“My Success”

The job was quickly organised by my father so I could repay the money I had borrowed for my travels and debaucheries. I had never done much photocopying or sat at a computer. I still hadn’t thought of death or madness. I’d never felt the rabid terror of my obsolescence drawing nearer every day. I was willing to be helpful somewhere.

The hours were 8am to 4pm and I should wear black and white, they said. The bus number to the financial district was 122. I’d be on the seventh floor. On day one, a man with papery skin and smiling eyes led me through the foyer to the elevator, saying, ‘Good morning, now I’m George the catering manager and I’ll bring you up to the girls.’

Maybe by now I had been told I was going to be making tea. You see the country was rich, and the firm was making so much money, the office was already magnificently overstaffed. But they had to find something for me to do.

The elevator doors split open, and we talked about university. George had a great love of books. ‘Ah, I must have read every book under the sun, every book under the sun,’ he said, shaking his head fondly. He carried a mop and bucket in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other. We reached floor seven.

Five or six or eight women in stiff outfits were shuttling round with trays; one by one, they waved, and nodded, and disappeared, and reappeared.

‘Bernie, Roz, Dolores, Mona, Geraldine.’ Or was it Jacqueline. George was introducing me to people who weren’t there. ‘And Ray over there, that’s Ray.’ The chef wore a striped apron, and he stood against a wall, holding a telephone with a spiral cord, writing something in a book. He glared at me.

We passed a cleaning lady, though she had no name. Nobody told me her name. She wore a purple smock, and looked away.

‘Testing, testing, coming in from Mars,’ George said, and he handed me a walkie-talkie. ‘Seven floors, eighteen meeting rooms, four-hundred-forty-six staff. We’ll need to be able to reach each other. So that’s you darlin’. Over and out!’ He left with a wave. I stood in the corridor and the women darted around, stacking teacups onto rows and rows of saucers, pushing trollies away.

One of the neat women was cutting the plastic coating off a Jacob’s biscuit tin with a pair of scissors. ‘What can I do to help?’ I asked her. Maybe it was Bernie. She pulled off the lid, then reached underneath the trolley for another tin.

‘Let me see now love,’ she said, considering me a moment. ‘I’ll tell you what you could do is just leave us at it. Head off and have a break.’

She marched away, and I went down the corridor into the toilets, locked myself inside. But I could so easily be found, so I took the elevator to the fifth floor and locked myself into a different cubicle. I shut my eyes. Half an hour passed.

The next day, at the same time, I went down to the toilets, as I was very tired from the night before. My head was a kaleidoscope of gorgeous carnal visions that I wanted to return to. I folded up tight on the cubicle floor and took out my diary, in case I might write some of them down. But they were too enjoyable. I thought of nice things until sleep overcame me.

Every day, the tea girls opened up the building and set up the breakfast meetings. They worked from 7am to 4pm then finished up and went home to their husbands, and their children and grandchildren, in the cottages and council flats around the Docklands.

But in the middle of all this, when lunch was done, they sat and had a break together. Bernie’s husband might have won some money on the dogs. They talked about the greyhound fixtures. Lotto numbers. Weight Watchers points. Fifteen points, twenty-five points. They spread low-point snacks around the table and as they ate each rice cracker or blueberry, they totted up the points.

September arrived, and the elevator down to the toilets got busy with the partners returning from their holidays. You had to look up and say hello more often. The numbers for the teas and coffees rose, and sometimes there was a trolley that you had to push.

They let me fill the boilers for the tea and coffee, and bring refills into the boardroom, where my father’s slight frame was crumpling in a meeting lasting hours, a cold cup of coffee marbling at his elbow.

I planted the replenished flasks on the sidetable, smiled at my father across a row of dark suits – we twinkled for a moment at each other.

I still had so much to learn about helping people inconspicuously. It was in that blue-chip firm I was taught never to carry a glass into a lawyer with my bare hands – the glass must be placed first on a folded napkin, then on a plate, then on a tray, maybe lest it be finger-printed and besmirched with human touch.

The biscuits and refreshments were laid out, and I took the elevator down to five, retired to my cubicle, to curl up and think about the good times I’d endured the night before.

You couldn’t just spend all your time in bathrooms, so once an hour or so had passed, I’d go back upstairs to continue to place saucers onto trays and coffee cups on saucers upside down in stackable rows. Then we would sit down at the small table along the corridor facing the kitchen, sky turning dusky through a window on the other side, and have a break.

Pink Lady apples, matchbox sized low-fat cheeses, packets of Lite Crackers. Fifteen points, thirty five points. They talked quietly about Roz’s son who had no intention of going back to school when term began, nor could he be forced. One time, Bernie told me her husband was laid off yesterday. ‘Laid off?’ I said.

Roz regarded me with exasperation. She explained. ‘They let him go.’

I still wasn’t sure I understood.

‘He won’t be going into work tomorrow,’ Roz said, and Bernie nodded quickly, with a grim stare. She sliced an apple into halves, then quarters. Bernie and her husband had four children.

We finished tea, cleaned up the tea and then returned to the laying out of Bourbon Creams in a fan shape on a doily. The cleaning lady in the purple smock came in, and Roz led her around the kitchen with Ray standing with crossed arms, and showed her all the places she had not been cleaning properly – ‘And we said it to you before,’ Roz told the cleaning lady with no name. She pointed in behind the gadgets and equipment, into the back of cupboards, and the cleaning lady hunched her shoulders, nodding, looking straight ahead of her.

