Kate Davies - In at the Deep End

‘How are you anyway? How’s work?’ asked Cat.

‘Too boring to talk about.’

‘You need a creative outlet outside work.’

‘No thanks,’ I said. All I wanted to do was watch TV without listening to people have sex. I sat on the sofa, coat still on, and felt around between the cushions for the remote. Come Dine with Me was on, and Alice and Dave were out. This was shaping up to be a good evening.

I was a little late to work the next day, so my usual desk was taken. I waved at Owen, who I usually sit with, across the grey no-man’s-land of desks and chairs. I could feel other people looking up at me from the trenches, so I ducked down into the nearest seat, next to Stan, one of the press officers. I usually try to avoid Stan, because he breathes loudly and eats crisps all day. An unsociable combination. This morning he’d gone for salt and vinegar rather than cheese and onion, which was a blessing.

I couldn’t concentrate on logging the new emails and letters – my session with Nicky was still playing on my mind – so I pulled out the latest letter from Eric, the Bomber Command vet, written on thin, yellowing lined paper in shaky blue biro, and started drafting my reply.

You’re not supposed to draft a stock response to government correspondence – you’re supposed to treat each letter writer as an individual. There are guidelines that tell you how to address a Baroness (‘Baroness Jones, not Lady Jones; it’s important to distinguish Baronesses from women who become Ladies when their husbands become Sirs’) and how to refuse an invitation to a Minister (‘Unfortunately, pressures on her diary are so great that she must regretfully decline’). Sometimes you take letters to the Minister for their signature. Sometimes, if the letter isn’t addressed to the Minister, you sign it yourself. Some people write back over and over again, so working on the correspondence team is a bit like having lots of self-righteous pen pals. Eric, the Bomber Command veteran, wasn’t self-righteous, though.

The care home staff are under so much pressure that they don’t have as much time to spend with us as they used to. I think the cuts to social care are a crying shame. Older people are an easy target, because once we reach a certain age, we’re hidden away out of sight.

Most of the old dears at my care home don’t get any visitors at all. That just breaks my heart. I’m lucky – I have a daughter who comes and sees me twice a week. She’s very good. But it’s very lonely getting older. I miss Eve, my wife, more than I can tell you. She died four years ago. Have I told you about her already?

Lovely Eric. He reminded me of my granddad, who I missed every day. When I was at university, Granddad had written to me every month or so, in wobbly, old-fashioned handwriting, telling me stories about his allotment and his cats, always slipping a ten-pound note into the envelope. I had usually been too busy getting drunk to write back. So I took extra care with my letters to Eric. I typed out the old lines about difficult choices and austerity, and then I asked him to tell me more about his wife, because I knew what it was like to be lonely. I caught myself thinking: At least he had a wife. And then I realized that being envious of a bereaved care home resident was taking self-pity too far, and decided to pull myself together.

I finished my letter and I was wrangling with the printer – usually you have to put the headed notepaper in face down, with the letterhead closest to the printer, but someone had fiddled with the settings – when I saw Owen heading to the kitchen for a coffee. I decided to corner him.

I glanced into the hallway to check that no one was about to interrupt our conversation and asked, ‘How long has it been since you had sex?’

Owen spends most nights gaming, and most of his lunch breaks reading comic books, and not a lot of time with members of the opposite sex. So I thought his response to my question would make me feel better. I was wrong.

He glanced at his watch. ‘Two and a half hours.’

‘You had sex this morning?’

‘That’s right.’ Owen crossed his arms and smirked.

‘No need to be so smug about it.’

‘But I am smug!’ said Owen. ‘Do you know how long it had been before I met Laura? Four years.’ He grabbed my arm and gave it a little shake. ‘Over four years. I hadn’t had a shag since I was twenty-four!’

I felt slightly better after that. ‘I haven’t had sex in three years.’

I could see Owen trying to arrange his face into an expression of sympathy. ‘Poor you,’ he said.

‘So. Who’s Laura?’

He shrugged. ‘We’ve been seeing each other for a few weeks.’

‘Great.’ I nodded and smiled, as convincingly as I could.

‘She does roller derby. She has tattoos all over her thighs.’

‘I don’t think I need to hear about her thighs,’ I said, lowering my voice as a group of Fast Streamers walked past the kitchen, speaking to each other in low voices as if they knew something we didn’t, which they undoubtedly did.

‘Sex is great,’ he said, smiling to himself in a way that let me know he was thinking about Laura’s thighs. Or what was between them. Grim. ‘I’d forgotten how good it is.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Don’t rub it in.’

The sex chat made us late to our team meeting. Owen and I huffed into the glass-walled meeting room, breathless, saying, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ as we sat down.

Tom didn’t look up. He had a very passive aggressive management style – that’s what I’d have liked to say in the annual Staff Engagement Survey, but our team was so small I thought he’d trace the feedback to me and passive-aggressively punish me for it. Probably by making me answer all the correspondence about Brexit.

There were three of us on our immediate team besides Tom: me, Owen and Uzo, who was smiling up at me kindly now. Uzo was always smiling at me kindly. She’d been working on the correspondence team for twenty years and had the least ambition of anyone I’d ever met. Whenever I messed up, she’d say things like, ‘Don’t worry, girl. You won’t care when you’ve worked here as long as me,’ and I’d go and quietly hyperventilate in the toilets. She did have a lovely collection of statement necklaces, though.

‘As I was about to say,’ said Tom, still not looking up, ‘they’re bringing in a new Grade Six.’

Owen and I looked at each other.

‘What, another senior manager?’ said Owen.

‘Yes, Owen,’ said Tom, smiling his tight smile.

‘Above you?’ said Owen.

‘Yes,’ said Tom, his smile tighter still. ‘Above me.’

‘But we thought you were going to be promoted,’ said Owen.

‘Yes, well. So did I,’ said Tom. He fiddled with his tie.

‘Fuck,’ said Uzo, which, to be fair, was what the rest of us were thinking.

‘And I have it on good authority that the new Grade Six is hardline on swearing in the workplace.’

‘Shit,’ said Uzo.

‘That was a joke,’ said Tom.

‘What’s his name?’ asked Uzo.

‘ Her name,’ said Tom, ‘is Smriti Laghari. I’m pleased to see you were paying attention during unconscious bias training.’ Sarcasm was another of Tom’s management techniques.

Owen took out his phone and started Googling Smriti. ‘She’s with Private Office at the moment. Used to be a banker.’

Groans from around the table. Former bankers were the worst for trying to make the Civil Service more efficient, which often meant getting rid of people and cutting ‘luxuries’ such as having enough desks for people to sit at.

‘According to LinkedIn, her interests include Cardiff University, Pineapple Dance Studios and the London Amateur Violinists’ Network,’ continued Owen.