Young British Slacker
By
Andrew Osmond
Copyright 2011 Andrew Osmond
Minnow Press/Smashwords edition
ISBN 978 1 907507 17 5
License Notes
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Prologue
You can only tell them the truth. And yet, that doesn’t seem to be what they want to hear. You could make something up, you guess: you were always being told that you were imaginative, but surely that would only make matters worse?
You don’t understand how you have wound up here. You began the day by going to the office, you never expected to end it by going to prison.
Four grey cell walls, ill-lit, no natural light; no respect, no dignity. It’s all so far removed from what you are used to.
And yet.
Four grey cell walls.
Ill-lit.
No natural light.
No respect.
No dignity.
It is also all so horribly familiar.
Chapter One
You will never be the best. It is to your credit that you have accepted this fact. You have spared yourself from wasting years of your life on misdirected activity and pointless enterprise. Ambition is bad. Admit it, it was a relief to give up the dream.
There had been a time, in primary school perhaps, and then occasionally later, when you were always being told that you were the best. Best at English; top in Maths; fastest runner; most popular pupil: there was a brief bubble of existence back then when you genuinely thought that you were the best. It was a good feeling. You can still recall it with a warm glow. But the world of your youth was very insular. You were only a big fish because your pond was so small. It is all a question of perception, and whatever inflated opinion that you may once have had about yourself, you were never left in any doubt that visually, you had always been impaired.
You blink, slightly myopically, at the flashing screen in front of you. An error message is demanding your immediate attention. You hit a button on the keyboard at random, but nothing happens. The computer has frozen again. You feel a degree of empathy for it; teeth clenched with frustration, you sit, yourself fixed in a catatonic stance of immobility, like an ice statue carved seated at your desk. You wonder how long it would take for someone to notice your stationary pose. Hold your breath. Rigid. Eyes wide-open, unblinking, unflinchingly staring at the attention-seeking cursor; your hands poised, motionless, four outstretched fingers hovering just above the keys ‘I’ and ‘A’ and ‘M’ and ‘N’. Not moving a muscle. Your feet planted firmly on the floor, resisting the persuasive impulse to swivel your chair. The computer is emitting a faint, constant tinitus-like hum, the background music to your working day. Out of sight, a photocopier is noisily spewing out a stream of paper, and at the far end of the room, several different voices compete, no one talking to each other, the headset in their ears their only answer; the loud false talk of vying ambitions. There is the rhythmic sound of a stapler being used on a monotonous chore, and a telephone ringing at a vacant desk.
You exhale. Cubicle hell. There is no one going to save you.
Best of Young British Insurance Administrators. It could have a snappy ring to it, perhaps if it was said with enough conviction. Although perhaps you are unduly flattering your status. Best of Young British Clerical Officers. What exactly is your job title again? Best of Young British Executive Assistants to the Corporate Claims Manager.
You have a non-job. In a non-organisation. In a non-industry. Don’t knock it, it has taken you several years to achieve this level of indolence. When you were new, there had been a time when you had worked hard at your job. You were more innocent then; you had still called it a career. The ‘c’ word was used a lot in those days. You remember using it a lot yourself. Conscientious. It was how everyone described you. Nowadays, no one even registers your existence, let alone comments upon you. Now you are wallpaper. And don’t go flattering yourself that you are some fancy patterned anaglypta. You’re not even a swirly flock, which everyone secretly loathes but is too polite to mention. No, we’re talking woodchip, plain and simple. Unloved and unnoticed.
This level of invisibility is not without its benefits, though. Indeed, it is the main reason that you have been able to devote so much time to your ... What word best describes it? Moonlighting? No, not really. Calling? Rather too spiritual. Stick to factual accuracy. Exploration. That pretty well sums it up.
Best of Young British Explorers. Now that would be an accolade worth attaining. But you know who they’d give it to? Ranulph Fiennes, bet your life. Ignore the fact that he is a sexagenarian who has undergone heart surgery, he would still top the list. Or Benedict Allen. But did he really ever go to all of those places? You’re not so sure. He’d still be up there, though. Okay, admittedly, your particular exploration is not quite so far-flung, but what is the big deal with distance, in any case. Live where you are; don’t fool yourself into thinking that just by travelling halfway across the globe you are going to alter who you are. There’s a big world out there. True, but there’s a bigger world right beside you if you only open your eyes to it.