I was on the biscuits. The lids popped open, and I spread the biscuits out and left them on the plates to grow a little stale, or to be eaten, in handfuls, by the young bloods in the boardrooms having sugar lows, or tipped into industrial bins, that or something else.

And I went back down to lock myself into a cubicle and cover my face and wait for everything to go back to being great. And returned to the soft pornography of recent memory.

I blackened out the day, replaying ecstatic visions of the night before. Wild thoughts. Delicious feelings.

Nobody asked questions. George would have understood. A dreamy man, he was okay about the shirking of a duty that did not exist. I was tired and poisoned from the late nights and it was in the bathrooms getting well again that I best served any organisation. I closed my eyes. In came the surge of bliss, wild feeling.

Except for a strange sound, on the day I’m thinking about.

A muffled sound was trembling from my bag. I didn’t, at first, believe it could be coming from my bag, but my bag was ringing. I looked in. The screen flashed with a number on the walkie-talkie.

The dread that it was me that someone wanted overpowered

every febrile thought.

I pressed at hard round coloured buttons.

‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Howya Margaret.’

It was George. He was talking quickly, out of breath.

‘Sorry for bothering you but I’ve a Mr O’Mahony down on the third floor. Are they all gone home, Bernie, Roz, Geraldine, Mona?’

I checked the time; after four o’clock.

‘I don’t know, I’ll try and catch them.’

‘OK. It’s only that we have a man down there, a Mr O’Mahony, a client, he’s come up from Cork and he hasn’t eaten anything all day. Do we have a plate we could warm up?’

‘A plate?’

‘A plate of food like. Had they done a roast pork at lunch?’

‘I don’t know. I think so, yes.’

‘Good because we’re going to need to give him something for his lunch.’

‘OK, we’ll look after him.’ Bernie and Roz, Geraldine, Mona, Dolores and myself, we would all look after him.

I unlocked the door and rearranged my shirt collar in the bathroom mirror. You had to look so smart in this environment.

On the seventh floor, I found them, putting on their coats to leave. Mona, Bernie, Roz, though not Dolores, they didn’t really like Dolores – she was always leaving early. All the girls were setting off for home as I tried to articulate what George told me – a Mr O’Mahony was down there. He’d driven up from Cork. Hadn’t eaten anything all day apparently. Had they done a roast pork at lunch, and could we warm some up for him?

They understood immediately. Geraldine bounced past. Mona unwrapped cling film from a tray she lifted out of the fridge, and found the meat – ducking underneath her, Roz found the balls of mash and vegetables in their sealed containers. Bernie switched back on the water for the tea, got the milk jug and the sugar out.

Mona was wrapping cutlery in a serviette. The microwave rang. Roz got to it first, and the sweet-smelling slices of roast pork, the mash and vegetables were ready, piping hot, the meal placed under a cloche, and onto a tray, and onto a trolley, with the water jug and on the bottom shelf of the trolley, the tea things, and just when I thought we must have everything, Bernie ran towards us with a strawberry trifle.

With Roz, or Bernie, whichever it was, I jangled it all down the corridor and pressed the elevator to the third floor. With every second, I knew, the plate was cooling underneath the cloche but the elevator flew straight down, it stopped for no one and delivered us to three. Bernie, Roz – it doesn’t matter does it, who it was – she looked straight in front of her. I went behind Bernie, behind Roz, who had the trolley now and as she pushed it down the hallway, we didn’t say a word because we knew we would make it, just in time, to Mr O’Mahony.

At the secretary’s booth, my father passed me with his briefcase, and a rueful smile my way, both of us too busy to stop. I’d have to wait until another time to tell him all of this.

The secretary nodded, stood out, opened the boardroom door – or she wasn’t there at all, we were doing this alone – we pushed on through, and found him right there sitting with the window at his back and a spectacular view of the coursing river and the rooftops and steeples of the north city beyond – Mr O’Mahony.

He was large-chested, with a foggy head of grey, a timid glisten in his eyes. He smiled, revealing an uneven cluster of yellow teeth. Roz was right there serving him a glass of water. Bernie might have been there quietly placing cutlery on the table, or maybe it was Mona – it doesn’t matter. More important is that Mr O’Mahony, he’d come all the way from Cork and he hadn’t had a thing to eat all day.

I laid the tray in front of Mr O’Mahony, who took all of us in with the most shattered face of gratitude.

Did he have everything he needed, asked Bernie, or she didn’t ask, she was already gone – she was on the bus home, with dread inside her stomach because her husband wasn’t going to work tomorrow. Bernie, Roz, Geraldine, Mona, Dolores – let’s forget about all them.

Most important, loud and pounding in its urgency was that Mr O’Mahony had driven up from Cork that morning and he hadn’t had a thing to eat all day. That was what we had to deal with, without any warning.

Mr O’Mahony was a big man, an appreciative man. He tucked his napkin in his shirt collar, and he closed his hands together for a moment’s grace. He lifted the steamy silver cloche, discarded it on a chair, and sliced quickly at his luncheon. Hadn’t had a thing to eat all day.