Wake Up Happy Every Day (25 page)

She goes through her yoga routine and her meditation and she does feel better, but she’s still sick of this mid-priced room. Maybe she could upgrade for the last few days of her stay. A junior suite maybe, with some space to stretch out properly? She knows she won’t though – she doesn’t like unnecessary expense – but it feels good to know that she can if she wants.

In the end she decides that there is nothing for it. She’ll have to write. She sets up the laptop and after a quick hour of eBay and FB, she gets started. The King Arthur story doesn’t seem so great now that it’s actually underway but her rule these days is to finish anything she starts; she has too many unfinished pieces of work already. Finally, finally, she gets going and it’s hard but after a few false starts and a bit of pacing and swearing she seems to get into some kind of a groove. She gets her young heroine to the cave where she finds Arthur and the other knights sleeping, and she manages – with some difficulty – to wake them up and they are immediately waving their swords and calling for their steeds and all ready to save England from whatever disaster was afoot. War, dragons, sea monsters, ogres or green knights – they are ready to take them all on. Her heroine – now called Harriet because Heidi was too foreign somehow – has explained that she’s sorry to disturb them. There is no war, there are no dragons, no green knights, but there is a nasty bully at her school and maybe – now that they are all awake – they could help deal with that if they like. Arthur and his men say they would be delighted.

It takes her about half an hour to get that scene done, and she’s pretty pleased with it and so she decides to have a bit of a break, watch some TV, catch up with the news.

It’s familiar stuff. Another teenage berserker howling his rage at the world in a hurricane of lead. Mothers bent double with grief, held by cops on whose body armour they then begin pounding, in whose faces they start screaming, choking, drowning in their own tears and snot. Dead children under olive-green army-issue blankets, stretchered in convoy to the ambulances whose futile lights spin feebly like those at the drab lunchtime discos of her youth.

It’s Catherine’s view that all this could be avoided. Give every teacher a gun to keep in their desk. Regular INSET days to make sure they know how to use it. Killer appears at the door toting his piece and bam, he goes down. Fight fire with fire.

It wouldn’t always work. Maybe the whining loser would get the kids and the teacher in the first class he came to, but he’d find a whole militia blocking the corridors when he tried to move on to the next. Seems simple. Gun control is never going to happen, so work with what’s possible. It wouldn’t be expensive, needn’t cripple any school-authority budgets. A gun is cheaper than one of those Smart Board things they use now. Lots of teachers would probably buy their own weapons anyhow, like they buy their own textbooks.

The phone breaks into sudden spasms on the table next to the bed. Madam. She doesn’t do chit or chat. She’s straight to business which suits Catherine. She has news about OR. The long-awaited organisational review. She needs to talk about finessing budgets, refreshing priorities and what that will mean in practice.

‘We’re having to chunk up I’m afraid.’

‘What?’

‘We’re all having to do more work. It’ll be just temporary I’m sure, till they get the review sorted. But it means we’ll all have to do more plate-spinning. Sorry about that.’ And Madam goes on to speak about intelligent investment and redeployment pools and competitive migration, as well as all the stuff that Catherine will have to decode later to find out details of her targets and deadlines and all that.

‘OK got it.’

‘And we should have a real chat when you’re back in London. We haven’t ever had a proper one-to-one have we?’

‘Look forward to it.’ And then she remembers something. ‘Oh, I’m taking some extended leave. When this gig is over, I’m going to see Tough. In Abkhazia.’

There is no need to tell her about it being freelance work. Madam will probably want to insist that she get written permission from HR, a signed note from the minister. There would certainly be a form and notification needed for the tax people.

Now Madam says, ‘Abkhazia? Is that really a place?’ And then she says, ‘Tough – he was a character, wasn’t he? So old school. Ancient school really.’ And the way she says the word ‘character’ makes it sound a bit like the word wanker. And she makes it sound like Tough is dead. Catherine really doesn’t like this woman.

