Wake Up Happy Every Day

by Stephen May

  There is no need to tell her about it being freelance work. Madam will probably want to insist that she get written permission from HR, a signed note from the minister. There would certainly be a form and notification needed for the tax people.

  Now Madam says, ‘Abkhazia? Is that really a place?’ And then she says, ‘Tough – he was a character, wasn’t he? So old school. Ancient school really.’ And the way she says the word ‘character’ makes it sound a bit like the word wanker. And she makes it sound like Tough is dead. Catherine really doesn’t like this woman.

  Madam rings off. The whole call has taken two minutes and twenty-four seconds and Catherine lies back on her bed and sighs. Then she plays through her recording of the conversation, makes a mental note of the important details and puts the phone in the full basin ready for binning later.

  It isn’t good practice to suddenly dump new work on people, but to be honest Catherine doesn’t mind. It’s always nice to have real stuff to do. Sometimes this life is just too much like the Army, too much waiting around.

  Twenty-seven

  NICKY

  The first time I am asked out: 2008 and it is my annual review. Sarah is my new line manager at the council and is discussing my personal objectives and the development plan that goes with them. I have already decided that Sarah is a big improvement on the previous senior manager in cultural services. She’s a looker for a start with her autumnal hair, her translucent, speckled skin, those appraising eyes a cool hydrogen-blue and, even more importantly, she seems to find the whole business as ridiculous as I do.

  ‘I see you’ve rated yourself as outstanding for every area of your work.’ She can’t quite keep the smile out of her voice. This is the system at the council. In negotiation with your manager you set yourself objectives and then, a year later, you rate yourself to see how you’ve done. Meanwhile, management also assess you and together you find a result that you can both live with.

  There are only three possible rankings: Outstanding, Good and Developing. As a matter of principle I rank myself Outstanding for everything. Of course I do, because then, when the line manager negotiates me downwards it’s hard for her to go all the way to Developing. We’ll probably have to stop off at Good. If I think I’m Outstanding and they think I’m Developing and we both stick to our guns, then there’s going to be tedious paperwork, additional interviews in the presence of our HR partner. A great big long stretch of precious flexi-time wasted over several weeks. Whereas this way we can all sort things pretty briskly.

  Can you tell I’ve been doing this kind of thing a long time now?

  And you’ll want a key to the terminology: Outstanding means doing OK, while Developing means doing a bit shit. There’s an alternative language in place in local government but the key that unlocks it is a simple one. Nearly everything equals shit. Developing means shit. Challenging means shit. Problematic means utterly, emphatically, impossibly shit. Though Challenging and Problematic are generally words we reserve for the general public and their insane ways.

  And I’m a small cog in the council machine so it’s not worth spending a lot of time working on my professional development plan with me. I’m the assistant in the cultural services team, which means I’m the one who sends out invites to private views, poetry readings, book launches and the opening nights of concerts to councillors and the local press. I maintain the cuttings file. I do a daily google search for news of any cultural events we might possibly be able to claim credit for for supporting.

  And quite often it’s me who has to meet the hopeful poets, writers, directors, actors, artists and musicians and explain why we can’t support their lunatic projects. We can’t even support worthwhile projects really. Cultural services give council-taxpayers’ money to the museum and to the football team, no one else really gets much of a look in. Though we might occasionally sling a few quid to the brass band for outreach work.

  Most of the time I don’t mind doing this saying no business. I’ve done a lot of boring jobs and in every single one of those menial jobs my co-workers were all experts at something. Everyone could do something brilliantly. It just wasn’t what they were paid to be doing. Even in my summer holiday job where I found myself working in the warehouse that just packed greetings cards, even there you found people who knew everything about classic cars; people who coached judo clubs all the way to black belt and beyond; blokes who could grow beautiful cauliflowers on the most unpromising of allotments; women who were champion pedigree dog breeders; men who regularly dug up Roman coins on metal-detecting weekends. You found real-ale connoisseurs. Amateur inventors, amateur astronomers, part-time magicians, Cordon-Bleu standard cooks. There was even an expert on the daughters of Coleridge and Wordsworth.

