‘When did it happen?’ I asked. I had reached my desk, which put me to the rear of the group, and I don’t think that any of them noticed my approach. Their eyes were on the plume.

‘When did what happen?’

‘Ray said it was an explosion …’

‘It doesn’t say,’ Ray said. ‘This morning.’

‘I think I …’ How to explain about the bubbles? If I said I saw the explosion I would sound ridiculous. ‘I think I felt it … The vibration …’

‘The earth moved for you?’ Kay asked, and a couple of people chuckled, Mohit and a golf wanker.

‘Now you mention it,’ Ray – woman Ray – said, ‘I think I felt it too.’

This prompted a more general and impossible-to-transcribe group conversation about who thought they had heard or felt what, whether it was possible to feel anything at this distance, and so on. I didn’t contribute much, and the group’s focus, such as it was, broke away from me. But Polly was still looking at me, and I frowned back, trying to figure out what I had said or done to earn this special attention. Her eyes darted down to my desk, which I was leaning against. My right hand was resting on one of the stacks of papers that are permanently encroaching on my keyboard and work space. It was this heap that Polly had glanced at, just a pile of torn-off notes, newspapers and magazines like the others, but I saw the top sheet, the one pinned under my hand, was not in fact mine at all. It was a yellow leaf from an American legal pad, and it was clipped, with many others like it, to a steel clipboard, which must have been left there by its owner while she was distracted by the drama at the window.

‘Excuse me,’ Polly said, and she grabbed her clipboard out from under my hand just as I lifted it to see what was written on it. Then she flipped the pages that had been folded over the back of the board to cover the sheet I had seen. But I had seen it. Columns of numbers – dates, times. The lowest line, the only one I saw in detail, read:

MONDAY: 10.11 12.05

Then two blank columns. I knew immediately, instinctively, what was recorded there, and what it meant. It was the time I had arrived that morning, and the time I had left for lunch, with spaces left for the times I returned from lunch and left the office at the end of the day. Polly was recording my movements – my latenesses, my absences, the myriad small (and not so small) ways I was robbing the magazine of time. The purpose of this record was obvious: she was building a case for my dismissal.