In Oxford
Mary Malone PhD is woken at 7:30 by the raucous clangour of the alarm clock. She groans, switches on her bedside lamp, gets up, throws a dressing gown over her nightdress, and shuffles into the chilly kitchen to put the kettle on.
She sits at the kitchen table, shivering, waiting for the kettle to boil. Her flat is heated by electric storage radiators, which have charged up overnight. The other rooms are warm – too warm – but the kitchen does not have a heater. Later, when she returns home, the storage heaters will have cooled down. The scientist in her rails against the manifest inefficiency of a system which heats the flat when she is out and requires the assistance of a supplementary electric fan heater when she is in. However, she cannot afford to have the heating replaced and so must put up with it.
Clutching a mug of milky tea, she returns to her bedroom and gets ready to go out to work. Work has not been easy to find, but she has a mortgage and council tax to pay. She was deemed to have been dismissed from her previous job for gross misconduct and did not qualify for any state benefits. Her savings were small and lasted for only a month or two.
She has learned what it means to be blacklisted. Her job applications have been ignored, or have rarely passed the first interview stage. One potential employer was impressed by her qualifications and evident ability, and invited her back to meet her future fellow workers. This invitation was cancelled in a cold letter two days later. She guesses that the employer was tipped off that she, Mary Malone PhD, is not sound.
She has never been part of the old boys network of interrelationships between the university and the ring of firms that feed off the expertise that it creates. She has few contacts of her own.
She will never return to the Church.
Later, fortified with toast and tea, she wraps herself in an anorak and lets herself out of her front door. Her bicycle is in its usual place behind the back door of the converted house in which she lives. She takes the plastic sheeting off it and pushes it to the front gate. Taking a precautionary look around, she sets off.
Oxford is a city of bicycles, but it is also full of cars, buses, vans and lorries. Mary must keep her wits about her as she cycles to work. If anybody notices her passing they assume that she is what she looks like – a lecturer, maybe, or a researcher. In the University, perhaps, or in whatever they call the Polytechnic now that the old technical colleges have started terming themselves universities. As if there could be more than one university in Oxford.
Mary navigates her way through Oxford's roaring morning traffic and reaches her place of work in good time. She parks her bicycle, says a cheery hello to her colleagues, goes to her locker and puts away her anorak and handbag. She takes out the white coat that is the uniform of her new job, puts it on, and walks over to her workstation.
She sits down at her terminal and logs in. It is nine o'clock. Soon the first customers will be coming in and another day's shift at the checkout in Sainsbury's will have begun.
Mary has been amazed by how little she resents her reduction in status. The job is mindless, true, but it is also free from care. There is a rhythm to the work which she enjoys. She gains an unexpected satisfaction from performing her simple tasks well, knowing that such wider and deeper matters as once concerned her – the meaning of religion, her researches into dark matter, the finding and keeping of a lover – are behind her now. She is liked by her co-workers in the supermarket and is known for her willing and cheerful approach to her job. Naturally she had to conceal certain details of her background before she was taken on, but her supervisors are already marking her down for promotion. They have noticed her intelligence and ability. In the canteen at lunchtime she smiles and chats with the other checkout girls – they are all "girls" here. They are planning a night in a club – would Mary like to come? Yes, of course she would, though she secretly wonders how she will be able to afford to stand her friends a round of drinks at club prices.
The afternoon shift begins. An endless stream of groceries passes before her. She lifts them one by one past the scanner, alert for the harsh beep that signifies a mis-scan. She prides herself on how well she uses the scanner and keeps a mental tally of her failures. So do the computer systems in the company's back office.
Shoppers pass through the supermarket. It is company policy that each customer should be greeted individually as they reach the checkout, but for Mary this is more a pleasure than a duty. She already knows many of the regular customers, and they often prefer to use her checkout so that they can chat to her over the cornflakes, packets of detergent and oven-ready chickens.
It is dark when she leaves Sainsbury's at the end of her shift. She cycles home in the January gloom, parks her bicycle in its usual place and wraps it up against the rain. Opening the street door of her house she checks her mail on the table in the hallway. Two brown envelopes and a crumpled Jiffy bag. She pockets them and walks up the stairs to her first-floor flat. Letting herself in, she dumps her things in the hall, makes herself another cup of tea in the kitchen and then settles down in front of the television news to read her post.
The brown envelopes are, respectively, a form rejection letter and an invitation to the opening of a new Audi dealership in Headington. Mary cannot imagine why she was selected to receive this particular piece of junk mail. She files the rejection letter with all the others and throws away the invitation to test drive a new Audi TT sports car. Then she opens the Jiffy bag. There is a note inside – and some other things. The note is from somebody she believed she had lost touch with for ever. She looks again at the items that have fallen from the bag and reads the note with growing disquiet.