Greyflake

Frank is falling. Spinning in darkness. Out of control. Where is he? Then it all comes back: the terrible plucking and snapping in his chest … walking out holding a box with a few of his things, dreading what he would tell Isobel. Then falling and darkness once again. 

A light comes on. He is facing a man across a desk. It is Roger Yeo, the director of HR at Security Systems International, an outlandishly tall man, white-haired and scarlet nosed. The ‘Cliff of Pinstripe’ they called him, but everyone knew that underpinning the pinstripe was the hardest of rock. 

Yeo is saying something: ‘Fine record … but sometimes it’s time for a change … maybe no longer the same commitment … need to make room for up-and-coming talent … start your pension right away … With your redundancy money you’ll be in clover.

‘Look on the bright side, Frank,’ he goes on. ‘It’s a chance to make a fresh start. As one door closes, another will open. And our outplacement staff is completely at your service. With your experience companies will be beating a path to your door, consultancies will flood in. You could start a new portfolio life. Or just take some time out to live for yourself for once. You’re not short of interests are you, Frank? Now’s the time to indulge them. Think golf, think gardening, think travelling – think cruises, think the opportunity really to see the world not just through the window panes of a convention hotel.’

Underneath the soothing words the hard reef of the message: just don’t make a scene, take what’s on offer and go vanish, disappear, leave not a wrack of regret or guilt behind. 

Frank opens his mouth to protest but Holmes holds up his hand. 

‘No, don’t say it, Hinchcliffe, you know the score. You’re a veteran. You’ve done it to others. Now it’s your turn. Comes to us all in time. So take it on the chin. Now, practicalities: don’t go back to your desk. We’ve already shut down your computer. No offence, Frank, but it’s normal protocol. Someone will collect your things and bring them down to Reception. So get yourself down there, take a seat and help yourself to a coffee from the machine. He won’t be long.’

So that was it: fired, ‘terminated’, ‘let go’: a guillotine blade suddenly slicing down and cutting him off from thirty years with the company. Then darkness closes in again.

Frank is lying in a bright white room under a crisp white sheet. He feels like an insect flat on its back and unable to move. And, insect-like, his body has sprouted all manner of strange new limbs and projections: tubes, monitors, drips. A man is leaning over him, smiling: a doctor, also saying something. It takes Frank some time to understand him. ‘You’re a lucky guy, Frank. You’ve had a massive heart attack. But you’ve come through it. We’ve cleaned out most of the gunk and put in a couple of stents but you’ll need a bypass in due course. By the way your wife’s outside. Do you want her to come in?’

Frank shook his head wearily.

‘OK, no sweat, Frank. Stress is the last thing we want right now. So just relax and rest for now.’ He grinned. ‘You know, Frank, technically speaking you actually died for half a minute or so. Maybe you had one of those experiences? Some people think they’ve floated up to the ceiling and are looking down on themselves or are speeding towards a bright light. Anything like that, Frank? No, nothing? Well, forgive me for asking, I’m just curious: In that case I’ll leave you for now.’

Frank’s bypass went as planned, and the doctors released him into the world with a whole chemist’s shop of pills, including thinners like Warfarin (a suitable poison for an old grey rat, thought Frank), along with graduated diet and exercise programmes. But Frank binned them. The life he expected to speed on forever had spun off the motorway into a void. What was the point? He was going nowhere. Frank felt furious. It was all so unfair. He’d made all the right moves hadn’t he? So why and how had this happened? There must be something wrong deep-down, something malign and systemic targeting him.

Frank was a child of the sixties but had never, unlike his parents, a flower child.  His mother, Maggie, a plump easy-going woman who favoured peasant blouses and long skirts, taught in a primary school, while his father, a tall man topped with long lank blonde hair, scraped along with odd jobs, taking advantage of his wife’s salary to laze round the house most of the time in a haze of dope. He too was called Frank (so father and son were known as Big and Little Frank respectively). Would-be artists, Mum and Dad daubed the interior of their North London maisonette in retina-stripping shades of acid green, lurid purple and sunburst yellow, filling it with hand-made furniture, the sweet-sharp smell of dope and the endless drone of prog rock. For them it was forever the sixties, and the seventies well into the millennium and beyond.

