‘We Get Paid For What We Get Paid For’ by Lydia Unsworth

I wait. My mouth dropping, hanging, receiving air. My posture heaves steadily forward – the angle of a slow and painless heart attack. The wonderful wait, like the ticking hands of an unrelenting clock slapping me repeatedly in the face. Cold water. Time. I am winning. The inbox fills. Time spills and leaks through these cracks in conversation. I am brimming and foaming with empathy, with the delirious triumph of a question offered out. My own little hors d’oeuvre of irresistible humanity dangled in front of the colleague to my right. Colleague Unknown, Colleague Temporary, Colleague We Can Be Whoever We Want To Be.

Weekend good? Yeah?

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it was alright. You know. Busy. The usual. Didn’t get up to much. Yeah. It was alright.

And settling in, how are you settling in? Are you settling in alright?

Yes, yes. I’ve made plenty of friends, thanks. Everyone has been really nice. Seems like a nice place.

Thanks, I reply, and then pause as I try to work out why I thought that was the right thing to say.

Her chair, Colleague Future’s chair, has swivelled away. I turn back to the sun-dusted screen.

The usual mid-morning conglomeration by the coffee machine. Some Temporary Contract from Tech Support has ordered the warm non-caffeinated citrus drink, and its odour buffets the line. I finger the pockets of my pencil skirt for my staff ID card; its transactional properties saving me the embarrassment of a visible coin line bulging around the hip area during these long walks.

It’s a busy week. Always is. The seasons fluctuate, the years return. The business has its peaks and troughs, of course, yet the model runs so smoothly now, with so many cycles of development and practice, that we tread the same pace throughout; we blink and immediately that blink is returned. Meetings fill the gaps, expertly placed gaps fill the meetings. Presentations last exactly forty minutes: twenty slides, fourteen jokes (snappy little one-liners; keep it inclusive; classic all-rounders). Schedule in ten minutes for a group activity to lighten the mood, keep things buoyant. So the ropes don’t snap.

Take the steps because it is a) healthy, b) environmentally sound, c) uses up more of the workday. However you want to play it.

I swipe and press a well-practised and manicured finger to the vending touchscreen. I wait and bend, as per instruction, and retrieve my latest cup. The pencil skirt bends and stretches, lines no longer parallel; waves in the making. Muffled murmurs. Stepping from the left foot to the right. Associates pushing their members to the sides. A few elbows back there near the citrus trails. The cattle are lowing; the baby, she shakes. Corrugated cardboard riveting to my fingernails. I step away.

Took two days compassionate leave when my stepfather died. Had my miscarriage at the weekend. Well, Friday afternoon. Flexi-time.

Short pause near the canteen wall. Near the double automatic doors that rarely open in time for you to pass through without breaking pace. A glance down at the coffee spot on one of my patent shoes. I try to scrape it off but scratch the surface laminate with the other shoe’s heel. A worsening situation. I lean down and rub it with my licked thumb. I do the best I can.

The canteen is busying; mouth-lined wooden trays being carried about. A curled lick along one of the longer sides so you can’t push your half-eaten tray in wild rage at your opponent across the table while she is staring, mouth open, at your jawbone rotating and at your inflated cheeks that misgauged the volume of that last forkful in haste, once again. Potato skin stuck behind a tooth for half the afternoon. A pen, a staple, a paperclip; you’ll never be free of it. Until you are, and you don’t immediately notice over the reverberating din of the springs inside the mouse controls.

The shifting sun rectangle settles over my IM work chat, periodically blinding my progress. I turn to the left to ask Colleague Left about his weekend. He responds with an elbow jutted out, fist-shaped end of a rigid forearm slowly and firmly shafting upwards toward his low growl and look of pride. I turn away.

If the email is longer than two paragraphs, don’t read it. Read most of the first one then skip to the end. Reply to the gist and to anything in capitals, retain a thick velvety layer of decorum, and hit send. If they come back to you, just do it again. It is important to be concise as well as polite; we all have homes to go to.

