Like Chilean miners rising from the deep, he thinks, I return to work. The stagecoach pulls up and he hops off. The great stagecoach really has lost its meaning: it was a symbol of pioneers, of doing the Village People and the Pet Shop Boys proud, going west. Now it’s just the 76 from Basingstoke to Andover on a drizzling Thursday morning. Other commuters hustle past him; they leave behind them that faint smell of unsatisfied escapism and piss that accompanies the residents of so many towns in Hampshire. He smells of cheap shampoo.
As he passes office blocks and hotels with their revolving portals he imagines getting stuck in an endless loop: never indoors, never quite out; the absurdity almost makes him smile until he sees a woman go all the way around in the little glass trap and he worries he made her do it with his mind. He gets a coffee. Like the beans, he is grounded. Although he suspects the beans are ground, not grounded, the image of connecting with reality through a beverage and the opportunity for wordplay is too tempting, even if it is only in his head.
Having done everything one can do in Basingstoke to avoid work, he makes his way into the office. He ought to be relishing the mundanity of his work, tomorrow will be miserable in its own special way. The day goes by with the platitudes and meandering anecdotes commonly found beside the watering holes of asbestos-filled Brutalist tower blocks in the Home Counties. He thinks on this: those who tell anecdotes that begins as though there were a punchline inbound like the inevitable coming of the 76 stagecoach to Andover only to find that, much like Hampshire public transport, the joke is on those waiting and the anecdote simply ends without going anywhere like a jet plane whose engines are filled with mustard, should be taken out back and shown the meaning of a satisfying narrative arc with a crowbar and several dozen Newtons of force to the kneecaps. He tells his coworkers about one of the cows his parents own and how frustrating he finds her ability to continually produce faeces as if it were its sole occupation.
At twenty to five he stops working and loiters for the remainder of his time in the office, cleaning coffee mugs and checking light switches. The light switch will always work, and so he thinks that turning it off and on and off and on and off and on again might demonstrate some form of Sisyphean effort. Eventually a buzzer sounds somewhere in the building and the doorway is crowded with eager besuited people wanting to get out of the confines of pinstripe and herringbone. The five o’clock rush is much like opening a small passageway in a prison or slaughterhouse: those not in the first twenty or so percent out are likely to be trampled by their fellows or pulled back in by some other, more malicious force.
His evening passes with a combination, so common to bachelors of his age, of television, a newspaper and beer until at last he rises and then subsequently sinks into bed. His mind fills with the dreads of the day ahead; of travelling to see his parents and their cow, whose efficiency at producing muck would have made Henry Ford with all his invention jealous; of the bus ride there and the horrible possibility of having someone who smells vaguely of something recently deceased sitting beside him; of the various ‘odd jobs’ he would have to do to appease his ageing parents; of waking to another day of bleak and hideous bovine excrement; of having to remove said excrement from the field with a spade not quite long enough to avoid the inevitability that certain particles may enter his lungs. If Sisyphus were alive today, he thinks, his punishment would likely be eternally picking muck from the rear end of his parents’ diarrhetic cow.
In many ways the comparison is admirable: he represents a hero of Greek myth. But, he concludes as he passes through the barriers of the conscious like a teenager passive-aggressively entering DisneyLand, Camus was wrong: one can’t imagine Sisyphus happy. Not with this life.