Enid was sitting at her desk wearily, with lowered eyes; Gerald stood some way off, searching for a book on one of the shelves on the wall.

‘Oh, hello there Joseph.’ Enid muttered, having caught sight of the lawyer, then she did a double-take, ‘w-wait, how did you come in?’

‘I...’ K hesitated for a fraction of a second, ‘I came in a minute ago, I was just checking something in the storage cupboard.’

He felt both pairs of eyes on him now.

‘We-ell, I swear I never heard you come in, that’s a little scary that is.’

‘Don’t be silly, Enid – he just came in a minute ago and went over to the cupboard.’ Gerald chided, with a smile. K couldn’t imagine why he was backing him up, except to have another way of teasing Enid, but he wasn’t about to complain. At that moment he realised, in any case, that he was still in just his overcoat and underclothes, but this hardly bothered him now that he’d escaped the catacombs (as they appeared to him in hindsight). If his goal had been to get in on time, he’d managed it; there was no use fussing over trivial details.

He walked over to the place that had been set for him – discernable from the enormous mass of papers and documents piled upon it. Just as he sat down, being careful to button his overcoat up to his chin so that no one should notice anything particularly amiss, Enid was at his shoulder.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Joseph, but I’ve got your time sheet to fill in – you just need to note what you happen to be doing on a minute by minute basis. If you notice the multiple, vertical columns, they divide the page into different types of activities – including reading, filing, writing, copying, meeting, visiting, toileting, sneezing,’

‘Sneezing?’ said K, holding the paper in his hand – a grid of almost illegible lines and symbols.

‘For hygiene and health reasons – we’re to keep a record of sneezes, coughs, nosebleeds et cetera, to prevent the spread of infections and to account for time off, inefficiency and all that.’ Her usual witty and vibrant tone of voice had taken on a glazed quality as she rattled off these points.

‘Take your time to look over it, dear, you’ll learn to live with it – or not, as the case may be, heh!’ and she sloped off back to her desk – facing opposite him – pushing a pair of glasses onto the end of her nose before setting down to her own work.

Gerald, after a number of stretches and crackings of hard-to-reach joints, sat down beside her and began his work also. A hush descended in the office, and a peaceful, productive atmosphere it was, what with the gentle sunlight slanting in through the windows, and a faint breeze. The clock on the wall struck 9.

Joseph looked over his time-sheet and pre-emptively struck out the first hour and a half as ‘reading’ time, before being a little confused by the separate columns allotted to ‘sorting’ and ‘filing’. In the event, he blotted out all three, supposing that the management could not be as pedantic as all that. Then, he set the time sheet aside and began to look over the first of the great pile of documents on his desk. It was an agenda for a meeting scheduled for 8:59 that morning, bearing the title ‘time-sheet handover and explanation.’

‘Fair enough,’ K shrugged, sliding the paper into a bin on his right. He barely had time to read the title of the next page – another agenda – when Abigail swept into the room and drew up beside him, with a smile and a wink intended to preserve the sacred silence of the office, handing him another note. In fact, it was a document of several pages, entitled ‘Beginner’s briefing for new lawyers in the event of the grievous, sudden bereavement of the reigning Lord of the estate.’ Surprisingly, the pages were very dusty, yellowed with age, and their print was almost entirely faded into a kind of coppery-green watermark. Joseph gave her as friendly a nod as he could manage, and laid it carefully in a bin to his left marked ‘to read’.

Returning to the previous document – the agenda – he read, in a marvellous, flowing script, of fresh, raven-black ink on pristine white paper, ‘Beginner’s briefing handover’. There was only one item on the agenda, which read: ‘hand over beginner’s briefing’. He passed this into the right hand bin.

Suffice it to say that most of the morning passed in this manner, with an almost constant exchange of documents between all four clerks. The schedule was so timed that one always heard the scraping of one chair or another as someone rose to pass something, but in a pattern that was both predictable and surprising in a peculiar way. It was best not to try and analyse it. Yet there was a dance-like grace to proceedings, even as K thought that nothing was being accomplished by it, exactly.

One thing he did ponder – who exactly was writing all these agendas in such a painstaking, neat hand. It filled him with a certain amount of self-importance, not to say conceit, to think of the army of scribes working away tirelessly in some part of the estate to make his work possible. This feeling, after a few minutes, made him a little uneasy, and self-conscious, however, and he dismissed the thought.