I studied Accounting at university, roughly two hours’ drive from the town where I was born. Did what I needed, came in above threshold with all of my marks. Went on to study to be a teacher. The world of work didn’t really appeal. All those applications and interviews; I didn’t really get anywhere. I taught for two years, as required. Cried myself to sleep most nights, especially Sundays. I lacked gusto. One of my biggest regrets is that I never worked out how to care about anything. My pupils were just ill-mannered remixes of the parents that might come in and hold me accountable. Abridged, simple-English versions; nothing worth delving into. Then I came here.

If the email is longer than two paragraphs then the sender is probably lacking something vital. They want a friend, or a therapist; someone to lend an ear. I would like to be nothing to nobody. I want to work, to go home, and to be private there. If the email is longer than two paragraphs, I think cut to the chase, go write a fucking book, no one cares. It is busy in the office, month in, month out. There is no time for allegiances, electronic or otherwise. We get paid for what we get paid for.

Occasionally, the emailers really try to get me to feel something for them; they go all out. I think to myself, ha, fat chance. That if a roomful of eager children with all of their little smiles and enthusiasm couldn’t rouse me then nothing will. Sometimes, if the tone seems particularly desperate, I might well read the whole enterprise. But that’s unlikely. It makes me edgy when I am not certain what all the words mean.

I imagine any misunderstandings are usually their mistake; they think they’re writing poetry, when it is supposed to be functional. Like all the conversations we have here; they are all merely a means to getting along, which in turn allows the days to flow more smoothly. Like honey down a throat. Like the colour grey again and again. Like 40-denier grey tights pulled right up to the join until we shine like small rectangles of administerial sunlight through the slits of blinds.

Colleague Left is looking at what I imagine is soft porn; minimising, maximising. I take a tissue from the desk and lick it, wipe the bits of grime from between the keys. The computer beeps accordingly. I send another email.

My spam folder is empty. I restore several messages from my trash folder to my inbox before emptying that as well. It is good when the folders are clean, when you have completed something, some small corner. I drink my coffee to the dregs, together with any sediment. I have to telephone out to a few of the clients and customers I have been emailing. I tell them the same things with my voice that I have already typed to them in my emails. I don’t like to speak to them on the phone; they can be feisty. I fumble. A stutter hides in a cough and has to restart from the beginning of the last sentence. It is important to be concise. And to be ready. I curl the wire of the telephone around my right index finger until the end third swells red.

I.B-something@placeofwork.domain is teetering over me. Some grand wobble of a gesture. A skinny hard hand in duck-mouth shape is flapping a couple of stapled sheets of A4 in my line of sight. My nose blows cold in the paper breeze. Fringe flickers off and back on to my face. Assuming she wants me to take the paper from her, I take it from her. She reclines a little back into herself. Rocks steadily, lulls that discomfort to sleep.

A claim form I haven’t filled in. A box not signed. A bold X highlighting the mistake. I sigh. Take a pen out of the last real ceramic mug ever to be seen inside this organisation. No lid, no handle. Minimalist to a fault. I.B-something snatches the paper back, tilts and angles away.

There is a sag to the day, around one in the afternoon, whether we have had lunch or we haven’t. You can see the walls loosen, the ceiling tiles sponge a little extra air in, holding their 600-by-600 shape tight until the mini-absence passes. The halfway point, the peak of the hill. Trays are dropped. The lift is stopped on the second floor. The non-caffeinated citrusy odour tucks itself in. I refresh my inbox page. You can never be too sure.

Colleague Maternity Contract to my right is sucking milkshake through a straw and looking at music videos on her mobile phone. She catches me considering her, pounds her fist twice, three times against her hefty chest and continues. Right hand performing occasional circles and clicks of the mouse around the pad, eyes glancing up here and there to see what a difference she’s making.