You haven’t told anyone else about the tunnel that runs under your desk. You know what people are like; they’d jump to the wrong conclusions. They’d probably assume that you had dug it yourself, like it was some kind of Wooden Horse-type escape plan. It would only confirm what they already thought, that perhaps you were a little bit weird, best avoided. People don’t understand this kind of stuff. Talking in generalisations, here.
You can hear someone calling out from the other side of the partition from you. Maternity Cover is asking if anyone has any more Rexel 9mm staples. You are too bored to answer. The open-plan office is a soup of indifference to you; each cubicle inhabitant an insignificant crouton, half-submerged in a viscous mix of bureaucracy, ambition and fear.
The tunnel - your tunnel - provides a lifeline away from the reality of nine-to-five existence. You crave the womb-like security that it provides. Physically, there is no light at the end of it, but metaphorically it shines like the brightest beacon.
You push your chair back and stand up. The coast is clear. No one is looking; a battery of downcast eyes lost amidst an ergonomically designed maze. No one is moving. Now is your chance.
You kneel down and crawl underneath your desk. Wires and plugs entwine like serpents on the floor of a dark electronic jungle, each vying with one another to find its matching socket; phone line; internet connection; printer port. It is dusty on the floor and you find yourself wiping your hands together, instinctively. You know which square of carpet tile is loose and you have the section prized up already, revealing the hard, plastic grill beneath. There are screws at each corner - Philips head - but you have left them loosened from before and you are able to undo them swiftly by hand. The cover comes away silently, revealing a surprisingly large cavity directly below. Without looking back, you ease yourself feet first into the empty space and, pulling the grill in place behind you, disappear into the void.
Chapter Two
You had discovered the tunnel by accident. It had been a few months ago now. You can’t quite recall the sequence of events; you’d dropped a pen, or a paperclip, or something, bent down to pick it up, and then noticing the edge of one of the carpet tiles was slightly raised, you had spotted the edge of the grid underneath. Even then you wouldn’t have looked further, it was a nothing kind of thing, not worthy of investigation, except that the pen, or the paperclip, or whatever it had been, had slipped down the very same gap in the carpeting and, as you had clumsily tried to retrieve it you had only succeeded in pushing it further away such that it fell between one of the slits in the grill and down into the space beyond. There had been a noise, you recall - a reasonably loud noise, if your memory serves you right, so it must have been a pen or something, not a paperclip, at any rate - the sound of the falling object striking something hard below. You prized the carpet tile right up to look, but there was nothing to see. Whatever lay beyond the plastic grill was hidden in darkness. You noted the screws that secured the portal in place even then, but on that first occasion they were impregnable. It had been at a later date that you had returned, fully equipped to penetrate the secret depths beneath your desk.
You remember several nights, immediately succeeding that initial discovery, lying in bed, your mind racing, speculating on what you might find beneath the grating. Even then, you knew it would be something important. You don’t know how you knew, you just did. Your nights were often like this: not for you the unbroken, peaceful sleep of the uncluttered mind; nor the immediate collapse into restfulness of the body that has earned its escape by dint of a full and hard day’s labour. You are rarely physically fatigued; your brain will seldom switch off entirely from minute thoughts and petty worries. Normally it is past conversations that keep you awake; the rerunning of earlier events; the re-writing of alternative life scenarios. Now what you should have said was... and, if you’d done this, then they would have done that. Your mind would speculate over how others had interpreted your words, long after the individuals concerned had forgotten that you had even spoken to them; that you even existed. You would lie, not sleeping, questioning; guilty, hoping that past words had not caused others upset; frustrated, wishing that your quicker thinking had inflicted others more pain. You are not a wit, you know. Not a quick wit, at any rate. Words come slow to you; retorts echo in your head long after the thunder has passed by, and yet still they come, like a final, distant grumble once the storm is over. Over-analysis. You know you are guilty of it. You think too much. You deliberate too long upon the consequences of your words and actions. But spontaneity requires a certain bravery and you are not sure that you are so blessed with a full cupful of that commodity either. Now, to have a new thought to dwell upon was actually rather refreshing, even if it did nothing to ease the insomnia.
