Fien Veldman | Exclusive Excerpt HARD COPY

From Hard Copy by Fien Veldman

Excerpt prepared for Fresh Fiction

Excerpt 1

Page 23 - 32

Word Count 1076

A message pops up on my screen. An event has been added to the shared calendar. How much effort will it require? I need to know in advance. Will it be physically demanding? I’d rather just stay in my little office. I hear enthusiastic footsteps approaching, then the click of the door handle. My colleague from PR sticks her symmetrical face round the door. ‘I don’t know if you’ve already seen it, but we’re having a picnic at lunch!’ She closes the door. I hate picnics. They’re just like karaoke: everyone gets dragged in and you’re the grouch if you complain. The door opens again.

‘By the way,’ she says. ‘Isn’t the heat in here suf­focating? We could do something about it, move the printer or something.’

Move the printer?

‘Oh, it’s no big deal,’ I say, feeling a drop of sweat rolling down my armpit. My hands leave moist marks on the printer, on my keyboard, on the letters. My legs stick to the chair. ‘I have a fan.’

‘OK!’ The door is shut.

The fan, an enormous white, rattling thing, makes a quarter-turn, swinging first towards the printer and then in my direction. When the fan is aimed at me, I selfishly wish it would stay there, cooling the film of sweat on my face. It’s only when the fan is pointed this way that I can think clearly. But I can’t deny my printer the cooling breeze. He’s already having such a tough time!

I eat lunch at my desk. When Marketing stops by in the afternoon to print his documents, he shows me a video of something that happened at the picnic. He laughs very loudly about it. ‘You should’ve been there,’ he says.

‘Hi, good morning,’ my boss says as he invades my office. He makes me jump. (Question: What is loneliness? Answer: Jumping when someone speaks to you.) ‘How’s it going in here?’

My boss stands very straight, his shoulders self-consciously relaxed; he must have learnt to do that somewhere. All his movements are controlled. You might even think a robot had taken over his body. A Real Person (trademark). He would proba­bly take that as a compliment: my boss is the kind of guy who thinks technology will only improve us. He says ‘AI’ in English instead of Dutch. He almost never enters my territory. I’m very self-conscious about what I’m wearing. Do I have enough clothes on? He steps into my little room and looks round, but there’s not much to see: the printer, the rotat­ing fan, and me. He takes a few steps towards the window. The old wooden boards creak under his feet. He casts a searching glance outside, but his office is right under mine, so he has the same view.

I sit up straighter. My stomach always contracts a bit when my boss and I are in the same room. I’d like to say as little as possible, but instead I say too much. I’m not scared of him, not really, but he’s my boss and no one else is. Most of my sex dreams are about him. I’m about to start listing everything that’s been going well, when he says: ‘Question.’ I would have said, ‘Just a quick question,’ and that’s why he’s the boss and I’m not. The stomach ache I already had spreads throughout my body. After all, it’s nobody else’s fault: I’m the one responsible for this package. He knows it, I know it. It will definitely be an expensive loss if it turns out it can’t be found. I should have asked the sender for a tracking number, but for that I would need to know who the sender was, and I do not. It’s probably lost forever now, and if that’s the case it will be one hundred per cent my fault, a mistake for which I’ll have to face the consequences.

‘Or actually, before we talk about that – I didn’t see you at the picnic yesterday. Were you not feeling well?’ He knows I’ve got some sort of illness, but what exactly…?

‘Well.’ What should I say? ‘No, not really… It was a little too hot for me. And the printer was acting up. I wanted to make sure the print job went well, so I stayed in my office. I don’t like leaving him alone.’ Leaving him alone? What am I saying? ‘I mean, like, to keep an eye on the printing, you know?’ My boss is gazing outside again.

‘That’s fine of course.’ He tries to conjure up a reassuring smile. ‘What I’d like to discuss with you is the inbox.’

I look at him as normally as possible.

‘Whether you’d be able to take over again for the next few weeks, because [name of colleague] is going on holiday.’

‘Oh really, where?’ Irrelevant question! ‘I mean, sure, no problem.’

‘Great. You’ve done it before, so I trust it will be in good hands, right?’

This is a start-up (can you still call something a start-up after seven years?) so customer service over the phone is viewed as old-fashioned. Young people don’t call. That’s why our work is strictly done over email. I’m support staff, and support staff are offi­cially part of customer service, although most of the time I just work with my letters and envelopes. And in our company we don’t call it ‘customer service’, we call it ‘support’.

How long will I have to take over those tasks for? He doesn’t say, just gives me a nod and disappears. Nothing about the package. But surely he must have noticed it hasn’t arrived yet? Is this a test? Is it pun­ishment for me not keeping track of the package delivery? It must be. The battle has begun.

For the rest of the day I invent versions of conversations between my boss and me. They all end with me angrily quitting on the spot because my loyalty is being tested so unfairly. After my resignation everything in the office starts going wrong, my printer and all future printers refuse to perform and no one knows how to repair them, I grow wildly successful in another field and everyone in this miserable office has regrets, my boss more than anyone. Every train of thought feels really good, but then I feel guilty, because my boss is actually a perfectly fine boss. Also, I shouldn’t be getting too worked up! I’m allergic to that.

Excerpted from Hard Copy by Fien Veldman, translated by Hester Velmans, run with permission of the author, courtesy of Head of Zeus, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.© Fien Veldman, 2023; translation © Hester Velmans, 2024

HARD COPY by Fien Veldman

This is a story of girl meets printer.

A customer service assistant spends her long workdays printing letters. Her one friend is the printer and, in the dark confines of her office, she begins to open up to him, talking about her fears, her past, her hopes and dreams.

To her, it seems like a beautiful friendship is blossoming. To her boss, it seems like she's losing her mind.

Diagnosed with burnout and placed on leave, she faces severance and – worse – separation from her beloved printer. But she's not about to give up on her only friend without a fight. And, it turns out, neither is he…

Weird, incisive and unforgettable, Hard Copy is perfect for fans of Sayaka Murata and Halle Butler.

Fiction [Apollo, On Sale: September 24, 2024, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781035906444 / ]