by Sam Byers
‘Apparently Norbiton thinks he is the only one with a fucking YouTube account,’ said Bream. ‘Hey Norbiton. Take a fucking duvet day, OK? You’re going to throw the whole morning out of whack.’
‘Should we call Wellbeing?’ said Holt.
‘And say what?’ said Trina.
‘Norbiton is delusional,’ said Holt. ‘He is trying to pass off a You-Tube video that has had several thousand hits as his own original thought. That is the textbook definition of psychotic.’
‘Folks,’ Norbiton was saying, ‘we, collectively, have lost our box. We’ve thought so far outside the box that we no longer know where our box is or what was in it or why we were supposed to get outside of it in the first place.’
‘I just googled the DSM criteria for a mental breakdown,’ said Bream. ‘It’s here under delusions: believing a publicly available work of another person that has been seen by numerous others, e.g. a YouTube video, is in fact your own original thought.’
Holt was on the phone. ‘Hello? Yes, this is Holt on floor three. We’ve got a mental health-type situation. It’s like that time Burgess said he wrote the whole of Wikipedia.’
‘One of us,’ said Norbiton, apparently unconcerned as to the attention levels of his audience, ‘has to get back in the box.’
‘Norbiton,’ said Holt. ‘You can’t just build yourself your own No-Go room. It doesn’t work like that.’
‘I can’t discuss that with you,’ said Norbiton. ‘You’re not NTK on what I’m doing. No-one is NTK on what I’m about to get up to in that No-Go room.’
‘All ready for you, chum,’ said one of the Structural Facilitators, passing Norbiton a swipe card.
Norbiton strode forward. There was a beep as he swiped himself in. ‘I may be some time,’ he said stoically. The door closed and he was gone.
There was a long, slightly uncomfortable silence. Somewhere, someone opened a packet of crisps and attempted to eat them discreetly. Several people received emails. Several people in turn received auto-responses.
Bream said, ‘Did, er, did those guys hook up any equipment in there?’
‘Negative,’ said Holt. ‘Norbiton is in an empty No-Go room with no discernible purpose.’
*
Mid-morning, another team of Structural Facilitators rocked up brandishing power tools and stood slightly awkwardly around Norbiton’s box. They were followed, with the sense of purpose and occasion for which he was renowned, by Dick Bangstrom.
‘Oh shit,’ said Bream. ‘Say it ain’t so.’
Dick Bangstrom was the smallest man Trina had ever encountered, and the man least at ease with his smallness.
‘Heads up,’ said Bangstrom.
Everyone did an overt heads-up over their screens.
‘Some of you may know me,’ said Bangstrom. ‘I’m Dick Bangstrom. AKA The Interrobang. I have been sent from above.’
Bangstrom nodded pointedly while he let that sink in. No-one said anything.
‘Both literally and figuratively,’ he continued, ‘I am way above your floor. I am a floor-five kind of guy both in terms of how I live my life and the fact that I am literally to be found most days on floor five. That’s where the big chimps play, kids. Only, we don’t play. If we did play, which we don’t, we would play for keeps. Think on that. I’ve been sent down here by floor seven. That’s right. The men upstairs. Half an hour ago, they called me up from floor five to floor seven and told me to get down here to floor three and not return to floor five or seven until I had done some very serious taking out of some very unwholesome trash. You know what they call you guys up there? The Troll Floor. This floor is averaging a new team leader every two months. It’s at the point now where no-one will take a post here because they value their sanity too much. But not me.’
‘You don’t value your sanity?’ said Bream.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Bangstrom.
‘Bream,’ said Bream.
‘I’ve heard about you, Bream,’ said Bangstrom.
‘Still holding out for an answer re your sanity,’ said Bream.
‘Yes, I value my sanity,’ said Bangstrom. ‘The point is I do not fear its loss.’
‘That does sort of imply you don’t value it,’ said Holt.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Bangstrom.
‘Holt,’ said Holt.
