Behaving Like Adults by Anna Maxted Page A

sounds, limbered up his tongue by attempting to write his name in the air with it, opened up his range by standing on all fours like a cat, miaowed ‘up and down a wall’ (touching the appropriate body part when he reached the bottom note ‘to focus the sound’), and diligently completed his articulation exercises (‘pepperpot pepperpot pepperpot pepperpot! Many men many men many men many men!’).
    At the end, Claudia and I clapped. Partly to ensure it
was
the end. I offered Nige my chair – we didn’t have a sofa in the office, the last thing I needed to do with those two was encourage sloth – and he bowed his thanks. Then he pretended to be in love with it. He did a good job. It was an ugly grey chair, one of those orthopaedic contraptions that bullies you into correct posture and spits in the face of style. At one point his lust for that chair was so
visceral
I looked away. My face screwed up of its own accord.
    I told him afterwards, ‘That was very convincing. Wasn’t it, Claw?’
    â€˜Oh yeah. We’ll probably come into the office tomorrow to a family of little chairs.’
    As it was hard to say if she was being sarcastic, Nige was forced to be satisfied. (Although only a standing ovation from Dennis Hopper and Al Pacino could have accomplished that.) Of course, another great swathe of the morning was then frittered fetching celebratory cups of coffee and KitKats and discussing what makes someone a lead, and the method and the breed of actor who, if cast as a murderer, felt obliged to run amok first and kill five people. I was enjoying myself, until I looked at the clock and saw that it was midday.
    â€˜Right,’ I said. ‘That’s it. Come on. Work.’
    Claw and Nige sighed, wiped the crumbs from their mouths and turned to their desks with regret. So did I. I found it hard to concentrate. I hadn’t told them about Nick moving out, not only because it would have meant another bumper round of coffees and KitKats. They’d have demanded an explanation and I didn’t want to explain. Unless the words are already formed in your head, neatly packaged like a false alibi, explanations can drag you down paths you don’t wish to go. Friends ask bold poking questions and trick you into analysing the whys and the hows of your experience.
    I’d patted earth over my experience so I wasn’t going to allow anyone to dig it up. Now and then a rotting claw sprang from the cold earth but I’d stomp it down again. Anything else wasn’t in my best interest. I started going through applications. Funny, how some women in their mid-twenties still write on bunny rabbit notepaper. And I don’t mean Miffy or Hello Kitty (a cat, I know) or any childhood character that could scrape by as ironic kitsch. I mean earnestly sketched brown creatures hopping about a painstakingly drawn forest glade. I suppose it’s acceptable when you’re seven or seventy, but I can’t condone it when favoured by someone in between. It suggests self-delusion on a grand scale.
    That day, I was annoyed by little things. First, the rabbits. Then, two people spelt definitely, ‘definately’. Definite, from the word
finite
, for goodness’ sake, don’t you know anything?
    And thirdly, I opened a letter from a guy who wrote that he didn’t like people who ‘picked there nose’s’. I took his application and scrunched it up and threw it in the bin. Then I got it out again. He was applying for a date with a girl, not to Oxford University to teach English. Then I threw it back in the bin. I’m sorry but ‘picked there nose’s’ was
ignorant
. He was stupid. No one has to be stupid. Stupidity is laziness. It’s a refusal to apply yourself, itshows contempt for the rest of the world, it means you’re too complacent to bother employing logic. ‘Picked there nose’s’ betrayed a small-mindedness I