The intern shouts from across the room. They’ve scored! They’ve scored! he cries. Magic! He’s only gone and put one in! The wankers! Ha! He looks around, blushing. Steps down from his chair, swivelling erratically. He brushes down the upholstery of the bum section with the base of the one hand no longer pointing upward periodically and singing Olé. Within a minute he is back at his screen, detailing new ways we should be thinking about our digital marketing strategy to an international video conference of sparky new graduates.

I have never been in love. In much the same way as I’ve never leapt from a moving train after darting from the top of one carriage to the next, never rolled in dust along the desert floor to the side of the tracks. I’ve never stood up without broken bones, with perfectly dusted hair, and shaken the ash and twigs and cactus spines from my off-black, skin-hugging leotard before checking my staff ID-card pocket to see if I still have my revolver there; an unsightly bulge against my otherwise well-sculpted hips. My face shape is oval. My legs are marginally longer than average for a person of my height.

So I have been told.

I am clicking no to any question asked of me. I am filling in a personal evaluation form; self-appraising. I am comparing answers on IM chat with a group of other self-appraisers to make sure we are all appraising in the same league. Just taking a pleasant scroll together along the page.

I have seventy-two unopened emails. Although not truly, because maybe ten or eleven have been opened and cursorily read through already, before being marked unread so as to potentially remember to re-read them in more depth at a later date. So, I have a bit more information than a stranger to my inbox might infer. I am unknowable in many ways.

I check my wages have been inserted into my current account and then replace with new items those things that need replacing. Perishables, clothes with holes, anything that has begun to make me introspect. I holiday alone. Driving until the fuel tank runs out before locating a GPS-friendly B&B. I don’t read, why would I? One life is enough, thanks: spare me your details. I walk along the beach, if there is one; or one of those well-trodden tracks, if there isn’t. Those tracks people think they’re achieving something by walking along. Think they are getting out into nature, that this is how the world really was or still is in places or should be; a series of lines to follow, people saying hello to other people who say hello back to them. Sticks in their hands, homemade sandwiches in their extremely specialised backpacks, mud inching up to their well-insulated knees.

I have seventy-one unopened emails. I reply to each and each replies in turn to me. We wean ourselves away from this with thanks and okay, that’s great and I’ll be in touch. It never ends. Unfortunately, I am sorry to say, it never will. Our business policy is that it is never going to end.

The children I taught didn’t like me much. I didn’t like them much either. It can’t work like that; those kids weren’t even getting paid to put up with me. I didn’t care what their names were or who they lived with. I didn’t check their homework. I didn’t set any; more work for me. I didn’t want to be an accountant either, not really. Not once I’d thought about it. Who would? Then I came here.

Colleague Left started at the same time as me. His name is probably Julian. He rarely speaks. I think I slept with him after the first Christmas party. It must have been him. I haven’t seen anyone else around who looks vaguely like the face I half remember. It’s hard to be sure of new faces when you meet a lot of them in the same exposure. They all start to look the same. Apart from the real eccentrics, and the ones you definitely wouldn’t.

I don’t remember him being so guttural, Colleague Probably Julian, so growly, so stinking of sweat and personal excitement. Ah well. It was just a bottle of white wine I billed to the firm and a bid to get along a little better with somebody. No real loss.

Colleague Replacement on my right is laughing heartily with two people I have never met and likely never will. They look like Project Managers from the in-house design team. It’s all shoulder to shoulder, and here’s my hand and that’s your forearm and that’s well within our rights!, well within!, and trying not to rub things against things.

I click open and reply, and template-sentence a couple more responses to a couple more pending emails.

I wipe the droplets of piss from around the toilet seat with some folded tissue. Four sheets folded on top of each other to ensure the liquid doesn’t touch my skin. It probably doesn’t absorb much further than the first two layers, but it is best to be careful. I wipe meticulously, as if polishing an award, wondering why people are so afraid to sit themselves down on the white plastic. Are they hovering throughout? Do they splutter a few unreleased drops on the way back up to their clothes? The days are so long, yet my career so uneventful. I remember, at a previous job, clocking-in six minutes past the hour and clocking-out six minutes before, to maximise my free time. But for what? I only ever spent those extra minutes by the clocking-in-and-out machine waiting to tap the numbers in.

