Erro was bored…

she was often bored. It was a disease that she had caught as a young woman and she had never recovered from it.

Most people had retired upstairs to their rooms in the hotel. At this late hour only the people who were always the last to leave restaurants and bars remained. His mother and sister was sitting with them and her daughter was talking to the interns. “I saw your mother just before i came here… “ Her words slightly slurred as she looked across at Franz and his sister. “Where was that?” Franz asked her. “The last job i did…” “How did you end up here Erro?” Ley asked, looking at her slightly drunken friend. “You shouldn’t ask that.” Park said. “I don’t think, she told me that horror story. never mind. tell them, don’t pay any attention to me…” Looking at their faces. Erro smiled at her. Erro looked at around the people at the table. Grinned at Park. Poured some more white wine into her glass. “Do you really want to know ?” Reaching over she poured some plum vodka into her glass…. “Yes, I’ve always wondered.” “You’ll all regret this…” Park said, whilst ordering some more turkish delight, espresso and a bottle of hungarian dessert wine. “Well in that case, It was all my own fault. Nobody else’s. “ She took a mouthful of the delicious chocolate mousse and a sip of the wine. “Well you know I worked surveillance. Not like Magrid, or deep undercover like Steve, where you go so deep sometimes that you feel fuzzy and are in danger of losing yourself. Like an anarchist who turns into a capitalist, or a trans woman who thinks handbags and Jaeger suits are womanly, rather than a front kick, or even if they are french into some weird Nazi supporting fascist, or Americans turning into Buddhists or cryptobros. Soooooo (eating more delicious chocolate mousse) I usually worked by following people, watching and investigating discreet aspects of their lives. What happened, It’s all my fault. “ She said mournfully. “ Park isn’t here because its her fault. Sam, you, Steve, even Franz, none of you. Me, its all my own fault. If I had only acted differently… I should by rights be in a deep existential crisis over this and I’ve never really understood why I am not, probably the chocolate mousse or maybe it’s a virus… “ (She paused, conscious that she couldn’t stop now. She looked at him sitting beside his sister who was looking at her with a curious expression on her face. )”It’s a long story and I’ll give you the short version, but if you must know. So I’d been working surveillance for years and my current task was watching Zoe, the chairman or CEO, i forget which of this company. It was the third or fourth month — and well I was bored, so bored [I’d rather eat-henry-the-cats-teeth-cleaning-biscuits than do this] level of boredom, level eight, where level nine is contemplating suicide and level ten is killing yourself rather than continuing to live like this, ( if you commit suicide from boredom do you get reincarnated as an ant or a coffee plant? ) I was so bored that I was becoming desperate. Zoe (not his real name obviously) was the most boring person I had ever watched. I mean god, how was he even alive! His emails, I had read them for months, were less interesting than your empty beer glass, less interesting than the ashtray filled with nuts. His phone calls more tedious than Jean-Luc Marion’s love of the christian god and the catholic religion, all those martyred christian saints, what is it with that guy ? Doesn’t he know how many gods and religions there are ? Or Bataille and his porno novels, Weird europeans who think christianity is too blame for everything. Or that guy Lyotard who thinks atheism is a religion, monotheism is so boring. I followed Zoe on the train, round the golf course, he was always above par, watched him swim, saw him play smash-a-dummy-to-relieve-your-stress, I staked out his boring house, hacked into his security system, searched his holiday home, searched his house, attended his choir practice, followed him around the supermarket when he went shopping with his wife. I even met his wife, his sister his mother… boring boring boring. […] After three months of watching Zoe, the most boring man ever to be born, with his ‘exotic’ wife and her young boyfriend (the grandson of the president) [ President ? President of what? ] You know the president of Tokyo and Japan. Whose baby was that I wondered? I’m getting ahead of myself… After a month I told them, my boss, Me-En-Tei at White Cloud that there was nothing. They sent me back, watch him, find something, they said, we need evidence. Evidence of what? I asked them. They looked at me as if i was a simpleton. After two months — I’m so bored, there is nothing, pleassseee