No doubt Frank loved his parents as a child but growing up he felt more and more alienated from them. He came to detest the routine Woodstock-ery of his home: the regulation posters of Che Guevera and a Medusa-haired Bob Dylan; the dog-eared copy of the I Ching; the battered supermarket carton crammed with LPs of Captain Beefheart, King Crimson, the Grateful Dead, the Doors and the Incredible String Band. One afternoon in particular he always remembered. He had come home early from school. Big Frank and all his mates were sat in a circle in the sitting room, stoned with spliffs dangling from their lips, nodding, communing or ‘grocking’ as they called it, murmuring the odd ‘Right on’ or ‘Yeah man’. Frank loathed the vagueness and vapidity of the whole scene, its sheer lack of traction with reality and, beneath that sustaining it, the dull note of persistently indulged me-ness.

He couldn’t break away quick enough. The future for him would be work, focus and achievement. One of the last children to clamber up the ladder of the soon to be abolished grammar schools, he did well enough there to on to study electronic engineering at university, buoyed by the then still freely available state grants. It was at university that Frank met Isobel and was immediately smitten. After they graduated they married her and in short order fathered two children, Jamie and Rachel. 

Meanwhile his career had taken off like a rocket. Frank soared through position and position. Then, in his early thirties he joined Security Systems International, SSI, a defence firm that made everything from drones to control batons and there he stuck, secure forever he thought, working first as an engineer, then moving across into sales. There he developed smooth new skills, pressing the palms of potentates and flunkeys. A corporate face fixed itself on his features. Despite that, something of the younger Frank, something soft and almost childlike, still showed through.  

Once Frank had been something of an athlete, a compact, handsome mesomorph blessed with thick fair hair. But the years had not been good to him. Now Frank looked his age – and more. Unlike Isobel who had kept hold of her good looks, staying in shape with yoga and dance classes – something Frank perversely resented. His body had softened and sagged, and his hair turned grey and thin. What with the banquets and toasts, the five star hotels and the deep first class seats, Frank had slowed and silted, his veins and arteries clogging with thick yellow fur. Now, suddenly, it was payback time. 

Listless and restless, Frank sits all day in his armchair watching the TV soaps, letting them wash over him, an unopened newspaper on the floor next to him. He is constantly conscious of – and again perversely resents – the efforts his wife Isobel is making to be ‘good’ about having him under her feet all day long, not to mention their reduced financial circumstances. He feels deeply disgruntled – with himself, with the way he has been treated and with the world in general and all its younger heirs.

The heat of the fire in the lounge is oppressive. Frank dozes off and dreams. In his dream a man is running towards him, shouting and shaking his fist. It is someone Frank doesn’t want to meet, a man who is in a rage – a man like him. Everything is wrong, the man is yelling. Life’s become just a great ball of wax, of hard and soft all stuck together – the hard being the terrorists and the knife-wielding hoodies, and the soft the millennials, the ‘snowflakes’, the me-too-ers, the feminists, the transes and the wokes. Everyone screaming about their rights and what’s owed them, never what they owe, sponging and scrounging and sticking flags on top of their claims. Someone needs to get a grip! The man is now standing nose to nose with Frank, bellowing into his face. Frank can smell the reek of his breath and feel his spittle on his cheeks. 

Frank wakes, feeling strangely rested and refreshed. The room looks different too:  sharp-edged and faintly luminescent. The smallest sounds – the crackling fire, the brushing of his slippers on the carpet – all resonate roundly and richly. Trippy’ his old hippy parents might have called it. Frank had not felt so nice since he was a child. And enormously curious about everything. Nothing matters at all but at the same time everything matters intensely. Time for a fresh start. Time to escape and get away. Time to break free of that man and never, ever, look back.

The very next day Frank offers himself as a volunteer at GreenTech, a non-profit set up originally to develop sustainable technologies such as wind-up radios and computers for the use of isolated communities in developing countries. Since then it had branched out into other areas: anti-globalisation protests, reducing plastic waste and fighting motorway developments. It even included a nascent arts lab. Occupying a large disused warehouse on the edge of town, the organisation now had a staff of well over a hundred, more than half volunteers. Frank’s job was in the despatch department, packing up and labelling consignments to be despatched to destinations throughout the developing world.

Walking through the parking lot to GreenTech’s doors Frank felt bleakly that he would be entering a world of pale do-goodery: earnest faces, dull eyes, drab clothes, flat voices. Not a bit of it. The world of GreenTech was lively, boisterous even, Frank discovered. As he was led to the packing department, he was struck by the bursts of banter shooting between the desks of his check-shirted and work-booted young colleagues even as they stared into their screens and phones and swam the spreading ponds of social media. The walls were painted in bright cheerful colours, he noted, not the lurid psychedelic riot of his parents’ house but softer hues of pink, lilac, lemon and lavender. A constant hum of ambient chill music in the background, broken every so often by a heavier thumping beat at which the staff would leap up and join in riotous mass dancing.  

