The Portable Door (1987) (4 page)

He glanced up. She was looking at him sideways, and to his horror he knew, somehow, that she could see what he was thinking.
Not fair
, he thought, then hastily tried to wipe it out of his mind, on the off chance that she hadn’t seen that too.
Not that it matters
, he lied to himself.

At last, mercifully, the door opened, and through it came a little vole-like woman with large spectacles. She had a big pile of green folders in her arms. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Julie.” She didn’t sound happy about it. “I’m Mr Wells’s secretary.”

Paul felt like he should stand up or something. Instead he said, “Hello.” The thin girl didn’t move.

“I’ve got a job for you two,” Julie went on, dumping the folders on the table between them. “You’re to go through this lot, putting them in date order. There’s no particular hurry,” she added sadly, “so take your time, and if there’s anything you don’t understand, come and ask me.”

She left without giving Paul a chance to say anything, not that he had anything to say. He looked across the desk at the thin girl; she was already dividing the folders into two piles.

Inside the folders were thick wodges of printed-out computer spreadsheets: a jumble of tabulated columns of figures, with a date in the top right-hand corner. They were all out of sequence, needless to say. Paul riffled through the contents of the first folder he came to, looking for some clue as to what the spreadsheets were actually about, and wondering what would be the best way of tackling the job. When he looked up, he saw that the thin girl had already established five or six neat piles, and was dealing the spreadsheets out like playing cards from the heap on her lap.

“It’s easy,” she said without looking up. “Each pile is a month. Once you’ve sorted them into months, you can sort each month into date order. Then you just collate them and put them back.”
Oh
, Paul thought.
Yes, that’s not a bad way of doing it
. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll try it your way.”

“You do what you like,” she replied.

It was certainly an improvement on silent sitting. Even so, it was frustrating, not being able to figure out what any of it was about. The spreadsheets could have been timesheets or accounts, or spectrographic analyses of mineral samples, or invoices or radio telescope readings or the Retail Price Index or unusually sophisticated betting slips; or maybe it was some entirely meaningless, manufactured task, an intelligence test designed to help assess their numeracy and efficiency. Not that he gave a damn, but for some reason it bugged him. The strong smell of stale cigar smoke suggested that, whatever they were, they had at some stage passed through Mr Tanner’s hands, but that didn’t really help much.

Still; puzzling over what the wretched things actually were helped take Paul’s mind off the tedium of the exercise, and it didn’t seem long before he realised he’d finished. He put the papers carefully back in their folders and looked up. The thin girl was still only about a third of the way through her half of the pile. That surprised him.

“Can I help you with your lot?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” she replied, “I can manage.”

And that’s me told
, he thought. But it didn’t seem worth picking a fight over, so he nodded and turned back to the first pile he came to. At the back of his mind a conclusion about those damned spreadsheets was struggling to be born, like a weakling chick trying to peck its way out of a titanium eggshell.

Cohere
, he ordered himself;
now, then
. He began with the obvious. The earliest printout was six months old, the most recent was dated yesterday. There were five piles in front of him, and the thin girl had five piles as well. He was too scared to check with her, but the odds were that neither of them had any printouts for October. There could be any number of reasons for that, starting with a computer crash that’d wiped out the system for four weeks or had lost all the October figures. The numbers themselves: they ranged from tiddly (0.84) to huge (4,667.863.87), which probably ruled out rain-gauge readings or petty-cash requisitions; if they stood for money, it was big money. There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern to them; he compared the printouts for the seventeenth of each month, but he couldn’t see that they had anything in common (but then, what he knew about statistics and maths in general could probably be memorised by a small frog). Each day had several printouts, some one or two, others as many as twenty. But no one day in any month seemed busier than any other, which didn’t help much. All in all, it looked to be one of those problems that gets harder the more you think about it. He frowned. Coded messages, maybe? If each number somehow represented a letter of the alphabet—Julie came in, without knocking; she had another armful of folders. “Finished?” she said.

The thin girl looked up at her guiltily. “No,” she said. “It’s my fault. I’m not much good at this.”

