Playing Truant

by John Eider

  ‘Now, my lad’s only ten. So what the hell had happened? His teacher only asked us to take him home, “To talk to him about what he’s done.”

  ‘Anyway, we did take him home and he told us: His class were waiting outside the lunch hut – it’s an old school with all these different buildings – and the boys had been held back for some reason. Probably they were messing around.

  ‘Anyway, by the sounds of it the boys just went wild. “We started banging our lunch-boxes,” my lad told me. “We were singing and shouting and jumping.”

  At this Mitch laughed again like earlier.

  ‘It sounds like this went on for a while. Can you imagine it? They had to move the boys to one side to let the other classes past.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ asked Jemima, ever worried over stories of children’s wellbeing.

  ‘The teachers let them in, of course, once they’d quietened down. They had to let them have their sandwiches. But my boy said he was worried then that he’d get into trouble.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Not from us! We went back to the school and told them he was right to stand up for himself; and that they should have let the boys in to have their dinners. And what could the school do? What had the boys done to anyone – cheered them up with a bit of lunchtime carnival? No fighting, no swearing, no spitting – they couldn’t pin a thing on them. I told you, the dogs have no teeth.’

  ‘Sounds like quite a day.’

  ‘Doesn’t it just. It made me wonder: what will his best days be? There’ll be girls of course, and Cup Finals, and holidays, and nights out, and Christmas Parties. He’ll have great days to come – but he’ll remember this one, singing outside the lunch hut with his mates.’

  Mitch continued, ‘You see, I think everyone needs the odd moment of gleeful, pointless rebellion, just to remind ourselves we’re human. And your moment,’ he looked around the table, ‘has somehow earned us all a day off. So be grateful for it. Take it as a chance to clear your heads. And in your case,’ turning obviously to Finn, ‘not to get fretting. Any troubles you’ve got we can talk about on Friday. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ they all concurred.

  ‘And on that note.’ He waved to the bar and made a circle gesture over their heads. ‘A last drink on me; and if you’re wise you’ll bring them into the restaurant.’

  At which Mitch paused before concluding,

  ‘Only never do that again, will you. Not when we’re back in town.’

  He didn’t need them to answer, it was understood.

  ‘Okay. So go and relax, you’ve got a free evening. Your rooms buy you another meal token too, so get something substantial inside you, you’re all as giddy as children.’

  ‘Are you coming, Boss?’ asked Sylvie as she rose. To which he only shook his head, as she and the other three left for the restaurant.

  Chapter 41 – Later, In the Bar

  It was evening now, reaching into night, and the hotel bar for all its permanent shadow was positively nocturnal. Honey-shaded lamps reflected in the mirrors that stood in for windows; and Finn could swear their faux-curtains had been pulled in a little since lunchtime, as if to keep out the cold of the fictional street outside.

  Back there after eating, the four team-members were sat around a table.

  ‘Mitch is a piece of work, isn’t he,’ offered Jasper admiringly, in a rare show of perception. ‘He gathers us all around him; takes an age to tell us we’re not in any trouble; has us all so relieved that we can hardly remember what we were running away from; and then – and only then – delivers his bombshell about the new jobs.’

  ‘Possible new jobs,’ cautioned Jemima.

  ‘He wouldn’t even mention it if it wasn’t certain,’ countered Jasper. (And the group all knew he was right.) ‘What a piece of work. Even telling us he’s shared our frustrations, and has had thoughts of leaving. When the world and his dog know he’s Digby’s heir apparent, and will be there till he gets his carriage clock.’

  ‘But, if he’s Digby’s favourite,’ asked Sylvie, ‘then why was he given the F-Teams job?’

  Jasper already had the answer to that,

  ‘You’ve never read up on management theory? It’s called the Jumbo Factor. You see, a pilot starts as a co-pilot, working all the way up to jumbo jets. But after that he has to go back to tiny planes as the main pilot, working all the way back up again. It’s why the best men in any firm are sent out to run things in the sticks, the provinces, overseas, before being called back to take the top jobs at Head Office.’