‘I’ve heard about you too, Holt,’ said Bangstrom. ‘Matter of fact, I’ve heard about every last motherfucking one of you. I do not fear the loss of my sanity because I do not believe my sanity can be taken from me. Am I clear? We’ve sent some weak men down here. Not our fault, just a lot of weak men out there, it turns out. But no longer. I have been sent from above to break you shits down.’
He gestured at Norbiton’s No-Go room. ‘Let’s get those walls down, boys.’
The Structural Facilitators took all of two minutes to unscrew the entire front wall and lift it clear. Inside, Norbiton was stripped to the waist and sweating profusely.
‘Hey Dick,’ said Norbiton. ‘Welcome to the sweat lodge.’
Bangstrom shook his head sadly.
‘Security,’ he said, gesturing to two uniformed guards who had arrived behind the Structural Facilitators. ‘Restrain this man.’
‘We’re going to have to towel him off first,’ said one of the security guards. ‘With that level of perspiration, we’ll never get purchase.’
‘You hear that, Norbiton, you sweaty fuck?’ barked Bangstrom. ‘You’re literally too sweaty to be satisfactorily restrained. We’re going to have to send you home packed in silica gel.’
‘Do what you like,’ said Norbiton. ‘It doesn’t matter. I see that now.’
‘Please don’t throw yourself a pity party, Norbiton. Try and leave here with your shiny little head held high, yeah?’
The security guards had repurposed a fire blanket and begun wrapping Norbiton up in it like a struggling cat at the vet’s.
‘You know why it doesn’t matter?’ said Norbiton, craning his neck to free his mouth from the blanket.
‘Shut the fuck up, Norbiton,’ said Bangstrom.
‘Because of The Field, that’s why,’ said Norbiton. ‘You think The Griefers are what we should be worrying about? The Griefers are nothing. Once The Field comes, you can forget about everything. There’ll be no inside or outside the box. Everything will be The Field. Everything will be—’
‘Let’s get some of that fire blanket pushed into his mouth,’ Bangstrom said to the security guards, who promptly gagged Norbiton with a dangling strap.
‘Hey, Bangstrom,’ said Holt. ‘What’s the—’
Bangstrom walked slowly over to Holt and stood menacingly in front of him.
‘Go ahead and finish that question,’ he said. ‘I dare you.’
Holt thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘I’m not going to finish that question,’ he said.
‘Do you have any other questions?’ said Bangstrom.
‘No,’ said Holt. ‘No more questions.’
‘Does any other motherfucker,’ said Bangstrom, turning to address the room, ‘have any other motherfucking questions?’
Everyone looked anywhere but at Bangstrom. There were, it seemed, no more questions.
*
Trina wasn’t one of these countrified cyclists you saw meandering with dangerous ease down the back roads. She was, in her own mind and in the eyes of others, a serious mover. At the end of the working day, she didn’t just tuck her trousers into her socks and freewheel home with a priestly smile. She changed into black spandex and hit the tarmac at a vicious clip. She had, in a concession to her partners, both of whom had repeatedly professed their concern at the thought of her barrelling unprotected through the notoriously unforgiving kinks and turns of Edmundsbury’s road network, reluctantly taken to using a helmet, but besides this she liked to be as exposed as possible, returning home, sometimes, with her skin chafed and tingling and deliciously sensitised from rain and hail. Code was all very well, she thought, but at the en
d of a day spent inside a machine, you had to get back out there in the world and feel a few things, otherwise you’d end up like Bream and Holt: weirdly eggbound and clenched with an anger they couldn’t name.
She felt, as she shifted down through the gears and pushed upwards towards the kind of fluid velocity that both blurred the world and sharpened her own bodily periphery, a sense of evaporation, of vaporisation. Trina had grown up on comics, and she still, in her happier, more kinetic moments, imagined the world in their hyper-onomatopoeic vocabulary, so that, cycling home, she pictured behind her a jetstream of swooshes and vrooms, the sharp, angular letters spilling out from her back wheel and bursting into language behind her. You were never too old, she thought, for a superhero fantasy, and such fantasies, with their dreams of muscled, costumed impermeability, were never easier to access than when moving at speed.
