erithacus' saga: do all miseries indeed derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone?

“Vanguard Fashions Erithacus to the office please”, a tannoy-timbre voice summoned me and put my temporary self-imposed confinement to an end. Warehouse operators were often called to the office and subject to interrogation by Jim the Warehouse Führer about delivery notes they had forgotten or non-correspondence of amounts delivered and actual garment numbers. However, the voice was Mary’s.

I idealised Mary from the first moment I set eyes upon and lusted after her. She was attractive and sharp-witted. Whenever I entered the office and Mary talked to me, I was overcome by a sweet sense of complete wellbeing and eye contact between us gave me an unfamiliar feeling of wholeness.

Destiny was cruel, however, and Mary worked in the same office as Jim. I could not explain why fate had brought the incarnations of good and evil together in the same hardboard-panelled, flickering fluorescent-tube lit office, but those priceless, blissful moments of attunement only occurred when Jim was not present to soil them.

I soon began to get the impression that Mary was calling me to the office with increasing frequency. Being summoned on a regular basis by anyone else might have been cause for vexation because great agility was often required to clamber out from the cardboard warrens without undermining the structure of these temporary erections. Yet when Mary called me I had no objection whatsoever.