Turn 2 of 11

Ask Ellis about his evening — keep talking, keep the wall standing

"I'm fine," you say. It comes out flat, automatic, the way it does when you are not fine but the alternative is a conversation you have not prepared for. You pull your hand off the key and rest it on the desk beside the keyboard, where you can see it, where it is doing nothing.

Ellis makes a sound — not quite a word, just an acknowledgment that he heard you and does not believe you and is choosing not to press. He does that. He logs the question as answered and moves on, and the moving on is not indifference, it is the particular courtesy of someone who has known you eleven years and knows where the edges are.

"What time are you heading out?" you ask. Your voice sounds more normal when it is aimed at someone else's schedule. You can feel the key's warmth still on your fingertip, a ghost of it, like a ring you have just taken off.

"Depends on this manifest discrepancy." He gestures at the screen without looking up.

"Someone booked four pallets as three, or three as four, and the paperwork is being very committed to not making sense. Should be done by half seven. You?"

"Soon," you say. "Just wrapping up."

This is a lie. You finished your actual work at four. Everything since then has been the key, and the tests, and the long quiet hour of sitting with what you know and not pressing. The overhead lights have that particular after-six quality, the amber wash of the emergency setting that Facilities puts the floor on when most people have gone home. Ellis's desk lamp and your desk lamp are the only two warm points in the aisle. The rest is blue-grey, the colour of a workplace that has stopped being a workplace and is just a room.

"Friday tomorrow," Ellis says, and there is something in it — not a suggestion, not quite, but the shape of one, rounded at the edges. He says this most Thursdays. Most Thursdays you let it land where it lands, and neither of you picks it up, and by Monday it has blown away. You are aware, with a sharpness that is new, that this is one of the things the wall is holding up.