Parallel universe

[Blue Italics Of Housekeeping: The ten shortlisted entries in the 100 Words competition I am helping to judge have just been announced. Check it out HERE. Congratulations to all the finalists, we now have a tricky job ahead of us narrowing it down to the eventual winner.]

My working day doesn’t really start until 9 o’clock. The alarm goes off, always too soon, always an unpleasant surprise, and then I grab another ten minutes of precious semi-consciousness, only slightly disturbed by the gentle rushing noise of the shower. Then, in a relay race, my wife returns to bed for ten more minutes of warmth and comfort while I traipse into the bathroom to try and wake myself up. By twenty past eight I am out of the flat, headphones firmly in place, making a half-hearted attempt at facing the world.

It is at least a comforting world without too many variables in it. I always see the same people drifting past me as I make my way to the bus stop. The crowds of schoolgirls, propelled by their impregnable self-confidence. The very large lady in a tent of chenille, walking slowly, as if on the verge of falling over at any minute. The man who was electrifying as Petruchio in an amateur performance of The Taming Of The Shrew a couple of years ago but, off duty, looks somewhat shrewish himself. That last one always particularly disappoints me.

Then of course there’s my throng of disaffected fellow passengers at the bus stop, reading the Metro or leafing through paperbacks, clutching rucksacks and coffee cups and, in Mikey’s case, the electronic cigarette he seems to have become so attached to. Sometimes the pretty Swedish blonde with the big nose is there, her spring wardrobe matching her yellow patent handbag, a flash of bright colour opposite the deep red Victorian bricks, urging the summer to hurry up.

Friday, though – well, Friday was different. On Friday, I experienced a parallel universe.

Forced into an 8.30 meeting I couldn’t talk my way out of, everything started thirty minutes earlier. It was me, not my wife, sent hurtling from the cosy paradise of bed. Not only that, but I had to get dressed in silence without the lights on, stepping out of the front door with nobody to kiss me goodbye. The streets, already bright with the morning sun, seemed empty as I picked my way through town. Everyone I would normally see was just leaving their house or getting on their train and this was an altogether different cast of characters. If I lived in another part of town, or had another kind of work ethic, these might have been my regulars instead.

When I got to the bus stop, it was much the same story. The drab gathering of men and women there were keen, like the ones who turn up at a gig hours before it starts so they can stand at the front, endure the support acts, and grab the set list at the end without elbowing people out of the way. I shifted nervously from toe to toe, aware that I was sharing a coach with an alien species; people who liked their jobs thirty minutes more than I did. Some of them gave me a look which might have been judgment, but was probably just a blank lack of recognition.

If I’d been on the half eight bus, this would have been a prime opportunity to say Don’t you know who I am?. But I wasn’t, I was on the eight o’clock bus, and so the words were magically rearranged into You don’t know who I am - and they stayed in my head, along with everything else. One of the passengers tapped relentlessly on his laptop, putting me to shame as I gazed into the middle distance and contemplated falling back to sleep. Sleep didn’t come, but the office – early on a Friday, the motorway only dotted with traffic – did. It came far too soon for my liking.

Reaching my desk and hanging my coat – badly chosen, far too heavy for a warm spring morning – on the plastic stand, I realised that my early arrival at work had made this a parallel universe for other people too. Gemma glanced up from her screen, saw me, looked back at her work and then, a split second later, had to look again. She seemed baffled, which made a pleasant change from the expression of diffident boredom which characterised most of our recent conversations. Sarah, who had probably already been in the office for more than an hour, stuck her tongue out at me on her way to the kitchen. “Decided to do a full day’s work today, have we?”

Heading for the adjoining office for my meeting, the lack of people was even more telling. The site is sometimes described as a campus, a lazy way of describing a few buildings with green space between them but one which, for me, conjures up different images; loafing on a bench pretending to catch up university work on the summer holidays, sneaking into the Student Union bar in my early twenties pretending that I was still young enough to belong there. There was an awful lot of pretence and pretentiousness, back then at least and maybe still now. The sun was uncommonly bright, illuminating even more clearly that there was nobody around. The scene was like a town in the Wild West thirty seconds before the bad guys turn up.

At the side of the building was a pile of huge plastic sacks, each one full of shredded paper. I wasn’t sure if that was what happened to all ideas and plans, just how many scrapped projects and how much wasted rhetoric was stuffed into those sagging transparent coffins. They were brighter than I thought they would be – not just beiges and whites but reds and deep blues, like streamers. They looked like they shouldn’t be there, like someone should be up on the roof shaking the sacks so they drifted down as people trudged into reception, an impromptu parade to try and celebrate the start of the day.

The high noon metaphor was repeated as I strolled through the car park. There, slap bang in the middle of the tarmac was a mallard, facing down an oncoming Saab estate. The surface of the road shimmered in the heat, and the Saab slowed down and stopped in front of the squat shape blocking its way. The duck had obviously wandered over from the nearby lake and decided to explore, and there was something about how it stood there, splay-footed and resolute, that said it was in no hurry to go anywhere. I admired its single-mindedness, even as I tried to work out whether it was even possible to play chicken with a duck. The Saab gave up and sloped off to squeeze its elongated body into another less convenient parking space and the moment it did so the duck walked away, its work completed. It had done a much better job of sticking it to the man in a single moment than I had in the last seven years.

The other building looked even more derelict and once inside, it took a full ten minutes of loitering in rooms, wandering corridors, sending texts and leaving voicemails to discover that I had been stood up and my meeting wasn’t happening. Outside and blinking in the sun again, I saw a battered metal bucket stood in front of the wall full of squashed cigarette packets and dog ends. It was evidence that only the day before people had congregated here to smoke and complain about their days; even though it was years since I had smoked you never lose an eye for those kinds of spots, and every office has one. In a parallel universe I would have lit up at that point, in fact I probably would have had a cigarette before going in, but fortunately that was a reality I could not properly imagine.

So instead I retraced my steps, zipping across the shadows, all the while thinking that the morning so far had been a complete waste of time. It would be unless I could somehow write about it, anyway, but that seemed unlikely; after all, nothing had really happened.