  These were people who dreamt of winning the lottery, not so they could lie on a beach all day, but so they could devote more time to their true calling. One soul-grinding job, in one faceless factory, in one drab industrial zone, in one dead town, and it contained so much varied and wasted human talent. Do the math – as they say here. Multiply that solitary greetings-card warehouse by the number of other similar places. Add all the call centres and offices, all the other hives and nests where human beings toil like termites – and, well, that’s a lot of experts putting their joys and expertise on hold. A lot of people kept away from their passions just so that stuff can be packed, filed, boxed, scanned, photocopied or otherwise moved from one place to another. Stuff that is shoved around for a bit, before ending up broken in a landfill somewhere where the poor live.

  Work is a shit way to spend your time and everyone knows it.

  And as far as I know, not one of these self-taught, self-financing, desperately self-actualising amateur experts ever went to the council to ask for a grant to pursue their dream. And yet poets, actors, novelists, directors, conceptual artists . . . Every week a pale goateed bloke comes to cultural services saying he ‘just needs time to write’. Or a woman who looks like she lives on seeds comes in to ask for a grant to buy welding equipment for her sculpture project. No actual welder comes in asking the council to buy his equipment for him.

  The sense of entitlement from the arty middle class is breathtaking. It’s always a pleasure to PP the letters that say no to these people.

  But saying no to poets is only one minor outcome as far as management in cultural services is concerned, so I have also had to come up with some objectives that specify engaging proactively with . . . Taking a hands-on partnership approach to . . . Encouraging ongoing stakeholder input in . . . Challenging myself to exceed expected competencies and organisational behaviours by . . . I can’t be sure of the exact wording because I do it on autopilot one lunchtime. But I must be generally okayish at my job, because I have survived no less than five restructures.

  And now I’m in Meeting Room Three in a building actually called The Hive, being gently interrogated by my hot new line manager. Who thinks of these names? Who thinks it’s a good idea to call a workspace a hive, with its clear mental picture of thousands of sexless drones slaving till death for one idle fatso.

  ‘Nicky, why are you here?’

  That’s the big question, isn’t it? Why are any of us here? And I’m stumped, and in any case I suspect the question is rhetorical and so it proves. ‘It seems to me you’re a bit overqualified for what you do.’

  Everyone at the council is overqualified. Even the receptionists have MAs. What she really means is – you’re a bit old for what you do. And I’m sure even hinting at that is explicitly against some employment code here.

  ‘I’ve got to pay the rent like everyone else.’ I’m irritated, so I’m curt. But she’s not fazed, she just smiles and says, ‘The rent, yes. That can be a bastard, can’t it?’ And then we talk engagement, proactivity, outputs and outcomes, service delivery and stakeholders for our allotted twenty-five minutes and, in the end, she agrees that my work has, indeed, been outstanding over the last year.

  I’m astonished, and I must look it because
she laughs as she says, ‘And this qualifies you for entry into our employee of the year cash draw.’ She’s not even joking. It turns out there really is such a thing. Huzzah! First time ever I’ve qualified for entry into the prize draw, the one I didn’t know existed, the one where the lucky winner gets a three-day spa break while ten runners-up get vouchers for seats at the ballet. The poor bastards. And then she asks me if I’d like to grab a bite to eat.

  She asks me out.

  ‘I hear you’re the office enigma,’ she says. ‘I want to find out all about you.’

  ‘You mean the office weirdo,’ I say and she laughs.

  ‘I prefer enigma,’ she says. ‘Everyone seems to like you – no one seems to know you.’

  She doesn’t want to go to Pret because there are too many council people there, so we go to the Golden Fleece, though it is frowned upon for council employees to be seen in the pub at lunchtime. Apparently the taxpayers don’t much like it. But not only do we go to the boozer, but she announces she needs a proper drink – ‘It’s been that kind of day’ – so I have a pint and she has a vodka and tonic – a drink I realise can be passed off as sparkling water should any vigilante from the Taxpayer’s Alliance take an interest in our order.

