by Sam Byers
‘Because what we categorically do not want here is a PR or litigation gangbang,’ said HR guy number one, eyeing her from across the table in the windowless basement room into which they’d taken her to lay out her lack of options.
‘Or both,’ said HR man number two. ‘A double gangbang.’
‘We’re being frank,’ said HR man number one. ‘We can be frank with you, right Trina?’
‘Hey,’ said Trina, ‘nothing I haven’t heard already.’
‘Great,’ said number one. ‘That’s just the kind of attitude we like here. Straight. No bullshit. So let’s tell it like it is. Trina: everyone respects your abilities. But they also do not respect your … background.’
‘Vis-à-vis the physical violence,’ said number two. ‘As opposed to your actual background.’
‘Right,’ said number one. ‘Good to clarify that. Your actual background is very much respected.’
‘I understand,’ said Trina.
‘So with that as a given,’ said number one, ‘we here at Green feel it’s only prudent to put certain failsafes in place to ensure that any early-warning signs are not only noted but also acted upon appropriately and effectively.’
‘By which he means,’ said number two, ‘that say one day a colleague is moaning about, I don’t know, some perceived inequality or slight, and you happen to say, I mean, hell, I’m just making this up off the top of my head, something like, If you don’t shut up, I swear to God I’m going to come over there and—’
‘Insert violent intention here,’ said number one.
‘Right,’ said number two. ‘Could be anything. It doesn’t even matter what it could be. The point is that we would have to take it seriously.’
‘Because of your history,’ said number one.
‘Right,’ said number two. ‘Your previous, as I think it’s sometimes called.’
They’d placed her on indefinite probation. The slightest misstep, the faintest of misunderstandings, and she was gone, ejected back out into the world, staring down the barrel of God knew how many more years ticking nameless tasks off an infinite checklist.
Trina finished her sushi and sucked up the last wisp of milk-foam from her latte.
‘I’m done.’
Kasia nodded. ‘Me too. Hey, look at this.’
Kasia thumbed the screen of her phone and tilted it towards Trina.
‘Oh fuck me, Kasia. Is that a dick?’
‘Dick pic.’
‘Is that like a consensual dick pic or one of those ones where they just assume you want to see a picture of their dick? Like, you text them about dinner and their reply is a picture of their dick.’
‘What are you saying? I asked for a dick pic?’
‘A lot of people do.’
Kasia made a face. ‘Not me. Who wants to see picture of dick? But this guy, he sends me one like every day.’
‘And are you, you know, getting daily dick from this guy in other ways too?’
Kasia made a face of abject disgust, tears of distaste welling briefly in her eyes while she imagined, then clearly unimagined, the prospect.
‘You fucking kidding me?’ She shook her head. ‘Never.’
‘But you know who he is?’
‘Obviously I know. That’s what makes the dick so disgusting.’
‘So who is he?’
‘Some guy. He looked round. Everyone was mister this and mister that. I gave him lunch. Then two days later, boom.’
‘So how do you know it’s him?’
‘It’s in his eyes. When I met him, I knew: this is a man who does something weird with his dick.’
‘How did he get your email address?’
‘It’s not so difficult.’
‘Do you think he wants to give you his dick in other ways?’
‘Who cares?’
‘Do you feel like if you have to look at his dick every day on your phone, you’re less inclined to look at his dick in real life?’
Kasia thought about this, giving the question the attention she clearly felt it deserved.
‘Depends,’ she said. ‘Sometimes, you know, seeing the dick, it makes you think of dick, so … But other times, yeah. You don’t want to see the dick.’
‘Maybe you need to develop some kind of code.’
‘Or a day. A dick day.’
Trina snorted and gathered up her lunch things from the bench.
‘Wait ’til you work upstairs with me,’ she said. ‘Every day’s a fucking dick day.’
*
His meeting with Teddy concluded, Hugo took the opportunity to grab what he increasingly thought of as a quick sanity break by popping outside for a fag. He was, as ever after one of his strategising sessions with Teddy, both baffled and slightly scared; unable to recall exactly what had been discussed, or pinpoint what had been concluded.
