.

“Don’t be like me,” she keeps saying. “Still here when you’re sixty.”

No chance.

“You’re wasted here, lovey,” she says.

Fliss knows my real goal is to be a writer. I wrote a short piece about her once – and Erin and Hannah – after I realised how much they all made me laugh.

For weeks I kept a little notepad in my desk drawer and every time one of them did or said something funny I would write it down. Like the time Erin laughed so much at a joke I told she did a huge fart in the middle of the office cafeteria. And the time Hannah told us she’d forgotten to take her contact lenses out before she went to bed and woke up the next morning thinking there had been a miracle. And the time Fliss came out of the ladies with her skirt tucked into her knickers.

When I had completely filled the notepad I wrote a short story about them. It was only meant to be for the girls to read, but they loved it so much they made me submit it for the company magazine.

And ever since then, Fliss has been on at me to “chase my dreams.”

“Malcolm wants us to split the Leeds accounts between Roger Calvin and Dave Anderson,” Fliss tells me, flicking the kettle on and dropping tea bags into three mugs. We’re not supposed to have a kettle in our office – we’re supposed to use the kitchen on the third floor, but we can’t be arsed. We’re rebels. And it gives us a little thrill every time we plug it in, knowing there’s a chance we might get caught.

“Why, for heaven’s sake?” I ask.

Fliss shrugs.

“Does he realise how much time that’s going to take us?”

“Bill is leaving, apparently. He and his wife are moving to France to run a Bed and Breakfast. He says he’s had enough of doing a job he hates.”

“I know how he feels,” I say, immediately regretting it, as I sense Fliss lifting one foot up onto her soapbox. Three, two, one…

“So leave. I keep telling you that you should.”

You don’t want to be like me…

“You don’t want to be like me…”

Still here when you’re sixty…

“Still here when you’re sixty…”

You’re wasted here, lovey…

“You’re wasted here, lovey. Go and use that degree of yours.”

Chase your dreams…

“Chase your dreams, Becky.”

“Yeah, I will Fliss,” I say, getting the milk out of the fridge – another illegal appliance – “just as soon as we’ve changed these accounts over.” I grin at her and she shakes her head, resigned to the fact that she’s probably stuck with me.

I switch on my computer and wait for it to whir into action, Fliss’s words ringing in my ears.

It would be great to be that brave – to just chuck it all in and ‘chase your dreams’. People do it all the time, supposedly. You read about them in magazines, don’t you – people who pack in their high-powered city jobs to run a pig farm in the Yorkshire Dales, people who swap their laptops and Blackberries for packets of doilies and recipes for fruit scones and run their own tea rooms, people who give up their six-figure salaries to become aid workers in Rwanda? People who give up something safe and secure, to do something they actually want to do.

It happens.