THE PERFECT EXCUSE

‘It’s not my fault!’ cried Alphonse for the fortieth time since I’d met him.

‘It just happened! I was just going to work in my car and this great truck swerved in front of me; I had to go off into a side street to avoid hitting him. Then it turned out to be one-way, and I spent half an hour trying to make my way through a whole labyrinth of tiny side-streets, going up dead-ends and having to reverse back out of them, getting lost and losing my sense of direction in a great cavernous set of concrete canyons, before I could finally find my way back to the main street. Took me half an hour!’

Whatever else you said about Alphonse (and many people did), he was original and his use of language was very creative. I’d heard so many excuses from him in the three months he’d been working for me. I suppose I should have sacked him, but somehow I couldn’t. He was so likeable in his incompetence, and I had found myself waiting for the next excuse, wondering how he managed to come up with so many, so varied, so artistic a set of excuses for being late, for making mistakes (they were never his fault!), for breaking things. And he never, never repeated an excuse. The guy was wasted where he was; with an imagination like that he should have been a writer or something.

The next day it was a bus broken down in the lane in front of him. Then a random police breathalyser on his way to work. A break-in at his house, so he had to wait for the police before leaving for work. A burst gas main in the street outside his house, a lost cat belonging to the old lady next door. The man was amazing! And it was never, NEVER his fault. You couldn’t help but admire him. I know, I know. I should have fired him. But he was such a nice guy, so cheerful, and everybody at work liked him, despite the mistakes and destruction. If nothing else, he was worth keeping on for his effect on morale. The men always invited him out for a beer, though he never had any money so they had to pay for him. The women all wanted to mother him. At least three of them lit up every time he walked past. They gave him little gifts, brought him home-made cookies, cup-cakes, chocolate fudge. They told him he needed fattening up – and certainly, he was as skinny as a rake; he never seemed to put on weight. And somehow he always looked as if he’d been in an accident – hair awry, shirt rumpled, shoes scuffed, eyeglasses blodgy and smudged.

And his excuses in the office itself. ‘It just broke!’ he said, when he snapped the switch off the photocopier and a technician had to be called in to repair it. ‘They must be unstable!’ when he tipped over the whole wall of filing cabinets. ‘That’s a design fault,’ when he blew up the coffee machine. ‘It’s never done that before!’

But there was one employee who wasn’t prepared to forgive his little mistakes. Bernard. Snippy Bernard. With a mouth screwed up tight as a cat’s sphincter. Like he sucked on half a dozen lemons every morning before he came to work. A wizard with computers; whatever went wrong, whenever a program crashed, when someone mistakenly deleted something that had required a week’s work, we called in Bernard. Snippy Bernard, who would make you feel like a stupid child. ‘It’s obvious!’ he would say. ‘How can you not understand this? What prompted you to do something that stupid?’

And he specialized in smug. He must have taken a degree in smugness. His sense of superiority was almost enough, sometimes, to overcome the cheerfulness engendered by Alphonse. Almost, but not quite. The office ran like a di-polar battery, with the positive supplied by Alphonse, the negative by Bernard. And somehow, Alphonse’s influence was stronger. Bernard couldn’t stand him. If he’d had his way, everybody would have been miserable – efficient but miserable. And Alphonse’s mistakes drove him bananas. You could see him simmering in his chair, bowed over his keyboard. You could almost see the steam coming out his ears as he muttered to himself. ‘Incompetent, unnecessary, ignorant, clumsy fool. They should have sacked him on his first day here.’

And Bernard had the hots for Dolores, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. She was stunning – a goddess come to earth. Every man in the office adored her, would have swum through crocodile infested waters for her. But she had eyes only for Alphonse. She would stop by his desk, shyly asking how his day was. Would he like another home-baked cookie? It was her mother’s recipe. Alphonse, oblivious Alphonse, unaware of the flame of passion that she held inside, that was obvious to everybody else in the office, men and women alike. The men were jealous, but couldn’t dislike good ol’ Alphonse. He was their buddy. The women were a little catty, especially the ones who were sweet on Alphonse. ‘She dresses like a ho,’ one whispered to another. ‘I can’t see what anybody sees in her.’

‘Cellulite!’ whispered the other. ‘It’s so obvious! And wrinkles around her eyes. And her mouth’s too big!’

But it was Bernard, always Bernard, who developed a long slow burning hatred for Alphonse. Several times he came to me to point out Alphonse’s shortcomings, to suggest – for the good of the office – that Alphonse be disciplined, punished, or better still, let go. I was just as aware of Alphonse’s failings as Bernard, just as I was aware that quite a few of the ones Bernard reported to me were invented. I fobbed him off. Told him I had heard what he said, but that no, I wouldn’t be punishing Alphonse, let alone firing him.

I don’t know what made Bernard think of sabotaging Alphonse’s car. I hadn’t realised his resentment had reached such a level. He tampered with the brakes one morning while it was in the car-park. He hadn’t known about the security camera that had been installed a week before. Alphonse had to go out over the lunch break and was stopped by a cop who had noticed a flutter in his tail light. The car was just like its owner, a pale vomit-yellow, faded, grubby, balding tyres, windscreen pockmarked with a million pebble-marks. He did a full inspection of the car – not a particularly nice man, said Alphonse later – Alphonse who liked everybody – and found that the brakes were about to fail. He impounded the car and Alphonse was an hour late back from lunch. But the policeman had probably saved his life.

‘It’s not my fault!’ cried Alphonse. And for once I had proof that his excuse was true. A shamefaced cop came to the office that afternoon and told me what he’d thought was a careless lack of maintenance had turned out to be malicious sabotage. He apologised to Alphonse, and said they would conduct an in-depth investigation into who had done such a thing.

Next day Bernard didn’t turn up for work. He emailed his resignation later that day. Nonetheless, the police traced the damage to Alphonse’s car back to him, and he ended up in deep trouble. Alphonse couldn’t understand it. ‘He was such a nice man. Why would he do such a thing?’ Good old Alphonse, everybody’s friend.

One day, Dolores finally summoned up the courage to ask Alphonse out on a date, seeing as she had realised he was never going to ask her. He was astonished. ‘Well, I suppose so. If you like,’ he said. I couldn’t help overhearing. Neither could the rest of the office.

They went out to a very nice restaurant one evening, an evening I’ll remember for the rest of my life, no matter how long I live. It was all in the papers and on TV. The footage went viral. The flying saucer hovering over the front of the restaurant as Alphonse stood outside waiting for his very first date and the aliens beaming him up. And the saucer rising into the air again, with Alphonse’s face seen through the slowly closing hatch, crying out ‘It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!’ The perfect excuse for leaving her standing there.

Somehow I can see Alphonse making friends with the aliens, having a long and happy life whatever planet he ends up on. I just hope they don’t let him anywhere near the controls of their ship.