I Do Not Work Here

An extract from Fired…

Lilly was cleaning up an old woman’s arsehole. ‘I saw your children this morning,’ she said, ‘Paul was stealing their money, basically, so that I, me, a stranger, could handle your body and so Nina could buy herself a new… actually what does she spend her money on? To be honest with you Wendy I’m starting to wonder if this is entirely right. I mean we’re friends, you and me; I like you, I do, but paying other people to handle the people you love, like this… I’m starting to think…’

Looking after the dead had brought Lilly to life, releasing the weight that school, university and the various jobs she’d had until now had pressed down upon her. One of her first jobs, while she was trying to pay her way through university, was temping for a market research company, collecting and collating ‘profiling data’ on the customers of this or that business, at least customers mad enough to fill in survey forms in the hope of winning a voucher. Occasionally, someone submitted some kind of honest comment, or they wrote something unexpected, and instead of ‘I really wish someone would produce orange-flavoured instant coffee’ a response would come through pointing out that the CEO of the company she was researching for was a kiddy fiddler, or asking at what point a bowl becomes a basin, or declaring that ‘the internet is death,’ or ‘triangles feel pain,’ all of which injected a little reliefy darkness into the over-lit, strip-lit, savagely plastic office. But any such moments soon got swallowed by the atmosphere of… what was it? Not sadness, not loneliness, not boredom, not anything. A notmosphere.

She worked then with twelve other graduates, also temps, and a few other older permanent staff, all hunched over their workstations, and in the corner was a landline which often rang, but which none of the young temps would ever answer. When she asked one of them, a bleakly pretty ginger girl called Aloe with eyebrows that looked like they’d been threaded by a robot, she said that she, Aloe, was anxious about the ringing phone, because ‘it might not be for me.’ This, for Lilly, said it all. Aloe’s phone only rang for her. Always for her. They did speak to each other, in the ‘real world,’ but their speech was so peculiar. Lilly had had conversations, she remembered them, at least she thought she did, with her grandmother for example, and she remembered, when actually speaking, contributing to a strange, lovely, flowing, living thing between us, growing, by itself, its own thing, and yet also ours. This hadn’t happened at university, where people didn’t talk, they exchanged memories and opinions. They only knew memories and opinions. Something was only true if you could have an opinion about it, and opinions were the only truth. If Aloe’s opinion was that she could levitate, or that she had ankles that bend both ways, or that chorizo was a pathogen, then that was real and to even raise an eyebrow was not much different to giving a Nazi salute and goose stepping round the office. None of them seemed to know anything beyond their opinions. Everything that had happened before they were born was an illusion. When Lilly said that Paul McCartney now looked like a budgerigar they all said ‘who?’ They hadn’t heard of Morrissey or Nick Drake or Louis Armstrong or Rachmaninov; nobody before they were born. Not just musicians, nobody. It was as if in the year 2000 a knife had come down upon the endless, billowing tapestry of culture and sliced off a piece of fabric the size of a sticking plaster.

Her course was music, which was alright, at least they forced her to work harder than she would have otherwise, but the whole cost was going to be something like seventy thousand pounds. Why not instead go and live in Finland and hire a good piano teacher there, or two, one to teach and the other to do an interpretative dance? And it was all so suffocating, so dreary, like a long church sermon. She felt like she was adrift on a dull grey ocean. The bastard Nick situation hadn’t helped, but that was a symptom not a cause, and the cause was still mysterious. A sense of not fitting in anywhere started seeping into her life. She had become aware that everyone was thinking the same, that they were the misfits here, too beautiful for this world, radical outsiders; and yet they all basically accepted the path they were on, they basically accepted that it had to be this way, or that there was no point in changing. They all knew that they were destined to graduate, and get some kind of professional job, and have kids, and vote, and see their parents every few months, and get old, and fat, and angry, and die. They all knew it, and they said they hated it, and they complained about it, or joked about it, or listened to rebellious music, or read edgy books, or went off to teach Nepalese orphans how to use Excel, or sat at home smoking genetically engineered brain-melting skunk and playing video games, or wrote novels about transsexual novelists, or marched in the streets for the bees, or for the poor, helpless black people, or whatever, it didn’t matter, because they all basically accepted it, the whole thing, the big, boring picture, the general down slope which, whatever grooves we choose to roll in, is only ever going down and down and down.

An all-pervading sickness had settled on Lilly. The nice ordinary world of university, with nice ordinary lectures, and nice ordinary people, doing nice ordinary things, suddenly this had become a plaster cast world, a ghastly, dreamy, hollow shell of things. So she’d left.

