Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  Norbiton set his pen down on his pad and folded his hands, which were, Trina noticed, shaking slightly.

  ‘Sidebar question, OK, guys? If none of you can disclose anything, why do you have meetings?’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Bream.

  ‘We were actually a little baffled when you called this one,’ said Holt.

  Norbiton stared at his legal pad, on which he had written nothing. He started humming tunelessly. He took out his phone, thumbed the screen without turning it on, and then returned it to his pocket. Trina saw Bream soundlessly mouthing the words system glitch to Holt.

  ‘I really need to …’ said Norbiton. ‘I mean, there’s quite a lot of pressure to—’

  ‘Get somewhere?’ said Bream.

  ‘Right,’ said Norbiton. ‘That.’

  ‘You need to put in an NTK request in writing, by email,’ said Bream. ‘We will then respond as appropriate.’

  ‘OK,’ said Norbiton. ‘But one of the reasons I called this meeting is because when I email you guys, I tend to get quite a lot of auto-responses, and so—’

  ‘We’ll prioritise as the situation demands,’ said Holt.

  ‘OK,’ said Norbiton, suddenly and, Trina thought, misguidedly positive. ‘Well, great meeting guys.’

  Everyone stood up. As Bream and Holt left, Trina heard Holt say, ‘I give him a month, tops.’ Looking at Norbiton’s face, it was clear he’d heard too.

  ‘Hey Norbiton,’ she said, after the other two had gone.

  ‘What?’ said Norbiton, failing to rise from his beanbag with any dignity and in the end just giving up and moving to an upright position through recourse to being on all fours.

  ‘It’s just that while I’ve got you, I need to talk to you about—’

  ‘Look here, missy,’ said Norbiton. ‘We’re in a fucking code-brown situation here. And no, before you say anything, that is not some kind of discriminatory remark. So unless what you’ve got to say to me is somehow even more serious than this business with—’

  ‘You know what?’ said Trina, cutting in before Norbiton had a chance to fully work himself up. ‘Forget it. I’ll catch you at a more … focused moment.’

  Now that her morning had been interrupted, and given that Norbiton would no doubt be firing off at least one nuclear-priority email the moment he got back to his office, Trina decided she might as well take a break from her No-Go room and go through her emails at her workspace. Everyone who had a No-Go room also had a desk on the open floor. This was where they managed everything they regarded as distracting, by which people tended to mean everything that was not the project for which they had been assigned a No-Go room.

  She sat down and opened up her mail client. She had forty-seven emails, most of which were auto-responses. Email at The Arbor was regarded as both antiquated and out of hand. Only managers, keen to keep some kind of record of their correspondence, bothered with it. Everyone else used IM. Consequently, most employees set global out-of-office responses even when they were in the office.

  As Trina watched, an email appeared from Norbiton, advising them that he was requesting an NTK exception. Almost immediately, an auto-response popped up from Bream, who always cc’d all on his auto-responses.

  Thank you for your email. Due to sustained inbox pressure, I am now only checking my email once a day. I aim to get back to you within one working day. Non-urgent emails will be deleted. If you have not heard from me in two working days, please assume you will not be hearing from me.

  Right above it was an auto-response from Holt.

  Thank you for your email. Due to the increased demands of managing email in the workplace, I only check my email once a day. Please regard this response as notification that I have already checked my email for today and will be getting back to you tomorrow. Non-urgent messages will be deleted.

  Trina didn’t cc herself on her auto-responses so that didn’t pop up, but after about two seconds she saw another email from Norbiton, subject heading: Auto-responses.

  Guys: Getting a lot of auto-responses here. Let’s get these turned off, OK?

  Then Bream’s auto-response appeared again, followed by Holt’s. Trina deleted both of Norbiton’s emails and started working through the forty-seven below, most of which were auto-responses advising her as to people’s email habits. Another email popped up from Norbiton with the subject heading Hello? and Trina deleted it without even reading it, along with the subsequent auto-responses from Bream and Holt.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Bream from two desks back. ‘There is a fucking gale-force dickhead blowing through this team.’

