Monday of Next Week

This is the fifth time I’ve done this now, which makes it about three months since I first came here; not here, but to the city although it feels as if here is the only place I have been in those three months. I turned up on time but as ever there is a queue and the kid on the desk tells me I can expect to wait at least half an hour before I get seen. The first time that happened I thought it was outrageous that I make the effort to be on time only to be told to wait. I asked: if I’d have turned up late would I have been seen in turn? I was told: probably not. They didn’t care it seemed. It was always someone different at the desk too. I wondered if it was a new person every time because people kept leaving or if whoever drew the short straw had to stand there all day, breaking the bad news to everyone and getting nothing but abuse all the time. I nearly went up to ask except that someone called my name. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t some tieless moron waiting to see me on time - it was Bernard, who’d befriended me on my first visit. He'd taken the opportunity of a stranger’s face to fill me in on what to expect every fortnight; he’d been coming here, on-and-off for years. He once joked, he’d told me, in an assessment interview, that he knew the procedures better than them. The adviser who’d been sat there suggested he apply for a post as they had vacancies. She was deadly serious too. Bernard had laughed in disbelief and then scorn and then told them no way was he working here. They suspended his money for about a month because he turned down an offer of suitable work. He went hungry for weeks because of that, he told me. He argued against it though and got all his money back. That was the kind of people they were though he said. Everything was done this way, that way or the other. He would hate them if he didn’t pity them so much. The only thing, he thought, worse than coming here every other week would to come here every single day. Doing nothing but staring into the dead eyes of people like him; people who were no longer of much use to anyone anymore.

Today he's talking about smoking. Bernard can remember the days when you could light up inside without so much as a tut or a glance. You can tell who the smokers were now he said, because they were the ones itching and twitching in their seats; desperate to walk out for a quick puff but reluctant to move in case they were called in their absence and ended up waiting longer or even rescheduling to be seen. They were the ones, he said, who were always the first to cause any trouble. A tinderbox combination of dry throats, cigarette sweats and an ever diminishing lack of patience. You could see it building up; some stubbled lad with a grey, drawn face unable to decide whether or not to sit or stand then pacing up and down the aisle until he marched right over to the clueless jobsworth on the desk and started bawling them out over the many failings of their employer. Once Bernard had seen one young lad, probably a work experience lackey, dragged across the desk by the tie he’d almost certainly borrowed off his dad; yanked over, bodily through the air, up and over his station to come crashing to the floor in a stunned heap. The bloke that had done this - a big fella that you wouldn’t mess with by all accounts - sat down on his seat afterwards as if nothing had happened. The kid walked straight out of the revolving doors, face red with shock and embarrassment and fear. Nobody breathed a word. Bernard said he wouldn’t be surprised if that was the real reason a lot of the lads didn’t want to wear ties these days. It was nothing to do with sex discrimination or any such nonsense; it was a survival tactic. As he told me this my eyes were drawn to the one nervous looking man sat across from me. I wondered if he was about to go postal too, right here, right in front of me. Part of me hoped he would, just to break the monotony, the dull rigid order of the place. I willed him to snap, to start throwing chairs and table at random hapless targets but instead he folded himself deep into his chest and sank even further down into his seat with an air of defeat.

The next hour passes in a slow drone, the monotonous static humming of overbearing strip lights the background to a punctuated soundtrack of coughs and mutters, beeps and shrill rings played against an audience of low simmering tension and ill-temper. Even Bernard has fallen silent, with his eyes shut - he could be asleep for all I know. The lack of conversation is uneasy. Few people make eye contact with you here; everybody looks to the hard, downtrodden carpet or the over-bright ceiling, where gaps in the tiled grid expose loose cable and foil pipes that sparkle conspicuously in an otherwise dull environment. I find myself almost dozing off too, my heavy head dropping lazily toward Bernard’s shoulder. A harsh buzzer sounds jerking us both awake and our names are called by an older lady with red cat’s eye glasses and a top heavy hairdo. She directs me into one booth and Bernard into another. I sit down at a plastic foldaway desk occupied by an expensive looking black computer and an overly optimistic looking girl with a name badge reading Emma. She greets me with an impossibly wide smile and asks me if we shall see what she can do for me today shall we?

