The alarm goes at ten past eleven, which is how we know it is a drill. A real fire would not wait until the fire marshal had found her tabard.
Nobody moves. Forty people look at forty screens and finish the sentence they were in the middle of. Then somebody stands up, so we all do, and there is a slow procession down the back stairs with the things people bring when they have been told to bring nothing. A laptop, open. One yoghurt.
I have the duty phone. I was not going to leave that.
Assembly point C
We stand in the rain by a sign that says ASSEMBLY POINT C. I have never found A or B.
It is the only time I see the whole building at once. Housing are by the bins, in fleeces. Planning have one umbrella between four of them and seem to be sharing it by grade. There is a man from Revenues and Benefits I have emailed for two years and never met. He is shorter than his emails.
The marshal counts us. Then she counts us again, with her pen. We are one short.
The one we are short
It is always the same one. He has worked here since before the building had a name, and he is on the phone, and he has decided that whoever he is talking to matters more than a drill. I can see him through the second-floor window with the receiver under his chin, writing.
The marshal can see him as well. She puts something on her clipboard, and I would not like to be it.
Eighteen minutes past
The duty phone goes in my pocket.
You cannot take a call like that in a crowd. Half the car park does not work for us. So I walk round to the far side of the recycling bins and turn my back, and say the name of the team in the voice I keep for it.
Somebody starts to tell me a thing they have been carrying since Monday. I write on the back of my hand, because my notebook is on my desk, next to the coat I did not bring.
What was said is not mine to hand on.
When I turn round the car park is empty. They have all gone back in. Nobody thought to tell the person behind the bins, and the door wants a pass, which is on my desk with the notebook and the coat.
Getting back in
I knock on the glass. The man from Revenues and Benefits comes back across the foyer and lets me in.
“You’re children’s, aren’t you,” he says. “I don’t know how you do it.”
People say that a good deal. Usually I make a joke. This time there is ink up to my wrist and rain down my neck, and what comes out is, “Somebody rings, and you answer it.”
He nods as though that were an answer. It may be the only one I have.
Upstairs, the man by the window is still on the phone. He has not noticed that we went anywhere.
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: What a social worker does on a Tuesday