The policy is called agile working. It means there are eight desks for every ten of us. The reasoning is that two of us will always be out on a visit, or ill, or at court.
Most days that is right. Today everybody is in.
The walk
I come through the double doors at twenty to nine with my laptop under one arm and my coat still on, and I do the walk. Everybody does it. You go down the middle of the floor at an ordinary speed, looking straight ahead. Out of the sides of your eyes you are checking every desk for a jacket on the chair.
A jacket on the chair means taken. So does a mug. So does a single pen, laid across the keyboard, by somebody who has gone to a meeting until three and wants the desk kept warm.
There is one by the window with nothing on it. I am four steps away when a man from the other team puts a banana down on it from the other side. He does not look at me. He puts it down like a man laying an ace.
Where I end up
On the end of the bank by the printer, at the desk nobody wants. The printer wakes up every few minutes and clears its throat.
The chair sinks. You sit down at one height and over the next ten minutes you arrive at another. The screen is on a stand made of two reams of paper, and somebody has written DO NOT USE on the paper, meaning the paper.
I plug in. I put my mug down, and my pen across the keyboard. It is mine until five.
The locker
We each have a locker, fourteen inches square. Mine has in it a pair of flat shoes and an umbrella. There is a box of cereal bars and a phone charger, and a card from a child that I am not going to describe. It has been in there a long time. It is stuck to the inside of the door with the kind of tack that is supposed to come off.
At a desk of my own it would have been on the wall. I think I prefer it here. I see it twice a day, when I open the door and when I shut it, and nobody else sees it.
Ten past nine
The woman opposite looks round her screen. We have worked twelve feet apart for a long time and have never had the same desks two days running, so that I know her mostly as a voice.
“You’ve got the sinker,” she says.
“I have.”
“There’s a lever. Left side, underneath. You have to pull it up and sit down hard, at the same time.”
I do it. The chair holds.
“How long have you known that?”
“About a year.” She goes back behind her screen. “I was enjoying it.”
Five o’clock
I take my mug and my pen. The desk goes back to being nobody’s.
On the way out I pass the one by the window. The banana is still there. He has been in a meeting since nine, and I do not think he sat down at it once.
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: Waiting at court