Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

Gryce opened the filing cabinet without difficulty and dumped the assortment of papers in it without ceremony. He was blowed if he was going to sort them into their proper folders at this hour: that could wait until morning when, by looking tight-lipped and doing a certain amount of crashing and banging with the filing cabinet drawer, he would make jolly sure the Penney twins knew what he thought of them.

He was feeling sorry for himself by now. The long, empty office with its harsh lights — left on, so he understood, for the army of night cleaners who would soon be descending on the seventh floor in great droves — had a forlorn air, reminding him of the North Circular Road. He wished he had had a chance to say good night to Pam. He wished, come to that, he had had a chance to say good night to all and sundry. The office was desolate now that they had all gone home, and he missed the camaraderie as keenly as any child kept in while its friends are playing in the street.

As always when in a self-pitying frame of mind, Gryce was getting peckish. After all, he had had nothing since lunch. A gulp of tea before setting off on his abortive expedition to Catering (Administration), yes. But nothing solid. There was a case, he had always felt, for having a biscuit in the afternoon tea break. When Mrs Rashman left in a few days, a vacancy would exist in the Penney twins/Hakim/Rashman biscuit-eating school. But then the question arose: who would look after the biscuits? At the moment the responsibility fell on Mrs Rashman, who clearly found it convenient to replenish supplies when buying in her vast stocks of groceries. Mr Hakim, with his connections in the wholesale confectionery business, might reasonably be expected to be next in line. But supposing the Penney twins asserted themselves? Gryce didn't know whether halitosis could transmit itself to a Huntley and Palmer's assortment in an air-tight tin but on balance he was not willing to take the risk. He would wait until he had got his knees brown, as they used to say in the Air Force, then start a little biscuit-eating school of his own, with probably Pam and Seeds as founder-members.

Pondering thus, all alone under the gently hissing, fluorescent strip-lights, Gryce was suddenly possessed by an overwhelming craving for one of Copeland's toffees.

Even the far distant rumbling of the lifts had stopped now. All was quiet. When exactly the night cleaners arrived on duty Gryce could not say, but he expected they would come barging along with vacuum cleaners and enormous waste-bins on squeaking wheels. He would get plenty of warning, God willing.

His own shoes squeaking ten to the blessed dozen he made his way, on tiptoe for no reason he could pin down, towards Copeland's personal filing cabinet in the partitioned-off space across the office. It certainly wasn't that Gryce felt guilty: more a bit of a devil, if anyone wanted to know. Anyway, if they wished him to work overtime, they could hardly expect him to do it on an empty stomach.

Even so, Gryce's pulse raced as he unclipped the ballpoint from his top pocket, and his hand trembled as he took aim like a darts-player, and pressed the pen home against the lock-face. Like a knife through butter, he told himself as the lock sprang open with a satisfactory click. If all else failed, he could always take up housebreaking.

He slid open the top drawer gently, gripping its sides to reduce the harsh scraping of the telescopic runners.

It was the lid of Copeland's Windsor Castle toffee tin that made more row than anything. Judging wrongly that it needed a good tug to get it open, Gryce pulled at it with a force that spun it clattering against the metal wall of the filing cabinet. What was more, the impetus had sent several toffees flying in all directions. If the noise had alerted anyone — how did he know the building wasn't crawling with security guards? — he would be in the soup now and no mistake.

Heart thumping, Gryce froze, his arms angled in such a grotesque position over the open filing-cabinet drawer that he could have been posing for a steel engraving of a body-snatcher desecrating a tomb. He counted ten. All clear.

He had better get himself organized. The first step was to select his toffee, call it two toffees for luck, making sure that the wrapper of the one to be consumed on the scene of the crime was placed in his pocket and disposed of later. The second step was to go methodically through the drawer and replace the four or five toffees that had been dislodged from their tin.

Gryce unwrapped what he hoped was a treacle brittle, found to his disappointment that it was fudge, wondered if he could re-wrap it expertly enough for Copeland not to notice, rejected this speculation as wild, popped the fudge in his mouth and the wrapper in his pocket, and abstracted a second toffee for future consumption. Then he set about eradicating traces of his visit.

It would, as luck would have it, be the work of only a moment. Besides the toffee tin, Copeland's personal drawer contained only a pair of string-backed driving gloves, the paperback novel Airport, a half-used packet of drinking straws for some reason — perhaps, taking his example from Mr Hakim, Copeland went on a 7-Up jag during summer coffee breaks — and a couple of what looked like instruction manuals, one white-covered, one black. The few scattered toffees were readily locatable among these sparse belongings.

Gryce recovered them, hesitated for a moment, then helped himself to an extra toffee and replaced the lid. He had already eaten his piece of fudge. He unwrapped the toffee in his hand and saw to his delight that it was butterscotch. Carefully pocketing the wrapper, Gryce sucked contentedly.

He wondered if the rest of Copeland's filing cabinet contained anything worth knowing about. Personal files, anything of that kind. He slid the middle drawer open: it was empty except for a teapot with a broken spout and a pair of braces. As for the bottom drawer, it was stacked with empty toffee tins, a dozen or fifteen of them there must have been. If Copeland were knocked down by the proverbial bus tomorrow, what a pathetic sight this little array would present to the bod detailed to clear out his cabinet.

Gryce returned to the top drawer. He had better make sure the toffee tin currently in use was exactly as he'd found it, that was to say, half-resting on the pair of driving gloves and tilting slightly. His eye fell on the two manuals. Sucking away at his butterscotch, he picked up the white-covered one. It was a dog-eared copy, probably badly out-of-date by now, of the guidelines leaflet summarized for him by Pam and Seeds. He flicked through it: not much there he didn't know already, except, on the last page, a list of the various firms of which British Albion was the parent company. About twenty of them all told: Binns Brothers, Rugby; Cobbs and Co., Harrow on the Hill; Fallowfield (Processing) Ltd, Slough. And so on and so forth. They meant nothing to Gryce.

The other manual, the black one, was a loose-leaf affair with pages of stiff card embellished with index tags, and if Gryce was not mistaken, it was an internal telephone directory. They were all much of a muchness, these things, presumably there was a firm that specialized in printing them. For no other reason than that he had not as yet finished his butterscotch, and didn't care to say goodnight to the three one-armed commissionaires, assuming they were still on duty, with it still in his mouth, Gryce picked up the internal telephone directory and idly turned its pages. Here it was then: the key to all those magic dialect wines explained at such length by Copeland.

Gryce looked up first the number of Stationery Supplies, then of Personnel, then the Buttery, the Cockpit, Catering (Administration), Traffic Control, In-house Mail, and Main Door. Those were the only departments he could think of. He began to dip into the directory at random.