“Me?”
Polly set down her cup. She had a line of foam on her upper lip, and her hair was suddenly burning red with the sun that had decided to come up, bloody and bright and beautiful. “Annie—I hope you don’t mind me saying this—you seem kind of the complete opposite of happy.”
Annie blinked. “I’ve been having a tough time recently. You saw my mum.”
“That can’t be it,” said Polly. “An attitude like that takes years of work.”
“Well, I live in a crappy flat full of plywood and mold, which I share with a Greek child who’d never washed a cup in his life before.”
“Costas? He’s adorable.”
“Maybe. But tripping over his dirty pants and chipping cheese off all my dishes—less so. Look.” Annie rooted around under herself on the sofa, bringing up a pistachio shell. “He leaves these all over the place. Drives me crazy. And I haven’t even got started on my job, which I hate, and I’m going to be late for if I don’t leave soon.”
“Okay. So you’re miserable. That’s why I want you to do this with me. What do you say? For the next one hundred days—if I make it that long—we’ll think of one happy thing every day, and write it down. We can backdate it to when we met, shave a few days off—Time’s winged chariot and all that. I want to prove that happiness is possible, even when things really suck.”
Annie thought of how to reply. “But...I’m not sure I believe that, Polly.”
“You could try, though. Why not?”
For a moment, Annie almost thought about telling her—explaining how much worse it got than a sick mother and an unwelcome flatmate and crappy flat—but she couldn’t. Polly was a virtual stranger. Instead, she said, “There’s plenty of reasons why not. I need to go to work now, or I’ll be late. Again.” She stood up, chucking down the remains of her frothy coffee (admittedly a big improvement on the bitter instant stuff she usually made). “Look, Polly, it’s nice of you to ask me to join your project—” (bloody interfering more like) “—but it’s honestly not my thing. I have a lot on my plate right now. Thanks for breakfast. I’m sure we’ll see each other around the hospital sometime.”
DAY 4
Make the most of your
lunch break
Much as Annie hated going to the hospital, she had to admit there was something strangely comforting about it. That hushed hum of activity, the sense the staff had things in hand, and you could just sit and wait and soon they’d come to take your blood pressure or scan you with their machines. All those notices about hand washing and crash carts—life in there was serious. There was no point getting upset about stupid things.
Unlike at Annie’s office.
“Annie—9:08. Just so you know, for your time sheet.”
Annie gritted her teeth so hard she was surprised she didn’t spit out bits of enamel. “Right. Thanks, Sharon.”
“Just make sure you note it down. That’s a quarter of an hour docked off, rounding up.” Sharon, a bitter woman who lived off chips and Appletiser, was the only person in Annie’s office who didn’t hate the new time sheets. Once, Annie had approved of the system, too. She’d even helped to bring it in, in her role as finance officer. Sure, she was sympathetic when people had sick children or late trains or broken boilers, but it was a workplace and they all had a job to do. Back then she’d worn smart trouser suits, or dresses with belts and cardigans, and she’d brought her lunch with her in Tupperware and she’d helped organize the Christmas do.
Until everything changed.
She sat down at her desk—dust and sandwich crumbs lodged in every crevice, no pictures, nothing nice. The plants she’d once tended had turned brown and dusty, and she’d thrown her wedding picture in the bin two years ago, shattering it. She switched on her computer, hearing it groan as it tried to come to life. She wondered if Polly still worked. She bet it had been somewhere with shiny clean iMacs, and plants that everyone watered, not just Sharon, who passive-aggressively let them die, then prodded their desiccated corpses like victims at a show trial. Where everyone wore dark-rimmed glasses and had creative brainstorming sessions over table football.
“Coming for the team lunch today, Annie?” asked Fee, the office manager, scratching at her eczema. “Only I need everyone’s choices in advance.”
Annie shook her head. She’d once made an effort to join in, but really she didn’t have anything in common with Sharon, or Tim, who blew his nose onto his sleeve, or Syed, who never took off his massive headphones, or—“Annie?”
“Hi, Jeff.” She pasted on a weak smile. He was her boss, after all.
“Can I have a word?” He mimed a mouth flapping, as if Annie didn’t understand English. Jeff didn’t seem to realize that he worked in the world’s saddest office, where enthusiasm was about as useful as opening a vein right onto the floor. His office was plastered in motivational posters and Post-its with slogans like Quitters Never Win, Winners Never Quit. His bookcase was crammed with business books. Get Rich or Die Trying. Rich Middle-Manager, Poor Middle-Manager. Although how you were supposed to get rich running local government waste-processing services, Annie didn’t know.
“Do take a seat in the Chat Area.” Jeff, who owned about thirty-eight suits from Top Man and was trying to grow a beard, was a big fan of the “Chat Area”—two spindly chairs and a table with fanned-out issues of the local government magazine, Inside Lewisham. “Annie. How are you?”
Shit, she thought. Awful. Dying inside. “Fine.”
“Because I’ve noticed you’ve been...not so present this week?”
“I took some days as leave.”
“Yes, yes, but—when you’re here, you don’t seem to engage with people?”
Why did he turn everything into a question? “What do you mean?”
“Well, people have mentioned that you don’t really chat in the kitchen, or go out for lunch, the old watercooler moments, you know, ha-ha!”
“That’s because I’m doing my job! And we don’t even have a watercooler since the budget cuts!”
“Well. You know what I mean.” He leaned forward earnestly. He was five years younger than Annie, she knew, yet he spoke to her like she was a stroppy teenager, which, admittedly, was how she felt right now. “Thing is, Annie, an office is more than just work. It’s a team. Friends, I hope. Like the crew of a ship.” He mimed something that she gathered was meant to convey pulling on rigging. “So what’s the harm in a bit of chitchat over a nice cuppa? And it might help if you smiled more. People find you a bit...unfriendly?”