Chapter 8: Don’t use the lifts

Leonard had been cleaning the fluff out of his keyboard with a paperclip when he received the next set of comments from the author. He had sent her a stock piece of work about Roman noses and chariots as a sort of holding response to keep her off his case while he tried to rustle up some ideas. She loved it. Her covering email was gushing: ‘Now we’re finally getting somewhere,’ like a teacher with a slow child who has just mastered a basic task that the rest of the class learned ages ago. Her comments and corrections were predictably about making it as much like every other Roman book as possible. It would be easy to keep her happy and to fill out the rest of the book on auto-pilot. Leonard didn’t like churning out bland material but when the author took a different view he usually felt that there was no point campaigning. These were commercially produced books and he already had more artistic licence than he ever expected, purely because he backed down on anything important to the author and reserved his creativity for the bits the author didn’t care about or notice. Whenever he lost some argument about content, he would try and make up for it by being more stylish or by sneaking in a phrase that he thought a kid might enjoy learning or asking their parents about, like ‘eyeballing’ or ‘frogmarch.’

This time though, he felt less comfortable about capitulating and moving on. He wasn’t satisfied with settling for some neatly-handled fact boxes, or digging out some obscure twist on a reworked apocryphal nugget. Whether it was his long-standing beef with the Romans or whether it was a response to the changes that had undoubtedly started to take place within him, he felt a new sense of impetus and creativity about his work. Some children might only ever read one book about the Romans and this one might be it. What if they were turned off history? Or worse: what if they were inspired by the example of the Romans to become their own little Caesars of the playground, making life difficult for the gentle, curious kids Leonard wanted the book to be read by? No, no, no, that wouldn’t do. He couldn’t dispute the Romans’ undoubted success at dominating the continent, and he could not deny their unmatched contribution to ancient civilisation. But were they not achievements for historians and sociologists to write about? Leonard wanted to ignite children’s imaginations about the world around them, and to inspire their curiosity. There would be plenty of time for them to learn the rough lessons of life, but shouldn’t they first be allowed to develop very special ideas about the world? Wasn’t it his role to catalyse the magic that happens when children read encyclopaedias, and especially so when they read them to their parents?

Leonard remembered getting a set of Our World encyclopaedias from his mother, one by one, every Christmas, birthday, special occasion and, sometimes, just because she wanted to cheer him up. With all his heart he had longed for the complete set: Our Artists, Our Insects, Our Mammals, and two dozen others. He loved getting a new encyclopaedia in the set without any idea what was in it. The notion that you could have favourites or could read some but not others was completely alien to him. Encyclopaedias were supposed to involve a sense of discovery, of openness to whatever came next. He read them in the back of his mother’s car, at the supermarket, at the dinner table, and in his bed with a torch. Encyclopaedias were books you were meant to immerse yourself in. They created their own worlds with magical pairings of writers and illustrators, using short exciting prose with memorable tableaux, drawn in a way that was meant to look lifelike but not so detailed that a young seven-year-old couldn’t attempt to copy the pictures themselves. Yes, they were factual books, but they weren’t just books of facts. They were storytelling books that used the world around us merely as a starting point, as kindling for a child’s imagination.

He had always pictured the author and illustrator as intrepid, inseparable friends who wrote the books about facts they had discovered themselves. The books were written and illustrated with such a personal touch that it was hard to imagine that the people involved had not actually seen all the animals and shared campfires with all the tribes in the pictures. As a child, they showed him what life could be like: an adventure undertaken in the name of curiosity alone. He had resolved to do everything in those books: climb Mount Everest, swim in a shark cage, walk on a tightrope over Niagara Falls, and pull himself out of quicksand.

But when he started working on encyclopaedias years ago as a proof-reader, he got his first exposure to the battery farm methods now used in the professionalised industry, the avuncular enthusiasts long since departed. Stock photos, dry facts, information with exclamation marks. It was still about getting kids excited, but now it was just sugar rush facts. Biggest this or that, gross-out facts, all written with an adult’s sense of what a child would like. Books abounded on vehicles, space, dinosaurs, the human body, but sets of encyclopaedias were on an irreversible decline. You now bought books on things you were already interested in.