  ‘And what about the best women?’ asked Sylvie.

  ‘Well, they don’t like the relocation; it takes them away from their families. That’s why there’s a glass ceiling.’

  Sylvie sipped her drink. ‘Well, thank you Jasper, at last it all makes sense.’

  After a while, Jasper left to play pool, Jemima leaving with him. Sylvie sat with Finn, asked him,

  ‘Do you want to go back to work?

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you want to stay here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Would your Mum put you up?’

  ‘She might do.’

  ‘You’d have a job with Belinda?’

  ‘There’s always that to fall back on.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Finn?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  And there was something quite personal in her voice when she followed this up with,

  ‘And will you be leaving with us in the morning?’

  He didn’t know.

  Looking up, his eyes caught colourful motion above the bar, and Finn saw a flat-screened TV on the wall. It was the rolling news channel, muted and subtitled. On screen, a suited woman sat before a backdrop of the London skyline, talking about unemployment. The scene then cut to lines of miserable-looking men huddled outside a windswept factory, or foundry, or metalworks. It was the kind of image that watchers of the evening news became familiar with.

  And yet, on this occasion, just for a moment, Finn lost his mind. And he imagined that the men were sad because they had to go back into the foundry, not sad because they weren’t allowed to.

  He thought, ‘No wonder they’re so glum, having to work in a place like that.’

  And as he caught his mistake, Finn realised that throughout his life he had borne a double-feeling at stories of job losses. Indeed, on the subject of employment as a whole. For, looking at the Blakean hell-hole showing on the news, then who in their right mind would want to lose their days to it? Or to a featureless warehouse? Or a bright, controlling office? It was like choosing – and then applying for the privilege! – of a life sentence at an open prison; and in the case of factories, heavy labour.

  And Finn was left then with the bleakest of his frequent thoughts – though he knew it wasn’t true, that it was only his own opinion – the notion that civility and culture were only dreams and aspirations, sticking plasters over the cracks of a nation of people still striving, making bargains to survive, and scuttling around their patch of the planet’s surface. And Finn sat there with his head down, for he hated mental images like that, for they could be so hard to shake.

  It was his mood that was doing it. It was the compromise solution that Mitch was offering, and which Finn judged all the team were accepting. It was the fact that deep down he’d never wanted his job, had never wanted to be there.

  At last the job had gotten so bad as to justify his decision to reject it. Now though, with Mitch’s being nice about everything, and with Digby’s rumoured reshuffling of the teams, Finn’s This-far-and-no-further, We-shall-not-be-moved stance was becoming disproportionate to the situation, might be deemed unreasonable. He hadn’t the strength to fight this new current; he was being drawn back in.

  Finn worked in a building of five-hundred people. It had once occurred to him that every year it robbed a year of each of their lives. ‘The office eats five-hundred years a year’, he found himself whispering to no
one in particular, as if quietly reciting a line of pentamatic poetry. Put those years together end-to-end, and you had a length of time that stretched back to the reign of Henry VIII. Finn had thought he would quite like to see the days of Henry VIII. He had tried to explain this thought to certain people, but none had understood what he was getting at.

  Chapter 42 – Bar Games

  Beyond the railing and the stairs, was the raised gaming area. There, the lights above the game tables caught the glass of picture frames. Jemima looked distractedly from one old photograph to another. She noticed a flowergirl here, an omnibus there. Before turning her attention back on the game of pool she was supposed to be playing.

  ‘Are you going to take this shot?’ asked Jasper, holding his cue as a staff.

  ‘I thought that other guy you met was playing?’

  ‘That was his last game. He’s gone to bed, like most sensible people.’

  ‘And where’s Mitch?’

  ‘He’s gone to call his wife.’

  ‘Of course, she must be missing him.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me who made us stay here another night.’

  ‘I’m not a great player,’ decided Jem. ‘I’ll get Finn to play. Where is he?’ She saw him sat silent at the table with Sylvie.

