by John Eider
What did Finn think of this? Sure, a part of him had been reassured by Sylvie’s outburst outside the hotel, the ten-year-old’s playground confirmation that they would always be friends. But had that also been a subtle confirmation that they didn’t have to worry about each other in any other way? He made no judgement if she appeared to be getting over the day’s upheavals rather quicker than he. She had her own needs, he made no judgement.
They’d never been together outside of work as much as during those two days. There had only been the odd work evening, Christmas party, team birthday drinks. Was Finn growing used to having Sylvie around? At the very least, did he not want her going off with someone else? Was that enough though?
Was it a quickening of sensation, a sense of having to up his game too? One of those situations where to do nothing was not an option, where to stand still was to move backwards?
‘Through his deeds shall we know him,’ as someone somewhere had once said. It had once occurred to Finn that you could spend an hour in agonised internal debate over an issue, decide on balance it was best to do nothing, and yet to an observer appear to have given the same consideration to the matter as a person who had walked straight past and hadn’t given a damn.
It was the lack of simple pleasure, he realised. As reminded by Belinda’s question, so obvious that it was almost dumb,
‘When did you last feel joy, Finn?’
Yes, Finn, he asked himself then. When did you last feel joy?
Electricity was essential to life, he knew. Had the first spark not fired among the soup of those primordial oceans, then would any of us be here? Yet Finn felt like an engine without spark plugs. Paul’s fruit machine had displayed more animation. When we always feel the same, how can we tell what moves us? How can we make decisions when we have no joy?
Finn had thought about Sylvie, of course he had – what man wouldn’t have, working beside her all that time? Yet whatever his daydreams of being with Sylvie, they had never gripped him as the need for Belinda had done. Was love then a need beyond conscious choice, something that hit you like a truck and did so regardless of consequence or whether the desire was requited?
That was what it had been for Bel. And even after meeting her again, Finn could remember those early years as a potent mix of that earliest desire and the heartbreak of it not happening, a kind of charged melancholy. He knew this combination as something to be searched for in books, films, music, and findable in his own diaries. But it was also a feeling to take sparingly, something to sometimes switch a song off for, or to leave a certain situation so to avoid feeling it any longer. Finn even wondered sometimes whether he enjoyed the doomed destruction of a thing more than the prospect of making it work.
He’d defined that feeling for himself once as a combination both of the presence of something wonderful and the acknowledgement that time would sweep it away. Like a character in a Philip K. Dick story, Finn could sometimes experience both the birth and death of something simultaneously. And people asked him to conduct a business career with so much going on in his mind?
Finn moved his gaze from Sylvie’s table, lest hers caught him in return. Although there was an undeniable pang at seeing Sylvie entertaining that other fellow, Finn felt no ill will towards his rival – the best of luck to him. Finn felt that what was dying in him now were only daydreams, and that the practicalities of a relationship with her were likely impossible, no matter how enjoyable such a situation might have been to think about.
He sometimes found hit hard to pin down the feelings of women. They were so deft in concealment, and needing to protect themselves. Yet the conclusion Finn was forming was the same as Sylvie had declaimed in her outburst – that they were only friends. However well they got on, they did not share that God-given urgency of attraction, that could not be willed and which was the only authentic underpinning of a relationship. There was no thrill. But then, when was the last time that Finn had felt that over anything?
No, he concluded, deciding that this would be his last thought on the matter. Sylvie brought a soft warm feeling, not a quickening of the blood. This was neither her fault nor his, just the way it was. And did he have the right to ask her to commit with only this in his favour?
‘Bloody hell, is anyone going to take this game seriously?’
Finn turned to face Jasper’s words. He’d drifted off during the re-racking.
‘Sorry mate.’ Lifting the cue he had been holding the whole time, Finn leaned over the table to take aim.
‘You’re reds!’ called Jasper just in time to stop Finn committing the foul.
‘Sorry, I didn’t know I’d potted anything yet.’
‘You haven’t, I’ve sunk three yellows so far.’
Refocussing on his own colour, Finn found a red nestling by a pocket at a distance that even he would have found hard not to nudge in. A second and harder pot brought a squeal and applause from Jemima. However, a hat-trick eluded him, and he withdrew to lean against the wall and watch Jasper step up.
‘At last we have a game on,’ cheered the opponent. Jasper though was evidently quite a player. He sunk two in a row of his own – a position from which Finn never recovered.
‘Things are warming up. Another game, Finn?’ Jasper eagerly pumped the pound coins into the slots. They played two more, Jasper winning all three, but Finn coming close in the second. This was a performance which Jasper commended in a show of sportsmanship.
Chapter 45 – Calling Time
‘Lord, it’s not ten already?’ asked Jasper eventually.
‘It sure is,’ answered Jemima, who’d been enjoying the games more as an observer.
Jem and Jay had clearly made a pact, thought Finn: say nothing more about their tryst till they were alone that night.
Jasper racked his cue and stretched his arms, ‘I’d better be getting off, old man, if I’m to be up bright and early for the journey tomorrow.’
