The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  There were a number of nods, and significant grunts, from the other heads of department. Southam went on to explain the new marketing plan his department had developed to cope with the changed situation. I took the minutes diligently, listening to what he was saying, but not troubling to comprehend it.

  When he had finished speaking my boss turned to Haines from purchasing. Haines’s arms were crossed and with the inside edge of each middle finger he was methodically rubbing the nap of suiting stretched over either elbow. He spoke quietly and expressionlessly, with his eyes fixed on the corporate logo opposite him.

  ‘I think that purchasing can report a success almost exactly congruent with that of marketing. Since last month a further 37 per cent of our purchasing has been reconfigured so as to come from within the Company. This means that 97 per cent of the goods and services we now purchase are sourced from the Company itself.’

  In due course, Thribble from sourcing confirmed these figures. The reporting process continued on round the table, in an anti-clockwise direction. I concentrated on the high-pitched ‘eek-eek’ my fibre-tipped pen made as it steeplechased along the narrow feint. I didn’t shut down my automatic dictation pilot until everyone had made their report. Then my boss turned to me and said, ‘I think it would be a good idea if, while we discuss the next item on the agenda, you type up the minutes you’ve taken so far. You can leave the dictaphone running and I’ll bring it down when we’ve finished. I think everyone present would like a copy of the minutes relating to the final phase of the corporate restructuring as quickly as possible.’

  There was a scattering of grunted assents to this. I gathered up my pad and, nodding to my boss and the other heads of department, left Conference Room 2.

  When I reached the stretch of corridor leading to my office, for no reason that I could think of, I parted two of the vertical textured-fabric louvres that cover the window by the door to my boss’s office. From this vantage I could see Conference Room 2 in its entirety, hovering up above me. The heads of the heads of department were outlined by the room’s windows. As I stood and watched, someone – I think it may have been Southam – rose from the table and walked around the room, pulling the lengths of chain that snapped the louvres shut.

  I went into my office. I knelt down to switch on my laserprinter. As I had the previous afternoon, I leant my forehead against the crossbar of the workstation.

  It was still there. The beaten path that my varnished nail had cut for the rest of my finger, through the eighth-of-an-inch pile of nylon undergrowth. I stared at it for some minutes in disbelief. Then I tried some experiments: I pushed my nails this way and that through the carpet-tile pile; now combing it, now ploughing it. Using one finger, or two, or the whole hand. These actions made streaks of crushed nylon filaments, but they soon sprang back up. Only the path I had created the day before – the really tiny event – remained a reality.

  After a short while I grew bored with this. I stood up, turned on my computer, and made ready to type up the minutes of the inter-departmental meeting. I accessed the file with the previous month’s minutes in it, and created a new file; I set my pad on the stand and began to type:

  The meeting was called to order and the Chairman asked T. Southam, head of marketing, to present the results of the implementation of the last phase of corporate restructuring. T. Southam reported that since last month a further 37 per cent of the marketing department’s allocated spend had been redirected towards internal marketing. As of the 5th of this month a total of 97 per cent of the department’s total budget is now dedicated to the internal market …

  The pattering of my nails on the keys faltered and died away. I stared at the paragraph I had just typed. The cursor blinked at me from the VDU, the complicit eye of a machine intelligence. Without analysing what I was doing I saved the file and reentered the file for last month’s minutes. The text scrolled down the green screen. I read:

  The meeting was called to order and the Chairman asked T. Southam, head of marketing, to present the results of the implementation of the last phase of corporate restructuring. T. Southam reported that since last month a further 37 per cent of the marketing department’s allocated spend had been redirected towards internal marketing. As of the 5th of this month a total of 97 per cent of the department’s total budget is now dedicated to the internal market …

  I felt sick – sick like vomiting sick. I got up from the workstation and walked to the window of my office. I adjusted the vertical textured-fabric louvres slightly, so that I could open the window and get some fresh air. I took deep breaths and stared down into the light well my window looks out on. I counted the paper cups that lay four storeys down, I counted the pigeons that were perched on the ledges four storeys up, I counted the fingers of one hand off on the fingers of the other, and then reversed the process.

