Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

In the bank there was a low sound like the sifting of envelopes and a mechanical whir. Machines beeped and gave out money. There was a long line of people, receiving cash. She had once seen a sci-fi film about a lottery. Each week you bought a ticket and entered into a draw. There were two prizes: one was 50 million dollars, the other was public execution. The chances of either were equally slim. Yet people entered, bought their tickets and waited. She had waited with her hand out at a million cash machines. Part of the cycle, taking and giving money. Now her own personal supply had dried up. She had a small segment left of her debt, a tiny pile of remaining slosh, and then even her borrowing would be stopped. This had caused her to question her assumptions. She had thought they let you pile up debt indefinitely, but that wasn’t true. They let you pile it up while they thought you could pay. When they realised you really couldn’t pay, they stopped the flow. They dammed up everything and told you to come in and talk about a repayment plan. They sent you tactless requests for money. They left messages on the answer machine. It was nice of them to call, but it didn’t make things better. She had to tell them that it wasn’t a lack of concern for her place in the international system of debit and credit, she was fantastically concerned about it, but she had been prioritising other things, and she had lost her sense of financial basics. She had ignored the rules of supply and demand, and her supply had simply vanished.

Therefore, she waited patiently while the clerks talked to each other and then she asked if she could see the manager. Of course he was busy, this moneysmith, and they told her to come back later. Better still, she could ring in for an appointment, said a brusque woman with a face like a piano. ‘Just a minute or so?’ said Rosa. ‘I’d be very brief. Just a question or two really, simple questions, requiring simple answers.’ Can you give me more? More time to pay off my debt, or more debt? She knew the answer anyway. But the heel-clicking woman didn’t want to help her. She didn’t even want to talk to her. Perhaps she looked unkempt, or maybe it was her unstudied air of desperation. ‘I’m sorry, but Mr Rivers is very busy. We can do you an appointment for Thursday,’ she said, this zipper-mouthed woman. Do me? thought Rosa. Do me an appointment? Thursday was three days away. ‘Perhaps tomorrow?’ said Rosa. ‘Tomorrow morning, first thing?’

‘Why not leave your number,’ said the woman.

‘Mr Rivers has my number.’ That old Sharkbreath knew everything about her. He had been patient for a while, but now he was getting sterner by the hour. ‘I’m sure he would like to see me,’ she said. ‘Please could you at least ask?’

Thus conjoined, Mandy clipped off. She vanished into another part of the bank and Rosa waited. She was too nervous to sit, so she stalked along the banks of machines and watched people taking money from them. We can do you an eviction on Tuesday , she thought. We can do you a spell in a reform centre for the fiscally incontinent on Wednesday . She edged around posters of perfect people with mortgages and TESSAs, smiling broadly because their mortgages made them so very happy. Whatever they might all say, she had really been trying to get a job. She knew money was an illusion, but she also knew that she needed food in her hardly illusory belly. It gave her something to aim for, and in recent weeks, she had tried a teeming array of things. Her terms were vague enough. She had to find a way to make money without being required to lie, to feign a certainty she didn’t possess. She thought that was broad enough. So she had tried to become a gardener. For a week she sat in the local library reading books about botany. The supply was patchy, but she learnt some definitions, tallied words with pictures. She pushed flyers through letterboxes and had a few calls. She went round to the house of a Mr Lewis, and they were getting on fine until she dug up a sunflower and he sent her away again. She had been applying for a variety of things, writing letters.

Dear Sir, I would like a job. Actually that’s not true. Without wanting to trouble you with my ambivalence, a job is what I need. Sheer bloody debt has forced me back. I am quite free of many of the more fashionable varieties of hypocrisy, though I suffer from many unfashionable varieties of my own. I have many strengths, most of which I seem for the moment to have forgotten. However, I am a goal-oriented person and so on, und so weiter … Yours ever, Rosa Lane.

Dear Madam, I am a person of inconstant aims and mild destitution. I find this combination of qualities excludes me from many jobs. But working together, I’m sure we can exploit my talents successfully. I still have a cream suit, a relic from a former life. I am unexceptional in every way, and eager to serve. You can find me in a borrowed room, in west London. Yours faithfully, Rosa Lane.

More recently, she had written to landlords and restaurateurs.

*

Dear Sir/Madam, I would like to be considered for the post of barmaid. I have no experience at all, but I have an abiding interest in bars. I like a nice glass of beer, from time to time. Some of my most memorable moments have occurred in bars, some of my most desperate humiliations and fleeting patches of pure claritas. So far she had been dismissed by every barman she met. Kindly, politely, but dismissed all the same.

A week ago — her finest hour — she had signed up for temping and gone along to a place where alcoholics rang to ask for help. She was put in reception and told to type letters. For the first day she was productive, working steadily through her in-tray, enjoying the flick of her fingers and her downright efficiency. She powered through a load of letters and cast them into her out-tray. By the next day, the novelty had worn off. Then she found the office air was stale and on the third day she was bothered by the conversations of the people to her left. It wasn’t fair, they were nice enough, friendly and clearly sane, but they did keep spilling out words. While she was typing up letters … Dear Sir, On July 21st we made an application for 20 purple box files with interior clips. These have as yet not arrived … they were pouring forth. Perhaps it was unkind to hate them by the end of the day. She knew it was. The following morning she realised they hated her. That hurt her feelings; she always preferred her hatred to be unreciprocated. They blanked her at lunch as she sat there with a plastic fork in her hand and a takeaway salad in a plastic box. Later she saw them queuing in the café, and it was hard not to feel sorry for them all, Rosa too, standing in their cheap clothes, waiting for a cup of coffee. When she got back to her desk her mood had darkened. She typed a few last letters … Dear Sir, On July 24th we ordered 504 brown envelopes and 10 million pencils and 30 trillion stamps and yet you have sent us 304 envelopes and only seven million pencils and only three trillion stamps please rectify this appalling oversight immediately before something terrible happens some unfathomable doom … and then she went home. The next morning she phoned to say she was ill. Her father called it lassitude. ‘You have to be able to get up in the morning,’ he said.

‘And I do,’ said his daughter, who was sitting in bed at the time with a cold compress on her head.

‘No one likes their job that much,’ said her father.

‘You liked yours. Mother liked hers,’ said Rosa.

‘Well, find something you like.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said. She still hadn’t found a way to resolve it all. ‘It’s ridiculous. You think, would the knights on their grail quest, would they have been able to do it, find the grail and the rest, if the bank had been constantly telling them about their overdraft and how they weren’t getting any more money when they finished the hunt? Would Jesus have done so well, had he had Mr Sharkbreath ringing him up and asking him to discuss a debt repayment plan?’