Leonard thought about his mother, who had always managed to find an encyclopaedia he hadn’t read yet, and who must have had to scour bookshops to find them in the days before the internet. He thought about how, whenever he read something he wanted to share as a child, if only because he would burst with amazement if he didn’t, she used the same phrase, a phrase that Leonard hoped every parent used with their children every day: ‘Tell me.’ With her attention undivided, he would gush with every last detail, urging her to share his awe, and pointing at the illustrations as if they were the only proof you could ever need that the world was indeed made of magic. In the past few weeks, as she started to retreat from his life, decades of conversation fragments like these had been stirred up within him. Random, unsorted mental echoes, not yet sweetened into nostalgia.

Leonard boldly tapped Ctrl-N, the keyboard shortcut that he hoped would launch the life-changing expedition he had always promised himself. He started filling the blank white rectangle with lines and lines of nascent ideas for his own encyclopaedia about the Romans, into which he would put all he understood about the world and the people who lived in it. If he wanted to do something special, and without front-facing angry people, he knew that he would have to illustrate the book himself. Though he was a little rusty, he had always been able to envisage epic drawings for the books he worked on, and often felt let down to see the stale, lifeless scenarios they used in the published works: battle scenes that looked like department store windows, warriors who looked like bored supermodels, and intrepid explorers killing lions while sporting a neat side parting and a Hollywood smile. Why not draw pictures that kids would want to pull out and hang on their walls, full of believable figures from other times and places, captured at their most heroic?

He wondered about Roman children and whether they were close to their parents. Were the Roman children born outside of marriage looked after in the spirit of Romulus and Remus, the storied founders of the city? He made a list of the toys Roman kids played with like kites and swords, all things that still filled toy boxes to this day. What did the shy Roman children make of it all—did they feel part of the Empire or did they have nightmares about Caesar? What about the public servants who actually designed and engineered the public works projects that the emperors took credit for; the unacknowledged geniuses who built great things and then came home to play with their kids, feeling exhausted and sore. He thought about the slaves who were smarter than their masters, who in a different era would have been as celebrated as Blackadder, Jeeves or Sir Humphrey. His mind became effervescent with pictures and stories of overlooked people who had simply lived their lives as best they could during the Roman Empire. Ordinary, kind, gentle people whose stories he had only ever considered telling in a generic way. Their details had only seemed relevant to him insofar as they typified Roman life. He had seen them as a topic, and in doing so he had made the mistake of dehumanising them, forgetting to make them into interesting people that kids would want to meet, or even be. All along he had been writing them as sort of historical mannequins, modelling generic facts about the period. Depicting them like that must be frustrating for kids, like bringing them to a toy shop where all the toys are in boxes. Kids needed to be able to put down the book, run off and grab their friends and bring the energy from the page into their play.

Locked away in his headphones, he bashed away at his keyboard like Mozart, writing his own alternative version of the book: a book about all the people who were invisible to history. He felt utterly connected to his work and creativity, timeless and free. It was as if the ideas were flowing from an imaginary classroom of children in his head, all with their hands up, asking him to write about their favourite subject.

It was like…

A hand waved in front of him.

It was like…

It continued waving in front of him like a windscreen wiper.

He looked up at a girl who was standing beside him and mouthing something.

Leonard took his headphones off with snappy overacted impatience.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

‘Fire alarm. We have to go.’ The girl with a green jumper and cherry-coloured hair was leaning to one side and double-pointing her thumbs in a direction she indicated was ‘thataway.’

‘Fire alarm,’ she repeated. ‘You have to get out of here. Run for your life. Please. If you don’t mind.’

‘Is it a fire or a fire drill?’

‘Now, I’m not allowed to answer that question and even if I did answer it, it doesn’t matter: you still have to get out of here. Those are the rules.’

‘It’s probably just a drill. They do them every once in a while.’

‘Doesn’t matter. You have to go. Women and children could be dying while I’m here talking to you.’

‘I’m okay, I’ll take a chance,’ said Leonard, reaching for his headphones.

‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,’ the girl sang the notes as a scale in the key of C. ‘Sorry to pull rank on you my friend, but you don’t have a choice.’ She pointed to the hi-vis sash she was wearing which said ‘Fire Warden.’