don’t send me back. After three months , still nothing. [ nothing? surely there was something? there always is. Ley said. ] No there was nothing, only amateurs think there is always something. Well, to be fair. I didn’t tell them that his wife is having an affair with a k-drama star. [That president…] It was sweet really, they made each other laugh and smile. How could she not have an affair with a younger man who makes you happy? Being married to Zoe in his boring grey suits with his lack… After three months I also noticed that his mother was in love with a university philosophy teacher, his existentialism was mutating under her erotic fingertips. Zoe knew nothing abut the happiness of the women around him. Three months and all I’d seen was two women in love and a man in grey… And that’s where everything went wrong. She grabbed her head in both hands. Poured more vodka into the glass, and into Franz’s glass, and took his untouched chocolate mousse from in front of him. Oh god how could i have been so stupid. [Park was laughing enjoying the performance. Remembering when Erro had told her this in her office. The alcohol makes it less horrifying she thought.] So I was so bored I thought I had to do something or I’m going to lose my mind, and that was it really. White Cloud wouldn’t let me leave so… My office was on the fourth floor, so I promptly did what amounts to being the stupidest single thing any human being has ever done, I moved a filing cabinet and went through the wall and tapped into the building surveillance feed. I ran the cat cable from the connection under the floor to my desk and plugged it into my PC. Pushed the filing cabinet back over the hole in the wall and started exploring the building through the surveillance cameras. [Did you have an actual job? Ley asked. ] Yes, I was in the PPR department, [ what?’s that Ley asked] Don’t ask, I have no idea. I had a single task which was to distribute the days press releases on paper to the relevant departments. I would carry the morning box of press releases and put a copy on the desk of the people who needed the press releases. I would start on the managerial floors eight, nine and ten, walk round the floors, putting them into their in-trays. Then I would do the same on the senior management floors of eleven, the directors floor and twelve the senior directors level. After that I’d go to seven and begin working my way down the building. The funny thing was that the middle floors say 5,6,7 the carpets were worn and the computers were always infected by viruses, it was where the security department was…. Usually I walked, sometimes if it was in the evening I would run… [Paper? Paper?] Yes, it was a paperless office, so if it was important it had to be on paper. I didn’t have any other tasks, so that by mid morning there was nothing else I had to do. They told me that every intern had to work their way up from mundane tasks like that. Some days I walked around the corridors of all twelve floors including the machine rooms in the basement and the roof. In the summer I worked on my tan on the roof, drones would fly over and video me in my underwear. So as I was saying because I didn’t have any work so I began exploring the office through the surveillance feeds and eventually found this guy Sot, who was an eleventh floor director, Sot’s office was the only office on the eleventh floor that had a permanent video feed. Which was pretty odd as behind the blinds of their offices I found that half the directorate was either fucking or dreaming of fucking their secretaries, for example Susan the CFO was fucking both her secretaries, sometimes at the same time. [How did you find that out?] I put a few extra bugs in their offices. The CDO spent a lot of time exploring different aspects of his polysexuality, and spent a fortune on antibiotics, the photographs he kept in one of his drawers. I could have sold copies on the dark net. These people were as bored as I was. Anyway I found a hidden camera in Sot’s office. Zoe was on the twelfth floor, it was a traditionally hierarchical organization. And as you probably realize his office contained nothing, and I do mean nothing of interest. Interestingly his secretary had replaced the Picasso painting in his office with a good fake, and the Pollack with a bad fake. i never found out where the money went because…. So I wondered what was it about this guy Sot that made them put a hidden camera in his office ? That’s when i saw her in Sot’s office they were talking about some report or other. ( She waves her fingers drunkenly at his mother, who was looking increasingly horrified. Was it at Erro or at the way he was looking at her. ) Anyway