Michael’s day is routine. He knows the route so well, that he doesn’t notice crossing the footbridge over the dual-carriageway. He doesn’t see the cars stuck in the school-run, the office-rush, the morning-delivery slot convergence, stop-starting under his feet. He hasn’t woken up yet, he never does until about half-ten. It makes the day go quicker. It makes the mornings less painful. He’s concentrating all his neural activity on his headphones, The Clash on Broadway (Disc 1) on MP3. He wishes he was Topper Headon. He wishes he was the drummer in a garage band in Garageland. He reaches into his pocket for his swipe card. Carefully and with a vague surreptitiousness, he flicks his spent cigarette into the same drain he always aims for. He misses. He reaches into his jeans pocket for his swipe card. It’s not there. Envisaging the awkward conversation with the security guards on the front desk, he tries his back pockets, his front pockets again, his coat pockets, nothing. Panicking, he starts to ransack his rucksack, trying not to spill leaking pens and expired bus tickets and the components of his not-very-well-packed lunch across the pavement in the hunt for this elusive identification and site access card.
Had he looked up earlier, he wouldn’t have bothered to continue the search. As it was, he had just reconciled himself to the reality that: (a) he had left it at home, and (b) that he would have to be condescended to by one of the physically intimidating and highly judgmental security guards, when he walked into the anxious throb of his colleagues, gathered at the gates of the warehouse-cum-aircraft-hanger in the middle of the regeneration zone. Michael takes his headphones out of his ears, and, like everyone else this morning, stares at the chained gates, as if an act of mass-concentration would lead to answers appearing on the Chubb High Security Cruiser padlock. Capital Radio One is now broadcasting to his collar-bones. He reaches into his inside pocket and turns off his personal stereo, an unbranded iPod imitator. He won it at work, for having the best attendance record. He’d have rather have had cash at the time, but now he had used it for a while, he wasn’t so disappointed. It wasn’t like he would have ever bought one for himself. Not with the interest rates on his wife’s credit cards. And the mortgage.
Half-an-hour later, a red-eyed former Communications Officer comes out of the building, escorted by two security guards. He tries to be officious and bureaucratic as he sellotapes laminated notices to the gates, and he’s ignoring all questions with a broken ‘it’s all on the statement, that’s all I know’. Michael has never really liked the guy, but that was then, in there. The way he loved the power, withholding information in a very extroverted oh-I-can’t-possibly-say manner. Now he was this cracked mouthpiece, sticking up the last rites of a fallen institution on a chicken-wire fence, being jostled and harassed by a swell of disgruntlement. Michael writes down the telephone number of the administrators, and as the local television news van drove up the access road, he puts his headphones back in, and started walking.
He may as well go home, he thought. The Citizen’s Advice place and the Job Centre can wait until tomorrow. Or next week. And he was already on the bus. He hadn’t noticed it. Autopilot again. Coffee. He had enough money to cover the mortgage for a couple of months. Some more money in an ISA, and there was that savings account he’d set up for a rainy day. It’ll be alright, we’ll be alright, he assured himself. There’s other minimum-hassle, minimum-wage call-centre jobs in town.
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