DAY 50
Quit your job
“I’m sorry, Annie, but we do need to get the bottom of this.”
Annie’s stomach fell away. She’d been called into Jeff’s office, where Sharon was sitting at the Chat Area, an expression on her face like she was chewing a rotten sardine. Today she wore outfit three—an oversize jumper printed with pictures of puppies, and sprinkled all over with hairs from actual dogs. Annie tried not to sneeze just thinking about it. “What’s the trouble, Jeff?”
Jeff looked even more awkward. “Um. Annie. I’ve just seen an online film thing.”
Oh, no. Her stomach sank so far it was knocking about in the region of her ankles. Not the stupid Thorpe Park thing. “Oh.”
“Is that you?” Jeff spun his laptop, which had the YouTube video on it, paused on a shot of Annie, mouth open, screaming.
“It’s hard to say,” she said evasively. “It’s quite blurry.”
“I have it on good authority that it’s you. That you went there, to a theme park, when you were supposedly off sick.”
“I don’t know who that Kent fellow was what rang up,” Sharon muttered. “Sounded so nice and all.”
“But you can’t prove that’s me,” Annie said, keeping her voice light and distant.
“No. We’d have to go through an official disciplinary process, and give you a written warning. It would take months. If you’d own up, however, we could leave it with a verbal warning. Three verbal warnings equal one written warning. Two written warnings mean a hearing...”
A familiar feeling was coming over Annie. Sitting in Jeff’s office with its smell of protein shakes and Pot Noodles, being told off for not smiling enough, or being sad, or not wanting to talk about other people’s healthy babies. In short, for being human, in a place that wanted to turn her into an invoice-processing robot. It sat on her chest, the knowledge that she could never change this place, its red tape, its rules. She wouldn’t even be able to get the dead plants taken away without a health-and-safety briefing. She couldn’t face one more day of lifting up her hand to key in the door code. Not one more day. “I can’t do this,” she heard herself say.
“Own up? I must say, Annie—”
“No. All this. Jeff...Sharon...why do we do this, day after day? Come into the horrible office—your homes are nicer than this, I hope? Don’t smell of gone-off food and have dirt on the desks that hasn’t been cleaned off in four years? They must be. But we spend most of our waking hours here—more than we’re even paid for—and we don’t even like any of the people we have to work with.”
Jeff opened his mouth as if he was going to protest this, then didn’t.
Annie went on. “What’s the point? Why do we commute for hours on crammed trains, with everyone angry and miserable, and sit at a desk all day in a dirty nasty place, and eat limp sandwiches and Cup A Soups, and ignore each other, and get sciatica, and then go home and sit in front of shows about baking and dancing and other people watching TV?”
“We ain’t all made of money,” Sharon sniffed. “Some of us need the cash.”
“No, we’re not. But why do we live here in London, where we just work to pay for travel and rent on horrible damp flats on the tenth floor? And surely we can find something else to do with our lives, something that pays? You, Jeff. I know you have dreams. You want to be the big man in local government. Big salary. Move out to Surrey. Propose to one of the women at your gym, with the spray tans and boob jobs. Send your kids to private school, give them what you never had.”
He gaped. “How did you—”
“But is it worth it? Is it worth spending your thirties pretending to care about dish rotas and photocopier etiquette and who stamps a little bit of paper? Just to get a good pension one day?”
“Annie! I must ask you to stop—this is very unprofessional.”
“I know. I know it is. It’s being professional that got me in this mess in the first place.” Annie felt like she was falling, and sliding, like gravity had her and she couldn’t stop even if she wanted to. Her fears were clinging to her legs, shrieking. How would she pay the mortgage? How would she look after her mum? How would she buy chocolate? But as Polly said, when you were dying, it really focused your mind. And Annie was dying, too. Maybe not in the next one hundred days, sure, but sometime, and in that context spending even one more hour in this office was too many. “I quit,” she heard herself say. “I can’t work here anymore. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. Well, it is sort of Sharon’s fault, but I guess she can’t really help it.”
