I was running out of money and looking for work. In Union Square I bumped into a friend, and when I mentioned my predicament, he told me his cousin had just left her copy-editing job, and they had yet to find a replacement for her.

‘The pay’s not great and the place is supposed to be a little weird. But it’s something, right?’

I wasn’t a copy editor, but I couldn’t afford to be picky. I asked him for his cousin’s number.

The business was located in Chelsea, on the top floor of a plain building. When I stepped off the elevator the next afternoon, I was buzzed into a loft with large windows, high ceilings and a rash of cubicles sprouting like mushrooms from a hardwood floor. A woman in a mint-colored pantsuit was walking toward me.

‘Patrick, I’m Mindy Bouché,’ she said. ‘It’s so nice to meet you.’

She had Marfan syndrome, I thought. Her hands and neck and forehead were elongated in a way that suggested Abraham Lincoln. And, like Lincoln’s, her eyes rested in ashy, swollen bags of flesh. Her bracelets jingled when we shook hands. ‘Sorry about the cold, but it’s good for the computers.’

As we made our way through the cubicles, a few of the workers glanced at us over the tops of their partitions. ‘Where are you from?’

‘South Carolina. Lucien and I make quite a couple because he’s from Paris and I sound like a hillbilly.’

She turned on the lights in a conference room. A long, dark table stretched before us.

We sat down across from each other. ‘So,’ she said, ‘we just want to fill this position and get on with our lives. You’ve copy-edited before?’

‘I have,’ I said. And then I did that thing one does in an interview in the electronic age: I produced a hard-copy of the résumé I’d emailed the day before, as if it were the original, valuable artifact.

The document may as well have been a placemat between us – which was for the best, since I’d made up the company I claimed to have copy-edited for, along with the name and phone number of my fictitious ex-supervisor. ‘Can you start tomorrow?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And Debbie gave you a sense of what our company does?’

Debbie was my friend’s cousin; she hadn’t told me anything but Mindy’s email address. I nodded.

‘So you know there’s the stock, first and foremost,’ Mindy said. ‘We find the stock, and then we generate the story, and the emphasis is always on the story. I don’t know if you’re a fan of stories, but they’re crucial to what we do.’

‘I love stories,’ I said.

She placed her long hands flat on the table, then stood. ‘I guess I should go get Lucien, then. Your timing couldn’t be better, because he leaves tomorrow for a buying trip to China and I want him to meet you before you start.’ She walked out of the room.

I sat there beneath the humming florescent lights: be-suited, anointed. Employed. On the wall before me, anchored with thumb tacks, was a poster of a pretty blonde woman of about fifty, smiling a wry smile. Her image was photo-shopped against a purple background and surrounded by a constellation. Orion, I thought. Printed below her chin in cursive letters were the words, Athena sees good things for you.

‘Patrick!’

The voice was gravelly, like a belch. I looked up to see a corpulent man with bleached blonde hair and skin tanned the colour of peanut butter. He clutched a lit cigarette.

When I extended my hand, he pumped it vigorously.

‘You must be Lucien,’ I said.

‘I am! And I am wonderful now that I put my eyes on you!’ He sank into the chair at the head of the table and spread his legs wide. Mindy sat down next to him. ‘But I have to tell you, it has been a morning of bullshit. For the last hour, I have been on the phone with scum in Peking. You want me to pay five dollars apiece for a thousand Buddha statues as big as my thumb? Okay, and how about I fuck your mother in the ass while I pay you?’

I forced a smile.

Lucien burst into laughter. His face immediately reset itself. ‘Let me ask you something.’ He motioned with the cigarette toward the poster of Athena on the wall. ‘You are okay with all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have met my passionate lover, Mindy. As opposed to my bitch of a wife.’

He was kidding, I thought; he and Mindy were married. Or he was serious and was cheating with her. I just wanted the job. ‘She’s captivating,’ I said.

‘Right answer!’ He glanced at Mindy. ‘I like him!’ Then he turned back to me and exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘And here is another question. Do you have a problem with astrology?’

I shook my head, then turned down my lower lip as if the notion of having a problem with astrology was silly. Absurd, even.

Lucien slapped his hand down over my kneecap, which I hadn’t realized was within his reach. ‘We have a deal, then,’ he said, squeezing it.

After he’d left the room, Mindy narrowed her eyes and looked at the hard copy of my résumé for the first time. I braced myself, fearing she was about to tell me she’d tried to call my made-up ex-supervisor. But she said, ‘One last question: How’s your HTML?’

At 8:55 the following morning, I was standing in the vestibule. Through the little window set into the door, I could see that the loft was empty and most of the lights were off. I tapped on the glass.

A minute later Mindy appeared, slouched and strolling across the far side of the room. She was dressed in another pantsuit – this one the colour of orange sherbet – and she had a plastic watering can in her hand. When I tapped the glass a second time, she straightened up to her full height, spotted me, and made her way across the floor.

‘Good morning,’ I said, after she’d unlocked the door.

‘Look at this place. Do you see anyone else here?’ she asked. ‘I don’t. They keep their own sweet time – work ethic is a rare commodity these days.’ She led me to one-fourth of a quad of cubicles in the center of the room. The desk surface bore a computer and enough coffee rings to make an Olympic flag. ‘This is you.’

Never, over the course of many different jobs, had I had a desk that was entirely my own. I sat down and ran my hands across the surface. My fingertips were crowned with dust.

Mindy walked off to tend to a nearly leafless ficus tree, and for the next half-hour, I sat there in the cold waiting to be given something to do. Eventually, I started investigating the drawers, which were empty save for a Snickers wrapper and two manuals: one for a program called Smartt Web Management, and the other for a program called HatInHand XG. I flipped through the HatInHand manual and gazed at screen-captures of drop-down menus, wondering if there was any coffee to be had.

A girl had slipped into the cubicle next to mine. A pair of large eyeglasses dominated her face, and a thick-knit sweater hugged her waist and rode high on her wrists. With a trembling hand, she fidgeted with her mouse and brought her computer screen to life.

I wiggled my own mouse. My computer screen remained dark. ‘Hi,’ I said.

She flinched. ‘Oh! Hi.’ For the instant that she looked at me, I thought she might be on the verge of tears. ‘Sorry – you’re new here, right?’

Before I could answer, her eyes were already back on her screen. She clicked icon after icon, opening multiple programs.

‘First day,’ I said. ‘I’m Patrick.’

Her head bobbed up and down in profile. ‘Kim.’

‘Hi, Kim. Are you a copy editor too?’

‘Sort of. Not really. It’s more…’ She trailed off, absorbed by her work.

Before long, her phone rang.

‘Good morning, Jesse,’ she said into the receiver. ‘I know, I…I will, I…okay, I’ll call you when it’s done, okay? Okay.’

She hung up and clicked more rapidly.

‘Who’s Jesse?’ I asked, thinking I ought to show a little initiative.

‘This woman in Nyak? She sort of manages the – well, it’s this fulfillment company we use. She can be a little…short-tempered.’

‘I see. And what does the company do? This one, I mean.’

She let out a breathy, mirthless laugh, said, ‘We sell things,’ and offered nothing more.

I got up and went looking for the kitchen.

I found it past a long row of bookshelves crammed with books about Christianity and the solar system, world history and the power of gem stones. Most of my co-workers had trickled in by now and were wandering about, sniffling and nodding good morning to one another. At the sink was a shrunken woman with a muffler wrapped around her neck. Next to her stood a bald man with a lantern jaw and a neatly-trimmed van dyke. His arms were folded across his chest as he stared at the coffee maker.

‘Morning,’ I said.

‘Hello.’

‘Are we still on Saint Xavier?’ the shrunken woman asked without turning around.

‘No,’ the man said. ‘I handed that in before I left on Friday. Now we’re on to the Mosaic of Prosperity.’

I wanted to hear a hint of sarcasm in his voice, but there was none.

‘Is the coffee ready?’ I asked.

‘Takes an eternity,’ he muttered as if sharing a trade secret.

Back at my desk, someone tapped my shoulder. I looked up to see Mindy towering over me. ‘How are things working out?’

‘Just fine,’ I said. ‘So will I be copy-editing web content?’

‘Kim will get you up to speed on HatInHand and Smartt Web. You should have that down as soon as possible. And you’ll need this.’ She handed me an astrological wall calendar. ‘It has all the moon phases, and they have to be correct in what we send out. Our credibility’s on the line when it comes to the moon.’

I was about to ask why when she clapped her hands, looked about the loft, and announced, ‘Ten minutes to Mollyglow, people!’

‘Jesus Christ,’ someone said.

‘Well, what’s the surprise?’ Mindy asked in the direction of the voice. ‘If you don’t like it, you can get here on time tomorrow and be ready, for a change.’

She walked off.

Kim blew her nose.

‘So you’re training me?’

‘I guess,’ she said. ‘I mean, your job is mine, basically. That’s how Debbie and I had it.’

And exactly what the fuck goes on here? I wanted to ask. Instead, I asked, ‘What’s Mollyglow?’

‘One of our websites. It gets updated every twenty-four hours.’

Had my computer been working, I might have gone to the site for some answers. I was mashing the reboot button when a woman across the way stood up from her desk, crossed over to mine, and held out a Jolly Rancher.

I took it and thanked her.

‘I heard about you. You’re a writer,’ she said in a voice just above a whisper. Her accent was German, I thought.

I hadn’t told my friend’s cousin I was a writer. ‘When I’m not here,’ I said.

‘I dance.’ She pointed at Kim. ‘She’s a writer. And Zach used to be a writer. And Sally’s a sculptor who says she’s can’t sculpt anymore. This place is fucked up, yeah?’

‘Well, I just started.’

‘You think it’s you for a while. But then you realize, wow, it’s this place. It’s a nuthouse and you have to accept that or go out of your mind.’

I sensed a comrade. Darting my eyes left and right, I unwrapped the Jolly Rancher and slipped it into my mouth. ‘What’s with the coffee?’ I asked.

‘It’s like piss. That’s this place: piss and shit.’

‘I’m Patrick.’

‘Inga.’ We shook hands.

Mindy’s voice launched like a cool dart through the air. ‘Two minutes, people! Mollyglow!’

‘Piss and shit,’ Inga muttered, and then wandered back to her desk.

For the next hour, I watched everyone – save for the bald man and the shrunken woman – scamper about in a panic, trying to fix several icons and something called a drop page. They tested and retested it. They got on the phone with a person named Louise, and Louise’s people ran some sort of diagnostic; each time, the results were unsatisfactory.

I went to lunch. When I came back, the crisis had been resolved; everyone was back in his or her cubicle and the only sound was the steady clicking of keys. I looked around for Inga, then asked Kim if there was any copy-editing to be done.

She looked embarrassed. She rubbed her chin for a moment, then took a folder from the metal rack next to her monitor and pulled out a few stapled pages. ‘I guess you could look at these if you want to.’

Dear X1, the first document began, On X2, as X3 moves into X4, I want you to turn X5 years into golden wealth.

I felt like I was looking at an SAT problem. But then Kim said, ‘Oh – not that one. Read one with the fields filled in; it’ll make more sense.’ She took the top document back and replaced it with another.

Dear Betty, this new document read, On December 17th, as Pluto moves into Capricorn, I want you to turn 53 years into golden wealth.

I’ve been studying your horoscope, Betty, and when I trace back from 1956 to 53 years later, I see a person whose too timid to make their dreams come true. But as a child, I know you created SPECIAL dreams that you still carry with you.

The document was a train wreck. I set to work fixing all the mistakes I found. Not far along was a picture of something called a ‘Golden Galaxy’ – a cheap-looking medallion on a chain. The medallion, glittery and stamped with a central white dot, was described as 14k Gold Plate Over Sterling Silver with a Mother of Pearl Eye and Enamored with Diamond-Glow Cubic Zirconia.

This brilliant treasure is designed after the shape of the galaxy – our Source of Life! – and not only that. It is a sincere reminder that the RICHES and GOOD FORTUNE you deserve are coming your way! Imagine, Betty, 53 years of fortune being spun with galaxial force into PURE FINANCIAL REALIZATION!

I didn’t have a dictionary but was pretty certain ‘galaxial’ wasn’t a word; I circled it and wrote ‘sp?’ in the margin. Gold had obvious value, the document reminded Betty; silver was the protective healing choice of the Ancients. And then, following a JPEG of Athena’s signature, Betty herself was speaking.

Yes, Athena! I understand that the Golden Galaxy is sacred to my birthday, December 17th.

Yes! I realize that this amazing piece will enrich my life, and I am looking forward to my RISK-FREE guarantee, and also THREE GIFTS – mine to keep if I return the pendant. (The gifts, I noticed – an authenticity certificate, a black velvet case and a laminated card detailing the activation ceremony that would unlock the pendant’s powers – were useless without the pendant.)

I’m so happy you’re making this choice, the text read, apparently slipping back into Athena’s voice. CLICK HERE!

Poor Betty.

The second document detailed three specific dates that would bring Betty wealth throughout the year, activated only by a pearl-studded pendant bearing the face of the Archangel Michael, known to lift the poor from suffering and shower them with riches. The third described a scarab bracelet that would heal all of Betty’s financial sorrows.

‘Do you want to take a look at these?’ I asked, re-stacking the documents and holding them out for Kim.

She took them from me, blinking with confusion. ‘You marked them?’

‘I copy-edited them,’ I said.

She was shaking her head and showing as much interest in my edits as Mindy had in my résumé. ‘We’ve been sending these out like they are for a year or so,’ she said as she tucked them back into the metal rack.

‘Between us,’ I said, lowering my voice, ‘is Athena real?’

‘Um,’ she said, and cleared her throat.

Mindy’s clapping broke the air. ‘Upsales, people! Ten minutes!’

Someone announced that the drop page on the Miracle of St. Bernadette Broche wasn’t working properly.

‘Well, fix it,’ Mindy said. ‘And fast.’

‘Upsales?’ I asked Kim.

‘Everything’s first in a series. Like a series of pendants or medallions or whatever. Upsales are when we write back and tell them the first one can’t really work without the second one. Which won’t work without the third.’

The next day, I arrived once again before everyone but Mindy, and I tried to take advantage of my time alone with her. ‘Kim’s great,’ I said. ‘She really knows her stuff.’

‘It’s a team effort,’ Mindy said, frowning at a small beige table that had probably come from Ikea. It sat flush against the outer wall of a cubicle and had nothing on it but dust. ‘I hate this table,’ she said.

I took a sip from the coffee I’d bought downstairs. ‘So my job is Kim’s job, right? Everything she’s doing I should know how to do?’

‘That’s right.’ She nudged the table with her hip. Bending over a few inches, she spoke to it: ‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m not getting much sense of how this all works,’ I confessed. ‘I know this is only my second day, but I’m trying to get a handle on the job, and I—’

‘Did I give you the calendar with the moon phases?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I can take that off my list.’

‘Where does the information come from? About our customers, I mean. Their ages and birthdays.’

‘They give it to us when they apply for a free horoscope reading online.’

‘So that’s where we get all the email addresses?’

‘Ryan,’ she said, mistaking my last name for my first and evoking my high school gym coach, ‘I have a philosophy: Leave the nitty-gritty to the team. That’s why you have a team.’

Later that morning, a tech person tried to fix my computer by fiddling with the cables. I walked around the loft and found lying on shelf tops many of the items we were selling. They reminded me of the kind of trinkets that came encased in plastic bubbles and rolled out of dime machines. In the kitchen over the sink was a sign that read, Rinse your dishes and put them in the dishwasher. (If Lucien can do it, you can do it). In the men’s room, taped onto the door of the stall, another sign read, If you smell something, say something.

Mid-afternoon, while Kim sweated through phone calls and Skype messages and Mindy’s commands, I found that my computer was finally working and visited the Mollyglow site. I double-clicked on a cartoon bunny and a chipper, syrupy voice blurted out, ‘Well, okay, then! Let’s see what the future holds for you!’ I immediately closed the screen to silence the bunny.

Athena’s presence was everywhere, but she herself was nowhere to be seen. She was ubiquitous, elusive, and oddly menacing – like Keyser Sőze in The Usual Suspects. At the end of my second day, I sat at home eating a cheeseburger and surfing YouTube. On impulse I typed in ‘Athena’ and ‘psychic forecast’. She had nearly two-dozen videos posted. I played the first one.

Here was the woman from the poster - blond and matronly but bearing enough makeup to warrant an evening on the town. In a sleepy British accent, she told me she could help me. She knew of my struggles, my financial burdens, and my potential for true and lasting happiness. In fact, my happiness meant more to her than anything else in the world. Wasn’t it time I allowed the universe and all its powers to work in my favour?

I then Googled ‘Athena’, ‘credit card’ and ‘fraud’. Within seconds, I was scrolling through over 400 complaints on a consumer advocacy website.

Mid-morning of my third day, I ran into Kim in the kitchen. She was staring into the refrigerator, looking for space to fit her Tupperware.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi. Sorry about Friday.’

