After sharing an enormous, emotion-filled hug with her best friend, Nora walks back home, head bowed, sad and angry. She's a 19-year-old, Basque girl who never knew her mother. She had a strictly disciplined upbringing. She was in fact brought up partly by her father and partly by nannies, due to her father's regular business trips. Her father – Gorka, as she calls him – is a high-ranking financial executive in an international business based in Bilbao. For the past three years Nora's been a boarder at a private school in Bilbao and after the summer, she's going to begin her higher education at a prestigious business school in England. She really hates economics and business studies; but she's never been able to make big decisions for herself because her father always makes them for her, and she doesn't really know what to study. Gorka's an authoritarian father who steamrollers his daughter. He expects Nora to become a successful businesswoman, following in his own footsteps; so he books her onto an intensive summer course in Oxford, without even asking her what she thinks about it. Every time she says she hates Business Studies, her father gets angry and tells her he's doing everything in his power to ensure a great future for her.
By the end of her first week in Oxford she realises the course is going to be a tightly-disciplined, rigid pre-seasonal Business Studies programme. She has to justify each personal decision and she has little access to her money. Before she does anything she has to ask permission of her tutor. She experiences a mixture of fury and sadness.
At the end of the week she receives a phone call from her father's lawyer. The bad news is that her father has been arrested on suspicion of committing a big financial fraud by selling worthless shares; and he's going to be in Nanclares, a north Spanish prison, over the summer. The good news is that he'll probably be released in due course.
After thinking about her father's situation all night long, she realizes this is the opportunity she's been waiting for. She needs to find sound arguments to convince her father that she doesn't want to be a businesswoman; that she wants to do something else with her life. In view of the distressing news, her tutor offers to let her off lectures for a day. She decides to escape from Oxford to London, take a job – whatever she can get – and spend the summer focused on herself and her own future and aspirations.
The following morning she packs some clothes and a notebook into a bag just big enough for a day trip so as not to arouse suspicion. She leaves the college and takes the train to London. Nervous but excited, she starts leafing through a free newspaper lying on the seat beside her. After pages of rubbishy pieces of news, in the classified ads section at the back she spots a job vacancy. A recruitment agency based at 25 Old Broad Street is looking for an office cleaner.
Once she arrives at Paddington Station, she calls for an appointment and by a stroke of luck the agency can interview her that very morning. She makes her way straight to what turns out to be a tall, vast and imposing building. Curiously enough, the office to be cleaned is located in the same building as the recruitment agency – the former is on the 23rd floor and the latter is on the 10th. Among the 1 million sq m of empty office space in the City of London, this office was occupied by an advertising agency that went under early on in the economic downturn.
She has three days in which to throw the useless stuff away and clean and tidy the office, in order to be rented again. On this June Monday, the leaden skies reflect the prevailing economic climate in the City of London; and as she's clearing out all the stuff the advertising agency left behind she realises that all these books, magazines, printed advertising slogans and hundreds of images are perfect materials to make a work of art with. Actually, she doesn't want to throw them away.
Suddenly, among all the stuff, she finds a card with the number of the office door on, and feels an unexpected surge of happiness when she discovers that the card unlocks the door. At first, she's thinking of using the card just to take some of the stuff away with her; but, by the time evening comes, tired and with no place to go, she's started to change her mind. She spends each night in the office, sleeping on the sofa in the reception area. Under the cushions she finds a spare pair of office curtains and she pulls them over her to keep warm. During the week she goes out just to buy food and take a shower in the public rest rooms at the Railway Station.
At the end of her three-day stint, once the office has been checked over, she rides the lift down to the recruitment agency and hands back the card they gave her, meanwhile fingering the 'treasure-trove' card in her left pocket. The assistant pays her in cash, mentioning that the office she's just cleaned probably isn't going to be re-let any time soon due to the current economic situation and the drab décor of that particular office. She thanks the assistant, goes to the lift, rides it up to the 23rd floor and locks herself in the toilet. For over three hours she turns her situation over and over in her mind, trying to come to a decision. She knows her father's probably already been told she's escaped from the business school. Afraid that her whereabouts will be discovered, with very little money in her pocket and not knowing a soul in London, she's determined to spend some time living clandestinely in the office.
She hatches a plan. She'll eat from the vending machines, use the toilets to wash herself and her clothes and sleep on the reception area sofa. She's going to stay there, living in secret in the office until she's sent a series of letters to her father to convince him there's a different future for herself and show him how she despises the office lifestyle. Shortly after 6 p.m., once she can be sure there's no-one about, she lets herself into the office.
That night, she can't sleep at all. She keeps thinking about her father and the letters. How can she muster her strongest arguments and convey them to her father? Maybe she should draw the letters. Instead of telling him about herself directly, she could describe her activities and state of mind spatially, as a critique of what it's like to live in an office. To achieve this she could use the former agency stuff that, fortunately, is still in the big dustbins in the utility room in the corridor. The letters will be signed by her, but she won't include any wording or return address – just images and her name. She does not know how she could manage to post the letters and she falls asleep while she think about it. In her dreams she finds a books of stamps. When she has the first letter ready, she sprinkles some sandwich bread crumb on a windowsill of the office. A pigeon comes to eat it and she grabs it and ties her first letter in a bow around one foot. Above the address is written "POST ME". She releases the bird which, weighed down by the letter, alights on the pavement opposite but the bow unfortunately fails and the letter falls on a car and disappear quickly. Then she takes another copy of the letter and writes above the address POST ME, folds the letter into a paper aeroplane, and launches it out of the window towards the letterbox on the opposite side of the street. The letter flies almost directly into the mouth of the box; but she misses her aim and it falls to the ground, where a passer-by soon picks it up and posts it.
In the drawn letters she sets out to show that she lives in the space she's drawn. The letters portray her mood, uncertainties and aspirations in a dynamic construction of her identity that's related to a specific part of the office and a particular living function while trying out a potential occupation.
The office is used as a dwelling but, like her father, she can't leave the place she's in. She decides to live the life of a night owl to minimize the risk of being found out; her sole contact with the outside world is the view from the office windows of the metropolis on the Thames between 5 p.m. and 8 a.m.
Charles Ⅱ statue
14 years ago
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