Will Self - Grey Area

I had an errand to do on the way to work this morning which made me a little late. It was ten to nine before I mounted the wide concrete stairs that lead to the Company’s offices. At this hour there was a steady trickle of employees entering the building, but it hadn’t yet swelled into the cataract of personnel that flows through the turbine doors between five to and five past.

During those ten minutes at least 90 per cent of the Company’s workforce arrive: secretaries, clerks, canteen assistants, data processors, post-room operatives, maintenance men, as well as middle managers of all shapes and sizes; and, of course, executives. They all crowd in, anxious to be seen arriving on time. The subordinates in a hurry to be there before their bosses, and the bosses in a hurry to be there before their subordinates.

But even at ten to, the foot traffic was light enough for people to observe at least nominally the pleasantries of the morning. These consist not in salutations to colleagues, but in the greeting you give to the commissionaire, Cap’n Sidney.

Cap’n Sidney stands in a booth by the security turnstile. He wears a white peaked cap, and a black serge uniform. The epaulettes on his shoulders are blancoed beyond belief. He stands there erect, the awareness that he is the Company’s first line of defence written into every line of his face.

Young male employees flirt physically with Cap’n Sidney. They duck and weave as they show him their security passes. They want to give him a little action and so they wave their uncalloused hands in his face, saying things like, ‘Howzit going there, Sidders,’ and, ‘Mind out for the old one-two.’ Cap’n Sidney grins benignly and replies, ‘Now, Rocky Marciano — there was a boxer.’

Older male employees, perhaps believing that their M & S blazers remind Cap’n Sidney of the officers he served fifty years ago, will touch the tips of their fingers lightly to their foreheads as they pass through the turnstile. It is the merest feint, a tiny gesture towards the communality of the past; and Cap’n Sidney returns it in the same spirit, with a touch of his nicotine-mitted hand to the peak of his cap.

Older female employees always say ‘Good morning’ to Cap’n Sidney with exaggerated care — as if he were an idiot or an imbecile. And he always says ‘Good morning’ back to them with exaggerated care — as if they were idiots or imbeciles.

Young female employees say ‘Good morning’ to Cap’n Sidney, and they touch him with their eyes. Cap’n Sidney is their talisman, their wise old uncle. He understands that, says ‘Good morning’ in reply and examines their breasts, as if they were security passes.

Cap’n Sidney never says ‘Good morning’ to me, no matter how early I arrive at work. When it comes to me Cap’n Sidney is oblivious. It’s not that he’s rude, or insensitive — after all he simply can’t salute every single Company employee, there are far too many of us. It’s just that we’ve never really met; and now, over thousands of mornings, a natural reserve has built up between us. It would be all right if some colleague of mine — whether a clerical-weight boxer, officer class, or the Right Breasts — were to introduce us, put us at ease with one another; then I too could become a warm, sincere, ten-second friend of Cap’n Sidney.

This is unlikely to happen.

The strangest of things, though; the last six weeks — which we may call the non-period for the sake of convenience — have marked an apparent shift in my lack-of-a-relationship with Cap’n Sidney. During this non-period, when I have approached his booth, pass held level at the convenient height, by the lobe of my right ear, Cap’n Sidney’s eyes have narrowed. And I have thought that, for the split-second my face was turned towards his, as I slid through the turnstile, his expression had a little more openness about it, that something writhed — ever so slightly — beneath his moustache.

The VPL man was in the lift. He smiled at me quite innocently, but as we ascended his presence there became somehow bound up with everything oppressive, everything crammed into the stippled, aluminium booth of my mind. It occurred to me too that the VPL man had only come into my life in the last six weeks or so — at any rate I could dredge up no earlier memory of him.

There is some linkage, some alliance, between my pre-menstrual tension and the VPL man’s VPL. He too has something bulging and constrained, yet vacuous, concealed beneath his clothing. These personalised voids, I imagined, were calling to one another, wailing the music of the empty spheres.

Between the third and the fourth floors I shifted tack. It might not be anything quite so nebulous between me and the VPL man. I now entertained the notion that the VPL man had somehow managed to impregnate me, without my knowledge. Perhaps he had crept into the women’s toilet midway down the departmental corridor, late one afternoon, when only the cleaners are about, and tossed himself off. There is more plausibility in this image: his puckered form in the formica cubicle, his salty dollop on the mushroom-shaped and mushroom-coloured toilet seat.

But there is someone else about. Me. And he knows that. As he strap-hangs his way home on the tube, he smiles enigmatically, his lips parted — because he knows that mine are parted; and at that very moment are sucking it up, his tadpole, his micro-construction robot, which burrows into me carrying the blueprints for the manufacture of more VPL men and VPL women.

By the time we reached the Department’s floor I was convinced of this. I was bearing the VPL man’s child, the chopped-ear-man’s child, the bastard offspring of he-who-lingers-by-the-facsimile-machine. It could be worse — the child will be a fine, healthy specimen, and grow up to do something undynamic but essential, like becoming a Communications Manager (since my boss took over the Department it has been mandatory for all job titles to be capitalised).

It didn’t even occur to me that our child might wish to work in his father’s department rather than my own.

I got out before Daddy, who barely looked up from the folded square of newsprint he was reading and re-reading.

A truly annoying morning was entirely dominated by a recurrent system error on my computer. I have a suspicion that we may have a virus in the departmental network. I said as much to my boss, when he poked his head into my office at around eleven. He asked me what was happening — and I explained that every time I exited from the network and tried to import files on to my own hard disc, the machine crashed.

He came round behind my desk to take a look. I pulled back from the workstation, allowing him the room to get at the keyboard. He was wearing one of his newer suits today; and positioned as I was, I found myself confronted by the seat and upper legs of his trousers. The suit is made from soft but durable fabric, and the designer had seen fit to create some miniature chaps of shiny chamois, which stretched a third of the way down my boss’s thighs. The chaps were mimicked by the distended epaulettes, which I had already seen flopping from the shoulders of the suit jacket, like the ears of a Basset hound.

‘See here?’ He flicked his hands over the surface of the keyboard, only occasionally grasping for the mouse, as if he were casting off a stitch. The cursor appeared here and there, in a whirl of shifts between applications and files. Instead of attempting to import the files directly, he went into them where they were stored, as if intent on doing some work on them. He then cut out the entire contents of each file and re-opened it under another application. Finally he imported the new application, and so sneaked around the lurking virus.

‘See?’ He was heading for the door, while an icon, somewhat like a triumphant Roadrunner, executed a frenzied jig on the VDU, and the tinny speaker cackled, ‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’