Three: We Leave The Office (continued)

The telephone is one of those flimsy plastic numbers that aquaplanes around one end of the bar. Some self-contradictory instructions are sellotaped to it. She answers before I hear a ringing tone.
"Dickie, where are you?" she says, with the usual note of crescent hysteria in her voice.
"In the pub," I tell her and she wails like a distressed bison, its hide punctured by a Pawnee arrow.
"With him?" she asks eventually, amidst sobs.
"Napier's here. He's reading."
"Always together, you two. Inseparable."
"That's hardly true, is it Darling. I spend every night with you, and every weekend."
"Not this weekend. I'm going home."
This, clearly, is excellent news. I resolve to make at least a token effort to dissuade her.
"But Darling our plans..."
"Our plans will wait for another weekend," she says. "I am packed. I will see you," she pauses, as if stuck for a word, "one fine day."
"Darling," I begin, but she has already put the 'phone down, no doubt with a flourish of black nightdress.

I return to the bench, and Napier has bought me another drink, something of a feat, since I didn't see him approach the bar, and he had run out of money the last time it was his round.

"Cheers!"
He closes his book, and looks at me over a pair of imaginary pince-nez.
"What gives?"
"Sorry?" Napier coughs.
"What news of the fair Lucia, La Strega?"
"She's off back up to Whitby for the weekend," I tell him. "I'm a free man."
"Remember the Memo," he says. "We are all trapped in the belly of the Leviathan, and can only free ourselves by tickling its uvula." I haven't read this section yet, and am immediately concerned that it may need some rewriting. "Nevertheless," he continues, "we should enjoy these intimations of liberty where we find them. Now, let's get properly drunk."

Three: We Leave The Office (continued)

Perhaps it's the sun's heat, perhaps it's because I missed breakfast, but the drink is making me feel a little hazy. Every half-glimpsed face on a passing Routemaster seems to consider me with a disapproving squint. Napier sits beside me on the bench, reading, and chuckling from time to time. He catches me looking at him from beneath a raised eyebrow and feels the need to explain.

"He's fucking her in the street!" he says, in an excitable stage whisper.

Napier is a creature of contradictions, being oddly squeamish about all things corporeal, unless they are under discussion between the covers of a work of erotic literature, though he would reject the description, on the grounds that it is something of a cliché. He does, however, shrink from any kind of physical contact, and will only discuss the merits, or lack thereof, of the opposite sex, in a purely aesthetic or intellectual context. I am obliged to remove to the post room for any frank discussion of earthier matters where Tony and Bob, universally referred to as the post boys, despite their advanced years, are only too happy to share their thoughts. Accordingly, when a particulary fragrant paradigm of young Middle-Eastern womanhood floats past in a long but semi-transparent frock, I am unable to communicate my base thoughts aloud but instead burble them into my lager.

"What was that?" asks Napier, looking up from his book.
"Ayou!" My pager vibrates in a trouser pocket. La Strega has somehow sensed that I have been thinking about another woman. "I've got to make a 'phone call." Napier dismisses me with a Papal wave, as if he hadn't, in fact, been ignoring me completely, and I go inside to find a payphone.

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.

Two: The Memo

Napier was a stranger to formal education. Prior to the incident which claimed the lives of his parents the family lived in Edinburgh on Tristan Da Cunha. He was accustomed, therefore, to a life of isolation. Upon their bereavement, he and Lara were shipped back to London, after a brief stay in St Helena, a bleak interval for Napier, apparently, which he refuses to discuss. It soon became obvious that these two dark children, still squinting into the remembered winds of southern latitudes, were not yet ready to adapt to city life. Aged nine (her)and ten (him), the orphans were removed to a progressive boarding school on the South Coast, where lessons and clothing were optional, but where at least they could let an offshore breeze dry the tears from beneath their dark, lost eyes.