‘What happens Friday?’

‘Oh! I thought Mindy told you. I won’t be here. I have to take my mom to her doctor in Philadelphia.’

In a panic and with quickening steps, I made my way to Mindy’s desk. She was on the phone and held me at bay with a raised finger while she finished her call. As she hung up, she said, ‘What is it?’

The words poured out of me. I wasn’t being trained. Kim was too busy. And tomorrow was Thursday and the next day was Friday and I wasn’t going to be able to do all the things Kim did to keep the emails flowing and the drop pages dropping and the upsales selling. Friday, I told her, was going to be a disaster.

‘This is exactly the nitty-gritty I was talking about, Ryan. It’s Kim’s job to train you and it’s Kim you need to be talking to about this. I have enough on my plate as it is.’

‘But what happens when – ’

‘Do you really want to be helpful?’ She took a screwdriver from her desk drawer and handed it to me. ‘Dismantle that ugly table and put it away somewhere.’

I carried the table to a corner and flipped it over. On my knees, I worked at the embedded screws, each of which proved to be a challenge. The fourth leg wouldn’t budge, and I was all but yanking on it when Inga approached.

‘Ha ha,’ she whispered. ‘Look at you. You’re copy-editing!’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘In all the time you’ve worked here, has anyone ever just come out and said…’ I found myself reluctant to be the first.

‘Said what? We’re a horrible company that sells worthless crap to innocent people? And sets up unauthorized recurring charges? And has a phoney customer service number? No, no one ever says that. Actually, it’s been calm here for the past few days. Wait till you see Lucien in action. Have you ever had a boss call you a ‘worthless piece of shit’? And when he yells at you, his spit lands on your face.’

I felt myself wince. ‘How can you stand it?’

‘A trick of the brain,’ she said. ‘You pretend none of it’s happening, and then – poof – three years have gone by.’

Despite the cold, I was sweating. I walked back over to Mindy’s desk and told her I was going to lunch.

‘Did you take care of that table?’

‘Just about,’ I said. ‘I’ll finish it when I get back.’

‘Thank you,’ she said with a smile. ‘It’s nice to see someone besides me doing work around here, for a change.’

I walked out of the building expecting to feel a sense of relief. But there was none – and no further panic, either. There was only the smooth, gray numbness that comes with being desperate and unemployed – again. Around the corner from the office, I sat down at a computer terminal in a Tasti-D-Lite, addressed an email to Mindy, and wrote, Thanks, anyway.

What else was there to say? Sincerely sounded insincere. Yours sounded absurd.

Best of luck! I wrote, and before sending I signed off with Ryan so she’d know who the email was from.

But the universe and all its powers were working in Mindy’s favour – or Athena’s. The next time I logged on, my usurped mailbox coughed up an offer for a rare, mystically-charged crystal ball – mine for five easy payments of $14.99.

David Jégou: Chief Accountant

Interview and translation by Andrew Hussey

For the past five years I’ve been working as chief accountant for a company called CIDEF (Centre d’Information et de Documentation et de Formation) in the suburb of Montreuil just outside Paris. I like the job. The organization is run by the French Communist Party and trains local councillors about law and other stuff. What I like most is that the staff are all card-carrying Communists – very militant and all passionate about what they are doing. I’m not a Communist and never will be, but it’s great to work in a place where people care about what they do, and you feel sort of connected to the world of politics and social issues. On a daily basis, they’re all usually squabbling with each other about politics, but whenever they come into my office they’re amicable and friendly. They have to be because I handle all the money. It’s a big job. I’m on my own with a government budget of three million to dole out. But they’re all good, decent people anyway. If they weren’t doing this they’d be teachers or nurses and things like that. We have a laugh most days too.

This is all so different from the other jobs I’ve done as an accountant. I came to Paris in 1997 – my girlfriend came here to study and I followed her. I ended up working in La Défense, a horrible district of skyscrapers where all the money is made. I hated all the jobs – it was so corporate and crappy and it made me feel like an insect or a sheep, just doing all of this stuff without any say or control in what I was doing. I love rock and dance music and really wanted to work in the record industry but I was too lazy and stupid to really get involved. My other dream then was to go to Manchester and go to the Hacienda Club which I read about in the French music press – it sounded brilliant. But I never had the money to go. I bought all the records and CDs though and in my office in Montreuil I’ve got a poster of the Hacienda from the old days. I’ve also got a signed poster of the Jesus and Mary Chain – they were a great band.

I loved it straight away when I got to CIDEF – so different from all those corporate places, and everybody arguing about stuff that matters. I also like the area. I live in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, which is a bit posh but not too much. But this place is different from central Paris. It used to be the old working-class who lived here – that’s why it’s always been Communist – but now it’s mainly immigrants from all over the place. You can see the difference when people get on the metro.

I start off on Line Nine, which is quite smart, and then at Richelieu, where I change for Line Eight, everything changes and there are more Africans, Arabs, all different nationalities. Then you know you’re heading to the suburbs. I normally set off about eight in the morning, and get to the office for nine. I listen to music and read things like les Inrockuptibles magazine or books about music and things that I’m interested in like art, but you can’t read anything too complicated, especially when the metro is full and everybody is bad-tempered. Nobody speaks on the metro anyway. I used to go to the office on my scooter but my back hurts when I do that now. I wouldn’t mind cycling on the Vélib’ – the cheap bikes you can hire in Paris – but it’s a bit far and I’m a bit lazy. And anyway, the Vélib’ doesn’t go out to the suburbs, which is something the Paris Town Council has to sort out. And then, you know, I don’t like the rain.

I get home about eight. I used to go out to gigs at least two or three times a week but now I sometimes feel more tired and I like to chill out in my flat and watch DVDs, make something nice to eat. Anyway, the 15th is a bit far from the main clubs and venues. I used to live up near Pigalle, which was great and I’d walk to gigs and that kind of thing, and I liked the bar life, but, you know, everything changes and I like it here too – small shops, nice family restaurants.

I like Montreuil and I’d miss it if I didn’t work there. I wouldn’t mind living there but I don’t want to be too near the office. I’ve seen the area change in the past few years – it’s getting a little bit more fashionable and there are BoBos [bourgeois bohémiens – Parisian yuppies] who are moving in all the time. You notice this in the way that people dress on the street, their accents and the new organic shops – which are expensive and no ordinary person goes to them.

From my window I can see the council estates – the walls are painted pink and they’re a bit drab, but you can also see that people are making an effort to make them nice inside. There are lots of young people – some of them dealing drugs from the park benches in the little bits of green spaces. The police come here a lot and chase them. It’s a bit like watching a film from my window – you get to know the different faces and characters and nothing really changes that much. Sometimes there’s a car chase. There are a lot of poor and desperate people around here.

Every Friday, we all go to a local restaurant as a group from work. If you don’t go it’s considered a bad thing. There are plenty of good simple restaurants around here and you can get a good meal for about ten to fifteen euros. There are lots of ethnic places, and French of course, old-fashioned basic places which I like. The rest of the week I just buy stuff from the supermarket – salads, sandwiches – and eat something in my office. I don’t think I’m rich or poor. I go on holidays and do what I want, but then I don’t like expensive things really.

I don’t worry about the future. This is where I am and I’m going to stay here.

Decaying grandeur has a strange allure. Those imperious structures that once represented wealth and power, crumbled out of context by man’s destruction and nature’s ruthless erosion. Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s photographs of the dystopian Ponte City in Johannesburg intrigue for exactly this reason. To look at their images is to enter a compelling tale, narrated by the reassuring voice of the local griot. They lead you with authority through an unfamiliar and intimidating environment.

Subotzky’s work in particular is profoundly sensitive for one so young. The stories are preserved with an immediacy that grips – but is in no way gratuitous. Like any good story-teller his presence is unobtrusive, allowing the viewer to absorb the atmosphere. Anyone with even a hint of claustrophobia will squirm at the very thought of the conditions we see in ‘Die Vier Hoeke’, Subotzky’s photographs of Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison in Cape Town. The Ponte City photo essay speaks in a similar voice. As with the prison series, it stresses the space that controls the movements and choices of the individual – recalling Michel Foucault’s meditations on space, power and control.

Claustrophobia is a recurring theme in Subotzky’s work, but what is arresting about this collection of images, particularly the series of window shots, is the individuality that defiantly peeks through a coarse thicket of decay. It is as though watercolour prints of a city skyline have been ‘crowdsourced’, as each canvas is individually customised. The composition of these photographs depicts each window as a collage. Layers of idiosyncratic objects are framed with ghostly silhouettes, creating images of contrast and solemn beauty.

Subotzky is unremitting in his documentation of an underexposed South Africa, but the Ponte City series also displays an intimacy that contrasts vividly with the building’s bleak exterior. See the domestic scenes in which the lively colour of a young girl’s dress illustrates warmth and a touching dynamic among a family making home in quarters designed for one. Or gaze as the bathing couple seemingly at ease with sharing such an intimate moment with the world. Irony echoes in the vacant hallways of this building, whose seductive marketing material sells an experience with the exhortation ‘LIVE YOUR LIFE’.

Although Ponte City was conceived as a monument to aspiration in a country trying to embrace universal capitalism, it ultimately represents South Africa’s failure to develop an infrastructure that could contain the inevitable fallout from apartheid and its resulting class structure. If this summer’s World Cup is even a tenth of the spectacle witnessed at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, a cloying fairytale of smiles and colour will be the prevailing image. We need artists like Subotzky and Waterhouse who choose to expose the reality beneath the sugar-coated façade.

To see the photo essay ‘Ponte City’, you can buy Granta 109 in our online shop.

Michael Salu is artistic director at Granta.

Author Brad Watson adjusts to the long winters and snow-covered charms of a state that most forget. Indeed, that’s why he went there...

Before I moved to Wyoming in 2005, I was – like a lot of people outside this region, it turns out – not quite sure just where it was. As for its character, no idea. We have our stereotypical notions of better-known states like Montana, Idaho, and Colorado. They exist in our imaginations as real places of this or that kind. I don’t think you can say the same about Wyoming. For a couple of years, almost everyone who called or emailed would ask, ‘How’s Montana?’ They couldn’t ever quite remember that I was in Wyoming. It’s like a state covered with one of those mythical invisibility suits. You look at it, but you don’t see it, you don’t really register that it’s there – or you do, because it’s beautiful, but you think it’s Montana. I’d bet that a lot of people who vacation in Jackson Hole don’t really think of the fact that it’s in Wyoming, most of the time. As soon as they get off the plane and onto a pair of skis, they think they’re at a resort somewhere in western Colorado. They can’t quite fathom, really, that the place is in Wyoming, because no one can quite ever remember that Wyoming exists.

This suits me just fine. It’s why I came here. I was looking for a teaching job in the desert southwest, which seemed to me a great isolation but now that I’m here I believe I overestimated the southwest that way and underestimated Wyoming. This is a state that covers half a million square miles on which live just over half a million people. There aren’t really any ‘cities’, with apologies to Laramie, Cheyenne, and half a dozen other urban centres: there are just a few big towns and one resort. I’m living a happy accident. There were no jobs advertised in the desert southwest that year. This was the only job I applied for. I got lucky. I didn’t really want to go anywhere at the time.

I admit that I’m a misanthrope. Once, standing on a sidewalk in Oxford, Mississippi with my friend Tom Franklin, the brilliant fiction writer who lives there among other brilliant writers (I’m not kidding or being ironic), I was invited by someone to attend a party later that evening. I mumbled something non-committal. Tom grinned and said to the inviter: ‘He doesn’t really like people.’

This isn’t exactly true. I like a lot of individual people, and some couples, and I suppose some groups – but I’m suspicious of groups. I am tired of cocktail parties (although I usually have fun while I’m there) and the small talk, and it’s true maybe that I’m not the most trusting person I know. Much of my misanthropy manifests itself in feeling crowded. Crowded roads, streets, towns, stores, airwaves, telephones, emails, and so on. It all makes me nervous. I was craving some kind of escape.

I think most people who live in Wyoming need a lot of space, or they wouldn’t live here. Unlike Mississippi, where I grew up and where it’s either warm or beastly hot for all but about three months of the year, in Wyoming it is warm only about three months of the year, and the rest of the year it is either cold or very cold. Such a climate tends to repel most people, and that’s fine since I believe that people here want Wyoming to remain wide-open. Southeast Wyoming, while it has beautiful mountains nearby with lots of bike and hiking trails and campgrounds and big game hunting and excellent trout fishing and the only research university in the state, is pretty much an off-the-radar part of an off-the-radar state, and I think everyone but the real estate developers want to keep it that way. Even in the South these days, the interstates are crowded. You can’t find a non-crowded interstate east of Austin or Abilene, Texas; Lincoln, Nebraska; or Galesburg, Illinois. When you cross that imaginary line, driving west, it’s as if someone unwound an overly tight Ace bandage from around your head, unscrewed a clamp from your heart.

Last weekend, we snowshoed the Little Laramie trail in the Snowie Range of the Medicine Bow National Forest, a good long two-hour hike, stopping every hundred yards or so to pick ice balls from the dogs’ paws, dodging the occasional cross-country skier gliding down through the lodgepole pine forest. The sky was overcast and gray, a light snow falling, about eighteen degrees Farenheit. Kind of perfect. Views of the Centennial Valley from the trail at 9,500 feet range for some thirty miles across the prairie back toward Laramie, at 7,200 feet, the eye resting on the Laramie Range to the east. On the way home, the wind was up, and the snow blowing across the road obscured it at times, a brief white-out, but blew on by in a few seconds, out into the rolling grasslands south of the two-lane highway, where small herds of pronghorn picked through the snow for the scarce but most nutritious plants. When they’re really on the move, the pronghorn out here seem more plentiful than the cattle and sheep, and maybe they are.

With the mountains and national forest land within half an hour of town, there’s a lot of good hunting and fishing and a lot of wildlife. We’ve seen moose, elk, more mule deer than whitetail, badgers, fox, coyotes, golden and bald eagles, marmots, jack rabbits. I haven’t come upon a mountain lion, or a black or brown bear, or one of the notoriously solitary wolverines. But there are more than 600 species of wildlife in the state, and I recently read that the insects in a square mile of prairie here outweigh all mammal life by several times. There is a mountain ridge west of town that looks from a distance like a long narrow escarpment, but when you ascend it you enter what seems a vast, hilly, borderless wilderness that is disconnected from the rest of the world. No one is allowed there, legally, for several months in late winter and early spring because it is a sanctuary for the local wildlife. During hunting season, elk and deer hunters pitch large canvas tents with stoves they’ve hauled up with horses, and the camps stand for weeks.

I don’t know how the settlers survived winters here. They were more severe than now just thirty years ago, regularly dipping to forty or fifty below. The people who settled this land are so much tougher than I’ll ever be that I cannot really comprehend it. Even in these milder times, we’ve just gone through a few weeks of waking up to twenty-five or thirty below. The ever-present wind is notorious, gusts often clocking in at fifty miles per hour (with no storm in sight), and the Big Hollow prairie between Laramie and Centennial is said to be the largest valley in the country carved entirely by wind. The snow’s deep.

The old-timers in Laramie call this population control. But I’m here for now and I don’t really want to leave. It was one day a couple of summers ago, driving that same two-lane between Laramie and Centennial, that I looked to the north and saw the long, high, rolling hills there and thought for the first time I understood what Hemingway’s character meant when she said the hills (albeit in Spain, in his story) looked ‘like white elephants’. They do look like some sort of colossal, vast-bodied, mythical dormant beasts.

This is a beautiful place in all seasons, no matter how harsh the winters are, the blessed character-testing winters. The summers are the best I’ve known, and everyone lives for them. The autumns are often longer and milder than you would think, although this past autumn was cut short in early October. People adjusted, after a little grumbling, put away everything but the winter clothing, got out the snowshoes, skis, heavy boots. Spring may not arrive in earnest until July. And then, the farmers’ market finally starts up again, people revel in the mild dry heat (and, yes, big skies full of blue and bright-yellow light), and try not to think about how soon the market and the summer will be gone again for most of the year.

Brad Watson’s story ‘Vacuum’ appeared in Granta 109. You can read an interview with him here.

Brad Watson’s story ‘Vacuum’ is published exclusively in Granta 109: Work. It will also appear in Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, to be published this year by W. W. Norton. Three boys - known to us only as the ‘oldest brother’, ‘middle brother’ and ‘youngest brother’ - try to watch a western, obstructed by their mother vacuuming in front of the television. ‘The boys really wanted to see what was going to happen in the western show, but now they had missed it because they had been watching their mother make faces and then yell that one day she would walk out of the house and never come back.’ They try to solicit help from a maid their father had fired; the neighbour Dr Hornegay arrives, besuited and carrying whiskey. The boys decide to entertain themselves with some experimental outdoor stunts. Granta’s Patrick Ryan interviewed the author about the story’s inception, the role of the middle brother, and the strains on mothers as they started going out to work, with task of keeping a household together undiminished.