Madam rings off. The whole call has taken two minutes and twenty-four seconds and Catherine lies back on her bed and sighs. Then she plays through her recording of the conversation, makes a mental note of the important details and puts the phone in the full basin ready for binning later.

It isn’t good practice to suddenly dump new work on people, but to be honest Catherine doesn’t mind. It’s always nice to have real stuff to do. Sometimes this life is just too much like the Army, too much waiting around.

Twenty-seven

NICKY

The first time I am asked out: 2008 and it is my annual review. Sarah is my new line manager at the council and is discussing my personal objectives and the development plan that goes with them. I have already decided that Sarah is a big improvement on the previous senior manager in cultural services. She’s a looker for a start with her autumnal hair, her translucent, speckled skin, those appraising eyes a cool hydrogen-blue and, even more importantly, she seems to find the whole business as ridiculous as I do.

‘I see you’ve rated yourself as outstanding for every area of your work.’ She can’t quite keep the smile out of her voice. This is the system at the council. In negotiation with your manager you set yourself objectives and then, a year later, you rate yourself to see how you’ve done. Meanwhile, management also assess you and together you find a result that you can both live with.

There are only three possible rankings: Outstanding, Good and Developing. As a matter of principle I rank myself Outstanding for everything. Of course I do, because then, when the line manager negotiates me downwards it’s hard for her to go all the way to Developing. We’ll probably have to stop off at Good. If I think I’m Outstanding and they think I’m Developing and we both stick to our guns, then there’s going to be tedious paperwork, additional interviews in the presence of our HR partner. A great big long stretch of precious flexi-time wasted over several weeks. Whereas this way we can all sort things pretty briskly.

Can you tell I’ve been doing this kind of thing a long time now?

And you’ll want a key to the terminology: Outstanding means doing OK, while Developing means doing a bit shit. There’s an alternative language in place in local government but the key that unlocks it is a simple one. Nearly everything equals shit. Developing means shit. Challenging means shit. Problematic means utterly, emphatically, impossibly shit. Though Challenging and Problematic are generally words we reserve for the general public and their insane ways.

And I’m a small cog in the council machine so it’s not worth spending a lot of time working on my professional development plan with me. I’m the assistant in the cultural services team, which means I’m the one who sends out invites to private views, poetry readings, book launches and the opening nights of concerts to councillors and the local press. I maintain the cuttings file. I do a daily google search for news of any cultural events we might possibly be able to claim credit for for supporting.

And quite often it’s me who has to meet the hopeful poets, writers, directors, actors, artists and musicians and explain why we can’t support their lunatic projects. We can’t even support worthwhile projects really. Cultural services give council-taxpayers’ money to the museum and to the football team, no one else really gets much of a look in. Though we might occasionally sling a few quid to the brass band for outreach work.

Most of the time I don’t mind doing this saying no business. I’ve done a lot of boring jobs and in every single one of those menial jobs my co-workers were all experts at something. Everyone could do something brilliantly. It just wasn’t what they were paid to be doing. Even in my summer holiday job where I found myself working in the warehouse that just packed greetings cards, even there you found people who knew everything about classic cars; people who coached judo clubs all the way to black belt and beyond; blokes who could grow beautiful cauliflowers on the most unpromising of allotments; women who were champion pedigree dog breeders; men who regularly dug up Roman coins on metal-detecting weekends. You found real-ale connoisseurs. Amateur inventors, amateur astronomers, part-time magicians, Cordon-Bleu standard cooks. There was even an expert on the daughters of Coleridge and Wordsworth.

These were people who dreamt of winning the lottery, not so they could lie on a beach all day, but so they could devote more time to their true calling. One soul-grinding job, in one faceless factory, in one drab industrial zone, in one dead town, and it contained so much varied and wasted human talent. Do the math – as they say here. Multiply that solitary greetings-card warehouse by the number of other similar places. Add all the call centres and offices, all the other hives and nests where human beings toil like termites – and, well, that’s a lot of experts putting their joys and expertise on hold. A lot of people kept away from their passions just so that stuff can be packed, filed, boxed, scanned, photocopied or otherwise moved from one place to another. Stuff that is shoved around for a bit, before ending up broken in a landfill somewhere where the poor live.

