[Total Word Count 32,162]
Lying in the dark, I stretched my hand gently across the bed to touch Julie’s side.
“I’m awake,” she said.
We had made it up that evening, gentle reader. I had turned up on the door step with a bunch of flowers. I know it’s a bit of a crummy way of doing things, but being a bit crummy is OK sometimes, even essential.
“What are those for?” she demanded.
“A token,” I replied, “Their significance is purely phatic.”
Once inside, I apologised, promised to mend my ways, and generally abased myself. It wasn’t difficult. It seemed that Julie wanted to forget the whole thing as quickly as possible.
Now, lying there in the dark in the small hours, I apologised again.
“I’m sorry about all that bottle stuff.” I said.
Julie sighed.
“It’s OK,” she said, “I’m sorry too.” She paused. “I know you’ve got a thing about tidiness, but I couldn’t understand what the big fuss was.”
“I know,” I said, penitently.
“But what really got me was later on. The anal bit.”
“The anal bit? I don’t remember…”
“Well, you’d wound me up quite a lot by then, and I accused you of being anal, and you said, did I even know what anal meant, and I said it means arsehole, arsehole, and you said no, no, what you’re referring to is Freud’s theory that over-strict parenting causes the child to seek to retain its excreta for fear of making a mess, and that this leads in later life to… et cetera… and that I was accusing you of wanting to retain your shit, but who the hell was it who wanted to retain shitty bottles on the shitty table, and I shouldn’t bloody well use words if I couldn’t be arsed to look up properly what they meant.”
“Oh yeah, that.” I said, blushing invisibly in the dark.
“You really need to cut out this Stephen Fry crap, you know?” she observed. I didn’t answer.
“It’s a very male kind of thing,” she said, “You’re, you know, fairly enlightened for a man, but that is just such a macho thing. Using words to show off with. Listen to me, telling you all this stuff. Watch me win this argument. Look what a clever little boy I am. Women just don’t do that. It’s definitely a gender thing.”
There was a protracted pause.
“You’re not going to tell me that ‘gender’ is a grammatical term, and that while words have gender, people have sex, then?” she asked.
“No.” I said, firmly, just a little nettled.
“It’s your hormones, I suppose I should try to be understanding. But it’s incredibly annoying, sometimes.” she said, taking my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but with just a little less enthusiasm than before. A longer silence followed, while we stared at the ceiling.
“OH. MY.GOD!” I exclaimed, sitting up suddenly.
“What?”
“I left the laptop in the pub. Oh my God! I can actually remember standing up and walking away while it was still down by the side of the chair. Oh my God! Should I ring the pub?”
“The pub? So you went to the pub?”
She turned over unhappily.
“Look, it’s three o’clock,” she pointed out, “You can’t do anything until the morning. Don’t worry, they’ve probably got it behind the bar.”
“All of the Nanowrimo stuff is on it,” I said, “I never backed it up or anything. Oh my God!”
I collapsed on to the bed again.
“Maybe this is a kind of sign from my subconscious that I should give up after all.” I said.
“Another thing Freud had a theory about? Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve been thinking maybe it would be better if you gave up after all. I never see you these days, and when I do, all you’re doing is typing. I know I said you should finish, but, you know, I’m beginning to wonder.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said, a trifle bitterly, “I’ve got problems with it anyway. I can’t seem to get Charlie out of the hospital.”
I must have slept some more that night, but I really don’t remember doing so. Not for the first time, I wished that I could stop uselessly thinking about things I couldn’t do anything about. I had very little time to do anything about the laptop the following morning, either: it was the day of Kevin’s big presentation, with me as bag-carrier, and I needed to be in Behemoth’s dingy halls early. A phone call to the Angel revealed that they had not found a laptop in the bar.
In some ways, my problems were helpful: they stopped me worrying about the presentation. Though it wasn’t the laptop that really preyed on my mind so much as what Julie had said the night before. Kevin, normally a picture of sang-froid, was showing some slightly endearing signs of actual nervousness, shifting from foot to foot as we waited outside the Boardroom. I almost felt sorry for him.
“Break a leg,” I said, as we were ushered in, and he smiled faintly at me.
Julie would certainly have seen this meeting as a male kind of ritual, a gender thing, I reflected, as we settled in. There were the high status males, led by John Sopert, sitting in judgement, and here were two little gangs – Kevin’s and George’s – who were going to shout and shake their spears at each other until one or other side retreated.
What Julie didn’t understand, I thought to myself, was what a precious cultural asset this adversarial business was. In China or India, in any proper civilisation, the King had an army that did what he said. Ideas were approved or not approved by authority, and the only way new ones could get in was if the Chief Vizier just happened to be an original genius. Whereas in the West, we were still a bunch of barbarians quarrelling over the wreckage of Rome. Everything was decided by a fight between two sides. But that meant that in any argument, the two competing authorities cancelled each other out: and that created, for the first time in human history, a window for the truth to get in, for disputes to be swayed by the actual evidence. That’s where all the great achievements of the West came from. And it was a macho kind of thing, but so what?