PR: In ‘Vacuum’, the middle brother emerges into a place of prominence by the end. He’s the one we learn the most about, internally, and the one who is the most changed. Did you know this (his prominence) was going to happen all along, or is it something you discovered as you drafted the story?

BW: Well, although it’s unusual for this to happen for me (I hear a lot of other writers claim it) this story did emerge from the single image of the mother, angry, vacuuming while her three boys watched television, a little dumbfounded and afraid. That’s a memory from my childhood that’s always stuck with me, and I always wanted to get a story from it. So, given that it’s my memory, and I was the one affected by it enough never to forget it, I guess it was inevitable the middle brother (I was a middle brother) would become central. That said, I want to add that after the image of the mother vacuuming, the story is entirely fictional except for the emotional content of the middle brother’s experience (and the razor blade incident – that really happened). My parents were not like those parents, and the supporting characters are fictional.

Related to that, how different is the finished story from the one you first envisioned?

Again, I normally do have something of a vision or idea of what a story will be (even if that changes in the course of writing) before I write it, but in this case I really didn’t: only the opening image and a strong sense of the emotional context for it, and the need to work toward some way of ‘resolving’ (for lack of a better word at the moment) that.

Can you explain why you chose to leave all the family members in the story unnamed? What did this provide you with as the writer, and/or what do you think it provides us with as readers? For all the anonymity this tactic might produce, the story feels almost wincingly intimate.

I’m not sure. I wrote the first paragraph, with that image of the vacuuming and the anger, quickly, in longhand in my notebook. After a long time of wanting to write a story from that image, this paragraph suddenly came out. It may have seemed right to say ‘the mother’ and ‘the boys’ because that was so strongly the picture I had in mind: in black-and-white, initially from a diffuse or omniscient perspective. It’s possible that I instinctively entered the story with a somewhat archetypal sense of its sources. Given that the impulse seems to have been largely emotional, this possibly makes sense. It seemed natural, also, to give names to the supporting characters, as if (as you suggest) naming them removes them some elemental distance from the central emotional content or development in the story.

The ending is so perfectly fitted to the rest of the story, and yet it is entirely unexpected. Were there other options you explored before settling on this one?

I can’t remember that there were, and I can’t find a draft any earlier than the one that ends the way it does now. I’ve also misplaced the handwritten first paragraph, and don’t recall if I wrote the entire first draft in longhand (but I don’t believe I did). So, although this is also unusual for me, it seems to have come out that way without tinkering or any substantial reconsideration. I guess that, once I got hold of the voice and my sense of the emotional evolution in the story, it was pretty firm. Again, that moment isn’t one that ever happened in my life, but I have a strong image of that particular kitchen and dining table and lamp, etc. In my memory, one or both parents are always at that table, too, with us boys. So the fact that the boys are alone says something about what’s at the heart of this story, I suppose.

‘Vacuum’ is the only piece in the Work issue that recognizes housework as an honourable (yet often thankless) form of labour. What is it about housework that makes it so invisible?

I know a few people who enjoy it, but not many. And for mothers of that era, between the 1950s and the 1970s, who were taking on jobs outside the home yet still expected to do most (if not all) the housework and cooking, too, it was especially difficult and probably began to seem degrading – in the sense that although it had fallen to a position of lesser status within the household, subjugated in importance to secondary bread-winning, it still had to be done and was expected to be done by the woman. That is, it became increasingly hard to get it done, but everyone (including those women, I think, in most cases) still assumed it would be done and with the same degree of diligence and by the person who’d always done it: the housewife/mother. Rushing home from work to face a pack of hungry children like fledglings squawking with open beaks takes all the joy out of cooking, too; it’s the polar opposite of Julia Childs’ world.

The society and individuals, alike and together, were complicit in allowing this gap between a tradition and a new reality to exist. I don’t imagine that there aren’t lots of people who never left the gap, you know, like defeated soldiers holding out in caves, for whom the war has never ended.

And, let’s face it. If you have to work a job outside the home, why should you like or want to spend your time off dusting, scrubbing toilets and floors, and pushing around an appliance as strange and loud and tyrannical as a vacuum cleaner? And why should any child, to be fair, view housework as anything but another sentenced element in the long incarceration of childhood?

Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

I
There was a time when not a day went by that I didn’t steal a book. It wasn’t that I didn’t have money; but there’s never enough money to buy all the books we need to read or simply admire, hold, caress, knowing that we have them, that they’re ours because no longer theirs.

II
And yes, there was something Robin Hood-ish about stealing books from the bookstores of Buenos Aires, the city where I was born and learned to read.

I was the child of upper-middle-class parents. Well-educated and highly regarded in their respective fields. Parents who bought me books for my birthdays and didn’t hesitate to give me money to buy books. But, of course, returning to the Sherwood Forest scenario, my collection was so small and pathetic compared to the ample, well-stocked shelves of bookstores.

And the other day I read that ‘stealing books is the most selfish form of theft’.

I disagree.

Stealing books is actually literature as sport. When we write or read we’re sitting or lying down, almost motionless. When we steal books, however, the muscle of our brain acts in perfect harmony with the muscles of our body. When we steal books, we think and act, and, in some sense, read and write.

When you steal a book, you’re person and character all at once.

III
There are many cases of thieves of fiction, from Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March to Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. And I’ve lost count of the doomed readers who steal the Necronomicon and succumb upon dipping into the horrors of H. P. Lovecraft. There are also more sophisticated cases, like that of Joe Orton, who took books from public libraries, altered covers and blurbs, and returned them changed for ever.

And still, all these deeds of characters or persons strike us as pallid and inferior to our own. Because it’s impossible that others – though they be better written and crafted – should feel the untransferable intensity of what one feels in the moments before stealing a book, in the precise instant of stealing it, in the ecstatic minute afterwards when you discover, once again, that you’ve gotten out and gotten away with it without being caught.

IV
The golden age of my career as a book thief spanned the years 1980 to 1985. There were as yet no electronic alarm systems or computerized listings. Everything was artisanally unplugged, truly artistic.

And – don’t ask me how, I can’t explain – after making my appearance at the imminent scene of the crime and selecting my immediate victim, I felt that I was almost physically enveloped in a kind of aura or halo that made me invisible to the bookstore employees. Something out of this world that made it possible for me to do whatever I wanted to do, take whatever I most desired. It didn’t matter how big the book was or how much it was worth. That book was there to be mine, to be abducted by the most loving of captors, to be spirited away to my room. To be touched only by my hands.

At some moment – reflexively or as a defense mechanism, one tends to regulate miracles in the hope of being able to call them up at will – I told myself that I might be one of the chosen, yes, but I shouldn’t waste or debase my talent by stealing books that were of no use to me or that weren’t indispensable in making me the writer I wanted to be.

And, of course, I immediately told myself that all books were indispensable, and, therefore, worthy of the honour of being stolen.

V
And so I gradually accumulated deeds that today I recall with the melancholy and wonder attached to certain picture-postcards of youth.

I stole, in plain sight of all, a hefty hardcover biography of James Joyce, signed by Richard Ellmann.

And one perfect winter morning, I challenged someone who at the time was a good friend and rival, another consummate book thief, to the ultimate test.

He and I stationed ourselves at one end of Avenida Corrientes, in Buenos Aires, famous for the number of bookstores located along it, bookstores that are still there, I think, though I’m writing this from so far away. And we set ourselves the goal – each of us on one side of the street, previously selected by the flip of a coin – to steal the seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In the order of publication.

I ought to say that I succeeded and he didn’t, and that our friendship was never the same again.

VI
In time, of course, I developed certain techniques more sophisticated than the simple, physical stash under the coat. The one that yielded best results involved choosing which book to steal, retreating to a quiet corner of the store, inscribing the book to myself, and then going up to any clerk, showing him the book that I had ‘received as a gift’, inquiring whether they had another copy, asking how much it cost, sighing ‘It’s so expensive; I’d better lend him mine instead’, and leaving with my copy of the Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (the category ‘Collected’ or ‘Complete’ is so stealable) suddenly legitimized, and belonging to me. Sometimes, when the book to be stolen was by a living writer from somewhere nearby, I didn’t hesitate to inscribe it to myself with affection and gratitude.

VII
And, of course, more than once, there were those occasions when something went wrong, when the protection of the golden shield vanished at the last minute and I had to run away down the street, chased by some clerk.

I remember fleeing with A Clockwork Orange in the inside pocket of my jacket, turning a corner, tossing some money on a counter, and going into a theater where Raiders of the Lost Ark was showing.

I had already seen it several times, I knew it by heart, the screening had already begun; but there was something fitting and poetic about the idea that a consummate thief of archeological treasures should give refuge to a young book thief, I thought then, I think now.

VIII
Now, in retrospect, it’s easy for me to see the Burgess/Spielberg incident as the beginning of the end.

I kept stealing books for a while. But I didn’t enjoy it as much. I felt less confident. Ambivalent.

Soon afterward I published my first story collection, and then – at a book fair, at one of those virtual olympic stadiums for book thiefs – came the moment of epiphany, the moment I watched a kid steal one of my books, then offer it to me to sign. ‘For X, who has given me the great joy of seeing someone steal to read the book I wrote’, I put on the first page.

The kid read the inscription and smiled at me with a mixture of pride and shame. More pride than shame.

I knew then that I had gone over to the other side, without possibility of return. And that – like the droog Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange – I was completely, unfortunately, and irreversibly ‘cured’.

For newcomers, fans and anyone else that’s stateside...

We hope you can join us at some of the following events:

When? Tuesday February 2 at 7pm
Where? At the Modern Times Bookshop, San Francisco, CA
What? John Freeman will host a panel discussion with Yiyun Li and Daniel Alarcón. You can read Daniel Alarcón’s latest Granta piece, on the thriving book piracy trade in Peru, here

When? Wednesday February 3 at 7pm
Where? Book Passage, San Francisco, CA
What? As above - editor John Freeman will speak to Yiyun Li and Daniel Alarcón about work and their varying experiences of it

When? Thursday February 4 at 7pm
Where? McNally Jackson Bookstore, New York, NY
What? Granta’s Patrick Ryan will speak to Colum McCann about his father’s trade, the newspaper business

If you’re in the area and you like good writing, there’s no better place to be...

Click here to read Granta 109 online.

New Artistic Director at Granta

Granta magazine is delighted to announce the appointment of Michael Salu as Artistic Director.

For the past five years Michael has been Senior Designer at CCVP, Random House UK. Working on a range of titles across the lists, he designed several jackets for Vintage Classics - a prestigious list that included Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, Bruce Chatwin and many others.

Salu has also worked with the musician Tricky, designing the merchandise for his most recent tour and the new deluxe edition of his first album Maxinquaye. As a freelance brand consultant, he was responsible for creating and designing the new brand identity for Curzon Cinemas, recently launched across all the group’s activities.

Editor John Freeman says – ‘Michael is a profoundly intelligent and stylish designer, and we’re all thrilled that he is on board to help us make the magazine as beautiful on the outside as it is on the inside.’

Michael Salu said – ‘Granta has a history of iconic cover designs and photo essays. This is a fantastic opportunity to develop a distinctive aesthetic presence for the magazine in all its activities. I am excited about working with that intelligent visual heritage to complement the magazine’s reputation for championing new writing.’

For further information please contact Pru Rowlandson on
pru@granta.com or 020 7605 1373

‘Have you always worked hard in your life?’ I asked Drieka on the first day I filmed her. She was on her knees in the Cape Dutch farmhouse bathroom, about to lift the rim of my toilet seat to wipe beneath it with a blue and white dishcloth.

‘No, not really,’ she replied.

I focused on her hands, distrustful of my Afrikaans.

She finished cleaning in silence, then stood and moved to the wicker laundry basket. I stopped recording at that point, just before she asked me if I had anything else I wanted washed.

My Afrikaans improved. Drieka began to talk to me without prompting, and most of what she said I understood. I filmed her making the bed I’d been sleeping in, opening the sliding door onto the pool patio, shaking out my duvet, billowing it in the winter sunshine. She moved from one side of the bed to the other, making neat envelope corners of the sheet to slot beneath the mattress.

‘Of course I used to drink,’ Drieka said. ‘My father drank, my mother drank, the father of my children drank. We have a choice – a cup of Oros or a cup of wine – at the curry and rice night, and now I pick Oros. It’s why they gave me this job, in the farmhouse. Everybody wanted it, to get out of the vineyards. And I got it.’

‘What about your kids’ father?’ I ask.

‘He drives the school bus, helps a friend at the vegetable market in Paarl, runs a nightclub.’

‘I mean, is he still in your life?’

‘The way I live now, I live as husband and wife – I’m the husband and I’m the wife. A lot of people ask me when I’m going to find myself another man, and I say to them, have you seen my oldest son? That’s my guy.’

I showed Drieka some footage I’d shot for my documentary on another farm further from Cape Town, of a worker telling me what was wrong with her house, the home she was expected to clean up to show she was responsible before the farm owner would build her a new one. Drieka found it funny how she rolled her Rs and wanted me to replay the part where she said, ‘Missus, the most important thing is the door,’ while she swung the door back and forth on its one attached hinge. The few things she had were placed on cereal box cut-outs; a child’s picture was stuck to the smoky wall. Drieka laughed and asked me to rewind it. She watched it closely, then said the door of her house used to look like that, back when the boss was still in charge. ‘How old do you think she is?’ she asked me.

‘Maybe thirty-five?’ I was thinking closer to forty.

Drieka liked that. ‘It’s the alcohol. She’s probably nineteen. Like a grape becomes a raisin.’ She laughed again, the tip of her tongue in the gap where her front teeth should have been. I knew by then her teeth were missing intentionally, had noticed the other women listening in amusement while Drieka explained to me why she called it her passion gap. ‘How old am I?’

I hesitated.

This too made her smile. ‘Don’t look so scared,’ she said. ‘I told you, I don’t drink any more. And my mother says our Bushman blood keeps us young. I’m thirty-five. But I look nineteen!’

I filmed a meeting of the Workers’ Trust Committee, to which Drieka had been elected. The men sat on one side of the cold school hall and the women on the other. The farm company’s representative suggested that the workers organize a talent contest for the children, something to celebrate the release of their new community-owned wine label. The foreman, Drieka’s father, protested, saying that the children already did too much dancing, that they were always dancing, that the women must do sports with them instead.

‘Why don’t you set up a sports day, then?’ the company representative asked.

‘I don’t want more responsibility,’ Drieka’s father replied. ‘If I must organize this sports day then I won’t work as foreman any more!’

‘Just get the men to work together with you,’ the company representative said.

‘It’s not like that,’ said Drieka’s father. ‘The men don’t work together like the women do, whoever is in charge gets lumped with all the work, whenever there’s something to be done then this one’s got a sore foot, this one’s got a sore leg.’

Drieka waited until the company representative had drunk his coffee and left. ‘The women don’t stick together,’ she said to her father. ‘It’s me and Lily who do all the work.’

The talent contest turned into a Miss Moffie contest, a chance for all the little boys on the farm to dress up in their sisters’ clothes and have their mothers fuss over them with eye-shadow wands and fat tubes of lipstick. Drieka put on a cassette tape in her kitchen one afternoon and had the boys parade before her and some of the other women to practise their struts and turns and blow kisses to win over an imaginary crowd. Her father slammed the door to his room.

‘Is it because they’re pretending to be moffies?’ I asked, a little shocked myself at the encouragement the women were giving their sons to be camp.

‘No,’ Drieka said, laughing at me. ‘He doesn’t like Atomic Kitten.’

Drieka told me that her father had agreed to me filming him washing out the wine barrels before dawn, even though he no longer did that kind of work as foreman. In rubber gumboots and overalls, he balanced on overturned barrels like a circus performer, leapt from one to the next across the cellar holding a hose, and landed in a blood-coloured puddle spreading on the cement floor. He climbed into a huge metal vat with the hose and a waterproofed lamp which he hung from the inside of the structure, and sprayed the inner walls. I was hungry for breakfast, felt queasy smelling stale wine.

My Afrikaans had abandoned me overnight, leaving behind nothing but a thick tongue. I walked dumbly behind him as he left the cellar and moved into the vineyards at first light, to the sound of chirping frogs.

He took pity on me. ‘You see here, the oats and clover we are growing between our vines,’ he said slowly in Afrikaans. ‘We make organic wine.’

‘The community owns these?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure I’d understood him.

‘Yes, we use the grapes from these vines to make wine for our community’s label. We used to have ducks to eat the snails but then somebody started to eat the ducks. Now we collect the snails and the company sells them to people to eat.’

‘Why are there rose bushes at the end of each—?’

‘Row? It is so the horses would turn properly without crushing them, in the time before the tractor.’

‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked, hoping he would say he was ready to return home.

‘I am going to put in some stakes.’

I liked the sound the wooden pale made as he hammered it into the soil. I wondered if I could leave him to work in peace.

