James Kelman - If it is your life

Who was this client?

She tapped the keyboard and I glimpsed a light flickering on my details, imprisoned forever. Certain phrases shimmered upward from the hard drive. I tried to read them before they vanished: clients are impressed by qualifications; promotional opportunities arise; salary scales are pleasing.

I shook my head in wonder. I was observed doing so. Would you be interested in less attractive options? she said, as though these existed. She did not wait for an answer but smiled remotely, tapping the keyboard and studying the screen. Here is one, she said. This is a provisional position. Opportunities for advancement do not exist, which is normal practice. Do you understand that?

Yes, I said, where I come from we take early steps in life.

Even should you indicate a willingness to learn and improve your all-round workskills superiors will not waive normal practice.

We dont begin with giant strides.

She stared at me. I smiled. I was not being sarcastic. My language, however, was a challenge. People use language of this nature rarely. Not unless they themselves are in an advantageous position. Advantageous.

When I left school I attended night classes and was fortunate that one class featured the place of linguistics in theories of economic psychology, being a grey area loosely associated with traditional philosophy: Celtic Continental as opposed to Roman. Roman forms are by nature imperialistic, especially at the personal level where ‘the negation of the other’ is the key to survival if not the ability to learn. The class was an aid to intellectual life and this had a negative impact on my capacity to serve and thereby earn a living in this country where non-thinking automata have been the vogue for for

For nothing. Since the dawn of the Holy Empire, that deadening blanket of wrong reasoning, governed governed and governed again.

I thought the bureaucrat woman intriguing and hoped it was mutual. She gave me the address and interview card, advised me of the bus I could take to get to this place of provisional employment. I stared at this card which was a pale green; lined, numbered and strongly luminal. I brought out my wallet, crushed the moths and blew off the dust, inserted the card into a compartment.

Then it was interview ended.

How had that happened? One minute I was sniffing her perfume the next I was stepping out onto the pavement.

Such is life. I am just so fucking trusting an individual. I always was. There is that bottom line with bureaucrats and some of the tools of their trade are tricks of deception. They get us doing things of which we, as it were, are unconscious. We seem to be unconscious. Yet we walk about and act in the world of other humans. It is not so much depressing as something less so, less depressing. I would have said it was not depressing, not at all, when I left the Agency on this occasion.

And it was this occasion and I was going to have to remember it was this occasion. And not forget.

She had diverted my attention. She had.

Here I was outside the actual building, and I had had plans.

I never leave buildings unless all internal possibility is sealed off. One wanders corridors. One has a look here and there. One makes discoveries. Too late now.

One’s defences are there to be lowered. This problem is singular. It exists for all individuals. The bureaucrat woman and myself were of an age. I had reckoned on a kind of I dont know man honesty. From her. Something. Is ‘solidarity’ too absurd a concept? Even using the word makes me turn my head a little, as though disguising my own naivety.

I shuffled along, then frowned and walked properly.

I felt like a think. There was a little grassy square with benches. I glanced to the sky then sat down.

One could only sigh.

Next thing I woke up! How long had I been sleeping! Who knows! No one. No one but God, and God is not a one, God is a all.

Still daylight. A bus; I spied it trundling round a far corner. On its near-side front window a sign read: ‘World Freedom From Exhaust Day’. Until midnight all bus travel was free. What luck! I took the address and interview card out of my wallet, then flung away the wallet!

Why did I do that. The current proceedings, they induced in me trauma, the nature of luck and divine providence.

I read the address. Yes. This bus was mine! I would ‘take it’. I would take this bus! Schubert’s Ninth. I would visit my future workplace.

There was no necessity of doing this but with time to kill and no money to do it why not make use of the free travel? Woa me hearties. I broke into a trot as the bus hove to.

Travel allows the chance to think, to think to think to think; consult with oneself. I relished the prospect.

The driver was a hopeless rascal, I should have known: a fellow of my age, and with someone else’s beard, not so much Lenin as that elderly chap with the full head of the stuff, Morris or Kropotkin, Bakunin. One presumes characters such as he hold revolutionary-grounded politics similar to one’s own. Whenever I board their bus I give a conspiratorial twitch of the head. But it never works man it just never fucking works. An authoritarian right-wing arsehole; that is what he was, somebody who would rather lick the boots of the bosses than join a comrade in acts of liberation. As soon as I boarded the fucking bus he wanted to kick me off. It was no misunderstanding. All I did was seek directions allied to matters temporal. I had a sandwich. There are people in this world who exist in a state of siege. They construct a moat round themselves and are continually raising the drawbridge. He was one of them. Why be a bus driver if one refuses to answer questions concerning time and place? These should be matters of fact, not issues for debate.

One seethes.

Later I alighted. I located the place of provisional employment although it appeared deserted. It was an unprepossessing building altogether. I could not imagine being tethered within such a structure.

Nearby was a building site. It wasnt a massive operation but big enough for its own purposes. This would have suited me. Guys were strolling around with lengths of wood and assorted tools. Building sites were out in the open, unlike factories; desperate places wherein we humans might perish forever. I had been employed in the building industry before. Much the better option. Perhaps there were vacancies. I could cross over the road to ascertain the likelihood. I was about to do this but recognized it as a psychological manoeuvre. Yet again I was trying to escape the true path. There was a path, why avoid it. Such was the mark of the coward. No, I would not run away. I would remain. I would confront the dark forces, perhaps foment a situation, take part in an epoch-changing strike.

The entrance gate into the parking area of the unprepossessing building lay ahead. Inside was a trailer but not much else. There were warning signs on Trespassing and Security. Suddenly a uniformed male appeared with a cup of tea or coffee in hand, a newspaper beneath his elbow, he yawned and spat to the ground. He had not seen me yet directed the spit towards the space into which I headed.

That boded ill. It meant he knew I was there. Probably he saw me from the trailer window and here he was keeping me at bay. I was tempted to return to the inner city. Mid to late afternoon. I would need a place soon. There was a cinema whose early evening entertainments provided a panacea for parties exhausted by life’s travels. Persons dotted themselves about the hall and might sleep. Management’s attitude was benign. When the programme ended the ushers roused individuals in a tentative — not to say sympathetic — manner. On one occasion one such usher panicked when unable to rouse me. I apologized for snoring. The usher apologized for wakening me. She had feared the worst, an inference drawn from the manner in which my head lolled. That to me was appalling. A lolling head at my time of life. I was a mere boy. (Sometimes I dreamed I was a man.)