By 11, he found his eyes beginning to wander periodically towards the window, to snatch a view of the sky or the grounds. By 12, he found his stomach was rumbling and his thoughts were turning to lunch and the vast dining room downstairs. At last it was 1 by the clock on the wall, and a bell was struck, sounding the call to lunch.

K looked down with a fresh pair of eyes at his desk and found the pile of documents had not diminished in size at all, but that the two bins either side of him were both quite full, none of the reading material to his left having yet been touched. He wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve, and rose with his colleagues, feeling strangely sluggish. He’d no idea why he felt so hungry after the heavy breakfast he’d had, and the deep sleep of the last night. Nonetheless, he filed after Enid and Abigail towards the door, imagining innumerable other workers in the estate buildings or the grounds doing the same, as tired and hungry as he. Gerald appeared at his elbow, smiling as usual, and asked him how he was getting on.

‘Oh, fine, fine. Thank you for asking,’ he murmured, holding his tongue. Gerald seemed to notice this, for he said nothing else, but looked down at the floor.

‘That is to say...’ K continued, ‘I’m a bit concerned about how I’m meant to keep up with my reading; what with all these agendas and instructions, I keep being handed, there’s not been time for me to get stuck into any of the briefing notes.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about those things,’ Gerald replied, ‘I think you’ll find all that will sort itself out over time; most of the time it’s enough just to handle what’s coming into the ‘in’ tray, so to speak, but if that ever gets too much for you, just give me a nod and we’ll see what we can do about it.’

‘That’s very kind, I hope it won’t come to that, though.’

Gerald made no reply to this, but it seemed to K that his smile grew just a bit.

They continued along the corridors in silence – K, lost in thought; Gerald, in a world of his own it seemed. The journey back downstairs felt a whole lot longer and, to K’s mind, needlessly complicated after the route through the hidden passage, but there was something reassuring about their plodding progress through a well-lit, warm, and tidy interior. Doors, opening frequently on either side of them, released hungry workers like shoals of fish darting downstream, and offered the occasional snapshot of the varied working conditions within the place.

Gerald led them down a shortcut – taking a stairway that veered back in the opposite direction, but which cut through several floors in one swoop. Joseph found himself in a wholly new area – a common occurrence, need it be said – so different in kind from what he’d seen already that he couldn’t quite register what he was looking at. It was as if they’d reached the guts of the estate, for the area in which they walked was somewhere between a factory floor and a boiler-room – a vast hangar filled with metal pipes of every shape and dimension. Starting just above eye level, they rose up beyond the point of visibility – either because the ceiling was very high, or because the tangle of tubes grew so dense before one’s eyes that it was like looking for the horizon through a forest, where the trees progressively layer up until scarcely the sun can shine a light in.

There were, K noticed, men sitting in slings and hammocks suspended from various pipes – many of them snoring away. A few workers – not those on the night shift, evidently – were shimmying down on ropes from above with the ease and elegance of acrobats, in uniforms of bright blue, almost indigo, overalls, and caps that covered the ears, fastening under the chin. Many of these paid no heed to their sleeping colleagues, but called out in loud voices to one another, laughed, joked and sang songs as they headed off to their lunch. Not that their hubbub made much of a difference to the general racket of clangs, hissing, groaning and creaking of pipes, which rather necessitated a form of communication consisting in shouts and exaggerated gestures. Indeed, these men had no use for subtleties, and K found this refreshing. Several of them exchanged winks with Gerald and him as they passed (no one could have mistaken their winks for a blink or a squint – they accomplished them with almost the whole body, if that can be imagined), but they seemed all to be heading away from the lunch hall.

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‘Is it not their time to eat lunch?’ K shouted hoarsely into Gerald’s ear.

‘What? Oh, no, it is. They’re off to the labourers’ quarters – about a mile in that direction.’ He pointed back the way they’d come.

K looked back, curious to see those burly, and also very merry, labourers tramping in the opposite direction to Gerald and him. The smiles on their ruddy faces; the booming laughter, brought him back in some measure to the friends of his student days, but distorted and different – like the unfamiliar reflections in the pipes running level with his head. The very strangeness, mixed with the familiar, filled him with a sudden longing to see what these other quarters were like. That, and the thought of what was waiting for him in the office that afternoon – the hours of silent reading and filing, unbroken hours that lulled you into a stupor – filled him with unusual daring, not for the first time that day. Perhaps, he thought, it was something in the atmosphere – something chemical leaking out of all these pipes? Or else he justified: ‘I need to ease into this job; if I’m on the go, giving it all I’ve got all the time, I’ll burn out. Now, while I’m an absolute beginner, is the perfect time to take a few liberties. Why not go exploring?’

