LITMIR.BIZ

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their faces, searching for the one person I can’t see.

      ‘Sabine! How you doing?’

      ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’

      ‘Brace yourself. It’s a mad house here.’

      ‘How are you? You look so well.’

      I haven’t seen any of them all the time I’ve been off sick, except for Jeanine.

      RenÉe comes up with a plastic cup of coffee in her hand. ‘Hello Sabine,’ she says. ‘Everything all right?’

      I nod, still looking at my desk.

      ‘Let me introduce you to your replacement, Margot.’ She follows my gaze. ‘She’s been filling in for you all this time. She’ll stay on until you’re back full-time.’

      I walk towards my old desk but RenÉe stops me. ‘There’s still a free desk at the back, Sabine. Margot’s been working here so long now, it would be silly to make her move.’

      I decide that making a scene over something so trivial as a desk is not the best start to my first day back. My new desk is in the furthest corner of the office far away from the others. My eyes remain fixed on the desk I used to face.

      ‘Where’s Jeanine?’ I ask, but just then the printer begins to rattle.

      It’s just a desk. Breathe in, breathe out.

      Something has changed. The atmosphere is different. Any interest in my return has evaporated. I’d expected some catch up chats, particularly with Jeanine, but there is only empty space around me.

      Everyone is busy again and I sit in my corner. I take a pile of letters from the mail tray and say to no one in particular, ‘Where is Jeanine? Is she on holiday?’

      ‘Jeanine left last month,’ RenÉe says, without looking up from her computer. ‘Zinzy has replaced her. You’ll meet her later in the week, she’s having a couple of days off.’

      ‘Jeanine’s left?’ I’m dumbfounded. ‘I had no idea.’

      ‘There are other changes you don’t know about,’ says RenÉe, her eyes still fixed on her computer.

      ‘Such as?’ I ask.

      She turns towards me. ‘In January, Walter promoted me to head of the department.’

      We stare at each other.

      ‘There’s no such position.’

      ‘Someone had to pick up the pieces.’

      RenÉe turns back to her screen.

      So much is going on in my head that I don’t know what to say. The morning stretches out endlessly before me. I resist the impulse to call Jeanine. Why didn’t she tell me she’d resigned?

      I stare out of the window until I notice that RenÉe is watching me. She keeps on looking until I’m hunched over the mail.

      Welcome back, Sabine.

      The first time I came to The Bank’s head office, I was impressed. It has an imposing entrance in a beautiful park and, when I walked through the revolving doors into a world of space and marble, I felt myself shrivelling into insignificance.

      But I liked it. The stylish suits and jackets around me turned out to be worn by very normal people. Remembering my mother’s advice that I would get more out of a few expensive good quality basics than a drawer full of bargains, I bought a new wardrobe. Tailored jackets, knee-length skirts and dark tights became my standard uniform. This was how I entered the imposing lobby every day—disguised.

      Working for a multinational is not the sort of work I aspired to. I trained as a Dutch and French teacher, but it was difficult to find a school I wanted to teach at—and I gave up applying for jobs pretty quickly. During placement I’d taught classes full of rebellious teenagers and it had been dreadful.

      Jeanine and I joined The Bank at the same time, when they had just set up a new trust fund. The job itself didn’t excite me. It had sounded great: administrator/office support, good communication skills and a broad knowledge of languages needed.

      But I needn’t have taken out a student loan to say, ‘Please hold the line’, and replenish the supply of glue sticks. That’s probably what they meant by ‘flexibility’ in the job description.

      But there was a good atmosphere in the office. Jeanine and I gossiped about the execs we were working for, we reorganised the filing system and picked up each other’s telephones when one of us wanted to nip out to the shops for half an hour.

      I was independent and I had a job. My new life had begun.

      After a while, we were really busy. The wave of business managers hired to work on the trust fund grew and we could barely keep up with the work. We needed more people, and fast.

      Jeanine and I presided over the interviews and that’s how RenÉe came to work with us. She was good at her job, but the atmosphere changed almost immediately. She knew how things should be run. RenÉe felt that our department didn’t come up to scratch and nor did Jeanine or I. She had no truck with extended lunch breaks. Of course she was right, but we had no truck with the fact that she had a personal meeting with Walter behind closed doors to air her complaints. Walter was pleased with RenÉe, she was a worthy addition to the Trust.

      ‘And to think that we hired her ourselves,’ said Jeanine.

      Walter felt that RenÉe should be in charge of hiring a fourth staff member. She had a good eye, according to him.

      ‘And we don’t?’ I said to Jeanine.

      ‘So it seems.’

      RenÉe placed ads in the main newspapers and called the employment agencies. She got so involved with it that the bulk of her workload fell to Jeanine and me. She spent entire afternoons meeting more and less suitable people, but no one was taken on.

      ‘It’s so difficult to find good staff,’ she said, shaking her head as she came out of the meeting room after yet another interview. ‘Before you know it, you’re overrun with people who think that office support is nothing more than typing and faxing. Try and build a good, solid team from that.’

      And so we struggled on, because the Trust was growing and work was piling up.

      We worked overtime every day and often through our lunch breaks. I became exhausted. I could no longer sleep properly. I felt hounded. I lay with a pounding heart staring at the ceiling, and as soon as I closed my eyes, found myself overcome by a dizziness that spun me round in accelerating circles. I struggled on for a few months but a year after I began I collapsed. I can’t describe it any other way. A feeling of complete apathy set in, spread through me and made everything look grey.

      I pull the pile of mail towards me and open envelopes and remove elastic bands. After half an hour I’m already fed up.

      What’s the time? Not yet nine o’clock? How am I going to make it through the day?

      I glance across the office. Margot is a few metres away; her desk is against RenÉe’s so that they can talk to each other without me overhearing a thing.

      The sales force go in and out with rough copies that need to be typed up, mail that needs to be sent by special delivery. RenÉe delegates like the captain of a ship. She gives the worst jobs to me. And there are quite a few of them. Cardboard boxes to be made up for the archive, coffee to prepare for the meeting room, visitors to collect in the lobby. And it’s still only mid-morning. When I pack up at twelve-thirty, I haven’t exchanged a friendly word with anybody and I’m shattered.

       3

      I arrive home exhausted. My face is drained, I have sweat patches under my arms and my two-room apartment is a tip. After the utilitarian neatness of the office, my scruffy

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