Seeing the Wires

by Patrick Thompson

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, and took her bundle of papers and oddments to the filing cabinets. She seemed to be fine with filing. Perhaps the agency was going to send us a few decent people for a change. I’d always thought, by the law of averages, they must have at least one on their books, although I had no proof of this. It was more a matter of faith.

  There are a lot of employment agencies, and as a general rule you get what you pay for. Balanced against this is the consideration that for the price of two top-notch temps, you can get four or five shit ones from an agency with an office in a back alley in Stourbridge.

  That’s where the council got theirs.

  It was a small agency, as many are. All you need to set up an employment agency is an office – which can be as small as you like – with a few chairs and a few desks and, most importantly, a smattering of young women in crisp blouses. I’ve been a temp – I was sent to the building sites via an employment agency – and I know what I’m talking about. In the office of any employment agency, there will be some desks and chairs, a couple of desktop computers (one showing a screensaver of stars moving jerkily towards the viewer, the other with a half-finished hand of Solitaire laid out), and four young women in crisp white blouses. When you arrive, none of these young women will be the one who deals with whatever sort of work you want to do. That will be dealt with – always – by someone called Sharon. Sharon will always be out of the office, and she will always be the person you need to see. A discussion will ensue, involving three of the four members of staff. The fourth will just nip out to do some photocopying although there is a photocopier in the corner of the office. It will be decided that in the absence of Sharon, you’ll have to fill in this fifteen-page questionnaire and bring it back in when Sharon is available, shall we say next Wednesday?

  Having spent three days doing your best to indicate why you’d rather not travel over ninety miles to work, without prejudicing your chances of employment, and having done your best to hint that you’d rather not work in a sewer or a rendering plant or on an oilrig five miles off the Norwegian shore without actually saying as much, and having failed to fill in even the top third of the blank page on which you are supposed to write any helpful or relevant work experience you might have, you go back in to the office as agreed.

  The four young women in crisp white blouses are startled to see you. It had not occurred to them that you might return just because they told you to. They agree that you will need to talk to Sharon. Sharon is not in the office at the moment. She’s gone to head office to talk to someone. A discussion will ensue, involving two of the four members of staff. One of the others will pop out to do some photocopying, despite the fact that there is a photocopier in the corner of the office. The fourth will telephone her boyfriend and begin to arrange her weekend.

  It will be decided that in the absence of Sharon it would be a good idea if you did an aptitude test to see what sort of work you can do. You’ll be escorted to an uncomfortable chair based on the tubular metal motif, installed in it, and given a ream of A4 paper. On the papers will be vast numbers of absurd questions – what is the next shape in this series, how many times does the letter J appear in this sentence, if a dog walked for three miles a day where would it be by Easter? None of these questions appear to have any relevance to anything. You write the answers in spaces which are either too small for the answers, or so large that you feel you must have misunderstood the question. You finish the test and hand it to one of the women in crisp white blouses. Disgruntled, she hands it to one of the others, who puts it to one side and taps at the keyboard of the computer not currently involved in playing Solitaire. She tells you that your scores are fine, they’ll call you if there’s any work.

  You go home and wait for three weeks, and then they call you at four in the morning and ask whether you can get yourself five miles off the Norwegian shore, only there’s this job cleaning out the sewers under a rendering plant based on an old oilrig.

  Of course, this might just be me.

  The good thing about the temps we got from the agency was that they didn’t expect much. Even the tedium of entering meaningless information into pointless spreadsheets didn’t upset them. They didn’t want to do anything else. In fact, they didn’t want to do anything at all. The temps had very low expectations, and the council always failed to live up to them.

  It was strange. The council would happily throw money at projects with no hope of getting anything back, funding single-parent theatre groups and disabled access to coal mines, but they wouldn’t pay enough to keep good temps. We did have good temps, but never for long. They were poached by other team leaders, offering bribes I was unable to match – longer lunch hours, more holidays, pleasant company. My team did not feature in the list of Best Teams This Week, any week.

  Jane without a Y finished the filing and went for a cigarette behind the firedoor. I checked the cabinets. She had done very well. Our filing had never been straight. I had never felt much like doing it, and there had been a lot of it in a bothersome tangle. I wasn’t sure what all of it was – old planning applications, things that ought to have gone to other departments, expenses claims we hadn’t got round to, letters from pensioners complaining about the rudeness of those young fuckers, you name it. Jane had got all of it into order. On top of the filing cabinet there was a folder with a question mark neatly drawn on it. Inside, she’d put all of the things that didn’t belong anywhere else. She was much too good to be doing filing, I thought. Knowing the alphabet put her ahead of two-thirds of my team and three-fifths of management.

  I decided we had to keep her. If I could get one or two good workers I could get some results from the team. They’d get a bonus if they managed to be Best Team This Week. That would bring me to the attention of management in a more positive way than was usual. By the time Jane without a Y came back from her cigarette break, I had decided to take her on permanently. If Personnel got stroppy about it, I’d sort them out myself. I’m not a violent person, but it was a matter of principle.

