The Ascendant

Chapter Fifty-Four

The whole team was in the office, frantically preparing the departmental quarterly figures which Hobbs was required to present the following afternoon at the general meeting of the board of directors. It was all stations go! go! go! as Joost, Rob, Angela, Mike and myself all blitzed our keyboards into oblivion, sweating and swearing profusely as we raced against the clock while Hobbs screamed more instructions, rejecting unsatisfactory submissions and demanding the deadline was met!

Number crunching was still something I was not really used to; there was a skill in presenting the figures: the art of dressing up an ugly sister and parading her as Cinderella’s beautiful sibling. Such flannel was not an option on this occasion, as Hobbs had stipulated a requirement of uniformity. He was interested only in his department’s performance as a whole, and any infighting and rivalries should wait until another day. There was only one problem with this candidness ... my figures were shit.

Hobbs was, of course, aware of my particular problems but this would hardly lighten my load once they bore the scrutiny of the hard-bitten businessmen of the boardroom. Questions would be asked, liability demanded. With just two weeks to go before my probationary period elapsed, and with no obvious upward trend yet forming (‘one swallow does not make a summer afternoon with cats everywhere,’ Hobbs told me curtly after the first set of improved figures were published), I was the obvious scapegoat should one be required.

We would be here until the job was done; as it stood Mike was the favourite to finish his compilation first, though Angela and Joost were providing stern competition. Rob was still some way ahead of me, as I struggled on, trying to concentrate on too many things at once, my mind high on caffeine and panicked by shoddy statistics – they had steadily deteriorated since my inception eleven weeks ago – but still I plodded on, hammering home another coffin nail with the verification of each set of statistics.

Angela was the first to submit her completed report, shortly after seven, while Mike and Joost were done by eight. Hobbs’s mood began to brighten and Mike and Angela assisted me for a while, pepping me up and getting me organised while Joost did the same for Rob but by nine it was just Hobbs, Rob and me left.

‘Are you nearly done?’, asked Hobbs wearily.

‘More or less. I should be there in about fifteen, twenty minutes tops,’ replied Rob.

‘What about you Ben? How are you getting on over there?’

‘About the same, maybe half an hour or thereabouts,’ I lied.

‘OK, well I’m going to head off, there's not much more I can do here tonight. I want those reports available for me to look at for seven o’clock tomorrow morning, and I shall need you both in to run through them with me. Do either of you have a problem with that?’

‘No that’s fine with me,’ replied Rob, clearly relieved to be close to finishing such a mammoth and exhausting task.

‘I’ll be here for seven,’ I added, ‘no worries.’

Me and Rob kept beavering away.

Without looking away from his screen but with clear causticity, Rob remarked, 'we all know you're out of this race, son.'

I conserved my mental energy, barely affording him a glance.

'Still, something to tell the lads about back in the car showroom between bullshitting all those poor punters, eh?'

Was it really so obvious, even to that dopey, thick-skinned twatdick?

'Try again!' I replied with a confident smirk and that false warmth I'd learnt to perfect over recent weeks.

Rob gazed back looking almost impressed before becoming completely absorbed in his task. He even made himself a final round of coffee shortly before leaving me alone in the barely lit office, without a word (although I may have heard 'wanker' muttered from further along the corridor). The eeriness of the usually bustling environment spooked me but there were no evil spirits, corporate spies, or cleaners lurking in the shadows.

A few minutes past midnight I finished writing my death warrant. I saved the evidence and backed it up onto a floppy disk, slipping it into my briefcase, just as Angela, Mike and Joost had done before me. And just as Rob had not.

I pushed myself away from my desk, my chair wheeling freely back and looked over at Rob’s desk; it was cluttered and chaotic, as always. I walked tentatively over and sat in his chair, dropping down to Rob’s lower seated position. I put my hand down to hold the height adjustment lever but stopped myself before I actually pulled it up. Slowly, I leant forward and flicked the ON button to his computer, checking the options on the start bar to find the documents he had most recently used, my eyes finally resting on “Quarterly Stats”. I navigated my way through his system, highlighting the file name in his documents folder and hitting DELETE, then repeated the exercise through the electronic recycle bin, hesitating only briefly before I removed the file permanently from Rob’s records.