Names of the Guilty

The names of the guilty have been changed to protect the
innocent.

It was a lively pool, but nobody was expecting a bomb to drop. The bomb
came from Kelly, the slobbering, pat-me and love-me over-enthusiastic
new girl (woman won't do). Like a big dog, she'd insinuated herself
into everybody's affections. Well, nearly everybody; Eve was still
pretty po-faced about her. But then, Eve was pretty po-faced about
everybody about from Stig. All the women were mad about Stig; he had a
fag hag fan club as long as your arm.

It wasn't one of those hackneyed things: like, I'm in love with the
boss and I'm going to have his baby. Kelly, for all I've said about
her, was more grown up than that. She did snog the Chief Executive at
her leaving do, but that was later and she was powerfully drunk, they
tell me. I wasn't there to see it. I was well into hell then.

No, it was pretty straightforward really: I've got a new job. That was
her bomb.

*
It had been a good holiday. The girls had had a great time by the pool,
on the beach, reading Harry Potter, wandering around the shops. Mum and
Dad had done pretty well too, swimming, reading, a few standing stones,
old towns and markets. The tents next door in both directions provided
company for all of us; we even met two families we knew, both in the
one day. We thought that only happened to us in St Ives. Apparently,
Carnac in Southern Brittany was in the same dimension.
There was only one thing missing when we got back; that elusive feeling
of having recovered, rested, being rejuvenated. It wasn't the holiday's
fault, so the problem must lie with work - too much of it.
Nothing much happened for me in the next few months. A birthday; too
many evenings worked, full of nervous energy, focussing on the people
around me: what did they want, how could they be satisfied, what was
the answer to their question.
Now I know enough about pop psychology to know I'm a bit neurotic, that
my childhood was not stable and did not fill me with a warm rosy glow
about myself. So I want to do well, and I want to please people. And
because I was brought up a bit on the margins, I don't always know the
rules. I fail in social lying; God help me, I even tell people how I am
most of the times that they ask me. Sometimes it's great living as I
do: I've heard it described as living on the edge of the rabbit's fur,
and you can see a long way and experience a lot more. Other times it's
awful, and you want to roll up in a ball way down inside the fur, and
not think and most of all not feel a thing. And you envy the people who
live there all the time; and that's most people. So let's just say, I'm
edgy.
I'd built a tight team for a new project. We all thought we were pretty
marvellous. Well, I did and I didn't; I can't turn the analyser off,
and I knew there could be trouble down the line with Eve. I'd wondered
in passing what had happened to the storming, in forming, storming and
norming, the way that teams are supposed to do. I needn't have worried;
it just came later.

***

I'm a talented young woman and I've learnt that you have to look out
for yourself. Some of it I learnt the hard way; I have a hearing
disability, you see. Some, I've just observed at work. Maybe a bit is
because I'm one of Thatcher's children, although it's a legacy I don't
acknowledge or endorse. I'm an environmentalist; I actually read what
Greenpeace send me and I don't have central heating, because I don't
need it. I'm also mad about football and most sport really. My visits
abroad are timed to coincide with Manchester United's international
games. Well, that was what John and I always used to do, before we
broke up (if we have broken up). John was my partner in crime and I had
hopes of marriage; hopes he didn't share - he'd already done it once
and had a child, almost an adult. Oh, and I'm clinically obese, at
least according to WeightWatchers; I think I'm just overweight.
Three words wobbled my world then. But they did not stick. They will
not stick, for I am a talented young career woman, who deserves - and,
now, demands and gets - better.

How did it all start? Like all good office soap operas, we did lunch. I
was the only member of the team who did lunch; I think my work
experience must have differed from the rest, in that respect. We'd
given the housing association a grant, and I was the grant goddess, and
he - well it was a good time to get back in touch with someone I'd
worked with before and got along with well, especially since at the
time I was mourning John. It started with an Indian, never thought it
would come to this: here I am, hands-free mobile and mobile in my
United-red Yaris, manager of the year (actually I made that bit up).
The ace one. There was this job coming up, he said, I might be
interested in; I'd be very good at it, he imagined. It started with an
Indian, went through faxing and phoning while I was on holiday, an
early morning interview and a formal offer. Never thought it would come
to three words that wobbled my world.

