Shuttlecock Read Online Free

kind of breakdown? (I have had some experience of breakdowns – but I will come to that later.) Could he begoing off the rails from overwork? The answer to that question is: yes – and no. Quinn does work extremely hard. He often stays in his office late into the night – his light shining purposefully through the glass panel when you yourself are winding up a late day. But I get the distinct impression that this extra work Quinn does is more by choice and design than obligation. And when you enter his office on some fleeting and innocent errand – merely to bring him a routine document he has asked for – the picture you get, as you wait for him to raise his head, is of a man happily – I repeat, happily – and earnestly engaged in his tasks. A man pleased with his efforts and sure of their usefulness. It is only when he looks up and says, with a scowl, ‘What is it?’ – as if you have encroached on his contentment – that any discord enters the scene. And then it seems that you are to blame for it.
    So, if that picture – of Quinn contentedly beavering away in his leather chair while outside the cherry tree waves at his window – does not capture his true malice, what does? I will tell you. It is when, at moments during the day, he gets up from his desk and – sometimes for minutes on end – looks down at us through his glass partition. If you look up then, as you only dare do for a brief, disguised instant, you see him framed in the rectangular panel. He stares at us with the air of a scientist surveying some delicate experiment. His face is stern and gloating. He rests his hands against the glass, and the tips of his fingers and the balls of his thumbs go white. It is then that I know that Quinn is evil – I hate him. It is then that I know too, most clearly, that I envy him.
    And let me tell you just two or three things that have been puzzling me – and still are – despite Quinn’s almost incredible remarks yesterday about my promotion.Firstly, those lists of file-items which Quinn gives me to investigate – they are getting remarkably long. It is rare for any one case to involve more than two or three files, but Quinn sometimes has me scouring through five or six – and in some instances I cannot find
any
relation between the material in one file and the next. Secondly, those missing files which I assume Quinn is working on himself (it would explain those late nights of his) do not reappear. I have watched. Even after weeks they are not back in their places. Thirdly, none of the other assistants says anything – only the usual quiet passing complaints about ‘bloody Quinn’. I am beginning to think that it’s only me Quinn is playing games with.
    But I didn’t mean to talk about Quinn, or about my problems. I meant simply to tell you about my work. I’m not the only one who has a tiresome job or a difficult boss. And I don’t want to give the impression that because we work in a dungeon, we are prisoners. That we don’t emerge at lunch-time, like everyone else, and make for the pub on the corner (Quinn, by the way, works through lunch); that we can’t go through, more or less when we like, to our ancillary offices and typing pool, beyond the file rooms, and joke with the girls (there is a new one at the moment called Maureen with extremely thrusting breasts). There is nothing exceptional about our job.
    But I hear you say, Yes, there is, and in an interesting, an exciting way. Something to do, you’re thinking, with the thrill of detective work. I used to think that too once, when I first began. I used to think of all those stories which no one ever knows about, all those buried secrets, hidden away in our files. It must have shown, because Quinn once said to me (here I go again about Quinn): ‘You’ve got a rich imagination, haven’t you, Prentis? Alurid imagination. That doesn’t help, you know, in this job.’ It was the first personal remark I can remember him making, and he said