Throughout the night, Control had slipped in and out of shallow sleep, constantly shifting in the queen-size bed.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” his girlfriend had finally cried out in exasperation, “what the hell is the matter with you?”, and arose to make a major fuss of dragging a blanket from a cupboard and draping it and a downie cover on the living room couch. She returned to wrench her pillows from their bed then decamped entirely.
In the morning he was irritable and monosyllabic. She counterpunched by spending an age in the bathroom then walked out without a goodbye while he was still carefully shaving (he only affected a designer stubble at weekends and holidays). He heard the apartment door slam noisily.
“Bloody, bloody, Monday,” he muttered.
His job title was ‘Senior Production Controller’, a euphemism for ‘bonus clerk’ (the ‘Senior’ of his title was an appeasement involving no intention of actually promoting him). To his girlfriend, Stella, he was the ‘Contract Manager’, on whom his Company doted, bestowing shrewd insights on a delighted clientele who breathed his name in hushed, venerated, tones.
But in truth, the bequest of an aunt, not an enormous salary, funded a pretentious lifestyle. His existence as ‘Control’ massaged the fantasy.
Traffic was dense and he twice jammed the heel of his hand on the centre of the steering wheel to release a blare of noise. In ill humour, he arrived at the office building and reached the space in which he computed bonus payments and summaries of output. He dropped his briefcase on the floor with a colourful gesture.
“Good weekend?” a nearby colleague smirked. Control growled by way of response and bent to open the briefcase. He had not expected to feel insecure, so fragile, so much at the mercy of events. Stella had been no comfort whatever. Histrionics in the night, a stand-off for the bathroom in the morning. The centre of his universe, or so she imagined herself. Pouty cow.
While he collected the previous week’s data on spreadsheets familiarly littered with names and numbers, his girlfriend returned to the flat. She left an hour later wheeling two large matching Samsonites, her final act being to drop her doorkey through the letterbox and on to the living room carpet, whispering, “Goodbye, shitface,” as she did so.