  Trina turned round and spoke to the tops of Bream and Holt’s heads over their terminals.

  ‘Maybe we should turn off our auto-responses,’ she said. ‘Norbiton seems like he’s on a hair trigger.’

  Bream looked up, shrugged.

  ‘What are you saying?’ he said. ‘That Norbiton’s, like, above protocol?’

  Holt said nothing. From his monitor, the tinny hiss of a YouTube video became audible.

  ‘What are you watching?’ said Bream.

  ‘The new Teddy Handler,’ said Holt. ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘No,’ said Bream. ‘Ping me that.’

  ‘Done,’ said Holt. ‘Trina: I’ll cc you.’

  Trina was about to say please don’t but the link was already in her inbox, meaning she now, if for no other reason than to avoid unnecessary conflict, felt pressured to watch it. In the tightly patterned existence of The Arbor, conformity was a serious business, and for various reasons a long way out of her control, Trina was already regarded as something of an outsider. She had to take her opportunities of inclusion where she could.

  Perpetually garbed in sleeveless workout vests that made his biceps pop, Teddy Handler had swelled outwards from his day job as a political advisor into an increasingly high-profile side role as raving proselytiser for the cult-like productivity movement. He ran so-called Teddycation weekends in corporate hotels during which he paced the stage braying into a head-mic, accompanied by impromptu whoops and throaty roars from the chino-clad white men who paid through the nose to attend. He was not, of course, the first of these dismayingly charismatic productivity gurus. The elevation of productivity and efficiency from helpful ideas about getting things done to quasi-religious ends unto themselves had happened long ago, and tech had always had a bit of a guru problem in the shape of these huge-ego’d man-boys who promised to lead the precarious masses into one-size-fits-all bliss-fulfilment through endless and unquestioning daily grind. Trina’s problem with Handler was the fact that he was, as far as she was aware, the first of these inexplicably revered figures to double as a political advisor to a party she regarded as being the National Front under a new name, and something about the way staff at The Arbor enthusiastically shared his productivity videos without ever stopping to question his politics left her nauseous in a way that far exceeded her usual background-level bullshit allergy. Not that not questioning someone’s politics was unusual in The Arbor. If anything, it was something of a credo. Politics was the anti-tech, anathema to data. It was, as anyone would tell you if you were fool enough to ask, very much Outside The Building.

  ‘Think outside the box,’ said Handler on the video, flashing up a PowerPoint slide of the word BOX in huge letters. ‘How many times have we heard that? It means we need to get creative, right? It’s where genius comes from, right?’ He paused dramatically. Behind him, the PowerPoint slide switched to the word WRONG in even bigger letters than the word BOX. ‘WRONG,’ emphasised Handler, pointing dramatically. ‘Why? Because newsflash: this ain’t the sixties any more, guys. All that free thinking? All that blue sky? That shit is gone. And you know what I say? Good riddance. Why? Because we’ve been running an outmoded paradigm, that’s why. What once was radical is now the norm. People have been thinking outside the box for so long that they don’t even know where the box was to begin with or what it looked like or what was in it that was so bad they ha
d to get out of it.’ He clicked his remote. Behind him the words SHOW ME THE BOX appeared on the projection screen. ‘This is what I say at my encounter sessions,’ he said, gesturing behind him. ‘When I’m Teddycating people, this is the first bit of Teddycation I throw at them. You should see their faces. They’re like: My box? But Teddy, I’ve spent my whole life trying to get outside the box! And you know what I say? I say: Get in it. Get in your box. Why? Because if you ever want to have even a hope of thinking outside the box, you’d better be sure you know what it feels like to think inside the box. And if you want to do that, then you’d better be sure you can actually find your box in the first place. Because I’m working with people now who are so far out of the box they couldn’t find their box even if they enabled some kind of find-my-box function on their phone. I say to people: that box isn’t going to come to you. You’ve got to be out there, hunting the box, tracking it down, every day, just trying to get a sniff of the box, a taste, so that then, when you’re onto it, when you’ve tracked that box down and backed it into a corner, you can get right inside it and ONLY THEN and ONLY IF YOU NEED TO, get back out of the box and do some thinking there.’