Sharon gaped. “You cheeky mare!”
Jeff was blinking hard, trying to keep up. “Annie, there’s a process, there’s a notice period, and—”
“I know that. But if I walk out right now, for example, is there anything you can do?”
“But...references...your final pay...”
“I don’t care about those.” If she was going to burn her life to the ground, she may as well douse it in petrol. “So, can you stop me? If I literally just go now?”
“No, but—I mean, leaving dos! We usually get a card and a whip-round...”
“That’s kind, Jeff. But I can’t go through it, pretending we all loved each other and you’ll miss me. I need to start being more honest in my life. So...bye.”
“But...but...”
Annie stood up. “Hey, by the way, you know those redundancies you’ve been holding over our heads for months now? Getting everyone to toe the line and work extra hours and keep their mouths shut? How about you give me one of them? Oh, and you’d be mad if you let Fee go. She’s the only one who does any work about here.”
She left the room, her vision swimming, her steps wobbly. Oh, God. Oh, God. She had to speak to Polly. Polly would think it was great.
No one looked up from their desks. They all stayed slumped at their screens, playing Candy Crush or scrolling through Facebook. Annie picked up her bag and coat, and powered down her computer. She looked around for one last time—the dead yucca plant, the invoice tray with the smear of ink, the dust ingrained in her keyboard. The square foot of the earth where she’d spent most of her life for the past four years. Her hands were shaking. She picked up the sparkly pens and posh tea bags and the little hyacinth Polly had given her. She opened her mouth to say something—Bye, everyone, hope you have nice lives, hope you get out of here, too, unless you actually like it, of course—then she closed it, and quietly walked to the exit, shutting the door behind her for the very final time.
* * *
“Okay, okay, stop whooping. I still got fired.” Annie held the phone away from her ear.
“You didn’t get fired,” said Polly. “You stuck it to the man. You made a break for freedom! Annie, this is awesome news.”
“Is it? Every time I think about the rent I want to throw up.”
“Rent, schment. You’ll find something. You’ve got some savings, yes?”
“A bit.” Things did add up when you never went out or bought anything nice.
“You can do whatever you want now. Shoot for the moon, Annie! Even if you miss you’ll be among the stars.”
“You do know the stars are millions of miles farther than the moon? That saying makes no actual sense.”
“Whatever. Never mind about work now. What you need is time to think it over. Regroup. Relax.”
“Uh-huh,” Annie said suspiciously. “What’s the plan this time?”
“Scotland,” Polly said happily. “Picture the scene, Annie. Herds of Highland cattle. Majestic snowcapped hills. A wee dram of whiskey to warm your cockles...”
“Are you working for the tourist board or something?”
“We’re all going. The doctors say I’m well enough to come out now, take a treatment break, and I’m not spending any more time in Lewisham. You, me, George, Costas and Dr. McGrumpy. We’re going to stay on his mum’s farm in the Highlands.”
“But won’t it be freezing? We couldn’t go to, say, Barbados?”
“I tried. He says I can’t fly, spoilsport, and can’t be too far from the good old NHS. Anyway, it’ll be nice. There’s tons of cool things to do up there, and we can cuddle up by log fires. It’ll be great. We might even see the northern lights. I always wanted to but I’ve missed it every time. Even went to Norway, Iceland—no lights. This’ll be my time, surely.”
As if the aurora borealis themselves would show up at Polly’s summons. After all, everything else did. “Well, okay. My diary’s suddenly become very clear.”
“Great. I’ll tell McGrumpy. He’s going to drive us all up.”
Annie had a brief vision of a blazing log fire, a fur rug and Dr. Max beside her, whiskey in hand, kilt on and...
No. Dear God, what was she thinking? She couldn’t have a crush on a scruffy grumpy doctor, especially not one who held her friend’s life in his big hairy-knuckled hands.
“Oh, and pack some warm clothes,” Polly added. “You can ski, right?”