  And, most startling of all as far as I’m concerned, she orders pie and chips. At lunchtime.

  I have lived long enough to assume all girls, all women, have a dodgy relationship with food. Women are almost all semirexic. Forgive me if I generalise a bit here but women, it seems to me, have the same relationship to food that men have to pornography. They want it, they need it, they hate themselves for it and want to do it in secret after everyone else has gone to bed, or when they have the whole house to themselves.

  It’s as rare to find a woman who is unabashed about her appetite, as it is to find a bloke who announces to his office that he ‘watched Amateur Cumshot Compilation 3 on RedTube last night. What a movie that is. A classic.’

  You do meet those kinds of blokes from time to time, but not too often thank God.

  And I’ve never understood the fear of food. Because food is not porn. Being embarrassed about eating is being embarrassed about living, isn’t it?

  And yet, bizarrely, there is one food group that women are not afraid of or embarrassed by. Cake. Take it from me, local government offices are mostly about flexi-time and cake. Cake comes in for birthdays, for house moves, for news of engagements, births, weddings, christenings, driving tests, kids making the cross-country team or passing grade one piano. There is no news too small that it can’t be celebrated with chocolate brownies for the whole office.

  Obviously though, I’m not such an idiot as to ever say any of this out loud to the women I work with. No, I eat their cakes, I bring in my own cakes. I watch them fill the minutes between slices of cake with crispbreads and low-calorie soups and I say nothing.

  Anyway, that lunchtime, Sarah has pie and chips and then she has pudding. Black Forest gateau. And she doesn’t apologise once. By the end of that lunch I’m already a little bit in love. And when we come back to the office she looks up at the sign over the automatic doors of our building and says, ‘Council business used to go on in Town Halls, now it goes on in Hives. It’s depressing really.’ And she had me then. Completely.

  And over the next few weeks we go out to lunch a few times. And I tell her about accidental drift. How I trained as a teacher but quickly discovered that to be a high-school English teacher in modern Britain is to be a bad comedian in a hostile club. You have to deliver your terrible material six times a day to a crowd that would rather be somewhere else. And the heckling is vicious and it never ever stops. So I left, drifted through offices, shops, factories and warehouses before washing up at the council.

  She just nods. ‘My sister’s a teacher,’ she says. ‘She’s looking to get out.’

  And that’s something I did learn in my year and a bit of teaching. Teachers – they all want to leave school. No one hates school like a teacher does. No one feels like setting fire to the bogs more than the staff. When I was working in schools a teacher in Hampshire killed a kid, battered him to death with a chair in design technology. When we heard about it my head of department said, ‘One for our team.’ There was a slightly more cheery atmos in the staffroom that day. It was then I knew I had to leave. The council was a safe haven. Sarah nods. She gets it.

  We go to the movies. We go to the theatre. We go to the bleeding ballet. We have dinner. We kiss politely afterwards. I meet some of her many friends. I go to Sunday dinner at her parents.

  Then one weekend Russell flies into London to acquire something, or liquidate something. And we go to the dog track. It’s the most fashionable night out that year. He bets a ton a race. And mostly wins. He has a system. Of course he does. Russell always has a system. And it works. And he leaves £4K up. Most of which he gives to waitresses as tips. He buys £100 bottles of Krug. He talks brightly, wittily. He’s a hurricane of energy and charm. He calls everyone sweetheart. He shines. At least, that’s what I think.

  When he gets a cab home, Sarah sighs and says, ‘Thank God, he’s gone. I know he’s your oldest friend and everything, but I’m sorry, he is a complete arse.’

  I tell her not to be sorry. To think nothing of it.

  That’s the night we go to bed. We go straight to bed, we don’t even pause for drinks. We’re both of us more than ready for it. And it’s uncomplicated and fun. She sets to with an appetite – as you might expect. You know those things men and women do to and with each other? Turns out she knows them all and she loves them all. And she’s happy to wait while I learn them. While I play catch-up. I wasn’t exactly a virgin, but there were certainly gaps in my personal development. Gaps which Sarah identifies and makes sure I address. With her support I go from developing to outstanding pretty quickly. I think I do anyway.

