Dear Samantha,
How are you? How is life as a new mother? (How is...God, is it James? Your baby? I’m so sorry. You know I’m bad with names). Anyway, you remember Terry? Mr fade-into-the-paintwork? Well, Terry retired recently and we had the usual party. You remember I'm sure. In the presentation room, always without enough chairs for some reason, the cardboard tasting cake, the one with the disconcerting pink icing and a few limp balloons.
After that little shindig, well....then he was gone, a single file box under his arm, heading off into the sunset. Retirement after 30 years of employment with the company. Some insanely eager temp instantly taking his place.
They temporarily moved me into old Terry’s cubical the following Monday. I had to use his computer until the IT guys updated mine.
Anyway, one morning I started hunting around, looking in different files on the desktop and I found this enormous word document. Turns out, this document was basically a satirical novel heavily based on…yep, you guessed it…our office. Twenty-five chapters of pretty biting stuff.
Personally, I would never have picked Terry for something this...corrosive? (Remember how quiet he used to be? How diligent? Toiling away in his cubicle, always cheerful and never getting caught up in the office gossip?). Anyway, he had nicknames for all of us. Terrible names. I don't think you’ll have much difficulty guessing who these people are: Baby Dragon, The Gimp, The Painted Clown, The Babbler Monster, Captain Fantastic, The Sandwich Cowboy, Pickled Brine, Erectile Dysfunction, Pandemic, Mommy Dearest….etc, ect.
Throughout the book, we are mainly referred to by these names. The book itself...I have to admit, it's a pretty amazing effort...I mean the scope of the thing. (I managed to save a copy before the IT boys wiped his hard drive). The sheer amount of detail Terry puts into chronicling all the grudges and bitterness the place seems to thrive on. The backbiting and scheming are perfectly captured. The way he describes all the psychos and perverts. The showboaters. The screaming skulls. The spies, whistle-blowers and brown-nosers. The crybabies and freaks. All of us. It really is amazing.
He is absent from this circus. Not even a minor character. In the first chapter, he appears briefly before vanishing and becoming the omnipotent narrator. Think about it. Remember how he never used to get involved in office politics? Always sidestepping the bullshit? Even when it was directed at him. Well, this was how he vented I guess.
You get a mention and I'm in there. We both get off pretty lightly compared to the others. I'm this junior office malcontent making snide comments in the staff meetings and in the corridors. Basically an 'impotent office clown.'
And again, I gotta say, he gets it all down perfectly. I'm not sure who would want to read it but...but this is what he's been doing for the last decade or so. Page after page of densely written paragraphs. There isn't much of a story. A narrative. He basically just describes the inane way people exist in a bureaucracy. Or as he put it 'A lukewarm tidal pool tainted with the sour tang of urine and broken dreams. A home for amputee starfish and other delusional creatures incapable of surviving out in the greater ocean.'
Anyway, the way it's written, the way you get lost in each paragraph and suffocated by the language, maybe that's the point? I don't know. Anyway, there it is. Page after page. Great slabs of text. Single spaced. Helvetica font. Size 11.5. A total of 400, 000 words in length. Just to give you an idea, fucking War and Peace is 587,287 words in length!
I got his number from the office. I called him, arranged to go around to his place. I didn't know what I was going to say to him. You remember Terry and I got on quite well? Did you know he had a girlfriend? An incredibly ugly yet cheerful woman. They were drinking in the back garden when I turned up. We had a cold beer. Get this: they were both naked, sitting out on the astroturf-covered concrete patio. What was I going to do? Leave when he answered the door in that state? Ask them to put clothes on? It was very uncomfortable for me.
The house was under the flight path. You could hear planes taking off every ten minutes and you could smell the jet fuel in the wind. As I say, it was very disconcerting seeing old Terry and his partner sitting out there naked, their white carcases pressing through the slats in the outdoor lounge furniture. He shrugged and told me he had always been a nudist. He and his partner usually spent the entire weekend naked, doing the gardening, watching television, reading, depending of course on the weather. Sometimes they drove out to a nudist camp up north.
He told me that he didn't care about the book. It was his way of keeping sane. Are you going to publish it? I asked (because you always have to ask aspiring writers if they are going to publish their crappy masterpieces). Naw, he said. Terry didn't seem to be under any illusions.
I thought about doing something with it, he said contemplatively, but then I thought about getting on with my life. He laughed again. I honestly don’t think I’d ever heard the man really laugh until then. A plane took off overhead.
Why did you stick it out so long? I asked. You have to work, he replied.
Anyway, that was it. They were going on a cruise the following week. All around the South Pacific. A nudist cruise. They had booked a luxury cabin. A boat full of naked people? Not my cup of tea but there you go. I finished my beer, politely declined another one and then caught a bus home.
Anyway, I just thought I’d tell you. You should drop by sometime, say hello to everyone. Bring your kid in. I’ll speak to you later Samantha.
