I've managed to hit two bad books in a row now. Well, one bad and one abysmal, so awful in fact that I only managed the first fifty pages — and it was supposed to be a best-seller too!
I abandoned it at lunchtime. The final straw came when Fletcher wandered into the canteen, pushed it back to check the title as he always does and said, 'Hey, something decent at last. That guy's great. Can I borrow it when you're done?'
'You can have it now,' I said and threw it across the table at him. 'It's terrible.'
'Yeah? Ta. What's wrong with it?'
I was about to say it was primary school stuff but managed to keep myself in check since one of the miracles of the primary school system is that they managed to teach Fletcher to read at all.
'Don't like the style,' I said instead.
'Bugger the style,' he said. 'What are the birds like?'
I left him pawing at the mildly lascivious cover and went back to work. I could have wandered up to Cuba Street and looked around the secondhand places for a replacement but it was such a nice day I couldn't bring myself to do it. I always think of rummaging round secondhand book shops as a grey day activity. Otherwise you come out hours later, blinking at the sunlight and feeling guilty for spending all that time inside looking at gloomy shelves. Or at least I do. Anyway, I've still got about half of that box full I bought for ten dollars at a gala day and I'm still determined to try them all.
Betti came in this afternoon and invited me to a party on Saturday. Actually she caused a bit of an uproar, especially among Fletcher's mob. She really is attractive — she knows it too but pretends she doesn't. She just walked in as though she owned the place, right round the counter, past reception and all the way through to my desk without being challenged by anyone — and she's hardly the sort of person no one notices! There's this kind of guileless, little-girl-lost look that lets her get away with murder at times, but I've noticed a mischievous sparkle now and then and I think she's really a lot smarter than she lets on, even to Stuart. I accepted the invitation — she can be very persuasive — and watched her go, along with all the other guys. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind me we're related.
I caused a bit of a stink this afternoon because I forgot about a special batch of supplementaries Tom gave me last week. They're for a bunch of families who were on TV because they're about to be evicted for not paying their rent. It's the same old story: they didn't know they were entitled to a supplementary benefit because we'd never told them. We'd never told them because the minister's told us to save money and only dish out special benefits to people if they're in dire straits. Naturally, they didn't come to us when they got into difficulties because we've been so cagey and unhelpful in the past so they went straight to a journalist. The result is yet another political storm in a teacup with the minister scoring brownie points by personally intervening to help the families and denouncing his own department who were only acting on his instructions in the first place!
Anyway, I forgot about them and Tom Coutts went mad because Mr Cotton had asked him specially and he'd given them to me because he thought he could rely on me, etc, etc. ... I let him carry on for five minutes about political fallout and jobs being on the line and then said that I could take them upstairs and get them processed directly. (He doesn't like us doing that because it makes his job irrelevant.)
'Oh? Could you?' he said, becoming all smarmy. (He's so transparent!) 'You wouldn't mind? And would they? I wouldn't want to tread on anyone's toes up there. And I'd hate them to think we weren't doing our job properly ...'
I told him it was all right, I knew one of the operators and she'd let me slip them in with another batch, which I did — crisis averted. So now I'm a big hero too — me and the 'minister!
What's been bugging me, though, is actually forgetting about them. My memory's pretty crappy about most things — birthdays, anniversaries, the names of people I run into in the street, what I had for lunch and what tie I wore yesterday (seriously!) — but I'm usually pretty good with work stuff. Not this time, though. I'll be forgetting where I live next — or where I work (I wish!).
I guess that's something else that bugged me about those last two books: their perfect recall of childhood days. I know they're only fiction and they're by big-name writers who probably employ teams of researchers to dig up all the details they want, but they irritated me somehow because of their perfect clarity compared with the fuzziness of my own memories.
What was I like when I was seven years old? What was I like when I was nine? I can remember incidents, feelings, specific events — though even these are like shadowy islands in the mist — but I can't remember me. Stu has some of our early photographs. Some are completely alien, a fuzzy likeness the only indication; some are more familiar — half-remembered surroundings, people, clothes. But still the serious little boy staring back at me from his monochrome world is unknown. What was he like? What was he doing, thinking, feeling?
There was nothing on TV tonight so I spent the evening tinkering around with one of the Erics I wrote a while ago, the one about one of the few bits of my childhood I do remember — or at least, think I remember. The problem is that it became something of a family legend, even when my parents were alive. I'm there, I'm in it as a bit player, I can see the shop we owned, see the name Spalding's Dairy above the door and remember swinging on the rope cordoning off the other half, but as far as the details are concerned I'm not sure how much is actual memory and how much I've added from all the stories. The mind has a habit of making things fit, irrespective of the facts.
That's where Eric has it over me. He said something tonight about his childhood being more cogent, and in many ways it is. I mean, honestly, when you read about the ice-block sticks things start falling into place. His attitude to authority, his contempt of bureaucracy, that pervading air of bitter sarcasm and sharp, unpopular observation ... you start to make associations, you begin to feel some of his outrage and start to think, 'I'm beginning to understand why he is the way he is.' But I wonder, is it really that simple? Aren't we being just a little lazy, a little too simplistic, a little too easily swayed? After all, those things really happened to me and I'm not actually like that.