Everywhere, work and play seemed to Frank to be softly, gently interfused. At a whim the staff would leave off working to play pinball, bounce on trampolines, bat balls around in a volleyball court or slide, whooping, down a helter-skelter in the corner of the main work area. A giant transparent globe of the world trundled up and down the corridors propelled by an occupant inside – whether accolade or forfeit Frank could not tell. And, although GreenTech grappled with grim global problems, no distressing posters of starving children or war-torn cities covered the walls. It was GreenTech policy, Frank learned,  to promote instead more positive ones of the developing world. Positivity was the keynote – that along with gentleness. Behind the main work areas were small dimly lit alcoves, full of soft furniture, toys and colouring books where staff could flee if distressed. Staff were encouraged to bond with one another to discuss ‘issues’. If someone were particularly stressed colleagues would ‘love-bomb’ them, huddling bee-like around them and cuddling and coaxing them back into tranquillity. 

Used as he was to the hard, clear channels of command and control at SSI, Frank was taken aback by GreenTech’s organisational looseness. True, there was a ‘manager’ at the top: Eileen Trowbridge, a capable woman in her forties but for the most part decisions seemed to emerge spontaneously and suffuse the organisation by a gradual process of osmosis. 

As his first weeks at GreenTech passed by Frank found himself sometimes wondering whether GreenTech’s work was no more than a front for virtue signalling and, coupled with that, the expression and indulgence of the ego. He hastily repressed the thought. After all these kids didn’t just sit around talking, they actually did something about the planet. Work got done, machines got built and sent off round the world. Frank found himself wanting to be like them. They were sweet and soft and fun cool but they were the future, Frank decided. The snowflakes would inherit the Earth.

But how in turn did they see him? Frank had made it clear from the moment he joined GreenTech that he would help in any way no matter how. It was to be his season for sackcloth and ashes, and Frank had made a public mea culpa to his new colleagues on his first day at GreenTech, openly confessing his sins at SSI. They had listened with horrified fascination. This was a man who had supped with the Devil and then walked away. As such they embraced him as a late penitent and a convert. All the same Frank obscurely felt he was constantly observed and on parole – that at all times and in all ways he had to proclaim his new credentials, his opposition to sexism, racism and global capitalism, his love of the environment and of the green grassroots, the tiny shoots at the bottom and edges of society. 

Frank was disappointed, however, that his openness was not entirely reciprocated. He detected from certain signals – frowns, tight lips and monosyllabic replies – that at GreenTech direct personal questions about members’ lives and pasts were not appreciated. One group of colleagues, though, seemed more relaxed and open. Its members included Liz, a small outspoken girl with long black wavy hair that flowed down her back, Gordon, a tall strong-built Scot, Axel, a blonde-haired Dutch boy and Milly, a girl with pale coffee skin and a smoothly shaven scalp. They all took their brown bag lunches together in the area of GreenTech set aside for meals, and they invited Frank to join them. Delighted, Frank jumped at the chance, and as lunchtimes went by felt he had been accepted as a regular member of their group. 

In a roundabout way he picked up details about their lives. They shared a squat, he learned, in a run-down old house near GreenTech. He also gathered there was some kind of emotional connection bound them together. Intrigued, Frank did not dare to probe further. So he was both surprised and pleased when Liz, perhaps sensing his interest, went into detail about their ménage.

‘We share everything – possessions and food. More than that we also share ourselves and our bodies. Polyamory” it’s called. You may have heard of it. Seeing Frank’s surprised expression, she added, ‘There’s a lot of it about, more and more of it in fact, especially here at GreenTech. Sexually, none of us belongs exclusively to any other. Sometimes I sleep with Axel, sometimes with Gordon, even with Milly – sometimes, if the vibe runs that way, all of us together.’ 

‘But isn’t there friction? Aren’t there quarrels, jealousies?’

‘No, why should there be? Frank, we’re free agents. We respect one another’s choices. We don’t own one another. People aren’t possessions to us like cars or fridges. We don’t objectify or commoditise one another in the old selfish conventional way of doing things. That’s what we’re trying to escape from that we’re trying to escape from.’

Frank was still puzzled. ‘But how exactly does it work?’ he asked. I mean, how do you work out who will sleep with who on any given night?’

‘Oh, things sort themselves out. We’re sensitive to the signals.’