There had been a story that had been read to you at school, many years ago, at juniors, it must have been, about two boys and an underwater tunnel. You can’t remember all of the details, but parts of the story have often come back to you since; if only you could recall the author, or the title, you might like to read it again sometime. The two boys had discovered the entrance to a tunnel and each would dare the other to swim down and to crawl along it to discover what was at the other end, but neither was bold enough to accept the challenge until, one day, goaded on by his companion, one of the boys entered the tunnel mouth, and... and now your memory is a little hazy, but for some reason you are pretty sure that the boy never returned. You can’t recall if that is just your latter-day interpretation of the story, or if it had been read as a morality tale by your teacher of the time, to warn his impressionable flock of the dangers of subterranean exploration, or maybe he was just a sick bastard who enjoyed scaring nine-year olds, but, as a lesson in restraint it was quite a sobering tale. You wonder if it has not shaped your whole adult life philosophy. One teacher’s juvenile tale has made you the unadventurous, non-risk taker you are today. It is too easy to point the finger of blame, though. It is something that you hate about modern society, the culture of non-responsibility for one’s own actions. After a certain age you have to face the fact, you are no one else’s screw-up other than your own.
Best of Young British Screw-Ups. No, you know bigger ones than yourself.
You don’t know how you even knew that it was a tunnel at that time. But you did. You were sure of that fact. You could picture yourself entering it. Again, how? When your every other action in life predicted that you would leave well alone. That you would, instead, replace the carpet tile and pretend that you had never set eyes upon the mysterious grid. Denial, you could do in bucket-loads. Maybe it all comes back to self-protection. Perhaps that is life’s great driving force. Although, you have heard other people argue equally forcefully, that it is pleasure. That is the great motivator. Each and every one of us engaged on a Bacchanalian roller-coaster ride of pure, self-indulgent pleasure, because we simply can’t help ourselves to behave in any other fashion. Nice notion. Except, it is hard to look at your own life - objectively - and find any suitable place where the adjective pleasurable could be slipped in and make any kind of descriptive sense. At the same time, though, you’re not going to come down too hard on this theory. Perhaps it could work. With refinements.
You know you should be trying to go to sleep, but these are just the kind of thoughts that always seem to keep you awake.
Okay. How about this. There are two paths. There is the path you take and then there is this other path. And it’s none of your, I took the one less travelled malarkey, because you don’t have any choice in the matter. You can wander around in the yellow woods for as long as you like and you’re still always going to end up taking the same route. But you should be happy, because the path you’re on is called pleasure, and what can be better than that? Except, there is that other path, the path that you can never get on, and that path is abstract pleasure; that path is guilt-free, responsibility-less, money-no-object, perfect pleasure, and the simple knowledge of its existence leaves the route you are set on always slightly tainted with regret. But you’ve got a solution. Just don’t get started on this tonight. You’re tired. Aspirational society: you’d be up for the rest of the night. It comes back to that same simple way out: forget the dream.
Perhaps you’ll run through the specifics another night.
So how does your tunnel fit into this philosophy? It is there, at this moment, dark and unexplored, as you try to fall asleep: virginal. It is the path untravelled. Pure pleasure. And yet, as soon as you were to penetrate its depths, would you not be sullying it? It was an intriguing paradox. Should you let experience spoil the perfect imaginary scenario?
Of course, you had no choice in the matter. You just couldn’t help yourself.
Chapter Three
Ask any good speleologist - okay, you’re talking caver here, you’re just being pretentious, with the advantage of a couple of weeks’ notice and access to a good dictionary - and you will be told that the key to a successful exploration is to go prepared. Dib, dib, dib. Baden-Powell was not all wrong. Or was he wrong at all? Perhaps you are thinking of Jimmy Saville.
