Navin has a really bad day at work and must face the consequences.

The delivery was late again. Navin ran his hand through his hair in agitation as he was swept up to the 8th floor in the lift. He checked himself in the mirror on the back wall, the blue LED’s casting his face in a sickly hue. This latest problem in a series of logistical fuck-ups had really drained him. New black circles rested under his eyes, pouchy and tired. The shipment was supposed to have been delivered to Navin’s warehouse in the early hours of the morning, the appointed time came and went and the van and driver hadn’t shown. Navin had spent several hours waiting, calling and texting the driver with increasing impatience and panic.

He couldn’t be late with another shipment, he just couldn’t. The last time Navin had been late with a shipment the van had gotten a puncture which meant a delayed turn around when it eventually turned up at the warehouse. The knock-on effect of this small delay had meant the shipment was stopped and questioned at customs control, the entire batch was found and confiscated and the checkpoints were tightened. Since then it had become that much harder to get even small shipments through customs, and this one that hadn’t shown up was one of the biggest Navin had dealt with. The demand in the USA was increasing at an incredible rate and Navin was hard pressed to keep up with the frequency of shipments. He had thought to say something to his handler, about how he couldn’t keep up with all the midnight rendezvous at the bloody warehouse miles away from anywhere, but the thought of saying any of that out loud caused sweat to break out on his temples and under his nose. He wiped a finger surreptitiously under his nose to wipe away the sweat that had broken out at the thought of saying such things to his handler, the mysterious voice on the phone that would tell him when to expect the next shipment.

Would his handler know the shipment hadn’t even arrived at the warehouse? Sometimes when she called she already knew things that had only just happened, Navin having told her nothing. He shuddered at the thought of her hard voice, and having to tell her that this entire shipment was screwed, wouldn’t even make it to customs even if it did somehow show up at the warehouse. Navin knew the power she held, had used it to his own advantage once or twice when something had gone wrong. He had dropped names during her calls of several people in the warehouse who were slackers, who had handled the shipment in ways that could damage the product. They hadn’t been seen since Navin had told her their names, nobody asked questions or even mentioned them anymore, one day they were gone and it was like they had never existed.

The lift reached his floor and the doors slid open with a groan, Navin straightened his suit jacket and took a deep breath before swaggering across the hall to his flat and throwing open the door with a flourish.

“Oi oi!”, cried Rajiv and Seb in greeting as they felt the concussion of the door reverberate through the flat. They had been sitting watching some new Netflix series but now turned to take in Navin who flashed them an artificially whitened smile.

“Alright boys,” cried Navin in turn, “Back home after a hard days work making millions!” He looked at their pathetic faces, eyes greedily drinking in his sharp suit and slicked back hair. They thought he was a day trader, at Canary Wharf, they had no idea what he really did for a living. They both worked in banal office jobs, one of them was in marketing or advertising but he couldn’t remember which.

His phone began to vibrate in his pocket and Navin’s practised smile froze, knowing who it would be. Rajiv and Seb seemed to notice no difference in his demeanour, so he pulled out his phone and jauntily called out, “No rest for the wicked, eh!”, the beginnings of fear making the words come out louder than he intended. Being loud helped to bolster Navin’s courage for the conversation which he dreaded. They nodded, in awe of their successful flatmate, they assumed these evening phone calls came from Tokyo, or Hong Kong or somewhere else equally exotic. Someone important from a different time-zone calling to arrange multi-million-pound deals that were too important to wait until tomorrow. They were so easy to con Navin thought as he sauntered over to his room and shut the door behind him before taking the call.

“Hello,” he said, pleased to note that he was able to keep his voice steady. He was met with silence from the other end, the faint sound of breathing the only indication that she was there. Navin attempted to slow his own breathing to match but only succeeded in increasing the tightness that was gripping his chest. He waited for her to speak, to say something, anything! But she remained silent, the silence grew to such an oppressing crescendo in Navin’s mind that excuses began to bubble to the surface and exploded from him in a torrent.

He blamed the van driver, the warehouse staff, traffic, he couldn’t stop himself, anything to keep the finger of blame pointed away from him. As he spoke he paced, from the bedside table to the window and back again, it didn’t help to alleviate any of the anxiety that was eating away at him but it gave his body something to do while his mind turned in somersaults.

Eventually, Navin ran out of people and objects to blame and he stumbled to a halt by the window, worn out as if he had filled his excuses with little pieces of himself in an effort to give them more weight, more validity.

silence

Soft, even breathing was the only thing that told him his handler was still there. She had never told him her name, he wondered if it was something normal, like Jane, or Karen. He waited, too tired now to even give in to the fear that was still coiled in his belly.

He began to imagine scenarios of what might happen to him because of the missed shipment. Brief pictures of the potential consequences ran through his mind, things Navin was too scared to contemplate. So caught up was he in his terrified thoughts, he almost missed the change in breath, the slight shuffling of a change in position coming from the phone.

I am displeased

she said, her voice cutting through Navin like a knife. He barely heard the dialling tone as she hung up, his ears were filled with a steadily increasing roar of white noise. He kept the phone at his ear, willing her to not be gone, willing her to come back and say something, anything that would stop the yawning chasm of fear that her words had rent open in his chest.

Navin turned and absently walked from his bedroom to the sitting room and found himself out on the balcony, Seb and Rajiv scrambling to follow him out. He fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette and a light, managing to control the tremor in his hands for long enough to get the bloody thing lit. He gazed out at the motorway that ran next to their building as Seb began to talk about something that had happened to him at work that day. Navin heard it as a murmur in the background, a gentle counterpoint to the rush of traffic as he contemplated if he would be a willing participant in his immanent career change.