by Liam Livings
Odd. Funny. I’d not done anything dodgy with the phone or work laptop. No exotic sites had been browsed, either at home or in the office. I wasn’t that stupid. Every website was either work related, or something I could show my mother or Charlie without embarrassment.
I drank my tea and waited for nine o’clock, then used my desk phone to call IT. The technician asked me to wait where I was—someone would be with me shortly.
An IT technician arrived with the Friendly HR Lady behind. The technician took my laptop and work phone and disappeared. The Friendly HR Lady handed me a box once used to hold A4 printer paper. “You’ve got five minutes to clear your desk. I’ll wait here. Take your personal things only.”
“What’s happening? Can I speak to Charlie, please?” I leant across the desk to dial my manager’s extension.
Not So Friendly HR Lady said, “He knows. Empty your drawers and put your belongings in the box, please.”
“What have I done? What’s happened? I saw him earlier this week, and he said everything was going well. What changed?”
“Unexplained absences.” She handed me a letter.
I started to read it through blurry eyes. I caught the odd word—“termination of contract, immediate effect, one month’s salary in lieu of notice.”
“Have you got all your things?” she asked, looking at my desk.
I put my belongings into the box, picked up my bag, and grabbed my coat from the peg on the wall in the corner of the area I’d called my office.
She walked me to the glass revolving doors and watched me leave the building, taking my security pass and ID badge from around my neck.
And then I was outside the shiny glass-and-metal building where I had thought I was starting my career in banking, until ten minutes before.
I blinked in the bright light, unclear how I was suddenly outside the building I’d expected to spend the day in… and the following week, and the week after.
I called Amy and told her what had happened.
“Wait there. I’ll meet you.”
“No, I don’t want you losing your job too. I just wanted to tell you so that saying it out loud would help me understand and get to grips with what’s just happened.”
“Just like that, no proper explanation. What does the letter say?”
I read the letter:
Dear Richard,
Re: Termination
We are terminating your contract of employment with immediate effect. We are not legally obliged to give a reason for this due to your current length of service being less than two years. We wish you well in your future endeavours. We have paid your contractual entitlement of a month’s salary in lieu of notice and in addition included payment for the twelve days of annual leave you had not yet taken in the current leave year.
Many thanks,
SF, Head of Human Resources
“Many thanks?” Amy was incredulous.
“I know. It’s a slap in the face, isn’t it?”
“What’s been different this week from before?”
I told her about visiting Mum in hospital. “I told Charlie the first day. He said to take all the time I needed. So I did.”
“Did you tell him you were going back afterwards?”
“He said take as long as I needed. So I did,” I repeated.
“I think that’s where you might have gone wrong.”
I held my head in my hands and started to cry, collapsing onto the ground.
“On my way.”
“No. Fuck off. Do not come. If you lose your job, I’ll not forgive myself. I’m fine. Really fine. I’m going home. Talk to you later.”
From my Tube station, I walked and soon found myself in the graveyard near my flat, where I’d met the old man. I spent a while reading headstones. I’d thought I was indispensable at work. I bet these people had thought they were indispensable too. Until they weren’t. I felt the lichen-covered stone of an enormous mausoleum. On either side of the doorway stood an angel in a long dress. The tops of their wings were worn smooth from the weather. The angel on the right had its nose missing.
“Can I help you, Richard?” came a voice behind me.
I turned to see the old man from the little hut.
I looked around the cemetery, looking at the headstones stretching as far as I could see into the distance. “They sacked me.”
He nodded. “And you’ve been looking for another one of these, haven’t you?” He pulled a perfect white feather from his pocket and held it in front of my face.
“I was looking for something.”
“You might have to strap yourself in for a bit of a bumpy ride.”
“I don’t have a car.” What on earth was this not creepy, but definitely pretty odd man talking about?
“The Higher Ones, they sometimes swap things around, up there.” He pointed to the sky. “And us poor buggers down here, we just have to deal with what’s thrown at us by whoever is looking after things.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Richard, you know about the sabbaticals and the temps?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t ready to tell the old man about all that weirdness.
“Then you know. You know what happens. I don’t need to tell you again.”
I turned to the mausoleum and stared at the angel with the intact nose. What to say to this? How to respond? I turned back to the old man, but he was nowhere to be seen, so I quickly walked to his little hut. It was locked.
I’m clearly having a bad reaction to my medication. That cannot have just happened. There’s something odd about this whole graveyard place.
I arrived at my flat and felt the silence like a physical force throughout. On my way home, I’d spent the whole journey staring at others my age, thinking What are you doing now, why aren’t you at work?
I switched the TV on, for some company more than wanting to watch anything. With the TV in the background, I made myself some lunch: a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. I returned to the living room and watched some programme about antiques, or houses, or a rerun of Columbo—I switched between channels while munching.
This isn’t so bad. I could get used to this. Onwards and upwards. I can find myself a new job.