It was clear that you were going to need a screwdriver, that much was self-evident. But what else? A torch seemed logical. And practical. And accessible. You knew that you had a small one at home; one of those kind where you can unscrew the end to expose the bulb and then stand it up on its base and it gives the illusion of being a candle. You couldn’t remember if the batteries were still working, though. You had bought it with the paranoia of power-cuts in mind, but then had never had reason to use it. A change of clothes seemed a sensible provision too. Whatever lay beyond the grill in your office floor the chances were that it was going to be dusty.
At work you were known - if known wasn’t too forceful a term to describe the degree of anonymity you habitually possessed - as quite a tidy dresser. Not smart, exactly. Not fashionable, certainly. But tidy. Colleagues didn’t go out of their way to comment favourably upon your sartorial appearance, but neither did they whisper behind your back. You looked what you were. Mid clerical grade; smart-casual office wear, freshly ironed, no designer labels, but no cooking stains either. A degree of dishevelment, as you could imagine would be obtained by a subterranean voyage beneath your desk, was likely to attract attention, and in the clandestine alternative universe into which you were hoping to penetrate, that was the very last thing that you wished to do.
It was strange, really, looking back, but never once did you consider the possibility of exploring your tunnel outside of office hours. And it would have been feasible. There were any number of reasons that could keep you working late; having to stay behind after all of your other co-workers had vacated the premises. Somehow, though, this lacked... what? Excitement? Certainly. Honour, somehow too. It was hard to explain.
Bunking off doesn’t seem a very honourable activity, but then again neither does the work that you are employed to do each day. Insurance? In the old days, wouldn’t it have been called protection? There was more honesty of language then. Now words are used to hide the truth, not to tell it. And it’s not just in your profession. The problem is endemic. Who would go into a career in fund-raising, if it was called what it really is: begging. And the Stock Exchange? Gambling, pure and simple. As for consultants: don’t even get started. Even the Mob and the old East End gangsters understood the meaning of honour. It was hard to imagine your current boss being able to spell the word. Guarantee, he wouldn’t include the ‘u’. He still had his spell-check set for US. Fuckwit.
You don’t like to swear, but contemplation of the office hierarchy always invokes a bout of internalised Tourette’s Syndrome upon you. At least you hope it is internalised; it is another of those anxious thoughts that keeps you up at night: “I did only think that, didn’t I; I didn’t actually say it?” You know this query will loop around inside your head endlessly awaiting an answer that you cannot with all certainty give.
There had been an article in the newspaper, several weeks ago, about saboteurs in the workplace. It was the kind of space-filler type stuff that the broadsheets love: no actual news or facts, instead, one freelancer’s overheard anecdote written large to sound as though it were a national trend. The term ‘saboteur’ was used loosely, to describe a worker resistant to change. If your boss had read the article he might have thought about you. When you read the article you thought about yourself too. Sabotage sounds rather a - warning: reach for the sick-bag, office jargon alert - pro-active word. And yet you always think of yourself as being fairly passive. Could you be the Gandhi of the workplace? Rather fanciful. And you weren’t after any followers. Passive sabotage, though. That was what the descent into your tunnel represented. If you can be allowed to use an expression that probably hasn’t been heard in any British workplace since the time of Queen Anne: you were cocking a snook.
Best of Young British Snook Cockers. It was something worth aspiring to.
That was why the exploration had to be carried out during work hours. It was integral to the working day. It was in the grand British tradition of individualism.
Chapter Four
When you realised that there was more than just one tunnel beneath your office floor, you began to give them names. Classification: it is a human trait, not just a scientific necessity.
The main route, that is the one that leads directly from the grill beneath your desk, northwest, is called Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya. Tag-Kras for short. You know it is a mouthful, but hey! what can you do. It wasn’t you who gave the Moscow Metro lines their names, was it. The idea of calling the tunnels after the Moscow Underground system appealed to you. It had a ready-made infrastructure already in place: all that it required of you was to fit your own personal subterranean kingdom into the model provided. One glance at a map of the Russian network, the dream-catcher web of multi-coloured lines superficially as familiar as that of a London tube map, confirmed the beauty of your choice. The central station was Lubyanka. It was meant to be.
The short crawl to Kuznetsky Most is your most - ho, ho - frequented route. It is only a distance of about thirty five feet and it is something that you can do during an idle five minutes. It doesn’t require great planning; it doesn’t involve high risk. Normally, you wouldn’t even change clothes for the excursion. The tunnel is clean and, now that you have set up an improvised light halfway along, well-lit.
