Little Black Everything
Page 30
“No, Eddie,” I said, “it’s nothing to do with my hair.” I wasn’t at all disturbed by his contribution. He wasn’t trying to be malicious or even amusing. He could see that I was upset and he knew that I’d been unhappy about my hair. He’d put the two together, that was all. He was really asking.
“Okay,” Eddie said and smiled for a fraction of a second. He tore off then, as if frightened by a loud noise.
I watched his back as he made his way to the photocopier, wondering if that was the longest conversation he’d had all morning. Then I told myself that I was inventing a sob story where one didn’t necessarily exist. For all I knew, Eddie spent his evenings sipping champagne in fancy restaurants with a succession of sex-addicted lingerie models. When I turned back to face my computer, Veronica was half-standing again and making kissy faces. It was her firm conviction that Eddie fancied me. She seemed to have based this theory on nothing but the fact that once in a blue moon, the previous incident being a prime example, he spoke to me without my speaking to him first. He didn’t do that with anyone else, not according to Veronica at any rate.
“Eddie and Jackie up a tree!” she chanted. “K-I-S-S-I– ”
I threw the cap of a yellow highlighter at her and was pleased to see it bounce off her forehead and land in her coffee.
If I hadn’t found the e-mail straight away, I might have given up and turned to the eight-inch-high pile of data that was teetering by my left elbow, waiting to be entered. My stress level would still have gone up, no doubt, but it wouldn’t have instantly doubled the way it did when I got a look at the e-mail. The gist of the thing was this: tardiness had become a serious problem for First Premier and was affecting its ability to meet targets, going forward (as opposed to backwards or sideways). Management weren’t callous, unfeeling monsters – as if – and could forgive an occasional five-minute slip-up here and there. However! Persistent offenders could no longer expect to get away scot-free. The new system (they called it a system four times) was points-based. If you arrived for work five to ten minutes late, you got a single point. Ten to fifteen minutes late, got you five of them. Fifteen to thirty, you got ten. Half an hour plus, you got twenty. Anyone who scored more than thirty points in a month had to do a forfeit. At that point the e-mail stopped being irritating and started being excruciating. In a breezy, matey I-Can’t-Believe-We-Get-Paid-To-Work-Here! tone, it revealed that transgressors would be obliged to wear a special tardiness hat for one whole working day. Anyone who refused to play along would be excluded from all social club activities until they did what had been asked of them. They would also be named and shamed as a “spoilsport”. There was a photo attached to the e-mail. It showed a dunce’s cap with a letter T where the D should have been. When I finished reading, all I felt was relief. I didn’t give two hoots, one hoot even, about the social club; if I really wanted to go to a pub quiz or karaoke night, I was sure I’d be able to organise it myself. And, I thought, they could name me every day until 2050, I’d still never be shamed. This meant that I could ignore the entire policy, hat and all. The relief didn’t last long though. It was swept away almost immediately by bitter, jagged anger. Why hadn’t they just declared that employees who were consistently late would be chucked out of the social club? Or fired, for that matter? Why bother with all the nonsense in between? Why did it have to be “fun”? It was Fancy Dress Friday all over again. That was a one-off event that had brightened all our lives a few months previously (it wasn’t supposed to be a one-off; it just worked out that way). I didn’t know how it had gone company-wide, but in Data Entry there were precisely three takers, out of a possible thirty-something. Jenny came as Wonder Woman and a bloke called Terry came as a vampire. They looked ridiculous, of course, mooching from their desks to the water cooler and back, but at least they had hired proper costumes. The third participant was Eddie. He came as a Roman gladiator in a bunch of kit he’d made himself out of cardboard, tinfoil and other cardboard. Not once, all day long, did he remove his helmet. It had taken him several hours to perfect, he said, and he was determined to get good wear out of it.
“Did you read this rubbish about the tardiness hat?” I called out to Veronica.
She looked up from her keyboard. I could see the top half of her head over the partition. The top half of her head looked surprised.
“Yeah,” she said. “I saw it a fortnight ago with the rest of the company. Did you hear about John Lennon? Shot dead!”
I ignored the last part and went back to fuming. It was just about then that the first six-inch nail was driven into my skull. I had no sooner registered the news that my day was going from bad to much, much worse when my mobile phone jangled in my handbag. The caller was Robert, my eldest (by twelve minutes). I couldn’t remember the last time he had called me and said something I wanted to hear. The smart thing to do, I told myself, would be to ignore it and get back to my impending headache. But it’s never easy to ignore your own flesh and blood. And so, like an eejit, I answered the damn thing.
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