The sense that he was being moulded into new and not necessarily positive shapes was one that had dogged Hugo for some time, and the more pronounced the sensation became, the more Hugo worried that he might in fact be hopelessly lost, until on particularly bad days he would go to bed and close his eyes and imagine that he could feel, physically, the internal compass of his self whirring wildly through its points.
In many ways, being required to form an opinion on a weekly basis about a subject of your choosing should have been a sure-fire way of creating and maintaining a bullet-proof sense of identity. But even Hugo, who by this point practically had a black belt in self-denial, knew that an erosion had long ago begun, and was now almost complete. The truth was, his job as a columnist was not to say what he thought, it was to say what people expected him to think, and as a result of his continual self-portrayal as an honest everyman, what people expected him to think was exactly the same as what they themselves thought, meaning that in reality, his job was to say what other people already thought so that they no longer had to feel guilty about thinking it.
The arrival of England Always onto the British political scene had happened just as Hugo was beginning to put all this together in his mind and ask himself whether anything he had thought, written, or done had been either genuine or of genuine note. When he died, he’d thought, what would be left of him? A handful of columns about waiting times in GP surgeries, the need for Muslims to conform to British values, the importance of wearing a poppy on Remembrance Day? Was that a legacy?
It was difficult, in retrospect, to figure out exactly who had approached and manipulated whom. Hugo had begun, gently at first, more stridently later, to praise the anti-European opinions of England Always’s leader, Alan Elm. Alan, again in an informal way at first, and later in print, had returned the compliments, calling Hugo the voice of exactly the same man in the street that England Always wanted to represent. Somewhere in the midst of this flirtation, England Always, chests puffed with post-exit pride, had begun their transformation from a party concerned with redefining England’s place in the world to a party preoccupied with people’s place in England, and had moved from shaping England’s post-Europe future to recapturing its pre-contemporary pomp. Brexit was over, but the energy it had accumulated had to be retained. Fears needed to be redirected. Hatred needed to pivot. The nation that England Always began to both diagnose and define was one Hugo not only recognised but remembered: the England of his childhood, of his frustrated and bitter dreams, an England in which he once again felt at home.
Eventually, a meeting had been suggested, and Hugo and Alan, over pints of ale and a curry in a Travelodge somewhere near Milton Keynes, where Alan was staying for a conference, had thrashed out Hugo’s move from, as Alan put it, opinion to action. They’d sunk a few more ales. Hugo had got looser, Alan looser still. They’d made the shift from the political to the personal. Alan had talked about his first marriage. Hugo had talked about his only marriage. They’d talked about what they wanted, what they feared.
‘We know what people say about us,’ Alan had said that night, his tie loosened, the remains of the all-you-can-eat Indian bu
ffet still clinging to his lips. ‘We know what people think. But you know what? They’re wrong.’
‘I know that,’ said Hugo, swishing the rubble from a desiccated pakora through a crime-scene streak of crimson dip. ‘It’s just political correctness gone mad.’
‘Exactly,’ said Alan. ‘Can’t say this, can’t say that.’
He downed the rest of his pint and clicked his fingers at the waitress. ‘Two more of these, sweet cheeks,’ he slurred. Then he leaned closer to Hugo, beer and bhaji on his breath and the last glazed glint of complicity in his rolling eyes. ‘We’re alike, you and me,’ he said. ‘We could do a lot.’ And then he slumped back in his chair, as if drained, and gazed out into the middle distance of the threadbare corporate lounge as if it were a landscape from which he drew deep and lasting inspiration. He took a long, extravagant sigh. ‘Fucking niggers,’ he said to no-one in particular. Hugo, woozy with ale, warmed by rare masculine understanding, had simply nodded.