Perhaps here, there is some necessity for a more detailed description of what you mean when you say tunnel. Not wanting to give the wrong impression to anyone. For some, the word tunnel must evoke the impression of a dark, muddy hole: a damp earth floor, and a ceiling of loose brown soil, more suitable for worms than human beings. The tunnel beneath your desk could not be further removed from this image. Pot-holers and spelunkers are probably more at home with the idea of a rock tunnel: rough, stone walls; caverns and grottoes; water and time twin architects of wondrous natural constructions. Your tunnel could not be described in these terms, either. The walls of Tag-Kras are undeniably manmade. They are smooth; free from any snags and burrs to cut and impede. You are no expert on building materials, but you would guess that the tunnel is constructed from some kind of rigid plastic polymer; the sort of thing that is strong, heat-resistant and doesn’t corrode over time. Ironic really, this featureless length of unbio-degradable tubing will probably still be here long after Wookey Hole and Gaping Gill have collapsed in upon themselves.
For the greater part of its length, Tag-Kras is devoid of any extraneous features other than a hard, thin, white plastic sheath, which runs its entire course, and which is stapled at regular intervals to the wall of the tunnel. On one of your early underground ventures you had taken a small sharp, craft knife with you, expressly for the purpose of cutting into this tubing. Beneath, orderly lined up like lanes on a race course you exposed five thin wires, each further insulated in plastic, each a different colour, like the lines on your Metro map. You shared your tunnel with the electronic veins of your building. You wondered whether Tag-Kras was a minor capillary or a major artery. Your desire for exploration was growing stronger.
Directly beneath Lubyanka there is an identical grill to the one that you enter from your desk. It is suggestive of another tunnel lying directly beneath Tag-Kras. There is an identical, double-grid arrangement - one in the floor, one in the ceiling - at the far end of the tunnel, at the point you have christened Kuznetsky Most. The grill in the ceiling must lead back somewhere into your own office. You have tried to pace out the distance - surreptitiously - when you are ‘top-side’, and your best guess is that it emerges either beneath the desk of Loud Telephone Voice, or underneath the furthermost filing cabinet. Neither is an interesting place to end up, though, and you dismiss further exploration in that direction as fruitless. On your imaginary subterranean map you draw a dead end.
There is only one direction for you: deeper.
The screws in the second grill have rusted slightly and prove harder to shift than you had hoped. It is the work of two trips before you have managed to open the portal into the lower tunnel. You realise that your risk assessment evaluation has shifted subtly, too. On your first venture into the passage you had been as jumpy as a cat on caffeine, moving slowly, anxious not to make the slightest sound that might give away your whereabouts; now, you are moving around the tunnel with a good deal more dexterity and freedom. You are beginning to feel at home. You are almost reckless to the possibility of being discovered. You feel as though you are taunting your colleagues with the possibility of uncovering you.
The lower tunnel proved to be wider than Tag-Kras, but also more unstable. You christened it Sokolnicheskaya. Soko. It appeared to run almost directly perpendicular to Tag-Kras, and opened up far greater possibilities for exploration. The difficulty with Soko is due to its construction. Whereas Tag-Kras gives the illusion of security, its tough, plastic walls seemingly impenetrable, Soko is made of an entirely different material. A lattice of narrow wooden struts provide the only secure aspect of the floor of the tunnel on which you could trust your full weight; between the struts are thin, polystyrene tiles, clearly not capable of supporting something as heavy as a human body. Even the gentlest of touches on the polystyrene is enough to make the material bend visibly and creak in an alarming fashion. You dread putting your foot or your hand through one of the fragile white sheets and so reveal your presence to whoever lay beyond. A journey through Soko is like walking across a minefield.