  II

  Work finished. One minute I was on the telephone trying to get sense out of Personnel, and the next I was alone in the building because it was one minute after five. I made my way to the bus stop and waited for a bus. The next one that came was full downstairs, so I went upstairs. There was a lot of room upstairs, perhaps because of the group of youths smoking at the back just under the NO SMOKING stickers. There was a maniac in the top front seat, as usual. This one had a satchel, as usual. I have always wanted to know what they carry in their satchels but I have never felt at all like asking one of them. A wasp was also using the top deck of the bus for its own purposes, zinging crossly from window to window.

  The only other passenger was my best friend, Jack. He saw me before I could escape down the stairs.

  ‘All right,’ he said, as though he hadn’t spent our last few meetings accusing me of murder. ‘What you doing, then?’

  ‘Going home,’ I said, sitting on the seat opposite his. The wasp rushed past me on its way to the back.

  ‘Right,’ he said. He had a carrier bag less roomy than it needed to be. Hints of shapes were edging from it.

  ‘I had a day off,’ he said, ‘so I went to the shops.’

  ‘Oh. Are you allowed upstairs with all that ironmongery? Only you might make the bus fall over if we hit a sharp corner.’

  ‘Still hung up about my body, then?’

  There was a stir of interest from the back seats.

  ‘I have no interest in it at all,’ I said.

  ‘You’re freaked out by piercing. You know why? It’s not actually the piercing, at all. It’s the body. It’s skin. No wonder you’ve blocked out the murders.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

  ‘I bet you don’t. You didn’t mind talking about it at the time, though. Couldn’t shut up about it. When you were coming up with this bright idea to live for centuries. You were fine about it then. Now you’re just the mild-mann
ered team leader. Come on. Admit it. You must be able to remember some of it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Really.’

  I turned and watched the factories as we passed them. One by one they were closing for the evening, the lights going out and the steam dissipating. A canal wound between them, going nowhere important; cold anglers fished pointlessly from its banks. There were no fish in the canals. They had died out years ago.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said. ‘I am. Really. If you don’t remember it, then you don’t. I didn’t, until a few weeks ago. Then it started to come back, odds and sods. Perhaps you’re right and I got poked too hard at the tattooists. Perhaps it’s a dream. But I can see what we were doing. I can feel it. It’s up here all the time.’

  He tapped his head with a finger. There were sniggers from the back seats.

  ‘I’d know,’ I said, ‘I would. I couldn’t not know. It’s not about blocking things out or covering things up. It’s about not doing something. It’s about doing something I couldn’t do. I can’t watch cookery programmes if they bone a chicken. I have to leave the room when there’s a programme about vets on in case they unravel a dog. I couldn’t have done any of it.’

  ‘Whatever. We’ll drop it. I’ll say no more about it. Here, look, I treated myself today. With all of this on my mind, I needed a treat.’

  ‘What did you get?’ I asked, peeping at his bag.

  ‘Presents for Lisa, mostly. A box of chocolates and a thing to put the remote control in so you don’t lose it. A box of nails.’

  ‘What for?’ I asked, worried.

  ‘Mending the shed,’ he said.

  Their shed had been losing cohesion for several years. Lisa would nag at Jack to mend it, and he would say that he’d get round to it. I’d always assumed he didn’t mean a word of it.

  ‘Got a hammer as well,’ he said.

  ‘That’ll help. With the nails.’

  ‘Got this in town,’ he said, and rolled back his right sleeve. His lower arm was a mess of Celtic designs and reptiles. I don’t know a lot about art, but I knew that wasn’t it. In the crook of his elbow was what looked like a burn, a puffy red expanse of pained skin. Ignoring my better judgement, I looked more closely, and saw a design in the centre of the sore area.

  ‘Fucking hell, Jack,’ I said.

  ‘Good, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tattoo.’

  He flexed his arm. Small spheres of blood popped from the damaged flesh. The design was unclear, perhaps because I was avoiding looking at it.

  ‘I know it’s a tattoo. It’s either a tattoo or you’ve had your arm ironed to get the creases out. What’s it a tattoo of?’

  He looked at me.

  ‘It’s a street map,’ he said.

  ‘A street map? Where? Why?’

  ‘It’s a street map of Dudley,’ he said, flexing the arm again. Thick veins pushed the reptiles out of shape, and a new set of bloody beads rose from his street map.

  ‘Put it away,’ I said, ‘before someone asks for directions.’

  There were catcalls from the rear seats. The wasp, sick of the smoke, passed us and worked its way towards the maniac in the top front seat.

  ‘Repressed,’ said Jack, ‘is what you are.’

  ‘Better than insane.’

  We’d almost reached his stop.

  ‘You can’t keep avoiding me,’ he said, standing

  ‘I wasn’t,’ I lied.

  He sighed. ‘Look, Sam mate, we’ve been friends a long time. Haven’t we? Don’t let this mess us up. Come round and see us tonight. I won’t say anything about murders, honest. Lisa would like to see you. Fuck knows why, but that’s women for you.’

  It was the best offer I was going to get. Besides, I knew he’d keep asking until I agreed even if it meant he went fifteen stops too far.

  ‘I’ll come round,’ I said.

  ‘Good man. When?’

