The Mound / Christopher Murtagh

Fiction

The moneytree died.

Iris was not surprised, every one of the last six attempts to plant something in the office plant pot had swiftly met the same fate.

The pot was huge. It had a square inverted ziggurat shape. Grey and stylish but brutally stained, like concrete, almost exactly like the facade of the sixties office block they worked within. The pot had outlasted tens of managers, hundreds of staff. Outlasted corporations, mergers, dissolutions. When an influx of cash meant it was time to rip out all the tables and filing cabinets, the pot remained. There was no planting budget. It was a good enough looking pot. It would have taken two or more of them to move it. So always, the pot remained.

Tyler crouched beside the dead plant, much to the surprise of Iris.

Few had ever given it that much attention. He was a good lad Tyler. Very polite. Maybe someone had told him to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, or maybe, he just had good fashion sense. He was rarely off-trend. His shirt was always ironed. The locks that flowed from his centre parting were never unkempt. Iris knew he wouldn’t be with them for very long, but in a good way. Tyler took out a pair of office scissors and started cutting away at the moneytree leaves. Then he worked away on the branches. Some of the thicker pieces he had to take over to the guillotine to slice.

“What are you up to Tyler?” Iris asked.

“Permaculture micro-posting,” he replied.

“Really? How lovely.”

He piled up the leaves and cut branches in the centre of the pot, then went off to the kitchen / staff room. Tyler tore

open tea bags fished from the kitchen bin and crumbled them over his mound as if preparing a sacrament.

“For the nitrogen,” he whispered, as he rubbed the last grains of tea-dust over his creation.

“Wonderful.”

Iris didn’t entirely understand the process, but didn’t want to ask too many questions. She knew to add her apple cores and orange peels and the crusts from her sandwiches, but never dairy and never pistachio shells.

“Well why don’t we make use of all the scraps?” Iris asked Julie on the front desk, a couple of days later. The receptionist forcefully agreed, and they both looked at a feeble aspidistra on the waiting area table with the eyes of hungry lionesses.

“I’ll get the scissors,” said Julie.

When Joanne in HR received a large bouquet on her retirement, that would have just ended up in the bin, they knew what to do. And soon after, the typists upstairs became an endless supply of sweetheart roses and lilies from mystery men of dubious existence.

It was lucky that in the vital first few months of life of the mound the office line manager was away on stress leave. A couple of experienced staff members covered the management tasks for a fortnight at a time. The basic management tasks. The few basic management tasks they understood. They had no real authority and little interest in matters relating to the dos and don’ts of office workspace biophilia.

The mound was watered with cold tea. Cups forsaken for pressing phone calls, for spreadsheets or emails, or folding letters, franking envelopes, filing folders, every cold forgotten half-mug-full found the mound.

The left-hand page background: a photo looking directly down at the dirt, which is dotted with plants.

@sigmund on Unsplash

It was fed by sneaky drops in passing, mid-stride by colleagues whose name Iris didn’t even know. Others would make a show of doing their bit. For some, it seemed a good excuse to stop and chat, to stretch their legs, to just get up and do something less miserable for a minute.

When Julie brought news there would be a new line manager next week, the three lunching ladies broke from their salads.

“It’s getting a little large now,” said Iris, her tone suddenly hushed.

“When a new one comes in, they always try to make an impact.”

“Do we know what they are like?”

“Karen interviewed him.” They all made their opinions of Karen clear without any words.

“We need to do something.”

When they each reached the last few scraps of greens left in their biodegradable sustainable bamboo lunchboxes, Julie grasped their forearms. “I’ve got access to the laminator,” she said.

When Tony, the new manager, made his first tour of the office, his reaction to the mound was a loud, “What?”

No one said a thing, as he stepped closer and closer to it. The mound was now twice as big as the pot. It was at least ten centimetres taller than the desk beside it.