She stuck to the main road back into town, weaving through the traffic when she needed to, opening up and roaring ahead whenever she could. She rarely went straight home. Instead, she orbited, picking roads at random, looping around her own centre of gravity until she felt herself change and lighten, the muscles in her back and shoulders suddenly and blissfully melting. It was a sensation she thought of, in keeping with her comic-book sensibility, as a literal transformation: all the plates and armour she wore through the day sliding back to reveal the body beneath. By the time she got to her front door, most days, she was herself again, and the people she lived with, the people she loved and was loved by, never had to encounter the person she was without them.
People moaned about the Larchwood Estate, of course, like they moaned about all estates, but Trina was more forgiving. She’d lived in nicer places in lives gone by and mercifully forgotten, but this was where she’d ended up being happy, and so inevitably there was a sense in which she’d projected that element of herself outwards, onto the fading walls and desiccated greenery of the ill-conceived and now no doubt doomed project she called home.
She sang out a greeting as she pushed her way through the front door, bringing the bike in with her and propping it in the hallway, where it dripped road-residue and oil into a thickening patch on the carpet. From the lounge, Mia and Carl both called back, while Bella gurgled something that may have been a greeting or may, more probably, just have been another expression of delight at her own ability to make sound. She found them on the sofa, Bella between the two adults, both of whom were playing a video game, and kissed them each in turn, Mia and Carl returning her kisses but also, as was their habit, leaning round her to eyeball the game in progress.
‘Wow, sweat much?’ said Mia, recoiling in mock disgust but smirking as she did so.
‘Look at you two,’ said Trina. ‘Glued to the frigging screen while the baby just sits there.’
She kissed them all again, playfully rubbing Mia’s head against her sweaty cycling top, then left them to it while she showered and found some comfortable clothes onto which little Bella could, if she wished, unproblematically throw up.
Trina’s hour or so with Bella when she got in from work had become something of a ritual. Of the three of them, Trina was, even by her own admission, the less dreamy in her approach to parenthood – no less loving, but perhaps less indulgent of the significance of her own feelings. It was also, in a way they all accepted and had discussed quite openly, restorative. Bella had been born when Trina was simultaneously Microtasking and studying, logging far too many hours at her laptop, exhausted and adrift in time. It was one of the benefits of Trina, Carl, and Mia’s relationship that no one person had to pick up the slack when a partner got busy, but at the same time it was, as Trina had eventually confessed to Carl and Mia one evening, difficult in other, less expected ways. Suddenly, while she tapped away at a keyboard and completed tasks that would never, for her, add up to any kind of complete picture, Carl, Mia, and Bella came dangerously close to becoming a nuclear family. It was no-one’s fault. It was simply something they hadn’t considered, and Trina was as surprised as anyone at the odd jealousy and loneliness that began bubbling away as she watched them.
‘I’m just becoming her aunt while you two play the happy couple,’ Trina had snapped at Carl and Mia one night. ‘You’re probably teaching her to call you mummy and daddy while I just get to be Trina or aunty.’
It had, the moment she’d said it, sounded ridiculous, but she was glad she’d said it for exactly that reason.
Now she was at The Arbor, there was more of a routine. Carl was the stable centre, while Trina and Mia operated in a kind of rotation, each of them slipping comfortably into whatever role was required whenever either of them happened to get home. Mia was a Chorer – a job that was essentially like Microtasking, only the tasks weren’t that micro and they couldn’t be done remotely. Every day, when the hours suited, she logged into an app in which she had listed all the things she was prepared to do. Clients could then book her at a moment’s notice and for very little money. Some people wanted their shopping done, their houses cleaned, their cars taken to the garage. Other jobs were more skilled. Last week, Mia had tiled a bathroom. The week before that, she had cleared some guttering. It was, essentially, the monetisation of an age-old unofficial economy. But of course, in this model, the developers of the app took a substantial cut, and the pressure to log in as much as possible was immense, meaning that Mia often ended up being out when Trina was in. It all just about hung together, but how the nukes, as the three of them referred to the drabber end of the family spectrum, managed it, Trina had no idea. Work was changing; the family was not. Something, Trina thought, was going to have to give.
