Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

'Curious,' he said to Beazley on his right. He would have to talk to the man sooner or later, no time like the present.

Beazley, holding the leaves of his revolving card-index open with a ballpoint pen so as not to lose his place, looked up. Not impatiently, but certainly not as if he had all the time in the world like Seeds.

'I was saying,' Gryce went on. 'Curious about these desks. I was telling our friend here, for my sins I served three years before the mast at Comform.'

'Comform,' repeated Beazley. He had a barking voice. He sounded as if he were accustomed to giving orders, or would like to become so accustomed.

'I was just noticing, all the desks here are Comform. So I suspect are the chairs.'

'They should make you feel quite at home.'

'Sha!' That was how Gryce laughed. 'Can't get away from the place, eh?' He was glad they had found a little joke to share. It broke the ice. Certainly it meant that Beazley could not be as unfriendly as he looked. Perhaps he was shy with strangers, as gruff people sometimes were. Encouraged, Gryce continued quickly before Beazley could turn back to his work:

'The curious thing is, I don't think British Albion had a contract with Comform. In fact I'd swear to it. Bear in mind, I was in furniture sales for three years.'

'Probably before your time,' said Beazley.

'Probably. This particular desk has certainly seen better days.'

He wondered if he'd perhaps gone too far there. Criticizing the office furniture on your first day was not really on. He rehearsed an apologetic rider, he could say there was a good few years' life in the old desks yet: but Beazley, with a curious glance at him, had already turned back to his revolving card-index. Copeland was still talking to Seeds but Gryce was pretty sure he must have overheard the remark about Vaart's desk having seen better days. Again he felt embarrassed.

He rose with the object of crossing to the windows and looking out to see if there were any likely restaurants or sandwich bars he had missed on an earlier recce of the district — he would have to establish pretty soon what his colleagues usually did about lunch. But his path took him past Hakim's desk and Hakim seemed to think he was looking for the lavatory.

'Yes! The geography!' Hakim didn't have the sing-song accent you would have expected, he must have been in the country a long time, perhaps even born here. 'Down the central aisle; all the way through Traffic Control, then turn right and the door is staring you in the face.'

'Thank you. Thank you.' Gryce found he was not only repeating himself effusively but also executing an unnatural wriggling bow, to show Mr Hakim that he had no colour prejudice of any kind whatsoever. Hakim had risen and had extended his right arm slightly. Gryce thought he meant to shake hands again and so he put out his own hand, just as Hakim retracted his. Hakim smiled, showing white teeth, and produced his hand again; but by now Gryce had deflected his own gesture to make it look as if he was adjusting the strap of his wrist-watch. The performance continued with variations: it finished with the two men grazing knuckles rather than actually shaking hands.

'Whoops,' said Hakim, unexpectedly.

'Sha!'

Gryce backed away nodding vigorously, as if to indicate that he and Hakim had just had a stimulating exchange which they must take up again. 'Would you like me to show you the way?' asked Hakim.

'No, that's more than kind of you, I'll find it. Through Traffic Control, then right?'

'And it's straight ahead.'

'Many thanks indeed.'

Traffic Control was the biggest of the three departments on the seventh floor. The section where Gryce had come to work, Stationery Supplies — 'the dreaded SS' as Seeds had dubbed it — was the smallest. It had its rows of desks on one side of the central aisle, and Copeland's partitioned-off space plus some banks of filing cabinets on the other, and that was it. The actual supplies the section handled were held, Gryce had been told, in the Stationery Stores Department in basement two. But if you included the space down in basement two as belonging to Stationery Supplies, which arguably it did, then the department was not smaller than Traffic Control, but bigger.

Traffic Control was laid out on the same lines as Stationery Supplies — rows of desks (but twice as many) on one side of the aisle and filing cabinets on the other, with the addition of a photo-copying machine. Traffic Control was responsible for the smooth running of the building and for reorganizations such as Copeland had promised for the near future, so there was often a need to run off copies of ground-plans or wiring-circuit diagrams. Two office girls, an English one with an Afro hair-do and an African-looking one with her hair cropped short, were working at the machine. The English one was gathering up the photostats of some graph or other and passing them to the African-looking one, who stacked them neatly by shuffling them together then rapping them smartly upon the surface of the copying machine. It was a job that either girl could easily have done on her own. It reminded Gryce very much of his last billet.

Beyond Traffic Control, at the far end of the seventh floor, was the internal post department or In-house Mail as it preferred to call itself. In appearance it was more or less a replica of Stationery Supplies. This too was only the administrative wing of the department, dealing with such matters as co-ordinating delivery times and rerouting letters to people who had changed their offices. The actual mail was sorted in basement one.

Reaching the boundary of Traffic Control and In-house Mail, Gryce turned right as instructed and went into the Gents'. It was a better appointed place than the one he had been used to, with tiled walls, mirrors with shaving points and a choice between paper towels and a hand-drying machine. One of the stalls was occupied by ex-President Nixon and they made the necessary exchanges.

'This is what comes of having orange juice for breakfast.'

'Sha!'

'Ahhhh, that's better.'

Gryce had no real need to urinate but he made the effort until his companion had gone. He rinsed his hands, drying them on a paper towel rather than at the hot-air machine which had a push button instead of a properly hygienic foot pedal. He went back out to the office and retraced his steps through Traffic Control.

The noises were all familiar ones to him: the low background hum of the air-conditioning, the fast rhythmic clattering of typewriters being used by properly trained girls and the sporadic pecking of machines being handled by men or novices, the murmur of private conversations and the louder voices of those who were talking business — 'Have you finished with the book of words, Amanda light of my heart?' Clerks who were crossing the central aisle to the filing cabinets or back again felt obliged as they did so to sing snatches of dated songs. The male ones, that was: the women did not sing, but they added to the medley by sliding back the drawers of the filing cabinets with unnecessary force, as women in Gryce's experience always did. (One or two of them, though, were quite presentable — something to bear in mind if there was nothing doing with Miss Divorce.)

There was one sound missing, he knew that but he could not place it. Individually all the small noises were recognizable almost as old friends but they were not quite weaving together into that acoustic curtain which, in all the offices he had ever worked for, had become as innocuous as the floor covering. He was noticing all the component sounds and that was how he knew there was an ingredient missing.

Back in Stationery Supplies, Mrs Rashman was speaking into her telephone. A personal call it was, something to do with her need to buy a packet of Ritz crackers in the lunch hour, an errand that would make her a minute or two late for a previously arranged appointment in a wine bar.