How To Not Exist

In the absense of any interest in writing new posts lately, here's the opening paragraphs from an old novel I'm clearly not going to finish.

The building where they worked was hidden. The building where they worked had been ordered to not exist.
And this was a difficult feat. Because the building where they worked lay in the most famous segment of Marston. And Marston itself had considerable renown amongst the sterner class of tourist. The building was – or should have been – part of the vista which epitomised the city. The scene which appeared by default in the brochures and leaflets, which summed up what Marston offered its visitors. A sort of composite history, not confined to any one period but incorporating elements from many epochs so long as they were twee and vaguely authentic. An image of history generally given captions beginning with "Merrie" or "Ye Olde."

To the left was the station, a mass of gently curving girders emanating an inexplicable beauty. Equally bizarrely it was one of the largest stations in the land, in a city emphatically not one of the biggest; although it was chiefly full of people trying to go somewhere other than Marston. Stretching out ahead, almost beyond the reach of the eye, tumbling gently down a slight incline, were the city walls. The ersatz city walls, rebuilt by the Victorians, and so given a sombre perfection free of the miserable terror which inspired the original set. Standing, just to continue the jumble of authenticity and propaganda, on tall, functional grass banks which became a beautiful speckled pattern of daffodils every spring. The walls ended at a broad lazy river which was bridged by fussy Edwardian iron. And beyond that, the cathedral. The vast temple, so beautiful that it is hideous and vice versa. The creation of an ancient society which could do nothing well except create vast temples, doggedly rebuilt after the many occasions it had burnt or fallen down. The cause of the city, really, and certainly the donor of its entirely undeserved label of 'city.' The cathedral which waited haughtily for the tiny settlement around it to grow as magnificent as it was. Which waited in vain, even when industrial sprawls elsewhere accidentally shrivelled their own cathedrals into toys; which seemed at times to be considering moving to a more fitting location but finally accepted its role as a very large rock in a small pond. A cathedral still dominating a city which was not a city and which no longer believed in God.

And to the right of the famous panorama? What could you see there? Well, you would have to actually stand there to find out. The vision to the right did not exist in any of the pamphlets. There would always be a careful positioning of the cameras, the focus obstinately fixed onto the centre-left of the horizon. More recently, too, a drag of the mouse and a click of the crop emblem to eliminate any lingering traces. The building standing to the right was a pariah, a solitary outcast. It should not, could not exist.

Dark brown concrete. That was the building's final audacious touch which had made it special. That won the awards on its birth in the 1960's, when hideous architecture was as prized as free love, and which would ensure its revilement forever after. There were many other things bad about the building, of course. The unapologetic bulk of it, standing seven floors high in a mainly double-story town. The asymmetrical sprawl of the place, leaving people uncertain as to whether it was a complex or a single structure; and if the latter, why it bothered being so since this clearly did no good. One of the tallest towers was stuck sort of middle-left, the other some way to the right. Around them were a host of meandering annexes which looked like careless later additions though the building was actually designed as a whole. There was a central courtyard… Or rather, there was a courtyard, with the main reception hiding deferentially in one corner. It may have been in the centre or it may not have been. Nobody was certain where that was or where most of the edges were either.

All this was impressive. Likewise the decision to use concrete, the most belligerently ugly building material ever invented by mankind. And to leave the great walls free of any decoration which might soften their impact just a little. But dark brown concrete? So that, on gloomy mornings, the building squatted like a collapsing star, threatening to pull all the light and facile beauty of Marston into its hideous flanks? That was genius of a sort. It deserved awards. It deserved to not exist.

The timid main reception area, Sushma discovered, was really just a clearing house. Visitors only arrived to receive directions to the smaller receptions of the various companies hidden inside the building which did not exist. These directions were almost always wrong because internally there was no logic either. Few of the companies occupied a single, clearly defined space. They owned little clusters scattered hither and thither. Their territories frequently shifted, like medieval dukedoms in the midst of a convoluted war of religion. Their receptions drifted according to the vagaries of battle and were only ever a desk behind a door. The companies were happy with this state, content, to remain as invisible as their host. They were not the sort to build beautiful headquarters in prime locations, to worry about market penetration and brand diversification. They were small firms selling specialised goods and services which most people had never heard of, would need a long lecture about before they understood them and would buy even then. And the firms simply wished to continue selling their wares to the small cadre of connoisseurs who had always bought them. Such companies seemed the antitheses of modern capitalism. In fact, from one perspective, they represented the system in its most perfect form. They did not sell dreams or lifestyles. They just made money.

Costoq Rail was the largest of them. In the old days when vital services were still nationalised it had technically been part of the state. Always an odd part, however, and lying remarkably far from actual government. It was a self-contained consultancy unit which did small, fiddly things to small, fiddly parts of the railway track. No senior manager had ever learnt whether any of the actions carried out were entirely necessary. However, as they affected huge metal objects which travelled at something approaching the speed of sound, some prudence was considered necessary. The consultancy somehow split from the rest of the railway infrastructure units in the chaos which followed the government's decision to privatise all its essential functions and so leave itself with nothing useful to do at all. The consultants continued doing exactly the same things, only now charged much more for them as they were working for a separate entity. Several years later they were swallowed up by Costoq International, a vague conglomerate going through a phase of 'market diversification.' Namely, swallowing up companies in sectors where they did not belong. So the Permanent Way Design Consultancy became Costoq Rail; thus exchanging a name which none of its employees could say to one which they could not spell. That, so far, had been the only change effected by the takeover.

Or almost the only one. Sushma, who had pulled the above information from the company website after her agency told her about the job, discerned signs of corporate modernity pushing at the old railway mentality. The fact that there was actually a website, for one. Many small engineering firms still jeered at such fripperies. A degree of effort had been made with the reception area too. There was a huge day-glo orange board behind the desk boasting the new company name and logo; which, like most corporate motifs, seemed a product of a junior art class. The website was simply a digital version of the leaflets, however. Both tried reaching out to the public with a few photographs of men in hard hats smiling awkwardly. Then they flung themselves into esoteric descriptions of complicated actions conducted on rail tracks in unfashionable parts of the countryside. And the reception was really just another desk behind a door. Manning it was a genial, elderly lady who greeted the sporadic visitors as if they arriving for a bridge morning, threw occasional homilies at the impatiently waiting Sushma and tried to master Minesweeper the rest of the time.

The room itself was testament that open plan does not automatically result in light and air. Almost all illumination came from the humming tubes set in the dispiritingly low ceilings. Most of the carpet was nasty dark blue. Random strips of nasty dark green and red intervened, as if somebody had decided to redecorate and then ran out of materials or motivation. The stale, chilly air was filled with drones of antiquated computers, the squeals of dying printers. And the chatter of sleepy workers easing into a Monday morning, female voices discussing cruel television programmes, male ones dissecting unjust football results.