Leonard gave in and walked huffily towards the door. ‘No need to thank me for saving your life,’ she called behind him.

He pushed the button for what must be the slowest lift in the world and tried to trace back the thread of his thoughts about the book, getting the feeling that he’d lost a little momentum, like when a sneeze nearly happens but doesn’t.

‘Hey, hey, hey, you can’t use the lift in a fire situation! Everybody knows that.’ His fire warden friend had followed him out, pegging him for a trouble maker.

‘How do I get down then?’

‘Most people use the stairs, but you can also abseil or climb the outside of the building like Spiderman if you know how to do that. C’mon, stop being difficult. Disobeying a fire warden is seven years bad luck.’

‘Shouldn’t you be wardening the other floors?’

‘Nope. I’m Floor 3 only. Other floors have lesser fire wardens so I imagine the body count on those will be pretty high. Look, can you not just go assemble yourself at the corner between the park and the museum with all the others. Please?’

Leonard did what he was told and as he walked off she blew a little whistle that was on a string around her neck, which startled him and gave her a giggle.

At the assembly point, the girl with the cherry-coloured hair carried a clipboard and counted up everyone, as the people from Floor 3 chatted light-heartedly, some wishing they’d brought coats, others wondering if they had time to get a coffee before returning to the building.

The girl cupped her hands into a megaphone and thanked everyone for their cooperation. As they all filed back to the building, some young guys joked flirtatiously with their colleagues about one last wish before they all perished in the fire. Leonard hurried back to his desk and started typing a few sentences, but the moment had gone and with it his inspiration. He decided to go onto the internet for a while, surfing aimlessly and brainlessly, before giving up and heading for a cup of tea.

He stood in the kitchenette and waited for the kettle to boil, checking his reflection in the microwave door. There was some stubble he’d missed during his preoccupied shave that morning, and, dumbest of all, he was still wearing his single-pocket, paisley pyjama top, having forgotten to change it in his rush out of the door that morning. Just as he was bending down, looking in the back of the bottom cupboard for some sugar, a loud peeping noise sounded behind him, taking two years off his life expectancy.

‘Hi there. Glad you survived the fire.’ It was the girl with the cherry-coloured hair.

‘You almost gave me a heart attack. What are you doing?’

‘Oh, just thought I’d come and say hello. A fire warden needs to know who she’s protecting, you know, in case I need to notify next of kin.

‘Actually, I think I kinda, sorta know who you are,’ she continued. ‘Are you Mark Baxter, BEd, the guy who wrote all the Facts at My Fingertips series? I’ve seen you working on them at your desk. They’re great books. You’re really good.’

Facts at My Fingertips was a series of mass-produced fact books that Leonard had worked on a few years ago, and which he had recently updated as part of a revised edition. It was supposed to be full of lists and records, with practically no original content, but Leonard had rescued it surreptitiously by pouring his creativity into it and making the series into what one industry newsletter called ‘a future classic.’ Mark Baxter, BEd, was the overseeing author and hardly lifted a finger on the whole thing. Interns from his office just emailed all the changes and feedback, while Mark was away on the conference circuit, presumably sleeping with more interns, the BEd in his title providing a clue as to where he did his best work.

‘Oh no, I’m not Mark Baxter. He’s the author of those books, I’m just the content supervisor. He decides what’s in the book and I just write it up.’

‘Oh, really? Is that a job?’

‘I hope so,’ said Leonard a little too sensitively.

‘I don’t mean it that way. I just think it’s unfair that you do all the work and he gets his name on the book. You should at least get a co-credit.’

‘It doesn’t really work that way,’ replied Leonard.

‘You’re kind of like a ghost writer,’ she said in a haunted house voice, relentless in her cheerfulness.

‘I suppose I am a bit. I prefer to be in the background. Anyway, better get back.’

‘Sure thing. Me too. Find any sugar by the way? Ah, never mind, I’ll just dip my biscuits in mine—would you like one?’

‘No thanks,’ said Leonard patting his slightly protruding stomach and immediately regretting he had done so in front of a girl, of all people.

‘Okay, talk to you next time there’s a fire,’ she said.

