I have been away for a fortnight. I had a tan for about four days of it.
The computer takes nine minutes to start, because it has a fortnight of updates to do, and I sit and watch the little wheel go round. My out-of-office is still on. For nine more minutes I am officially not here, and I would like that noted.
The number
Three hundred and twelve.
I have learned not to start at the top. The top is this morning, and this morning is people asking whether I am back. I start at the bottom, the afternoon I left, and come forward through it like somebody going through the post after a funeral.
Most of it sorts itself out. A meeting was moved, then moved back. Somebody asked a question on the Tuesday and answered it themselves on the Thursday, with an apology. The car park is being resurfaced, in four parts.
About thirty of them are real. I write those on paper, in a list, with a gap beside each one.
The desk
Somebody has borrowed my chair and returned a different chair.
There is a sticky note on the monitor in the handwriting of the colleague who covered for me. It says: “All fine. Nothing on fire. Rang everybody on your list. One thing to tell you, not urgent, find me.”
I read “not urgent” for some time. In this office it can mean not urgent. It can also mean that it was urgent on the ninth, and was dealt with, and she would like to tell me herself and not in an email.
Finding her
She is at the kettle. She sees me and gets a second mug down without asking.
It was not urgent. It was a small thing that had gone well, in fact, while I was away, and she had wanted to see my face when she told me. She had been saving it up for a week.
I would tell you what it was. It would not mean anything to you. It was the kind of thing that does not go in a report, because nothing happened, and the nothing took about eight months.
“You should go away more often,” she says.
“They did it. I only went on holiday.”
“I know,” she says. “I’m only saying, go away more often.”
Ten to five
The list has thirty things on it and I have done eleven. The tan has gone, and I think it went at about eleven o’clock.
I go to turn the computer off and find that my out-of-office is still on. All day I have been answering emails, and every answer has gone out with a message saying that I am away until Monday and will reply on my return.
Nobody has mentioned it. I think about that on the way down the stairs. Either nobody noticed, or they all did and thought it was fair enough.
I leave it on until the morning.
This is a scene, and it is made up, like the book. Nobody in it is a real person.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: The pool car