ART OF EUROPE

Week 1 - Wednesday

If you did work in a place with pneumatic cylinder message tubes it would be really easy to kill your colleagues. You'd just put an explosive device in one, or a cobra or a deadly spider or something, and then send them out to your victims all over the building and no-one would know where it came from.

People have been getting on my nerves a bit today but I think it's just the early rising. I never become acclimatised. Given my druthers I awake in the afternoon and stay up all night and whenever I have a day-job and have to get up early I never really adjust; I have so much caffeine and nicotine to keep me going I hardly sleep the following night and then it starts all over again. The missed sleep accumulates and I get more and more frazzled as the weeks go by. The first few days I am merely by turns hyper-twitchy and irritable or hyper-sensitive and feel like I will burst into tears at the slightest provocation. Then comes a plateau where I sort of zombie out and can barely even speak; I remember while I was in this state last time I was here the pretty receptionist I had a crush on came into the filing room and said hello to me and smiled and tried to start a conversation and I just stared at her uncomprehendingly until she went away again. After that it gets worse and I am completely certifiable for a while. Eventually I start to feel OK, even somewhat invigorated by regular doses of daylight, but then the job generally ends and I sleep for a week and then go back to rising at tea-time as God intended.

Anyway, work. Nothing really to tell. I think I could stash a body in the ceiling of the little file room off the back corridor on the third floor. It's one of those false ceilings with removable panels, polystyrene or something I think, and a metal frame. I think it could take the weight but I suppose I ought to check. I'd need a stepladder, but I have a stepladder. If I could wrap the corpse in plastic or something it would be a while before it started to smell, and besides no-one but me ever goes in there. The most likely victim would be old Mrs. Prendergast who works in a little cubby-hole around the corner doing God knows what, as I wouldn't have far to drag her and she smells really nice, all sorts of old lady scents, which might disguise the odour of corruption a while longer. Now. She would eventually be missed, of course. But. If I was to knock off Reg the boiler-room man on the same day, stuff him either in the boiler or behind those really dusty ancient files at the back of the basement where no-one ever goes, and leave a note saying they had eloped together...

I have nothing really against either of them. They are just... hanging fruit. And of course all of this is purely in the realm of mental exercise.

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