Leonard brought his tea back to his desk and faked some typing. Too much in one day: first the Romans, then a fire drill and now a conversation with a girl. In fact, that was his first one-to-one conversation with a girl in a very long time. As he sat at his desk he went through the whole thing again. When he was chatting to her he had been slightly out of body, still sobering up from the intense immersion in his book. He catalogued his mistakes with an amplified sense of embarrassment: the way he missed her humorous cues, his stilted aloofness, his patting of his stupid, stupid, stupid, what-was-I-thinking stomach. He wanted to bang his head on the desk. To take his mind off the embarrassment, he tried to start a piece about the children of gladiators, and whether they got to see their dads fight, but all he could think about was his own ineptness. It was not even that he thought she fancied him, he just wanted to give a good account of himself. She took his side on the whole Mark Baxter, BEd, thing—that was positive wasn’t it? Why didn’t he even hear the compliment that was buried in what she said? She had offered him a biscuit—a biscuit for God’s sake. Why didn’t he just say ‘yes, thank you’ or eat it from the palm of her hand or offer to eat it together until their lips touched à la Lady and the Tramp? And the pyjamas—of all the days to make that blunder.

Was he attracted to her? Or was it just that she was a girl and he should have taken the chance to notice whether she was flirting with him or just doing that woman/man office banter thing that he could never tell apart from real flirting.

He thought back to what she looked like. His shyness meant that he unconsciously avoided eye contact, which meant that he wasn’t able to picture her clearly enough. A bit arty maybe—with intelligent but vulnerable eyes? How long was her hair—seemed to be about shoulder length, but was it a bit wavy or just messy? Her hands—nail varnish on chewed nails maybe? Rings or jewellery—Jesus, rings! He didn’t even notice a wedding or engagement ring. How could he overlook such a thing? She was probably married. Married women can be overly familiar with men without being misinterpreted, can’t they? How tall was she? Hard to tell: he was sitting down when they first started talking, then she was behind him and then outside she was standing on her own, so hard to compare, and then in the kitchenette she was sort of leaning against the sink, making her seem smaller than she was. She wasn’t tall, but hard to say otherwise. Her accent—what was it—her voice was kind of, what? Squeaky maybe? She kept putting on funny voices. The haunted house voice and other jokey things—was she kind of quirky or was she being nervous or nice or just embarrassed to be in a position of semi-authority and telling grown-ups what to do?

He tried to get back to his work. The gladiators. Their kids. Come on, think Leonard, think. Every time he tried to focus, his mind drifted back to some other slip-up. He never even asked her name. What kind of rude, self-absorbed person would forget to extend a hand and ask her name? Idiot! He never even said his own name. All he said is that he wasn’t Mark Baxter, which was true of pretty much everybody except Mr Mark Baxter, BEd, himself. And he never asked her about herself. What did his mother always say? ‘Leonard, if you want to make friends, ask people about themselves.’

Maybe if he’d had some warning he might have handled it better. Had he known that today would be the day when a girl, a real-life, probably attractive girl, would talk to him, make jokes with him, he might have prepared a little. He wouldn’t have worn a pyjama top. Instead, he might have worn a nice shirt, or knotted a jumper around his shoulders, like a winner. He would have shaved properly, or at least grown all stubble, or maybe even grown a big beard like lots of other guys in the office. And then he looked down at his shoes—black bloody brogues, with jeans. Good God!

Not for the first time, he longed for an ‘undo’ button in his life. He wished that she had met the very best version of himself. He always felt that he stood little chance with women, but on his best days—wearing his newest clothes, after a haircut and a good night’s sleep—he just might be considered passable by some patient girl who could see past the superficial stuff and realise that he had the makings of an apprentice boyfriend. Not the finished article admittedly, but surely there was potential there. Hopefully she went to a mixed secondary school. If she went to an all-girls school he was finished. Those girls went out looking for the perfect man, their perfect man. At least girls who went to mixed schools had the attitude of ‘just give me something I can work with.’ He was certainly that. A nice, warm-hearted girl could possibly work wonders with him. Her friends would say ‘where did you find this one—does he have any brothers?’ While he didn’t exactly have confidence with girls, he did have hope. He saw loads of girls and thought them to be way out of his league, but he had also seen lots of couples, where the girl, the happy girl, was holding hands with a guy from his league. A sort of okay-looking guy who made her laugh maybe, or who made her feel comfortable in herself. You just needed an in, so she would give you a chance. A chance to get to know her. Not to blow her away—he knew he would never be that type—but at least for her to warm to him over time maybe; to overlook him, only to realise he was what she was looking for all the while.

