Grey Area (16 page)

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 was 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 split-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 pre-menstrual 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 Department, 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.

The office workers sat canted sideways on the benches. An occasional pigeon hopped up to one of these sandwich eaters, clearly shamed by its capacity to fly and doing its best to hide tattered wings. These exchanges between people and birds were embarrassing to watch. That’s the truth. We have now advanced so far into a zone of the genetically furtive, that office workers, contemplating these flying vermin, feel their own humanity compromised in some way. So they roll up bread pills, and averting their eyes, proffer them to the un-stuck craws.

All afternoon I sat in my office and worked. The straining in my belly grew, swelled, became even more pregnant. I was certain that I was on the verge of getting my period. My nipples were so sensitive that I could feel every bump and nodule on their aureoles, snagging against the cotton of my bra. The afternoon was also punctuated by a series of quite sharp abdominal pains. After every one of them I was convinced I would feel the familiar ultimate lancing. I was poised, ready to head for the toilet – the venue for my imagined impregnation by the VPL man – but no blood came.

Instead I occupied myself with the collation and binding of a series of management briefings that the Department was publishing for the greater edification of the Company as a whole.

Five o’clock found me bending the flexible prongs back on the clean sheets, to house them securely in their plastic covers. My boss hung his face around the doorjamb and grunted approval. I couldn’t see his ear – and this troubled me. I wanted to ask him to take a step into the room, so that I could check on his ear, check that it was still there and still his. But the idea of it was silly, a nitrous oxide thought that giggled in my head. To stop myself from smirking I concentrated on the odd, phallic intervention, made at waist-height, by the black-taped handle of his squash racket.

Then he left. I ordered my desk, and soon afterwards went home.

At home I ate and then had a bath, hoping that it would ease the pre-menstrual tension. It didn’t. I put on a dressing gown and wandered about my flat. Never before had it seemed so claustrophobic. The neat, space-saving arrangement of double-seater sofa and twin armchairs was a cell within a cell. The coffee table, with its stack of magazines and dish of pot-pourri, was part of a set for a chat show that never made it past the development stage. The images on the walls were tired, static, self-referential, each one a repository of forgotten insights, now incapable of arousing fresh interest.

I turned on the television, but couldn’t concentrate. I must have slept, squelched down amongst the foam-filled, polyester-covered cushions. Slid into sleep, the surfaces of my eyes grounding quickly on the salty, silty bottom of unconsciousness. There I floated, twisting slowly in the deceptive currents.