With this attitude, he slowed his pace somewhat, and just as they were coming up to a narrower passage – hemmed in by some particularly low-hanging pipes – Gerald went ahead of him, leaving K free to look around for an opportunity to give him the slip. It didn’t take much looking. A flash of indigo caught his eye, and sure enough, there was a pair of overalls hanging, unattended, over a particularly fat and noisy length of tubing. K nabbed it as he passed by, hoping that it wouldn’t be missed; intending (quite sincerely) to return it to the same spot, however he might find it again. They bore no name or number, and judging by the oil stains down the back, along with the rather threadbare trousers, they’d been ditched anyway. He spied a knapsack too, which had been stuffed in the end of a bell-like open pipe, to muffle the noise coming out of it. It must have been there for months, for it was stiff and crinkled with age, but it would do for K to stuff his overcoat into when he donned his disguise.

The very fact that these elements had been so forthcoming was greatly encouraging, so that he had hardly any doubts when he saw Gerald, tall, serene, drifting ahead, leaving him behind. K seized his moment to dodge aside, duck behind some kind of control console, and slip on the overalls. The moment he’d done so, he felt at least five times lighter and more confident. It’s true, they were very dirty, itchy, and rather smelly, but then the official’s uniforms he’d seen looked stiffer and more uncomfortable for all their starch and fussiness. Just having them on, K felt himself beginning to move differently, in a free and easy way that some might have called slovenly, if they were feeling snobbish. It seemed the most natural thing in the world now to head down-current with the other labourers, and so he fell in behind a gang of four who were chatting noisily about the one thing on their minds at that very moment – filling their stomachs.

This earthy simplicity also appealed to K as he heard them, and seemed the perfect antidote to the worrisome chatter of thought that had been filling his head most of the morning. Keeping step with their long, leisurely strides, the journey back in the direction he’d come didn’t seem to take half so long, and he soon realised that they were travelling on a downward slope, whereas before he’d been coming up an incline.

Eventually, they passed the stairs which he’d taken, and all at once the path got very narrow again, so that the labourers had to file up two-by-two. Someone had scrawled the title ‘Pitzhangar lane’ in graffiti on one side of the passageway – as close to an official title for this place that K supposed he was likely to get from these rough and ready types. It seemed strange to him that, though he could only have travelled about half a mile to get back to this point, from then on it was as if the journey was contracted, for the remaining half seemed to take less than half the time; the final quarter even less, until he stumbled headlong into the doors to the labourers’ mess.

I can hardly attempt to describe the smell to you; it came in layers, like a poorly thought out sandwich, but the top layer – a tantalising aroma of home-cooking – made up for the other, ghastly, undertones of dirty washing and body odour. The “dining hall” was a sight. At the far end were the kennels, where many of the run-of-the-mill hunting dogs were kept – or not, for they just about had free roam of the place. In the rafters above pigeons nested besides sparrows and starlings, and along the rough stone floor ran long wooden tables and benches, packed with men and women in overalls. The din was, if not deafening, then of a level to cover the sound of a foghorn or trumpet fanfare. Worse was the mess, for it was a long-standing tradition in the ‘pits’ as they were known, to throw one’s leftovers to the local four-footed or feathered residents, part of the fun being to see if they would get into a fight over them.

Thus the air was full of diving, flapping birds, and the lanes between the tables were taken up in endless processions of hounds, faster off the mark than the most attentive waiter, and probably more welcome there. They dashed up and down incessantly; some of them leaping onto the tables if a seat went vacant or a meal was left unattended; and the humans never begrudged them these antics, being far more likely to shower the canines with affection than the birds, whom they regarded as little better than vermin. Sometimes they would throw stones up at the nests in the rafters, or prod them with long sticks (all in the course of a meal time). But this had the adverse effect, following Newton’s law, of bringing down debris somewhere else in the room, thus provoking a bust-up.