Soko does have its advantages, though. It is a large space; high enough in some places for you to almost stand, or at least stand bent double. The walls are made of timber, which was somehow more homely than the unnaturally inorganic environment of Tag-Kras. It is full of shit, though, which upsets your aesthetic sensibilities. There are long, loose cables, haphazardly strewn around; not ordered and concealed as they are in Tag-Kras. And there are odd pieces of wood littering the floor, serving no obvious purpose. It is dirty, too. Your hands soon become grimy, and your clothes covered in a thin patina of dust. You do not like getting dirty. You never did. You remember as a kid, in nursery school, eschewing any activities in the sandpit in favour of a simple jigsaw puzzle, or a book, or something... clean. You are pleased that you have Tag-Kras as a transitionary area between the lower tunnels and the real world. Increasingly, Tag-Kras takes on the role of a decompression chamber on a submarine; it is the link between two entirely separate worlds. It is here that you change clothes. It is here that you make the mental adjustment required to inhabit your two different universes. It is a barometric chamber: pure and unpolluted.
Soko is great for spying. You have discovered that the white polystyrene tiles are very straightforward to remove - they just rest on a wooden grid below; not even tacked in place - and by discretely prizing one up, just a fraction, you can glimpse into the realm beyond. By your reckoning, Soko travels the length of the whole third floor of your office block, giving you access - should you so wish - to Human Resources Department at its extreme northeast limit, and to Information Technology Department in the southwest. You begin to know colleagues you never would have met in the normal course of working life. Red Hair in IT is trying to buy a house: he is having trouble with his survey; he has loud - and long - phone conversations to his solicitor about it. Curly Perm and False Laugh in HR pretend that they like Grey Cardigan, but they both bitch about her when she has left the room. She is old and that is a crime in their eyes. Nail Biter in IT looks at internet reflecto porn.
You have a nervous habit of picking away at the brittle, polystyrene tiles, as you watch from your place of concealment. It is something that you must try to stop, but it is not easy to give up. You find your fingers fiddling compulsively without you realising it; the impulse to break off small particles of the hard, white foam is almost irresistible. You are concerned that the trail of polystyrene fragments might give you away. That is your major anxiety: the constant need to observe whilst remaining undiscovered. You sometimes run through possible scenarios in your head about what would happen should you be found in the tunnels. What could you possibly say? What would be a reasonable excuse? You are still working on this; there are no words that would seem to adequately account for your position. It is like one of those awful dreams where you turn up at the office and realise that you aren’t wearing any clothes.
You know it’s going to happen one day. It’s not a question of if; it’s a question of when.
Chapter Five
You sit frozen on your chair. You know the pose now. It is part of the ritual of every working day. Office yoga: inert frog. Your feet are planted firmly on the floor. You no longer have an urge to swivel in your chair. You are holding your breath. Your fingers are outstretched, hovering, like children’s hands above a chocolate box, over the computer keyboard, one digit covering ‘O’, the next over ‘T’, another over ‘G’, the last over ‘U’. You wonder if you will ever learn to type correctly. Touch-typing: you were never taught it. It must be part of the curriculum now.
Caffeine is the drug of the office. It is an essential narcotic for the working day. Without its widespread distribution and cavalier use all activity - such as it is - would grind to a halt. The Management turn a blind eye to the number - and length - of workers’ breaks: they know the score. The company runs on coffee. There are dealers on every floor: silent, mechanical pushers, who for the exchange of three 20 pence coins - or one 50 pence and one 10, although strictly no change given - dispense their addictive cargo. The one exception might possibly be Perma Temp: she appears to run on nothing but Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates. You have watched her eating them from the concealment of your tunnel. She doesn’t realise that anyone is watching: she is secretive, like a lioness with its kill. She looks around; no one is passing; she is not going to share a single sweet. Open the box; in her mouth; back in the drawer again. The box will be finished by the evening. A new box will be in its place tomorrow morning.
Also rife is petty theft. The stationery catalogue is like a kleptomaniac’s bible. Now that the system has been computerised, it is possible to email your order to the stationery firm one evening and have all the items that you intend to steal delivered directly to your desk by the next morning. The wonders of modern technology. If you had been more popular, you might have been invited to join forces with the syndicate in IT who were competing with one another to see who could purloin the most expensive item. Nail Biter was a clear leader: you had chanced to leave work at the same time as him one evening and noticed that he drove a huge 4WD with capacious storage facilities. The whole stationery catalogue was his oyster. You, on the other hand, were limited to only those items that were able to be concealed within your lunch-box. Envelopes, principally. Little acorns, though. You didn’t want to do yourself down, but you did realise that it reflected a lack of ambition on your part.