  I felt the swelling feeling, and the awful, tight vacuity, worse than ever before. I stood there for a long while, my hand lightly brushing the dusting of yellow and mauve pimples under the softening, water-retaining line of my jaw.

  Then I went back to the computer, altered the date at the head of the minutes of last month’s inter-departmental meeting, and hit the keystrokes necessary to print out the document.

  At five I finished up my work for the day. I had transcribed the tape of the latter half of the inter-departmental meeting and left a copy in my boss’s in-tray. I now made my list of tasks for the following day and then began to tidy my desk.

  But halfway through ordering my pens and papers I had an idea. Instead of aligning everything just so, as usual, I would engage in a little exercise. Using my ruler to calculate the angles – so this would be precise – I shifted the computer keyboard, the desk blotter and the mouse mat out of alignment by two or three degrees. This alteration was so slight as to be barely perceptible to the naked eye, but I knew it was there.

  Then I went home.

  Tonight, eating a late supper in front of Newsnight on the television, it came to me, the expression I really needed to describe the man from personnel. VPL. There used to be an advert on television in which puckered bottom after puckered bottom would float across the screen. Buttock after buttock after buttock, all bobbling away and contained by stretchy cloth beneath the stretchy cloth. VPL – Visible Panty Line. That’s what they called it. If you bought their underwear you were free of it, but if you didn’t you were condemned to an elastic jail.

  That’s what he has. Except that it isn’t just his bottom – it’s his whole body. Every limb and portion of the man from personnel’s body is contained in an elasticated pouch, the seams of which show up from under his implausible clothes. What has he got on under there? Some complicated harness that braces his entire body? Some sacred garment enjoined by the Latter Day Saints? Who knows.

  The radio woke me at seven-fifteen this morning, and this time there was no doubt in my mind. I got up and stood, looking out of my bedroom window for a long time, marvelling at the limpidity, the utter voidness of the sky.

  There was no blood last night and this morning there was no blood in the sleep-warmed sanitary towel either. I stood for quite some time in front of the mirror, scrunging the insides of my thighs; catching up painful bunches of my own flesh and feeling the individual pores between my pincering fingertips. Then I pressed down hard on my belly with both palms and pushed a wave of flesh down to my pudenda, as if I were a giant sponge and I could somehow squeeze the blood out of myself. I repeated this operation a number of times, not really expecting it to work, but thinking it was worth a try.

  But I wasn’t frightened. Throughout this whole period I haven’t felt frightened at all. Perhaps I would feel less disturbed, if only I could get frightened. Perhaps I don’t really care that I’ve stopped menstruating, or that the days are unchanging, or that events tirelessly repeat themselves. Or perhaps I’ve simply adjusted – as people do.

  In the kitchen I examined the wash of pale light that fell across the draining board. It wa
s at precisely the same angle as yesterday. And my bath, gurgling away with a froth of bubbles and white water outside the kitchen window, was frothing in exactly the way that it did yesterday. I greeted the miniature cumuli, sparkling oily greens and blues, like old friends. Childlike, I allowed myself to imagine that I was weightless and miniscule, that I could roam and romp in this pretty, insubstantial gutterscape.

  I had an errand to do on the way to work this morning which made me a little late. It was ten to nine before I mounted the wide concrete stairs that lead to the Company’s offices. At this hour there was a steady trickle of employees entering the building, but it hadn’t yet swelled into the cataract of personnel that flows through the turbine doors between five to and five past.

  During those ten minutes at least 90 per cent of the Company’s workforce arrive: secretaries, clerks, canteen assistants, data processors, post-room operatives, maintenance men, as well as middle managers of all shapes and sizes; and, of course, executives. They all crowd in, anxious to be seen arriving on time. The subordinates in a hurry to be there before their bosses, and the bosses in a hurry to be there before their subordinates.