‘What news from the homestead?’ she said, wandering back into the lounge and plucking Bella from the sofa.
‘Nothing breaking,’ said Carl.
Mia elbowed Carl and he shot her a recriminatory look.
‘What?’ said Trina.
Mia widened her eyes at Carl.
‘Snitch,’ said Carl. He looked from Mia to Trina. ‘Forgot to say the other day. Some journo popped round. Mia here thought it might be important.’
‘Journo? Wanting what?’
Carl shrugged. ‘He asked about my accident. He asked about Downton. He asked if people were organising in any way. That was it.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said that Downton pop round and make sure I’m alright, and he seemed to understand what that meant, and then I said people were scared of reprisals for organising, but there were ideas floating around.’
‘You’re sure he was a journo? Did he have any ID? What paper does he work for?’
‘He’s a blogger. Robert something.’
‘Townsend,’ said Trina. ‘I’ve read his thing. He’s insufferable.’
‘Have you read the comments though?’
Trina laughed. ‘I only read the comments. Maybe that’s the point. He’s totally in love with himself, but at least he gets comments. Who else is getting any comments about this mess?’
‘So we’re cool?’ said Carl with a smile. ‘I haven’t, like, leaked, or something?’
She kissed him on the top of the head. ‘We’re never not cool,’ she said.
Trina took Bella through to the kitchen and sat with her at the table, telling her about her day, bitching about Bream and Holt and whatever else came to mind while Bella made what Trina thought were encouraging noises.
The kitchen, like much of the house, was relatively sparse – the dining table and its matching chairs simple, plain wood. Rather than attempting to merge their collective tastes, Trina, Mia, and Carl had opted instead to suspend them, leading to a home of uncluttered simplicity, the effect of which was somewhat undermined by all the once-niggling and now barely tolerable incidences of disrepair they had given up on ever getting resolved. Damp was a major issue. In places, the paintwork was coming away in crumbling hunks. The boiler rattled and groaned. Hot water could not be relied upon. In several places, the linoleum of the kitchen floor had come completely away, revealing
bare, disintegrating floorboards beneath. Last month, a pipe in the flat upstairs had leaked, leaving a palebrown splotch like an outsized tea-stain on the ceiling.
Tired of battling for the television when Mia and Carl were mid-game, and desperate for something on which to fix her gaze so that she wouldn’t be forced to stare in mounting despondency at all the evidence of neglect around her, Trina had set up a small television in the corner of the dining area. She picked up the remote and turned it on, hoping for something mindless that would neither demand nor annoy.
‘Let’s see what we can find, huh?’ she said to Bella, who, perhaps because this television was producing less noise and drama than the one next door, appeared uninterested, and who was contenting herself instead with the drawstrings that hung from Trina’s hooded sweatshirt.
The problem with television as a medium for relaxation, at least as far as Trina was concerned, was that so much of it so rapidly and comprehensively annoyed her that she wound up more tense than if she’d just, as Mia had suggested far too many times that she should try to do, sat with Bella and savoured the moment. Following other notable trends in the direction of what, to Trina, was little more than faux-nostalgic, overly twee fantasy indulgence, British television had given itself over almost entirely to the perpetuation of a faded and frequently offensive English ideal. Clicking through the channels, grumbling softly to Bella as she went, Trina encountered first a programme in which everyone had to cook according to nineteen-forties rations, then a reality show based around the pressures of competitive knitting, and finally a much-discussed and supposedly narcotically addictive period drama set in the last days of the Raj in which glowing young Caucasians lay about on lawns wearing a uniform of pristine whites, picking at sandwiches handed to them by turbaned extras while professing to be ever so worried about the future. Unable to recognise either herself or any element of the world she inhabited in a single one of these shows, she decided to give up on all the regular channels completely and instead zone out with some news, which she hoped would prove less annoying than the tsunami of whitewashed nostalgia and chocolate-box history currently on offer everywhere else – a hope that was cruelly dashed the moment she was confronted by the smug visage of Hugo Bennington, a man whom Trina had actually, more than once, fantasised about killing.