The cubicle walls balloon in towards me. Soft round pillows, breathing life into any contemporary washroom. Grey matter. My hot yellow heat escapes. These toilet seats that fit me perfectly, throughout it all. Rubber rings. I flush and I am sailing down the rapids, legs in the air and arms in it likewise. An upside-down bare-bottomed pyramid. Along a raging stream. Over the boulders and their rushing membranes of untamed river current. Up and over, forever wiping the droplets of piss from my plastic seam. In this manner, small pieces of the afternoon also escape me.

I pull up my 40-denier tights. Press the thighs in. Inconsequential undulations. I never wanted to be an administration assistant but I’m good at it, so it happened. I create order out of chaos. Turn piles of too many things into piles of no things. Somebody presents me with a problem, leaves me with it, then comes back the next day asking for the solution, the report, the progress. But I say, no, there is nothing, it has all gone away. I create space where there once was clutter. The blue pens and the black pens are kept in separate clusters in the very last ceramic mug ever to be seen in this organisation, at the side of my desk. I delete emails when I am short of time. When a day looks set to end I make sure it is all concluded. Colleague Clean Slate, that’s what they should call me. Colleague Giving It Everything. Colleague All Gone Away.

I roll my pencil skirt down over the grey sheen; smooth on top of even smoother. I wipe the seat. Check for piss-damp around the bum and hem. I push my splayed fingers into my hair and ruffle it, make it large and symmetrical. Unlock the door. Put the fourth finger of each hand into its corresponding eye socket to remove any sleep that might be collected there. Wipe my nose.

Pink flecks of milkshake are on my mouse and across the corner third of a low stack of nearby envelopes. I look to find one pink fleck of milkshake gushing expansively throughout my last neglected coffee dreg. The chair to my right is vacated and swivelled in the completely opposite direction to its screen. I drop the milkshaken dreg and its container into the cup-brimming bin. My left hand grasps for something to pick up, to put down. I sit on it. Tuesday.

I delete a spreadsheet that doesn’t seem to be important. A pause. Open Task Manager to see if I can get things moving again. I reboot my computer rather than call system support: there is no time for all that. I wait. Stare at the little horizontal bar on the screen doing its thing/s. Remember the dial-up tone. Remember when all this was mysterious. There is no blood running to my hand. I shake it. Slap it against the desk, my thigh, the chair-back. It stabs with its tendency to become an ordinary unnoticed hand again, to stop feeling so heightened. I smack it until it feels right.

There is nothing I want more than absence. A little space to do nothing within. Fresh air. Passing clouds leaving me alone, keeping their distance. A real break. Conversations of least resistance. Nothing too serious, nothing too involved. Just enough to order a meal once in a while, or enquire about some nuance of a less-than-clearly rendered timetable. To reduce the size of a pile of paper. I work out. I go to the gym. My body is ordinary, marginally longer than ordinary. I stand on the machines and strain as recommended in the various directions; television screens surrounding me with the sounds of slick people dancing around and also getting paid to pretend to care about things. Speaking to nobody, just moving my muscles the way they like to be moved sometimes, remembering to breathe.

I wait for the fire drill. There is no point beginning something when you know that noise is about to arrive. I sit with my fingers resting over some of the more popular keyboard keys, just in case. The music I was streaming ended hours ago. I didn’t bother to put anything else on. Better to accept the background melodies of mobile-phone-heavy banter drifting up from the aisles. The occasional cackle or guffaw like wild rare beasts. Six years I’ve been here, hasn’t it? This, the seventh.

Miscarried three or four years ago. A painful few days, followed by relief. I had nothing to give; would have held myself accountable. At least this way I can blame the almost-kid. For also lacking gusto. My expedient tiny almost-son. Pointless to remember children’s names, they have nothing interesting to say; will grow up sending convoluted copy-paste emails asking HR teams if they can please join in.