It was difficult to take all of this in at a glance, and while K hesitated on the threshold, making sense of the scene that met his eyes (and ears), a steady stream of labourers was barging past him towards a row of buttery hatches along the right-hand wall. Though he had had far from enough of taking in the spectacle alone, K joined the queue, for his stomach had other priorities. Simple, heavy food was served in handsome portions into metal tins: great slices of thick white bread, like door-stoppers; dense masses of some kind of pale-green mash; dumplings; meatballs; and all served up with a tankard of some dark, almost black liquid which gave off a scorched wood smell. It might have been ale to K’s eyes, if it had had any kind of head of foam on it. He didn’t dare taste it until he’d got some food down, however, which was just as well for him.

Finding a place to sit was not so bad as all that, since shifts were so irregular in the pits that there were constant comings and goings in the labourer’s mess, and the food hall was always in use, every hour of the day and night. K only had to lunge forward when a space appeared (before any dogs were at his heels) in order to claim it, for the men and women down there were an easy-going lot, and were so used to having conversations broken off by the endless coming and going, that they had all got into the habit either of joining a discussion in the middle, or else starting up a new topic instantly. Indeed, neither presented much of a challenge even to an outsider, for the general topic of conversation was usually the first thing on their minds at any given moment; and seldom being very imaginative, this usually turned out to be the food, or their immediate surroundings:

‘Bye Ted, see you later!’

‘Hi Ned.’

‘Say, it’s you again!’

‘Good to see you – great grub this.’

‘Delicious – just like last week.’

‘And the week before.’

‘Haha!’

‘Eh, look at what Ed’s up to.’

‘Uh oh, he’s up the wall again.’

‘Crazy old Ed! Leave those dogs alone!’

‘Give ‘im what for!’

‘Alright, Red?’

And so on.

K kept his head out of it, content simply to observe their ways. He looked up, at the sound of a clamour some way to the right of where he was seated, among Red, Ned and a few others, and saw what all the fuss was about.

Someone – Ed, presumably – had tossed a rope over one of the rafters, and had tied the other end of it round his knapsack in a kind of sling, not unlike the hammocks strung up in the hangar. Now he’d laid a dog in the sling and was hoisting it up to the ceiling amid whoops and shouts from the crowd. The dog didn’t seem to be bothered by this, but when it got enough height, began to swing itself with its own weight, building up momentum in order to snap its jaws at the birds lodged up there. These promptly scattered, except for one dove – or whitish pigeon if there is much difference – who was pluckier and cheekier than the rest, and who flew over to land on the top of the dog’s head. The poor thing swung around, snapping in vain, looking hung up, rather helpless and all the more silly for its impotent rage at the dove.

The crowd below, and Ed especially, howled with laughter at this (while some of the dogs simply howled), since none of them had the imagination to have foreseen how things would turn out. I suppose that was what kept them so amused by everything all of the time. K allowed himself a laugh with the rest of them, before venturing to tuck into his food.

It was very heavy stuff; the mash began to fill his belly after just a couple of spoonfuls, and the bread sank down like a lead weight. Indeed, a peculiar combination of sluggishness and energy came over him – a kind of energy that made him feel he could have hiked the length of a marathon without flagging, but would scarcely have managed a sprint across the room. All his limbs began to feel heavy, yet very strong – like great girders that could lever open a prison door, or slowly crush a man. It was a fearful kind of strength.

K reached for his mug gingerly, feeling he could do with a drink, and was grateful for its sturdiness in his now clumsy hands. That odour of scorched wood was all the more enticing and indefinably familiar now that he’d got some of the labourers’ food down, and he gulped it with gusto. Big mistake. It didn’t exactly burn on the way down, but the impact rolled in slowly like storm clouds and hit like a clap of thunder. It was rather like being punched underwater, or in slow-motion, and instantly transferred the heaviness in his limbs to his brain, once the thunder clap had passed.

K swayed in his seat with a gravity that could not be called ‘giddiness’ by any stretch, but was much the same thing on a larger, slowed-down scale. He at once began to find everything very amusing around him, and stared for some minutes at the spoon in his hand with a fascination that transcended word or thought. It was as if, for the moment his eyes rested on it, his whole existence had been absorbed in that spoon – and the same thing happened with whatever he looked at. Best of all was to look at the faces of his fellows, which filled his heart with an immediate warmth and deep sense of fulfilment – for in that they’d shared the same food, they looked at the world in the same way, and a certain understanding (without room for doubt) passed through their eyes. And it erupted from the lips in such banal expressions as:

‘Good to see you, Jed.’

‘Great food, ain’t it, Zed?’