sliding in opposing directions, north and south.
The job required you to fold two thousand fliers and put them into two thousand envelopes. Two thousand address labels then had to be affixed and the envelopes fed, one by one, through a franking machine. You got the job: two days’ work. You executed it in a damp-smelling room in the basement. You thought that might be it but they said, come back tomorrow. You came. You were sent to the printer’s to collect a box. More fliers. More envelopes. The franking machine. You were sent the next day to the post office.
You watched everyone carefully. You saw what they did, how they spoke, what they drank. You made them their coffee without being asked. You took an old T-shirt and, after some deliberation, cut off its arms and hems and wore it over a white shirt, just like the deputy programmer did.
At the end of two weeks, they said there was a permanent job as an admin assistant in the office upstairs and would you like it as you seemed to have a good work ethic, it wasn’t very much money but it was a start, and what did you think? You said, yes, yes, please, yes, I would, yes I have a good work ethic, I do, yes, I love to work, I love it.
You ran outside, filled with euphoria. You felt like a shaken bottle of carbonated water. You wanted to shriek, you wanted to roar. You ran up the steps and over Waterloo Bridge. You weren’t looking where you were going and you ran into a lamp-post. A swelling the size of a doorknob rose on your forehead. You didn’t mind.
And you loved the job, you loved it so much. You answered phones, you took messages, you made coffee, you inputted what you learnt was called data into databases (this turned out to mean typing addresses). You were amazed that, at the end of the month, money appeared in your empty bank account. The miracle of work! The next month, there it was again. It seemed such a simple, alchemical transaction. You were required to arrive at the office at ten a.m., to stay there until the evening, doing whatever it was the people wanted you to do, and then they gave you money.
You searched the narrow columns of the newspaper and found a room in a shared flat: own bed, near tube, sixty pounds per week. The room was marginally larger than the bed, overlooked a main road and had no curtains, but you didn’t care. You sent your new address to your mother, to your brother, to your friends, to all the people you knew. You couldn’t have been prouder.
The head of the Society was solicitous and said things like ‘someone of your calibre’ to you. You didn’t know what she meant by that but you smiled and tried harder not to reroute her phone calls accidentally. She let you sit in on meetings, go out on what she called fact-finding missions, asked you to read documents for her. She wanted you to ‘learn the ropes’, she said, to ‘bring you forward’.
She took you shopping and made you try on collared shirts in dark colours, trousers that covered your feet, shoes with laces and stacked, rubberised soles. You painted your room the white-grey of the London sky. You had a drink with your friend on the newspaper and she told you the hours she worked, her salary, the difficulty of fixing a mortgage. Most nights, you went downstairs from the office and into the flickering dark of the Society’s cinema and watched films until it was time for the last tube home. You ate popcorn for dinner. There was so much to know, so much to watch, so much you had missed out on. You didn’t want to forget a thing so you watched most of the films two or three times.
When a director or actor came to give a talk or a lecture, it fell to you to book their hotels, their flights, their restaurants. You made sure they had drink and food in the green room; you put them into a taxi at the end of the night. You were surprised, sometimes, by how nervous they could be. An acclaimed French director went away to throw up just moments before he went onstage. An
The job required you to fold two thousand fliers and put them into two thousand envelopes. Two thousand address labels then had to be affixed and the envelopes fed, one by one, through a franking machine. You got the job: two days’ work. You executed it in a damp-smelling room in the basement. You thought that might be it but they said, come back tomorrow. You came. You were sent to the printer’s to collect a box. More fliers. More envelopes. The franking machine. You were sent the next day to the post office.
You watched everyone carefully. You saw what they did, how they spoke, what they drank. You made them their coffee without being asked. You took an old T-shirt and, after some deliberation, cut off its arms and hems and wore it over a white shirt, just like the deputy programmer did.
At the end of two weeks, they said there was a permanent job as an admin assistant in the office upstairs and would you like it as you seemed to have a good work ethic, it wasn’t very much money but it was a start, and what did you think? You said, yes, yes, please, yes, I would, yes I have a good work ethic, I do, yes, I love to work, I love it.
You ran outside, filled with euphoria. You felt like a shaken bottle of carbonated water. You wanted to shriek, you wanted to roar. You ran up the steps and over Waterloo Bridge. You weren’t looking where you were going and you ran into a lamp-post. A swelling the size of a doorknob rose on your forehead. You didn’t mind.
And you loved the job, you loved it so much. You answered phones, you took messages, you made coffee, you inputted what you learnt was called data into databases (this turned out to mean typing addresses). You were amazed that, at the end of the month, money appeared in your empty bank account. The miracle of work! The next month, there it was again. It seemed such a simple, alchemical transaction. You were required to arrive at the office at ten a.m., to stay there until the evening, doing whatever it was the people wanted you to do, and then they gave you money.
You searched the narrow columns of the newspaper and found a room in a shared flat: own bed, near tube, sixty pounds per week. The room was marginally larger than the bed, overlooked a main road and had no curtains, but you didn’t care. You sent your new address to your mother, to your brother, to your friends, to all the people you knew. You couldn’t have been prouder.
The head of the Society was solicitous and said things like ‘someone of your calibre’ to you. You didn’t know what she meant by that but you smiled and tried harder not to reroute her phone calls accidentally. She let you sit in on meetings, go out on what she called fact-finding missions, asked you to read documents for her. She wanted you to ‘learn the ropes’, she said, to ‘bring you forward’.
She took you shopping and made you try on collared shirts in dark colours, trousers that covered your feet, shoes with laces and stacked, rubberised soles. You painted your room the white-grey of the London sky. You had a drink with your friend on the newspaper and she told you the hours she worked, her salary, the difficulty of fixing a mortgage. Most nights, you went downstairs from the office and into the flickering dark of the Society’s cinema and watched films until it was time for the last tube home. You ate popcorn for dinner. There was so much to know, so much to watch, so much you had missed out on. You didn’t want to forget a thing so you watched most of the films two or three times.
When a director or actor came to give a talk or a lecture, it fell to you to book their hotels, their flights, their restaurants. You made sure they had drink and food in the green room; you put them into a taxi at the end of the night. You were surprised, sometimes, by how nervous they could be. An acclaimed French director went away to throw up just moments before he went onstage. An
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