Jenny Colgan - Working Wonders

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.