Chapter 8
Lando
“What’s this?”
Amy has called me over to her desk in the corner of the big open-plan office space.
There’s an envelope next to her keyboard with “Orlando” scribbled on the front.
I go to pick it up, but she holds up a hand.
Instead, she picks it up and hands it to me, as though that teeny amount of control was worth the humiliation.
I tear it open, scan the text, and I’m still confused.
“Huh?”
“It’s payday today,” she says. “For everyone else in the company. But you missed the cutoff for the month by a few days. I spoke to your father, and he suggested you might need an advance to help you with buying groceries.”
I look at the letter again. Is this a payslip? Is this what a payslip looks like? There are a bunch of numbers and tax codes and other shit I don’t fully understand.
“One thousand, one hundred and four pounds, and thirty pence. Is that it?” These trousers alone cost more than that.
“That’s two weeks’ pay. It’ll be taken off of your next pay cheque. Payday is the first Monday of every month.”
“Oh,” I say, because double that isn’t too bad, I guess, but it’s nothing like I was used to.
Granted, I don’t have rent to pay or a mortgage, and I don’t have any gas or electric or car bills to pay.
I only have groceries, clothes, and skincare to fund.
I could probably make it work if I cut back on a few things.
I could start using The Ordinary instead of La Mer.
Jesus, save my soul, I’m going to die out here.
“What is this bit? Gross pay?” I ask, pointing to a number significantly higher than the one reportedly hitting my bank account.
“That’s how much you earn before tax,” Amy says, like she’s explaining the ABCs to a toddler.
Ew, tax.
“And what’s this?”
“National Insurance. That pays for your state pension and NHS,” she says.
“And this? Why are there so many deductions?”
“That’s your company pension. You pay a certain amount each month, and Oakham Industries will match it.”
“Jesus, fuck, do I have to pay that?”
“You can opt out, but sixty-five-year-old you will thank current you if you don’t.”
I curl my lip at her and refrain from hissing. “And what’s this three-pound deduction?”
“Oh, that’s your company health insurance. You can download the free app, and you have loads of—”
“No. I don’t need it. I’m on my father’s Bupa. I’m not paying three pounds a month for something I already have. Take it off.”
Amy folds her arms, leans back in her chair, and puffs out a long sigh. “You’ll need to speak with HR, then. I can’t remove it for you. Listen, Orlando, whilst you’re here, we should conduct your one week informal review.” She gets to her feet. “Let’s take this to one of the smaller meeting rooms.”
“Now?” I ask, firmly standing my ground and not following her.
“Unless you’ve got something more important to work on?”
I don’t say anything. I simply limit my eye roll to a brief ceiling glance and follow her through the office space.
The overhead fluorescent lights flicker on, and Amy takes a seat.
The room is small, three metres by three metres at most, and there are only three chairs at the table.
The air smells of dust and printer toner, and despite the sunlight cleaving through the dirt-speckled windows, it’s chilly.
The hairs on my arms stand to attention beneath the goosepimples on my skin, and my nipples are spiking against my shirt fabric.
“So . . .” Amy says. “How are you finding it here?”
Do I lie? Do I tell her I’m enjoying it when in fact I’d rather slice my veins open with a rusty screwdriver and squeeze grapefruit juice into the wounds than watch another fucking manual handling training video?
And let’s be honest, who in this office full of vitamin D deficient zombies is doing any heavy lifting? Isn’t that what the porters are for?
I’ve accidentally been silent for too long and answered Amy’s question.
“I understand it’s a bit of a culture shock, and this is what these review meetings are here to address. We’ll have another in a couple of weeks, and then one at the end of twelve weeks and one at the end of six months.”
I don’t mean to do it, but a groan slips out. Imagine working here for six months. Imagine waking up every single morning at six thirty and dragging my ass all the way from Mudford to Swindon. Imagine eating that minging cafeteria food five days a week for the rest of my fucking life.
“Tell me what it is you’re struggling to adjust to and we’ll see if we can work something out.”
She’s trying to be nice. I need to remember that. I need to hold that thought in my head. She wants me to succeed. She wants to report back to Mr Oakham with, “Good news. I’ve managed to tame your brat son.”
“Everything.” Fine, fuck it. Honesty it is. “I’m struggling with everything. Motivation to come here. Motivation to get me through the day. I’ve been here for a week and I still have no idea what my official job title is. What my role will entail.”
Amy checks her paperwork. She flicks through a stack of notes and evidently doesn’t find what she’s searching for.
“We will get back to you with that. What I can tell you is that you’re in band two for PAYE, which means you’re on thirty-five thousand pounds per annum.
That’s usually a junior supervisory role, not an entry role, so it’ll be something a little more important than say . . . admin assistant.”
Even I can see the classism in that comment. Me, Orlando Oakham-Goodwin.
“It’s not the job title that’s bothering me. It’s just . . .” Okay, I started with honesty, let’s end this with honesty. “How am I supposed to muster enthusiasm for this job when I’m A, just winging it, B, don’t give a shit about it, and C, fucking loathe it?”
Amy flinches. I feel like I’ve won a tiny battle.
“Orlando, that’s really unfair. Your dad—”
“Do not drag that man into this. If it weren’t for my father, I’d probably just be a normal kid, with normal dreams and aspirations, and could just go ahead and have a normal career.”
She places the paperwork on the table. “Nobody’s stopping you from doing that.”
I open my mouth to argue. To tell her that he is stopping me, that’s he’s always been controlling me, but it just hangs open. Is she right? Could I actually do something I enjoy?
Daddy Dearest had told me he would only fund my education if I studied at Cambridge or Oxford.
I didn’t want to do that at either of those, so I stayed in Mudford and fucked my way through the past three years.
But did I always have more choice? Kids from poor backgrounds still go to uni.
They fund themselves through loans and part-time jobs.
It hadn’t felt like an option back then.
In any case, if I’d actually gone to uni, what would I even have studied?
So perhaps, through inactivity, I’d made this bed for myself.
Fuck, and now it’s time to lie in it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and Amy flinches again. She’s so sensitive to the slightest change in emotion.
“It’s okay. Like I said, having a real job is an adjustment. If you want to stay here, though, we’re going to need you to put in one hundred and ten per cent.”
No way am I pointing out the total ick of her statement. I nod instead and hold my breath.
“I understand that this past week you’ve been catching up on training.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to come, but what I need to see from you is more desk time.
We’ve got an app that reports back to your line manager—at the moment, that’s me—how many minutes per day you’re logged onto your computer.
Orlando, last week you spent more time away from your desk than at it. ”
“I was in the bathroom. I have IBS.”
“You need to figure out a way to manage it more effectively.”
My hackles are raised again. “I already manage it as best as I can. I avoid dairy and brassicas. I drink peppermint tea. I follow the FODMAPs diet. I take gut biome supplements and eat lots of oats. But stress and nerves will also trigger flare-ups, and this past week has been very stressful and nerve-racking for me. Would you rather I’d stayed at my desk and shat myself? ”
She actually rolls her eyes, like I’m the one being unreasonable. She’s clearly not led a life of carrying around clean Calvin Kleins and a pocket-sized packet of wet wipes.
“We’ll move your workspace closer to the toilets,” she says.
A silent “happy now?” hangs on the end of her sentence.
“We need to be looking at getting your logged-in time up from forty-four per cent to at least eighty. Our company policy is ninety per cent, so there’s still a lot of work to be done. ”
It’s unachievable. Physically unachievable. Unless I figure out how not to be stressed out by this hellhole. I nod.
“The other thing is that some of your colleagues have made statements about you being . . . somewhat hostile towards them.”
“Example?” I say and internally wince. I don’t point out that was probably Exhibit A.
“Well, I’m not going to name names, but we’ve had reports of you calling someone an ‘indolent pleb,’ and making fun of their shoes.”
I do not laugh. Though it takes a lot of concentrated focus not to.
“Andy Whatshisname told me to photocopy this eight-hundred-page document, and when I said no because I was doing yet more manual handling training, he said I was bone-idle, called me a waste of company resources, and said I only got the job because of . . .” I use air quotes. “Fucking nepotism.”
In all fairness, he’s not wrong about any of it.
“Ah.” Amy jots something at the top of her papers. “He shouldn’t have said that. I’ll have a word with Andrew. And he shouldn’t be asking you to do his work, but that still doesn’t excuse you taking the mickey out of his shoes.”
“He wears loafers without socks,” I say, and fold my arms in an “I rest my case” gesture, but my eyes fall down to Amy’s feet as though I can see through the table. I remember she also wears shoes without socks or tights.
God, this place is infested.
“Fine, I’ll apologise to him,” I say.
“Wow. Okay. Thank you,” Amy says, a genuine smile creeping over her face. “I wasn’t expecting such a grown-up response.”
I force down my retort.
“The other thing we need to discuss is the type of work you’ll be doing after your training’s over,” she says.
“You mean there’s an end to the training?”
Amy laughs as though I’d been joking. “We’d like to try you out on a few different tasks to see which one is a good fit for you. It’ll be mostly administration tasks for the first few weeks, if that’s okay?”
Fuck knows why she’s asking for my approval. She and I are both painfully aware it’s not mine to give. I’ll shut up and get on with whatever task she gives me, or they’ll report back to Father. It’s that simple.
“So we’re thinking you could do some archival work, answer the phones, do some file assembly? How does that sound?”
No ma’am. No. Archival work? Answering the fucking phones? File assembly? Not for me. Not for little old Lando. Please excuse me now so I can go to the bathroom and cry myself into a coma.
“Are we done?” I say instead of responding. “I’ve got a lot of riveting training to get back to. No such thing as too many ways to learn to lift a box.”
Her genuine smile pinches into something much tighter. “Yes, we’re done. I’ll send you an email with your progress report, and we can start thinking about chipping away at your targets.”
Before I realise what I’m doing, I flash her a double thumbs up and a fat-cheeked but dead-eyed smile, and push up from my chair.
“Hey, Andrew,” I say, taking the long way back to my desk to pit-stop at Andrew’s.
He casts a glance at the meeting room Amy and I recently vacated and raises a single brow.
“I’m really sorry I called you an indolent pleb. That was way out of line.”
“Oh,” he says, clearly surprised by the turn of events. “Thank you?”
“I’m also sorry your shoes are so ugly.”
His smile falls away as he realises what I’ve said. I don’t wait around for his response.
At my desk, I pull my headphones on, knock two more Buscopan down my throat, and try my best to ignore the cramps building in my lower abdomen. The toilet paper in this necropolis is practically made of sandpaper, and my hole is already protesting another attack.
And then, for what must be the quadrillionth time this week, I do a multiple choice quiz on how to set up your monitor, desk, and chair to avoid certain death from neck strain.
I fucking hate this place.