All the best,
Jarrah,
How are you? How is life as a new mother? (How is...God, is it James? Your baby? I’m so sorry. You know I’m bad with names). Anyway, you remember Terry? Mr fade-into-the-paintwork? Well, Terry retired recently and we had the usual party. You remember I'm sure. In the presentation room, always without enough chairs for some reason, the cardboard tasting cake, the one with the disconcerting pink icing and a few limp balloons.
After that little shindig, well....then he was gone, a single file box under his arm, heading off into the sunset. Retirement after 30 years of employment with the company. Some insanely eager temp instantly taking his place.
They temporarily moved me into old Terry’s cubical the following Monday. I had to use his computer until the IT guys updated mine.
Anyway, one morning I started hunting around, looking in different files on the desktop and I found this enormous word document. Turns out, this document was basically a satirical novel heavily based on…yep, you guessed it…our office. Twenty-five chapters of pretty biting stuff.
Personally, I would never have picked Terry for something this...corrosive? (Remember how quiet he used to be? How diligent? Toiling away in his cubicle, always cheerful and never getting caught up in the office gossip?). Anyway, he had nicknames for all of us. Terrible names. I don't think you’ll have much difficulty guessing who these people are: Baby Dragon, The Gimp, The Painted Clown, The Babbler Monster, Captain Fantastic, The Sandwich Cowboy, Pickled Brine, Erectile Dysfunction, Pandemic, Mommy Dearest….etc, ect.
Throughout the book, we are mainly referred to by these names. The book itself...I have to admit, it's a pretty amazing effort...I mean the scope of the thing. (I managed to save a copy before the IT boys wiped his hard drive). The sheer amount of detail Terry puts into chronicling all the grudges and bitterness the place seems to thrive on. The backbiting and scheming are perfectly captured. The way he describes all the psychos and perverts. The showboaters. The screaming skulls. The spies, whistle-blowers and brown-nosers. The crybabies and freaks. All of us. It really is amazing.
He is absent from this circus. Not even a minor character. In the first chapter, he appears briefly before vanishing and becoming the omnipotent narrator. Think about it. Remember how he never used to get involved in office politics? Always sidestepping the bullshit? Even when it was directed at him. Well, this was how he vented I guess.
You get a mention and I'm in there. We both get off pretty lightly compared to the others. I'm this junior office malcontent making snide comments in the staff meetings and in the corridors. Basically an 'impotent office clown.'
And again, I gotta say, he gets it all down perfectly. I'm not sure who would want to read it but...but this is what he's been doing for the last decade or so. Page after page of densely written paragraphs. There isn't much of a story. A narrative. He basically just describes the inane way people exist in a bureaucracy. Or as he put it 'A lukewarm tidal pool tainted with the sour tang of urine and broken dreams. A home for amputee starfish and other delusional creatures incapable of surviving out in the greater ocean.'
Anyway, the way it's written, the way you get lost in each paragraph and suffocated by the language, maybe that's the point? I don't know. Anyway, there it is. Page after page. Great slabs of text. Single spaced. Helvetica font. Size 11.5. A total of 400, 000 words in length. Just to give you an idea, fucking War and Peace is 587,287 words in length!
I got his number from the office. I called him, arranged to go around to his place. I didn't know what I was going to say to him. You remember Terry and I got on quite well? Did you know he had a girlfriend? An incredibly ugly yet cheerful woman. They were drinking in the back garden when I turned up. We had a cold beer. Get this: they were both naked, sitting out on the astroturf-covered concrete patio. What was I going to do? Leave when he answered the door in that state? Ask them to put clothes on? It was very uncomfortable for me.
The house was under the flight path. You could hear planes taking off every ten minutes and you could smell the jet fuel in the wind. As I say, it was very disconcerting seeing old Terry and his partner sitting out there naked, their white carcases pressing through the slats in the outdoor lounge furniture. He shrugged and told me he had always been a nudist. He and his partner usually spent the entire weekend naked, doing the gardening, watching television, reading, depending of course on the weather. Sometimes they drove out to a nudist camp up north.
He told me that he didn't care about the book. It was his way of keeping sane. Are you going to publish it? I asked (because you always have to ask aspiring writers if they are going to publish their crappy masterpieces). Naw, he said. Terry didn't seem to be under any illusions.
I thought about doing something with it, he said contemplatively, but then I thought about getting on with my life. He laughed again. I honestly don’t think I’d ever heard the man really laugh until then. A plane took off overhead.
Why did you stick it out so long? I asked. You have to work, he replied.
Anyway, that was it. They were going on a cruise the following week. All around the South Pacific. A nudist cruise. They had booked a luxury cabin. A boat full of naked people? Not my cup of tea but there you go. I finished my beer, politely declined another one and then caught a bus home.
Anyway, I just thought I’d tell you. You should drop by sometime, say hello to everyone. Bring your kid in. I’ll speak to you later Samantha.
All the best,
Jarrah,
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