regularly bought newspapers, and felt comforted by the vast prairies of knowledge that I had assimilated. Often I would dispute political matters in restaurants and at the dinner parties I attended. Frequently I found myself with words falling from my mouth that I barely recognised, but as they met with approval or enthusiasm I did not worry much.
At night, when I was not fucking my secretary, I would spend many hours in the passenger seat of my car, looking out of the window at the interior of my garage, which shimmered in my eyes, my bicycle shadowed on the bricks, interrogated by the fluorescent striplight.
More time passed, and I was being paid considerably more money whilst actually having less to do. I now often visited other people’s offices, and they often visited mine. I became adept at handling biros, A4 paper, and the use of argument and persuasion. I was pleased that many meetings proved successful if held in restaurants, particularly if we all got drunk.
I decided to extend the franchise overseas, and asked my people to arrange it. This happened easily, without my having to alter my habits very much. I found air travel less harrowing than I had first imagined, as I had a propensity for queuing.
Deluges of A4 paper were used in a deft manoeuvring of intangible properties, and the numbers I surveyed on my computer screen grew laterally. I was now rich, and wondered what my face would look like in photographs.
*
And then my life fell into small pieces. The letter from the Department was delivered, after being redirected four times, to my new offices. I was choosing the paint, but the subtleties of green were forgotten when I recognised the logo on the envelope. I requested that the interior designer should go away by making a gesture I had copied from television. With shaking fingers I opened the envelope and pulled from it a piece of A4 paper, folded twice.
It generically congratulated me on my new job, and had a computer-printed signature. There was also a questionnaire to fill in.
Was I happy in my new employment
?
I dropped the piece of paper, and stood in my new office, a wealthy and successful man. Something immensely sad passed through my mind, my Giro fluttering for ever out of my reach.
I walked a little way and sat down on a bench between two saplings, and stared at the dust between my feet. I sank my face into my hands and began to moan quietly.
Here Be Dragons
I was somewhere south of somewhere, north of somewhere else, east of everywhere and west of nowhere at all. I had been wandering along endlessly straight roads and tracks that dissected peroxide-bright prairies of barley, which the wind lashed into yellow oceans on which long, low, black ships sailed with their unseen slave cargo of caged poultry.
I’d made some kind of mistake, I now knew. I had begun with the idea that my world – encircled and delineated by diaries, deadlines, telephones, newspapers, emails, bank statements, bills, invoices, tax demands, mortgage payments – might be a creation merely of my own. Perhaps simply by removing myself from this apparently scripted existence I could discover a species of reality that had been previously invisible to my blinkered senses.
In some ways I wished myself in an era when the known had faded at the edges, where civilisation petered out into blank spaces occupied with the superstition of the unknown: here be dragons. But England had long been charted in exhaustive detail by Ordnance Survey maps; maps that showed every building, each gradient, each brook and pond, every pylon. Useful, doubtlessly, but also somehow imprisoning.
And what happened was this: browsing the Ordnance Survey map section in a bookshop one morning, I hadfirst been annoyed and then intrigued by the absence of a certain sheet number. I crossed town to another bookshop. It wasn’t there either. To be certain, I checked at the library, where it was also missing. I began to feel excited. More than anything, I
At night, when I was not fucking my secretary, I would spend many hours in the passenger seat of my car, looking out of the window at the interior of my garage, which shimmered in my eyes, my bicycle shadowed on the bricks, interrogated by the fluorescent striplight.
More time passed, and I was being paid considerably more money whilst actually having less to do. I now often visited other people’s offices, and they often visited mine. I became adept at handling biros, A4 paper, and the use of argument and persuasion. I was pleased that many meetings proved successful if held in restaurants, particularly if we all got drunk.
I decided to extend the franchise overseas, and asked my people to arrange it. This happened easily, without my having to alter my habits very much. I found air travel less harrowing than I had first imagined, as I had a propensity for queuing.
Deluges of A4 paper were used in a deft manoeuvring of intangible properties, and the numbers I surveyed on my computer screen grew laterally. I was now rich, and wondered what my face would look like in photographs.
*
And then my life fell into small pieces. The letter from the Department was delivered, after being redirected four times, to my new offices. I was choosing the paint, but the subtleties of green were forgotten when I recognised the logo on the envelope. I requested that the interior designer should go away by making a gesture I had copied from television. With shaking fingers I opened the envelope and pulled from it a piece of A4 paper, folded twice.
It generically congratulated me on my new job, and had a computer-printed signature. There was also a questionnaire to fill in.
Was I happy in my new employment
?
I dropped the piece of paper, and stood in my new office, a wealthy and successful man. Something immensely sad passed through my mind, my Giro fluttering for ever out of my reach.
I walked a little way and sat down on a bench between two saplings, and stared at the dust between my feet. I sank my face into my hands and began to moan quietly.
Here Be Dragons
I was somewhere south of somewhere, north of somewhere else, east of everywhere and west of nowhere at all. I had been wandering along endlessly straight roads and tracks that dissected peroxide-bright prairies of barley, which the wind lashed into yellow oceans on which long, low, black ships sailed with their unseen slave cargo of caged poultry.
I’d made some kind of mistake, I now knew. I had begun with the idea that my world – encircled and delineated by diaries, deadlines, telephones, newspapers, emails, bank statements, bills, invoices, tax demands, mortgage payments – might be a creation merely of my own. Perhaps simply by removing myself from this apparently scripted existence I could discover a species of reality that had been previously invisible to my blinkered senses.
In some ways I wished myself in an era when the known had faded at the edges, where civilisation petered out into blank spaces occupied with the superstition of the unknown: here be dragons. But England had long been charted in exhaustive detail by Ordnance Survey maps; maps that showed every building, each gradient, each brook and pond, every pylon. Useful, doubtlessly, but also somehow imprisoning.
And what happened was this: browsing the Ordnance Survey map section in a bookshop one morning, I hadfirst been annoyed and then intrigued by the absence of a certain sheet number. I crossed town to another bookshop. It wasn’t there either. To be certain, I checked at the library, where it was also missing. I began to feel excited. More than anything, I
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