This bold act didn’t lift the weight at all though. If anything, it got heavier after she signed on, and looked for a job, and found a job, and lost a job, and found another one, and all the time a dry, excruciating, spine-draining sense of total futility was making her shoulders ache and her stomach sick and she had to do these big sighs all the time to try to be rid of all her feelings. Until the dead came into her life. Then, something peculiar happened. A new kind of alrightness appeared. She’d never really worried about ‘mortality’—that seemed to be something men did—but still, some underlying worry about getting somewhere, achieving something, seemed to dissipate in the company of the no longer living.

The worst thing was the families. God. Death really brings out the worst in people. Totally and utterly broken, completely bewildered or absolutely cold were the three basic modes, and they all seemed false, or unnatural. Lots of people were dreadful hypocrites, really; all solemn and sad, but thinking of themselves, what this will mean to me. How much I can get out of it. Every week she’d hear of a family at each other’s throats over an inheritance, it was all so ugly. Ugly! The poor families were okay. More likely you’d find they actually cared about losing someone, sometimes with a kind of softness which actually meant something. Most people just seemed secretly glad it wasn’t them.

‘Hello? Anyone here?’ Joe’s voice floated in from the garage.

‘Carl!’ Lilly shouted. No answer. She poked her head through the PVC strip curtains. ‘Hello! …oh!’ She wasn’t expecting a priest. ‘Hold on a mo!’ she said.

‘Okay,’ said Joe, fiddling with his dog-collar, which was too small and was making his voice a little strangled and awky.

As Lilly passed the phone on the wall, it rang. She took a deep, tense, breath and picked it up. ‘Hi Nina,’ she said.

‘Lilly, I’ve just been to the supermarket…’ said Nina, twittery and tremulous. ‘…and I don’t understand why they don’t put the celery in with rest of the vegetables.’

‘Where is it then?’

‘It’s in with the salad foods.’

‘But it is a salad food.’

‘I just don’t see it as a salad food, and I know I’m not alone.’

‘I think most people see it as a salad food.’

‘What about the carrots? They’re not a salad food, not mainly, you fry with them.’

‘God alright, but why is this a problem?’

‘I just waste far too much of my life looking for things in supermarkets.’

‘Don’t we all…?’ Lilly wasn’t confident enough to cut short conversations that were going nowhere, but she could feel the pressure of the man waiting outside. Fortunately, Nina, whose only significant relationship was with her father, a man who boiled over with rage whenever she rambled on, was overly sensitive to any hints that she was talking too much.

‘Oh yes, yes, yes… have you, um, finished Mrs. Watts?’

‘Not yet, no.’

‘Only we’ve got three more to fit in today. We have to get them done Lilly.’

‘I know, I’m going as fast as I can.’

‘Erm, okay, okay, but as long as you do finish. Sorry, but, will you finish?’

‘Yes, I will.’ She went to hang up before the irritation rising in her chest could reach her mouth and emerge as some unpleasantness, but Nina caught her, ‘And, I was going to say, sorry Lilly, I’m sorry, but could you… do you think you could not wear dresses at work?’

‘Why? Nobody can see me. Nobody alive at least.’

‘Oh, but that’s not the point. It’s just not professional. I’m sorry Lilly, I’m just saying, um, perhaps you should dress more like a mortician?’

‘Perhaps you should pay me more like a mortician?’ Lilly replied, under her breath.

‘Sorry? I’m sorry? What?’

‘Perhaps I should dress more like a mortician. You’re absolutely right.’

Nina hung up. Lilly slumped, then straightened up.

‘Just washing my hands!’ she called out.

She emerged, shaking her hands dry. Joe, in the workshop, was measuring his eye-width with a sliding T-bevel, which he put down when Lilly appeared.

‘Not that it matters,’ she continued, ‘those strips of plastic must be, can you imagine what’s on them? I don’t like to think about it. Life’s a lot easier if you don’t think about death isn’t it?’

‘I find the opposite is true.’

‘So do I! I suppose that’s what you’re employed for though, to think about death for everyone else. You’re employed to think about it and I’m employed to tart it up with Maybelline Buff Beige foundation. Sorry, I’m rambling, I hate long hellos don’t you? I’m just a bit stressed. You probably don’t have boss problems?’ She looked at Joe, and was struck with a sense of recognition, an oh, you, yes, I knew that you existed. There was something familiar about his soft voice too.

‘I do.’ Joe looked upwards, significantly.

‘Yes, but He doesn’t give you grief does He?’

‘Oh He does, continually. He finds failure far more entertaining than success.’

‘What about your colleagues? You know, church people, do you get on with them?’

‘I don’t really talk to them. I’ve got selective mutism.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s where you’re totally fine and talkative in one situation and then, when you’re at work, you’re completely unable to say anything.’

‘Oh yes. I have that. Actually, not so much here. I do work with a bit of a pig, but I actually quite like him, although I don’t want him to know that. And Paul, he’s an odd fish, but I think he might have a child mind. It’s… I just wish my boss would apologise once in a while… do you know what I mean? She’s always saying sorry, but she never really apologises.’

