Macdonald The Threat Level Remains Severe

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-456-9
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

House of Commons secretary Grace has been counting the tea breaks in the same dull job for a decade and feels she could do something better... if only she knew what.New recruit Brett is on a mission to shake up the dusty backrooms of power - and on a collision path with Grace. When Grace receives an email from an admirer, office life begins to look up... but amid the gothic gloom of Westminster, she begins to wonder who soulful, enigmatic Reuben Swift really is.

Rowena Macdonald was born on the Isle of Wight, grew up in the West Midlands and now lives in East London. Her debut collection, Smoked Meat, was short-listed for the 2012 Edge Hill Prize. Her short stories have won various prizes and been published by Galley Beggar Press, Influx Press, Ambit, Unthank Books and Serpent's Tail, among others.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macdonald, Rowena

Leseproben

5

Schmoozing Members. God, the new guy really was a dick. He clearly had an inflated idea of what his job would involve. And why couldn’t he sort out his own business cards? She wasn’t his personal secretary. Grace flicked back and forth between Outlook and the stationery request form. It was so tedious of Brett to make her do something so trivial while she had this weird, exciting email conversation going on.

—im reuben swift

—Yes, but who are you exactly and where did you get my email address?

—why are you so suspicious?

—Why do you think? You can’t send random emails out of the blue and then not explain yourself.

—it wasnt random. i think you have amazing beauty, very unusual beauty and i just wanted to tell you that. i reckon youre the kind of girl that doesnt think of yourself this way. dont be cross with me

—How do you know what I look like?

—ive seen you around

Amazing beauty? Though this was obviously just shameless flattery, a warmth unfurled inside Grace and she had to concentrate hard on not grinning at the computer, which would have given rise to demands from Rosemary to share the joke. She also fought the urge to get her pocket mirror out and examine her face for signs of unusual beauty.

—Where’ve you seen me?

—around

—Yeah, but where?

—just around

—All right, what do I look like?

—youve got long auburn hair, blue eyes and pale skin. you look like a bronte heroine.

—‘bronte’?

—like ann bronte jane bronte whatever their names were.

—Oh, you mean the Bronte sisters: Anne, Emily and Charlotte. There wasn’t a Jane Bronte. Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre.

—yeah yeah thats who i mean. theyre always on at christmas. middlemarch or whatever.

—That’s George Eliot.

—oh well, whatever. i can imagine you on a moor with your hair flying about in the wind. the kate bush type.

—Kate Bush wasn’t a Bronte heroine.

—yeah but she sang about one.

—I suppose so. Actually it should be Brontë. With an umlaut. But that is a bit of a hassle, I must admit.

—youre clever arent you? knowing how to spell bronte and who wrote middlemarch.

—If you say so. But I think these things are fairly common knowledge.

—not to a bit of rough like me.

—Are you a bit of rough?

—would you like me to be?

—Er. I don’t know. Maybe.

—is that what you like?

A couple more messages and Grace knew they would plunge into pure filth. Amazing how easily you could start talking dirty with a stranger. The freeing anonymity of the Internet was extraordinary. Time to back-pedal. She was at work. In the office. She was supposed to be doing Brett’s bloody business cards. If Rosemary knew what she was up to she would be disgusted. Brett would probably think she was a bit sad. And, in any case, if she and this Reuben Swift did end up meeting in the flesh, it would be embarrassing to have kicked off on this note. He might not be someone she’d want to talk dirty with. Despite this, her crotch was flooded with heat.

—I’m not telling you what I like at this particular juncture.

—ha! fair enough. juncture. i like that. youre good with words arent you?

—I don’t know. I’m OK with them, I guess.

—although its not an umlaut

—what?

—in bronte. i looked it up. its a diaeresis: a mark (¨) placed over a vowel to indicate that it is sounded separately, as in naïve, Brontë

—Oh well I’m not that good at words then. I’ve never heard of a diar—whatever it is …

—even a bit of rough like me can teach you something eh?

—I guess so.

—can i just tell you something else?

—I’m not sure.