  Trina closed the video and tuned out Bream and Holt’s Handler-adulation behind her. It wasn’t just Handler’s politics that repelled her, it was the entire ideology these life-hacking white boys espoused. Unable to explain their privilege by any other means, they had convinced themselves and others that everything that had landed in their laps had landed there not through basic structural imbalance but through some sort of philosophy. Tech-bros weren’t overpaid and over-lauded because they’d had everything handed to them on a plate, went the accepted wisdom, but because they’d focused, or lived their vision, or actualised. Because they’d done it, anyone could do it. Because anyone could do it, anyone who didn’t do it had only themselves to blame.

  An email arrived from Bream with the subject line: Concerns re: Norbiton. Bream had forwarded all of Norbiton’s emails to Head of Corporate Efficiency Mike Grady and cc’d everyone Norbiton originally emailed as well as Norbiton himself.

  ‘Kablammo,’ said Bream. ‘Someone get me a mop and some Mr Muscle.’

  *

  ‘Touchdown,’ said Teddy, emerging jubilantly from the bathroom at the end of the hallway in Hugo’s office building. ‘You know what I’m saying, Hugo?’

  ‘Regrettably, yes,’ said Hugo.

  ‘My body is such a clock right now,’ said Teddy, easing himself into a seat across the table from Hugo. ‘I mean, you could literally set your watch to my body.’

  ‘Is that a good thing?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a very good thing. Our bodies are essentially mechanistic. They want to behave like machines. Basically because they are machines. If you just let your body be a machine, you free up your mind to be unlimited.’

  ‘How do you … Actually, you know what, Teddy? I’m just going to accept that statement.’

  ‘That’s great, Hugo. Unconditional, open. I love it.’

  ‘Now tell me about my day.’

  They were in what Hugo rather grandiosely referred to as his conference room, but which was actually, officially, called Meeting Room Three, and available for booking on a rota basis by everyone who rented offices in his particular complex. It was a small, square room with laminated tables and plastic chairs and a whiteboard at the front. Teddy had asked about a digital projector but that was still very much up in the air.

  ‘Well, obviously I’ve scheduled some you and me time,’ said Teddy, tapping away at his tablet.

  ‘Great,’ said Hugo.

  ‘But first, you’ve got a meeting with that Downton guy.’

  ‘Oh Christ. Jones? When’s he coming?’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  ‘Ten minutes? For fuck’s sake, Teddy, I haven’t even … I mean, aren’t you going to brief me?’

  ‘Precisely what I’m about to do, big guy.’

  ‘In ten minutes?’

  ‘No briefing should ever be longer than ten minutes, Hugo. Otherwise it stops being a briefing and turns into a meeting.’

  ‘OK, but let’s not make this a briefing about briefings. What does Jones want?’

  ‘Catch up, basically.’

  ‘Catch up. That’s it. That’s your briefing.’

  ‘I’d say strong bet he’s going to want to mention Robert Townsend.’

  ‘Robert who?’

  ‘The guy who blogs about the estate.’

  ‘Oh, that guy. And what should I say?’

  ‘Tell him we’re on it.’

  ‘Right, but—’

  ‘Time’s up, big guy. He’s on his way up. I’ll be in your office.’

  Teddy bounded up, performed a brief squat, exhaled powerfully, and made for the exit. Hugo turned his attention to his posture and positioning on his side of the table. Jones unnerved him. It would be important, he thought, to project a sense of control, of authority.

  Hugo’s link to Downton wasn’t just complicated, the very nature of its complexity was itself a complication. His entire career, his entire existence, was built on simplification. His critics assumed this was because Hugo was simple, but Hugo, who prided himself on not being nearly as stupid as people seemed to believe, knew that his reliance on simplicity was one of the better examples of how astute he was able to be. In an ever-complexifying world, simplicity was a much sought-after and increasingly finite commodity, and people had a tendency to grab it where they could find it. For some, this took the form of what was effectively a culturally approved regression into infantilism. Teddy, for example, owned at least one adult colouring book, framed world events as extended riffs on Harry Potter, and had once told Hugo that constructing spaceships out of Lego helped him brainstorm. For others, it manifested as a form of nostalgia in which it was assumed that everything had been so much simpler before it all got so complicated.

