XZ#1 - Noir

One This was the routine: pour the whisky the moment you wake up at your desk. The glass is ready at your elbow and your eyes can remain closed; your hand can find the bottle in its usual spot between the hole-punch and the ball of rubber-bands in the drawer by your knees. Angle the glass and bury your nose in its fumes.

Don’t think about the evening previous or that blue pain in your ears and return the glass to the desk. Don’t instinctively loosen your tie: you are probably not wearing one. Now, use this unsipped glass of whisky as a paperweight all day until all the documents beneath it have been shifted, until they go from ‘To Do’ to ‘Done’. Finish the glass. Finish the bottle. Buy a new bottle, and shelve it in the usual spot between the hole-punch and the ball of rubber-bands in the drawer by your knees.

The monkey will work for peanuts, the donkey prefers the carrot to the stick, and Sam Grayle would never be putting Sheaffer pen to paper or wingtip shoe to sidewalk until the bottle of Glenlivet is ascertained and close at hand.

The base of the whisky glass was slightly bent which meant that sliding this morning’s slug of liquor across the fresh pile of scattered documents had a pleasingly magnifying effect on the paper beneath. The names on the folders, the telephone numbers, the time-tables, fingerprints; handwriting and typed-up notes all shifted in bulging macro-fiche under its squat, amber eye.

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