And the award for Best of Young British Office Supplies Pilfering goes to... you were never going to be in contention.
When you had first begun your career - pantomime cough for ironic effect - you had shared an office with a man called Barry Robins. At the time, he had seemed elderly but, with the benefit of hindsight, you realise that he must have been somewhere in his mid-thirties. The job you had been doing was not either intellectually or physically taxing: a bit of filing; a bit of fetching; a bit of carrying; a bit of photocopying. In short, it was an entry-level office clerk’s job. You were the office dogsbody. It was the kind of job that you did for a year in the knowledge that if you did it with at least a modicum of efficiency you would be moved a short rung up the company ladder, for someone younger than you to come in and fill the junior slot that you had just vacated. Barry Robins had been doing this job for the last fifteen years.
Now Barry was no slouch. There were some who would have described Barry as something of an intellectual. He had been to university. He had a degree. You couldn’t understand why Barry was stuck in what amounted to the bargain basement of career development. You thought that Barry was a loser. The sign had not been invented at the time, but if it had you would have put up your right hand and stuck a big perpendicularly opposed thumb and first finger up on your forehead at Barry. Loser. Loo-oo-ser.
When you duly received your promotion - eleven months after joining the company, quicker than most, you were obviously destined for “fast-track” - you asked Barry why he remained where he was. It was almost the first conversation you had had with the man.
“No responsibility,” he had replied.
Your youthful opinions were all confirmed in those two words. Loser. Wasn’t responsibility exactly what you were trying to attain? Didn’t responsibility mean more money, and money mean more power, and power mean more... what was it at the top of the tree? What would you find at the top of the corporate skyscraper? At the time you didn’t know, but you knew that you were eager to find out.
You never spoke to Barry again. To your knowledge he is still working in the same office doing the same job as he was back then. Idly, you speculate whether through one of your newly found tunnels you may be able to pay him a visit. It would make an interesting excursion. You think that nowadays you might have a lot in common.
You exhale. Still no one going to save you.
Chapter Six
The Circular Line runs around the whole perimeter of the building. There is an identical tunnel on every floor, each linked by a vertical shaft. The tunnel on your floor is named Circular Line 4. Or CL-4, for short.
It is quite a complex journey in order to get to CL-4. You must transit from Tag-Kras directly to Soko, scramble along northeast until you reach the junction named Chistyie Prudy, climb up again so that you come into Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya - Kal-Riz - and then head directly north until you hit Prospekt Mira. Your best time between Lubyanka and Prospekt Mira you have clocked as seven minutes, twelve seconds, and this includes changing clothes. You have investigated possible alternative routes, but nothing would appear to be any quicker. It is at Prospekt Mira that the vertical shaft between the various floors of the building runs.
The discovery of the Circular Line has been a major breakthrough for you. It has opened up myriad realms of exploration. You think, with a bit of forward planning, that there is probably no room in the whole tower block that is not accessible to you, from the squash courts in the basement to the CEO’s office in the penthouse. You have had to ask your boss for overtime, purely in order to give yourself longer to map your new kingdom. Not, of course, that that was the reason you gave to him. Fuckwit.
You have always had a good head for heights, which is to your advantage because the shaft - strange that you have never named this - is no place for sufferers of vertigo. It is a dark cylinder to hell. No, you are being melodramatic now, but, nevertheless, it is not your most favoured environment. It is a narrow tube made of alternating ribs of timber and steel and is made scalable by means of a metal ladder fixed to the far wall. The ladder, though, is either intended for use by a giant or is designed to discourage unwelcome joy-climbers, since the rungs are distanced so far apart that it is a physical effort to stretch from one to the next. Going up is relatively straightforward; going down involves many miserable leaps of faith in the semi-darkness. It is always with a measure of relief when you can leave the shaft and access another of the horizontal tunnels on a new floor.