During his time as a columnist of greater notoriety than regard, and now as a politician of greater exposure than ability, Hugo had been asked many times if he was a racist. It was the liberal media’s default ploy, and a reflection of the fact that the word racist was now toxic enough that simply placing a person in proximity to it would irradiate their public persona as surely as it would undermine their message. His answer was always the same: of course he wasn’t a racist, of course his party wasn’t racist, and of course people who voted for the party weren’t racist. He would then, deliberately, digress. He would talk about the importance of free speech, of democracy, of living in a society where views could be aired and heard in a civilised manner. Sometimes, if he felt more evidence were needed, he would point to the valuable contributions assorted ethnic minorities had made to the country, such as Indian food and Thai massage. Finally, he would say that England was, and had always been, a tolerant country, and that he was proud of that, just as he was proud of England in so many other, less fashionable ways.
But these were, Hugo knew, the things you had to say, and he said them in order to sidestep the possibility that he might say any of the things you were no longer allowed to say. Even as he was saying them, even as he was actually believing them, other ideas would flood into the foreground of his mind, as if the dam between his public self and his private reservoir of disgust had been breached. Because he could not, or felt he should not, release them, they pooled, and once they’d pooled they began to stagnate, thickening into a dark, brackish puddle. This, for Hugo, was the reality of tolerance: the continual, day-to-day, unrelenting swallowing of your own bile.
What did Hugo believe? He had to keep asking himself. His views, once so simple and easily expressed, now drifted in and out of focus depending on whom he spoke to. Was it Teddy who distorted things? Or was Hugo confused because the world was confused? If he, Hugo Bennington, an experienced commenter, an intelligent man, felt this baffled, this uncertain of his ability to navigate the modern moral mishmash of equivocations and evasions, then imagine how the average man in the street felt. That, Hugo always decided, was why England Always was important. It wasn’t about white this or black that. It was about clarity.
But clarity was an increasingly precious commodity, and one, Hugo was coming to believe, over which Teddy had ultimate and not entirely positive control. Hugo’s understanding of his own beliefs was intimately bound up with his understanding of Teddy’s reframing of those beliefs, and his ability to track the ways in which his beliefs were being moulded was hamstrung by his inability to unpick the extent to which Teddy could be trusted. Teddy, after all, had begun his career with Alan. He’d been sent to assist Hugo only after Hugo’s name had risen in stature rather faster than anyone could have predicted. And there was a fine line, Hugo thought, between assistance and observation, reconnaissance and outright sabotage. Did Teddy work for him? Or did he still work for Alan? Technically, Hugo thought, they both still worked for Alan. Hugo’s suspicion, which had become ever more strongly held the more aware he became of Teddy’s other activities and interests – his tech work and motivational speaking, his unfathomable productivity videos – was that Teddy worked for everyone and no-one. His approach, or, to use a word Teddy was more likely to use himself, his philosophy, was always to connect. The merits and complexities of his connections could, he seemed to think, be thrashed out later.
The more Hugo looked at it, the more he concluded that his life was travelling in a direction of ever more arcane ambiguity. His views and direction were uncertain; his sense of whom he could trust was itself increasingly untrustworthy. The irony was not lost on him. Every day, be it in print or in person, he reduced the world to its starkest black-and-white simplicities, yet with each passing, opinionated minute, the once-sharp lines of his reality seemed to blur that fraction further, until he was forced to spiral inwards, questioning again and again what he believed. What he found, once he was there, corkscrewed all the way in to the deep core of his wavering being, was a truth dark even to himself: the truth that, in the cold, lived reality of his life, when he stepped into a shop and was served by an inscrutable Indian, or when he stood in the pub beside necking, fondling queers, or listened to the babble of Middle Eastern and Middle European tongues as they clashed violently with the tribal boom-thud of rap from the open window of a passing car full of smug, grinning black men, Hugo felt a fear and revulsion stronger and deeper than he could ever let on, meaning that, far from being cautious of the ideological roads down which Teddy could sometimes be seen to be leading him, Hugo knew better than anyone just how badly he needed Teddy’s spin. What Teddy was doing was simply a far more efficient version of what Hugo had always done himself: taking the unpalatable matter of who he was and moulding it into something the shifting, unrecognisable world could cautiously, guiltily, accept.