He stopped to rest and pointed at a tree beside the farm’s small reservoir. ‘The fink tell us what kind of winter it will be. If they build their nests high in that branch hanging over the water, there will be a lot of rain. If they build it lower down, there will be less rain.’

‘You know the farm well,’ I said.

‘Of course. My grandparents used to stay here, and my great-grandparents.’

‘Did your great-grandparents know any stories from the days of slavery?’ I asked.

He didn’t know.

On the day the vineyard workers were given pairs of shears to prune away dead tendrils and leaves from the company’s rows of vines, Drieka’s father said I could shadow him again. It was misty and wet, and he wore a bright yellow raincoat with the community’s wine logo printed on the pocket as he walked up and down the rows. One of the young women working nearby was humming to herself, the same six sweet notes over and over.

‘Can I ask you about the old system?’ I said, knowing Drieka had already asked him on my behalf.

‘This is how it used to be,’ he replied. ‘Instead of money, we got a tot of brandy at six in the morning, at eight, at eight-thirty, at eleven, at noon, at twelve-thirty, at four, and at six at night.’

‘Were there other – benefits?’ I asked.

‘We were given a roof over our head and clothes, food on the weekend. If the boss fired us, we called it emptying the house – do you understand?’

‘You called it emptying the house.’

‘Now, we are told we are bigger than children and must stand on our own two feet. We own our houses. When the company first bought the farm from the boss, we couldn’t understand what it was, a company. We asked the company representative, sir, this thing you’re telling us about, this company, is it a ghost? Because he always said it was something that you couldn’t see or touch.’

‘Is there anything you miss, from before?’ Subtle transitions were beyond my grasp.

He was quiet, walked with his hands in the pockets of his raincoat to the end of one row, around the rose bush, into the next. I held my breath, felt my right shoulder muscle aching from the weight of the videocamera.

‘When Drieka was born, it was the middle of the night. It was the boss who drove my wife and me to the hospital.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My Afrikaans is rusty. I didn’t mean it like that. I can see that things are better.’

‘We had a clean-up competition of our own,’ he said. ‘A few years ago, after the empowerment. My grandson embarrassed me. He challenged the company’s farm manager when he came to our house to judge it. He said to him – we want to make our house clean, but how can we? Where else can we throw our rubbish but here in the bushes?’

At the Worcester bottling plant, Drieka’s son’s job was to check each bottle of wine as it came off the assembly line to make sure that the gilded label was not on skew. I almost missed my chance to speak to him in private during the tea break, mesmerized by filming the corks being plunged mechanically into each bottle and the black foil sleeves as they were slotted over the necks and heated until sealed.

He did not smile when I approached him, let me squirm for a while in silence after my first question. I switched off my camera, replaced the lens cap.

‘You must hear the crap these people talk,’ he said quietly. ‘They say – we are bringing the farm workers into the boardroom. All those years, they said, don’t think, just work. Now they tell us, think for yourselves.’

‘Is that better or worse?’

‘For me? I can flush my own shit down the toilet now. What do you think?’

‘Drieka says the company is paying for you to take a wine tasting course,’ I said. ‘She says you want to show her you can get better work than she could.’

‘Stand like a farmer in the land with a spade,’ he said. ‘That, I don’t want.’

I drove to one of the oldest Stellenbosch vineyards to film Drieka’s son carrying trays of wine bottles at a competition. Aproned middle-aged men sat in cubicles tasting glass after glass of wine poured and served by him and other farm workers on the course. At lunch, I was caught in a conversation with one of the judges, talking rugby. I told him I played on a touch rugby team.

‘So it’s true, you need only one ball to play rugby,’ he teased. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, seeing my reaction. ‘It was a joke.’ He refilled my glass with red. ‘Anthropology, you said you studied? So it is your job to see through people?’

Drieka’s son gave me a lift back to the farm as it got dark because I was too drunk to drive myself. The back windshield of his car was tinted and had neon letters painted across it in English: I’m The Boss.

I closed my eyes because the moonlight was hurting them.

‘You see it there – the Afrikaans language monument?’ he said. ‘On the Paarl rock?’

‘Please don’t make me open my eyes for that,’ I said.

‘It is not what you think,’ he replied. ‘The views from the top are beautiful. In summer, I have taken a picnic up there for the full moon.’

‘It doesn’t offend you?’

‘Not at all. I like the words that are written in the path to the monument. This is our earnestness. Do you understand?’

‘This is our earnestness?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘About this, we are earnest.’

Guddu and Pintu are looking at a road that cuts through fields of sugar cane.

‘Twelve per cent, minimum,’ says Guddu, who’s younger.

‘What are you saying? At least twenty percent, look at how the edges are going.’

Pintu is taller and older, but he never pulls rank unduly.

‘Maybe you’re right, maybe twenty, twenty-two,’ Guddu says, quickly correcting his calculations so as not to contradict his elder on such an insignificant detail. ‘You see, bhaiya, we are also contractors but our roads don’t crumble like those made by some other people.’

Guddu and Pintu are first cousins, their fathers being brothers, and they examine roads the way I imagine wine-tasters assess a new vintage or a strange grape. They come from a land-owning Thakur family, a landlord-warrior caste, but now, like many of their generation, they’ve branched out into other kinds of money-making: they run a medium-sized road construction company, with ambitions to expand beyond laying roads locally.

We pull into the small town of Khhair and we stop to look at a roadside tyre-retreading workshop – at least Pintu and I do, while Guddu looks at a new connector that’s just been laid. I can see his mouth working, as if he’s tasting the thing for body, fruitiness, tannins, after-presence, profit.

‘Arre! The bugger’s checking out roads again! He never stops! Oye, Guddu! Look this way, yaar!’

But Guddu will not budge till he pronounces his judgment. ‘Thirty crores that Bansal took for this! What can you say, really? And people call this a government.’

Pintu is consoling. `Well you know that fucker is in trouble with his construction business. Huge losses. He has to make it up somewhere doesn’t he?’

Back in the car, we take a short-cut. The road, which leads through fields full of white-plumed kans grass, turns out to be under construction. The two cousins have agreed to show me ‘the road business’ as they call it, and as tour guides they are infinitely polite and solicitous of my needs and comforts. As the car wheels roll over sharp stone chips, Guddu and Pintu begin to explain how a road is made.

‘See, first you have to break up the old road,’ Guddu starts.

‘You have to break it up completely if you’re doing the job properly,’ Pintu chimes in.

‘Completely’, Guddu agrees, ‘smash up all the old asphalt.’

‘Unless you’re cutting corners, of course.’

‘Like this fellow…’ Guddu points to the moonscape below our car, ‘isn’t completely cutting corners. See how he’s broken up the road? But it’s not done properly, the asphalt bits are too big. But there are some people in our business who won’t even break up the old road! They just say they’ve done it and lay the new tar on top… and at the end of the next monsoon, you have another contract! For the same stretch of road!’ Pintu is grinning now, as if marvelling at the beauty of the scheme. Guddu keeps his eyes on the road while Pintu leans forward from the back seat. `You see, bhaiya, it’s like this, it’s all a matter of proportion.’

‘Percentage,’ says Guddu.

‘Proportion,’ insists Pintu.

‘Proportion, how? Well, when you go for a road contract, either to repair or make a completely new one, you have to go to the relevant officer in the relevant government department. But the thing is, the man giving out the contract can’t avoid the system. He has people below him to feed and people above him also waiting to be fed, his superiors. So, if some new officer comes to the post and decides to try some funny honesty stuff, he will be transferred to an obscure job before he finishes registering his kids in the local school!’

‘Just moved to a post where he can do no harm! People depend on the money up and down the chain, you see. You are not alone, so that you can become some clean mahatma who won’t take money. It’s not just your money, you are affecting other people’s expected incomes!’

I turn back to Pintu. ‘So, proportion, you were saying.’

‘Proportion is a kind of vivek. You know the word in our Hindi, don’t you? Vivek?’

‘Yes, of course. Conscience?’

‘So it’s a kind of vivek, a fine-tuning of conscience on part of the officer, that “I won’t be too greedy.” That the work also needs to be done. You see?’

I don’t, but I nod anyway.

Pintu gives me an example. Suppose a government department has a budget to make a road for ten crore rupees. In each department there is a norm – say ten per cent or maybe twelve per cent of the budget – that the contractor applying for the tender has to take in cash and give in advance to the officer in charge of the project; the officer then grants the tender to the contractor and work begins; then the contractor calculates his own profit on making the road – the official figure he’s allowed is, again, say fifteen per cent, but what with the investment of the bribe, the man needs to make twenty per cent, so he puts aside two crores immediately, before breaking a single chip or buying a single vat of tar.

‘So, if he pays the officer ten per cent, and he himself needs twenty per cent, that leaves…what?’ Pintu asks.

‘Seventy per cent, in this case seven crores.’ Guddu is clearly the figures guy in the team.

‘Okay?’ Pintu re-arranges his long legs in the back seat as we move on to a smoother portion of the road. ‘Okay? So. Now, say the officer is feeling greedy. Or he has debts to pay off, or say his daughter’s getting married and there’s the matter of the dowry, yes? So he decides ten per cent is not enough, ten or fifteen, whatever the norm is, in that particular department. He asks for, let’s say, twenty-five per cent. Loses his vivek and demands it, yes? Now, the road has to be made and the contractor also has to make his money – he’s not in this game for charity, right?’

‘Right. So…’

‘So, you have to do all this – break up the old road, get new stone chips for the bed of the road, dig the bed deep and wide according to specifications, have a certain consistency of tar that you lay on top, have a certain number of days to allow parts of the road settle before you make the next stretch, while your labour just sits around. All this is the man’s cost, so first thing he does is he saves his twenty per cent, protects his profit of two crores, and so the road is now made from, what?’

Guddu provides the final read-out. `The road is officially supposed to be made from eighty-five percent of total budget, with a fifteen per cent fee for the contractor. Now, if twenty-five per cent goes to the officer, that leaves seventy-five. Now minus from that the contractor’s twenty per cent, which leaves only fifty-five per cent to actually make the road.’

We’ve now moved on to a fairly good stretch of tarmac running parallel to a railway line. In the distance I see a row of electricity pylons ranged across the flat, north Indian farmland and then I notice something odd: echoing the towers are pillars, tall modernist vases of new, light brown concrete, sprouting abstract ikebanas of steel rods. These pillars troop across the green, stretching into the sky, an exact distance apart from each other, so far connecting nothing to nothing.

‘That is the Taj Corridor!’ Guddu’s voice leaps with excitement.

‘Don’t call it that!’ Pintu grins. ‘Madam-ji now insists everyone call it the Yamuna Corridor.’

This is part of one of the most controversial construction projects in the country. The madam in question is the megalomaniac Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayavati. Along with grand residences and massive statues of herself (made by the same local sculptor who once served Saddam Hussein), the corridor is another stamp that the madam will leave on the state. It is a six-lane, access-controlled, aquaducted super-highway that will stretch from Delhi to the corner of Agra where the Taj Mahal sits. The road, which met with huge protests on its inception because of the potential damage to both the countryside and the target monument, has been shelved and revived several times; now Mayavati has pushed it through, building it under the more neutral name of Yamuna, the river that it will accompany along its course.

When our road passes under the Corridor’s route, we get out of the car. One huge pillar looms above us, a few metres to the left.

‘You know,’ Guddu says, ‘they will have scoured concrete surface all the way through, latest technology, no tar, no chips, no stones, just pre-fab slabs of road, just imagine the profit. Six lanes, but expandable later to eight.’

Pintu puts his fists on the small of his back and stretches. ‘You know…’ he arches himself back to regain his full height, ‘…this thing is going to pass right over the village where we were born.’

Guddu also extends the joints of his shoulders. ‘Yes…they’ve acquired land from all of us. Very good money. But as a farmer – we were gentleman-farmers once, you know – you don’t want to sell land, but there was no choice.’

‘Anyway,’ Pintu turns his back to the road and steps a bit into the fields, ‘once this thing is up, you know what they will do for entertainment in the village?’

‘What?’ I also turn away from the road.

‘Every evening the people will climb the embankment to the highway and watch the cars whizz by for hours.’ Pintu positions himself.

‘Pintu Bhaiya is right!’ Guddu is on the other side of the road out of respect for his older brother and me, the guest. He calls out over his shoulder. ‘That’s what they will do, sit there and gawp at the speeding cars and how there is no wear and tear on the tyres!’

‘Well, who can blame them? It won’t be like our country roads, which eat up rubber as if it was a sweet dish!’ Pintu and I are angled away from each other as we each begin. Guddu has started a bit before and I can hear his piss slapping into the bushes, interrupted by the noise of passing cars and motor-cycles. For a while we water the countryside, communing silently like proper Indian men. By the time Pintu and I finish, Guddu is back near the car, holding out a bottle of water in his left hand. Pintu holds out his hands absently as Guddu pours water over them. He’s still looking up admiringly at the invisible highway arching over us. ‘What a road it will be, hain? What a piece of work!’

Marc Pastor: Forensic Investigator

When I was younger I wanted to be a detective, a clown and a writer, in that order. Today I’m a member of the Criminal Science Unit of the Mossos d’Esquadra Police Force in Catalonia.

I spend a lot of time working on facial recognition, analyzing images from closed-circuit TV cameras in banks, office buildings and the street. Sometimes it’s difficult: there’s just a glimpse of a person or the light is poor, and it’s the only lead we have. My job is to compare the facial features I see in these images with the ones we keep in our database. If the images match, we’ve found our suspect.

I remember solving one case where the only closed-circuit image we had was of a man putting on a ski mask. We suspected it might be someone who was already on our database (and who in fact was back in prison). But we had nothing else. It seemed impossible, but I requested permission to go see the suspect. I asked him to do exactly what I’d seen on the tape: to put on a ski mask. He did, and when he repeated the action I noticed what we call an ‘identifying selection trait’; one of the fingers in the hand he used to cover his face was missing a phalange. He also had a scar near his thumb. It was only when I looked at the camera image again that I saw those traits I’d previously overlooked.

More than anything else I consider myself an illustrator. I specialize in police sketches, a task in which everything I like about my job comes together. To start with, I never sketch by computer. You see this a lot on television; it’s not at all effective. It just confuses the witness and tires them out. Nobody can distinguish much after being shown fifty different kinds of eyebrows or noses. When I need to do a police sketch, my only tools are pencil, paper and an eraser. I sit in front of the witness and begin drawing. Usually the person I’m with – and this is extremely important - is someone who has suffered a heavy emotional shock. And only someone going through that kind of trauma can become truly involved in the identification process.

I’ve sat in front of people who’ve been mugged or battered, rape victims and homicide witnesses for five years. The first thing I make clear to them is that I’m not a policeman, I’m Marc. Then I start sketching. My job is to make the victim or witness feel confident, because the human brain is like a room full of doors, and I need to find that door. I sketch, erase, and touch up the portrait according to their recollections. If the victim is short, I know that he or she will remember the attacker’s face as being rounder than it probably really is, because a short person’s perspective widens the jaw and face. When I draw, I correct this optical illusion. If the attack took place under a streetlight, I work out how prominent the aggressor’s forehead is likely to be based on the victim’s recollection of how the shadow fell over the eyes. As I finish off the portrait, the victim usually remembers details they thought they’d forgotten. That’s my job – to tease out information that the other person didn’t realize was there. Experience has taught me that it is very difficult for someone to recall the aggressor’s ears or nose. The eyes and mouth, on the other hand, they remember as they truly are: a weapon that is as threatening as a gun or a knife.

Because of television, people tend to be mistaken about what my job consists of. It’s a stressful job. In my first year, at the end of the day, I found it impossible to forget about work. Walking down the street, in my neighbourhood, on my way home, I couldn’t stop trying to identify suspects in the faces I came across. It was hard. I started getting migraines and couldn’t sleep. I was obsessed, scanning faces in the street for people who looked like one of my portraits. Finally, I asked to be transferred to Sant Feliu de Llobregat, a town that’s half an hour away by train. Now, when I take the train back home to Barcelona I no longer see suspects everywhere I go.

On the other hand, I didn’t suffer from any ill effects at all when I confronted my first corpse in 2004. I remember being called out one night to go to an apartment belonging to an upper-class family. The home help had been found dead - apparently murdered. I don’t remember feeling particularly nervous in the car, maybe I was excited. I’d already seen dead bodies and attended autopsies while studying criminology. To this day, my family is always surprised - I was squeamish as a kid. But that day, when we arrived at the apartment and found that woman lying on the floor, I just did my job: I took photographs, measurements and searched for clues.

I decided to study criminology because I felt that it would open the doors to those subjects that continue to interest me - sociology (a lot), and psychology. And law. But all the explanations these various disciplines offer us, all of them, just paper over the cracks. Yes, it’s true, psychology and sociology can explain why a particular person may have become a certain type of criminal: because of a violent father or an irresponsible mother. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of people who are mistreated as children don’t go on to become criminals. There is such a variety of factors – genetic, environmental – that come into play in people’s lives that considering all the explanations could take forever.

