Government Life

"Luke!" came a hearty voice almost as soon as Luke and Hannah entered the building. David was propped against a column in the foyer. He beamed at Hannah as she shuffled off with barely a glance at her brother. Luke nodded at David, his mouth suddenly dry.

"If you follow me, we'll get you set up. You can start doing proper work!" Luke knew there was an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence. He could hear it in David's voice. He had the feeling that there were a lot of exclamation marks in David's world, especially where work was concerned. He followed him through an impressive set of doors, and promptly stopped, stunned by what he saw. Stretching across the entire expanse of the building were desks, crammed into every conceivable configuration, nooks, crannies, pods. There must have been hundreds of people at work, just on this floor, in this building. David noticed his charge was no longer hot on his heels.

"Oh, it's a little daunting at first, I know, but you'll soon get used to it, find your way around. We need to keep moving, though, son. We're not on this floor." He turned without checking that Luke was following him, and was threading his way between desks. Luke noticed a wave of sudden activity preceded him. Nobody seemed to want to make eye contact with either of them. He suddenly grew more suspicious of Hannah's avoidance techniques when he was questioning her.

They reached a staircase on the far side of the building through a narrow door, partly hidden behind a pair of columns. It wasn't so much that the stair was deliberately concealed, more that the door was added as an after thought. David had to swipe a card across a reader to get into it.

"You'll get one of those once you've been here for a while. Until then, you'll need to make sure someone is with you when you want to come and go." David barely drew breath as he bounded up the stairs. Luke, not used to climbing, was a little slower. He wasn't expected to talk, however, just to listen as David continued.

"Now, for your first day, you'll just be observing things, for the most part. Finding your feet, so to speak. There's no reason for you to feel obliged to actually contribute anything just yet. We'll tell you exactly what to do. Just follow instructions, and you'll be just fine. Hannah tells me you're smart enough, so I'm sure you'll pick up the drill in no time. And here we are, our own little corner of the world."

The stairs opened onto a small landing with five desks, all except one of them occupied. A glass wall surrounded the desks. As Luke moved closer, he could see that there was a view over the floor below. None of the other people on the landing looked up when he entered. They were all busy at their desks, although he couldn't tell what they were doing. David had stopped at the empty desk.

"Now, Luke, this is where you'll sit." It was a brown desk, the laminate peeling from the surface below. An ink stain marked the top with a red smear; cup rings could be seen elsewhere. The chair was ripped and torn, the padding of the seat all but gone; one of the five wheels was missing. Obviously, it was all that was left when his fellow employees had scavenged their share. "If you look in the drawers, you should find pens and paper. Kent! You can find something for Mr Turner to do for you, I'm sure."

With that, David turned and left. A mousy middle aged woman scooted over, still in her chair. She was clearly Kent.

"Here," she muttered, throwing some folders on his desk. "Sort these. Ask if you have any questions."

Luke had all sorts of questions, but he didn't think the woman would be able to answer them for him. Or rather, he didn't think that she would answer them, regardless of her ability. Instead, he put his lunch bag in a drawer of the desk and carefully sat on his chair. The constant sensation of falling was something he would have to get used to until he could scavenge a better seat.

Opening the first folder, he noticed the heading: 'Department of Deportations'. He blanched. Was that where he was working now? A little reading clarified the matter for him. The short answer was no, he wasn't working for Deportations; he was working for the office that oversaw them. This little sample of humanity was responsible for making sure that Deportations followed the rule book. The files in front of him were the justifications for actions. He suppressed a shudder at the implications of the number of them, and got down to sorting, trying desperately not to read too much into what he couldn't avoid seeing. No wonder Hannah hadn't wanted to tell him what he would be doing.

Each file was a sad testament to a life interrupted, Luke thought. He didn't know the outcomes, or the causes, but somewhere, there was probably a record for each of the Li family, for old Mr Hussein, for anyone he'd ever known who had disappeared. Somewhere, a pencil pusher had justified their removal from society. And someone like Luke had sorted the paperwork for filing. He tried to suppress the feeling of something oily coating his hands as he sifted through the paperwork. He didn't want to feel that he was any part of that machine. You need the money, he told himself. Without this, you'll all go hungry. Becca. Hannah. But he couldn't help adding Pete, Georgie in his own mind. The black vans. The Vanished.

Somehow, he managed to finish the day. He didn't take a break for lunch; he couldn't face food. At the end of the day, without having spoken to anyone, he got up and took his lunch bag from the drawer. He joined the tide of humanity flowing from the building,  determined that he would never set foot there again. 

