Psychological horror · 7 min read ·
The Second Interview
She keeps being called back to interview for the position she has held for years, and each panel remembers her employment differently than the last.
- perspective: first
The letter says I have been shortlisted, first round, and asks me to bring a copy of my CV and two references, one of whom must be my current line manager. I found it in my own in-tray, on the third shelf, where nobody puts anything but me.
I want to be careful here, because when I tell this to my sister she says, gently, the way you talk to somebody on stairs, that I should just go to the interview and sort the mix-up out in the room. She has heard the part about my name being on the shortlist in my own handwriting. It goes past her the way rain goes past a window, and I understand why, because I have worked in this office for eleven years and the fact does not go past me either, and yet here is the letter, and my hand made the list.
I have been interviewed for this position before. I want to say that plainly, in case the rest of this reads like confusion. The post is documentation officer. I applied for it in the spring eleven years ago, was appointed in the summer, and have sat with the lanyard, the desk by the north vent, and the payroll reference beginning CI- ever since. The first year, my manager introduced me at the departmental meeting as the new documentation officer, and twenty faces turned to me and smiled. There was a card on my desk that first week. It had a cartoon of a filing cabinet. I still have the card. I still have the desk. I am still the new documentation officer, and that is where the sentence starts to come apart in my mouth.
The interviews have happened seven times now. I used to say eight, and then I found the seventh in the folder with the others, so it is seven, and I am firmer with my own count than I was. Nobody announces them. A calendar invitation arrives from the staffing team, always for a Tuesday at half past two, always titled Second Interview, as if the first one, the real one, the one I sat in eleven years ago, is the one being repeated. I have attended every one. I would like to be a person who did not, and I have read about standing things up, but these are my colleagues, and the room is room 14, and I know the walk to it the way I know the walk to the stairwell.
The panels change and the panels don't. There is the chair, Mr. Stook, who is not anybody's chair in the actual office; the staffing team could not produce him from a name search, I have done it, civility, indexes, staff directory, the whole ladder, and there is no principal officer called Stook anywhere in the organization. And Mrs. Dibley sits with him, and she and I process the same post backwards and forwards on the north run every day, and when she goes past my desk at nine she never passes my desk, and I have watched her gait go round my corner twice now.
In the room they remember me wrongly, and this is the part I cannot say to anyone at the office because of what it does to their faces. Mr. Stook remembers that I was, in his words, just short last time, just missed out, terribly close, and we were all rooting for you. He says it the way people say kind things at the door of a chapel. Last time was the time I got the job, and I have said so, in room 14, five times now, and each time he nods with real warmth and says, of course, of course, you would know that better than me. Mrs. Dibley remembers my being from somewhere. She asked about my coming up from the coast, and whether my mother still kept the shop there, and my family has never lived within fifty miles of a coast, and I said so, and she said how good that must be for them, the peace of it, and looked at me with such settled fondness that I let her have the shop. I let her have the coast. Twice, now, in that room, I have answered questions about my life in a voice I do not use, and it frightens me more than anything the room itself does.
What is the position, do I hear you ask. Documentation officer. It is the same post. It has to be the same post, and the panel's information pack proves it, because I have asked to see it, and the specification they hand across is mine, my own typed pages, my own stale tea ring on the last sheet, duties word for word as I retyped them in my third year when the manual was revised. They are interviewing me for my job with my own tea ring on the evidence.
I have tried everything a diligent person tries. I reported the duplicate competition to the registrar of competitions, in writing, enclosing my contract, and the reply came thanking me for my interest in the post and confirming that shortlisting would follow. The reply is addressed to me at my current desk. Payroll says I cannot be paid for attending an interview for a post I hold, and I did not ask to be. My GP, whom I like, wrote refusal in my notes and a word I will not put here, and then the practice rang and asked me kindly to bring in the documentation officer's file, because they had misfiled mine, and the voice on the phone was the GP's own, and I stopped going, and enrolled on the interview training the union runs.
The training did not help. The trainer said, when a panel misremembers you, correct them once, then let it pass, and I could feel every person at the table doing the arithmetic of my face as she said it. What the trainer did not say, because she does not know, is what I have been sitting on since the sixth interview, and have decided to put down here, because this page has no faces on it.
At the end of the sixth interview, Mr. Stook stood to shake my hand, and he said the sentence they always say, which is that I would be hearing within the week, and then he turned to Mrs. Dibley, on my way out the door with my hand still on the handle, and said, quietly, the settled voice a person uses about weather, she's much closer this time. And Dibley said, oh, she always was, and they both laughed, not unkindly, and the laugh went on a half beat longer than a laugh about staffing ever goes.
This time Tuesday's invitation has come, and I will go, because they are my colleagues and room 14 needs somebody in it. But I have done one thing differently, and I want the record to show it. I have written my letter of introduction, the one I read at my own first interview eleven years ago, out from memory, and I have compared it against the carbon copy in my box at home, and they agree word for word, and the thing that agrees is this: there is no question in my letter of how long I had been the new documentation officer already. My own letters, both of them, eleven years apart, open by referring to my years in the post. And I have checked the letterhead on the old one, and there is no year on any copy of it, and I am not going to room 14 tomorrow to find out whose half beat the laugh keeps time to. I am going because somebody should, and because if I sit facing the vent, and answer in my own voice as long as I can, the room only ever takes what I hand it.