things move around

The dual-purpose hat / coat stand, which stands in the corner of the tax guys’ windowless office, is bare. This in itself tells us nothing, for none of the tax guys are in the habit of hanging their coats on the stand, and as for hats, all three eschew them entirely. Therefore the hat / coat stand is bare whether or not one or more tax guys, at a given time, occupies the room. However, there are other, more reliable indicators of the vacancy or otherwise of the unspeakably beige chamber which is the sometime habitation of these men. The timid tap-a-tap of a desktop calculator. The infrequent creak of an ergonomic chair. A closed door, for the door is closed only when a more senior tax professional is present, conferring with our heroes in hushed tones (are there any other tones in which one might confer?) And borne out into the corridor, on a foetid zephyr of conditioned air, very faint, but definitely present, the psychic odour of despair.

And of course, the tax guys themselves, visible, doing what it is that they do. But let’s not go there.

“D’you have allergies?” asks the tax guy to whom I have referred in the past as Mike. Ostensibly Mike is making small talk with Percy - or is it Ken? - all part of the ‘getting-to-know-you’ process. Presumably Ken, out of my line of sight behind a flimsy interior wall, has taken some medication or sneezed or dabbed his eye with a handkerchief or given some indication that he has allergies. But there is a terrible subtext: Mike is probing the newcomer for psychological weaknesses, insecurities, faulty wiring in the bulb, call it what you will. Mike is newly-shorn and his once-bleary blue eyes are shining bright in response to the challenge presented by the interloper. Ken is a man who spends 80% of his time demurring and therefore his response is predictable: he demurs, and the first iron slab of a hierarchy is established. This is the kind of everyday confrontation, constructed from pure will or if you will pure spunk, by which men establish their empires on this earth and ultimately ascend to the wide welkin, from whence their enduring light directs the dream-travels of their descendants after they are gone. Then all three of the tax guys go for their morning coffee. As to how Ken spends the remaining 20% of his time, I wouldn’t want to hypothesise.

The number of tax professionals inhabiting the windowless room opposite mine has increased by one: let’s say his name is Ken.

Ken is approximately five foot five inches tall and has whiskers which look like they are drawn in pencil. This combined with his blimpish physique and tardigrade gait give the impression of a wretched but benign cartoon.

I introduce myself to Ken, or is his name Percy, I forget. The original tax guys look on, aghast.

My friend’s lumbar problems continue to worsen, despite courses of massage, physiotherapy, yoga and more abstruse techniques including electrical stimulation and chiropractice. His absence, now into its second month, is attested to by the pile of subscription periodicals, on the subjects of investing and personal finance, slowly spreading across his desk like mold.

My friend tells the story of his time in London in the sixties, when he would go occasionally to the Billingsgate market at four in the a.m. to buy sacks full of crab, which he would boil that same evening in an enormous wrought-iron cauldron and share with seven or eight acquaintances of both genders. The implication being that when all the crab had been eaten, or everyone’s appetite for crab satisfied, whichever was the sooner, various romantic activites would ensue, in keeping with the temper of the times.

Two jackets hang in the windowless, striplit room which is the tax guys’ locale and universe. The younger one - Mike, I think he’s called - leans back in his cheap office chair and feigns consciousness as his cellmate describes, in depth, the symptoms of his arthritis. Mike scratches the back of his head, just below his thin patch. Mike nods lightly and habitually, a pale flame writhing in his skull and spine, lashing his brain, gnawing at his sense of self, flaying his dreams into a thin colourless gruel which sloshes when he turns, seeping from his eyeballs, spilling from his nostrils unseen onto his thighs and groin.

Sad are the days before the days I work, sad and long, and they’re full of dread, and they regret themselves even as they slip out of reach; like a river swollen to full-bore, roaring like a furnace, hurrying and pouring to the sea where the tides will shackle it and grind it into a slow, cold current.

I am not back in work yet, but it has always been in me. My thoughts turn to it as I cradle my infant daughter, as I salute the new year with my wife, as I cook, as I write this diary. Work - has there lived a man whose mind was not once sullied with its tedious certainties, whose feet were still fresh as the spring, at five a.m.?

It has always been in me. But what is work, for me? A man tied to two railway tracks, waiting for one half of his body to be left oozing, with no memorial but another traumatised driver, and his family, and so on; and the sound of the trains moving past, predatorially, every day, heeee-haw, every day.

But work. That strange and terrible jungle.

I think back to my first day here: the point in time at which my existence most tangibly overlapped with that of my predecessor, Stephen. He was two weeks gone on the day I started. Perhaps if I can recall every detail of that day - every flick-knife of feeling, every intuition, every sense of any sort at all - then I will form a more detailed impression of his being. In other words it’s possible that he left some lingering psychic imprint on his office, something of which still remained before I came and trampled it like a hobnail boot on a butterfly, in the firm but spongy mud of a tropical delta.

What were my feelings? Apprehension, terror, delirium, those go without saying on the first day of a new job. But what else? I remember feeling hungry when I first sat down at my desk (and I had already breakfasted), and for the first day or so struggling to breathe, although not seriously, not as with a compressed chest or an infected tongue. So what, then? So Stephen was a very meagre man, of this we can be sure, not given to overindulgence of any sort, as likely to feast and cavort as an aphasic to recite an epic ballad, a cripple to ascend a crag, a dead man to walk around bodily in the world of the living, although there are those who would affirm and believe in all three of those wild scenarios.

The tax guys are unusually industrious today. Mike - at least I think that’s his name - hunches over his desk-calculator, the fingers of his left hand dancing gaily. Often he lifts his head to glance at the screen of his laptop, and in his eyes I see a shining earnestness and a Corinthian vigour; or I would, if I could look into his eyes. But if I am at the centre of the clock face, facing North, then Mike is at one o’clock, facing East, and all I can see of his face is the baggy, saggy, flop of his right cheek, charred as always with a day’s growth, and his right ear, and his short brown hair, thinning slightly at the crown, and the beginning of his right eyebrow and the profile of his nose.

I take a swig of Barg’s Cream Soda and turn again to my own work.

Naturally I can’t get a straight answer out of my friend as to how was his holiday, did he see any family, recognise the byways of his bygone days, and did Shanghai live up to expectations? Instead he tells me about the fresh-caught octopus he ate, ink and all, and the one-legged man who served it to him. He describes at great length the sound of the lightning licking the shingles of his colonial B&B in Singapore, and the rain devouring the streets around him. He tells me that he will have to change his broker soon if things carry on. And all this he tells me without speaking. And all the while he maintains that oblique smile which is his customary expression, a smile which relies upon his eyes, lying in his wide, smooth face like obsidian pebbles on a wide, sandy-smooth beach.

And all his stories lie upon my desk like octopus ink or aurorae or mingled, tangled, dim fingerprints.