  She’s a laugh. She really is.

  On the Monday after that first night I stop off at Greggs and buy every cake in the shop for my delighted co-workers.

  And six or seven months on, we’re in bed at hers. A lazy Sunday, Adele on the iThing.

  Sarah says, ‘So . . .’

  And I say, ‘So . . . what?’

  And she says, ‘So . . . we’re going out now, right? You are my boyfriend?’

  And I say, ‘It certainly looks like it.’

  And she says, ‘Good.’

  And then, later, at the Shoulder of Mutton where we often go for Sunday lunch, Sarah starts again ‘So . . .’

  And I laugh and say, ‘So . . . what?’

  And she says, ‘So . . . I want you to move in. And I want a baby.’

  I laugh and she laughs. And she says, ‘I’m going to have sticky toffee pudding and custard. Oh and, actually, Nicky, I’m not joking.’

  And I say, ‘Ah.’

  And she says, ‘Ah? Ah?’

  And then she orders pudding. I don’t have any dessert. I have a whisky. The house double, which is very good value.

  And back at her house she says, ‘Nicky, if you have regular sex with a thirty-eight-year-old woman, then you need to expect to have these conversations.’

  And she tells me that if I’m not into it I have to let her know right now because she’ll have time to get over me, to fall out of love with me. And then she’ll need time to meet someone else and fall in love with them, to trust them enough to want to have a baby with them, and then time to get pregnant by them.

  But actually I only really hear the bit where she says she’ll have to fall out of love with me, because that means she’s in love with me now, right? I seek and get clarification. It is, indeed, right. Right. And then she tells me I’m an idiot.

  And that afternoon there is more music – Dusty Springfield this time – and there’s more whisky and we make a start on a baby. And, eventually, just when we’re about to do the calculations about IVF and whether we could re-mortgage the house to pay for it, we make Scarlett.

  Babies turn out to be more complicated than love. L
ove is a cinch by comparison.

  At first it all seems easy. At first it just seems like a happily endless stream of cake-buying obligations. I’m moving in with Sarah – there’s cake. Sarah’s pregnant – there’s cake. We’re getting married. A rush job. But time for cake, naturally.

  We’ve had the first scan – cake. Second scan – cake. Third scan – cake. Maternity leave – cake. And suddenly there’s a baby. A real-live girl-child who slides out with ridiculously little trouble or trauma. A girl as pinkly slippery as a young salmon.

  We call her Scarlett. Yes, it is a lovely name, thank you. And how is she? She’s gorgeous, thank you. Beautiful. Happy. Smiley. Strong-willed though. She’s her mother’s daughter right enough. Oh and yes, she’s hemiplegic. Cerebral palsy. According to our Dr Joshi she has a neuromuscular mobility impairment stemming from an upper motor lesion in the brain as well as the corticospinal tract of the motor cortex. This damage impairs the ability of some nerve receptors in the spine to properly receive gamma amino fluid leading to hypertonia in the muscles signalled by those damaged nerves. Determined googling would seem to confirm Dr Joshi’s diagnosis.

  No cake.

  And then Sarah goes back to work. Should mean cake surely? Then she gets a new job at the uni. That should be cake too, right? Senior Lecturer in Management, which means more money plus she has the holidays and can be at home a lot more. In the normal world, the one we’ve left behind, this would definitely mean cake. Double cake. Cake overload. Cake frenzy. Cake apocalypse. Only we don’t feel much like cake any more.

  And Scarlett walks, eventually, though with a pronounced limp – or dynamic equinus as we call it in the trade – but she doesn’t start talking and so we stop too. Silence comes into our house like a thief. A professional burglar who knows where all the good stuff is kept and removes it a piece at a time so that it takes us a while to notice. And meanwhile sympathy waits on us outside like a policeman, ready to escort us everywhere, making sure we don’t get into trouble. I think sometimes that the sympathy might be worse than the silence. The policeman worse than the thief. Police and thieves. Neither are good. Neither are anything like cake.