  ‘Yes, it needs to be a man really,’ reflected Jasper as she left him temporarily alone.

  Jemima approach her friends’ table,

  ‘Finn, are you coming up to play?’ she asked.

  ‘Go on, it will get you out of yourself,’ said Sylvie.

  With Jemima taking his unoffered arm, she moved Finn up the short stairs and to the games area; Jasper asking,

  ‘You’ve played before? You know the rules?’

  Finn hardly knew where he was.

  It felt all over for Sylvie. Their few hours of freedom were finished. And even those hours had been nearly wrecked with nerves and angst and uncertainty. It was as though, by some freak chance, they had been thrown clear of the great machine that they were bound to. Hurled up into the air, as if fired from a piston housing. For Sylvie imagined the machine like a huge car engine, chugging and pumping, and emitting smoke and flames from its vents and exhausts.

  And for a moment, they had been suspended above this machine, in clear air, free to see all around them, free to move.

  Yet they must have known that gravity was going to pull them back. And that when it did so, they would have no idea of what the landing would be like, what part of the machinery they would fall back into, whether they’d be minced up between cogs and gears and wheels.

  All in all though, they’d gotten out of it with hardly a scratch.

  After Mitch had made his announcement about their possible new jobs, Sylvie had looked straight to Finn. She and Jemima and even Jasper had breathed sighs of relief – Mitch had done enough to bring them back. Yet Finn had been unreadable, worse even than during the day. And talking to him since, he had been barely responsive. Sylvie hoped his chat with Mitch on Friday would help him; but he was lost to her, she hadn’t gotten through.

  Sat alone now, Sylvie looked at those around her: at another table were a smart young couple back from a meal out. In the booth next to hers were serious-looking men discussing business. She caught the odd quick word: returns, cashflow, capital.

  On a corner sofa by the railings was another pair. Sylvie had seen them before: they were the copping couple from lunchtime – how many days ago lunchtime felt. They surely hadn’t been at it all that time?

  Now Sylvie saw them as the characters in Belinda’s painting. And also as only one of the host of couples passing through this grand hotel, a place known by Bel as ‘where the men went with their mistresses’.

  Just one of a thousand couples.

  Sylvie watched them, and for a moment caught the man’s eye. Women could sometimes be labelled girlish, pondered Sylvie, with their love of Teddy bears and bright colours and fancy fripperies. The Disney belief in shining knights, that they could never quite dispel. Never getting out of the dressing-up box, she thought; and looking at her own scarf, hairband, bangles, there was some truth in that. But it was overgrown boys like that man – his face red with drink and glee – who at the slightest quickening of the blood revealed their rush back to adolescence.

  ‘Man cannot bear very much reality’, she half-remembered from somewhere, probably a film, or something Finn once told her – he was always coming out with daft things like that with little prompting.

  Sylvie looked at the couple, and asked the bitter questions – Were they married? Were they boss and secretary? If so, then did his wife know? Had she known for years? Had she even given up trying to pretend she didn’t know? Yet Sylvie hadn’t the heart for it. And whether they should have been there or not, Sylvie could see that they were enjoying it. And who would want to rob them of that?

  The man was nearly falling off the sofa again. His companion deftly held him up, in the same movement as pressing his hand against her stockinged thigh. Sylvie was still thinking of Belinda’s painting, in fact she couldn’t stop thinking of it.

  Of course, what Sylvie felt was envy. All she saw were holding arms, pressing mitts, lifting clothing, and an urge to feel anything similar herself. How long had it been? Finn, she was sure, still thought her the Whore of Babylon. She had calmed down of late though. She wanted only a partner, and wasn’t ashamed to admit it to herself. She couldn’t help her biology, nor did she want to. ‘Leave careers for the men, give me love,’ she whispered. Even thinking it made her want to cry.

  Jemima had summed it up outside the minibus – ‘You’re thirty and single and no-one on the horizon’ – though Sylvie hadn’t needed reminding.