I sipped my tea, and it tasted sour. The milk was off. Why hadn’t I noticed that as I poured it into the mug? I hugged my legs under me on the sofa and sniffed. I had a cold. It had crept up behind me and taken me hostage just that morning. Yesterday I could have told you the milk was off from ten paces. But not today.
I went to the cupboard for a blanket as I’d started shivering. “I’ll start job-hunting tomorrow,” I said to myself, out loud. “Wonder if the shoe shop still wants me?”
Better stop this. Therein lay madness.
I called the shoe shop, which I hadn’t got back to before, such was my enthusiasm for the bank graduate training scheme position. Once the woman remembered who I was, she went quiet, then said they didn’t have any vacancies but I could call in a few months.
In a few months… I’d be on the bones of my arse finance-wise by then. I checked the letter Siobhan had given me. I had a month’s pay to last me… a month, I supposed.
I started to tidy the kitchen from making my lunch. After wiping just one work surface, I felt exhausted, like I’d run from the office to home.
I’ll just have a little lie-down.
I woke when it was dark outside. My whole body ached, and I could hardly lift my head from the pillow.
Man flu. It had to be.
I texted Bobby, told him about work, then told him not to come round because of the man flu. He texted straight away, saying he’d call later. I replied that I was too tired and would call him tomorrow. There wasn’t really anything to talk about. I’d been fired, and I had flu.
“It is what it is,” as Mum was so fond of saying.
The next day I woke midmorning, my head full of gunk and my body still aching to my bones. I looked at the glass of water on my bedside table. My
throat was dry. The glass might as well have been in the next building. My body refused to comply with my brain, and I couldn’t reach for the water. Next to the glass, something caught my eye. A perfect, large, white feather.
This one was white, perfectly formed, and large. Just like the other feathers.
I summoned all my strength and grabbed it, holding it to my chest, stroking it gently. I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting to happen, having been told in no uncertain terms by Sky that he wasn’t a genie and I couldn’t summon him, but I continued all the same.
After a couple of days, I dragged myself to the sofa and switched the TV on. I’d spoken to Mum before leaving bed. She was out of hospital now, but only just. They were keeping her “under observation,” and she was to call if anything changed. Her temperature had returned to normal, and she was eating and drinking again.
“At least that’s over,” I had told her earlier that morning.
“Not quite yet. I’m not out of the woods yet, the hospital said,” she replied.
“Oh.”
“They said it could have gone either way. They said at one point they were keeping a bed for me in ICU.”
“Right.”
“Enough about me, what’s this I heard about you losing your job?”
“Exactly that. You’ve got it. And I’m sick. And I’m bored, literally going out of my head here, all on my own.”
“Hasn’t whatshisname, the man you’re seeing, or Amy come to visit you?”
“I told ’em not to. I didn’t want them catching it off me.”
Amy arrived, with a bag of essential oils. “When was the last time you had a bath? Never mind… put some in a bowl of hot water, put a towel over it, and rest your head over the bowl. It’ll clear up your chi and other blockages.”
“It’s gonna take more than that to unblock my chi. I’ve been on Night Nurse since it started, and Day Nurse in the day. Some days I hardly know who I am. It’s fabulous.” I smiled weakly. “Thanks for coming. It’s really good of you.”
“Do you want me to help you with your CV?”
“I’m too ill. Don’t worry.”
“It gives us something to do. You said you were bored, when you called. You said you were going out of your head with boredom because you hadn’t done anything. Let’s give it a go. I’ll type, and you tell me what to say. Or just sit there, breathing in the essential oil fumes.”
“The what fumes is it now?”
Amy disappeared into the kitchen, then reappeared with a bowl of hot water and towel.
I assumed the position while she turned my laptop on. “Is the battery dead?”
“No, it’s fine. Plug it in, though.”
“Still nothing.” She continued to coax my laptop back to life, but nothing doing. “We can use a printout, and I’ll type it on my phone and email it to you afterwards. What’s your Wi-Fi code?”
I gave her the code and waited. The steam and smells were starting to send me asleep.
“Richard, sweetie, it’s not working. Says to contact the Internet provider.”
“Just use your phone. That’s got to work.”
“Okay, so the first paragraph’s a bit weak.” I heard rustling of paper as she held the printout.
We worked well together for an hour or so, and I even started to feel halfway normal again. My head unblocked at least partially.
“I’m cold. Can you turn the heating up, please?” I was shivering now.
Amy stood and adjusted the thermostat on the wall, stopping on the way back to feel the radiator in the living room. “Cold. It’s cold. No wonder you’re freezing—it’s off. Is this you saving money? ’Cause if it is, I think that with a cold, you’d be better having it on.”
“It’s been on Constant since I got up.”
Amy went to the kitchen and inspected the boiler cupboard. Sucking air through her teeth, she proclaimed it wasn’t looking good. “No pilot light, no numbers, no lights, nothing.”
“Fucking marvellous, exactly what I need.”
“Do you want me to call someone to sort it out?” Amy was rifling through the Yellow Pages already.
