The Secretaries

I

Janie and her friends were punk. They dressed in leather combat uniforms and ate vegan meals in squats in Birmingham. Janie had infinite arguments for and against the charade known as rebel life, and she kept to stringent punk requirements requiring consistent bamboozles and debate - however, her disastrous secret life behind a desk was a daily nightmare for the ethical punk ministers, her friends Dave and Joey. The only indication of establishment principles were two M.C. Escher postcards fixed with their Royal Academy printed backs against the rusted blue fridge-door. Janie was in no way a political friend of Joey, instead a friend to his personage; although the quality of their friendship was so remotely wonderful that it might even have been neo-platonic love. Joey, the ex-soldier, had been through wars in Eastern Europe, he'd served with UN forces in Cuba, he was an expert marksman and a self-styled "paraschitzotic-paranoiac-trooper" - or in Janie's stylistic exchange, a 'puppet'.

Joey quit it all for the squat, the punks and the homemade garlic pesto after a long letter from Dave about fidelity, politics and life between monotonic London schisms. Janie knew of Dave's influencing Joey, but never knew about his anamorphic literary trickery techniques; Dave needed another punk for his band, and Joey's war stories were too tempting for him to resist sadistizing the letter's introductory paragraphs. The period between the letter and the returning hero's entrance resonated in Janie's memory as a time of intense conversational paranoia; outbursts of anti-political ranting and socio-emotional tribulation ruined the young punk secretaries imagination. Her ears used to melt after Dave's sessions on tuba, she went to doctors, therapists and all kinds of psycho-analytic response teams, yet never even once suspected Dave of anamorphic paranoiac experimentation.

Janie went off again and again to her secretarial job, became schizoid, dreamt of prisms and commercially manufactured sandwiches and returned to guitars, fridge defects and homemade garlic pesto. There in the squat's underbelly behind the pesto inside the fridge door were Janie's escapist medicaments - green and brown coloured NHS sponsored anti-depressant capsules; a concoction once lined up and sniffed by a fraught and drunken Joey, however now safe from theft classified with a pre-biopic moan as "long-term drugs". The drugs meant Janie's socio-emotional ups were up, her downs no longer so far. The downs came after routine combinations in the mechanism of her life combined with "psyco-holic political theorization" the councillor said, the drugs were taken to up the downs as it were.

Secretarial responsibility reached as far as Janie's central nervous system - she felt sure that eminent work cured all known viral infections, flu symptoms, diahorea and even toothache. Cocaine however was not a viral infection, although certainly a cause of severe dihorea, it's flu-type symptoms were recognizable, and it's uses as a toothache repellent were noted, yet it remained however classified as a remedy, and not as an illness, however noxious it was. The rocks were friends to the secretaries - all of them crushed, typed, lined and filed official papers, a routine as such that was never discontinued. An emphatic ex-lover of Janie brought the girls "Caine's fluffy mixture" twice weekly, 'Ron' was a code name. Converse was minimal, the secretarial girls worked like a fluid solution - never wary, annoying or mercurial - they noted dates that correlated like the frothy meniscus in glass of goat's milk, bubble wrap was specially ordered and boxes were so neatly arranged that the post-mortal elder Pablo Picasso would have been astounded, at least the office manager was quite sure of that massive yet un-noticable facet of the organs office. The quips levelled at Zak the manager were ignored like the flies nearly swatted by buffalo or gnu tails - "Zak the ranting runt", or "Zak the pornophile", or "Zak's user-friendly pen selection".

""User-friendly?" that sounds bad. That sounds like abuse of situation in order to achieve satiation of desire" - Janie knew these invitations weren't friendly offerings, secondly they were inert, all in all some inverted insultation. Inordination ranked highly in the secretaries' office, many were accustomed to bouts of tea-drinking or frenzies of doodlography. Janie's desk smelt of celeriac, copies taunted her free desk space and paper glue leaked onto the beige framed computer screen, she never moved the many doodles away. Photo-cuttings littered onto an office floor involved in a daily session of telephone wire mingling, and were left unnoticed until the preliminary tea time. Janie's hours ranged from forever to weekend lunchtimes, her relevant workaholism closer to a 'tea-holism' - Ayurvedic mixtures and Earl Gray were blended with sugar, full fat milk and large lung-fulls of tobacco smoke inhaled among the wistful secretaries.

