Working Wonders Read Free Page B

too much on the fact that if he was absolutely spot-on for time, this could mean something on the psychometric testing. Cathy looked up at him with wide-eyed fear.
    ‘I’ll write the answers down on the back of my hand for you,’ he said.
    ‘Will you?’
    ‘No right answers, mate,’ said Sven. ‘Ooh no. Just wrong ones. Then they escort you out of the building and lock you up for life.’
    ‘He’s kidding,’ said Arthur. ‘Leave her alone.’
    ‘Woo, back off Sir Galahad.’
    Cathy giggled and blushed again. Arthur wondered how much he would mind starting his working life all over again as a lonely shepherd on a hillside.
    ‘Sheep is to shepherd as goats are to … banker-shepherd-goatherd-banana.’
    Arthur sighed and ploughed on with his pen. These were unbelievably crap, but he knew in the way of these things that they might suddenly get really hard in about fifteen seconds. At this point they were still checking his ability to read, which didn’t exactly reflect well on their hiring strategies in the first place.
    ‘Pig is to sty as dog is to … house-sty-kennel-banana.’
    What was the fascination with farm animals, anyway? Was it an additional measure of stress, to conjure up bucolic fantasies whilst being held prisoner in a room without any windows? Arthur suddenly felt a desire to draw one of those adolescent penises, with enormous teardrops coming out the top, all over the paper.
    ‘Monkey is to banana as polar bear is to bamboo-banana-fish-asteroid.’
    Hmm. Perhaps being a town planner was marginally better than being the guy who had to make up questions about polar bears.
    ‘Sword is to truth as horses are to … loyalty-dreams-journeys-bananas.’
    Arthur started and sat back from the table. He looked at the question again and remembered his dream suddenly. Well, that was a strange one. Horses again. Then he ticked ‘journeys’, even though it wasn’t the least bit the same at all.
    It was ten forty-five and he’d barely made a dent in the piles of paper. Now he was doing stupid maths questions along the lines of squares of things and whether or not two is a prime number, just because it really doesn’t look like one. He dispatched these quickly enough – one doesn’t become an expert on suburban bus ratios without being able to do long division – and reached the largest section of the test. Stretching, he realized how incredibly hot it was in the room. His shirt was sticking to his back.
    ‘There are no right or wrong answers on this test,’ it said at the top of the paper. Arthur snorted, then instinctively looked around for a security camera. ‘Please answer questions as quickly and honestly as you can and give the first answer that comes into your head.’ I would do, thought Arthur, if there was a box that said, ‘Augh! Christ, get me out of here!’
    Please tick whichever you feel most applies to you .
    I want everyone to like me
    I want to be successful
    I want time to read my book
    Hmm, thought Arthur. It’s like a haiku. And I want all of these things. Let me see: like me means weak, read my book means slacker – he ticked successful.
    I want to travel in my life
    I want to be successful
    I carefully finish projects
    Ooh, getting tricky. Let me see: slacker, successful, anal. Okay. If there was a ‘I want to be successful’ line in every question, then he was home free.
    Only your mother really knows what is best for you
    I want time to read my book
    I want to be the leader
    Okay. Hmm. Between all the successes and leaders, he was coming out a bit too type-A-heart-attacks-risk. The mother thing was a nightmare waiting to happen. Books are good.
    Four hundred identical ones of these later, Arthur was going stir-crazy. The same lines, repeated in seemingly infinite patterns of stupidity, designed to gradate just in whichever direction, given that you were already going to lie, you would prefer to lie. Would he rather come out as the teacher’s anal sneak or the crazed