Grace braced herself for a sweaty revelation unconnected with obscure linguistic facts.

—youve got a very pretty name. both bits. your surname reminds me of rice pudding and heaven.

—Rice pudding?

—ambrosia creamed rice. you know: rice pudding in a tin.

—Oh right. Ha ha. You’ve got a nice name too.

—thanks

Reuben Swift was a wonderful name. Grace set great store by names and spent more time than most thinking about them. For as long as she could remember she had kept a running list of names for future babies. Reuben was, in fact, one of her current favourites, along with Silas, Freya and Roisin. She knew her own name was romantic and appealing and, for reasons of aesthetics more than feminism, she would never take on a husband’s surname, unless it was even prettier than her own. For Grace, names held the characteristics of their owners. Rosemary was dependable and robust – like the herb – the delicacy of the two names within the one was cancelled out by their being conjoined. The first syllable of Hugo sounded like a noise you might make when yawning, while the second syllable made the name both pompous and clownish. She considered Brett. He was now wearing a pair of headphones and tapping languidly at his keyboard as if cruising along a freeway. Brett was a modern, sharp name with very little poetry: going by first impressions she suspected it suited him. He certainly beamed a lot too. In a rather false way.

But Reuben Swift. Reuben was old-fashioned, biblical probably, with an exotic Jewish/gypsy vibe, which made it also sound modern and slightly American. Swift implied graceful speed and flight. The Jonathan Swift connection added gravitas. It was a decisive, handsome, masculine name.

—Anyway, tell me properly, how do you know what I look like? I’ve never heard of you. You can’t have seen me around. This is really weird.

He didn’t reply. Until now he had replied within a minute of her replying to him. His first email had been sent at 01.45. Reuben Swift was a night owl.

Out of the corner of her eye, she suddenly noticed the voicemail light blinking on her phone. She picked it up and dialled. Eleven new messages. Eleven. Bloody hell. She’d never had eleven messages before. She hoped she hadn’t done something wrong, that it wasn’t a load of people ringing up and complaining about something. With a faint buzz of panic rising in her chest, she braced herself. But each message was blank. All she could hear was the click of a phone being put down eleven times. Puzzled but relieved, she continued filling in the stationery request form for Brett’s business cards, saved it, then sent it as an attachment to the print unit. When she’d finished Reuben still hadn’t replied. She supposed she’d have to get on with work in a normal way. If Brett hadn’t been there she might have told Rosemary about her mystery admirer. Although Rosemary wouldn’t understand the excitement of an unknown man emailing out of the blue. She’d put a dampener on the thing. Best not to tell anyone. Work was more bearable with a little secret fizzing away beneath the humdrum.

This was the thing with the Internet. Back in the day – though not any day Grace could remember because she had started her first job after the advent of the Internet – people probably talked to their colleagues more. Now, your colleagues could be emailing their illicit lover, in a neo-Nazi chat room, playing online poker or, if firewalls permitted, buying sex toys, and you would never know unless you tiptoed up behind them and peered over their shoulder. While they went through the blameless motions of work, they could be simultaneously living a far more intriguing virtual existence.

She Googled Reuben Swift. Up popped pictures of a middle-aged black man in Washington, DC, a young white man of unspecified location but with American teeth, a man rugby-tackling another man and a blurry sepia gent in a bow tie with the pale, staring eyes of all Victorians in photos. On Facebook the only Reuben Swift was a portly, cowboy-hatted man holding up a large fish. He lived in Idaho. There were no Reuben Swifts on Twitter. On 192.com there were three. One was 31 – 35: an ideal age for her, although his location in Derbyshire was not. Also he lived with four other people, all surnamed Swift, which suggested he was married with kids.

She caught herself. She was being silly. Reuben Swift could be anyone. He could be a woman. He could be a complete weirdo. Or someone playing a prank. For a moment she wondered if he was someone in the IT Department, tasked by management to find out whether she was a good employee or not.

—ive written a poem for you:

    eyes like blue skies

    hair a dying sunset

    skin like the moon

    your face is the promise

    of a wide open space

...