  ‘Seven?’

  ‘Don’t be fucking stupid, it’s Emmerdale at half past. You interrupt that and she’ll skin you … Make it eight.’

  He moved along the bus, threw himself around the pole and onto the stairs. His overstressed carrier bag followed him down and out of sight. I spent the rest of the journey listening to the jeers from the smokers at the back, wondering why the wasp didn’t sting them all to death.

  III

  Jack’s bag of nails got me thinking. Whenever Judy came round, she informed me that my house was untidy. She was right but I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried to tidy it sometimes but it resisted. It wanted to be untidy. Shelves would help it, I thought. Shelves would make it take pride in itself. I could pile stuff onto shelves, and then there would be space on the floor for furniture. Anyone could make shelves. You didn’t even need foundations. A few planks, a few nails, and there you were: shelves.

  I ran into snags immediately. I didn’t have a few planks. The only planks in the house were being used as floorboards. I didn’t want to clear the floor to that extent. I had an assortment of nails in a tin in one of the drawers under the kitchen sink. It’s a male instinct. There’s a primitive need to keep a tin of bent and odd-sized nails somewhere in the house in case they come in handy. I picked through the nails. Some were very long, some were very short. None were the right length. None were straight. There were some screws hiding among them. I put the top back on the tin and thought about it.

  I wanted to make shelves. It would make Judy happy, or at least less vocally unhappy. It would be something accomplished.

  It was a short walk to the hardware shop, down a gently sloping hill. I got a selection of planks and a smattering of nails. It wasn’t until I started walking back that I realized walking back would be difficult while I was carrying planks. For one thing, there was a hint of drizzle in the air. It was difficult to tell, what with the pissing rain, but there was a hint of drizzle in the air. I didn’t want to wait for a bus. The buses had never been reliable. I once asked Judy why they bothered to put timetables in bus stops.

  ‘Got nowhere else to put them,’ she said.

  I started to walk. It wasn’t as easy as the walk down the road. The hill was gentle on the way down. It was hard on the way back up. The bundle of planks became heavier. I thought that this was because my arms were getting tired, and then I noticed that the planks seemed to be getting fatter.

  This was because they were getting fatter. They were absorbing rain. I began to think that they were attracting rain.

  I’ve noticed that rain doesn’t wet everybody. Some people can walk through a downpour and they’re dry. I walk through a downpour and keep most of it.

  I got home and put the planks on the floor. They’d swollen. The string bundled around them was taut. I picked a knot loose and the planks sprang free.

  They weren’t just swollen. They were warped in all directions.

  Never mind, I thought. This isn’t a delicate job. Once they’re nailed together they’ll be forced to be straight. I found the hammer in the bathroom cabinet, where it had been for a year or two. Every time I saw it there I meant to put it away, but I didn’t. At least I knew where it was. If I’d put it away I’d never have found it.

  I approached the planks with the hammer and my new nails.

  ‘Right you bastards,’ I told them. ‘Fucking behave.’

  I selected the three that were going to be shelves, and the two that would be the ends. I did some rough measurements and then nailed the lot together.

  They turned out surprisingly well. There were one or two bent nail incidents, and some unnecessary splitting on the part of one of the planks, but overall the materials showed less truculence than I’d expected. The head of the hammer only flew off once, and it didn’t hit anything breakable. I heaved the new shelves upright and dragged them to the wall. They leaned in several directions.

  ‘Don’t,’ I told them. I began to pile on the things that had been in piles on the floor, books and CDs, sp
are nails, old TV guides, cushions.

  I hadn’t bought any cushions. Judy must have sneaked them in.

  I bundled as much as possible onto the new shelves. They failed to fall down. The weight of rubbish held them solid.

  I put the remaining nails on the top shelf, in a saucer that had something dried in it. It seemed like a good place for nails. It wasn’t as though they’d be giving me any trouble, I thought, wrong as usual.

  IV

  A few hours later I was waiting with a bottle of Macedonian wine outside Jack’s house and trying not to look like a burglar. This made me look like a burglar.

  I was waiting for it to be late enough for Emmerdale to have finished. I’d been waiting a long five minutes and there was a longer ten minutes still to go. I hadn’t planned on being early. That was Judy’s fault.

  She’d thought about coming with me. I had to keep saying it’d be nice if she did. I wasn’t much bothered either way to tell the truth. I saw her almost every night. This long-standing relationship business took up a lot of time. You couldn’t skip a meal or stay up until four in the morning playing on the Playstation. It was like being a child again. It was like living with an adult again.

  Not only couldn’t you skip meals, you couldn’t eat a lot of things you’d taken for granted up until then. There were rules about food that only Judy knew. You couldn’t have chips two days in a row. They’d make you fat and spotty.

  You could eat barrowloads of chocolate all day long, and that made you fat and spotty and gave you the runs into the bargain, but that was fine because chocolate was an approved substance. I knew what the rules for approved substances were: if Judy liked them, they were approved. If I liked them, it was best to keep quiet about it.

  She’d been undecided all day. She called me at work and asked me whether it would be a good idea if she came along. She could talk to Lisa. She asked me what Lisa was like.