  Hugo, in his columns, in his talking-head television appearances, in his careful deployment of what he very advisedly called common sense, had become adept at synthesising these instincts. When he talked of present-day England and the ways in which it both disappointed and terrified him, he made it clear he was regarding it in contrast to another, historical England, which had once made him proud and secure. When he decried political double-speak and lambasted his rivals for their inability to construct a simple policy that could be conveyed in a simple sentence to … he didn’t say simple people, of course, he said ordinary people … he was careful to communicate the idea of an implied alternative of clarity, directness. Through simplification, Hugo was selling reassurance. Through nostalgia, he was selling the political equivalent of escapism. And through reductive blame-mongering, he was, he knew, selling a potent combination of the two.

  So when Hugo muttered to himself in the mirror before going on television, as he sometimes did, keep it simple, he meant it in a highly literal sense: keep not just what he said simple, but keep everything simple, and defend the simplicity he had created from the opposing political forces of nuance, subtlety, and doubt.

  There were, however, elisions. Hugo’s politics, given the backroom deals he continually found himself making with people like Ronnie Childs, were not exactly simple. Nor, given the Downton situation, were his finances.

  Hugo was, even he would admit, awful with money. He liked the idea of it. He savoured the vocabulary of its accrual, injecting words like portfolio and interests with all the mouthwatering suggestiveness he felt they deserved, but actual financial success came only when he employed advisors who categorically refused to carry out any of his instructions and instead invested his money in industries and institutions they regarded as safe. Two or three of these investments, made with no supervision on Hugo’s part, had become comparatively profitable, and one – Downton – which had begun snapping up local-authority housing contracts alongside big-ticket private developments, had become very profitable indeed.

  Downton’s courting of Hugo had begun in unspectacular fashion. The
y’d noticed he was a long-standing shareholder, they said, and they wanted to thank him by inviting him to some sort of dinner. Hugo had, naturally, attended. A more business-oriented meeting had followed, during which Hugo was encouraged to take advantage of a particularly attractive extra share package that had been put together just for him, as a way of saying thank you. To celebrate Hugo’s taking up of this offer, another dinner was arranged, this time on a smaller scale, at which Hugo got to know Wallace, who headed up something to do with expansion, and Sterne, who did something involving planning. Both Wallace and Sterne sent follow-up emails jauntily expressing what a pleasure it had been to meet Hugo and suggesting they all get together in a less formal setting sometime. Hugo had agreed, because what possible reason was there not to agree? After all, Hugo’s involvement in politics at this point was still strictly at the opinion end of the scale, so there couldn’t really be said to be a conflict of interest. Even when, after listening to Wallace and Sterne bemoan the effect of certain, as they put it, draconian planning legislations, he had subsequently bemoaned the state of those very same regulations himself in one or two columns which ran shortly after, Hugo still didn’t feel he was buggering about with any boundaries. The Downton connection was completely coincidental, just as it was coincidental when, a short time later, as England Always were reaching out to Hugo and Downton were beginning to feel out Edmundsbury Council with regards to rescuing the moribund Larchwood estate and turning it into something profitable, Wallace and Sterne chummily suggested to Hugo that they get together round a dinner table with one or two council types so they could all have a friendly chat about how they might be able to help each other out. The Larchwood was an embarrassment, a magnet for all the issues Hugo had been talking about, and redeveloping it would be exactly the kind of project he intended to very strongly support if, as he was beginning to suspect at the time would be the case, he decided to make a proper run at being an MP – a run for which, were it to happen, Downton, in a move that reflected nothing more than their deep personal and economic commitment to Edmundsbury and their wish to achieve at every turn what was best for the town, had agreed to provide substantial assistance with funding.