‘Only idiots talk about the weather,’ Management replied as she surveyed me from a sinister distance.

I tried to leave a baffling number of times. Each time I tucked my hair behind my ears in a nod towards a tidy aesthetic and squeezed myself into Management’s tiny cubicle. ‘I quit. Thank you,’ I’d say and Management would reply, ‘I will see you tomorrow,’ and somehow she was right and I was always destined to be wrong.

*

I had up-and-down periods. I experienced great bursts of tenderness towards Kevin, the pigeons that littered the garage forecourt, even the empty chairs. I was hugely nostalgic and wistful for the garage even while I was still technically working there.

‘Kevin, do you remember the good times we used to have?’

He looked at me. ‘Not really.’

Then: the anxious darkness, a rising feeling that I might rip all the leaves from the plant for no good reason, an anticipated anger at the next person who might dare touch me.

‘I hate this place and if you are having similar feelings, my friend, we should run away,’ I said.

‘Haven’t you just come back from running away?’

The garage encouraged education – learning skills that would be transferable to newer, better positions – and in its own sterile way, it succeeded. I gained insights into my own personal habits that I could have gone decades quite happily never knowing about. This mental unravelling happened at no great speed. Even the catastrophe of my own life was something I managed with amazing slowness.

*

Christmas came from nowhere. ‘When was that decided?’ I wanted to ask, but it brought a new thrill and direction to our days so I didn’t want to argue. Management, occupying the head chair, her smooth, superior hands sitting on the table, searched out themes for the decorating. And in a burst of friendliness and participation, that surprised even myself, I suggested we went with ‘Christmas’.

‘In what way?’ Management inquired.

‘You know the festive way with tinsel and the colour red?’

She pursed her woeful, shrivelled lips.

‘Can you not think of anything else?’

‘No.’

In that brief moment everyone saw my mind and my mind was absent of all ideas. I thought I would be a different person by this time in my life, but I was actually becoming less like someone else and more like myself. It was troubling. Kevin ignored me during that Christmas discussion. Often, during Friday group, he sat across from me with Henry and Lynn. I tried to let him know we were being held hostage using just my eyes but I could widen them only so far to convey the corniness, the stupidity. I sometimes saw him laugh with his hand over his mouth – that was for me.

‘Don’t give out to her just because she didn’t have a good theme,’ said Lynn with deft and hidden savagery. She was the kind of woman who would cause tears in others just to wipe them away. Lynn had no respect for complicated people and situations. It was so lousy and exhausting. It probably had caused a lot of problems in her life. And she was brutal at her job. She made me look conscientious. She simply had to draft email correspondence, but she never quite got the tone right; there was always a whiff of incompetency. We were all nervous about her genuine ineptitude. I, for example, was consumed by compassion for her child.