When I clock in late, my manager gives me the look of death and my brain screams against the inside of my skull, but I nod apologetically and shove my stuff in my locker. They don’t know about Alex at work. The funeral was on a Saturday and by the time I walked in on Monday morning it was all over. I don’t see the point of milking false sympathy from co-workers I only ever really converse with on Facebook so I say I’m ill, hungover, going through a bad patch with Sabine. The waiting room is half full. The ticket machine has already fed out twenty-seven tickets - little triangular-nosed pink things, like carnival tokens, except the winner’s prize is a heated one-to-one discussion about housing benefit payments. Their payments aren’t enough, they’re too late, they’re being stopped, or the claimant doesn’t have the right paperwork, they don’t understand the form, they need the money now, for fuck’s sake, not next month. The one unifying factor is that it’s all my fault.