Not much as it turns out, or at least that‘s what I tell Bernard. I’m sat in a darkened pub just down the road, slowly nursing, not savouring a pint of piss-weak bitter, unsuccessfully attempting to finish off an abandoned crossword while Bernard relates the minutes of his afternoon’s meeting:

"Pointless it was, as usual. Tried to get me to apply for something to do with computer training. Told them they’d have to train me first then. All these stupid jobs they know I can’t do. Keep telling me - 'that’s the future Mr Brownlow, that’s where all the work is, you can’t keep turning these opportunities down.' 'Want to bet', says I? It’s no good telling me to go for this job, that job when they know damn well I’ve got no chance of getting any of them. Then tell me I need to go on a training course. Make me feel like a frigging kid again they do. Like I never managed to survive without them before. Ignorant pricks. All they’re after is someone to tick their boxes so’s they can tell their bosses they’re doing a good job. Well they’re not, they’re doing a shite job. Waste of fucking space they are."

I stay silent, pretending to be engrossed in the crossword that I can’t complete. I don’t want to tell Bernard they got me an interview while I was in there. The ever perky Emma thought she knew of a post that would suit me "right down to the T" that’s what she’d said. She’d given me vouchers to pay for a sweatshop suit, a handful of photocopies on interview techniques and a whole bundle of forms with accompanying notes to fill so I can claim back all kinds of expenses. I’d barely said two words to the girl; she’d just read through my details, asked me if I’d be interested in working in a university setting - just admin work like - and after my non-committal "mm-hmm" jumped straight on the phone and within five minutes told me I was to present at the University in the town centre at 2.30 on Thursday afternoon.

If I say something he might get pissed off that I was offered something so quickly. If I say something he might get pissed off that I don‘t want it. If I say something we might have to acknowledge the fact that our sole connection is the depressing set of circumstances that we both happen to find ourselves in and I don’t think I’m ready to admit to either one of us that he’s the only friend I’ve got right now. He’d murder me if he found out I was thinking of ballsing it up. I couldn’t simply not go - they’d stop my payments. I wanted to give Bernard my suit money, I wanted to trade it in for cash and take him out for something to eat, or a few drinks - a proper night out. I wanted to say thanks - I wanted to say thank you - for befriending me when he probably knew it was inevitable that it wouldn’t last for very long anyway. I didn’t want to be that person to him. I didn’t want it to happen again.

He still sees them, the others, the ones who came before me. The clueless monkeys signing on for the first time. He looked after them all - sat them down, told them what they needed to know, bought them drinks while they had their waiting days, told them about the time some nutter had half-strangled the work experience lad - he’s done it all before, I’m not the first. He told me he still sees them, sometimes, walking down Portland Street on his way to the library or at the bus stop or on the overcrowded bus they sometimes share before he gets off where the bunched up maze of redbrick streets are - long before they get off. He sees them and sometimes they look at him and blinking hard and fast they look away, they look somewhere else, somewhere where he isn’t. I was with him once when it happened in the early days before I understood. We were sat in the pub, the one in town we go to on a Thursday afternoon, when a young blond lad, younger than me, came to the bar. Wearing a cheap blue suit he was, stood with some girl in a similar outfit. Saw me and Bernard and looked at us just a little bit too long. "Alright there Martin", Bernard said. The blond lad flushed red then white, nodded and mumbled an "Aye, alright" and guided the girl to a table at the other end of the bar, in a corner behind a pillar. We left before he did. The next week when we went in the girl at the bar gave Bernard an unrequested whiskey to go with our pints. From Martin, she said. Bernard grunted and nodded and swallowed his gift in one before we settled ourselves down for the afternoon.

"How’d it go then, your one?" he asks. "Same as ever", I reply. "Waste of space they are, like you said". I studied the crossword even more intently wondering if I could come up with an excuse why I wouldn’t be coming for a drink on Thursday.