Work is a shit way to spend your time and everyone knows it.

And as far as I know, not one of these self-taught, self-financing, desperately self-actualising amateur experts ever went to the council to ask for a grant to pursue their dream. And yet poets, actors, novelists, directors, conceptual artists . . . Every week a pale goateed bloke comes to cultural services saying he ‘just needs time to write’. Or a woman who looks like she lives on seeds comes in to ask for a grant to buy welding equipment for her sculpture project. No actual welder comes in asking the council to buy his equipment for him.

The sense of entitlement from the arty middle class is breathtaking. It’s always a pleasure to PP the letters that say no to these people.

But saying no to poets is only one minor outcome as far as management in cultural services is concerned, so I have also had to come up with some objectives that specify engaging proactively with . . . Taking a hands-on partnership approach to . . . Encouraging ongoing stakeholder input in . . . Challenging myself to exceed expected competencies and organisational behaviours by . . . I can’t be sure of the exact wording because I do it on autopilot one lunchtime. But I must be generally okayish at my job, because I have survived no less than five restructures.

And now I’m in Meeting Room Three in a building actually called The Hive, being gently interrogated by my hot new line manager. Who thinks of these names? Who thinks it’s a good idea to call a workspace a hive, with its clear mental picture of thousands of sexless drones slaving till death for one idle fatso.

‘Nicky, why are you here?’

That’s the big question, isn’t it? Why are any of us here? And I’m stumped, and in any case I suspect the question is rhetorical and so it proves. ‘It seems to me you’re a bit overqualified for what you do.’

Everyone at the council is overqualified. Even the receptionists have MAs. What she really means is – you’re a bit old for what you do. And I’m sure even hinting at that is explicitly against some employment code here.

‘I’ve got to pay the rent like everyone else.’ I’m irritated, so I’m curt. But she’s not fazed, she just smiles and says, ‘The rent, yes. That can be a bastard, can’t it?’ And then we talk engagement, proactivity, outputs and outcomes, service delivery and stakeholders for our allotted twenty-five minutes and, in the end, she agrees that my work has, indeed, been outstanding over the last year.

I’m astonished, and I must look it because she laughs as she says, ‘And this qualifies you for entry into our employee of the year cash draw.’ She’s not even joking. It turns out there really is such a thing. Huzzah! First time ever I’ve qualified for entry into the prize draw, the one I didn’t know existed, the one where the lucky winner gets a three-day spa break while ten runners-up get vouchers for seats at the ballet. The poor bastards. And then she asks me if I’d like to grab a bite to eat.

She asks me out.

‘I hear you’re the office enigma,’ she says. ‘I want to find out all about you.’

‘You mean the office weirdo,’ I say and she laughs.

‘I prefer enigma,’ she says. ‘Everyone seems to like you – no one seems to know you.’

She doesn’t want to go to Pret because there are too many council people there, so we go to the Golden Fleece, though it is frowned upon for council employees to be seen in the pub at lunchtime. Apparently the taxpayers don’t much like it. But not only do we go to the boozer, but she announces she needs a proper drink – ‘It’s been that kind of day’ – so I have a pint and she has a vodka and tonic – a drink I realise can be passed off as sparkling water should any vigilante from the Taxpayer’s Alliance take an interest in our order.

And, most startling of all as far as I’m concerned, she orders pie and chips. At lunchtime.

I have lived long enough to assume all girls, all women, have a dodgy relationship with food. Women are almost all semirexic. Forgive me if I generalise a bit here but women, it seems to me, have the same relationship to food that men have to pornography. They want it, they need it, they hate themselves for it and want to do it in secret after everyone else has gone to bed, or when they have the whole house to themselves.