When he opened the first drawer he found it empty of the expected files. Instead he found a small plastic foetus swaddled in a sheaf of burger wrappers and laid on a bed of shredded tv pages. The foetus had for a headboard or gravestone a calculator, one of those desk top-sized ones. All the buttons had been prized off the calculator and lay around like broken teeth.

Weed was intrigued. This was something he could relate to. In his summer jobs as a university student he had worked as a filing clerk and had hated it. His days were occupied by arranging bits of paper in alphanumeric order and stuffing them into cabinets that were already overfilled by tatty, mop-eared crumples of paper. Everyday something would crop up that defied the system; something that just wasn’t A or N or Z, that wasn’t 1 or 500,000 or 545-486-424/B, something that wasn’t a letter of credit or a letter of query or a letter of complaint, something which was specifically a document of conundrum, a memo of mystery, an epigram of enigma. Lumbered with one of these orphans, one of these abandonees — these children of Fagin, these cuckoo chicks, these weeds — Weed was forced to discover which was more hateful, the mindless, soul-sapping filing of regulation scraps, or the futile, soul-sapping search for a non existent location for the bits that were too obtuse or too unlucky to follow regulations.

It was in this job that Weed first learned that surviving a mindless job is difficult, while surviving a mindless job that you actually have to think about is a medieval torture. He used to fantasise about filing odd things. He once broke a tooth and spent much happy time wondering whether to file it under t for tooth, f for fragment or o for ouch. Should belly button lint go under l or f for fluff or h for ‘ha ha ha’?

Whoever was responsible for this bit of creative filing had gone several better and had let their imagination out to play way past bedtime.

He wondered who was that clever to have found the right place for them; who was smart enough, who was perceptive enough to have realised that just these things should be billeted here in this drawer together, that these bits should be together in this drawer and not in those drawers over there, nor in some drawers in Poltoratsk; indeed who was bright enough to have divined that they should all have been in a drawer at all? He thought he might want to meet this genius