Twenty Minutes

The message arrived at twelve minutes past nine, on a Tuesday, between two sips of lukewarm coffee.

Camille, could you come up to my office? Now if possible. — R.

She looked at the screen longer than she needed to. In fifteen years, Rémi Sauval had never written “now if possible” to her. He came down. He sat on the corner of her desk, moved her files without asking, talked too loudly. He did not summon people.

She saved the open file. Out of habit. Then she went up.

There were three of them. Rémi behind his desk, the HR director on the chair to the left, and a man she did not know, in a suit that was too new, a closed folder resting on his knees.

Three people to say something that takes one sentence.

— Camille, sit down.

She stayed standing.

— We're going to restructure the finance department, Rémi began. You know we've come out of a difficult period.

— I know, yes. I was there.

He made that small movement of the head, the one he made when an answer would not fit into what he had prepared.

— The board has approved a more… streamlined organisation. Your post is disappearing.

Nadia Brenner pushed an envelope across the desk. Nobody touched it. Camille noticed that the HR director kept both hands flat on her knees, very straight, like somebody waiting at the dentist's.

— Disappearing, Camille repeated.

— It's a structural decision. It isn't against you.

She thought: yes, it is exactly against me. She said nothing.

The man in the new suit opened his folder for the first time.

— Madame Ferrand, your system access was suspended a few minutes ago. That is the procedure. You have twenty minutes to collect your personal belongings. I shall accompany you.

Twenty minutes. For fifteen years.

She looked at the clock over Rémi's shoulder. Nine nineteen. Somewhere in the building, a technician had typed her name into a console and pressed a key, and it was done. She knew the procedure. She had reread the paragraph three years earlier, when it was drafted. She even remembered asking for a sentence to be added about returning the badge, because otherwise it was not clear.

It was being applied for the first time, and it was being applied to her.

The most humiliating part is not the box. It is the walk.

You have to cross the whole floor, from the director's office to your own, with a man in a suit walking a metre behind you while everybody watches. Conversations stop in waves, one after another. Somebody coughs. A chair scrapes back too fast.

She counted the desks, because she had to count something.

Marion, in treasury, dropped her eyes to her screen with schoolgirl diligence. The intern in management control — she had never learnt his first name, and felt bad about it for exactly two seconds — looked openly, mouth half open, not understanding. Sabine, in accounts payable, stood up. She stood right up, and stayed standing behind her chair until Camille had passed. She said nothing. She was fifty-eight and had been with the company thirty-one years, and that was all she could do.

Adrien half rose — she saw the movement — then sat down again when the man in the suit turned his head towards him.

She remembered that too. Half.

In her office she opened the box they had brought her. It was new, still creased at the corners.

A succulent that she overwatered and that survived anyway. A photograph of Léa at eight, on a bicycle too big for her, her left foot reaching for the ground. A chipped mug. A scarf left over the back of the chair since February. A spiral notebook, eighty pages, bought in the concourse of the Gare de Lyon on a Sunday evening coming back from a conference.

She hesitated over the glass frame holding the team photograph, taken the year of the recovery, everybody lined up in front of the Charleville plant with post-war smiles.

She left it on the shelf.

— Company documents stay, said the man.

— I know how it works, Camille answered. I wrote the procedure.

He did not take it up. He must hear things like that every week.

She closed the box. It was not heavy. That was probably the worst detail of the morning: after fifteen years, it weighed nothing.

In the lift, alone at last, she looked at her reflection in the wall.

Fifty-one years old. A cardboard box in her arms. A company she had dragged out of the red for three years, with two cash-flow plans a week, banks that had to be chased on Friday at six in the evening, and eighteen months without a real holiday.

The box came up to her chin. She realised she was gripping it.

She did not cry. She did something else.

She took out her personal phone — the one they had no right to suspend — and opened an application whose existence nobody in that tower knew of.

The screen took a moment to respond. Three words, in grey, under a cloud icon:

Backup is current.

And below, in smaller type: Last sync: today, 8.41 a.m.

Eight forty-one. Thirty-one minutes before Rémi's message. She had had her coffee, opened her computer, and the machine had done what it had done every morning for eleven months, without being asked.

The doors opened onto the lobby.

The security guard at reception, who had greeted her by her first name for six years, made an awkward movement towards her badge. She held it out before he had to ask.

— Have a good day, Karim.

— Madame Ferrand…

He could not find the rest. She did not wait.

Camille Ferrand walked out into the November cold, her box under her arm, and for the first time in eleven months, she smiled.