Will Self - Grey Area

The Roadrunner may have known more than I did. At night, the cleaners long departed from the Department, the computer icon could have quit the screen and entered my world of static grey. ‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’ Something had been in my office during the night, something fervid but precise — like the Roadrunner icon, because this morning (‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’) the computer keyboard, the desk blotter and the mouse mat were all perfectly aligned once more. It wasn’t perceptible to the naked eye, but I checked it with my ruler.

At lunchtime I looked hard at the sky for more than five minutes. On the way into work I stopped by the DIY centre and picked up a colour chart. I had been doing comparisons at half-hour intervals all morning. Initially I was certain the shade the sky corresponded to was ‘pearl grey’, but latterly I made up my mind that it was really ‘mid-grey’. It was mid-grey for the rest of the morning.

In fact it grew more convincingly mid-grey the more I checked it, until at lunchtime it was no comparison at all; it was rather that the tiny rectangle on the chart was a miniature window, looking out on to another quadrant of the grey heavens. All it needed was its own vertical textured fabric louvres, to complete the marriage between sample and sky.

I went down to the café and bought my sandwiches, a can of Diet Coke and one of those giant, crumbly cookies.

In the park I sat with other office workers in a circle of benches that surrounds a sagging rotunda. This feature is built from red London bricks. It’s damp and destitute, long since re-pointed. The pillars resemble a demented loggia, which instead of moving forward has turned in on itself, forming a defensive corral. The pools of rusty water at the base of each pillar seem evidence of incontinence, a suitable indignity for wayward park furniture.

The office workers sat canted sideways on the benches. An occasional pigeon hopped up to one of these sandwich eaters, clearly shamed by its capacity to fly and doing its best to hide tattered wings. These exchanges between people and birds were embarrassing to watch. That’s the truth. We have now advanced so far into a zone of the genetically furtive, that office workers, contemplating these flying vermin, feel their own humanity compromised in some way. So they roll up bread pills, and averting their eyes, proffer them to the un-stuck craws.

All afternoon I sat in my office and worked. The straining in my belly grew, swelled, became even more pregnant. I was certain that I was on the verge of getting my period. My nipples were so sensitive that I could feel every bump and nodule on their aureoles, snagging against the cotton of my bra. The afternoon was also punctuated by a series of quite sharp abdominal pains. After every one of them I was convinced I would feel the familiar ultimate lancing. I was poised, ready to head for the toilet — the venue for my imagined impregnation by the VPL man — but no blood came.

Instead I occupied myself with the collation and binding of a series of management briefings that the Department was publishing for the greater edification of the Company as a whole.

Five o’clock found me bending the flexible prongs back on the clean sheets, to house them securely in their plastic covers. My boss hung his face around the doorjamb and grunted approval. I couldn’t see his ear — and this troubled me. I wanted to ask him to take a step into the room, so that I could check on his ear, check that it was still there and still his. But the idea of it was silly, a nitrous oxide thought that giggled in my head. To stop myself from smirking I concentrated on the odd, phallic intervention, made at waist-height, by the black-taped handle of his squash racket.

Then he left. I ordered my desk, and soon afterwards went home.

At home I ate and then had a bath, hoping that it would ease the pre-menstrual tension. It didn’t. I put on a dressing gown and wandered about my flat. Never before had it seemed so claustrophobic. The neat, space-saving arrangement of double-seater sofa and twin armchairs was a cell within a cell. The coffee table, with its stack of magazines and dish of pot-pourri, was part of a set for a chat show that never made it past the development stage. The images on the walls were tired, static, self-referential, each one a repository of forgotten insights, now incapable of arousing fresh interest.

I turned on the television, but couldn’t concentrate. I must have slept, squelched down amongst the foam-filled, polyester-covered cushions. Slid into sleep, the surfaces of my eyes grounding quickly on the salty, silty bottom of unconsciousness. There I floated, twisting slowly in the deceptive currents.

Assembled backwards. Quickly. Scherlupppp! The elements of my dream: I arrive for work and see that the organisational chart has been rearranged overnight. The strips, dots and squares have been manipulated so as to form a new configuration, which places a dot I haven’t seen before at the very apex of the Department’s hierarchy. I consult the legend, a small ring binder dangling from the rail at the bottom of the board by a length of twine, only to discover that the dot is me.

I realise that I will have to move across the corridor into my ex-boss’s office. I am relieved to see him coming through my door; cradled in his arms is his desk blotter and giant mouse mat. On top of these surfaces is a miscellany of objects he has culled from his desk: a Rotadex, a date-a-day diary, a dictaphone, and a collection of plastic beakers, joined at the root, brimming with pens, pencils and paper clips.

He finds it difficult to meet my eye, but I’m wholly unembarrassed. I gesture to the collation and binding exercise that I was undertaking the previous evening, and which is still spread out on my desk. I say, ‘Finish this off, will you?’ He nods, dumbly.

I cross the corridor to my new office. I go behind the broad, black slab of desk and sit down. My former boss has left one object behind on his desk top, an executive toy of some kind, saved from the era when these mini constructions of stainless steel and black plastic had a vogue.

This one takes the form of a Newton’s cradle. But in the place of ball bearings, there are tiny, humanoid figures hanging from the threads by their shiny aluminium hands. The figures are naked, and when I set the cradle in motion, they engage in dangerously athletic congress. There is silence, except for the sound of miniature, metal, intercrural activity.

Piled under the vertical textured-fabric louvres; tucked up against the vents under the storage heaters; squidged sideways to lie along the top of the cable-tracking conduit, which circles the office at knee height; stacked in loose bundles on every flat surface, bar the desk itself, are many many panty liners, tampons and sanitary towels. Staunchers, stemmers, cotton-wool barriers. There is so much plastic-backed absorbent material in my new office that, taken together with the fabric-covered walls and carpet-tiled floor, the effect is of a recording studio. The clicking of the Newton’s cradle has amazing clarity. The shadows of the figurines banging into one another are thrown into sharp relief against the whiteboard on the far wall. A cord of pain, running like a zipper up through the flesh from my vagina to my throat, threatens to undo me, to spill out my interior, like so much offal, or rhino shit, on the carpet tiles.

* * *

When I awake Newsnight is on the television. Peter Snow is running the world from his modular grey bunker of a studio. He’s sitting in front of oversized venetian-blind slat panels, and ignoring the micro-computer that has sunk at an oblique angle into the vinyl-veined console he’s sitting behind.

He is speaking with undue emphasis. It’s this undue emphasis that impinges on me first — but it occurs to me immediately afterwards that perhaps everything I have ever heard anyone say has been subjected to undue emphasis.