Free Utterly Monkey by Nick Laird

law school mates he saw solely to take drugs with, his friend James who’d dropped out of law school and now lived in Guildford, selling rubbish compactors (or compactors of rubbish, as James would correct him), and Clyde, his oddest cousin, whoworked as an environmental health inspector in Hounslow.
    He wrote:
    Party. No exclamation marks. It’s my birthday on Wednesday. I’ll be receiving guests from 9ish tomorrow night. If you have nothing better to do, please call in. Bring your own whatever.
    After opening another Internet window and typing in the address roadmap.co.uk, he brought up Sofia Road, copied the link and pasted it into the e-mail.
    Click here for the map: www.roadmap.co.uk/mxccsofia/n16. It’s No. 23. The blue door. Get off at Dalston Kingsland Overland on the Silverlink and turn left. Or get the no. 73, 112, 43 buses.
    Many thanks, kind regards,
Admiral Sojourner Watkins
    He always signed off with an assumed name. It wasn’t meant to be funny, at least not any more. It was a way of articulating the other lives he could have tried and which were slowly closing up elsewhere. He clicked on Send . Danny thought how if someone transcribed the twenty-five years or so of his speech they would be hard pressed to justify ever using an exclamation mark. When he answered the phone, even at work, people invariably asked him whether they’d woken him up. He never understood why everyone else was so excited by life. He was either bemused or enraged at their effortless joy. Three Out of Office messages pipped into his inbox.
    He called Rollson to tell him how lovely Ellen was in person. Rollson groaned and pretended to choke on his pain au chocolat in a jealous fury. Albert was working on a settlement agreement, something to do with four-wheel drive jeeps which hadn’t yet been made, and which he’d worked on ’til three the night before. He was on course for another late one, waiting for New York to wake up and send him comments on his last draft. He’d been on a conference call all morning and now wanted to chat. Danny agreed to nip round for five minutes.
    Rollson’s room was like a show office for the ethical employer, or, more precisely, the employer who is worried about being sued for RSI. He had the desk raised on four wooden blocks for some odd reason, odd given that he was five foot five, and therefore also had a specially high chair, one which Danny called the Wimbledon Judge Seat. The chair raised and lowered itself by levers and Rollson would, as a distraction, frequently drop himself a foot or so in the middle of an argument if he felt like he was losing. The chair also had a special lumbar support fitted, and his keyboard was the new-fangled angled kind allowing maximal access for the wrists to rest on their own special pad. His VDU had a transparent screen fitted on it to reduce glare and even Rollson’s mouse was ergonomically designed and different to every other lawyer’s. It had three buttons and was about twice the normal size: more canine than rodent. His mouse pad contained a further wrist rest, one which Rollson, in his over-enthusiasm at receiving another toy from the company’s full-time physiotherapist, had upsettingly described as feeling like a thirteen-year-old girl’s breast. It should be clarified that overall Albert Rollson wasn’t a particularly sick or delicateor querulous man. He was just very very bored, and had found that the best way to counter the ennui was to exercise all of the pointless opportunities offered by an enormous company. He had them change the pictures on his walls every six weeks. He attended training seminars on using a Dictaphone. He attended a two-day course in Northampton on speed-reading at which the tutor had said ‘the main trick to it is just to read faster’ and they had all lowered their heads and obediently tried. He visited the in-house doctor at least once a month and though the doctor had prescribed him a variety of beta-blockers and