there was a filing cabinet In the centre of the feed. I watched him take out a large beige book out of the cabinet and write things down in it. That’s where i saw you before, Sot showed her some entries, they talked about them. She wrote things down in her note book. There were other things in the cabinet, boxes, a couple of guns, chocolates and some birdfood for his small parrot. Nice parrot, I thought about releasing it from its cage. And I wondered if it was the cabinet they were observing and not Sot. So I decided that I had to have a look inside the cabinet. It had a fingerprint and long multidigit code, so I lifted Sot’s fingerprints and created a pair of latex gloves with his fingerprints. You’ve seen the kind of thing on television. It was Wednesday or Thursday, the office was empty. I had an hour. I was wearing my Irma Vep gear, [ Irma Vep? who’s Irma Vep. Franz asked] You know from Les Vampires, black boots, black underwear, black lycra leggings, black top, black vest, mask etc. [You wore what! What were you thinking. Ley said laughing ] Hey I told you i was bored. It was worse than that time I worked a surveillance job inside a naturist beach colony, I got a good tan that summer. Anyway I had taken control of the CCTV system and went up the unsurveilled fire stairs. I crashed the entire surveillance system, ran down the corridor, went into his office and opened the cabinet. I looked through the contents quickly. There was as I already said nothing in the cabinet, bird seed, a couple of vials, water various files, some blueprints of the building. Then I found the ledger for the council, it contained details of the hedge fund, and the money laundering investments. It was incomplete just one or two lines of the current history. I was so horrified at seeing this, (oops, my future mother-in-law-will-kill-me-if she knows I’ve seen this level of oops, I did not think) that i dropped the box of vials [ you dropped one of the vials… his mother said. ] no, two ir three of them broke, the liquid had a strange smell. I muttered various curses, most of which would be unsuitable for Franz to hear. Shoved it back into the cabinet. And left. Everything would have been fine. Except those bastards in the council had put a separate video feed that I, in my boredom had missed. They couldn’t identify me, all praise Irma Vep the vampire but they must have decided it was an inside job and late the next morning they were in the offices investigating. White Cloud must have told them I was there, because they came to see me. I wasn’t bored any longer. I thought I had about 24 hours before they found out, noticed. Zoe left at 3pm, bless his boring cotton socks, I followed him out of the office and they followed me. I lost them in Yoshiba and i was developing a migraine so I ran. I went home, grabbed my go bag. not the one that White Cloud knew about but the other one, underwear, change of clothes, id card, money, a gun, a knife, dumped my phone, left the flat through the loft. I left through another building … (she paused grinned at park who she’d told about dropping into the bedroom and the two women whipping the man with leather and plastic. ‘Sorry girls don’t mind me’ and thought better not as she might disturb his mother…) I went north to collect some new papers. My head wasn’t working properly because of the migraine or they’d never have found me. The next day or the day after they caught me in an alley in North Thalia, too many of them on the team and they beat me up, they must have had a kill and interrogate notice on me. I don’t know what happened, nor how much time passed but i vaguely remember being looked at by a doctor, saying to someone “it’s not good, she should be in hospital… “ i woke up in a chair in a basement with a man offering me, a woman with fractures, bruises over most of my body, they must have hit my head a few times, a migraine that lasted two or three days, a chance to survive. I was alive, couldn’t believe it. She paused, poured and then drank some more plum vodka. For a while, years, I thought some person from White Cloud would come through the door and then I occasionally thought they couldn’t find me, or it was because of Franz and then I thought it was because of K. But now i think i am probably just lucky. Good vodka this… Anyway that’s how I ended up here, these days when i am bored, i read a book, watch k drama, sleep with my cat, make Franz take me out or in… ( Hey, leave me out of this. franz said…) So, anyway if anyone ever asks you, Boredom is the most dangerous thing in the universe. So that’s why it is all my own fault that I ended up in London…

Originally published at https://www.driftwork.work on May 28, 2022.