Ghosts Don't Affect Typewriters
This was not Anne’s first stint as a secretary. After school she’d trained as a typist and worked in a junior capacity at the local library, firing out letters about overdrawn books and unpaid fines. It was simple work and not at all taxing. She often found that she’d completed most of her tasks by mid-afternoon and had to linger over her last few letters poking at the typewriters keys with one finger when she usually flew across the board. When the job came up at the Foreign Office, Anne applied immediately. It wasn’t an enormous improvement salary-wise, but she hoped there might be more opportunity for promotion and -though this was neither stated openly, nor even implied in the listing- she wondered if she might get to work on classified documents. Whilst working at the library Anne had read her way through all their thrillers and made a significant dent in crime fiction. Consequently, she imagined London to be full of murderers and spies.
The Foreign Office was something of a disappointment. It did not look like it looked in books. Anne had been expecting something regal and rather imposing but the typing pool was based in the dingy basement of an ordinary office block. To the right was a Lyons’ tea shop. To the left a solicitors. Anne’s desk was situated in the corner, beneath one of those thin basement windows through which she could see pedestrians passing on the pavement outside, though only from the shins down. Her desk mate was a girl from Sheffield, by the name of Doreen who, when she really got going with her typing, made an infuriating humming noise. Anne thought of asking if she might reel it in but, wishing to make a good impression, instead leant across the desk and asked where was decent for lunch ‘round here, and would Doreen care for some company.
Over lunch, Doreen told Anne about the ghosts. “I say,” she said, as she picked the tomatoes out of her quiche, “you aren’t the sort who’s bothered by ghosts?” Anne wasn’t. The library had been fairly well-haunted and she’d once spent a summer on a barge, tormented by the spirit of a boy who’d drowned in the canal while trying to fish his football out. Anne didn’t mind the odd ghost, she explained to Doreen, so long as they didn’t interrupt her work. She’d be grand in the office, Doreen reassured her. Their ghosts were quiet secretarial types. They lingered demurely by the coffee table flicking through hairdressing magazines and sometimes primped in the bathroom mirrors. They certainly didn’t affect the typewriters. They were very conscientious ghosts.
“Good to hear,” said Anne and tried to hide her disappointment. She’d hoped the Foreign Office might’ve had a better class of ghost. If there weren’t to be spies in her immediate future, an interfering ghost -the sort intent on bringing down the system- would have been a jolly good alternative. It seemed such a shame to be working for the Foreign Office and not see any significant action, so Anne resolved to create her own. She peppered her typing with secret messages. Send in the troops. Alert all agents. Abort mission. Code red. Code red. She brought paperback novels into the office and kept them hidden in her desk. When requiring inspiration, she’d flick from page to page until she discovered a phrase or sentence which sounded sufficiently authoritative. By the third week of her employment she’d instigated an assassination, declared war upon the Isle of Man and blown the cover of sixteen different secret agents stationed across the USSR.
It didn’t take much investigation to trace these missals back to Anne’s desk. She was thrilled to be summonsed to the big boss’s office; more thrilled to be accused of espionage. She’d been planning her defence for the last two weeks. She was sure her alibi was watertight. Anne smiled confidently at the big boss and his secretary, who was taking notes, at all the gathered operatives “It wasn’t me,” she said, shrugging slightly, “it seems the ghosts have learnt how to affect typewriters. This one must be working for the other side.”
Inspired by Agatha Christie’s 1924 novel, “The Man in the Brown Suit”
Dropped on 21st January 2020 in the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris France
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