Polyamory? Frank thought about it. It reminded him of his parents and their sixties dreams of communal living but it was different – les stridently self-conscious. But what a contrast with himself and Isobel, the straightly monogamous couple, and with their sex life, perfunctory and intermittent at best and, since his heart attack, non-existent! As he thought about it, images of Liz and Milly’s bodies popped into his brain, and for the first time since his attack his dick stiffened. Polyamory – could he and Isobel ever have handled it? Could he handle it now? Maybe. He was smart, a man of experienced, not too bad looking – possibly even distinguished in their eyes: a silver fox in short. Above all he had become a new man. Maybe it was a test, a threshold that he had to cross as proof of his transformation. And there were always those little blue pills now freely available over the chemist’s counter …

But how would Isobel feel about it? Doubtless appalled and disgusted. He’d do better to keep his thoughts to himself. But the notion of polyamory would not leave him alone. One morning he surprised himself by obliquely broaching the topic with Isobel over the breakfast table.

‘Isobel, we’ve always been open with one another, haven’t we?’ (Though, he reflected that was not quite true.)

Isobel shot a suspicious look at him. ‘Ye…es. So?’

‘I know we’ve had our difficulties but our marriage has always been – is – solid, wouldn’t you agree, but I’ve been thinking maybe there might be ways to make it even more solid.’

‘More solid in what way? What are you getting at?’

‘Well, by being more open and sharing.’ Frank was terrified but pressed on. ‘By being more open with one another and with others as well. Sharing. But not in any way threatening the central bond between us.’

‘Sleeping around – is that what you mean?’ Isobel snapped. ‘Start acting promiscuously at our age? And with whom, pray? Is there someone you’ve met? Some woman down at that GreenTech place?’

‘No, no, of course not. I don’t mean promiscuous. I just mean being less possessive. “Polyamory” it’s called. Not objectifying and commoditising others,’ he added lamely.

‘”Poly what”? “Objectifying”? “Commoditising”? Where on earth are you getting these words from? Is it from that bunch of young flakes you have lunch with? Well, it might be alright for them but not you! You need to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror, old man. Act your age. You’re an antique – and a cracked one at that!’

Frank quailed and fell silent. Isobel glared furiously for several seconds tight-lipped, then turned on her heel and marched out of the dining room, slamming the door behind her.

Frank sighed. Well, there was nothing for it. He’d have to apologise, say he was just rambling and rabbiting on, still confused after his operation? But no, he decided. That was old soft-soaping salesman Frank, not new reborn Frank. There could be no going back. He got up from the breakfast table, dressed and drove down to GreenTech.

At lunch he joined his four friends.

‘Liz, you were talking the other day about polyamory,’ he began jauntily. ‘About sharing and not objectifying and commoditising.’

‘Mmm, yes.’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking and I think you’re right. It’s the way to be. The way we all should be.. Me too. I need to open up more.’

‘That’s good to hear.’

 ‘I mean I should experiment more myself’

Liz looked surprised. ‘Experiment more – how do you mean? You mean sexually? Sorry, I don’t mean to sound ageist but you’re no spring chicken, Frank. And what exactly do you have in mind?’

Frank looked slowly round the group and grinned broadly.

Silence descended, a silence descended and went on and on. Eventually Frank could stand it no longer. He got up and walked away, writhing with embarrassment. Suddenly he saw himself in their eyes: a relict, an embarrassing artefact left over from the previous century, wrinkled and deluded, a dirty old man who’d wormed his way into GreenTech simply to get his dirty paws on firm young flesh. He could never face them again. He’d have to leave GreenTech, leave his shame behind him and, he hoped, soon forgotten. Perhaps something be salvaged from the wreckage? Perhaps straighten things out with Isobel, apologise, explain, grovel – do anything to bring her round.

No-one was home in when he got back. Frank shouted up the stairs but there was no reply. Puzzled, he went to their bedroom. Isobel’s wardrobe was bare apart from a handful of wire coat hangers. Then he noticed something white on top of the duvet, a note. Trembling, he picked it up. It read:

Frank, I’m leaving you. It’s not been an easy decision to make but I’m convinced it’s the right one. As you said, we’ve had our difficulties in the past, what with that horrible job of yours and your being away all the time. But I always thought, for all of that, that I knew you. Now I feel I just don’t anymore. You’ve turned into something unpredictable and irresponsible. And that dreadful conversation this morning – I felt so confused and disrespected! Well I’m going and for good.  I’ll be staying with Madelaine at first. We can sort out the details later – separation to begin with, probably divorce in due course. I’ve spoken to Jamie and Rachel and they both agree I’m doing the right thing. You probably think I’m rotten leaving you like this after your heart attack and everything but I don’t feel I have any other choice. Believe me, Frank, a clean break is for the best. I’ll be much happier from now on, and I can only hope you also find what you are looking for, whatever that might be.