Click here to see the first article in this series, by Rio de Janeiro taxi driver Antonio Oliveiro Ruvenal

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Erich Segal, author of the best-selling romance novel Love Story (1970), died aged 72 in London on Sunday after suffering from Parkinson’s disease for 25 years. He taught classics at Yale University, and continued to do so after becoming a succcessful novelist. He held visiting professorships at Princeton, Oxford and the University of London.

His daughter Francesca Segal was eighteen months old when her father was diagnosed, and never knew him without the illness. In her attempt to reconcile the father she knew with the one that had gone before, she went in search of his past - to the Brooklyn neigbourhood where he grew up. Her article on the experience appeared in Granta 104: Fathers, and is free to read online.

Photographer Claudia Alva accompanied Daniel Alarcón on his investigation into the book piracy business in Peru. Some more photos from this selection were published on the Guardian website.

Daniel Alarcón’s piece, ‘Life Among the Pirates’, is published in Granta 109: Work, which is out now (you can buy the issue here). You can also read the piece online.

Orhan Pamuk speaks to Granta editor John Freeman about his latest book, The Museum of Innocence. Orhan Pamuk has been published four times in Granta.

Granta editor John Freeman interviews the author about book piracy in Peru - the subject of Daniel Alarcón’s piece in Granta 109: Work.

The day after my visit to the silica factories in Godhra, I am taken to meet three dead men.

Heading east on the highway to Indore with Magan, my guide from the workers’ union, we turn on to a secondary road and wind our way through the countryside. The air is fresh and, again, the fields are green and full. But up close, I’m suddenly not sure about the quality of the crop. Maybe I’m imagining it, but the stalks of corn and millet look thin and reedy; they already rustle too much.

Every now and then we pass a village set back a little from the road, the thatched roofs steep and descending almost to the ground. We reach a village called Kharkua – Salty Well – and we gun off the road and on to a dirt track. Parking in a lane, we walk through a small gate in a thorn hedge and then down through a field to a thatched house. As we approach, Magan calls out and there is a quiet, almost inaudible response from within.

Ducking almost to a crouch, we pass under the roof and enter the shadowy vault of the hut. There are two men standing there. Both are younger than thirty, but I can’t tell their age with any precision – they both look young and old at the same time.

‘This is Hajiriya and this is Gajiriya,’ Magan tells me. The men greet me with small gestures of folded hands, not quite meeting my eyes. Both are wearing the traditional short tribal dhoti and frayed T-shirts. Behind the men sits an old woman, staring into the distance. ‘And this is the boys’ mother,’ Magan says. The woman looks at me but says nothing, giving us only the faintest of nods. Magan turns to me ‘You know she has five sons, all afflicted with the illness. The older three are not here, two are at work and one has gone to another village, and then there are these two here. Can you imagine?’

As I finish nodding to the men and their mother, I see there is another woman, maybe in her early thirties, standing a bit further back. There are four kids clinging to her but looking straight at me, children between the age of two and eight. She is the wife of one of the older brothers, the only one who’s married.

The younger woman pushes the children off and gestures to me to sit on the large string bed. I do so, sinking into the net, my legs awkwardly crossing the wooden frame. There is a nervousness, a timidity of greeting that makes me uneasy. I’ve hardly been expecting a cheerful reception, but nor did I expect such a passive welcome.

Hajiriya and Gajiriya are not the first tribals to have gone looking for work in a city. That bleak migration, that long, slow yo-yo-ing between the unreliable land and the brutal town has been happening since the arrival of industrialisation in the nineteenth century. The difference is that these two migrant workers have come back with their future hacked off.

They live in an old space, connected simply to the land around it, which should normally be liberating; but here, hard poverty has dried everything up, squeezed, wrinkled and made brittle all the soft edges you find even in the simplest of India’s rural households. I look around and see the bumpy, mud walls, the bent tree trunks on which the loft is supported above the main seating area. There are odds bits of vegetation and vessels hanging from the walls and rafters, chickens running around, a big billy-goat tethered just outside, chewing something. I notice there is no offer of tea or anything to eat, unusual even among the poorest villagers, and it occurs to me there may not be any milk or tea to offer visitors. Or maybe they just don’t want to offer it to us.

Magan sits next to me and starts to chat with Hajiriya in a mixture of Hindi and Bhilali, going through what sounds like a check-list. Did this happen? No. Has so-and-so come yet? No. Have you had this letter? No. How’s the coughing and the breathlessness? What about this medicine? Yes. You and him both? Yes. Since when? What about the other brothers?

Slowly, between the silences and asides, I put the story together for myself. Their father died a while back, leaving a small piece of land that doesn’t yield enough, specially for five brothers, with nothing much to harvest between February and August. When the labour contractor came to the village, saying that there is work in the silica factories, when he offered crazy amounts of money per day, who didn’t want to go? First the two older brothers went, then the third, then Hajiriya, and finally, for the longest stint, Gajiriya, who is the youngest. All the work was ‘unofficial’ – all the payment was in cash and there was no record on paper. At night they slept in sheds provided by the factory or in huts nearby. Every now and then they took a break, came home on the bus, bringing back the money and a cough.

‘Here we can’t make much,’ Hajiriya says, ‘maybe thirty to forty rupees a day, at most. There they said they would pay two rupees per sack, however many boris we could fill in a day. So if I filled sixty boris that meant a hundred and twenty rupees. Per day.’

Later, as an exercise, I try and do the sums in Sterling. Forty rupees is about sixty pence now, but a few years ago it was less, between forty and fifty pence. One hundred and twenty rupees is £1.62 today, three or four years ago it would have been about £1.30 for almost twelve hours of labour. Two rupees per bori, per sack, is an almost indecipherable £0.0271. I give up – the different numbers don’t talk
the same language.

‘And how long did you work there?’

‘I worked there for less than a year, but not in one go. I would come home after every couple of weeks. Gajiriya went on and off for about two years.’

When I ask at what age they went, the boys tell me ten and eleven, but Magan later corrects that: ‘They would have gone at about thirteen or fourteen. No ten-year-old can pick up one of those boris.’

‘I am twenty,’ says Hajiriya, ‘and this fellow is…how old are you, rey? He’s seventeen.’

Gajiriya squats next to me, staring at the ground, saying nothing, nodding every now and then, to agree or disagree. When I ask him something, other people answer for him. It doesn’t feel as if he’s unable to talk; there seems to be no physical impediment. It’s as if life has robbed him of speech, as if a disbelief at his own condition has turned him mute. Following his gaze downwards, I notice something: there are small balloons at the end of each of Gajiriya’s fingers, the fingertips are swollen, turning each finger into a weird probe shape. Arching over its swelling, the thumb of his left hand still has a long, manicured vanity nail, typical of western Indian men.

‘I came and warned you, didn’t I?’ Magan breaks the silence. ‘Four years ago, right? Before these two went.’

‘Yes, you did. We didn’t listen to you.’ The old woman’s voice is clear. ‘Even when the older ones came back coughing, we didn’t listen.’

She quickly covers her mouth with the end of her sari, as if she shouldn’t have allowed the words to come out.

‘We should have listened.’

We’ve been joined by a third young man, who lives next door. I can see his thin body under the torn vest, bulging with the same distensions as Hajiriya and Gajiriya, arms swollen where they shouldn’t be, muscles absent where they should be, his torso caved in, his eyes cul-de-sacs. I try and calculate how much each of these young men weighs – none seems to be more than fifty kilos, all the flesh horribly redistributed by the silicosis. The medicines given to silicosis victims are basically the ones for tuberculosis and these are nothing more than elaborate placebos. The compensation the Farmers and Workers Union is demanding from the Government is a million rupees for the family of a worker who has died from silicosis and half amillion for a victim who is still alive. It’s still a demand – there is no agreement yet from any authority.

At some point, I feel I should try and say something. I open my mouth but nothing very much comes out. Every question I think of sounds stupid. The answers are all there, inscribed on the faces and bodies of everyone around me.

I take recourse to my camera and it’s just as bad. What do I frame? I ask the three boys to stand up for a ‘portrait’. First each one alone and then all three together. Then one of Hajiriya and Gajiriya with their mother. I distrust the pictures the moment I take them, pictures that have been taken many, many times over, too many times, in independent India. The subaltern in his sparse habitat, the tribal as victim, the afflicted industrial worker as photographed object.

As I’m photographing the boys, they start talking about the contractor who came to recruit them.

‘Does he still come?’ I ask.

‘He doesn’t come.’ Hajiriya shakes his head. ‘He knows we know. We all know what those factories do to you.’

‘So now they are recruiting from much further away,’ Magan adds, ‘from other states, all the way north in Rajasthan, from further south in Gujarat.’

‘We will kill that contractor if he comes here again.’ Suddenly there is a small pulse from Gajiriya. ‘The villagers will all gather and kill him.’

First you notice the dogs. In all other ways Freetown is a West African city like any other, of red dust and raised cries, forty-degree heat and a year neatly segmented into two – hot and dry, hot and wet.

Today water tips from the sky. Beneath the canopy of a local store three street dogs and a man holding a briefcase stand and contemplate the rain. Another dog shelters beneath the umbrella of a cigarette seller. A fifth follows a woman across the street, literally dogging her footsteps, using her as a beacon to navigate the traffic and the floodwater.

In the dry season the kings of the city are the dogs. They weave through the crowds, lie in the roadside shade watching through slitted eyes, they circle and squabble, unite in the occasional frenzied dash. For the most part the people and the dogs exist on separate planes. The dogs ignore the people, who likewise step around and over them. On the road the drivers steer around reclining animals. This city has more street dogs than any I have known.

It is eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Torrents of water sluice off the hills and rush down the cross streets. The force of the rain has swept the traffic off the road, and now threatens the battered Peugeot ahead of me. Inside his clinic Dr Jalloh has placed his plans on hold, waits for me in his tiny surgery surrounded by dogs, waits for the rain to stop.The whole city waits for the rain to stop.

It was the dry season of 2004 and I was home working on a novel when I first met Gudush Jalloh. My friend Rosa called, concerned that her dog, at that moment whelping, was in trouble. The dog in question was a snappish bitch, a street rescue by the name of Corre whom I had so far failed to befriend. I was in that selfish space of writers and the interruption was unwelcome. Could she not call a vet? She told me the vet was upcountry. Call another vet? There was no other vet. Someone who knows about dogs, then? Yes, she replied, and waited for my answer.

I know a bit about dogs. I do not pretend to know a great deal. I enjoy the company of dogs and keep them, but know nothing of whelping bitches. I consider myself something less than an expert. An interested amateur.

Eyes closed, half in, half out of this world, the puppy looked dead. I had no idea what to do so I telephoned my husband in South East London, who in turn called our vet and relayed his instructions via mobile phone and satellite to reach us six thousand miles away, at a pound a minute. Try to free the pup’s shoulders. Olive oil might help. Corre, by now docile in her distress, allowed me to try to hook my forefingers under the puppy’s forelegs. I tried. Nothing worked: not the olive oil, the bitch’s efforts, or my own fumblings. At last we obtained the home number of the local vet. He’d travelled overnight from the Provinces, been asleep less than an hour and his telephone manner displayed the lagged thinking of the abruptly awoken. He told me he had sent his car away. I offered to collect him.

Dr Jalloh is the only vet in the country. No, that is not quite true. There are three government vets, employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. They wear rubber boots, but mostly deal with deal with figures, with capacities, stock and yields. There are also a small number of charlatans. Gudush Jalloh is the only qualified vet in private practice. The single person in the country to whom you might bring your sick dog, cat, monkey or goat.

The pup had never, not for an instant, known life. The body cavity was a huge fluid-filled sac, devoid of vital organs. By now we had moved Corre to the surgery and Dr Jalloh prodded at the dead puppy with a long pair of tweezers, declared this the second instance of such abnormality he had seen. Rosa turned away. I, whose paper-mask fantasies had never found expression, leaned in.A second pup suffered the same deformity. Another was stillborn. Four survived.

That first meeting made a deep impression upon me. In the years that followed I met Gudush Jalloh on one more occasion which was significant, and then socially perhaps five or six times more. At one point somebody mentioned his work with the street dogs, in which they thought I might be interested.

This is the country where I grew up. It was the 1970s. Here, as a child, I gathered, rescued, raised and lost more dogs than I can now recall. I have some of their names: Jack. Jim. Tigger. Apollo. Pandora. Bingo. KaiKai. Jupiter. Pluto. The turnover was so fast there are many more I have forgotten. My dogs died of disease, of being hit by cars, of falling off balconies, generally of life expectancy in the Third World. Sometimes they were lost or stolen. When I was nine Apollo disappeared. For months I scanned the streets during every car journey. One day, a long way from home, on the other side of the city, I saw Apollo. The driver stopped the car. We opened the back door, pulled Apollo inside and drove off at speed. I never found out who had taken him or why; he had not been mistreated. Nor do I know whether we were seen as we effected his rescue. I imagine whatever witnesses there were remained silent for fear of being disbelieved.

The third child and the youngest, I passed my earliest years as the beneficiary of what the experts call benign neglect. When I was three my father became active in politics. He was detained several times, once for three years. Amnesty named him a Prisoner of Conscience. My stepmother kept the family together. I collected dogs. My parents, if they noticed, did not pass comment, even when the household total achieved a high score of six. I read White Fang and Peter Pan and longed for a wolf and a dog which slept at the foot of my bed. Ours were strictly yard dogs.

Other animals passed through my life: a mongoose, a green parrot, a fawn. They interested me, fed my ambition to become a vet, but I did not love them. I loved only the dogs for reasons too complicated to elaborate upon, and yet also painfully obvious. In a time of lies, I found honesty and loyalty among the dogs. And if the memory of particular dogs has grown unreliable, then the memory of what they offered me in that time has become indelible: a retreat from the mutability of the human world, a place of safety.

There were a lot more vets back in those days. In the intervening thirty odd years they have all gone: pursuing opportunities overseas, fleeing a civil war that lasted ten years and killed countless and uncounted numbers of us.

We arrive late. It is nine o’clock. Outside the school building people and dogs wait beneath a steady drizzle. The dogs are collarless, held on lengths of electric cable, nylon rope or string. A woman in pink holds on to a brown and white dog. A boy cradles a furious pup. A man arrives with a large black and white dog, which leaps and twists at the end of a long rope. Another man leads his dog on its hind legs, holding on to the front paws, like a dancing bear. Inside the schoolroom a line of people and dogs wait upon on a bench and impassively watch a technician gently shave the balls of a sedated dog.

This is a street clinic. Bring a dog here and you can have it sterilized for free. On other days Jalloh’s team rounds up dogs from the streets, puts them in a wagon and takes them to the clinic to be vaccinated and neutered. The first time they tried to remove dogs local people chased them, demanding to know why the dogs were being taken and allowing them to leave only after the team promised the dogs’ return.

‘In Thailand,’ Dr Jalloh told me from the wheel of his Land Cruiser on the drive across town, ‘the authorities have a “keep your dog at homeday”. Everybody has to bring their dogs inside. Afterwards they go through the streets and shoot any dog they see.’ A few years ago the Freetown municipal authorities decided upon a similar cull of the street dogs. Dr Jalloh elected himself the dogs’ representative and spoke during a public meeting. Though the odds were stacked against him, he argued that most of the dogs weren’t stray but belonged to the community, that they – the dogs – performed a function and a service by offering security and protection. The mayoral dignitaries told Jalloh the dogs were dirty. Jalloh retorted that the opposite was true; their scavenging kept the streets clear of rotting rubbish. He had a point. There had been no systemized rubbish collection in the city for decades. The authorities backed down; the dogs were reprieved. ‘They say we are crazy...’he paused to answer his phone. The ring tone was a puppy’s whine. They said he was crazy. And that was just the beginning.

In 1952 Konrad Lorenz published King Solomon’s Ring in which he set out the terms of ‘the Covenant’. The Covenant describes the relationship between human and canine, its beginnings and the stone upon which it is founded. A pack of jackals followed Stone-Age man’s hunting expeditions and surrounded his settlements, were tolerated, accepted and ultimately encouraged. Firstly for the warning note they sounded at the advance of predators, secondly for their ability to track game. The jackals, who initially followed the hunters in the hope of scraps and entrails, began to take the initiative, running before instead of behind the hunter, bringing to bay larger animals than they would be able to hunt without assistance. And so the covenant was created, an interdependent exchange of services.

This is how, fifty years earlier, Rudyard Kipling described the origin of the Covenant in ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’: ‘When the Man waked up he said, “What is Wild Dog doing here?” And the Woman said, “His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always. Take him with you when you go hunting.”’

For Lorenz, who went on to win a Nobel Prize, the contract between human and animal was: ‘signed...without obligation.’ Jalloh, closer to Kipling than to Lorenz, would disagree. There is an obligation, it is unequivocal and one-sided. Having brought the jackal into his sphere, having bred the wildness from him – man owes dog.