‘Me too,’ concurred Jemima, with an innocence that no one not in-the-know would ever have doubted. ‘You up?’ she asked Finn.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he answered. Finn instead took one last look at the bar, and at Sylvie’s now-empty table. He had evidently had a couple of drinks, for he had so lost track of time and situation that he had forgotten to keep tabs on her progress. Finn wondered: had Sylvie cast sad eyes up at him to judge his reaction as she left? To see if he had any qualms with the scene as it was being played out? Only to find him absorbed in a silly game of pool? Before accepting the shiny man’s urging to take it upstairs?
But Finn was only internalising again, creating fantasy situations. Doomed emotional scenes, resulting in missed opportunities and personal sadness to be taken away by the characters and brooded over.
‘It looks like Sylv’s been playing her own games,’ said Jemima without judgment.
Finn silently concurred, only muttering under his breath, ‘Enjoy it, fella, this is the luckiest night of your life.’
But as they left to join Jasper and go up, Finn paused, asking Jemima,
‘Do you think we love less as we get older?’
‘No, not at all. Why ask?’
‘I felt it once, you know, years ago, and it nearly killed me. It felt like I was dying. Does that sound mad?’
Jemima giggled, ‘You ought to read some of the books my Mum reads. She’d call that mild. Any affair that doesn’t kill at least one of the couple isn’t worth reading about.’
‘But I’ve never felt it the same since.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? I don’t want to see you dropping dead.’
Finn turned and saw Jasper waiting impatiently at the door to the hotel stairs. Though he was obviously unable to say any more than, ‘Are you pair coming then?’
Yet the conversation was too important to Finn. He asked Jem,
‘But does that mean I’ll never love again? Or do I even want to, if it’s like that?’
‘You’re losing me, Finn.’
�
�Might it be a subtler feeling? Less obvious maybe?’
She took his hand, whispering,
‘Is this about Sylvie?’
To which he could only answer, ‘I don’t know.’
Jasper broke in,
‘And this woman you’re not sure you like, is this the one you’ve had your mind on for the entire game? For you sure as hell weren’t thinking about your pots. Lord, Finn. You’d think your way out of Heaven, you would. You know she’s left with someone?’
To which Finn nodded.
‘Well, it looks like you missed your chance for tonight, Bud.’
This situation evidently required no sympathy from Jasper, who grabbed Finn’s cue and placed it back in the rack.
And it was left to Jemima to smile sadly, and to say,
‘I think you know, somewhere, deep-down.’
Which was precisely what Finn had been trying to decipher all along.
She hugged his arm, and spoke brightly to break the conversation,
‘Now come on. Things will seem clearer in the morning.’
Leading Finn to the door, the three went up to their floor.
Chapter 46 – Diary Thoughts
‘Women could be amazing, couldn’t they?’ thought Finn. ‘They share the world, but live a different life.’
While Finn was still with them in the corridor, Jemima and Jasper performed the play of turning to their own rooms. The third party closed his door, to what he thought might have been the faintest giggle of Jemima’s. Then came the sound of feet skipping back past his door. Though they were not soft enough to be her feet. Always the woman’s room, Finn observed, the man not wanting the messed-up bed any more than he wanted the emotional commitment; meanwhile telling her she’d feel more comfortable in her own space.
The whole world’s getting it, thought Finn, except me.
He stood behind his door and kept silent, so as to put himself out of their thoughts. Yet the door was heavy, and he heard no more.
A thought niggled. It was a vague sense that, had he only conducted either of his conversations that evening with Bel or Sylvie differently, that somehow he wouldn’t now be the only one among those he’d been with all day to be returning to their own room alone.
Yet this was nonsense and did not bear scrutiny. Finn knew himself well enough to recognise how a part of his mind fed off mystery. And it was this part that was now trying to form a new narrative, to tally up all it had felt that day into one saga. He was looking at two entirely separate intrigues, each concerning a different woman, neither forming a genuine missed chance, and trying to add them up to one larger, dead-cert lost opportunity. His mind was equating quantity with quality, so to speak, making the parallel series, which could not be done. Different chances could not be added to a sum total.
Yet Finn had no intention – or expectation – of allowing his mind to rest just yet. For he had one faithful partner for these nocturnal hours. And turning to his opened holdall, he pulled out the work notebook and pens that he’d bought along for the conference.
In the end, he’d written little in the lectures, and less that he’d ever look at again. Yet in the absence of his real journal, he found fresh pages in this notebook that he could later pull out and staple to the right volume.
Finn thought then of calling to reception for hotel notepaper, as he’d a feeling Stephen King had once done – or had it been George Orwell? – when the muse had gripped them.
Yet he decided to make do with these ripped-out leaves. Finn still wished he’d bought his real diary though. He hadn’t thought he’d need it, only away for one night, and with hardly a minute left to himself throughout. So short a time without it had felt bearable. Yet as the holiday extended, so more was happening to record. Now he’d found this time to write, and could hardly bear not to.