II

"Those rules are outdated", Janie's voice leant across the room finding the secondary secretary adjacent to the copied laminate poster of office rules. Twelve simple phrases rendered in an excessively commanding typeface wove a tricky way past an historic deadline. The 13th of April spelt trouble for those secretaries who missed the organizational marking system, however none did, all were apt and up to date with all files and organ softwares. Organs were the nature of the business, they were kept hidden in cases behind lockers inside massive black portfolio suitcases. The organs were dusted regularly, and shipped to Brazil once a fortnight. Carnival administration teams met a small company aero-plane in a Rio de Janeiro suburb known to locals as 'el Barrio de los Arbos', a famous suburb riddled with coffee drinking, football teams and platform construction warehouses.

Glowing lanterns adorned an old Christmas decorative display in the corner of the office behind a batch of newer ophicleide sample bank boxes. Rhythmic flashes and glow programming made smokey laser patterns in the surrounding humid office atmosphere. Organic milk cartons spilt condensation into the melding gaseous fumes - although the nicotine and crack-cocaine smoke were the primary intoxicators of passing house-flies and their relevant spiders. The secretaries were hyper; however, it was so that they were not too hyper, for the manager Zak never took kindly to too much of any sort of thing - hyperactivity, regularity, cocaine consumption, incoming mail or excessive binge drinking were all one in the same as far as Zak concerned. Saporific lemsip and chocolate chip muffins were left in the cupboard for his irregular consumption, sometimes the chocolate chips became melted but no one bothered, especially not the reclusive, irregular manager.

Between the Christmas display and the door was a large French style window door contraption that lead to a small dirty and dusty balcony. Plant pots contained vine type things that wrought their way round iron railings with corroded tips. On the 4th floor of the converted Georgian house the reddened ripples of grey storm cloud weren't too distant, they loomed at the window encasing the room in a shroud of dark light. Janie opened the doors in order to relieve the room of smoke. Unaware of a nestled pigeon's roost, she sat on a ledge and began to doodle into an instant text message. Her thumbs and fingers twiddled as thunder clapped and a wisp of breeze pierced the humid atosphere. The mangy pigeon became evident as it squirmed it's way out the the hole in the wall and began flitting around within the railings on the balcony. Janie was struck by it's wings and she covered her face with bare arms leaping back into the office to the great alert of her fellows. No longer was Zak the butt of their secretarial jokes, now it was Janie's new 'boyfriend' who had red feet, flew past the window of Hilda last night and cooed into the ears of every secretary in the office. They amassed in a gaggle to the left of Janie, they pointed and laughed together, their banter mingled and their energy compressed - rays of the stormy firmament shone onto their glistening washed hair. It was common for each of the secretaries to tie long hair up into beautiful arrangements, save the shaven-headed punk secretary.

Janie sat her shaken body into the swivel-chair behind her laden desk; she held back tears of shock and noticed a schizophrenic altercation take effect behind her eyes. She wiped snot from her upper lip and took a stinging line of cocaine through a bleeding right nostril, it's effect was not taken instantly, instead slowly like a trip through psychedelic effects - first her mind became, her gums and nose numbed, then her face swelled and bloated, dry red lips cracking. The drug lead Janie back into a bout of file organization, her befuddled mind adhered to the many sheets of data, labels and boxes. The end of the day approached according to the large office clock, so she clicked an alarm into her mobile telephone and continued with the organizational efforts. After work she traipsed past two empty bus stops to her usual waiting point, then the rains came. Big and noisy and voluptuous rains came pouring down onto the slower cars and other street-life. A dog-walking pedestrian hurried past Janie, threw his dog into a parked car and proceeded to wait, Janie fastened within the gleaming bright lights emanated from the head-lamps. The bus never came for Janie, she was stabbed to death by the dog-walking pedestrian, he came lunging forward, asked for paid sex then virulently attacked her throat with a Stanley blade. She was left dead on the floor, the dog-walking pedestrian drove away. Another pedestrian found her limp body and called for futile aid, which came promptly it must be said, but to no avail.