Julie didn’t seem bothered. “Well,” she said, “here’s another lot to be going on with. Like I said, no real hurry. Take your time.”

Of course, Julie would know what these rotten bits of paper actually were. Probably she wouldn’t mind a bit if he asked her, and if she did the worst that could happen would be that he’d get the sack, and would that be such a terrible disaster? But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it, and she’d gone before he had a chance to search down the back of his moral sofa for his mislaid courage. Also, before he could stop her, the thin girl had partitioned the new pile and added half of it to her existing backlog. Working with her was going to be a riot, he could see that. Still—“Here,” he said, “I don’t mind doing a few more. Why don’t we—?”

She gave him a look you could have sliced bacon with. “No, thanks,” she said. “I may be slow and stupid, but I’ll manage.”

He didn’t say anything, in more or less the same way that people don’t try and shake hands with grizzly bears, and pulled a sheaf of papers towards him. Blessed, therapeutic tedium washed over him like water in the desert. He had work to do. He got on with it.

When Julie brought in the fourth batch, she announced in a singularly mournful voice that they could stop for their coffee break if they liked. Apparently, neither of them liked; the thin girl was now almost invisible behind a barricade of paper, and was clearly determined not to rest until she’d caught up, while Paul thought of the coffee room, packed with secretaries, some of them undoubtedly terrifyingly pretty, and the moment of dead silence that’d inevitably follow as soon as he walked in, and came to the conclusion that he didn’t want any coffee. At 12:57, Julie brought in the tenth batch (still nothing for October) and reminded them that lunch was one till two. They’d be locking the door at one minute past one, she said, so if either of them did want to go out—(From the way she said it, she might have been addressing Captain Scott and Captain Oates.)

“Thanks,” Paul said, and stood up.

He made it through the labyrinth to the front office with seconds to spare; Karen the receptionist was just about to shoot back a bolt the size of a young tree. It was just starting to rain and he’d left his coat in the office, but there were worse things than getting wet. He slipped through the front door feeling like the last man off the
Titanic
, and set off down the street at a brisk trot.

Now what?
Pubs, cafés and sandwich bars were pretty well out of the question, at least until he got paid.

Walking the streets in the rain didn’t appeal, somehow. That didn’t leave many choices, in a district rather lacking in shops where you could mooch about and browse without actually spending money. There was also the small matter of hunger; he’d brought a cheese-and-stale-bread sandwich, but it was in his coat pocket. He could always go home and never come back, but he wasn’t quite at that point yet.

“It’s Paul, isn’t it?” He recognised the voice without turning round, though of course he couldn’t put a name to it; as far as he was concerned, the owner of the voice was the tennis champion (or the 1970
s
pop star, depending on personal choice).
Bugger
, he thought, and turned round slowly.

“Your first day, yes?” Today, the tennis champion was wearing a pale grey Armani suit over a white polo neck; the claw necklace was still there. “Join me for lunch. There’s a little Uzbek place just round the corner; just peasant food, but they do a passable
kovurma palov
.”

Motorway-hedgehog syndrome; the mind goes blank, the motor functions shut down, and although the survival instinct is screaming,
No, no, get out of there!
, it’s wasting its breath. “Thanks,” Paul muttered, thinking of the five pounds and seventeen pence he had in his pocket.
Well
, he thought,
look on the bright side
. Either this lunatic was going to buy him lunch, which meant he’d be one free meal to the good; or else he was going to spend the afternoon washing dishes with a lot of expatriate Uzbeks, which would almost certainly be an improvement on shuffling paper with the thin girl. Who knew, maybe they’d take him on full time.

The little Uzbek place was very little indeed, so it was awkward that the entire population of central London seemed to be trying to get into it. For a blissful moment Paul thought he’d been saved; but a waiter materialised at the tennis champion’s side and led them through the crush to a table tucked away in a corner. The tennis champion muttered something, presumably in Uzbek, and the waiter nodded gravely and vanished.

“Hope you won’t mind,” the tennis champion said, “I ordered for both of us. I think you’ll like
kovurma palov
. I’m going to be boring and stick to
moshkichiri
.”