Kevin had done his opening, tension-dispelling joke, and his settling introduction. Now he was beginning to tell them what he was going to tell them.
You see, I’m not brooding over what Julie said or anything, but you know, you’ve got to dance the dance. It’s a battle. It’s like some grand confrontation; a great decisive battle: the Men of the West versus the filthy Orc bands; and may the best side win…
I suddenly roused from a vague meditation.
“John, you did the figures on this?” said Kevin. “Bill is suggesting there actually is a summer uplift in the distribution figures for last June?”
I looked up and saw he was beset by great Troll warriors on three sides while I let the sword sleep in my hand.
“The June figures? Is that a genuine rise?”
“Perhaps John thinks the rise is diminimus.” offered Bill. They chuckled.
“That’s what they used to call it, Bill,” I said, “But I think you’ll find that what we’re calling it now is ‘Fuck all’.” A bigger laugh, and the gnome fell back.
“I think those are some figure you brought with you, Bill,” I said, “but those are on a different universe. You’ve got packaged Mueslis in one and not the other. In fact, I think if you compare the figures from the same dataset, you’ll find that instead of a rise, you’ve got a fall of 15.76 percentage points. Do your sums agree with that?”
I knew and he knew that I couldn’t work out the figures to two decimal places that quickly: but I banked on him not being able to contradict me. If he could, I was sure the figures would still be in my favour, and the net effect would be even more in my favour, since he’d implicitly be confirming my theory.
“Nuh, OK” he said, after a pause.
The Orc’s ugly head went spinning from his neck: Kevin and I stood shoulder to shoulder, cleaving a path through the filthy spawn of Mordor.
“OK, John, well done,” said Kevin later, when we had retired once more to his tiny office. “You did OK once you woke up.”
“Thanks. A shame they wouldn’t take a decision, though. Nothing’s going to change.”
“Well, not this year, anyway. But we made a good impression. You’ve done yourself no harm, and I’ve enhanced my reputation as a caring mentor.” He must have noticed a slight hint of incredulity in my face, because he went on “Look, I know you think I’m just a slave-driving bastard, but the thing is John, you need to do the work if you’re going to get anywhere. You’ve got great potential, but you need to focus on the job, instead of farting around on the internet all the time. By the way, I get my suits from an old Jewish tailor in the East End – not many of those left now. I’ll give you his card if you’re interested.”
I thought for a moment. I thought hard.
“You… you’ve read my blog?” I deduced.
“Not really – I’ve got better things to do than read about you. But I did Google my own name the other day, and guess what came up? You ought to anonymise that thing if you’re going to keep it – you know what the attitude here is. If I catch you doing that stuff at work, you’re in a bit of trouble, but if John Sopert knew you had it at all, it would be clear-your-desk time, you know that? And another thing – you haven’t got time to write novels, OK? Don’t fuck around with novels. Not if you want to get your manager interview.”
I felt slightly winded.
“I was going to give that up, anyway.” I said.
“Good. You did well today. Just focus, that’s all. Focus.”
He was right, no doubt, but I found it difficult to concentrate for the rest of the day. I sat at my desk, toying with emails and pretending to look at figures. I was confused. I probably shouldn’t be writing this, should I? Kevin’s going to read it. Hi, Kevin! I hope you realise that although there may be some slight resemblances between the account in this blog and my real life, it’s all exaggerated, highly coloured, or even imaginary. It would be totally naïve to equate Kevin Johnson, the fictional construct here, the man of fine suits and unexpected insights, with the Kevin Johnson of real life, equally a man of fine suits and insights though he be, of course.
Oh God.
At last the hours rolled round and I set off for home, still feeling a little unsettled and vulnerable. We had agreed that Julie would come round to my place that evening, and she was already there when I arrived: in fact, she met me at the door.
“Who’s Miss Mouse?” she asked, and once again I felt the metaphorical blow to the stomach which goes with the discovery that people know more about you than you realised.
“Did you read the blog?”
“Blog? She’s in your blog? No. What are you talking about? Who is this person? Minnie Mouse?”
“She’s one of the Nanowrimo people,” I explained, neutrally, “One of the people who go to these writing sessions, and so on. I’ve met her there a couple of times. It’s a nickname. I don’t even know her real name.”
Julie raised her eyebrows just detectably, and handed me a post-it note.
“Well, she rang. She got your number from somebody called Tom. She’s got your laptop. If you give her a ring on this number, you can arrange to pick it up.”
“Ah!” I exclaimed, with genuine relief and not-so-genuine jollity, “She must have noticed I’d left it behind. That’s a relief.
“You’re still giving up on the Nanoo thing, aren’t you?” Julie asked.
“I think I’ve got to. Kevin at work knows about it now. All for the best, probably. I’ll have to buy Geoff his bottle, though.”
“Maybe it’s worth it.”
“Yeah, I’m beginning to think so.”
