‘Bloody hell!’ said Arthur, all the frustrations of the morning welling up. ‘Sven, I thought you were supposed to stop bringing that fucking dog in. Today of all days!’
Sven grunted, entirely unconcerned. ‘Are you my boss?’
‘That’s not the point. Your dog is so dirty he’s a fire hazard. It’s health and safety.’
‘It’s “Bring Your Dog to Work Day”, innit?’
‘It is not,’ said Arthur fiercely, although a faint glimmering of doubt crept into his mind. Was it?
‘Yeah, it is. It said so in the Guardian.’
‘What? What on earth could a dog possibly do in an office? Well, yours could lick all the stamps.’
Sven snorted. ‘Yeah. And he could probably do your job. With one paw tied behind his back.’
‘Oh, don’t start.’
‘Who started? You started, you doggist bigot.’
Sandwiches reached up and carefully ate the end of Sven’s malodorous bun.
‘And if you fed your dog properly he wouldn’t fart all over the place.’
‘He doesn’t fart all over the place!’
‘Yes, he does, actually. You just don’t notice because you, too, fart all over the place.’
‘Why are you so fucking grumpy this morning then? Not getting any?’
Arthur wondered if job stress might make him impotent for the rest of his life. ‘NO!’
‘I reckon Sandwiches gets more than you, and I chopped his bollocks off five years ago.’
‘Nyeaarrgh,’ said Sandwiches.
‘Coffee?! Anyone? Who wants coffee!?’
A woman in a bright pink mohair sweater popped her tidy, short-white-haired head round the other side of Sven’s desk. This was Cathy who administrated the planners, oiled the troubled waters, did far too much of everyone else’s boring jobs and gave off an aura of complete desperation. She had a horrible husband and two horrible teenage boys, and coming to work was just about the most fun she ever had. Arthur tried not to think about this too often.
Sven and Arthur stopped sparring for a moment and grunted back at Cathy. Sandwiches’s tail wagged sturdily: he was the only person in the office, and possibly the world, who loved her unconditionally.
In fact, Arthur didn’t mind fixing coffee in the morning: it deferred the ultimate computer switching-on moment when the jolly day’s crap would begin.
‘No, it’s okay, I’ll manage.’
‘Ooh, I’ll come with you. But we can’t be too long, or people will start to talk!’
Cathy tried to look flirtatiously at Sven, who gave a groan of disgust and ignored them.
‘Do you like my new brooch?’ Cathy showed off the diamanté panda bear incongruously fastened to where her nipple must be underneath her shapeless sweater. ‘It was a birthday present!’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Arthur. ‘From Ken?’
‘No.’ She looked at the floor, then jollied up again. ‘I got it for myself. Well, you know, the boys are soo forgetful. Which is actually better, you know, because I get to choose what I want!’
‘It is,’ said Arthur, trying to nod as if this were true.
‘So … it all starts today …’ Cathy offered tentatively as she pottered around the urn.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’ In fact, he reckoned mousey work-horses were almost always the first to go; they complained less about redundancy.
‘Is it really a good idea to make us reapply for our own jobs, do you think? I mean, management must be right, but …’
Arthur nodded. ‘Absolutely. The fact that we’re in these jobs to begin with, of course, must be sheer chance. I got mine through my lottery numbers, in fact.’
Cathy perked up as she spotted someone on the horizon.
Great, thought Arthur, as Ross, his Tosspot Boss, came striding towards them in his cheap suit, with a big grin on his face implying that, whatever might happen to the rest of them – destitution, poverty, depression – he, mate, was going to be just fine, alright, mate? Yeah.
‘Art. Cath.’ Ross the Tosspot Boss was a year younger than Arthur and liked to point it out. His shirts were always on the wrong side of shiny, his voice on the grating edge of bonhomie and his actions mean as a snake. Arthur half-suspected that this strategic review thing was his idea. It meant Ross got rid of people with no direct route to himself: the consultants made him do it. Perfect. Although on reflection, Ross would probably have absolutely no trouble telling people to go by himself. He’d like it, in fact. A lot.
‘What are you getting up to in here then, yeah? Hanky panky!’
Cathy grinned and blushed. She had a hopeless crush on Ross – she clearly had a type. ‘Oh no!’ she fluttered.
‘Unlucky, eh Art?’
‘Yeah,’ said Arthur, as if yearning for nothing more than to be banging a sad-looking fifty-year-old woman on top of a coffee machine. Every time he let Ross call him Art, he reflected, a little bit of his soul died. He suspected (correctly) that Ross knew this. ‘I was doing alright until you came along.’
‘Oh!’ Cathy blushed again and waved her hands. This was possibly the most wonderful time she’d had in years.
‘Never mind, eh, pet?’ Ross leaned in chummily. ‘If you get made redundant today we’ll just go and cruise round the world, eh?’
Cathy smiled happily. Arthur shut his eyes. This was awful. Why didn’t he just punch him? He’d seen the picture of the ex-page-three model Ross claimed to be going out with, and she didn’t share much in common with Cathy apart from a certain look of resignation around the eyes. He should defend Cathy and punch Ross and … thrust a sword through his heart.
He opened his eyes. A sword? That was a bit much, surely. Offensive weapons weren’t really his style: he was a Labour voter and an inveterate spider freer.
‘Worried, Art?’ said Ross.
‘No,’ said Arthur, panicking.
Ross sniffed, looked as if he knew something the others didn’t, and walked away.
Can I feel my blood pressure rise? thought Arthur. Ooh. If I had a heart attack I’d get three months off to recover. Then: I am thirty-two years old and wishing for a heart attack. That cannot be good. Perhaps a mildly painless form of cancer, that got lots of sympathy. Or if he jumped out of the window here, made it look like an accident …
He wandered back to his desk, ostentatiously holding his nose as he passed Sven. ‘You’ve got mail!’ said a smarmy American voice. Arthur was surprised to see he’d automatically turned on his computer. Oh God. This, as well as a tendency to dial ‘nine’ before making a phone call at home was starting to make him think that his brain was gradually melding with the office. Soon, he would have no independent thoughts left of his own. His computer would beep ‘You’ve got thoughts!’ and then proceed to delete them, one by one.
Eighteen messages, almost all involving the project he was currently working on – the mooted bid for a new hypermarket near the town centre which involved knocking down substantial bits of old houses and creating a six-hundred-space multi-storey car park which would obscure the view of the marshland. It would also create fifteen hundred jobs and, on the whole, people tended to like