Of course, by now, Lubyanka is no longer your only point of entry or egress and, while it still remains your preferred conduit to your subterranean kingdom, you have been able to identify several ‘dead areas’ from where you can depart the tunnels and return to the real world. This flexibility has largely done away with the necessity of having to enter the shaft more than once on any one particular voyage of exploration: the lift providing a more comfortable means of returning to the fourth floor and your desk. ‘Dead areas’ take many different forms. Your favourite is the large, walk-in storage cupboard on the sixth floor. It houses industrial size packs of toilet rolls; long cardboard tubes encasing replacement fluorescent strips; coils of white cable; a box full of electric plugs. There is also a tray on which are laid a dozen small, hard cardboard tubes: a mystery to you, until that is, you were able to find a picture of something similar on the internet and realised that they are used as mouse-traps. A similar ‘dead area’ is the linen store in the basement, although it is seldom that you venture there.
The mouse-traps had got you thinking about what other creatures may share your underground network. You had heard the statistic that when you are in London you are never more than twenty feet away from a rat. It didn’t seem very believable. I mean you knew that it was only an average figure - or do you mean a mean - but even so. When had you last seen a rat? A couple of dead ones, perhaps, but even that was a while ago. You just don’t come from a rat kind of neighbourhood. The tunnels, though, were just the sort of place you imagined that rats would inhabit: and yet, nothing. Maybe the mouse-traps were doing their job?
The most important service of the Circular Line is that it gives you relatively easy access to Park Pobedy. In the past this would have been the best part of an hour’s round trip from Lubyanka; not a journey that you would normally contemplate embarking on more than once or twice a month. The old trip had involved a long scramble through the dustier end of Soko; the awkward ‘double’ transfer at Biblioteka Lenina in order to get onto Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya - Arb-Pok - the unpleasant crawl through that very narrow wormhole; and worst: the perilous long, deep descent from Kievskaya to Park Pobedy itself. Use of the Circular Line had halved this journey time and had largely done away with the most arduous transits. Nowadays, you could visit daily, if you should so wish.
You knew that you were being a bit foolish. You realised that there wouldn’t be something waiting for you everyday. But just the exquisite pleasure of expectation was enough to quicken your heart-rate. You would catch yourself sometimes: a simple smile on your face for no reason, and you knew it was because you were thinking about the prospect of what you might find at Park Pobedy later on that day. Even when you would arrive at the dark dead-end - the lowest and deepest part of your whole underground network - the place that had been christened after the Russian victory in the Great Patriotic War, only to find that there was no gift left for you, you would not be disappointed: it only increased the likelihood of something being left tomorrow. You knew the importance of hope. The hope of change. The hope that things would remain the same.
It must have been two weeks ago now, the first gift. You knew that it was intended for you straight away. Don’t ask how you knew. You just did. It was like one of those occasions when you are reading a newspaper and the article is talking about the very thing you had been thinking about earlier that day. Some people would call it coincidence, but you have never believed in coincidence. You know better: the article had been writing specifically for you. The journalist had been trying to communicate with you, and you alone. Others might laugh at this notion, but you know that you are right. It happens too frequently for you to be wrong. The Germans have a word for it. You forget how this is relevant, anyhow, now. You’ve lost your thread. It must be the excitement of anticipation.
The first gift was a small posy of carnations. You can still smell that sweet bouquet as freshly today as you could then, holding them in your hands.
No one had ever given you flowers before.
Chapter Seven
It is important to keep fit. You have never been one to subscribe to the modern gym culture, but you can see that it perhaps does have some advantages.
Fitness is all about discipline and routine. You know all about routine. You feel that this is something that you should be good at. It is all about setting aside a fixed period of time, each day, everyday. Or every other day, if you listen to one school of thought. Apparently the body needs time to reoxygenate. Aerobic recovery. Is it just another term for lazy? The ‘every-other-dayers’ in your company are conspicuous by their lack of upper torso muscular development and by the fact that they are generally more likely to be spotted assembled around the front steps of the building smoking a fag. They have routine, but they have no discipline. The two must go hand-in-hand for a successful exercise regime. In a theoretical world, you would be the perfect sculptured specimen. You have the routine. You have the discipline. You are just defeated by the boredom. Getting fit is just so bloody boring.