To a tiny extent, it is a relief to get back into work. The chat when I get in is of the world cup and the weather and wasted weekends. But it’s there, just below the surface and it doesn’t take long for someone to reach under the waves of meaningless, lolling words and prick its skin. Then it seeps out black and heavy. someone asks. The sighs and the platitutes are no barrier to it. It seeps through the smiles and blackens the black black humour, and at least the shabby veneer of normality I had to paper up all weekend is stained for what it is. Flimsy and brittle and pointless.
I log on to my shared calendar and see that my boss has a new appointment at 11 with the other senior managers. Oily sweat starts to pour out of me; it doesn’t take a genius to work out what item 1 of a hastily called SMT meeting will be. My guts feel loose and black. I laugh grim in the bogs, my wife was wrong. There is a need to worry. The fear is seeping over the floor and staining all that it touches.

I look through my bosses calendar. Amongst all the junk and banal static ('funeral') I look for meeting with our director. I find one for 9 o clock on Monday morning. She's not normally in that early on Monday. . Monday is the best time to sack people, I seem to recal. I google it and find advice that the worst time is Friday. Apparently sacking people on a Friday ruins their weekend. If I lose this job it will be the end of more than my week. It will be the end of my future and stability. I know I am supposed to rationalise away worse case scenarios to over come panic attacks. I am supposed to visualise poverty, homelessness, despair and then to each one, I am supposed to say 'who cares'. It is supposed to make it go away, but nothing happens. The scenario just smirks aack at me. Again, on the toilet, I imagine the dole office, the awful job search engines and the lies you get when you type in my job title and vacancy. You would think there are a hundred thousand vacancies in my field. But my field is not a field, its more a cramped back yard. Back from the toilet I job search again: nothing. I check the calendar again, nothing, I look at the face of another director as he walks past. Nothign. He's smiling. I might be OK till Monday then. I think about what I want to think about over the weekend; nothing, not even nothing. I touch my desk. It is cheap wood made up to look expensive, but it fools no one. What are the chances I'll still be sitting here in a year and all this uncertainty will be over? Nothing.

In the park one child squeals with delight at a plastic wheel, the other shouts as they descend slowly down the sticky yellow plastic slide. Everything here, except for the grass and the trees was probably made in china. From where I am sitting, on the brown brittling glass, I can see the way the bolts at the bottom of the slide have been driven into the ground plate.

"This is nice" she says. It's not though.

I look through the grass at the soil. I can see little fissures in it, from where the water has gone. Where something has gone, what it leaves behind can crack, and break. I do not think about how I could check my email again; instead I think, again, what the subject is likely to be. "All Staft, Important information concerning the future of X" it will say, with a little red flag, as if words were never enough.

Tonight she'll try to have it off with me, and I'll try to pretend that this isn't happening. In a sick way it will be good to get back to work 2 days from now. I'll walk into my office, wondering how many more times I'll walk through the bad glass doors in the morning, and I'll talk to our colleagues blackly about how we're to blame for the recession and we deserve all this uncertainty. All over teh UK people are doing this, fretting at bbc news headlines, checking email, worrying, looking at cracks and fissures

a xe

In the office the talk is of forced normality but I feel the opposite, and I feel everyone else is feeling the same, too. I feel as if I am waking from a dream. Things which had become familiar are becoming unfamiliar again and their lines and positions gently startle me. There is the photocopier, and here is my desk, paintings from my children a lifetime of this stress away. There is the kettle, the finance office.

We’re waiting to be sacked. As back office function in a quango its not handwriting on the wall. Our demise is written in h1 font. We’re just waiting for the announcement from the shiney haired government lackey. Everyone talks the same in the same meetings. The phrases, again, familiar then non familiar; routers, xml, workflows, sound like incantations. Our planning sessions are a framework against chaos which will come in and render this safely sterile world dirty with words like redundancy, and then, repossession.

Every time the department manager is in a meeting I flurry. Every night I check my email at 6, in case the message should come in tandem with cowardice, adn then at 7 in case I missed it, 8, midnight, 5am. They are in a meeting now, the glass room unfamiliar from the fading of the future from certain to un. I look at the gestures, the body language, looking for the familiar signs I imagine a thousand times an hour.