‘This way,’ said Jane, listing suddenly and sharply to the left. She opened a door and the brown, mummified silence of the corridor was all at once broken by the familiar chatter and hum of the office and a bank of dull natural light emanating from the large windows to the far side. Francine followed Jane into the room. She felt dazed, as if she had just emerged from beneath deep water. The office was instantly recognizable, a flat, immaculate vista of steely geometry and manicured synthetic fibres, its variations in tone all conducted in the key of grey. Through the windows the low cloudy sky and iron hives of companion office blocks were visible. From the fifth floor one could see other fifth floors, the heads of buildings like a crowd of adults.
Several people looked up at the intrusion and Francine suddenly remembered herself. It was one of the advantages of her position that her novelty, the most fragile of all her arts, rarely had the opportunity to wear off. There was a perceptible lull and swell as things shifted to accommodate her. One or two people allowed their glances to linger like tenacious guests into stares. Seconds elapsed and eventually everyone bent their heads, or turned to gaze blankly into computer screens while their fingers tapped at keyboards in an imitation of tedium. Francine’s eyes swept the surface of the secretarial pool and then rose to confront what instinct informed her was a masculine inspection. The man wore a dark pinstriped suit and was examining her in an authoritative manner. His desk was on a raised podium, like a car in a showroom. Francine looked away and then back once or twice until the persistence of his stare caught her eyes and held them. At that moment he assumed a bored expression and dropped his attention back down to the slim pile of pages in front of him. He made a mark or two on the top sheet with a heavy gold fountain pen and crossed his legs away from her.
‘This is Francine,’ said Jane loudly. She threw her voice in the direction of another man on the far side of the room and then followed keenly after it like a dog chasing a stick. The man wore a pinstriped suit identical to that of his colleague, but sat behind a desk whose podium raised it just perceptibly higher. At the sight of Jane advancing briskly towards him he stood up and put out his hand, as if anticipating the transfer of a baton. His gesture had been automatic, but as he comprehended the nature of the interruption Francine saw him waver in his maintenance of it, his arm flopping feebly as if the mechanism designed to retract it had suddenly failed.
‘Francine, this is Mr Lancing. Francine will be looking after you,’ said Jane, raising her voice for Mr Lancing in the manner of a matron in an old people’s home.
‘Hi,’ said Mr Lancing in an American accent. The blood appeared to flow back into his dysfunctional arm and it twitched perkily, inviting Francine to shake it. He had a boyish, grinning face over which a map of age had been laid as if artificially. His clear eyes peering through the tanned and withered skin gave him the appearance of a child wearing a rubber mask. ‘Great!’ he said enthusiastically.
‘Hello,’ said Francine, shaking his hand.
Mr Lancing continued to grin at her and she noticed a slightly dead expression behind his eyes.
‘Well, that’s the introductions over with,’ said Jane. ‘I’ll just show Francine to her desk, Mr Lancing.’
‘Give ’em hell!’ said Mr Lancing. He clenched his fist and punched it into the air.
Jane laughed shrilly. ‘We will, Mr Lancing,’ she said.
Francine’s desk was a right-angle of grey counter-top positioned near the foot of Mr Lancing’s podium. The desk was fenced in by a capacious window to the side and a wall on which shelves were hung to the rear. Along the shelves were arranged a large number of box files, their vertical labelled spines inscribed like tombstones. In front of the desk stood what appeared to be a coffee station, a small table on which a kettle fumed in a dry and dissolving landscape of shiny brown pools and white hillocks of sugar, interspersed with tiny dark granular boulders, stained spoons, and damp fists of used teabags. Francine’s objections to this arrangement were strong and immediate, not least because it formed a second channel of interference — the first being the rows of files — which permitted the unrestricted access of office traffic to her territory. She moved behind her desk and saw that it put her in view of the whole room. From beyond the plastic plain of the desktop, a chirping forest of computers appeared to monitor her movements with their single unblinking eyes. She wrestled for a moment with her faint-heartedness, knowing that if she cowered from this corporate ecology she would disable herself for survival within it, becoming victim to a new range of cruelties whose invisibility did not lessen her faith in their existence. Mr Lancing and his colleague sat atop their rival podia, dumb and vigilant as marble dogs at a gate.
‘I’ll just run you through one or two things,’ said Jane. She manoeuvred her broad hips round to the other side of the desk, as powerful and clumsy as a car. ‘Do you mind if I just sit on your chair for a minute?’
‘Not at all,’ replied Francine. In such a place territories were as quickly and fiercely marked out as they were returned to their anonymity. She moved to stand behind Jane so as to observe her instructions. On the chair, the cheeks of her buttocks were forced sideways like a tomato crushed underfoot.
‘You’ll be in sole charge of Mr Lancing’s diary,’ said Jane, lifting a large ledger from the far end of the desk. It had scraps of paper stuck to its cover and protruding from amongst its pages, scribbled relics of other hands. She opened it and began to leaf through the blueprints of days long since passed, with their emergencies of meetings and lunches. The diary was thick with arrangement and rearrangement, its pages gnarled into relief by the hieroglyphics of rounded handwriting. ‘Here’s today’s schedule,’ said Jane, turning to reveal a fresher page. ‘11.30 Haircut’ read Francine.
The phone on her desk began suddenly to shriek. Francine started and stepped automatically aside so that Jane could pick it up.
‘Let’s see if you can answer it,’ said Jane, revealing her large teeth.
‘All right,’ Francine replied, bright with loathing. She picked up the vibrating receiver, and in the imperative of its sudden silence felt necessity overpower apprehension. ‘Mr Lancing’s office,’ she said smoothly.
‘Gary there?’ barked a voice in reply. Its American accent took her by surprise, disabling her comprehension as if it were a foreign language.
‘Excuse me?’ she said, after a pause.
Jane lifted her head like a guard-dog detecting an intruder.
‘I said gimme Gary.’
Francine paused.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know who Gary is.’
‘Who is this?’ said the man impatiently.
‘Francine,’ said Francine stupidly. She felt herself beginning to drift away and pulled herself back sharply. Jane writhed beside her in her seat. ‘I’m new here,’ she added. Her blunder had brought heat to her face.
‘Well, Francine, all I can say is you must be pretty new,’ said the man. ‘Gary’s your boss, honey.’ There was a pause. ‘Ha! Ha!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Ha!’