ANOTHER DAY

He sits in an arid office in Maryhill. A big man, he needs constant circulated air from a fan to keep him cool. He has already upset two of the office staff, who complained to him because they felt a draught on their legs. He now hides the fan under his desk, so it blows on his shins, rather than his face, but at least the office staff have stopped complaining. He sits at a workstation of four, alongside three colleagues. They are all highly technical people, and he doesn’t always understand what they say. They tend not to speak to him. He just beavers away. He looks directly into the sun, when it shines, which gives him a headache as he peers vaguely at a computer screen. His is an open-plan office and the noise and cackle irritate him. His seat is unpleasant and hard, and the only comfortable position for him is semi-recumbent. That puts a strain on his spine, which by the end of the day feels like a safety-pin. He sits for hours on end, creating files, documents and tables. He is a modern-day Bob Cratchit, working with spreadsheets rather than a quill-pen.

He occasionally stops and walks stiffly to the mess area for coffee. Whenever he does that, he has to make a beverage for his three colleagues. One drinks decaffeinated coffee with milk, one weak black tea and one decaffeinated green tea. He often gets it wrong, and puts milk in one of the teas. His colleagues sulk when he does that. He drinks filtered coffee himself, which is often sitting on a hob stewing for hours. When it has been stewing, it tastes like WD40. He goes out at lunchtime, and eats a baked potato with cheese at the crumbling community hall. It is generally cold, damp and cheerless in there, and the filthy windows stream with condensation. Today, he offers the chef, who used to be a caulker at the shipyards, a twenty-pound note for his £2 meal. “I hope this doesn’t discomfit you, but it’s all I have,” he says to the chef, who replies: “It doesn’t discomfit me at all, mate, but it doesn’t half bugger up the float.” He lumbers around the streets of Maryhill after his lunch. The experience is grim. Piles of litter, dusty and decaying shops, roads so full of potholes he might just as well be in Omsk.

When his work is finished for the day, on foot, he drags a suitcase on wheels a mile and a half to an hotel that is cheap but not particularly cheerful, due in part to the fact that the walls are predominantly painted olive-green. When he gets to his room, invariably there is no shampoo or soap in the dispenser, the toilet seat is loose, several of the coat-hangers are broken, the bulbs in three of the lamps have failed, the batteries are flat in the remote-control unit for the TV. Worst of all, the bottom has fallen out of the second drawer in the vanitory unit, a contingency he doesn’t appreciate until he places three shirts in it and they all fall straight onto the floor, thus necessitating use of the iron, which he has to have sent up from reception, to make them wearable again. From then, until he lumbers into the office the next morning, he is quite alone. He is not lonely, per se, because he has several railway magazines from 1975 to read, and a DVD of ‘Outside Edge’ to watch. He typically buys a ‘meal deal’ from Tesco and eats the ensuing pasta salad with a teaspoon.

In the mornings, he goes down to breakfast in a suit and tie, and sits amongst 36 workmen wearing jeans, hi-visibility waistcoats, steel-toed boots and dirty jeans. They have come to Glasgow to instal water-coolers, pvc downcomers and solar panels. They stay there because it is cheap. One of the workmen often steals toast that he has made. The cooked breakfast, served cheerily from feebly heated tin trays by various Estonian, Slovakian and Slovenian girls hardly out of their teens, is never quite hot enough. He never complains, but he does refuse to eat beans, for beans with a cooked breakfast disgusts him. All of the workmen eat beans with their breakfasts.

He has been doing this for three days a week since July last year. Despite his privations and the fact that so few people seem to desire his company, he is not in the least nonplussed. Why? He finishes up at Maryhill on 30 March.