Will Self - Grey Area

‘I think that purchasing can report a success almost exactly congruent with that of marketing. Since last month a further 37 per cent of our purchasing has been reconfigured so as to come from within the Company. This means that 97 per cent of the goods and services we now purchase are sourced from the Company itself.’

In due course, Thribble from sourcing confirmed these figures. The reporting process continued on round the table, in an anti-clockwise direction. I concentrated on the high-pitched ‘eek-eek’ my fibre-tipped pen made as it steeplechased along the narrow feint. I didn’t shut down my automatic dictation pilot until everyone had made their report. Then my boss turned to me and said, ‘I think it would be a good idea if, while we discuss the next item on the agenda, you type up the minutes you’ve taken so far. You can leave the dictaphone running and I’ll bring it down when we’ve finished. I think everyone present would like a copy of the minutes relating to the final phase of the corporate restructuring as quickly as possible.’

There was a scattering of grunted assents to this. I gathered up my pad and, nodding to my boss and the other heads of department, left Conference Room 2.

When I reached the stretch of corridor leading to my office, for no reason that I could think of, I parted two of the vertical textured-fabric louvres that cover the window by the door to my boss’s office. From this vantage I could see Conference Room 2 in its entirety, hovering up above me. The heads of the heads of department were outlined by the room’s windows. As I stood and watched, someone — I think it may have been Southam — rose from the table and walked around the room, pulling the lengths of chain that snapped the louvres shut.

I went into my office. I knelt down to switch on my laserprinter. As I had the previous afternoon, I leant my forehead against the crossbar of the workstation.

It was still there. 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. I stared at it for some minutes in disbelief. Then I tried some experiments: I pushed my nails this way and that through the carpet-tile pile; now combing it, now ploughing it. Using one finger, or two, or the whole hand. These actions made streaks of crushed nylon filaments, but they soon sprang back up. Only the path I had created the day before — the really tiny event — remained a reality.

After a short while I grew bored with this. I stood up, turned on my computer, and made ready to type up the minutes of the inter-departmental meeting. I accessed the file with the previous month’s minutes in it, and created a new file; I set my pad on the stand and began to type: The meeting was called to order and the Chairman asked T. Southam, head of marketing, to present the results of the implementation of the last phase of corporate restructuring. T. Southam reported that since last month a further 37 per cent of the marketing department’s allocated spend had been redirected towards internal marketing. As of the 5th of this month a total of 97 per cent of the department’s total budget is now dedicated to the internal market. .

The pattering of my nails on the keys faltered and died away. I stared at the paragraph I had just typed. The cursor blinked at me from the VDU, the camplicit eye of a machine intelligence. Without analysing what I was doing I saved the file and reentered the file for last month’s minutes. The text scrolled down the green screen. I read: The meeting was called to order and the Chairman asked T. Southam, head of marketing, to present the results of the implementation of the last phase of corporate restructuring. T. Southam reported that since last month a further 37 per cent of the marketing department’s allocated spend had been redirected towards internal marketing. As of the 5th of this month a total of 97 per cent of the department’s total budget is now dedicated to the internal market. .

I felt sick — sick like vomiting sick. I got up from the workstation and walked to the window of my office. I adjusted the vertical textured-fabric louvres slightly, so that I could open the window and get some fresh air. I took deep breaths and stared down into the light well my window looks out on. I counted the paper cups that lay four storeys down, I counted the pigeons that were perched on the ledges four storeys up, I counted the fingers of one hand off on the fingers of the other, and then reversed the process.

I felt the swelling feeling, and the awful, tight vacuity, worse than ever before. I stood there for a long while, my hand lightly brushing the dusting of yellow and mauve pimples under the softening, water-retaining line of my jaw.

Then I went back to the computer, altered the date at the head of the minutes of last month’s inter-departmental meeting, and hit the keystrokes necessary to print out the document.

At five I finished up my work for the day. I had transcribed the tape of the latter half of the inter-departmental meeting and left a copy in my boss’s in-tray. I now made my list of tasks for the following day and then began to tidy my desk.

But halfway through ordering my pens and papers I had an idea. Instead of aligning everything just so, as usual, I would engage in a little exercise. Using my ruler to calculate the angles — so this would be precise — I shifted the computer keyboard, the desk blotter and the mouse mat out of alignment by two or three degrees. This alteration was so slight as to be barely perceptible to the naked eye, but I knew it was there.

Then I went home.

Tonight, eating a late supper in front of Newsnight on the television, it came to me, the expression I really needed to describe the man from personnel. VPL. There used to be an advert on television in which puckered bottom after puckered bottom would float across the screen. Buttock after buttock after buttock, all bobbling away and contained by stretchy cloth beneath the stretchy cloth. VPL–Visible Panty Line. That’s what they called it. If you bought their underwear you were free of it, but if you didn’t you were condemned to an elastic jail.

That’s what he has. Except that it isn’t just his bottom — it’s his whole body. Every limb and portion of the man from personnel’s body is contained in an elasticated pouch, the seams of which show up from under his implausible clothes. What has he got on under there? Some complicated harness that braces his entire body? Some sacred garment enjoined by the Latter Day Saints? Who knows.

The radio woke me at seven-fifteen this morning, and this time there was no doubt in my mind. I got up and stood, looking out of my bedroom window for a long time, marvelling at the limpidity, the utter voidness of the sky.

There was no blood last night and this morning there was no blood in the sleep-warmed sanitary towel either. I stood for quite some time in front of the mirror, scrunging the insides of my thighs; catching up painful bunches of my own flesh and feeling the individual pores between my pincering fingertips. Then I pressed down hard on my belly with both palms and pushed a wave of flesh down to my pudenda, as if I were a giant sponge and I could somehow squeeze the blood out of myself. I repeated this operation a number of times, not really expecting it to work, but thinking it was worth a try.

But I wasn’t frightened. Throughout this whole period I haven’t felt frightened at all. Perhaps I would feel less disturbed, if only I could get frightened. Perhaps I don’t really care that I’ve stopped menstruating, or that the days are unchanging, or that events tirelessly repeat themselves. Or perhaps I’ve simply adjusted — as people do.

In the kitchen I examined the wash of pale light that fell across the draining board. It was at precisely the same angle as yesterday. And my bath, gurgling away with a froth of bubbles and white water outside the kitchen window, was frothing in exactly the way that it did yesterday. I greeted the miniature cumuli, sparkling oily greens and blues, like old friends. Childlike, I allowed myself to imagine that I was weightless and miniscule, that I could roam and romp in this pretty, insubstantial gutterscape.