Training course

Lounging upstairs, a bored boy, twisting his hair and lurching up dizzy from bed, clicks on TV, and sits humming. Half-shaven he sits bored with chin on palm, later he'll go downstairs slugging quick a cup of tea and later he'll go outside, open fresh the heavy back door and step out onto grim soot-marked pavements and the hugeness of droopy autumn. He'll roam anxiously around town, sniffing, plodding his boots round the cluttered backstreets, huddled in his jacket, wanders back home, boils the fat lunk-headed kettle for more vacant sips of sugary tea... Becomes the cliché of the unsatisfied boy upstairs in his room.
Sometimes they set up dull training courses for you to go on, which train you for nothing, and you end up sitting on a seat around the edges of a sad brownwood lecture-room, everything having the atmosphere of an AA meeting really, you'll sit and chew gums in your jeans and trainers, fold your arms, check out dim newspapers. The training provider is an officious and partly domineering Welsh lady in a smart business suit and tied-back hair bustling around self-importantly with clipboards and photocopied worksheets. Around the edges of the room sit the eighteen to twenty-five year olds in bleak workshy jokes after a while.
At one end of the room was a business lecture type board standing there, which the woman would use, flipping over the pieces of paper to point out the next hastily-drawn, childish diagrams or discourse for five minutes on obvious facts. The whole system of training is tailored for dumb people.
Upstairs there's an airy room with a big window looking out onto grey rainwashed cityscape roofs, and at the back a tiny backroom filled to the windows with old folders and boxes of superfluous data. Robert is sitting around the edges, practical-faced, going through all the routines like a good boy, but with that underlying cynicism always present, that dark anarchism sleeping beneath in sadistic jokes. Ticking off his worksheet, sitting blankfaced in front of the shiny computer, waiting till end of day for the highlight of the day, when travelling expenses are doled out from a steel cashbox and he can go home. He sits frustrated, grinning now and again at the jokes of his peers, flicking through newspapers, scanning rows of close-set dusty type and stealing brown envelopes and sheafs of printer paper from the in-tray.