PEPAC novel: excerpt: "The Email"

communication leapfrogs onto the UK broadband network, speeds North West out of London and, accelerating through PEPAC’s very own fibre optic cable beneath the borders of Hertfordshire, bursts unscathed through the firewalls of the PEPAC IT Department.

Here it glides onto the main email server, where its arrival is duly noted.  It is then nudged on to dock, with a single bleep, in the inbox of Clarissa Gordon, 48, Managing Director of PEPAC.

Clarissa – aka “Gordons the Gorgon” – is in her plush office, which takes up an entire lower floor of the Executive Dome, C building. 

Competent queen of all she surveys, she sits at her desk.  She is a svelte, attractive woman, more greyhound than Gorgon. 

There’s a lean, compact look to her frame.  She is dressed as always in immaculate black business suit and sharp white blouse.  Subtle, but no doubt sharp, heels.  Artful make-up, flattering hint of a tan, very short hair (flat, dark curls). 

A face you’d call handsome, stunning almost in a Mediterrenean way, but not pretty —assuming you hadn’t pissed her off and been turned to stone by the stare that gave her the nickname “Gorgon” in the first place. 

Clarissa has serious presence.  She doesn’t need to try and intimidate anybody.  It just happens.  There’s rarely anything malicious behind the stare that scares the shit out of colleagues and paralyses minions like rats in a cattery. 

She has neither the time nor energy for malice; what’s more, she is genuinely one of these people who has moved on from projecting their own shit.  If she’s feeling angry with somebody, she knows it’s because, on some level, she’s angry with herself. 

Clarissa is wise, fierce only when necessary, and, ultimately, saddened and oh-so-slightly snuffed by life. 

But, snag her attention for the wrong reason and she will reveal an unexpected and terrifying level of calm, predatorial energy.  Quick like a lizard she will incline her head.  She will fix you with clear green eyes that have seen things.  She will stop in its tracks your own pitifully-pedestrian perception of the world and replace it with one grandiose with imaginings of bleak and hideous punishment; you’re frozen to the spot, you feel like a six-year old caught using your mother’s most expensive perfume to clean the windows, you’re being probed by an angry alien intelligence, hazed and blazed by a cross between a “fit Cylon”, a “scorned fire-dryad” and a “fooking tiger” (these last being the impressions recorded by three recipients of the Clarissa Treatment, drawing on diverse schema of comparison). 

If there were any doubt whether Clarissa knows what she is doing, this, the Gorgonic Eye-Fuck, is the moment that all bets are sensibly declared off. 

But right now, in the early afternoon of a summer’s day, Clarissa is engaged in innocuous activity.  Her favourite office activity in fact.  Well, her favourite office activity with No Guilt Involved.   NGI.

No Guilt Involved in filling her stapler, that’s for sure.  (No Guilt Involved in dreaming up sad acronyms either). 

In completing this menial act, this simple act of stationery replenishment, Clarissa finds something deliciously fulfilling.  How thrillingly self-indulgent. How positively evil to perform a task of such insignificance with such consuming focus.  And such satisfaction in the empirical, absolute nature of its completion.   No ifs and buts, no could-have-done-better, no ambiguity, just a done, perfect job.  One universe at least where everything, bar nothing, is hunky-dory.  And, blissfully, nobody is any the wiser or would care if they were.

If it sounds like Clarissa is bordering on the obsessive-compulsive, that’s missing the point – the whole point is that she knows there’s no point in filling her stapler properly, but she does it anyway.

And today she’s taking all the time in the world.  This is her ritual.  The quiet of her office, somehow amplified rather than ruined by the gentle hum of her fridge, makes it an almost sacramental experience. 

It’s like, she thinks sometimes, loading a designated firearm for an execution, with all the slow dignity and attention to detail that such a grave task demands: pulling back the top of the piece with a click to reveal the sterile loading chamber below, plucking neat blocks of staples from their dry cardboard box as if they were precious clips of hand-dyed rounds, maybe ten at a time, inspecting them one by one for flaws, and fitting them flush and true into the magazine.  They don’t snap tight with the reassuring clunk that ammunition would, but at least the top of the stapler clicks back into place like it means business.

Which is all very well for the stapler – but does Clarissa ever use it in anger, to staple anything? 

Does she fuck. 

That’s not the point of the exercise.  This is “me-time”. 

And the whole point about oh-so-fashionable “me-time” is that you do what you like, not what you think you should like.  So instead of doing Yoga or Facebook or the handsome boy from accounts, or merrily phoning friends she doesn’t have, Clarissa expertly loads her stapler with one hand and, armed with a quadruple gin and tonic in the other, squeezes off blanks onto the floor with quiet joy as she checks her inbox.   

The prize specimen of Señor Francesco Hernandez.  Quite a few from him recently.  Clarissa feels a sly tug of excitement somewhere in her stomach (and it’s not from her gin and tonic).  This latest email is short, but she re-reads it.