The card has been going round for a week in a brown envelope marked CONFIDENTIAL, which fools nobody. You can hear the coins in it.
She is leaving on Friday. Twenty-six years. She started when the files were paper and the office was above a shoe shop, and she has told us about the shoe shop so often that some of us feel we worked there.
Writing in the card
It reaches me on the Wednesday. There is not much room left.
Somebody has written “Good luck in your new adventure!” and she is retiring to look after her mother. One person has drawn a cat, and one has signed only a first name, and I do not know who that is.
I hold the pen over the card for some time. What I want to say is that in my second week she found me in the stationery cupboard, not looking for stationery, and she did not ask. She took a box of envelopes off the shelf as if that were what she had come for. Then she said, “It’s usually the third week. You’re early,” and went out again.
It does not fit in the space. I write, “Thank you for the envelopes.” She will know.
The buffet
Friday, half past twelve, the big meeting room. Somebody’s husband has made a cake in the shape of a filing cabinet, and it is so good that nobody wants to cut it.
There are sausage rolls. There is a bowl of salad that will go home untouched with whoever brought it.
Half the team is not here. They are out on visits, or in court, or on the phone at their desks with one hand raised to say they are coming. That is what a leaving do is like in this job. You are seen off by whoever was not needed somewhere else, and you would not want it any other way.
The speech
The manager says some words. They are kind, and they have been said before.
Then she stands up herself, which nobody expected, holding a paper plate.
“I’ve been trying to think what I’m proud of,” she says. “It isn’t a case. You don’t get to be proud of those. They’re not yours.”
She looks at the cake.
“I think it’s what I wrote down. Some of them will ask for their files one day. They’ll sit in a room and read what I put about their mum. I’d like to think I could sit next to them while they did.”
Nobody says anything. Then somebody’s mobile goes, and we all laugh, and the person it belongs to takes it out into the corridor.
Afterwards
She cuts the cake in the end. She does it herself, from the bottom drawer up.
At four o’clock her desk is clear apart from a spider plant and a note on the monitor, which says the plant is for whoever sits here next and wants watering on Mondays.
I water it on the Monday. There is nobody at the desk yet.
By the Wednesday there is. She is new, and she has moved the plant to the windowsill, where the light is better. I think about telling her about the Mondays and the shoe shop, and I decide she has enough to take in. I leave the jug where she will find it.
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 lanyard