The bell rings. Big red image of a bell inside my head. Trembling sides. I’ve never looked around to see where the bell actually is, if there is one. It’s likely just a speaker playing an old-fashioned bell noise. I imagine a big brass bell and a thick coarse rope to hoist upon, to slip myself in. Who wouldn’t want to pull on a rope every day and, every time you did, to hear a huge great clang?

Colleague Left closes all of his tabs and wipes the clam from his forehead before making his way to the nearest fire exit. Colleague Right doesn’t exist anymore. Her rebelliously-swivelled chair is surrounded by police tape and forensics analysing the pink flecks of dried-in milkshake. My longest relationship lasted eight years. This, my longest job, has already been six. Before long, this profession will be the most defining thing about me. My ability to identify the task in hand and get the job done with time to spare. The way I keep calm in a crisis. How I work well on my own initiative but also don’t shy away from taking the lead in a team situation. I pick up my handbag, slide on my black patent shoes, and make my way to the second-nearest fire exit, where I heard there is less of a bottleneck to get out of here.

Standing in the forecourt, small stretched spheres of rain tap at my pores. Wet skin. The nose, always one of the first parts to surrender; then the cheeks, then the fringe. There are hundreds of us standing outside relatively close together. Professional pillars with heads at the ends. F.R- and G.K-whatever skulk off around a corner, no doubt maintaining utmost efficiency and best practice throughout. The rain continues down. It is okay, wetness is just a feeling; it passes. Returns back to its former other. My feet are wet. The usual procedure is to think about something else until the case applies no longer and try not to move in the interim; figure a set of workarounds – forego one’s imminent coffee or coffees, postpone all scheduled trips to the printer – and then at some point the feet are dry again. The exact moment that pain subsides is always underwhelming. I glance around at all the dreary, dripping bodies. I’ve missed a trick. The huddles are all so tightly huddled that there’s no way in. Standing outside, small stretched spheres of rain divide me.

With the downpour blurring any attempt at eye contact, I fade and dissolve. Flimsy beaded curtains catch any remaining sunlight and spread it around. I turn my palm up. Nothing. I don’t even feel damp. I rub my two palms together. Neither wet, nor dry.

We wait. There is never any fire. There has never been any. We simply gather and huddle outside.

I have often thought about running away. When I was eight years old I drew plans in a tiny metal notebook attached to a keyring. Like a spy’s notebook, but for girls, so with a picture of two owls on and diamante crystals around the outside. The plan was to pretend to be collecting daisies from the grass to make into a longer-than-average daisy chain. Innocent enough, but then at the last minute, while picking daisies closer and closer to the school gate, I would make a run for it. Out the gate, and up the main road, to my aunt’s house, where the plan was to hide out and drink blackcurrant juice until the end of time.

When I was fourteen I planned to run to London, I don’t know why. I suppose it was the biggest and most far away thing I could imagine. I think I had about ten pounds, and I thought that would be alright. I didn’t imagine happiness. The picture I had in my head was of me sitting on a wet cobbled pavement at night, crying slightly, but not really being afraid. Wet hair, a warm coat, light rain falling down. Glistening stones and a smell that I can’t remember enough anymore to identify. Just being alone.

When I was seven I told my classmates that I was adopted, that I was Russian. When I was nine I had a fight because someone said my hair was black and I thought it was brown. When I was twenty I drank a full bottle of vodka straight in less than an hour and cut my back open on a full-length mirror. When I was twenty-five I woke up anywhere, everywhere, it didn’t matter. I want to be on the opposite side of the world to myself. I want to walk deep into the ocean and see what comes up again. When I was twenty-seven I punched a stranger in the face to see if they would punch me back. They didn’t. There is never any fire.

From issue 4: spring/summer 2017

About the Author
Lydia Unsworth is a poet based in Greater Manchester, whose recent collections include Mortar (Osmosis) and Arthropod (Death of Workers). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Oxford Poetry and Shearsman Magazine. She has recently received Arts Council funding to work on her current collection and will soon begin a NWCDTP–funded creative writing PhD at MMU, exploring kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture.