Chapter 1
ONE
I am a drone. I am a worker bee. I am a cog in a machine.
This is what I chant to myself as I go about my work each day. As I sit in front of a computer screen in an office with as much charm as a motorway service station toilet, completing the tasks that the computer has assigned me.
At eleven o’clock, my deskmate Dan tells me, “I’m off to the loo, Bridget. Send out a search party if I’m not back in five.”
I’m not sure whether he knows that he says the same thing every day, or he thinks the repetition makes it funnier.
I never mention it. I just smile and pretend it’s sweet.
Dan and I have sat opposite one another at an S-shaped desk for two years now, and all I really know about him is that he does not have a particularly good sense of humour.
I am a drone. I am a worker bee. I am a cog in a machine.
That’s not actually true. I’m more like the pin that holds a single cog in place, and even that suggests I’m in some way pivotal to the functioning of the machine.
If anything, I’m one of those bits of transparent plastic that you get on the front of a router when the broadband company decides to send you a new one.
If someone removed me, no one would notice the difference.
This is what occupies my mind as I try to make the day pass quicker.
And it works. It works oddly well. As boring as my job is, there’s a sort of hypnotic beauty to it.
I sit down in my chair at nine o’clock. At eleven, Dan goes to the toilet.
At five past eleven, Dan comes back from the toilet, and at one fifteen I have my lunch.
In between all that excitement, I float through space.
There will be a report open on my computer, and it will be more complete by the time I eat my ham and cress sandwiches than it was when I took my coat off that morning, but I would estimate that only 12 per cent of my brain is actively engaged with it.
It’s hard to say what the other 88 per cent is up to.
When I was a kid at home in Somerset, I had a tortoise called George.
I liked to imagine what he was thinking as he sat chomping on lettuce leaves, saying nothing.
Somewhere out in space, there are aliens watching me as I fill in box after box on my monitor, and I bet they’re pondering the exact same question that I had about George.
Is there anything going on in that tiny head?
My afternoons are pretty much carbon copies of my mornings, with the small exception that my best and only work friend, Tammy, comes by at three thirty and we go outside together so that she can smoke a cigarette and talk about how she should give up smoking.
At five o’clock, I go home, and that’s when things get truly bleak.
As I walk back to my one-bedroom flat – that had felt like such a milestone to buy and is now such a millstone to maintain – I think about my time at university when anything seemed possible.
I think about the friends I had at Goldsmiths College and what they must be doing now.
I think about Ade Okojie. Because really, that was the highlight of my otherwise pointless life: a drunken snog in a cupboard with a guy who went on to be a rock star.
And every night, when I close my front door behind me, I think, Bridget, your time is your own. You have five hours before you need to go to sleep. Do something with it. Get your old notebooks out. Write something amazing, or draw a picture of somewhere beautiful that you dream of visiting.
And then I make dinner and wash the dishes and realise that I don’t have anything to write about and that drawing somewhere beautiful will only make me sad I’m not there.
So I sit on the sofa to watch a film or read a book, but even that seems like too much effort, and in the end I stay right where I am, exercising my right thumb every ten to forty seconds as I scroll through videos made by people I would probably hate in real life, whose lives look so much more interesting than my own.
I am a drone. I am a worker bee. I am a cog in a machine.
Not just in my job, but at home too. I am the eyeballs on the videos that make people rich.
There are billions of others just like me, and it is our job to watch the occasional adverts that flash up on our six-inch screens so that more people make money in a manner I don’t fully understand.
I am a cog in a machine in a room full of machines in a factory that makes machines.
Every day is the same… except today.
I get home at six twenty-five, as usual. I need eighty-five minutes, a bus and two trains to arrive because I can’t afford to live anywhere near the place I work. This city, which once seemed so magical, but I have now come to despise, is approximately more expensive than anywhere else on earth.
I unlock my front door, pick up the assorted bills and ads from the carpet and walk into my apartment, with its stunning view of the car park where I could park a car if I could afford one.
I can’t afford one because I have a mortgage to pay.
And I’m just about to tell myself that the next five hours belong to me when I realise that one of the bills in my hand isn’t a bill.
I’ve never had a letter from abroad before.
Actually, I don’t think I’ve received a real letter here full stop.
As much as I enjoy the missives from my bank telling me that I have just enough money to continue doing nothing with my life, and the kindly reminders from the electricity company of exactly where most of my pay cheque goes, this one surprises me.
There’s Arabic writing on the postmark, and I can just make out that the stamp reads Muscat.
I have no idea where that is, but my phone tells me it’s in Oman, which a further search reveals is at the south-eastern tip of the Arab Peninsula.
This is hardly the most revealing information, but then I remember I’m allowed to open the stiff, bulky letter and not just goggle at the envelope.
I was going to rip it open, but the paper is so thick and fancy that I change my mind.
Whatever is inside deserves a touch of ceremony, so I go to the drawer in the kitchen and find my sharpest knife.
As I insert it ever so carefully in the little gap at the side, I tell myself not to get too excited.
It’s a scam. Bound to be a scam. It’ll be from some Omani prince who needs to borrow my bank account to deposit ten million dollars. There is no chance I will come out of this well.
So you can imagine how I feel when I tip up the envelope and a plane ticket to Mauritius falls out.