Paul mumbled something about that being fine by him. A heartbeat later the waiter was back with two enormous platefuls of yellow rice with bits in, and a cauldron of steaming green tea. The tennis champion said something to him, and he roared with laughter before vanishing again. It occurred to Paul that he had only a very sketchy idea of where Uzbekistan actually was; somewhere in Russia, he’d always thought, but the food looked like curry.

“Dig in,” said the tennis champion. “Of course, this isn’t
kovurma palov
like you get in Samarkand, but it’s a reasonable imitation, even if the barberries are grown under glass. Have some tea.”

“Thanks,” Paul said, as the tennis champion filled his cup. At the next table, seven Japanese businessmen were comparing ties. “This is very kind of you,” he said.

The tennis champion smiled. “My name,” he said, “is Dietrich Wurmtoter, but please call me Rick, everyone does. So, how are you settling in?”

“Oh, fine, great,” Paul said. “It’s very…” He had no idea what to say next, but the tennis champion was busy shovelling rice with bits in through his mouth like a steamboat stoker trying to win a race. He was very good at it, not so much as a grain of rice or a raisin going astray, but the general impression was distinctly alarming. Paul guessed it was because they had to hurry so as to be back in the office at two sharp, and stuck his fork into the yellow mountain in front of him. Actually, it wasn’t bad; in fact, it was scrummy, and he wished he was in a fit state to enjoy it.

“So what’s Julie got you doing?” said the tennis champion, with his mouth full.

Paul swallowed, and said, “Urn.”

“Something with lots of bits of paper, I expect,” the tennis champion said. “That’s one thing I don’t like about our little firm, all the bits of paper. Green forms and pink forms and blue forms and miles and miles of computer stuff.” He glugged down a whole cup of tea; Paul’s cup was so hot he hadn’t dared touch it. The tennis champion obviously didn’t feel pain. “Still, it’s not all like that, I promise you. In six months or so, a year maybe, you’ll find out what we’re really about. Depending on what you decide to specialise in, of course. I mean, it’s up to you, you’ve got to go where your talents lead you. That’s the good thing with this business, there’s so much scope.”

Yes
, Paul thought,
but
. He was almost tempted to ask, there and then, but the thought of how stupid he’d look prevented him. Clearly the tennis champion believed he knew all about J.W. Wells & Co. Maybe he’d get the sack if it turned out he didn’t; in which case, would he have to pay for his own lunch? Not for the first time in his life, Paul cursed heaven for not letting him in on the secret, the secret that everybody else was in on except him. If only he knew, he was sure, he’d be able to cope, it’d all be so easy. The thought that the thin girl didn’t know either was some small shred of comfort; at least he wasn’t the only one. For some reason, though, he didn’t want to think about her. (Did she like Uzbek food? Did she know where Uzbekistan was? Probably. It was just the sort of thing that everybody else in the world knew, except him.)

“Anyhow,” said the tennis champion, “tell me all about yourself. Not the unimportant stuff you told us at the interview, exam results and all that nonsense. The real you.”

Oh God
, Paul thought. “Well,” he started; but fortunately the waiter appeared with another loaded plate of whatever kind of rice with bits in the tennis champion had been eating. He slid out the empty plate and substituted the full one with the practised skill of a production-line worker. The tennis champion launched into his mound of food with even greater savagery than before, and didn’t stop until his fork screeched on the floor of the plate.

“Is there something wrong with your
palov
?” he said. “Or aren’t you very hungry?”

Paul reckoned he’d done pretty well, having eaten in five minutes more than he usually got through in a week. “Oh, it’s absolutely fine,” he said, “great. What was it called again?”

The tennis champion told him, and then embarked on a long and complicated story about some occasion in Tashkent, which had started with him sending the
sarimsokli
back to the kitchen, and ended with a bizarre form of local duel, fought on camels with padded tent-poles, which the tennis champion had apparently won. The story went on for quite some time, but Paul didn’t mind that in the least, since it meant that he was spared from having to invent a real him to tell the tennis champion about, and could get on with his eating task.