***

Of course I never said them; I never would use that figure of speech.
Although I swear and curse a lot, I avoid phrases which I think are an
abomination of the English language, or are degrading. My swearing
isn't a reflection on my personal morality.

I'm struggling: you want to know now what this is all about, and I want
to spin it out a bit until I feel strong enough to tell you. That's not
yet, I'm warning you.

I'm not always good at diversionary tactics. I once saw a book which
described the week I was born in, as "the week of literalness". I do
tend to take things rather too literally, and so I tend to stay focused
on a problem, until I can solve it. I'm not sure, now I've written it,
that there's any automatic connection between those two things, but,
without analysing, it feels like it makes sense. The astrology book was
in the kitchen at work; one of those books, cards, gifts, assorted
garbage that comes in with bargain blazoned all over it, and is
designed to meet the endless need for gifts to mark ludicrous dreamt-up
or overblown occasions, or because you can't apparently just say thank
you to somebody and mean it, unless you give them something they don't
want and with no intrinsic value. The marketing of appreciation is
hateful, preying as it does on people's fear of being seen to be
ungrateful by not buying some cute, worthless bit of junk. The Chief
Executive banned this stuff from the kitchen, heaven knows why - well,
probably because it stopped people working. I know that I enjoyed
pressing toys that made annoying noises, rifling through books invented
just for the gift market, even occasionally buying a book or some cards
- and I enjoyed it because it filled that vital period between putting
hot water in your mug and the tea being brewed, if you don't need to go
to the toilet. I now leave the mug and try and find something useful
and quick to do, and find twenty minutes later, I've forgotten about
the thing. Anyway, it was just such a moment, when I read about the
week of literalness.

We've not really done context; well, you know it's in an office, and
again I don't want to give the game away yet really. But there are more
painful things I don't want to talk about yet; so I'll give on this
one. Office stories are always in multinational corporations or
somewhere fashionable-sounding like the media or marketing. My story is
in local government. The last refuge of the coward, it was memorably
described in one television programme (one of the Beiderbeck series). I
think I've been pretty brave. And, just in case you're still looking
for glamour, I'm not talking about a municipal empire, with a glamorous
or evil Council Leader or Chief Executive. I'm talking pretty much the
lowest of the low: a district council. Housing, if the Government
hasn't enforced a sale to a Housing Association; Leisure, if the
Government hasn't bent the rules to make it sub-contracted to a private
company, or at least a Leisure Trust; Cleansing, ditto; Economic
Development, except that's likely to be controlled by a "Local
Strategic Partnership" which subsidises developers, where it doesn't
meet Government targets; Planning, as long as all we do is apply the
law, whatever the local consequences; Environmental Health, I think by
and large we're still allowed to do that. Oh, and local democracy; yes,
we're allowed to absorb all the hopes, expectations, and complaints of
residents, as long as we don't have any power to do anything about it.
Classic power-play: central Government lets us have all the
responsibility and none of the power. Just in case you're a
metropolitan, there are still parts of the sticks with both district
and county councils (education, social services, ....I won't go into
the polemic). You'd be forgiven for not knowing; unfortunately civil
servants have given up knowing too; nothing to come out of Government
since 1997 has recognised that we exist. The first time I really
noticed it was when the idea of an elected mayor (deficit model of
local government again - nothing new there - totally arbitary solution
thrown in without any evidence to substantiate it) was included in the
local government white paper.
My favourite idea was for there to be both an elected district mayor
and an elected county mayor: this town ain't big enough for the both of
us and it ain't me that's gonna leave; pistols at dawn. Mayors duel,
not many dead.
But all human life is here; we've got it all. And you're much much more
likely to know the person, and that's the critical bit. You don't have
the anonymity of the city, where you live in your ghetto. We haven't
gone in for this in a big way, I prefer less monocultural surroundings,
but in Bristol we lived in the welfare-state-managers streets.
To be continued