Pigeon Variations - Ch 41 - Incident in the Workplace

The CFO, Dennis Butcher, asked Pyser to follow him into a meeting room. “Take a seat,” he said.

Pyser did as he was told. It was already a bad morning. Another two fingers on his left hand had fallen off on the tube.  

“How are things?” he asked.

Pyser mumbled.

“Excuse me?”

Pyser realised Dennis couldn’t understand him properly. He forced himself to enunciate the word, “Fine.”

“I hear you had an accident yesterday. What happened?”

“I shat myself.”

“Pardon?”

Pyser repeated himself. He explained about the white bird droppings that trickled down his legs and onto his shoes in the kitchen as he tried to pour himself a glass of water. It made Siobhan in marketing shriek. Pyser hadn’t realised she was standing behind him when it happened.

“Tell me about your face.”

Pyser didn’t quite know what to say. It was self-explanatory.

“Could I ask you to remove the scarf and hunting cap?”

Dennis was South African. He liked rugby, cricket and pretended not to be racist – ‘The thing is, when I was growing up, our servants were like part of the family’ – and he liked to start meetings by saying, ‘Look, I know I’m the smartest guy in the room…’ There was a picture of his rich white family on his desk.

Pyser did as he was told and removed the garments. His nose and mouth were changing shape. The skin and bone remoulding into one beak. It’s what made talking tricky. “I think I’m becoming a bird,” he managed to say. 

Dennis studied him and said, “You think you are?”

“Yes.”

“I’d say it’s a dead-on certainty, Pyser.”

There was an awkward silence.

“When you accepted the job, did you know you were turning into a bird?”

“No.”

“But you must have known the day you started? Didn’t I mention to you how peculiar it was to see a purchase ledger clerk wearing a suit, tie, hunting cap, scarf and sunglasses?”

Pyser felt himself being backed into a corner. He wasn’t a good liar. Never had been. “I literally had it confirmed the week before.”

Dennis leaned back in his chair. “So you did know?”

“I suppose.”

“Do you not think you should have told us?” He put his hands behind his head, locking his fingers.

“Probably.”

“Most definitely,” he corrected. “I want to ask you another question. In the interview, you told us that your spreadsheet skills were… ‘pukka’.”

“I did.”

“Our Financial Controller suggests otherwise. She seems to think you’ve never laid eyes on a spreadsheet before. Is it true that when she asked you to create a formula you apparently froze and started to make cooing sounds?”

Pyser wanted to claim he didn’t remember but it was nonsense to deny it. The CFO had him over a barrel. “It’s true” he said.

“And you’ve never used spreadsheets before?”

“No.”

“So you lied?”

“In a way.”

“There’s no ‘in a way’ about it. This is binary.”

“What does that mean?”

“We asked you a direct question, fundamental to the role, and you lied.”

“But I wanted to work here.”

Dennis leaned forward and tapped the table with his functional fingers. Janice and Pauline talked about him behind his back. They called him arrogant and there was a rumour that he was knocking-off the Head of Marketing, Justine.

“I should dismiss you instantly, you know that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“How long do you have before Full Transition?”

“Six weeks, maybe less.”

“That’s what I thought. Our Head of Sales turned into an Ibis last summer. We’ve suffered ever since as a business. He was a born rainmaker, brilliant at what he did. I doubt I’ll be saying the same about you.”

They sat there and Pyser realised the meeting was over. “Am I fired?” he asked.

“No,” said Dennis. “Not yet at least. I might have a use for you but I need to run it past a couple of colleagues. Go back to your desk – there’s plenty of invoices for you to input onto the system. You can do data entry, right?”

“Yes,” said Pyser, making sure he kept his one-digit left hand out of sight.

“We’ll catch up again next week, probably.”

Pyser left the meeting room. It was the first time he had felt relieved not to be fired.