One: Just After We Meet (continued)

I'm anxious not to appear anxious, and keen not to appear keen, so I leave it at that. He's told me nothing, but I can't dig further, it would be... unseemly. She's coming to meet us for lunch on Monday, just seventy hours hence, and I'm giddy right now, and somewhat nauseous but there is work to be done this afternoon, and then a weekend with La Strega, my ladyfriend, to negotiate.

Rather than involving ourselves in those tasks identified by management as time-critical and due for completion by the day's end Napier and I decide instead to work on The Memo. Napier unlocks the bottom drawer of the rosewood partner desk that he has recently appropriated from office storage, and which now occupies most of the cubicle. He removes a small, fireproof deed box therefrom, then places one hand on each side of the box and exhales thoroughly. He depresses the latch, the lid of the box pops up a quarter of an inch, and Napier, with infinite care, pulls out the linen-bound notebook within.

"Let us return to our great undertaking," he says, "alert to the wayward nature of truth."

One: Just After We Meet

Napier is tall, six foot four, maybe taller. He can see over the partitions in the office without standing. He just straightens his arms out on the armrests of his chair as if he's on the parallel bars and he can see as far as the coffee machine. They're talking about getting rid of the partitions and going open-plan. And we've talked about it. Napier's against it as it would rob him of a slight advantage; I'm against it because the permanent staff, the rest of the office, essentially, are vile thwarted creatures I like not to look upon.
Napier says that I should be less judgmental of my colleagues but this is a little hypocritical of him, as he variously describes our co-workers as "fatheads" and "drones" and is often quite sharp with the supervisors, particularly when they ask him to do anything. Just to give you an idea of what he can be like I shall report an exchange that took place on my first day here. The supervisor involved, whose name is Alison, is somewhat less grotesquely uneasy on the eye than the others, and might be considered pleasant, by the kind of person who would choose to employ such an essentially redundant word.
Alison (appearing at the entrance to our cubicle) : How's our new boy getting on?
Dickie : I'm settling in okay, I hope.
Alison : Good, good. Hasn't proved too much of a burden for you then, Napier?
Napier (lifting his gaze from a well-thumbed copy of L'Histoire d'O) : No, he's stayed out from under my feet. You might do well to follow his example, in fact.

Alison retreats, biting her bottom lip and nodding slowly.

He's not a difficult person to be around, generally, provided you don't say anything that raises his pulse, or do anything that distracts him from whatever he's reading. Last week it was Tropic of Cancer. Napier complained that it was a little story-heavy.

You could call it hauteur. I put it down to the fact that he sees the world from a slightly steeper angle than most of us. The only person with whom he is unreservedly warm is his sister. When she telephones, which she does every morning at eleven (they are orphans and have only each other), he bookmarks whatever filth he's got his nose in, tosses it into his in-tray and cradles the receiver with both hands, speaking to her in quiet, reassuring tones.

Her name is Lara. I've not met her but I imagine that she looks nothing like Julie Christie. Instead she is dark, her hair is soft and straight, where her brother's is coarse and unruly. Her eyes are the same rich shade, but are scintillatingly alive where his are flat, reflecting only disapproval. I dream of her at night; hot, disturbing dreams from which I awake in a tangle of loose bedding.

Napier announces that we are to be introduced, this sister and I. We are inspecting a large, iced birthday cake that has been returned at some expense to the customer services department of the retail group for whom we currently, temporarily work.

"Customer reports flecks on cake which look like greenfly. Jesus, it's green icing. Check she's not on the database, send her a letter of reassurance and some vouchers."

Napier, for all his studied idleness, is decisive when required to be. The cake has been pushed around the office for a couple of days, like a giant chequer, with no-one having a notion of what to do with it.

"Do you think she'll like me?" I ask.
"Impossible to say," replies Napier. "I don't actually dislike you, and she's a more generous spirit than I. You don't smell or anything like that. You are a trifle common, but at least you're not inbred, like so many of them here."
"Thanks. Thanks a lot."