Will Self - Grey Area

Desk tidying is quite an important ritual with me. I like to have every paper clip in its modular plastic container, every pencil, staple, rubber and label in its assigned position. I like my highlighting pens arranged in conformity with the spectrum. I like my blotter located in the exact centre of my desk. I like my mouse mat positioned precisely along the front edge of my workstation.

When I first came to work at the Company I was a lot sloppier about this; my desk was tidy, but it wasn’t exact. Now it’s exact.

Then I made a list, using the soft ‘scherluump-scherluump’ that the laserprinter was making as a counterpoint with which to order my thoughts. I always make a list at the end of the working day. They are essential if you want to maintain any kind of ordered working practice. I finished the list just as the presentation document finished printing. The icon came up on the VDU. It shows a smiling and satisfied little laserprinter, with underneath the legend: ‘Printing Completed’.

I stacked the papers, punched them, bound them in a ring-binder with a plastic cover, and took the document across the corridor to my boss’s office.

He was tipped far back on the rear wheels of his chair, so that his head was almost hidden between two of the vertical textured-fabric louvres that cover the windows of his office. The posture looked uncomfortable. The black head of the lamp was pulled low over the fan of papers on the wide expanse of his desk. His feet were propped on the desk top and the cuffs of his trousers had ridden up above his socks, exposing two or three inches of quite brown, but hairless ankle. He said, ‘Have you re-done the presentation document for the inter-departmental meeting?’

I replied, ‘Yes, here it is.’

He said, ‘Good. Well, I’ll see you in the morning then.’

I turned and walked back across the corridor. I shut down my computer and then bent to turn off the laserprinter. Kneeling like this, with my face level with the lower platform of the workstation, I could see right underneath my desk. I could see the flexes of the computer, the laserprinter, the desk lamp and the telephone all join together and twist into a spiral stream of mushroom-coloured plastic that disappeared down an oblong cable-routing slot. There was nothing else to see under the desk, no errant rubber bands or propelling pencils gone astray.

The bottom of my workstation is shaped like an upside-down T, with a castor protruding from a rubber bung at either end of the crossbar. I rested my forehead on this bar for a while and let the coolness of the metal seep into me. When I opened my eyes again, I focused not on the distant prospect of the skirting board, but on my immediate vicinity: the beaten path that my varnished nail had cut for the rest of my finger, through the eighth-of-an-inch pile of nylon undergrowth. It was this that caught my attention — a really tiny event.

How small does an event have to be before it ceases to be an event? If you look very closely at the tip of your fingernail as it lies on a clear surface (preferably something white like a sheet of paper), so closely that you can see the tiny cracks in the varnish; and then push it towards some speck of dust, or tweak the end of a withered hair, or flick the corpse of a crumb still further into decay, is that as small as an event can be?

When I stood up I rapped my head on the underside of my workstation. Both it and my skull vibrated. I bit my lip. I stood like that for a few moments, concentrating hard on the angle of one of the flexible fronds in the stack of binders in my stationery cupboard. Then I shut the cupboard doors, snapped the switch that bathed my office in darkness, and left it.

I went down the first flight of stairs, past the plant that lives in the grey granules, down the second flight and along the corridor. The Department was already empty. I knew that, at five on the dot, the entire workforce would have risen up like a swarm, or a flock, and headed for the six big lifts that pinion the Company to the earth.

I also found myself on an empty platform, caught in the hiatus between two westbound trains. The platform’s dirty tongue unwound along the side of the tube, which was ribbed like a gullet with receding rings of be-grimed metal. A tired, flat wind, warm with minor ailments, gusted up my nose. The electronic sign above the platform kept on creating the word ‘Information’ out of an array of little dots of light; as if this in itself was some kind of important message. I listened to the sough and grind of the escalator belt.

Gradually the platform began to fill up with people. The minor-ailment smell was undercut with hamburger and onion, overwhelmed by processed cheese and honey-cured ham, encapsulated by tobacco. They stood in loose groups, bonded together by a mutual desire to try and avoid uniformity. Thus, blacks stood with whites, women with men, gays with the straight, middle class with working class, the ugly with the beautiful, the crippled with the whole, the homeless with the homeowners, the fashionable with the shabby. That so many people could believe themselves different from one another only made them — appear more the same.

To my left, clamped against the bilious tiling, was a strange machine. It wasn’t clear whether it was mechanical or electronic. It had a curved housing of green plastic. It was eight inches high, and bolted at top and bottom to brackets hammered into the grout. In the middle of the thing was a circular, venetian-blind-slatted plate. Underneath it was a small sign that proclaimed: ‘Speak Here’. I pressed my ear against the plate. and heard the faint rise and fall of what might have been a recording of outer space, or the depths of the sea.

When the train eventually came, I stood for a moment watching the people get off and get on. The two streams of shoving bodies folded into one another, like the fingers of two hands entwining deep in the lap of the ground.

And that was what my day was like — or at any rate the second half of it. Wherever I start from I will experience the same difficulties, so it might as well be this afternoon, when I sensed the man’s presence behind me as I fed the facsimile machine.

One last thing. This morning, as I have for the past fourteen mornings or so, I put a sanitary towel in my underpants. Tonight, when I stood in front of the mirror’s oblong and looked at the pouch between my legs, I felt certain that there would be blood absorbed into the quilted paper. Just a few dabs and blotches, together with a brown smear at the edge, denoting earlier bleeding.

But there was nothing. It was virgin territory. No period — period. I haven’t had sexual intercourse for over six months — I can’t be pregnant. I am normally as regular in my body as I am at work. And over the last two weeks I have felt the swelling feeling, accompanied by an odd sensation of vacuity, that always precedes my coming on; and the dusting of yellow and mauve pimples under the softening, water-retaining line of my jaw has appeared as it should. I’ve also felt irascible and unaccountably depressed. (Well, normally this depression is accountable, I just can’t account for it. Only now is it truly unaccountable.) But still there’s been no period. Only the feelings, straining me for day after day.

In the morning the radio woke me at seven-fifteen, as it always does. Outside the sky was limpid, void, without properties of colour or density. Was it light yet? There was no answer to this, it was as light as it was yesterday at this time — and the day before, and the day before that.

I got up and went over to my bureau, where I started flicking through my diary. I looked over the pages of the past six weeks or so. I seldom write anything in the diary but appointments, and there was a scattering of these, like mouse droppings, on the lined paper. I tried to think about those days that had gone, taking with them fading memories of dental appointments and dry-cleaning collection times.