Free Living As a Moon by Owen Marshall Page A

sure. Whole show down the gurgler in no bloody time at all.’
    ‘Think of the disruption to the office equipment supply industry throughout the country,’ I’d say, or some such. Actually, although I didn’t like Matthew, it was true that he kept the place going. Cusip was like a rabbit in burrow, fearful of the ferret. In all the time I worked there he never addressed us as a group, but sidled up to us individually if there were instructions to be given.
    ‘I see you as someone with a career path in this office,’ he said to me once, and touched his nose like a character from Dickens. How Ramon and I laughed at that on the roof: how we teased out the magnificence of a career path among the five of us in that office.
    Ramon showed me how to get onto the roof. He and I kept it as a secret. You went to the top floor and at the end of a corridor next to the fire hose was a ceiling flap and a counter-weighted folding ladder that you pulled down. Lunchtimes sometimes we went there, using the ladder only when all was quiet. The roof was flat concrete with drain grilles and ducts and pipes poking up. We’d sit in the sun, forget about the office for a while, forget about the inventories of business equipment and exchange rates and the rudeness of people you have to deal with. Even there occasionally, even in the middle of day, we would hear people shouting in the alley, and could look down on their foreshortened figures.
    Ramon’s name was ludicrously inappropriate. He was a tall, red-headed Californian named after some forgotten matinée idol. Almost everything about our jobs was a source of humour for him, but then he was younger than me, and knew it was a passing phase of his life. He was waiting for his overseas accounting qualifications to be verified, after which he’d float upwards into a rarefied professional world in which office equipment was just something you sat on, or manipulated, without thought. He hadn’t told that to the others, and when he was rebuked by Matthew, or patronised by Felicity who’d been to a private school, he’d take it with mock contrition, and a glance towards me. I would have enjoyed a greater share in his derision had I been as assured of a future. Maybe in ten or fifteen years, following the career path proffered by Mr Cusip, I would inherit Matthew’s seniority in the office, still peddling mundane merchandise, still at the same desk hearing the shouted profanity from the alley below, still wearing cheap shoes, while Ramon flew to business deals in Singapore, or wound up national corporations as official receiver.
    ‘You should sign up for one of those evening courses at university,’ said Ramon on the roof. His lunch was a supermarket brie cheese that he ate like a bun.
    ‘I’m okay,’ I said.
    ‘You’ll get screwed down there. You’ll end up like Cusip, or Matthew.’ Felicity and Becky didn’t count. Felicity made the most of herself, went to the right parties and would marry security with a big dick. Becky would stop working when her husband agreed to have a kid.
    ‘It’s a job,’ I said.
    ‘You need to move on, man. It’s no way to spend your life down there. Those people, they’re just rotting.’ Down there meant the office on level four, not the alley. In the alley people were already rotting surely, but then you don’t look below you, do you, you look at those doing better than yourself. Dissatisfaction and envy are ambition’s goads. Yet I couldn’t persuade myself that Puli, Jimmy, Saucer, the limping guy with the grey hoodie, the Sex Slut and others would be breaking their necks to move to level four, except for warmth.
    ‘I’ve got plans, don’t you worry,’ I said. I had no plans: dreams, yes, but there was no bridge between dreams and the office on level four. I needed a plan. Sometimes at my desk with invoices, or being belittled on the phone by the manager of some tin-pot store in the provinces, I felt a sort of panic rising because my life