‘No chance of that. Downward-apologisers don’t rise.’

‘Maybe God will apologise, you know, when I die. He doesn’t seem the apologising sort though.’

‘God? No, no. He has issues around the idea of admitting he was wrong.’

‘I think, I just want no bullshit. A world that is the opposite of bullshit.’ She peered up into Joe’s eyes. ‘What is the opposite of bullshit?’

‘Cow’s milk?’

Lilly smiled. She could feel herself relaxing. There was an unmoving expanse in the middle of this conversation, a relief, like getting into fresh air after being stuck in a hole with someone you don’t like, which was more or less what the world was.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘you’ve probably got things to do, erm, you know, Goddish things. What can I do for you?’

‘I’m here to pick up the coffins.’

‘Oh that’s Carl’s business, he’s not here right now.’

‘Right… Carl…’ Joe said to himself, thinking back to the hearses that had turned up at his house for no reason. ‘I think I’ve met him. Tall man? Looks like Lurch from the Addams family?’

‘That’s Paul. Carl’s short, shorter than me. He doesn’t have any hair.’

‘I don’t remember his hair,’ said Joe.

‘That’s because he doesn’t have any.’

Lilly burst into laughter. Joe laughed also, and Lilly suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to confide something to this man, anything, it didn’t matter what; as much to give him the gift of a confidence than to get anything off her chest.

‘I’m just not designed to be happy,’ she said, surprising herself. More surprising was how this departure from the unspoken rules of conversation was taken, by this strange, large godman, in his stride.

‘Perhaps the world isn’t designed to make you happy?’

‘So what do I do? Leave the world?’

‘I don’t know about that. I try to ignore it, but it won’t leave me alone. It’s a real attention seeker, the world.’

‘I think,’ said Lilly, ‘that the world used to be a simple thing, like this…’ she picked up a plastic fork which Carl had left in a can of baked beans, ‘like this fork, which you could use, or which would, erm, fork you. Now it’s not a thing, it’s a person, the world is a person, and as a person it’s… it’s erm…’

‘A bell-end.’

‘Right,’ said Lilly, frowning, ‘a bell-end.’

‘The world is a bell-end,’ Joe repeated the judgement with religious seriousness.

‘It’s just so hard to get along with, isn’t it, the world? It won’t let you… You know, I used to think I could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. I mean, that’s what they teach you isn’t it. Be your best self. What’s to stop me being a carpet-weaver or a train driver…?’

‘Oh, don’t. They’re all wankers.’

‘Are they?’

‘You know they’re on fifty thousand a year?’

‘Are they?’

‘It’s very boring as well, driving a train. Just one track.’

‘All jobs end up boring though don’t they?’

‘They do.’

‘But why? I sort of feel they shouldn’t.’

‘It’s because we’re living in the end times.’

‘Oh yes! I was just thinking that today.’

‘That’s not a bad thing though,’ said Joe.

‘It’s not is it?’

‘Sometimes I lay awake at night, in a cold sweat, afraid that civilisation won’t collapse.’

She smiled. Joe smiled. Lilly realised she was still holding the plastic fork, which she now put back into the empty can of beans. ‘There’s always so much admin too,’ she said, ‘Is that connected with the end times?’

‘Yes, many people are surprised by the amount of paperwork involved in the apocalypse.’

‘And there’s no getting away from it, the world I mean.’

‘No. It’s everywhere. It even follows me into dreams. I had one last night where I was in a Chinese supermarket, I was shopping there, and a customer came up to me and said “where’s the soya sauce?” and I said “I don’t work here,” and they said “I want the low sodium kind,” and I said to them, “but I don’t work here,” and then another one came up to me and said “where’s the black vinegar,” and again I said, “I don’t work here,” and they kept on coming, asking me for chilli oil, dumpling dough, oolong tea and dried shrimp paste, hundreds of them and I just went down, submerged under them, shouting “I don’t work here! I don’t work here!”’

‘Do you work here?’ Lilly asked.

‘If there’s one thing I can say about myself it’s that I do not work here.’

She nodded. She felt much better. Kind of sadder, but it was a good kind; definitely much better.

‘Anyway, you know which coffins are yours?’ she asked, and then immediately regretted it because this question would draw the conversation to an end.

‘Errm, yes, those two.’ He pointed to two coffins.

‘Okay, well, do you want some help loading them?’

‘No it’s okay, I’m on foot.’

‘You’re going to carry two coffins down the road?’

‘Oh it’s fine, people think I’m in fancy dress anyway.’

‘Maybe you are?’

‘Maybe I am.’

You have been reading an extract from Fired. A burlesque epic set in a world out of joint. Get a copy here or (more cheaply) from the usual places. Terry Gilliam ‘couldn’t stop thinking about it’, and neither will you.