Four, then five, then six freshly neutered and comatose dogs lie in a neat row, the paw of one lies across another, strange babies sharing a bed. An assistant tattoos the ear of each dog. There is a general air of understated chaos. Dogs roam the room. Outside a circle of children gather to watch as recently anaesthetized dogs stagger, circle and crash to the ground. The technician with the tattoo machine clips the ear of a reclining dog which, far from being sedated, is merely sleeping. The astounded animal jumps to its feet and stalks huffily away. Elsewhere a technician attempts to inject a dog. It tries to bite him. The owner’s efforts to hold onto his dog are so ineffective that the technician suggests the dog doesn’t belong to him. The man insists otherwise. The waiting crowd wades in. He’s afraid of you,’ the woman in the pink top points out. A small boy steps forward and takes the animal. To me Jalloh says: ‘Some people think they are the owners, but they are only the proxy owner. Usually the children are the true owners of the dog.’

Sitting on the plane halfway across the Sahara two days before, I had suddenly remembered my rabies vaccination. I pulled out my yellow international health certificate, relieved to find there was month left before it expired. ‘Ah,’ says Jalloh, cheerfully, ‘but it is an inexact science.’ He tries to keep himself inoculated, but the vaccine is rarely available in the Sierra Leone. The staff wear doubled gloves. They have two or three muzzles in the surgery. That’s the sum of it.

On our way back to the surgery we stop at the government veterinarian offices, which Jalloh is keen to show me. He jumps from the vehicle and leads me inside, introduces me to three men dressed in overalls and wellington boots. The room is virtually empty of furniture and equipment. Dusty glass cabinets house aging texts. The sole piece of equipment appears to be an old freezer. In one of the cabinets I find an elegant wooden box.

‘Post-mortem kit,’ says Jalloh. ‘It will be empty.’ I open it. Nothing, save the abandoned chrysalis of a moth.

As a child I’d owned a dog that overnight turned suddenly affectionate. Soon afterwards his hips locked. I carried him to the vet, walked him up and down to demonstrate the strange gait. The vet instructed me to bring him back if anything changed. The dog wandered and late one evening returned, his hind quarters split open to the bone by an axe wound. Through the night I tended him, feeding him raw egg with my fingers and following him around with a bowl of water, from which the wretched animal heaved itself away time and time again. I remember the episode now and recount it for Jalloh. The dog was rabid. I worked it out for myself later. The vet had refused to admit it.

‘“Craze dog” they call it,” says Jalloh. And tells an everyday story of his own. Some months ago, a woman brought three dogs to him for a regular check up. In one Jalloh saw the telltale paralysis of the lower jaw. By the time the owner returned Jalloh had destroyed all three. He had no choice. It happens sometimes. In the slums the cry goes up at the sight of a drooling dog. Occasionally somebody will call him, but often by the time he gets there the dog is dead. Now that frustrates him, for diagnosis on a dead animal requires a post mortem of the brain. If the dog were alive he could gather a sample of blood. Jalloh likes to keep accurate records of such things. After all, nobody else does.

Gudush Jalloh was born in Kono, Yengema, in the Camara Chiefdom. His parents were Fula Muslims, the nomadic cattle owners of West Africa who drive their herds through Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Nigeria. By the time Gudush was born in 1959, the first son of the first wife and eldest of twenty-two, the family had abandoned their pastoralist ways. Still, the knowledge of his heritage interested the young Jalloh. His early ambition was to own a herd. His mother reared chickens and the occasional goat, dogs played an early role in his life. When Gudush was fifteen his father arranged a marriage to a local girl, told his son it was time to leave school and join the family business as petty traders of gasoline. Gudush refused either to marry or to leave school, finished his education with the help of a scholarship and a former teacher who employed him as a part-time lab assistant. He began to apply for government scholarships to read engineering overseas. In 1978, he was one of a dozen who won scholarships to Hungary, but then, on the eve of travel, the scholarships were withdrawn and awarded to candidates with government connections. A year later he won a scholarship to Moscow. The African students arrived in Rostov in late September, without a word of Russian between them. They worried about how to make their stipends last, how to cook potatoes. Some time during the year-long induction, Jalloh was persuaded by a colleague to switch courses and join him at the Moscow Veterinary Academy. He returned to Sierra Leone in the mid-1980s, the rift with his father healed by the prestige of having been chosen to study abroad. Jalloh tells me his father didn’t mind that he had become a vet; he didn’t know what a vet was. Later people said: ‘So your son spent six years in Russia just to treat dogs?’

That year, the same year Jalloh returned, his younger brother, the second son of his father’s third wife, was bitten by a dog. By the time Jalloh heard the news in Freetown, the boy had died of rabies.

Thursday. We are standing in the yard of an ocean-view house in the west of Freetown, close by the Mammy Yoko Hotel, where the great siege of the civil war played out. Guests hunkered down while the rebel troops of the RUF fought Nigerian led ECOWAS troops and American helicopters said to hell with the no-fly zone, landed on the beach and evacuated their citizens and a few others as well. My stepmother was among those who escaped. She told me how she was on the ship with a dozen working girls, scooped from the hotel bar and set down on the ship along with everyone else. They were excited. They thought they were going to America. Briefly, and for the first time, the world became aware of what was going on in our country.

From where I stand I can see terraced lawns reaching down to the waterside and an ornamental pagoda. No sign of the owners, a Sierra Leonean businesswoman and her European husband, or so I am told. There is just a watchman with a squint, a pronounced underbite and a diploma in passive aggression. The steward, who was supposed to fetch the prescription shampoo from the pharmacy and meet us back here, has still not shown. Teddy calls him. The guy swears he is on his way, but Teddy says he hears the sounds of a bar behind him. Dr Jalloh is not with us. He hates this kind of job, hates owners who don’t know how to handle their own animals, who won’t come to the clinic. Sometimes, he says, people just show him out to the yard, to a couple of half-wild beasts, and leave him there. He hates that more than anything. He’s a vet, he says, not a dog whisperer.

Teddy, Zainab, Nabsieu and I are here to wash the dogs, but nothing is happening. We are standing in the eye of sun while four dogs circle us, demonstrating various degrees of animosity. ‘Here, in this situation, the relationship between owner and dog has reached total breakdown,’ pronounces Teddy. ‘These dogs no longer trust human beings. They will not allow themselves to be touched.’ The dogs are flea ridden and one has a skin infection. The exception is a tall, slim brown and white dog with a cropped tail. It looks healthier than the rest and allows itself to be petted. The dog came from next door. His Colombian owner turned out to have been the mastermind behind the planes local people would hear landing in the dead of night at the airport on the other side of the water. Motorboats from a small jetty in front of the house ferried the cargo to the mainland and from here the cocaine was loaded onto mules bound for Europe. Neighbouring Guinea has already turned into a cocaine state. After the Colombian’s arrest the abandoned animal jumped the wall to join this pack. Teddy nicknames it ‘the gangster’. One thing you can say about the Colombian though, he looked after his dog.

Twenty minutes on we get started. The watchman, who has been asked not to give food to any of the dogs because we are about to administer an anaesthetic, is now giving one of them a plate of food. What is it with this guy? Poorly paid staff take out their resentment on the dogs, says Teddy. They sometimes feel the owners of the house care more for the animals than they do for them. Here the householders have been away for some months, which might explain the neglected state of the dogs and their hostility to humans. Ten more minutes more are spent persuading the watchman to fetch soap and towels. Finally we begin. Nabsieu inserts a dart into a hollow pipe, raises the mouthpiece to his lips and stalks the dogs with the quiet footfall of a hunter. The gangster goes down first. Nabsieu fells the remaining dogs one by one, a single dart each.

An hour later the job is finished. We have washed and scrubbed four dogs, searched for two in the nearby bush after the watchmen opened the gate and let them out into the street. Now four dogs sleep it off in the shade. Zainab, Nabsieu and Teddy sign off on the job, telling the watchman they’ll be back next month.

Back in the surgery Jalloh asks how it went. I say the whole thing is crazy. Jalloh shrugs and shakes his head. What to say? They service about twenty elite households in this way. The clinic needs the money. Maybe he’ll dig a dip out back. Even so, he muses, people like that still wouldn’t bring their dogs.

He says that the main problem here is neglect. People don’t have the money to care for and feed all these dogs, which I feel is broadly true, though the last two days have produced a strange, more complex picture. The slum-dwellers’ dogs are ten times healthier than the dogs of the country’s most wealthy.

Lunch in a nearby restaurant and a conversation begun the day before is reprised. Jalloh has a television crew arriving from Holland in a week’s time. On the drive back across town from the street clinic I’d asked whether he planned to allow the crew to film a clinic. Jalloh nodded. Some of what I had seen, I’d suggested, might prove unpalatable to Western viewers.

A small silence. Jalloh wrinkled his nose and sighed: ‘Oh dear,’ and then, ‘Europeans are so emotional.’

Ordinarily his tendency is to talk about the West in uncritical terms: as an animal nirvana where pets exist as legally protected family members. I wondered if this was a habit borne of the need to flatter, to treat everyone who visited from overseas – including me – as a potential donor. At the seminars and conferences Jalloh attends on his funded trips to Europe and America, the face the West wears is typically humane, rational, superior. Next to the representatives of international animal welfare programmes such as the RSPCA whose reserves of £150 million represent twice our nation’s annual revenue, Jalloh is the beggar at the banquet.

What the West reveals of itself at such times, naturally, is less interesting than what is concealed. In our street in London the kids with pit-bull crosses; the dead pit bull in a bin liner; the dog fights. Now, sitting over steak sandwiches and Fanta, I detail none of this. Instead I tell him about a photographer employed by a national newspaper magazine in Britain who was sent out to work with me on an assignment some years before. The woman suffered culture shock such that she was virtually catatonic, only showing signs of recovery within sight of the airport. Jalloh chuckles, his chuckle deepens into a laugh. Then for a moment he is quiet.

An American came to Sierra Leone to work for the Special Court responsible for trying war criminals, one of hundreds of lawyers and support staff employed by the American-backed court. She wanted to fly three street dogs to the United States and asked Jalloh to prepare the dogs for travel. He suggested she give the money to his programme instead. For the same money he could help a thousand dogs. She refused, spent 3,000 US dollars to transport the dogs He remembers her name and repeats it. In time it will become a running gag between us, a byword for solipsistic sentimentality. It made him think he should be doing a ‘sponsor a street dog’ programme, like those for sponsoring children. Send a photograph of the dog and a monthly update.

That would work, I agree: ‘She wanted to be a hero.’

Jalloh repeats her name. Shakes his head and laughs.

Then there are those dogs, larger than the other street dogs, who roam the streets, tattered collars hanging around their necks.We call them the ‘NGO dogs’, adopted by aid workers, abandoned when the contract is over. Not so very different to their relationship with the country. A departing staff member at the British High Commission recently left two dogs in Jalloh’s compound before flying home for good. Last year the High Commission denied visas to two of his staff members who had been offered free training places at an animal centre in Britain.

And yet some people think it’s Jalloh’s enterprise that is misplaced in a country officially the poorest in the world. Seventy-sixth out of seventy-six in the United Nations Human Development Index – a ranking we sometimes switch with Bangladesh. When last that happened, the President announced a national celebration. In the early days Jalloh found himself turned away by the World Health Organization and other international funding agencies, who told him animal welfare was not a priority. He argued, with incontrovertible logic, that human health and animal health were inseparable. He won.

The deputy Foreign Minister, lunching at a table nearby, comes over to say hello on his way out. The minister donated the old trailer Jalloh has converted in to holding kennels behind his surgery where a small shanty town is growing. Part of an old truck is being fashioned into a second unit. He keeps his vaccines in the freezer of the restaurant where we are lunching: the surgery is without electricity.

His is a makeshift existence. Before I arrived Jalloh had e-mailed asking if I might help him obtain consumables for a VeTest, an elaborate piece of diagnostic equipment someone had given him. The cost would have come to €2,800, the materials required an unbroken cold chain between the factory in Holland and Freetown. The VeTest sits, unused, beneath his desk.

He tells me of a British woman who wanted to set up a dogs’ home in Sierra Leone. ‘Who would pay for it? Who would adopt all those dogs?’ Of the international companies who offer him vast sums to exterminate the strays that roam their compounds.

The conversation will range over days: African pragmatism and reality, Western sentiment, the schism between the values of the two and the West’s own conflicted treatment of animals. Of Jalloh’s lot in trying to embrace, negotiate and reconcile so many ways of thinking.

Here, a man presses a knife against a bull’s neck, croons as he looks the animal in the eye and slits its throat. I have seen it happen many times and again. One occasion was a family celebration, the ‘opening’ of a house rebuilt after the war. A cow was to be slaughtered, cooked, and fed to one hundred people. In the forest behind the house five men prayed and held her until she died. The killing of an animal is attended with all the ritual of an offering. Indeed ‘sacrifice’ is the word we use. In Britain factory-farmed animals, strung up by single hind leg, inch along a conveyor belt to the screams of those who went before, emerge stripped of hair and skin, wrapped in cellophane.

I will ask Jalloh what he thinks of the dogs he sees in Europe, bred beyond the point of deformity for the show ring and the fashionable, a million miles from Lorenz’s noble working dogs. Jalloh will smile and shake his head: ‘And now they call our dogs mongrels.’

I will repeat the conversation I had with my London vet, about the link between the physical abuse of animals and the physical abuse of children. Vets are under instruction to report every incident of animal mistreatment. Jalloh will listen, ask questions. Who are the perpetrators? What sector of society are they from? He frowns. No, he has never heard of dogfights here. In England he once trained as an RSCPA inspector, although he never went out on patrol. He read about the torture of animals. He found it ‘interesting and very strange’. Another time he says: ‘People here believe if you do something bad to an animal, something bad will happen to you.’

Once, I remember, I visited a hotel looking for a place to house a writers’ conference the following year. A wild goose chase, as it soon became evident. The hotel had been abandoned since the war and was in an impossible state of neglect. In the bathrooms of a collapsed bungalow I found a litter of puppy corpses. The caretaker who accompanied me covered his mouth with his hand. ‘Bad, very bad.’ Nobody had seen the bitch for days, they’d searched for and failed to locate her pups. Perhaps she had been hit by a car. He shook his head, sure this was a portent of something terrible.

Says Elizabeth Costello, protagonist in J.M Coetzee’s The Life of Animals, in which the author uses a fictional setting to explore the moral argument about the treatment of animals: ‘I do think it is appropriate that those who pioneered the industrialization of animal lives and commodification of animal flesh should be at the forefront of trying to atone for it.’ Trying to atone for a crime she compares to the Holocaust, a crime of ‘stupefying proportions’.

Costello’s response is an ethical vegetarianism so extreme she is unable to sit at a table with meat eaters. On the other side of the table, Jalloh has just completed work on his steak sandwich. I have never met a vegetarian in Sierra Leone. Perhaps because there isn’t food enough to be fussy about protein sources. Or perhaps simply because there is a great deal less to atone for. In places where the distance travelled from Wild Dog and the creation of the Covenant is shorter, one finds neither the gas chambers nor the need to expiate, but rather a middle ground between the world of humans and the world of animals: A rough and ready equilibrium.

Still, it would be disingenuous to suggest crimes never occur. Jalloh chides me for my romanticism, reminds me, via e-mail in our continued conversation some weeks later, that sometimes the knife is blunt. There is no singing. In Britain he finds people who care. In Sierra Leone they tell him he doesn’t have enough work to do, to be wasting time on animals.

The Sierra Leone 1960 Animal Cruelty Act, a parting gift from the departing colonials, sits unchanged upon the statute books. Jalloh wants it updated and enforced, he tells me. In the lifetime of the Act there have been only two known attempts to bring a prosecution: Jalloh. Once against a man who beat Jalloh’s dog. The man was a neighbour who had taken a dislike to the dog, a sentiment the animal heartily returned. The dog barked. The neighbour, when nobody was watching, took a stick to it. Another time Jalloh attempted to prosecute a man who stoned a goat to death. The man claimed the animal had destroyed his crop, he’d warned it several times. Neither case reached the courts. The police treated both incidents as crimes of property. What struck me as I listened to Jalloh’s telling, what strikes me still, was the history, the very personal enmity between victim and perpetrator at the heart of both crimes. There existed a relationship, a warped and angry one, but one that existed – something no law of property could ever take into account.

There were those who disapproved of Jalloh’s actions, of the primacy he would give animals such that a man might be imprisoned. Jalloh would like to see rights for animals enshrined in law. Limited rights. The right to food and shelter. Not the right to life that animal activists in Britain would advocate. No, he shakes his head and thinks some more. Freedom from mistreatment, yes. An animal ombudsman, someone to enforce those rights. Someone like him.