  ‘Your twenties are for fun, your thirties get serious,’ she had once been told by a woman she worked with. Sylvie had tried that line out on Finn to judge his reaction, but had only got the response, ‘But what if you didn’t have any fun in your twenties?’

  Chapter 43 – Kindness

  Sylvie sat there at the table, confused, feeling her insides turn to dust. The drinkers around her were her compatriots for the night. The spirit of the place seemed to grip her, to hold her as if in a transparent fluid, as viscous as axle-grease, that made every action slow and in which every bright object gleamed.

  The overheated couple she’d been watching were leaving now, though the bar was still buzzing. Here were people enjoying the experience of being away from home, and living in a building with a bar inside, where you only had to go downstairs to go to the pub.

  One of a group of business-folk at the bar caught Sylvie in his sights. This was right on cue, though he’d probably been on the prowl all evening.

  Come over, he gestured with his head. To which she demurred, shaking hers. In this situation any response at all was still a flashing neon ‘Yes’, and she thought she’d give this early bird a chance. Come on, he gestured again. Again she demurred. At this, he accepted the situation as it evidently was, and made his way over to the table,

  ‘You’re all alone?’ he started. Sylvie sensed already that he was hardly Orson Wells when it came to repartee.

  ‘No, I’m with my friends.’

  ‘Are they imaginary then?’ he asked, looking around her at the empty table.

  Oh no, she’d made a bad choice here. She’d landed someone without subtlety, who’d make fun in his opening statements.

  ‘They’re over there,’ said Sylvie, nodding toward the pool table. She moved her finger around the rim of her almost-empty glass, at which he at last took the hint.

  ‘Can I get you one?’ he asked.

  To which she nodded, calling, ‘Same again, please,’ to the elderly barman who was already looking in her direction. (The younger barman she’d liked had not reappeared.)

  As her suitor went to fetch her drink, and another for himself, Sylvie considered if she’d time to make a break for the stairs? He was drunk, and far too young, not even filling his suit – a suit that, by the way, was of an awful
material, too shiny by half, and with a huge snag in one sleeve.

  Sylvie looked up to Finn, staring out across the pool table as Jasper took his shot, and wanted to call out, ‘I don’t want the men in bars any more, Finn.’ But she didn’t call out, and knew that he was lost to her, was lost to everyone, buried under floods of confusion and compromise and God-knew-what else.

  ‘Reasonability,’ said Sylvie out loud. That was Finn’s word, the way he thought about the business world (for she had heard it from him countless times): what was reasonable of bosses to expect their workers to accept, what was reasonable behaviour from the workers in return.

  And a phrase she’d heard Finn use came back to her, one of those that could become his catchphrases in happier times, when he could be witty in his cynicism. Aphorisms like, ‘Never explain, never apologise,’ or, ‘We’re not here to enjoy ourselves,’ or, when going into a particularly gruelling meeting, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends…’ she whispering,

  ‘Be reasonable: demand the impossible.’

  It made Sylvie chuckle even in her sadness, before the man came back with the drinks. Yet soon he had calmed down his nervous joking, and she her nervous silence. And soon each had relaxed into it, were having a nice time; and Sylvie felt that for five minutes on this blessed work trip she could let herself ease off. And that felt good, and she felt that she needed it.

  Chapter 44 – Pool

  Finn had made half-a-dozen shots across the table. None of them were any more accurate or resulting in a pocket than his past experience of the game had suggested they might be. And so he had turned his attention – as Sylvie had been doing – to the characters of the bar. He saw the holiday-makers and city-breakers enjoying a drink after their evening meal. He saw that same couple from earlier apparently forgetting they weren’t already back in their room.

  He saw young business people entertaining their drinking-culture evening rituals. And from that group a young man in a shiny suit, who emerged, wearing a perceptible look of excitement and expectation. He took two glasses from the bar, and headed back across the floor to… to Sylvie, at the table at which he himself had been sitting.