“I’ve just been on the web booking tickets for a few gigs. You ever heard of a band called Peachy Cheeks?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Boner?”
A shy little shake of her head.
“Arse Bandits?”
Barbara thought for a moment. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Peter shrugged. “I’m not surprised. This stuff’s a little out there. It’s…” He broke off for a stagey chuckle. “It’s not exactly what you’d call mainstream.” A hideous pause, then “All righty! Great to meet you, Babs. Any questions, my door’s always open.” And he winked.
Good grief, the man actually winked.
“Sorry about him,” I said once the door had clicked shut and we were safely out of earshot.
“Don’t be. He seems nice.”
“You’ll learn. Come on, let’s grab a coffee. I’ll get us a meeting room.”
I found us a room, where we sat for a while, each staring awkwardly into our cups. “I’d better say something about what we do here,” I said at last. “What did they tell you at the agency?”
The girl looked apologetic. “Not much.”
“We’re filing people,” I said, starting the usual speech. “Our job is to catalogue every document the civil service produces.”
“Sounds riveting.”
“It has its moments. Record retrieval can be surprisingly interesting.”
“And how long have you been here?”
“Me?” I said, stalling for time — as though she could possibly have been referring to anyone else. “Oh, about three years.”
“You’ve been a filing clerk for three years?”
“It’s a living,” I protested. “Anyway. On your feet. You ought to see where the magic happens.”
The largest of our filing rooms was the size of several tennis courts but still felt cramped and claustrophobic thanks to the enormous metal cabinets which took up every available inch, crammed next to one another like stainless steel commuters. Filled with moldering paper, packed end to end with dead statistics, old reports, putrefying memos and long-forgotten minutes, the place had the air of a second-hand bookshop which never makes a sale.
“It’ll be nice to have some company in here,” I said before going on to explain the filing system (a needlessly complicated business of acronyms, mnemonics and numeric codes) whilst Barbara did her best to stifle a yawn.
“This stuff’s just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “This is just a fraction of it. Of course, a lot of the older stuff’s in an annex in Norbiton but even there we’re running out of space. It’s getting to be a real problem.”
“You’ve really been doing this for three years?”
I tried a grin. “For my sins.”
“Don’t you get bored?”
“Sometimes.” Sighing, I admitted the truth of it. “Every day.”
For the rest of the morning, Barbara stood by my side as I filed a batch of records, ostensibly watching me work (“shadowing me,” as Peter had put it), though, as I kept catching her sneaking glances in my direction, I wondered if she wasn’t spending more time looking at me than at the work. I wasn’t at all sure how to take this, although I had my suspicions and it’s almost certainly not what you’re thinking.
At ten to one, we were back at my desk and I was tussling with a more than usually insubordinate spreadsheet when the telephone rang.
“Henry? It’s Peter. Could you step into my lair?”
My desk was seconds from his office but he seemed to derive pleasure from making me come running.
When I went in, he barely looked up from his screen. “New girl settling in OK?”
“She seems fine. Very competent.”
“Good, good. I’ve just had a call from Phil Statham. He’s got to do some induction thing with her this afternoon. Safety training. Two o’clock in the conference room?”
“I’ll let her know.”
“I’d like you to sit in as well.”
I cleared my throat. “I’ve already done the safety course, Peter.”
“Sure, sure. But after last month’s little blunder…”
I blushed.
“You see what I’m getting at?”
“Of course.”
“All righty. You kids enjoy yourselves, OK?” And he waved a cheaply bejeweled hand to indicate that my audience was at an end.
I prefer to eat lunch alone. I like to find a bench, unparcel my sandwiches and lose myself in the flow of the Thames. I can spend an entire hour gazing at the river as it gropes and claws at the banks, watching the scummy hitchhikers who float on its surface — the plastic bottles and the crisp packets, the used condoms, the sodden paper and all the random metropolitan junk which bobs on the black water to be tossed ashore or sucked under. Often I’ve made myself late watching that liquid history, wondering who has come before me and who shall come after, who has watched that same stretch of river, that same water ebb and flow in its endless mysterious cycle.
On that particular Tuesday, however, I had Barbara with me. She hadn’t brought any lunch so we had to go to a sandwich shop, where she blew an hour’s pay on a cheese baguette.
The riverbank bustled with London life. We passed flocks of suits and clusters of tourists — the first group strutting with jaded impatience, the last ambling, filled with curiosity and exaggerated wonder. We passed a homeless man juggling for pennies, a crocodile of schoolchildren on a daytrip and a shaven-headed young woman who hassled us for donations to charity. There was a power walker who scurried feyly past, his head set at a comically quizzical tilt, a blind woman and her dog and a fat man in a bobble hat selling early editions of the Evening Standard and bellowing out its headline. This was something about the Queen, I think, although I wasn’t moved to buy a copy. At that time (my apologies) the royal family had never interested me all that much.
Barbara picked a bench close to the gigantic Ferris wheel of the Eye, and after some desultory attempts at small talk, we settled down in silence to watch its stately revolutions.
As she chomped through her baguette, I couldn’t help but notice that she persisted in sneaking little looks at me, shy, curious, sideways glances.
At last she came out with it. “Do I recognize you?”
So that’s what it was.
I was spooning out the last of my yogurt. “I’m not sure. Do you?”
I let her flail about for an explanation. “Did we go to school together?”
We did not.
“Do you know my father?”
How would I possibly know her dad?
“Did you used to go out with my friend Shareen?”
Actually, I’ve never been out with anybody, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.
She chewed her lower lip. “I’m stumped.”
I sighed. “Don’t blame me. Blame Grandpa.”
“Do you know,” she said, “I thought it was you?”
This happens from time to time. I can usually tell when someone’s about to recognize me. They tend to be the type who watched a lot of telly as kids, who were regularly dumped in front of it by their overworked parents before dinner. I sometimes wonder if there might not be an entire generation who, in some weird Pavlovian way, are actually able to smell fish fingers and chips at the sight of me.
“What was it like?” Barbara asked.
“Oh, great fun,” I said. “Mostly.” I swallowed. “By and large.”
“God, you must have had a riot. Did you even go to school?”
“Course. Mostly we filmed during the holidays.”
“Will you do the catchphrase for us again?”
“Do I have to?”
“Oh, go on.”
“Don’t blame me,” I said, and then, again, eager not to disappoint: “Blame Grandpa.”
For two years, between 1986, when I was eight, and 1988, when I was ten, I played the part of “Little” Jim Cleaver, the wisecracking son in the BBC’s family sitcom Worse Things Happen at Sea. That said, I’m a terrible actor and I freely admit that my casting was entirely down to nepotism.
It was Granddad’s show, you see. He wrote all the scripts, his only major credit after twenty-odd years toiling in the Light Entertainment department of the BBC, something tossed to him as a favor by mates who wanted to give the old guy a break. My catchphrase (actually, often my only line in an episode when they worked out that I couldn’t enunciate for toffee and was pathologically unable to emote) was: “Don’t blame me. Blame Grandpa” — this invariably delivered on my entrance, as I trotted through the door to the family home and onto the main set. Although gales of prerecorded laughter followed on its heels, I never actually got the joke nor met anyone who did.