"The Red Tie" - 2
Weekly serialisation of my short dystopian thriller.
When he looks out of his kitchen window each morning the view is always the same: wrapped around his small courtyard garden, the dark evergreen hedge whose colour varies little with the seasons. It is a hedge which always seems to need trimming somewhere. This time of year there is nothing cheery or uplifting about it, nothing celebratory; the winter mornings are so dark for so long that most often the hedge appears to be nothing other than black, its leaves virtually invisible as if they had been absorbed by the night.
This particular morning he sighs as he probably does most mornings in January. Not only does it already feel as if it has been winter forever, but the sameness of his routine overwhelms him: switch on the light, fill the kettle, prepare his breakfast. Then stare out of the window as he waits for the hot water, the toast. Some days he tries to vary the routine — perhaps put the toast on before boiling the kettle, or opt for coffee rather than tea — but the sequence makes little difference; they are still things he is forced to endure. Then, at the end of the ritual, after his perfunctory eating and drinking, he will go back upstairs to the bathroom and finish his ablutions, choose a tie from his very limited selection. At this point on most days, Monday to Friday, he tells himself he will go out at the weekend and buy a new tie, one that isn’t blue. It will be a statement tie. His colleagues will see him the following week sporting a yellow or green one, or one with a vibrant paisley pattern, and they will wonder what was going on, draw conclusions, ask him who the lucky girl is (because for many of the men he works with, women are the reason for everything).
But today, this Friday, things are different. Breakfast may have been the same and the hedge appeared identical, but for once he does not have to go to work; he does not have to choose which blue tie to wear. Verna had called them into her office just before they left the previous evening and told them they would not be needed; there was some kind of inspection scheduled which would so disrupt the normal working of their department. Consequently management had decided to give certain individuals — those not needed by the auditors — the day off. With pay. It had taken him the entirety of the tram-ride home to process the information and, even then, left him vaguely unsettled all evening. A day to himself. And an unexpected and unplanned one. Perhaps it would give him the opportunity to finally go and buy that tie.
Having finished cleaning his teeth, he stares at himself in the mirror, undertaking the examination almost as if he were a hedge. Like the evergreen, his is a visage which has barely changed. Yes, the face is gradually ageing, but it is doing so imperceptibly; and on occasion, like the hedge, he too needs a trim, both of his hair (which he worries is beginning to thin) and his beard, which he returns to its sharply defined best every Sunday morning. He can do nothing about his hair of course — not in terms of how thick it is — but the beard is an entirely different matter. It had been cultivated as part of a somewhat lacklustre office initiative when most of the men decided to abstain from shaving for a month in order to raise money for the widow of a member of the finance department who had unexpectedly died. At the end of the month virtually all newly-grown beards were removed, the effect being that, on the Monday following, it was as if half the staff in the office had been replaced by newer and younger versions of those who had previously been working there. For some reason he had decided to keep his. He believed it endowed him with gravitas; others thought it made him look old before his time. In the two years since then he has nurtured it with care. Now it is as much a part of him as the hedge is part of his meagre garden or a blue tie part of his work uniform.
When he looks in the mirror he also does so knowing there will be no-one creeping into view behind him; just as there is no-one with whom to share breakfast, nor split the chores attendant on part-owning a small house with a small yard and an over-large hedge. Like most single men of a certain age, he has a limited range of excuses to apply to his domestic solitude, the most common of these being that he has yet to meet the right woman. Given current cultural norms, what was once called ‘playing the field’ is more or less frowned upon, and this, in consequence, applies pressure on individuals to ensure they make the ‘least worst’ choice of partner at the first attempt. This imperative also feeds into his explanation for his solitude. He has known people who have rushed into partnership and regretted it within weeks; indeed, he works with one or two of these unhappy souls. Increasingly rare is the kind of kinship witnessed between that departed finance colleague and the widow he left behind. Perhaps his keeping of the beard is a tribute to that. Most people seem satisfied to rub along reasonably well, yet he has always told himself that achieving nothing more than the emotionally average is hardly ambitious. Old fashioned it may be (indeed it may even be a manifestation of fear) but there is a part of him that chooses to remain faithful to the notion of love and kismet, and this — along with his instinctive caution and introspection — is perhaps the primary reason that, aged nearly forty, he remains conspicuously unattached.
Not that he is a naturally ambitious character; both academic and work records demonstrate as much. Marginally sub-par educationally, his choices when it came to post-college employment were somewhat limited, and he settled on the Ministry’s publishing function as the most palatable of the options presented to him. Over time he discovered that his eye for detail was valuable to them. Initially this involved checking texts for grammar and syntax, and that authors had not strayed too far from permissible language. If the book under scrutiny was non-fiction and a matter of historical record, then the truth needed to be adhered to. Like all Ministry departments, they used artificial intelligence for much of the grunt-work — even to the extent of having it write some of the less complex books — then discovered that computers, however clever, lacked nuance and human instinct, and that in order to produce the most engaging books people still needed to be involved. Adept at manipulating the AI interface, he had become one of the main controllers, a prestigious if not senior role, and an appointment which suited him perfectly well. In non-fiction he had been happy enough doing a good job and expanding his knowledge along the way.
Whether his employers had regarded it as some kind of reward he is unable to say, but for just under two years he has been assigned to fiction. The grammar-checking part was initially problematic given he was instinctively inclined to be far too rigid in his linguistic assessment. When some of the authors complained, he expected to be returned to work on non-fiction; yet they persevered with him, gave him more time, more training, and an opportunity to improve his reading. Gradually he found more appropriate ways to use the AI tools at his disposal, then he started to use them less, became attuned to an author’s style and voice more readily, and understood what — in terms of grammar — he could let go. Complaints fell away. After six months everyone seemed happy.
Everyone except him.
The reason for his discomfort was simple enough. Where he had been at home in the certain world of facts, of names and dates, with events of record, the fabricated stories in the texts he had been asked to process confused him. In the early days he read fiction as if it were fact, would consult the National Record to check on the veracity of incidents depicted. His was a move from a world where there was indisputably a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, to one where everything was false. Those early months had been dark, and even as he progressed in terms of technique and understanding, during the first year he was never entirely comfortable. Historical novels — those blending fiction within proven historical context — confused him most of all.
Yet it is not this confusion (admittedly occurring less frequently now) which is the source of his current disquiet; rather it is one of belief. In the old days he had been able to trust what he read and, trusting it, accept it as fact. It was a kind of learning by rote. But now, even though he understands that he should not believe everything he reads, he worries that in his editing he runs the risk of inadvertently turning fiction into fact. He tries to comfort himself with the knowledge that he will filter out anything malevolent or misleading prior to public consumption, adhere to the yardstick by which he and the rest of the population have been navigating successfully for at least forty years now. And it has been a success; anyone can see that. There have been no wars in all that time, no famine, no major disasters other than natural ones — and it is common knowledge that the incidence of those has been on the wane for some time. These are facts; he has worked on the books which prove as much. Yet occasionally he comes across things in draft novels — hidden deep within the text — which hint at a different kind of truth. It is never much more than a whisper: there is nothing to be pulled out of the text, no specific words to which he can point or edit away; the narratives are always coherent and believable and — most importantly — acceptable. He cannot recall any of the novels he worked on ever being recalled because he missed something problematic. Surely there is some reassurance to be garnered from that?
If you can’t wait for the rest of the serialisation, you can buy a discounted copy of the book.