"You're what?" demanded Hannah after dinner that night. Luke had just declared his resolution. "You can't quit. You don't know how hard it was to get you in there this time."

Luke looked down at the table, his standard reaction to any confrontation.

"I'm not doing anything to do with deportation, Han." He glanced up at her. "I can't."

She blazed up, angrily. Her coppery hair seemed to crackle around her and she swelled to far more than her usual petite size.

"You can't? You can't work with deportations?" Words failed her for a moment and when she found them again, her voice was a hiss. "What do you think I had to do to get you then job, Luke? You don't think it was my pull that got you in there? Or Dad's? What do you think I've had to do, to keep a roof over you and Becca, and food in your mouths?"

She struggled to control herself. Luke didn't intervene. He knew her temper enough to know that any reaction would fuel the fires. When she spoke again, it was through clenched teeth, the battle for reason showing in her tone.

"You'll go back there, tomorrow, Luke, or you'll move out. If I'm marrying bloody David James to keep Becca in school, you can go to work in that office. I'll be damned if you throw it back in my face. You take what I can offer you, or you leave. It's as simple as that."

Luke was stunned. Hannah was marrying David? It was not what he had expected. Not that he'd thought it fully through. But suddenly the muffled conversation he'd overheard made sense. 

"Congratulations," he spat, pushing away from the kitchen table. "I'll be gone in the morning."

...

The next day saw Luke walking beside Hannah on their way to the office. He was wearing one of his father's suits; it fit him badly, given his tall father's broad shoulders compared to his slim build and medium height, but it was the best that they could manage. Hannah promised to fix it for him when she got the chance. Under the suit jacket, he had on one of his school shirts, a plain white collared style that they'd decided would do for office wear as well, and a tie that came from the supply of clothes Andy has left in his drawers. Luke regularly raided his brother's cupboards when he needed new clothes. It didn't look like Andy was going to be needing them again.

"We'll have to fix Dad's coats for you come winter. And maybe find you some better shoes." She glanced doubtfully down at the scuffed shoes Luke had been wearing to school for the past year. They were the worse for wear, the sole hinting at coming apart from the upper in several places. "I guess you'll do for today, though."

They walked in silence for a while, each head down in thought, not looking at the drab streets they were passing through. There were many people out on the street, also walking to work. Some wore office attire, like Luke and Hannah, but more were in the overalls and blue collar clothes of the manual labourer. Luke looked at Hannah from the corner of his eye, trying to gauge if now was a good time to ask her what was on his mind. She looked distracted, he decided. Now might be the only chance he would get though, so he decided to plunge in.

"Han, what exactly am I going to be doing?" She looked up in surprise.

"What do you mean?" she asked him. "You're going to be in the government. You do whatever they tell you to do."

"Yeah, but what department will I be in?"

Luke tried to tell himself it was just his imagination when she looked uncomfortable. He waited for her to answer, looking with a sigh at the crowd of people around the bus stop instead. It would be a squeeze to fit them all on an empty bus. The ancient bus he could see approaching, belching dark clouds of fumes from its exhaust, was decidedly not empty.

"It might be best if you wait until you see David. He can tell you better than I can." She gestured to the crowd. They were on the edges of it now. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought that she had deliberately held him off. But there was no arguing with her in public. It wouldn't do to cause a stir, especially on his first day in employment. There could be anyone in the crowd around them. 

He bit his tongue and bided his time as they elbowed their way to the front of the crowd and shoved their way onto the bus. It was lucky that he was with Hannah, or he would have been left standing on the footpath. The crowd jostled furiously even within the bus, vying for positions where they would be able to hold onto something rather than falling against their fellow passengers every time the bus hit one of the innumerable potholes in the roads of this part of town. The silence around them was strange to Luke; he was more used to the hustle of the footpath than the bus. His walk to school was always a little rowdy with street sellers trying to tempt passersby with their wares, with school children running around each other and vying to make the most noise. Here, in the world of adults, all was quiet. It was something else that would take a little getting used to, Luke thought to himself.

When they pushed their way off the bus, Luke wanted to pursue his conversation with Hannah. As soon as they were out of hearing of their fellow passengers, he tried again for information.

"How do you know him, then? David?"

"I work with him," she responded, giving him a strange look that he couldn't interpret. Her tone suggested it was a stupid question, but her cheeks were flushed slightly.

