The Office Fox

The first time Toby saw the fox, he was microdosing mushrooms on a Tuesday in the office. The creature darted from under a desk on the other side of the floor and trotted down an aisle. A hallucination, surely, but a realistic one. Slipping on his facemask, Toby went to look around the corner. The fox was sat on its haunches further down, licking at its fur. It was too solid to be imaginary.

If he’d not taken mushrooms, Toby would have contacted the maintenance team. Instead, he went back to his desk. He was the only person on the floor, so there was no-one else to ask about this. Only a few people had been allowed back because they couldn’t work in their own homes. Toby had applied because he found his divorced-Dad-life too depressing. Sitting alone surrounded by empty desks felt better than the flat.

Microdosing took the edge off. Annie had said she’d leave if he ever took drugs, but she’d left anyway, as soon as the kids went to Uni. Toby’s friend Linda had suggested the little doses of mushrooms, saying it was big in Silicon Valley. It had seemed to help, up until the point when he saw the fox.

The afternoon featured a series of Webex calls, but nothing he needed to pay attention to. He made a list of things he might have done if he’d not had to provide for the boys – now at uni, too busy to call their Dad, even in a pandemic. Toby listed countries he could have visited; old friends from his partying days that he could have kept up with. He listed places he could have walked. Toby had taken the boys camping a couple of times and they’d hated it, constantly asking to go home to play with their tablets.

Annie and him had made plans for when the boys left home. Twenty years together, and, when she said she was leaving, his first response was to say that they had planned to walk the South Downs Way together. She said that responses like that were one of the reasons why she was leaving.

That night he dreamed of running with the fox in the snow, senses sharp and cold, and then nestling together in a root bole burrow. Was it OK to be having erotic dreams about an animal, given that he was dreaming of being an animal himself? Was this the pandemic getting to him?

Thursday lunchtime, he saw the fox again. He’d not had any mushrooms, since he was keeping the last few aside, in case he couldn’t soon see Linda. This time, he was knew the fox was real. It walked towards him, cocked its head to stare at him.

“Hello,” said the fox. It licked a paw, then turned and walked away.

Toby followed, but when he turned the corner, he couldn’t see the fox. He looked under some desks and under the fourth he found it. The creature wasn’t scared of him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked the Fox.

It stood. “What are you doing here? It’s not much of a life.”

That second time was the last time Toby saw the fox. He couldn’t tell anyone what he’d seen. It wasn’t the talking fox that was the problem but that even a fox knew he was wasting his life.

Background

The Office Fox is the first in a series about Toby, someone who is about the same age as me, but hates his job. I struggled with work for a long time, and in 2019 finally settled down to focus on having a career, a few months before the pandemic hit. Work now provides me with meaning and fulfilment, but this strand of stories will explore the negative aspects of office life.

I started planning my stories about the South Downs Way in late 2019, with the first collection released during the first lockdown. All of the planned stories were set before the pandemic and, for a long time, I thought I would ignore the topic completely. But a ten-year project is a long thing, and as time has gone on, I’ve shifted in my views on this. The Office Fox is the first story I’ve written in this series that directly engages with the pandemic.

Recommendations

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently but I think my favourite is Pop Could Never Save Us, by Holly Boson and James Murphy. Each episode talks through a top five chart, either historic or current. Holly is a musician and does a brilliant job of talking about what works in a song. In the first episode, they took a chart from January 2023, and it made me excited about new music again.

One of my favourite things about the show is Holly’s explanations of how technology affects popular music. For example, how the murkiness of ’the Wu-tang sound’ came from RZA’s use of the SP-1200 sampler. The 2003 episode also included an interesting discussion of mash-ups (and it’s interesting that those had such a short life).

The podcast is about to go on a break between seasons, which is the perfect time to catch up on it. Highly recommended