Three: We Leave The Office

At around three o' clock Napier decides that he can no longer offer his magnum opus the concentration it merits, and suggests that we adjourn for the weekend. The Memo is replaced, along with a list of suggested revisions and a blue pencil, in its deed box and locked away again in the bowels of his colossal desk.

I write the word "archiving" on the reverse of a fax header and pin this notice on the outside of the cubicle. And we slip away, undetected; two black cats on a moonless night.

We emerge, blinking, on to Oxford Street, where the air is thick with bus fumes and the panic of lost tourists. They used to hang people here, and you can see why. Though London extends forever westwards the other side of Marble Arch this feels like the end of the earth. We cross the Edgware Road and jump on to a Number 6. Napier flashes his long-expired travelcard and a look which suggests that the conductor would be well-advised not to examine it too closely. The conductor is suffering in polyester on a warm, late spring day and waves us upstairs. We disembark six or seven stops later outside The Brown Derby.

We patronise The Brown Derby because, perversely, considering the pub's location, the beer here is cheap enough for us to afford. There is nothing else to recommend the place on a wet November afternoon, say - the food is disappointing, the decor uninspired, the service surly and the clientele unappealing - but now, as the seasons turn, you can take your sensibly-priced pint outside, find yourself a seat and watch a rich pageant of human folly unfold before you. Rich is the word. The sense of money drifts through the air and gathers in the gutters like blossom. The people that you see on the street are at leisure, truly at leisure. They will not have to go back to work on Monday morning. They are shopping, consuming, to fill the empty time in their empty, wealthy lives. I relay these thoughts to Napier and he acknowledges me with a slight pout. His attention, as ever, is devoted to a book, in this case a bright orange paperback. He shows it to me.

"Sexus," he says. "Much more like it."

Two: The Memo (continued)

It's nothing to look at, the document itself; just forty loose pages, half hand-written, half word-processed, gathered in a manilla folder. The manuscript is illuminated only by its author's brilliance, which does not extend to the trivial matters of spelling and punctuation. There is no elegant copperplate for me, Napier's de facto sub-editor, to unravel, but instead the tiniest angular scribble, which resembles cuneiform, more than anything. Frequently, I am obliged to check words and sometimes whole sentences to ensure that I have grasped the meaning meant.

"'Young men of destiny, we find ourselves on the - something - of this march into oblivion.'"
"What does it look like?" Napier asks.
"It looks like 'flink'. Could be 'brink', or 'flank'. You then talk about the imminent techno-apocalypse and the marginalisation of men of vision, so I can't be sure one way or the other, contextually."
"Don't remember, but the whole thing sounds a little pompous. Perhaps we should cut it altogether."

And so the process continues, and every day The Memo becomes sleeker, tauter and more irresistible.

Two: The Memo (continued)

"I approached my supervisor within the Complaints Department and told her that I had a complaint to make. She said that staff complaints were dealt with by the Personnel Department. I went and spoke to the Personnel Department who told me that because my complaint was about the personnel within the Complaints Department I'd have to speak to you."
"What's the great big problem, then?" says Tash. Then she laughs, a brief, excruciating, fake little laugh and I worry momentarily that Napier is going to knock her unconcious with a chop to the side of the neck, something that he has threatened to do from time to time.
"I feel that all the other employees within the department are striving towards my redundancy."
She wants to tell him to stop being silly, and probably should do just that, but something about the childlike look of appeal with which he fixes her provokes the question:-
"How so?"
"I look at it like this," Napier begins to explain. "Our stated aim is to improve levels of customer satisfaction by dealing with complaints swiftly and efficiently and reporting customer service issues, where appropriate, to other departments, thus minimising future complaints."
"Quite right," says Tash. She hasn't caught on.
"In which case, if we all do our jobs properly there will be less work for us to do, and presumably less of us required to do it."
"Ah, I see where you're coming from." Bet she doesn't. "Of course, we can't expect to eradicate complaints altogether."
"If that's the case then what are we doing here? We would seem to be working towards an unattainable goal, pursuing the ghost of an idea. It makes no sense."
"Surely we can consider ourselves successful if we get it right almost all of the time."
"Can we?" He asks, making it clear that he thinks this idea is half-baked. "But if only a tiny, intractable minority are complaining how can the continued employment of all these people be justified?" Napier says this in a louder voice than is perhaps necessary and gestures towards the rest of the office, where several faces emerge, ferret-like, from their cubicles.
"I think, Napier, that perhaps we should fix an appointment to discuss this further."
"Okay," he says, retrieving a half-eaten apple and Fanny Hill from his desk drawer, "I'll wait to hear from you."

He's still waiting. We heard that Natasha, who likes to be called Tash, transferred sideways into Purchasing. Our department is being rebranded as Customer Care. Napier believes that this demonstrates the power of The Memo in action.

Two: The Memo (continued)

He abandoned schooling altogether at fourteen, and found work in a boatyard, lying about his age to an employer who didn't care how old he was. And it was here, amongst drums of pitch and wood shavings that Napier began to think hard about labour, about how we exchange time and effort for a wage which is calculated to be only just enough to keep us coming back to make the same exchange, day after day, week after week, month after month. These early reflections formed the heart of The Memo.

Napier thinks of himself as an autodidact in the mould of Sartre but the comparison is somewhat inexact, as Napier has never bothered to teach himself anything. Nevertheless he is terribly opinionated, and more than compensates for his fundamental ignorance with good instincts and a persuasive manner. The Memo is intended as a kind of indisputable flowering of these factors. The passage we're honing at the moment has to do with the absurdity of our current employment. Let's listen in as Napier explains his concerns to Natasha - she likes to be called Tash, Napier therefore refuses to use anything other than her full name when speaking to her - our Head Of Department.

"Natasha, may I have a word?" He's smiling, something he almost never does.
"Call me Tash, er, Napier, is it?" His smile disappears.
"Natasha, I'm worried that everyone here is trying to get rid of me."
"I'm sure that's not the case. " She doesn't seem sure.