Leonard was getting overstimulated. Having gone through long barren stretches, his romantic feelings were now starting to awaken, with all their crazy body chemistry. It was exhausting. It was actually physically uncomfortable: all this genetic programming kicking in at once, while his poor fragile personality got run over.

Leonard had little to say on the Romans that day. He left a little early to meet Hungry Paul who was under instructions to buy a suit for Grace’s wedding—‘by sundown,’ is how he explained it—and as Thursday was late night shopping, Leonard offered to keep him company and help him decide.

One consequence of Hungry Paul not having a mobile was that he was always on time. You could arrange to meet him six months hence at a certain time on a given spot and, without any reminders or last minute excuses, he would be there exactly as arranged. When Leonard arrived early, Hungry Paul was already waiting for him. They decided to try Marks, where Leonard had bought his suit for his mother’s funeral, which he planned to wear again for the wedding, albeit with a different colour tie.

‘So, what are you thinking of getting?’ Leonard asked.

‘I suppose I’ll just see what they have. I hope I can find something that fits. I’m a little bit in-between, sizewise.’

‘When was the last time you bought a suit?’

‘Well, if you don’t count the gi I bought for judo the other day, this is my first one.’

‘So what size are you?’

‘Dunno. Usually shirts that fit my shoulders are too long for my arms, and trousers that fit my short legs don’t fit my waist.’

‘What they call in tailoring, the orang-utan problem,’ offered Leonard. ‘Let’s ask them to measure you.’

They looked around for a shop assistant, harking back to the days when shops actually employed people on the shop floor to help customers. Various middle-aged women in black clothes and name badges scuttled by:

‘Sorry, I’m just with someone.’

‘Sorry, I’m on my break.’

‘Sorry, I don’t work here.’

So they tried to figure it out themselves.

‘What colour do you want?’ asked Leonard.

‘Not navy, as that’s too much like my post office uniform. Not black, because I’ll look like someone in a ska band. Not brown, because I’d look like a teacher. So, maybe grey, dark grey even?’ Hungry Paul had given this some thought.

‘What about this pinstripe one?’ suggested Leonard.

‘Nah, pinstripe is for a work suit, not for a social occasion. Besides, that’s chalk stripe, which is different.’

‘I’m impressed,’ said Leonard, ‘I sort of expected you to be hopeless at this, to be honest. How do you know so much about all this?’

‘I think my mother thought the same. There isn’t much to know. Men don’t have huge variety in suits and I like to pay attention to what goes on, so after a while you notice who wears what, even if you’re not interested in a wearing a suit yourself. Let’s try the dark grey one.’

Hungry Paul put it on but was defeated by his own proportions.

‘Maybe they could take it up, in and out?’ offered Leonard.

‘You mean that it would be a perfect fit if only the dimensions were all different. Hold on, here’s one of the orderlies.’

Hungry Paul intercepted a male shop assistant, who looked about eleven years old and had ‘stock room’ written all over him.

‘Do you have this one in any other sizes?’ asked Hungry Paul.

‘I think it’s just what’s out on the racks,’ he answered.

‘So what’s in the stock room?’ interrogated Hungry Paul, QC.

‘There might be some other sizes, but I’d have to check,’ offered the shop assistant in the spirit of Muhammad going to the mountain.

‘Could I ask you to measure me first, just so it’s not a wasted journey—it won’t take a moment,’ asked Hungry Paul.

The shop assistant found a measuring tape from somewhere and started measuring Hungry Paul, using what looked like a self-taught method he had only just invented that second. ‘Eh, I’d say something around 36”, short jacket and 38” short for the trousers,’ he guessed, calling out the measurements for E.T.

‘Maybe we’ll just look around. Thanks all the same,’ said Hungry Paul.