  But even at ten to, the foot traffic was light enough for people to observe at least nominally the pleasantries of the morning. These consist not in salutations to colleagues, but in the greeting you give to the commissionaire, Cap’n Sidney.

  Cap’n Sidney stands in a booth by the security turnstile. He wears a white peaked cap, and a black serge uniform. The epaulettes on his shoulders are blancoed beyond belief. He stands there erect, the awareness that he is the Company’s first line of defence written into every line of his face.

  Young male employees flirt physically with Cap’n Sidney. They duck and weave as they show him their security passes. They want to give him a little action and so they wave their uncalloused hands in his face, saying things like, ‘Howzit going there, Sidders,’ and, ‘Mind out for the old one-two.’ Cap’n Sidney grins benignly and replies, ‘Now, Rocky Marciano – there was a boxer.’

  Older male employees, perhaps believing that their M & S blazers remind Cap’n Sidney of the officers he served fifty years ago, will touch the tips of their fingers lightly to their foreheads as they pass through the turnstile. It is the merest feint, a tiny gesture towards the communality of the past; and Cap’n Sidney returns it in the same spirit, with a touch of his nicotine-mitted hand to the peak of his cap.

  Older female employees always say ‘Good morning’ to Cap’n Sidney with exaggerated care – as if he were an idiot or an imbecile. And he always says ‘Good morning’ back to them with exaggerated care – as if they were idiots or imbeciles.

  Young female employees say ‘Good morning’ to Cap’n Sidney, and they touch him with their eyes. Cap’n Sidney is their talisman, their wise old uncle. He understands that, says ‘Good morning’ in reply and examines their breasts, as if they were security passes.

  Cap’n Sidney never says ‘Good morning’ to me, no matter how early I arrive at work. When it comes to me Cap’n Sidney is oblivious. It’s not that he’s rude, or insensitive – after all he simply can’t salute every single Company employee, there are far too many of us. It’s just that we’ve never really met; and now, over thousands of mornings, a natural reserve has built up between us. It would be all right if some colleague of mine – whether a clerical-weight boxer, officer class, or the Right Breasts – were to introduce us, put us at ease with one another; then I too could become a warm, sincere, ten-second friend of Cap’n Sidney.

  This is unlikely to happen.

  The strangest of things, though; the last six weeks – which we may call the non-period for the sake of convenience – have marked an apparent shift in my lack-of-a-relationship with Cap’n Sidney. During this non-period, when I have approached his booth, pass held level at the convenient height, by the lobe of my right ear, Cap’n Sidney’s eyes have narrowed. And I have thought that, for the spilt-second my face was turned towards his, as I slid through the turnstile, his expression had a little more openness about it, that something writhed – ever so slightly – beneath his moustache.

  The VPL man was in the lift. He smiled at me quite innocently, but as we ascended his presence there became somehow bound up with everything oppressive, everything crammed into the stippled, aluminium booth of my mind. It occurred to me too that the VPL man had only come into my life in the last six weeks or so – at any rate I could dredge up no earlier memory of him.

  There is some linkage, some alliance, between my premenstrual tension and the VPL man’s VPL. He too has something bulging and constrained, yet vacuous, concealed beneath his clothing. These personalised voids, I imagined, were calling to one another, wailing the music of the empty spheres.

  Between the third and the fourth floors I shifted tack. It might not be anything quite so nebulous between me and the VPL man. I now entertained the notion that the VPL man had somehow managed to impregnate me, without my knowledge. Perhaps he had crept into the women’s toilet midway down the departmental corridor, late one afternoon, when only the cleaners are about, and tossed himself off. There is more plausibility in this image: his puckered form in the formica cubicle, his salty dollop on the mushroom-shaped and mushroom-coloured toilet seat.

