Lisa Owens - Not Working

“I’m Claire. I used to be you,” I say, holding a hand out to him, “or you’re the new me, depending how you look at it.”

“You didn’t do digital, though,” he says, hooking a small plastic bag onto the wrist of my extended hand, before taking my fingers in a limp, damp shake. “Did you?”

“No.” I’d spent much of my last year dodging digital, insisting that it wasn’t in my skill set. “What’s this?”

“You somehow managed to miss all that stuff when you cleared out my desk,” says Jonathan, typing so fast he looks like he’s faking, though I can see on his monitor he’s not. His WPM rate must be insane. I look in the bag, which is weighed down with coppers and small denominations of foreign currency. There are also some bobby pins, a disintegrating London A — Z, a bunch of receipts and some pay stubs with my name on them. I notice a few of the latter have been opened, something I never bothered to do.

“You really didn’t need to keep this, but thanks anyway,” I say. “You could have chucked it.” I have so many similar plastic bags at home, full of not-quite-rubbish I can’t bear to throw away.

“Do what you need to do. Wait.” He reaches over to his corkboard and unpins a sheaf of paper. “Also yours.”

I flick through it and my face burns. They’re all the personal emails sent in error to my work account since I left: weeks and weeks worth of invitations to brunch and dinner parties, and a thread entitled “Tuesday Drinkies,” ten-odd pages of my school friends’ plans to meet up for a drink. A glimpse of the final page reveals the discussion has devolved into farmyard-animal puns.

“Wow,” I say, “don’t you have my new email address? You can just forward this stuff to me.”

“Somewhere,” he says, resuming his virtuosic typing. “I thought it would be easier this way. Do it all in one go, post them on to you with that other stuff. None of them seemed like they were that urgent.”

“Well…delete anything else that comes in, will you?” I say, dropping the emails in his recycling box.

—

At the bowling alley, there’s a company tab. I feel bad availing myself of it and end up buying a round for eight people that makes my heart race when I hand over my card. No one even knows I paid for it — they hardly say thank you when I set down the tray.

I open with a half-strike that turns out to be a fluke: my next five balls go straight in the gutter.

“How’s the job hunt?” my old boss, Geri, asks, frowning at her bowling shoes while we await our turn. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her in flats.

“Slow, but it’s going, just about. I don’t want to rush into anything, end up somewhere I don’t want to be.”

“We must have been paying you too much,” she says, “if you can afford that luxury!”

“I have savings. Anyway, some things are bigger than money.”

“Striiiike!” she says, thrusting her index fingers high as Jonathan’s ball blasts through the pins. He’s turned away already, swigging a beer. “Aw,” she continues, patting my knee, “we do miss you! Jono’s brilliant, an absolute whiz kid, but between you and me, he can’t make coffee for shit.”

—

When I leave, everyone is dancing. The song “9 to 5” has come on the jukebox and I slip away as they all join in with the chorus, feeling like a fraud. On the Tube home, I pull out the pay stubs from my little plastic bag, and see one of Jonathan’s has got in by mistake. I’m pleased until I open it and discover he’s only making a grand less per year than I had been, even though he’s twenty-two and I was in the job for over six years.

I log in to Luke’s emails to see if we’ve paid the gas bill: I have the gas supplier’s reminder letter open on the table as proof. My eye alights on an email dated three weeks ago, from his colleague Fiona: no subject, just a link to some article from a medical journal. She has signed off “xoxo,” which makes me think even less of her.

Colin Mason, MBE, has erected some scaffolding outside our building. It doesn’t look in the least official or sturdy, and seeing him creaking around up there makes me a little nervous. I hurry past, not wanting to be drawn into conversation, but he’s either forgotten who I am or has no further business with me.

The next day, the scaffolding has gone, but the buddleia remains, waving gently in the breeze.

More than forty years since man walked on the moon, yet still no truly viable alternative to bread.

As I’m eating lunch with Sarah in a cafe near the school where she works, she talks about Paddy and how happy she is. Her experience of him seems so far removed from the sullen nail-chewer I’ve encountered thus far that I have to confront the possibility my judgment might be wide of the mark this time.

“I’ve never met someone who knows so much about everything. The other day, right, I told him about my hay fever and he said I should eat local honey to counteract the symptoms. Local honey.” She’s shaking her head. “He doesn’t even have hay fever himself.”

“I’ve heard that before,” I say, and then, “Oh my God, so weird: this has happened before. You and me, sitting here talking about this, me telling you I’ve heard about local honey before.”

“No,” says Sarah firmly, leaving absolutely no room for debate. “It definitely hasn’t happened. I’d never heard of it until Paddy told me.”

“I know,” I say, annoyed. “It’s called déjà vu? This is the second time it’s happened to me this week.”

Sarah looks at me and grips my wrist, interrupting the rise of my salad-laden fork.

“Claire, I don’t want to freak you out but I think you should maybe go and see a doctor. Do you smell burning?”

I sniff the air. “No? Maybe? Is something burning?” I say. “I can’t tell if I only think I can now because you mentioned it. Why?”

“Talk to Luke,” she says. “It’s probably nothing at all to worry about, and I might not have got this right, but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that frequent déjà vu is linked to brain tumors. And the smell of burning.”

“So there’s a little bit to worry about,” I say, certain I can feel something hard expand inside my skull.

I call Luke to sound him out.

“Start from the beginning. Forget about anything you’ve read online and give me the facts.”

I tell him about my lunch with Sarah, about Paddy and the local honey.

“Right…” I detect a twist of impatience.

“You did say to start at the beginning,” I remind him, but to keep him onside, cut to the déjà vu. “What do you think? Be straight with me: I can take it.”

“Second time this week?” He doesn’t sound even slightly concerned.

I say, “At least . Part of the issue with déjà vu is the feeling itself being so uncanny: it’s hard to separate it into different instances.”

“Okay, let’s back up a bit. Have you had any headaches? Problems with your vision?” I consider this carefully. “Hangovers don’t count,” he adds.

“Well…there’s a general sort of background throb, but I’ve always put that down to, like, life.”

“We’ll talk more when I come home,” says Luke, “but in the meantime, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get through this, or don’t worry, there’s nothing to worry about?”

“The latter,” he says, gearing up for a yawn.

“And is that your personal or professional opinion?”