Soon after his return from the Soviet Union Jalloh collected fifty signatures on a petition, called a meeting and launched the Sierra Leone Animal Welfare Society. A young engineering student, Memuna, attended the first of those meetings. Two years later they married. An afternoon in the surgery they sit side by side and reel off the names of the other attendees by heart, produce the original minutes on translucent onion paper, offer them for my perusal, laugh and touch hands.

And then came war.

Jalloh and Memuna fled across land to Guinea. They carried nothing but his vet’s bag and some antibiotics. Memuna was pregnant. ‘I was worried she would abort,’ he says. Abort, the terminology of a vet. In the Gambia they found sanctuary, Jalloh offered his services to the government, working on food security and cattle farming and once, administering an NGO-funded programme to neuter the street cats that clustered in hundreds around the tourist hotels.

Two years later Jalloh and Memuna returned in time for the rebels’ big push on Freetown. The street dogs grew fat feasting on the corpses. People thought the dogs would go mad, Jalloh tells me, from eating the drug-addled flesh of the rebel soldiers. Though who could deny they did the city a favour? A doctor who worked at Connaught, the city’s main hospital, described to me days spent collecting corpses during pauses in the fighting. He found people’s loved ones shoved down pit latrines, rebels left to the dogs. Once he tried to move the corpse of a young girl, a commander in the rebel forces, but furious locals refused to allow it. Leave her for the dogs. The fate she deserved.

The city was overrun with dogs. Jalloh chose that year to launch his campaign to protect them. More than once I have heard the story of how it all started. Now I hear it from his wife: ‘He gathered eighty dogs and brought them to the compound,’ says Memuna. ‘I had to cook rice three times a day to feed them all. That night it was a full moon. The dogs began to howl. Next day I had to go to each of my neighbours to beg.’ She laughs for a long time.

Today is Saturday. We are sitting together in the surgery and Memuna enters with wet hands, touching the back of hers to the back of mine. She excuses herself to return to the kitchen and oversee the cooking of tonight’s feast. It is the first day of Ramadan.

It vexes Jalloh – the new fundamentalism spreading from Saudi Arabia has now reached even Sierra Leone. It breaks down the relationship between man and dog, he says. Teddy gives an account of a cleric who told one of his congregation to scrape the skin away from his arm where he had allowed a dog to touch it. At that Jalloh jumps up, begins searching for the papers upon which he has copied Hadiths about animals from the Koran. He talks fast and waves a finger in the air. He went on Radio Islam to talk about the treatment of animals under Islam. Now he’s persuaded Alhaji Sillah, the city’s chief Imam, to read out some of the Hadiths during Friday prayers at the Central Mosque.

In all the years of his life Jalloh has never been diverted from his faith or his love of dogs. Only one thing came close to defeating him. His right eye, when it catches the light, contains a diamond-hard glint. I remembered hearing, when I was far away in England, that Jalloh was going blind. The glint is an intraocular transplant, an artificial lens. He is functionally blind in his left eye, having suffered severe optic-nerve damage and the resultant loss of ninety per cent of the sight. Two years ago he looked at the world through a tunnel, a six-inch span. He couldn’t drive, could barely work although he carried on. The cause was cataracts.

On a trip to the United States, a friend, an animal-lover and supporter of his, persuaded him to visit an optician. The optician referred him straight to a specialist who gave Jalloh six months before he lost his sight altogether. Jalloh had no money for the operation. The Dutch animal welfare agency who fund his work with the street dogs declined to help, informing him their funds were reserved for animals. Calls were made and the surgeon, who loved his two Labradors, agreed to waive his fees. Jalloh underwent the surgery but found he had overlooked the $10,000 hospital bill. The surgeon persuaded the hospital to cut the bill by half. Then came the $1,500 anaesthetist’s fee. A phone call and he too waived his fee. So it went. This is how his sight was saved. For the love of dogs, says Jalloh, stands up and spreads his arms. But for the love of dogs, he’d be blind.

Saturday is the day the responsible middle classes bring their dogs to the clinic. Jalloh cleans out ear infections, administers antibiotics and vaccines. The vaccines carried a half-dozen at a time in an ice-packed Thermos from the restaurant down the road. At my behest he demonstrates the correct way to remove a tick: burst the body and let it detach naturally. Make the mistake of pulling and the head will remain inside. Dogs, his own, move freely in and out of the surgery. Jalloh, his assistants and I circle each other in the narrow space between his desk, examining table and shelves labelled: Orals/Endoparasites and Ectoparasites/Emergency Injectables/Injectables for Infectious Diseases, Catgut Suture Needles/Surgical Gloves. New supplies have been stuck in the port for two months now. His wish list for a far-off future: an orthopaedic surgical kit (most dogs are hurt in traffic accidents); a binocular microscope (he can’t use his old monocular scope because of his eyes); an auroscope and – dreamtime now – solar power to run lights and a fridge.

We treat Emaka, Joffy, Fluffy, Cannis, Tiger, Rambo and Combat.

At two Joffy’s owner comes to collect her dog. Jalloh springs up and hands her a form for his latest initiative – a licence scheme – tells her to go to City Hall and license her dog. Later he outlines the scheme for my benefit. There is now a municipal by-law, thanks to Jalloh (one begins to believe the City Council has given up denying him anything) which states every dog must be vaccinated and licensed. The funds collected from citizens like Joffey’s owner are diverted to vaccinate and license the community dogs. That’s the plan anyway. The tax amounts to around two pounds for a sterilized dog and three pounds for an unsterilized dog.

Me: ‘Is the law enforced?’

Jalloh: ‘No. But it’s enforceable. This is a test run. First we’ll find out how much voluntary take up there is.’

Me: ‘Has anyone actually licensed their dog yet?’ There being, in my view, no real possibility of enforcement in a state still struggling towards a functioning police force.

Jalloh pauses, gives the habitual headshake, which I now know signifies disbelief. ‘No.’

And now I will tell you about the second time I met Gudush Jalloh. It took place a few months after our first meeting, less than two years after the end of the civil war. I had taken into my home a street dog, a yellow-coated bitch. I’d noticed her searching for scraps along the beach, checked with some of the beach boys who confirmed that nobody took care of her. With their help we bundled her into the back of my car where she stood on the parcel shelf and howled. The other strays, who’d scattered at the moment of the kidnap, gathered around the car, some howled back. A boy said: ‘Dis ’oman dae cam take you na heaven and you dae fom?’ This woman has come to take you to heaven and you’re complaining?

I named her Mathilda and wooed her with corned-beef sandwiches, just as I had on the beach. By five o’clock of our first afternoon together she sat to my command. By six she had learned to lie down. She became my companion during the long days of writing. Several people asked if they might have her when I left, for I had earned a reputation as someone who knew a good dog. And Mathilda was a good dog, though she never lost her skittishness around strangers, she gave me her devotion entirely.

Then Mathilda was hit by a car. In the early morning a man on his way to work passed a wounded dog lying in a ditch, recognized her and brought her to my house. I drove her to the only place there was, to Dr Jalloh’s surgery. Mathilda had two dislocated hind legs and, he suspected, a broken pelvis. He could try to slip the dislocated legs back into their sockets, but not if the pelvis was indeed broken. With no X-ray machine it was impossible to give an exact diagnosis.

The injured dog lay silent and still upon the table. A solution seemed unreachable. To attempt to relocate the bones into a broken pelvis would be agonizing and ineffective. I thought I knew what Dr Jalloh was saying, I might have to put her down. I stroked the top of her head. Then Dr Jalloh said he knew one person with an X-ray machine. It was possible they might let us use it. He offered to make the call.

Haja Binta, a Fula like Jalloh and recently returned from twenty years working for the NHS in Britain. Now she was the proud owner of a small private clinic on the other side of the city. I arrived, carrying Mathilda who was partially sedated and wrapped in a towel. The people waiting to see the nurse thought I was holding a baby, but when they discovered it was a dog, they gathered around:

‘Hush ya,’ said an old man.

‘Sorry-oh!’ said someone else.

Haja Binta led us to the X-ray room and laid Mathilda on a steel bed, beneath the eye of the giant machine. Several times she repositioned the dog, pausing only to adjust her hijab. Afterwards she offered to develop the prints while I waited. I returned to the waiting room. After twenty minutes Haja Binta came to find me. She smiled as she held up the X-rays. There was no fracture to the pelvis. The old man surveyed the images and gave a grunt of approval at the outcome. Somebody else said: ‘Na God will am so.’

Mathilda recovered over time, retaining a distinctive sideways skip. One day, during dinner at the British High Commission, I told the story. My audience were mainly expats, people sent to the country in the wake of war for one reason or another. One man took exception to the waste of time and resources on an animal in a country where people had so little. He told me so as he walked away.

But, you see, here’s why I think he was wrong. The people who had helped Mathilda: the man who reached into the ditch and brought her out, Dr Jalloh in his makeshift surgery, the Haja and her patients – they were Africans. They lived in the poorest country in the world. We were, all of us, two years out of a decade of civil war. We had survived the darkest place and we had all lost a great deal.

This is Milan Kundera’s test of humanity:

‘True human goodness can manifest itself, in all its purity and liberty, only in regard to those who have no power. The true moral test of humanity lies in those who are at its mercy: the animals.’

I did not see foolishness or indulgence in all those people coming together on a single day to save the life of a street dog. What I saw was compassion, a sense of community, the sweetening of a soured spirit. In other words: I saw hope.

To contribute to Dr. Jalloh’s work, email him on steriliseit@yahoo.com

The following extract is taken from Peter Stothard's forthcoming memoir, On the Spartacus Road. It appears in Granta 109, ‘Work’, which is published on Friday.

Essex clay could be like living flesh or a cold dead wall. We could punch it, climb it, cut it, try to mould it, try not to offend it, but the clay was permanent like nothing else. Half a century ago, behind the back door of a semi­detached house on the Marconi works estate, a mile from Chelmsford, were hundreds of slimy­sided cubes of this clay, newly cut by machines, soft but indestructible, leaden red by day and looming brown by night, an amalgam that at a child’s bedtime might be an Aztec temple or an ancient Roman face or a Russian.

Ours were homes built in a hurry, dug out of a butcher’s farmland below a giant steel aerial mast that had been erected against the Communists as soon as the Nazi threat was past. The mobilization of men and material to watch for Cold War missiles was as demanding as the hot war in which my father and his engineering friends had learned their craft. In the Rothmans fields of Great Baddow village, beside a town that already boasted the title ‘Birthplace of Radio’, we became part of an instant works community of families whose fathers understood klystrons, tweeters and ‘travelling­way tubes’ for the long­distance radar that kept the enemy at bay.

Every man I knew then understood either about the radar that saw things far away in the dark or about the various electric valves that were its eyes. There was a residual wartime spirit, an appreciation of values shared; and also a rising peacetime ambition for new values, new houses, holidays and televisions. As well as helping to defend British prosperity against hostile objects in the sky, we were supposed to share in it, creating a haven of high education, a science park, even an Essex garden community in which the clay cut to make the foundations of 51 Dorset Avenue might one day grow cabbages, fruit trees and flowers.

There were many advantages to life on these company streets. Almost everyone, for example, had a television set. Almost everyone’s father could make his own model if he wished. Ours had no polished cabinet (my mother’s woodworking came only later) and its twinkling diodes were slung along the picture rails and around the back of the sofa. But when we wanted a better picture, the contrast of our black and white could be improved from the first principles of the cathode ray. To make the most of The Billy Cotton Band Show, a massed expertise could be deployed, from as far afield as Noakes Avenue, the outer limit where Marconi­land ended and Essex farming returned.

The houses were so alike, and the food in their cupboards so absolutely alike, that it hardly mattered where on the estate we fed our pet pond creatures or ate our tea. Most boys had the same­shaped box room for their den, an unusual cube that contained within it another cube, not much smaller than itself, in which the inner supports of the staircase were held. A sawn­off end of a radar monitor was so perfect for newt­keeping that every boy who braved the ‘bomb­hole’ pond in the ‘rec’ had one of his own. Break the glass and there was always a replacement the next night. All groceries came from the same dirty­green single­decker coach of ‘Mr Rogers’, a silent ex­soldier who piled his fruit and vegetables on either side of the aisle where the seats had been and twice a week toured the avenues from Dorset to Noakes to sell cereals, sugar, flour – everything that the gardens might one day produce but did not yet.

Books were universally rare. There were five at 51 Dorset, the brightest­coloured being a sky­blue edition of S. T. Coleridge, the title printed in such a way that for years I thought that the poet was a saint. Next to it sat a collected Tennyson, in a spongy leather cover, half bath accessory, half one of the then new and exciting table­tennis bats from Sweden. There was my Yorkshire grandfather’s copy of the second half of Virgil’s Aeneid, with the name B. Stothard, in a firm, faded script, inside the flyleaf. I have that one here with me now. On the shelf below was a cricket scorebook in which someone had once copied improving philosophical precepts, and beside that, The First Test Match, a slim, slate­green hardback which alone looked as if it had been read.

This was a community of algebra and graph paper. Mathematics was the language of choice. Contract bridge was the nightly recreation. My curly­haired, smiling father had a brain for numbers that his fellow engineers described as Rolls­Royce. Notoriously, he did not like to test it beyond a purr. In particular – and this was unusual in a place of intense educational self­help – he did not care to inculcate maths into his son. This was a task which he had recognized early as wholly without reward. Max Stothard would occasionally attack the mountain of clay in his garden but never knock his head against a brick wall. He was nothing if not blissfully relaxed.

Like most of our neighbours, he had learned about radar by chance, in his case while becalmed for the war years off West Africa on a ship called HMS Aberdeen. He had bought red­leather­bound knives for his mates back in the Yorkshire­Lincolnshire borderlands; he had sent postcards of Dakar’s six­domed cathedral to his strictly Methodist mother; he had never fired a hostile shot except at a basking shark. And when he had needed something else to do, he chose to watch the many curious ways that waves behave in the air above the sea, turning solid things into numbers. That was how he spent most of the rest of his life, in the south of England instead of the north because that was where the radars were made, quietly reasoning through his problems on his ‘bench’ in the Marconi laboratory and in an armchair at home, spreading files marked ‘Secret’ like a fisherman’s nets. He earned £340 per year, as my mother and I discovered when he died. Secrecy about earnings was always an obsession, although everyone was paid much the same.

The Rothmans estate was based on a bracing sense of equality and a suffocating appreciation of peace. Although most of our fathers felt they had a part in this great military project of the future, rarely can so massive a martial endeavour, the creation of air defences along the length of Britain’s eastern coast, have been conducted in so eirenic a spirit. Not even the Bournville chocolate workers of Birmingham, the group best known then for living together in a company town, could have demonstrated such a Quaker appreciation of calm. The fighting war was absolutely over. The new business was civil, work carried out with civility above all else, work that would keep us safe and increase our prosperity as the politicians promised. And because everyone was in it, everyone was in it together.

That was the constant message of Miss Leake, our doughty headmistress at Rothmans School, whose doctrine of ‘excellence and equality’, delivered in her severest voice, was adapted only slowly to the gradually advancing evidence of differences around her. There were certain girls with vastly superior proficiency at maths; but certain boys could freely pervert the spirit of Rothmans peace in a greater Rothmans cause, designing missiles and fighter planes to crash Pauline Argent and Anne Spavin back to earth. For our first two years Mrs Sheffield reassured us repeatedly that we were all much the same; but eventually and inexorably, when we were aged seven and in the empire of Mrs Maloney, those of us who counted badly had to be separated from those who counted well. Those who could not sing were called ‘groaners’ and told to wait outside the door; and those who preferred Virgil’s stories to vulgar fractions were reluctantly allowed to write fiction for our homework, as long as it was science fiction.

My father was not at all worried about my being a ‘groaner’ (he listened to no music himself at all and was especially offended by the violin and the soprano voice) but he was faintly sad about my missing number skills. Numbers were the key to advancement. Physics was the first step to a working future, a future in paid employment in a world which itself worked well. Many of my friends with no aptitude at all for figures – who could draw a beautiful anti­Pauline­Argent plane but never match her equations – were pummelled on to numerical paths. How, asked our neighbour on the other side of the clay mountain, could anyone pull themselves up by any other route? It was hard to find anyone who would argue with this doctor of metallurgy from the northern steel lands of Scunthorpe – about that or about anything much else except bidding conventions in hearts and spades and the best way to see things that dared fly low in the sky.

At the same time there grew among us the gradual acceptance of other differences. Ours was only in part a works estate in the tradition of the Birmingham chocolatiers and the Wirral’s Port Sunlight. It was becoming a place for the upwardly mobile at a time of restless mobility. So there were questions. Were the engineers’ families of Rothmans Avenue, Dorset Avenue and Noakes Avenue quite as much the same as first appeared? Did the more brilliant scientists live in Rothmans, the more managerial in Dorset, the more clerical in Noakes? Were they richer in Rothmans and rather poorer in Noakes? Did the ‘Millionaires Row’ houses by the school gates really have four bedrooms? Whose kitchen had less Fablon and more Formica? Should Marley floor tiles be polished? And where exactly did everyone go on holiday?