  But there is someone else about. Me. And he knows that. As he strap-hangs his way home on the tube, he smiles enigmatically, his lips parted – because he knows that mine are parted; and at that very moment are sucking it up, his tadpole, his micro-construction robot, which burrows into me carrying the blueprints for the manufacture of more VPL men and VPL women.

  By the time we reached the Department’s floor I was convinced of this. I was bearing the VPL man’s child, the chopped-ear-man’s child, the bastard offspring of he-who-lingers-by-the-facsimile-machine. It could be worse – the child will be a fine, healthy specimen, and grow up to do something undynamic but essential, like becoming a Communications Manager (since my boss took over the Department it has been mandatory for all job titles to be capitalised).

  It didn’t even occur to me that our child might wish to work in his father’s department rather than my own.

  I got out before Daddy, who barely looked up from the folded square of newsprint he was reading and re-reading.

  A truly annoying morning was entirely dominated by a recurrent system error on my computer. I have a suspicion that we may have a virus in the departmental network. I said as much to my boss, when he poked his head into my office at around eleven. He asked me what was happening – and I explained that every time I exited from the network and tried to import files on to my own hard disc, the machine crashed.

  He came round behind my desk to take a look. I pulled back from the workstation, allowing him the room to get at the keyboard. He was wearing one of his newer suits today; and positioned as I was, I found myself confronted by the seat and upper legs of his trousers. The suit is made from soft but durable fabric, and the designer had seen fit to create some miniature chaps of shiny chamois, which stretched a third of the way down my boss’s thighs. The chaps were mimicked by the distended epaulettes, which I had already seen flopping from the shoulders of the suit jacket, like the ears of a Basset hound.

  ‘See here?’ He flicked his hands over the surface of the keyboard, only occasionally grasping for the mouse, as if he were casting off a stitch. The cursor appeared here and there, in a whirl of shifts between applications and files. Instead of attempting to import the files directly, he went into them where they were stored, as if intent on doing some work on them. He then cut out the entire contents of each file and re-opened it under another application. Finally he imported the new application, and so sneaked around the lurking virus.

  ‘See?’ He was heading for the door, while an icon, somewhat like a triumphant Roadrunner, executed a frenzied jig on the VDU, and the tinny speaker cackled, ‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’

  The Roadrunner may have known more than I did. At night, the cleaners long departed from the Dep
artment, the computer icon could have quit the screen and entered my world of static grey. ‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’ Something had been in my office during the night, something fervid but precise – like the Roadrunner icon, because this morning (‘Ah-ha-ah-hahahaha!’) the computer keyboard, the desk blotter and the mouse mat were all perfectly aligned once more. It wasn’t perceptible to the naked eye, but I checked it with my ruler.

  At lunchtime I looked hard at the sky for more than five minutes. On the way into work I stopped by the DIY centre and picked up a colour chart. I had been doing comparisons at half-hour intervals all morning. Initially I was certain the shade the sky corresponded to was ‘pearl grey’, but latterly I made up my mind that it was really ‘mid-grey’. It was mid-grey for the rest of the morning.

  In fact it grew more convincingly mid-grey the more I checked it, until at lunchtime it was no comparison at all; it was rather that the tiny rectangle on the chart was a miniature window, looking out on to another quadrant of the grey heavens. All it needed was its own vertical textured fabric louvres, to complete the marriage between sample and sky.

  I went down to the café and bought my sandwiches, a can of Diet Coke and one of those giant, crumbly cookies.

  In the park I sat with other office workers in a circle of benches that surrounds a sagging rotunda. This feature is built from red London bricks. It’s damp and destitute, long since re-pointed. The pillars resemble a demented loggia, which instead of moving forward has turned in on itself, forming a defensive corral. The pools of rusty water at the base of each pillar seem evidence of incontinence, a suitable indignity for wayward park furniture.