An emergency plumber and three hundred quid later, I was told, amid much teeth-sucking and the odd “Doesn’t look good, mate,” that it was sadly “new boiler time.” And I was looking at the thick end of two grand for the pleasure.
“You can’t just leave it, Rich. What’ll you do for hot water? It’s winter. You’ll never get better if you’re not warm.”
“If I don’t get a job, I won’t be here much longer anyway. I’ll have to sell it and move back home to Mum’s.”
“You can’t do that. That’s properly admitting defeat that the London dream is over and you can’t handle it. I didn’t do it, so I’m not letting you do it. I won’t take no for an answer. Is that clear?”
“It’s hardly the same. My mum lives just round the corner in a suburban bit of North London. Your parents live in the depths of the Welsh valleys, with not a shop or mobile phone signal for miles around. If I have to move back to Harrow—the cheap bit, Harrow and Wealdstone—I’ll live.”
“How long do you reckon you can pay the mortgage before you get a job?”
“If I don’t eat, or heat, or drink, two months tops. No more. But only if I don’t eat, mind.”
“Why don’t you ask Bobby to move in? Weren’t you talking about it anyway? Well, this has just hurried it up a bit.”
“He mentioned it once, because we spend so much time at each other’s places. But I doubt he’d want to leave his loft apartment and all the shiny chrome and black leather for this place.” I gestured around the flat at the more-shabby-than-chic furniture, walls I’d not decorated since moving in, and piles of washing drying on air dryers behind the sofa.
“You won’t know if you don’t ask him!”
“Can you go now? I’m feeling really tired. I think you’ve done more than enough for today. If you leave the letter and CV with your notes on the side, that’s great. Can you email me what we worked on, and I’ll pick it up… when I have Wi-Fi again?”
She stood, waved childishly, and left, shouting as she was at the door. “Make sure you call him, or I’ll talk to Pat, and she’ll talk to Bobby, and you don’t want it going all around the houses, do you?”
The door slammed behind her, and she was gone.
I sniffed at myself as I lay on the sofa. Amy was right: I could do with a wash. Somehow I managed to summon the energy to boil all my saucepans of water and summoned up enough for a bath that came up to my hips. I lay in the water, wondering which part of my life I would tackle next. I remembered our bath together in Margate and smiled. Wondering if I really could ask Bobby to move in with me, or if that was possibly the worst idea ever.
I opened my eyes and noticed a shape in the mirror by the sink. Remembering the white feather, I leapt out of the bath and wiped the mirror clear of condensation. The shape was definitely there, but it was definitely not Sky.
“Hello? Anybody in there?” I peered into the mirror.
“All right, all right, wait a minute and I’ll….”
The shape walked closer and closer to the mirror until it became clear. It was a large woman with an enormous smock covering a pair of breasts that I was sure were giving her backache.
“Who are you? What happened to Sky?”
“Thanks, that’s lovely of you. Nice to be wanted, isn’t it? I’m Kylie. I’m covering for Sky while he’s away.”
Her voice had a strong Australian twang, and she ended almost every sentence with an upwards inflection, so at first I thought everything she said was a question.
“Away? Where away? When’s he coming back?” I remembered I was naked and grabbed a towel.
“Seen it all before, sweets? Remember, we can see you all the time?”
I wrapped the towel around my waist and climbed out the bath. “Sky? Where’s he gone, please?”
“He’s gone on a sabbatical. I’m covering for him?
The agency sent me. I was just finished with a few months with this girl from Sydney, actually. It was her summer holidays or something. It’s your winter, but their summer, or some shit. Didn’t really pay much attention when they gave me the handover notes. The only thing I really did all summer was stop her getting bitten by a snake when she went camping with her school. The rest of the time, I just watched and did my nails. Look, they’re nice?” She showed me her perfect half-inch-long white nails, and waved them in the air.
Honestly? “How was her summer, apart from the snake?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“She didn’t do as well at her exams as she thought? Boohoo for her. Her best friend is now going out with her boyfriend. Strewth, that was a fun argument to watch. I got a front row seat for that one, I can tell ya. I’d have sold tickets to the others, but it’s not allowed. I pulled myself a chair, settled down with some snacks, and watched it all unfold. I’d have sold tickets—”
“Yeah, you said, but you’re not allowed. How was the rest of the time you were covering? Any life-threatening diseases? Any missing limbs or suchlike?”
“Oh no, I didn’t let anything like that happen. I’m not a monster. Apart from her failing her driving test again and her car bursting into flames during the test, she’ll be right.”
“You stood by and watched her car burst into flames?”
She picked a nail file out of her smock and began filing her nails. “Like I said, I could’ve sold tickets. She’ll be right. Car’s insured—she can take another test. And anyway, her normal guardian angel’s back now: she’s returned from her sabbatical. Wonder if I’ll get to go on one…?”
She stared at her nails and moved the file along to a different nail.
“Do the temp angels normally get to go on sabbaticals?” Sky hadn’t mentioned anything about that.
