Our superiors booked our branch in for an away day. We all received phone calls at predawn, a chirpy robot informing us that we had been volunteered for a mandatory training experience at our local corporate conference centre and golfing grill.
We arrived half-dressed, bodies sour and hearts pounding. The green was abandoned and the grill closed, sealed in dusty shapeless sacks. A trestle table had been set up with orange juice and biscuits, and beside it stood a dusty flipboard bearing our schedule.
Our schedule looked exceedingly busy, not helped by the way the handwritten entries sloped and crushed against the edges of the frame. I could pick out a few in the tangle. Organs of accountability. The phrenology of cashflow forecasts. Zero-sum offerings. And at the bottom, half-scribbled, half-etched – SELECTION SESSION.
A man with a forgettable face in a dark jumper walked out from the shuttered kitchen. Our trainer. He led us to a cramped and windowless room. Here, he said, we would peel back our potential, see what we were really made of underneath. He stressed the need for total surrender. Management is watching, he intoned, although I could see no cameras or microphones dotting the whitewashed walls, which rippled occasionally like the backdrop of an amateur production.
I can hardly remember the activities before the selection session. They slid from my mind as if coated in oil. It was the usual stuff. Company stuff. Watching a slideshow consisting of closeups of unhealthy mucosa. Standing in a circle and confessing our deepest fears. Practising trust falls, although you would be told not to save your partner, to instead let their skulls crack against the worn carpet tiles. I was given a test and I lied on every question.
An alarm whooped, once, puncturing the stuffy air.
We were led, bruised and dehydrated, into a section of the corporate conference centre and golfing grill even more decrepit than the rest, where halogens shone weakly through layers of dead moths caught inside them, down corridors which seemed to double back on themselves in impossible contortions, the dark wood panelling growing black and charred. Our destination was a dim red mirror of our previous classroom, now cast in emergency lighting. The chairs and tables had been heaped into a crude mound at the back. Nest. Temple. The words came unbidden to me.
Something weaved and coiled within the darkness of that structure, visible only by the glare of crimson on moist tissues. A faint, viscous sound like parting lips. The smell of dry sockets. I couldn’t help but take a step back.
“Did you see that?” I whispered to those stood next to me.
“See what?” one replied.
“It’s quite dark,” said the other.
“Shh.”
“Okay gang.” The trainer’s eyes flicked to me as he clapped his soft hands together. “This is a tricky one. Who would like to inside go first?”
A pause, a bubble swelling. I waited. You should always wait. Ignore the coughs, and the shuffling, and the bunching of shoulders. Just before it grew unbearable, Tim from Finance stepped out from our pack.
“I will. I’ll…peel back my potential,” He turned to us, his face slack and wet, eyes glittering in the umbra. “It’s like what they say. If I’m uncomfortable, I’m doing something right.”
Our company slogan. There was a rumble of assent, a few repeating it after him. Rich was always a good sport. He’d once run a marathon for charity. Now, he got onto his hands and knees and crawled within the furniture, shrinking from view. I expected a gurgle, a scream cut-off midway, but no, nothing. Others followed him in, one by one. Mildred. Anders. Richard. Susan. Whenever it looked like the supply of willing participants was about to run out, someone would announce their intentions.
Could nobody else see it, I wondered? What did they think was going happen in that tangle of rusted furniture? Perhaps my intuition was wrong. Perhaps we would all come out on the other side stronger, irreversibly bonded together, but I knew the company too well for that. Our branch had been considered a withered appendage for quite some time.
Eventually our group thinned and silence reigned. Still I said nothing. There we were, the wastrels and the stragglers. The no-hopers of the no-hopers. Desperate glances flitted between us. Someone made a muffled grunt, and I too felt a creeping sensation up my throat, a thousand tiny threads wanting to crawl out of my mouth.
“Anyone else?” The trainer asked, lips tight over his teeth. The walls, which I was sure then were extremely heavy curtains, rippled again.
I’m a rational person. I know when to cut my losses. Crawling in there seemed…inimical to my continued career. And existence. And so, I did the only thing I could think of.
“Ah. Really, really, sorry.” I exhaled through my teeth as I looked at my phone. “Do you mind if I make a quick call? It’s those jokers at the Glasgow office…”
Before anyone could reply I’d pressed it hard against my ear. The trainer started to say something as I slipped out through the way we came. I paced, faster and faster, the lights flickering as I went, shutting down behind me. All the while I listened to a voicemail, a robot informing me about my car insurance. “Mmm,” I said, to no-one, while the walls billowed, revealing nothing underneath. “Yes, interesting.”
Once I reached the empty lobby I broke out running, out onto the green, stumbling through ash-filled bunkers and cresting overgrown hills, aware of the mirrored rows of windows at my back. It was only when I reached the station and boarded the train, heard the doors hiss shut and the watched empty platform fled from me that my hands stopped shaking, and I fell into a feverish fugue.
Upon my awakening, the trainer was sitting opposite me. For some reason I didn’t feel surprised. Just tired.
“Why didn’t you go with the others?” he asked.
“I was scared.”
“Your fear was different to theirs.”
He was right. There wasn’t anything I could say.
“Don’t you feel the slightest bit…guilty?”
“I…”
I don’t know how long he sat there, watching me. Searching me. My limbs felt carved from the same dull plastic as my seat. Outside the sun dipped and the fields blurred blue-black, blue-black. The carriage dimmed, and in the clanging void between the sections I thought I saw something shudder and writhe. My fellow passengers stepped around it, ignored it as it tousled their hair or tapped at their scalps.
Finally, he said:
“We collated your test results. You are craven and untrustworthy. You think only of yourself. You feel everything is a game, or an act, or a trick. You are, in several key ways, lacking an essential humanity to your thoughts and actions.”
As the patches of scattered streetlights grew closer together, he rose and pushed a card across the linoleum table towards me. Neatly embossed upon it was the logo of the corporate conference centre and golfing grill.
“Management are looking for someone to spin up a new branch in Croydon.”
“Well,” I said, my voice returning to me at last, “Do I have a choice?”
He chuckled. “Don’t be so dramatic. It’s just a job. And between you and me, you’re a shoe-in.”
“There isn’t an interview?”
“Hm? You’ve already met the bosses. Management, I mean. They were quite impressed with your performance.”
I flipped the card. On the back in deep red ink was a gordian knot, and below that, a phone number.
“We’re always looking for new people,” he called back to me, as the thronging mass carried him down the aisle. “Think about it.”
I’m a rational person. That night I called the number. And wouldn’t you know it, management themselves answered. I’m amazed they found the time for me. They clicked and burbled on the other end of the line and were kind enough to explain what exactly they select for. They told me why they manage us they way they do, why we desire to be managed, why poor performers cannot be tolerated. They even let me listen to the rest of my branch, stronger, irreversibly bonded together, a coherent working unit at last, as they gave me a glowing reference.
All in all, they made a compelling case. One that I desperately wish I could forget.
My training experience of the training experience begins at the company conference corporate hub and bowling bar tomorrow. There should be a fair few of us. We start at three in the morning and there is no end planned – for the selection is continuous, and it will continue unabated. I’ve been told to bring a packed lunch.
Alexander James 