As he sat down to begin, Finn had a sudden memory: had he really told Sylvie earlier that evening that he didn’t know how to express himself? Or words to that effect. He thought of the bookshelf back at his flat; and how he sometimes feared that if someone were to see his collected notebooks and computer files and manuscripts, that they would think they look like Kevin Spacey’s shelf of diaries in the movie Seven.
For even if Finn couldn’t bring himself to admit it to others, maybe even fully to himself, he did know how to express himself, and it was through an endless flood of words. This was his dream, his drug, his ‘profession’ in a way that made him not one penny a year. It left him with two jobs, that when combined nearly killed him.
Sometimes, when he came to write, Finn wouldn’t know what his theme would be, only that he had a need to journalise. Sometimes this was a subconscious urge, sometimes merely a tactile need: the feel of pen on paper, ink accruing into words. That evening though he thought he had an outline of what he wanted written. Doing so, he might explain it better to himself: the forming notion that the life he had been living had taught him to deny his own mind. What he wrote was less narrative than mission statement. He began, after the time, date, etcetera, in bold print:
THE POISON PARAGRAPHS
We insurance workers, we financial sector conscripts, we back-office serfs, we call-centre secondees… We quiet army rolled beneath the wheels of the Private Sector juggernaut, work in an industry whose relations are conducted in an atmosphere of inter-personal placidity. We could be foreclosing on someone’s home, concluding their life as they know it, but are entitled on the phone to ask them not to raise their voice at us. Nor are we staff allowed to raise our voices, to be upset, to show any kind of ‘unreasonable’ emotion, however we are spoken to or treated.
We live under threat of job cuts and disciplinary actions. Our managers can threaten our livelihoods as we can those of our customers. Yet we must accept this in a way that leaves no weight on the shoulders of the manager enacting their policies. It is beyond the pale for a manager to have to live with any intense reaction toward the way they choose to treat us. As such they are scot free to undermine our self-esteem and rob us of any lingering sense of who we are – or at least of who we were, before falling under their influence.
The relationship between employer and employee, once pay is taken out of the equation, seems therefore one entirely of take and give. They can treat us how they like – move us, ask we take on any task – and expect us to accept it in ‘a professional manner’. The phrase, the concept, of ‘professionalism’ has thus been degraded under these people’s stewardship. It has gone from referring to a talented and dynamic figure, the craftsman, the artist leading their line of work, to instead representing the emotional equivalent of beige, an institutionalised non-responsiveness.
This is a manner of conduct and communication that, taken to the nth degree, leaves the only acceptable response to the news, ‘You’ve been fired,’ being, ‘Thank you for taking the time to see me.’
(Presumably, meanwhile, the poor bereft desensitised soul leaves the building quietly, without a fuss, not causing a scene. They go to the cinema to cry in darkness, into the woods to scream at the sky; before heading home with their empty briefcase, to search for the whisky bottle and their grandfather’s service revolver.)
And always ending with the tag line, ‘It’s just business’. Could these then be the three worst weasel-words in the language? How many ruinations of a father’s pride, erosions of a family’s wellbeing, massacres of a town’s economy have been incited, instigated, advised of by a white-shirted corporate automaton, who afterward concluded, ‘It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.’
In those three little words is granted licence for any act short of first-degree murder to be committed without the perpetrator having to expect any response to their actions beyond polite acceptance. And worse, for any response that breaks this code of polite acceptance to be branded ‘unprofessional’.
For management want to have their cake and eat it, to treat their staff as they will but not have any consequences come back on them from it. They want to deny Newton’s
famous rule, to commit an action yet experience no equal and opposite reaction. They wish for the energy released in their office to be wholly soaked up by the foam partition walls and carpet tiles. They expect to play with others’ lives, but not let it upset their dinner that evening.
This all gives rise to two effects, each reliant on the other, and each as dispiriting for anyone with any faith left in human nature to encounter. For these effects are each enacted to some degree a million times a day without conscience:
The first one I’d term something like ‘professional disconnect’, and which results in a workplace which displays itself to an outside observer as an environment populated by the lobotomised. A landscape apparently devoid of human feeling, response, emotion or genuine experience. A place in no way memorable, remarkable or desirable to anyone presumptuous enough to claim they have a soul.
The other effect we might term ‘corporate blindness’, and goes something like this: if the workers are trained into offering only bland, acceptable responses to even the most dramatic news, then a manager, should any consequence to a sacking or disciplinary action or whatever come back on them, could justifiably claim: ‘How could I know they’d start a fight/get drunk/get arrested/smash the office/hit a policeman? They were fine when I spoke to them. I’d been given no impression that they were so upset.’
The manager could say this, and their words would be factually correct; and to a person with no conscience, that would be enough.
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
PART SIX – VELVET MORNING – THURSDAY
Chapter 47 – Morning Feeling
Finn woke early and calm. Firstly he remembered his flurry of words the night before, which he judged not the worst ever penned by human hand. Then he remembered where he was, in life more than that morning, and his heart sank. It was a horrible sensation, and a sure sign that his recent life was wrong.