Frank sank down on the bed, and everything went dark. As he came to he became aware of a buzzing vibration in his pocket: his mobile. Dully he pulled it out and flicked it open. Hope flooded through him. Maybe Isobel had changed her mind and was coming back. 

Frank,’ said a voice, ‘Frank, are you there?’

‘Yes. Who is it?’

‘Roger Yeo, Frank, from SSI.’

‘Frank, are you still there?’ asked Yeo. ‘Can you hear me?’

Frank sat up. ‘Yes, I can. What is it? It’s not a good time, Roger.’

‘Well, the thing of it is this, Frank. We’d like to make you an offer. Something’s come up and we need your help. It’s a new project. I won’t go into the details now over the phone but it’s something new we’re working on, an anti-missile system. The target markets will be those you already know so well. Look, Frank, I won’t beat about the bush. We need someone with your knowledge and experience and, if I may say, your wisdom. We miss you, Frank. We should never have let you go like we did. It was a cock-up on our part but we’re more than ready to put it right. You’d be very generously remunerated – on a consultancy basis at first but in all probability with a permanent position in prospect. You’d be free to write your own job description, I promise you that. Well, Frank, that’s the long and the short of it. We need you. We want you back. So what do you say?’

Frank heaved himself up. ‘Listen Yeo, I can tell you straight off the bat the answer’s “no”. You didn’t bother to think ahead, did you, when you put me out to grass. But that’s no surprise. Your vision is limited by the rim of your next pink gin. You treated me like a piece of shit. But that isn’t why I’m turning you down. I’ve moved on. I’m no longer the man I was. And I certainly don’t want to sully my hands any more working for merchants of death like SSI. So you can just fuck off to hell, the whole fucking pack of you!’

With that Frank slammed the phone on the bedroom floor. Next, he tottered down to the kitchen, pulled out a bottle of scotch out of a cupboard and took a long hard slug then several more. Then he went back upstairs to the bedroom and thrust himself, still fully dressed, between the cold sheets and immediately fell asleep.

In the morning Frank woke shivery and stiff. Somehow he levered himself out of bed, stepped across to the bathroom and washed and shaved, then went downstairs and made himself a coffee and took another slug of scotch. Then, for some reason, he decided to put on a collar and tie and a business suit. His old corporate uniform felt strangely stiff against his skin after months of casual dressing.  Now what? Ring Isobel at her sister’s?  No way! He knew Isobel – she wouldn’t change her mind. Ring Jamie and Rachel? No, he couldn’t face them either now. He’d been as self-centred and deluding as his parents. But the moment comes when reality kicks in.

A few minutes Frank was behind the wheel of his car heading to GreenTech. It was time to draw a thick black line under all fantasies. Eileen Trowbridge stood near the door when he went in. ‘Frank,’ she said crisply, ‘we need to talk. Could you please come this way.’ Frank trotted obediently behind her, and she led him into into a side room where Liz, Milly, Axel and Gordon were already sat, serious-faced, in a half circle. Frank himself felt beyond embarrassment and apprehension, utterly numb apart from a desire to take what was coming to him and then have done.

Eileen turned and faced him. ‘Frank, I’ve learned that yesterday you implied certain things that your colleagues here found inappropriate and hurtful. You hinted that you were harbouring – shall we say – a covert sexual agenda. I think you need to apologise to your colleagues, more than that, to undertake that in future you will purge yourself of all such thoughts if you wish to continue working here at GreenTech.’ Frank felt a flicker of hope. Was she going to let him off the hook after all? 

‘Frank, it’s terribly sad this has happened. It has undone all your good work since you joined our organisation. You have shown yourself to be committed and ready to take on anything. For that reason I want to take a risk and give you a second chance. I want to give you an opportunity commensurate with your experience and abilities. To come to the point, we are setting up a major new project, one we believe will rewrite manufacturing worldwide on a more democratic, distributive basis. We are aiming to develop a range of solar powered, internet-connected 3D printers and make them available to isolated communities in developing countries. Frank, we should like you to front this new project and to go out and sell it. With all your technical background and your international experience you’d be a perfect fit. It would be a permanent position with a salary, although a modest one. That’s my offer Frank. So, what do you say?’

Frank thought.

Thought about what a fool he had been. Thought about his cynicism and their callowness and the gulf between them. About the effort in starting over and the little time he had left.

‘No,’ he said and shook his head.

Frank left and drove slowly home, nursing his old heart. That night he had his falling dream again. He was a glittering object falling through a freezing interstellar void, his fractals whirling and wheeling like the arms of a distant galaxy. Falling, melting, disintegrating.