"But if you work with him, why can't you tell me what I'll be doing?" They were approaching the building as he asked. It loomed above him in all its dirty, grey, eight storeyed glory. There was a flow of foot traffic pushing them into the doors. Hannah pulled him out of this human tide and turned him to face her. Her face was serious, worried.

"Luke, you can't ask questions. There's a reason why we never talked about work at home. It's not good to question things. It gets you in trouble. When you're in there, you do what they tell you to do, whatever it is. Do you understand me? You don't question anything you are told while you're inside that building. And you don't discuss it with anyone. Am I clear?"

Luke nodded.

"OK then. Let's go get you started."

They walked into the building, and Luke's working life began.

...

Luke stopped going to Becca's locker at the end of the school day. Never really involved in classroom activities, he stopped trying at all. His teachers noticed, but they had other students who were more of a priority. Luke no longer had a father with influence in the government. Hannah was sufficiently lowly that she couldn't even manage to get Luke a job; there was no reason for them to waste their energy in finding out what was going wrong in Luke's life when his classmates had more power behind them. With no classroom contact and little sight of Becca outside school, Luke barely spoke to anyone for days on end. He found that he almost preferred it that way. What he did hear from people wasn't to his liking.

'Luke, you have to come in here for a minute.' It was Hannah, calling from the front room that had been their parents. She'd moved into that room soon after the funeral. Before that, she'd been sharing with Becca. It was one of the few positive changes in the house, that they all had their own rooms now.

'What's up?' he asked her from the door. He didn't like to go in anymore. It still had his parents' dark, timber bed, their worn, old fashioned clothes in the closets, their pictures on the faded blue walls. Hannah had barely made an impression on their years of occupying the room. It was like she was only squatting. But she wasn't alone.

'Luke, this is David,' she told him, gesturing to the pale faced man perched on the edge of the bed. Luke nodded at him, wondering who he was. 'He thinks he can get you a job, Lukie.'

Hannah was excited. She'd been trying her best for him, he knew. Her influence didn't stretch very far; not as much as their father's had when he'd found employment for Hannah and Andy within the government. Luke looked once again at the man, not impressed with what he saw.

'Luke,' he nodded, standing up and extending a smooth white hand to shake. His dark hair fell to his shoulders, carefully maintained. Luke noted with surprise that he was taller than him; David had seemed smaller when he was on the bed. In fact, Luke decided, he was difficult to read. He was tall, but seemed small. He had smooth hands but dirt-blackened nails. He was, in short, a bundle of contradictions that Luke could find no solution for.

'Hannah tells me that you're almost finished school. It would be a shame to miss out on the certificate now, don't you think?' Luke flicked a glance at Hannah, wondering what she had told him. When Luke didn't respond, David continued. 'But if you're set on it, then I could find you something in my department. We're always looking for bright youngsters, especially with a good background.'

Luke suddenly understood why Hannah had brought him into their parents room; it was the least threadbare of the rooms. She was trying to impress him. She was nodding enthusiastically at him, trying to get him to move. Her springy curls bounced around her face as she urged him to say something, anything, to acknowledge his acceptance of the half hearted offer.

'That would be good,' Luke finally muttered. 'When would I start?' Hannah looked relieved.

'Is tomorrow too soon?' laughed David, heartily. The volume seemed inappropriate for the room. Luke was taken aback.

'Tomorrow? But I -' he stopped when he saw Hannah's face. 'Tomorrow would be fine.'

'Great! Excellent! Well, Hannah can show you where to come. I'll see you then.'

The dismissal was clear. There was nothing else for Luke to say. He fled the room, outraged that this man, this stranger, had taken charge of his parents' bedroom, had engineered his departure from school, had done everything that his father ought to have been doing for him. His father. Luke pulled up short at his bedroom door. Why, he asked himself, was this man prepared to help him get a job? Why was he still here, after Luke had accepted the offer? With quiet steps, Luke went back to the bedroom door and listened to the muffled voices within.

'David, you know I can't say anything about that. Becca will still be at school. She can pick up Luke's things for him. He will be in the office tomorrow. That's all we can manage for now. It's only been a couple of weeks. I don't want to rush things and find later that I did it for the wrong reasons.'

'But surely -' came the pleading voice of David. Luke liked him less and less.

'No, David.' Hannah was firm. 'Not yet.'

Hearing David's steps approaching the door, Luke quickly and quietly dashed back to his own room, shutting the door just in time.

'Well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow then,' he said.

'Yes, tomorrow,' came Hannah's reply. There was the sound of a kiss, then he was gone.