He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and tipped his head back against the wall to slowly release the smoke from his lips. It’s OK, he told himself. You’re alright. It’s everyone else that’s lost.
*
Trina arrived back from lunch to find Bream and Holt standing beside her desk.
‘Shitstorm,’ said Bream.
‘Seal up your body cavities,’ said Holt.
‘This is re the emails?’ said Trina.
‘This is very much re the emails,’ said Bream.
‘Mike Grady emailed Norbiton and told him to shoot one and scare the hundred,’ said Holt.
‘And you know this how?’ said Trina.
‘Mike Grady cc’d the hundred,’ said Bream. ‘Presumably to advance-scare the hundred prior to the one being shot.’
Trina sat down at her desk. ‘Bream: you emailed Grady.’
‘Right,’ said Bream. ‘But I spoke on behalf of everyone. I think that was clear.’
‘Look, Bream,’ said Trina, ‘I think on this one you’re our lone gunman.’
‘Hey, come on,’ said Bream. ‘Give a guy a grassy knoll.’
Norbiton stuck his head round his office door.
‘You three,’ he said. ‘I’m calling a huddle. Right here. Right now.’
‘You can’t,’ said Bream. ‘You used your huddle quota this morning. Your allocation won’t reset for another twenty-four hours.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ said Norbiton. ‘Trina: confirm.’
‘It’s twenty-four hours,’ said Trina.
‘Email me,’ said Bream.
‘Copy that,’ said Holt.
‘OK,’ said Norbiton, ‘I’m going to play ball, but if I get a load of auto-responses I have to say a touch of negativity might start creeping into my day.’
Norbiton went back into his office and started pounding his keyboard. Trina logged on and fired up her email to find that Norbiton had sent a high-priority scheduling invite to her, Bream, and Holt.
‘I didn’t have time to turn off my auto-response,’ said Trina.
‘Me neither,’ said Bream, not making any sort of move towards his desk. Holt just shrugged. From inside
Norbiton’s office a sort of warcry went up. He came back out of his office and marched up to them.
‘You lot are so fucked,’ he bellowed. ‘Do you even know how fucked you are? You are beyond fucked. You are quad-core, ten gig of ram, retina-display, twenty-hour battery life fucked. Bream: my office.’
‘No can do,’ said Bream.
‘No can do? What do you mean no can do?’
‘I used up all my Meeting Minutes at the huddle this morning and just now when I had to take time out to explain to you how huddles work. I can’t do any kind of meeting now until next week.’
‘Then why in the name of fuckery did you tell me to email you to arrange a huddle tomorrow?’ screamed Norbiton.
‘So I could respond by email to let you know I am out of Meeting Minutes and could we maybe do next week,’ said Bream.
There was a slightly overlong pause while Norbiton digested this. Then he started laughing maniacally. He laughed all the way back to his office and slammed the door.
‘Whoa,’ said Holt. ‘Norbiton’s flashing a crash screen.’
Everyone went back to their desk to do emails and check their to-do lists. Just as they were all about to head off to their respective No-Go rooms for some real work, three Structural Facilitators rocked up carrying PortaWalls and began annexing an empty corner. Norbiton came out of his office and watched as they bolted the walls together and started hanging a swipe card-protected door.
‘Think outside the box,’ he said, gazing into the middle distance and smiling enigmatically. ‘How many of you have heard that old chestnut?’
‘Norbiton,’ said Bream, his head popping up from behind his multi-display setup, ‘I would urge you very strongly not to do this.’
‘Think outside the box,’ said Norbiton, putting his foot up on a chair and resting his elbow on his knee. ‘That’s what we say, isn’t it? That’s what we’re all here to do, right? Well riddle me this: how can you think outside the box if you don’t know where your box is?’
‘What’s happening?’ said Holt to Bream. ‘I mean, obviously, on a purely audio-visual level, I can appreciate what is happening but on a deeper, more meaning-based level I find myself very reluctant to accept what is going on.’
