The Long Walk

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We were sat in the middle of a busy open plan working office. Around us busy people stared at their monitors.

It was the ultimate insult to sit people who were going to be made redundant in the midst of busy office. It reminded me of that terrible room in the nearby hospital where mothers whose babies had been stillborn spent the night in anguish listening to the mewling cries of other mothers’ living newborns.

One by one we were being called to walk ignominiously down a long corridor, then through the double doors and into the small meeting room. Here we were informed in our 1:1 meeting of our fate.

It was my turn next when Man Boobs raced down the corridor into the hum of the office.

‘Ah,’ he said seeing me waiting.

He didn’t stop moving.

His great bulk had gained so much momentum from his ‘dash’ down the corridor that it was probably impossible for him to do so.

I had met him once before. That had been the day he’d informed us that the funding for our work had been cut, and that we were all going to be made redundant. He’d worn a pink shirt that day with bursting buttons.

Later, he’d sat next to me at lunch. He had eaten with his head bowed; his mouth wide open just a few inches above his plate into which he rapidly shovelled food.
‘Can’t stop,’ he said seeing me, as I sat awkwardly on a chair surrounded by the hum of busy working people whose pay packets and pensions were secure.

I stared at him.

‘I have to go,’ he called from a great distance as he rounded the corner. ‘Janet’s in there. She knows what to say. She’s got the script.’

And he was gone.

He left me feeling bitter and disgusted in an island of resentment. I was shocked to be treated so shabbily with the few off hand remarks he’d just thrown in my direction.

He was making us redundant and thought it was more important to be somewhere else despite the special journeys we had made to meet with him that day.

And there was a script!

I was astonished that he couldn't even be bothered to walk up to me to apologise, or even to explain the reason for his sudden departure.

I was left there waiting an hour for my turn to hear the script being read out with no offer of tea or biscuits. No one had spoken to me in the way that no one knows how to speak to the recently bereaved.

I was the living dead and it was best to keep your eyes averted.

And nobody looked up from their screens as I began my long walk down that corridor.