The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an underpass in Trafalgar Square. The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
It was midmorning, on a warm October day, and he stood in the square holding his bag and blinking at the sunlight. Black taxis and red buses and multicolored cars roared and careened about the square, while tourists threw handfuls of pigeon feed down for the legions of tubby pigeons and took their snapshots of Nelson’s Column and the huge Landseer lions that flanked it. He walked through the square, wondering if he was real or not. The Japanese tourists ignored him. He tried talking to a pretty fairhaired girl, who laughed, and shook her head, and said something in a language Richard thought might have been Italian, but was actually Finnish.
There was a small child of indeterminate sex, staring at some pigeons while orally demolishing a chocolate bar. He crouched down next to it. “Ur Hello, kiddie,” said Richard. The child sucked its chocolate bar intently and gave no indication of recognizing Richard as another human being. “Hello,” repeated Richard, a slight note of desperation creeping into his voice. “Can you see me? Kiddie? Hello? Two small eyes glared at him from a chocolate covered face. And then its lower lip began to tremble, and the child fled, throwing its arms around the legs of the nearest adult female, and wailing “Mommy? This man’s bothering me. He’s bothering me.”
The child’s mother turned on Richard with a formidable scowl. “What are you doing,” she demanded, “bothering our Leslie? There are places for people like you.”
Richard began to smile. It was a huge and happy smile. “I really am most frightfully sorry,” he said, grinning like a Cheshire cat. And then, clutching his bag, he ran through Trafalgar Square, accompanied by bursts of sudden pigeons, who took to the air in astonishment.
He took his cashcard out of his wallet, and he put it into the cash machine. It recognized his four-digit pin number, advised him to keep it a secret and not disclose it to anyone, and asked what kind of service he would like. He asked for cash, and it gave him cash in abundance. He punched the air in delight, and then, embarrassed, pretended that he had been hailing a cab.
A cab stopped for him—it stopped!—for him!—and he climbed in, and sat in the back, and beamed. He asked the driver to take him to his office. And when the cab driver pointed out that it would almost be quicker to walk, Richard grinned even wider, and said he did not care. And as soon as they were underway he asked—practically begged—the cab driver to regale him, Richard, with his opinions on Inner-City Traffic Problems, How Best to Deal with Crime, and Thorny Political Issues of the Day. The cab driver accused Richard of “taking the Mickey,” and sulked for all of the five-minute journey up the Strand. Richard did not care. He tipped the man ridiculously anyway. And then he walked into his office.
As he entered the building, he felt the smile begin to leave his face. Each step he took left him more anxious, more uneasy. What if he still had no job? What did it matter if small, chocolate-covered children and cab drivers could see him, if it turned out that, by some appalling mischance, he remained invisible to his colleagues?
Mr. Figgis, the security guard, looked up from a copy of Naughty Teenage Nymphets, which he had hidden inside his copy of the Sun, and he sniffed. “Morning Mister Mayhew,” he said. It was not a welcoming “morning.” It was the kind of “morning” that implied that the speaker really did not care if the recipient lived or died—nor indeed, for that matter, if it was even morning.
“Figgis!” exclaimed Richard, in delight. “And hello to you too, Mister Figgis, you exceptional security guard!”
Nobody had ever said anything remotely like that to Mr. Figgis before, not even na**d ladies in his imagination; Figgis stared suspiciously at Richard until he got into the elevator and vanished from sight, then he returned his attention to the naughty teenage nymphets, none of whom, he was beginning to suspect, was ever likely to see twenty-nine again, lollipops or no lollipops.
Richard got out of the elevator and walked, slightly hesitantly, down the corridor. Everything will be all right, he told himself, if only my desk is there. If my desk is there, everything will be fine. He walked into the large room full of cubicles he had worked in for three years. People were working at desks, talking on telephones, rummaging through filing cabinets, drinking bad tea and worse coffee. It was his office. And there was the place by the window, where his desk had once been, which was now occupied by a gray cluster of filing cabinets and a yucca plant. He was about to turn and run when someone handed him a cup of tea in a Styrofoam cup.
“The return of the prodigal, eh?” said Gary. “Here you go.”
“Hello Gary,” said Richard. “Where’s my desk?”
“This way,” said Gary. “How was Majorca?”
“Majorca?”
“Don’t you always go to Majorca?” asked Gary. They were walking up the back stairs that led to the fourth floor.
“Not this time,” said Richard.
“I was going to say,” said Gary. “Not much of a tan.”
“No,” agreed Richard. “Well. You know. I needed a change.”
Gary nodded. He pointed to a door that had, for as long as Richard had been there, been the door to the executive files and supplies room. “A change? Well, you’ve certainly got one now. And may I be the first to congratulate you?” The plaque on the door said:
R. B. MAYHEW JUNIOR PARTNER
“Lucky bastard,” said Gary, affectionately.
He wandered off, and Richard went through the door, utterly bemused. The room was no longer an executive supplies and file room: it had been emptied of files and supplies, and painted in gray and black and white, and recarpeted. In the center of the office was a large desk. He examined it: it was, unmistakably, his very own desk. His trolls had all been neatly put away in one of the desk drawers, and he took them all out, and arranged them around the office. He had his own window, with a nice view of the sludge-brown river and the South Bank of the Thames, beyond. There was even a large green plant, with huge waxy leaves, of the kind that looks artificial but isn’t. His old, dusty, cream-colored computer terminal had been replaced with a much sleeker, cleaner black computer terminal, which took up less desk space.
He walked over to the window and sipped his tea, staring out at the dirty brown river.
“You’ve found everything all right, then?” He looked up. Crisp, and efficient, Sylvia, the MD’s PA, was standing in the doorway. She smiled when she saw him.