“What?” he said quieter, as he stood above and inhaled a good long whiff of the mound. His eyes appeared to follow a tiny fly as it wobbled through the air. Iris fought the urge to grit her teeth, kept a strong smile on her face as she pointed out the laminated sign blutacked to the wall.

The sign said—

Eco-office Bio-mound. Recycle > Regenerate > Activate.

The left-hand page background. A camera looking directly down at soil. The left half of the image is covered in leafy plants, while the right is somewhat bare.

It was decorated with clip art of a smiling boy with two thumbs up and a triangle of green arrows swirling on his t-shirt. And in the top right corner, was the mark, the official logo of their company. Tony pinched the top of his nose. Started to gradually stroke his thin stubble. At that moment, Iris would have done anything for that mound, but she didn’t know what she could do for it. She pointed again at the sign, specifically at the logo on the sign. And then casually as she could, turned away and went back to pretending to work.

Everyone left the new manager to his examination of the mound and of the sign on the wall. Eventually, he walked back to his desk at the other side of the office, not having said another word.

Iris told herself it was a good thing that he hadn’t said anything, or at least it wasn’t a bad thing. He was turning a blind eye. Surely? As she dressed for bed she was frantic. Her husband put down his novel and rubbed her back, he listened but he couldn’t understand, not really.

Sleep would not come until it got light. She dreamt of being lost in an endless office. A maze of filling cabinets and desks. No life, only thin aluminium and sponge and carpet and styrofoam ceiling panels. She ran frantically to colleague after colleague asking them if they had seen her pot. But all they could say in return were the mechanical greetings they said a hundred times a day, the script of their company, for answering every customer call.

She saw Tyler then in silhouette against the light of the windows, far on the other side of the office. His hair glowed golden in the sun.

The more she struggled to get closer, the more filing cabinets and carpet and desks rolled back between them.

Countless colleagues held their phones out to her, the phones were ringing and he was slipping still further away.

An office chair spun right into her chest spilling her to the floor, to her bed, to her ringing alarm.

The next day, Tony made a show of walking up to the mound with a stride that told them all he was certainly go-

ing to get something done. It pained Iris to look. It pained her more to not. Once there, Tony flicked open his briefcase, and pulled out a bulging paper bag.

“Grass clippings,” he said, “you need a proper balance of green to brown material.” He smiled warmly at Iris, who could have almost kissed him. “And. . .” he said as he pulled out a little metal tin. “. . .best of all, these little colleagues.” Tony lovingly blessed the mound with skinny and long, pink purple compost worms.

Once the heap was sufficiently claimed by Tony, it was a free for all. It grew at twice the speed of before. The gardeners, who maintained the car park, were informed of the new place for their green waste. Documents and files were shredded and added to the mass. The work experience lads or the young new starters were handed pitchforks fashioned from printer parts bound to office lamp stands, and told to dig in, put their backs into it. ‘You have to perspirate to aerate! To oxygenate the substrate!’ The office would chant, as the mound was turned.

Not long after they had received their plastic plaque through the post for the country’s most eco friendly office, when it touched the ceiling, and had claimed three quarters of Iris’ desk, just after Tony had been bumped up to director in reward for his instigation of bold new working strategies, and for breaking all records in office efficiency and employee well-being ratings, Tyler popped in to see how everyone was doing. He was gobsmacked.

A thick earthy stench met him before he opened the door to the office.

He tried to open the door, but could only half way.

Each shelf was filled with bags sprouting mushrooms.

Quails and chickens were happily making progress pecking out the last few strands of carpet.

The filing cabinets were now bee hives and beneficial insect habitats.

All the staff had a working circle of stones in the middle of the office floor, there they would sit cross legged, their laptops on stands made of reclaimed wood, held aloft just in front of them.

They turned to look at Tyler with big smiles, as one.

He had returned.

Their inspiration.

He brushed back his angelic locks as he panicked inside. Everything was so dirty.

Everything so smelly. Everything was crawling. Everything alive.

Tyler made a quick round of awkward handshakes and after a bit of forced conversation he left them to it.