The young shop assistant went through some double doors to finish his adolescence.

Thanks to some methodical persistence, Hungry Paul managed to find a smart grey suit that fitted him well on top and which would fit him well in the trouser once it had been adjusted a little bit. He actually looked quite smart when he put it on, even though anyone trying on a suit in his stockinged feet (with protruding toes) leaves an impression tantalisingly short of the full effect.

‘What colour shirt—blue maybe?’ asked Leonard.

‘It’s not a policeman’s ball,’ said Hungry Paul. ‘White, of course. And for a tie, let me see. I’ll pick purple. It was always Grace’s favourite when we were younger. It was the colour of the wrapper of her favourite sweet in the Quality Street tin at Christmas.’

‘I suppose I better sort myself out too,’ said Leonard, inspired by Hungry Paul’s example. ‘A white shirt, of course, and for a tie, I’ll go for this nice green one—not too loud is it?’

‘Not at all. It looks like the colour of birch leaves when light shines through them,’ answered Hungry Paul, with a touch of poetry.

As they queued, both men became smitten with the days-of-the-week socks on offer near the register and bought a set each. Tragically they had not realised that, far from making sock selection easy, they would be an absolute nuisance, and that once the first wear was out of the way, each sock of a given day would never again be matched with its counterpart.

On their way home, with Leonard still in awe of Hungry Paul’s hidden aptitudes, they started chatting about the generalities of life, their duty for the evening now discharged.

‘So any plans for the rest of the week now that the suit shopping is done?’ asked Leonard.

‘My mam suggested popping in to the hospital with her where she volunteers, to see if I could help out a bit,’ answered Hungry Paul.

‘Very thoughtful of you to offer your skills as a heart surgeon for free. Do you have to bring your own scissors and glue?” asked Leonard.

‘Well, I have your book The Human Body to help me—what could go wrong? Actually, my mam does visiting there. Just walks around the ward and asks people if they want a chat, so she suggested I join her. I’m not sure I’ll be much use, to be honest,’ said Hungry Paul.

‘I never had you down for that sort. Talking to strangers isn’t usually your thing,’ said Leonard.

‘I think I’ll just sit there and listen rather than chatting much. I’m due to start doing it tomorrow. How about you—how are the Romans?’

‘Okay, I suppose. I’ve decided to do a basic job on the main book, as that’s all the author wants, but I’ve also started putting together my own ideas. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but I quite fancy a go at writing my own book. In fact I’m spending most of the company’s time working on my own ideas at the moment.’

‘You’ve always been able to write but you’ve just never seen yourself as a writer—you’ve always held yourself back. You know more about encyclopaedias than anyone—why so much self-doubt? If I were a kid I’d much rather read your books than the regurgitations of some absentee author,’ said Hungry Paul, with his mother’s gift for encouragement.

‘I was also going to mention that I was talking to a girl today. In work I mean. As part of a fire drill,’ non-sequitured Leonard.

‘The old fire drill romance, eh? What’s her name?’ asked Hungry Paul.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does she work with you?’

‘Not with me, no. But she might be in the same company, I’m not sure.’

‘What does she look like?’

‘A bit arty I think, but I’m not sure.’

‘How do you mean, not sure? Was she wearing a wrestling mask or something? Was it dark or foggy in the office today?’

‘I just didn’t get a good look at her.’

‘Was it a hit and run—did you get her registration plate? How can you know so little about her—can you at least tell me whether she was a liquid, gas or solid?’

‘To be honest, it was nothing more a chat. She was nice though, as far as I can remember,’ said Leonard, retreating a little.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t joke. All I can say is best of luck with it. If you need any advice on how to mess it up, just ask.’

‘I will, old pal.’

The two friends parted company, swinging their bags and looking forward to starting with the Friday socks the next day. Hungry Paul had a nice grey suit that needed taking up and Leonard had a tie which was the colour of birch leaves when the light shines through them. Coincidentally it was the same colour as the jumper worn that day by Shelley, the fire warden on Floor 3, who is 5’5”, has cherry-coloured hair, bites her red nails and is responsible for training and induction at a company called Physical Solutions Limited, which trains carers how to lift their patients without hurting their backs.