Summer was the great unequalizer. On the North Sea coast, only thirty or so miles away, the skies were known equally to all masters of air defence. But the beaches beneath were crisply divided. Clacton, Walton and Frinton were never the same. We always went toWalton­on­the­Naze, the middle town of the three, the one which had the widest concrete esplanades where children could ride bikes. Clacton­on­Sea was south of Walton and had slot machines and candyfloss booths where ‘other people’ could waste their money. North of Walton was Frinton­on­Sea, which had no candyfloss, no caravans (we always stayed in a caravan), no fish and chip shops, not even a pub, just Jubilee gardens and what was known, only by warnings not to walk on it, as ‘greensward’. Did Rothmans Avenue families prefer Frinton? By the time of my eleventh birthday in 1962, it sometimes seemed that they did. Our Marconi estate was small, confined and had only one entrance to the world. Once inside it we could always roller­skate through the class lines. On the coast, it was an impossible walk, and even an awkward drive, between three neighbouring towns that seemed built deliberately to show how different from one another we might be.

My father was a typical Rothmans engineer of his time, in every respect except in certainty that his was the right path. That was his grace and glory. He never stopped me preferring stories about science to the understanding of what science actually did. He read the fictions that I wrote about my manufactured hero, Professor Rame, without complaining directly to me that there was no point in any of that. He did not much like the Coleridge and the Tennyson being on hand. But he did not take them away. He himself liked to see people as electro­machinery, as fundamentally capable of simple, selfless working. It was simpler that way. But he never imposed the company line. His own mind was closed to the communications of religion or art. His favourite picture then was a photograph of Great Baddow’s tribute to the Eiffel Tower. But his passions for moving parts, moving balls and jet streams in the skies over air shows did not preclude an acceptance of others’ passions. He was a pleasure­seeking materialist – in a company estate where those were the prevailing values and the predominant aspirations. Materialism in those days was a means of science, which he loved, not of extravagance, which did not exist, nor even of shopping, which he would barely tolerate. It was the successful basis of a contented, comfortable life.

Granta’s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey interviewed author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o at New Beacon Books about his childhood in rural Kenya and his piece in the new Granta - an extract of upcoming memoir Dreams in a Time of War.

Granta’s new issue, on the theme of ‘Work’, is launched this week. See here for details of the launch party, at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon this Wednesday.

Nicola Monaghan returns to her hometown of Nottingham - also the setting of Alan Sillitoe’s classic novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - to discover a city struggling to keep up with the times.

It was the middle of summer and a group of us were out on the town in Nottingham City Centre. It was Saturday night – ‘the best and bingiest glad time of the week’, as Alan Sillitoe put it in his classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. We were doing our best to live up to that. There were ten of us - friends I’d known since I was at school - and the evening began with vodka shots and cocktails. As we moved from bar to bar around town, the crowd around us became increasingly dishevelled, many weaving and slurring as they chatted each other up or put the world to rights.

Nottingham City Centre on a Saturday night is raucous with packs of young girls on the streets, wearing their beer coats and not much else. Rumours of ‘five women to every man’ bring busloads of stag parties here every weekend. Of course, it’s not actually true. Historically, Nottingham was a city dominated by its female population thanks to the lace and textile factories, and the decline in the male population after the two world wars. Certainly in the late 1860s, when the lace industry was at its height, there were over a hundred thousand women employed in the city.

I don’t remember getting home. My husband and I took what we like to call the ‘beer taxi’. On our Saturday night out, nobody fell all the way down the stairs after a drinking contest like they did in the Sillitoe novel, but still, observing us and the city around us, you’d be forgiven for thinking that little had changed in Nottingham since the publication of Sillitoe’s first novel. Of course, it has: my mate Richard is the only person in the group who works in a factory, for Toyota, and that factory isn’t actually in Nottingham at all but on the way out to Derby.

The rhythm of the factory floor used to be the strong heartbeat of our city. When my parents left school at fourteen, the main decision a young person had to make was whether to work at Raleigh, Boots, Player or one of the textile factories. By the time I hit sixteen, just over twenty years later, it was a different picture. The choices were college or Thatcher’s Youth Training Scheme, working full-time hours and sometimes studying as well. The reward for the latter was your £25-a-week dole money: about enough cash to fill your car with petrol. It was an easy choice for me to stay on at school. Although it pains me to concede that particular government credit for anything at all, I wonder if the poor alternatives available to us influenced the significant number of people of my generation who were the first from their families to go to university. My father, for example, would have liked the opportunity of a place in higher education. His choices were restricted in other ways. There was a lot of family pressure for a bright young lad to go out and get a trade apprenticeship and contribute to the household as soon as possible. In Thatcher’s Britain, this was no longer a viable option.

Little remains of the bright lights and throbbing production lines of the city my parents grew up in. They were both textile workers when they met. The factories are long gone; there’s only one remaining lace maker. Boots and Player have downsized production and Raleigh, the factory documented in Sillitoe’s classic book, withdrew all its manufacturing several years ago. They retained just a warehouse outside the city boundary, moving production to the Far East for the cheap labour. It’s a bizarre twist of fate then that Toyota, a Japanese car manufacturer, should move in just down the road shortly afterwards and become a major employer. The factory makes a limited range of vehicles and has a workforce of nearly four thousand people. As well as my friend Richard, my brother works there, as a buyer, and my sister used to work on the production line.

A few days after our Saturday outing, Richard came round to our house. He’d been on good form that drunken night, cracking jokes and trying to persuade my brother-in-law to do press-ups on one of the main roads through the city centre. We hadn’t talked about work, or his life, but I’d taken it from his demeanour that everything was going well. He’d recently become a father for the first time and I knew that aside from sleepless nights, the experience had been all positive. It wasn’t until he arrived looking worn out that I realised things had been difficult.

Richard and my husband met when we were all at school together. They were both into heavy metal and hard rock and spent formative years in the mosh pit at Rock City then, afterwards, bonding over the size of their bruises. He hung onto the Michael Hutchence hair for far longer than he should have, only conceding last year that it had to go. Now his head is shaved. To make up for this, he has grown a small, pointed beard and a moustache. He is heavily tattooed, and has a number of piercings. Although he looks like the kind of bloke you shouldn’t mess with, Richard is a gentleman - funny, intelligent and loyal.

He came armed that day with potatoes from the allotment he’s set up to grow his own vegetables. This development is not about sustainability but necessity, I realised. We’d had a tree blow over in our garden and my husband had chopped it up; Rich asked if he could have the wood for the open fire in his living room.

I asked him how things were at the factory. Had there been redundancies? He reassured me that although, as a car company, Toyota had had things pretty bad, they had for a time managed to ride through it without laying off any permanent staff. The first step had been to get rid of the temps. Although workloads increased, most of the remaining staff were relieved to have kept their jobs. But this wasn’t quite enough. The company was still losing money and the next step, rather than making a handful of permanent staff redundant, was to reduce everybody’s hours. Overtime was frozen and the factory shut for one afternoon a week.

I suggested that this must have been the best way to deal with the issue. ‘I wasn’t sure at first.’ Richard told me. ‘I was used to the overtime and it was a big adjustment. To be honest, it was a relief all the same. Some of the alternatives up for discussion were scary.’ For a while a rumour circulated that the factory bosses were considering using an age-old clause in the employment contract which gave them the right to close the factory for up to three months, suspending workers with just five days’ pay and little warning. Looking back now, it seems unimaginable, but Richard says it was a real fear.

I was once asked at a reading if I thought my first novel, set among council estate drug dealers, was a modern version of Alan Sillitoe’s book. I don’t, and I said so. Sillitoe documented normal working life; set in the same areas forty years on, the story described in my book is far removed from that. A fellow panel member at that event pointed out that an updated version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning would have to be set in a call centre. And he was right. I was once playing with my nephew Frank and he was pretending to run a fish and chip shop. I acted unhappy with the food he gave me, and told him I wanted to see his manager. He protested, ‘I can let you speak to my manager, but he’ll only tell you the same thing I did.’ This made me laugh, but I also felt it was a sign of the times; both of Frank’s parents worked in a call centre, and I suspected that it was from them he’d heard this line. My friends and family in Nottingham have a variety of jobs and careers, but this frustrating line of work is the most common way of making a living.

A couple I know, John and Mandy, worked until recently for Capital One – a Nottingham-based credit card company, rare for supplying cards to ‘people needing to strengthen their credit rating’. In other words, those who would usually be considered high-risk. (Of course, they charge appropriately higher interest for this service.) Not surprisingly, they had a busy collections department – and it was there that my friends worked. I asked John what it was like. ‘It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.’

They hadn’t set out to take jobs at the same company; being reliant on its fortunes wasn’t in their plan. John had been working there for a couple of years when another position came up that fitted around his hours and the needs of their young children, so Mandy applied. They had a young family to provide for and a mortgage: the money was better than the wages Mandy received working for a supermarket, so it had seemed the ideal solution.

In April 2008, following large losses, the firm announced a massive redundancy programme. Profits had taken a nosedive of 72 per cent in the last quarter of 2007, and they’d had to write off nearly two billion dollars in loan losses. The cull would affect 750 Nottingham jobs – a whopping 40 per cent of their workforce in the city, most of them from the call centre. John and Mandy both lost their jobs.

Not long after the redundancies were announced, I went out for lunch with Mandy, her little girl and my stepdaughter. We didn’t go posh that day, for obvious reasons, and Mandy had a discount voucher, so we felt we could enjoy ourselves fairly guilt-free. We met at a pub with a soft play area, and the girls ran around and after each other like feral creatures playing hunting games. Mandy was pale and looked tired; her white blond hair pulled back in a harsh ponytail, a style my husband refers to as the ‘Broxtowe facelift’. During our conversation, she reminded me about something I’d altogether forgotten. ‘You warned us,’ she said. ‘You told us ages ago that they were going to do this to everyone.’

I had, in fact, predicted everything that was happening to them. Capital One wasn’t just closing down its business in Nottingham; it was moving the call centre operations to India and Sri Lanka. The way the past was repeating itself made me think of these companies as parasites; pale, greedy creatures that made their homes in the guts of the city and left it wiped out, diminished. My warning wasn’t born of any unusually astute foresight. Someone had told me. A girl I played badminton with worked in a senior position in the company and was taking regular trips to the East to train managers and other workers. She actually suggested I warn the people I knew who worked for the company. So I did. Years had gone by since that conversation and we’d all come to the conclusion she had been mistaken, or that the company had abandoned the plan. Presumably, they had just been taking their time over it. The thought that I should have probed and found out more put me off my pudding that day. If I’d been surer of my facts, perhaps I would have been more insistent about it and that may have persuaded my friends. I felt slightly guilty for the position they found themselves in.

I went round to see John and Mandy at their home a few weeks later. Their house is on a main road just down from the Catholic secondary school Mandy and I attended, in the neighbourhood where we’d all grown up. The houses are red brick terraces, council properties mostly, but John and Mandy aren’t the only people who have exercised their ‘right to buy’. The result is an interesting variety of frontages, some double glazed or cladded, gardens scattered with kids’ toys or garden ornaments. Until speed bumps were installed, the road was much favoured by joy riders. Walking down the streets around Aspley you can often smell the cannabis on the breeze. Youths walk down the road wearing hoodies emblazoned with seven pointed leaves. I’ve heard stories that more people are setting up attic grow rooms, people who never would have considered it before but now see this as a way to make money. In fact, a working class Nottingham lad, Damione Thomas, was recently jailed for drug dealing and blamed the recession for his turn to crime. It sounds an unlikely excuse, except that twenty-seven year old Thomas did have a full record of employment in various manual jobs since leaving school and right up until a redundancy in 2008.

Across from John and Mandy’s house is the shell of a school that used to be the worst in England, although it was closed down years ago. A new building is scheduled to go up. I doubt it’ll be a school; every school on that site has so far has sunk to the bottom of the national league tables. My aunt went to the secondary modern that stood on the site for some of her teenage years, back when it was called Player, named for the factory where many of its students would have ended up working. I think it says a lot about the way Nottingham used to be that there was actually a school named after a factory, and that Jesse Boot, the founder of the chemist chain and another large local factory, donated the land and paid for the development of the University of Nottingham.

Cast adrift in the middle of a recession caused by badly managed lending, two people whose main work experience was at a credit card company were not best placed to find new employment. Although I could tell she hadn’t been sleeping – dark circles shadowed her eyes - Mandy was smiling through it. John arrived back from work as we were talking. I mentioned that at least they’d had plenty of notice to get themselves organised. It wasn’t even summer and they both had their jobs until September. Mandy pulled a face. ‘It’s not that simple. We’ve both got interviews at places,’ she told me. ‘But the problem is that even if we get the jobs we might not be able to take them. If we leave before the exact date they’ve given us, we lose our severance pay.’

As we carried on talking, it became clear to me that superficially, at least, the company was handling the redundancies sensitively. They had given their staff several months’ notice and, along with reasonably generous lump sum payments, each employee was entitled to a training allowance to invest in their own professional development. But the truth was that such a long notice period with absolutely no flexibility made securing alternative employment difficult. John and Mandy persevered and were eventually both offered new jobs. Then Mandy’s fears were confirmed when John was forced to turn down a well paid position because he couldn’t negotiate a suitable start date - he’d been at Capital One for many years and his payout was just too much to walk away from. Mandy found a job with the call centre at Experian, a credit data management company.

A few weeks after I’d spoken to Mandy about her new job, she phoned me, obviously distressed. Capital One had changed their D-Day. It turned out the company had miscalculated and wasn’t yet ready to open its call centres overseas. As a result, the ‘lucky’ staff in Nottingham had a few weeks more employment and Mandy could no longer keep the arrangement she’d made with Experian without losing her severance pay. When I went round to see her again recently, I found her distracted. The house was in disarray - they are having the loft converted and an extension built. There’d been more bad news. After less than a year at his new firm, John is to be made redundant again. The company hasn’t given him a leaving date yet, so some of his colleagues are living in the hope it could all be cancelled. But John is past believing in that kind of miracle. All this could not have come at a worse time; they’ve just remortgaged to pay for the building work.

This time, they plan to make major changes to their lives. John has applied for a job as a teaching assistant in a local school and Mandy is thinking of training to be a teacher. They want to become recession-proof, and they realise that working for finance companies is not the answer. John has had enough of doing the ‘dirty’ work that is credit collections. ‘It was never what I intended to do with my life,’ he told me. ‘I used to coach football to kids and I preferred that, and with my development allowance when I left Capital One I did a course in training. I think I’d be good as a teaching assistant or learning mentor, especially with some of the kids from round here.’

My friends will find new jobs. They’re resourceful and bright and tough enough to live through this. Richard is doing fine; his young son is thriving and the worst of the cuts at the factory appears to be over. Despite planning for several half-day closures over the course of six months, in the end, the bosses at the Toyota factory didn’t feel the need to go through with them all. Although there have been rumours of similar ‘dark days’ in the coming months, as far as Richard is aware, the production company is much healthier. The government’s scrappage scheme, enabling people to trade in old cars for two thousand pounds towards a brand new one, seems to have achieved its purpose: orders have increased. ‘Who knows what’ll happen next,’ says Richard, “but I think we all feel confident now that Toyota won’t shaft us over. Personally, I’ve learnt how to get by on less and that was good for me. It’s amazing how many things you buy that you don’t really need.’

Other friends of mine are thriving despite the recession. My brother, who works for Morrison’s supermarkets, has had three pay rises in the last year. My sister, a bus driver, tells me that although more people are taking public transport, the price of petrol means the bus companies are making less money. But she’s had pay rises this year and still earns overtime. A few days ago the local paper ran a story about Raleigh ‘coming back to Nottingham’. Was it possible that they had plans to reinvest in the city the company owes so much of its success to, in the people who made the Choppers and the Grifters, the signature bikes that made them so much money? Well, not really, it turned out. The story was actually about the company rebranding, and returning the word ‘Nottingham’ to its logo on the bikes. It’s a compliment to the city, no doubt, but it won’t bring jobs here for my friends or relatives. It won’t solve John’s latest employment crisis.

In an interesting coincidence, I was born on the same road as the bicycle company and from which it took its name; Raleigh Street. I’ve settled in my hometown and love it; I can’t imagine living anywhere else. The people here are tough; they’re from generations of workers used to doing proper hard jobs. There’s a pinch of rebelliousness in the air here too, always, with a measure of hedonistic abandon. In that sense and, right at the core of it, the city hasn’t changed as much since the days of Arthur Seaton as it might sometimes seem. The people here haven’t changed at all, not really. Just the jobs that they do. It’s still a place where folk are prepared to get their hands dirty and this is perhaps what attracts so many businesses here. There will be more, I don’t doubt it, but none of them will destroy the place.

Nicola Monaghan is the author of two novels - The Killing Jar and Starfishing - and a novella, The Okinawa Dragon. She is the winner of a Betty Trask award.