Limehouse Taster of Exit Through The Wound by North Morgan. Maine Hudson has a high tolerance for pharmaceuticals and a low tolerance for everything and everyone else. This includes his Greek parents, who bankroll his glorious isolation in London. This includes his career as a consultant, his clients, his boss, the majority of his colleagues and people he sees on the way to work. This includes the dumb model boyfriend of the American girl that he has decided to fall in love with. This includes her also. When Maine fails to obliterate himself through drug overdoses, the obsessive changing of his legal name and half-hearted thoughts of suicide, it falls to his central nervous system to pick up the challenge of trying to kill him off. Can Maine survive with his lack of values intact?

1. Limehouse Taster
Exit Through The Wound
by North Morgan
Chapter Three

2. 1 This is the Monday after the weekend and on this Monday I opt to go
to work, for no other reason apart from I have to. Had I chosen to stay
and live in Athens, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have to go through
this daily torture. My brother is 27 years old and he’s never had to do
a day’s work in his life. I, however, am being punished for choosing
to live abroad, a choice which my parents have decided to take as
outright aggressive, part of a spiteful plot to hurt them and send them
to an early grave. Hence, they’ve decided to only pay for my rent and
bills while I stay in London, forcing me to have a job for my other living
expenses. This, of course, is terribly unfair and it cuts me up inside. Not
enough to move back to Athens, mind.
As a job, I have chosen to underperform daily in a central London
business consultancy. My full title is Associate in the Media Sector, and
I’m not sure exactly what that involves, but I think it has a lot to do with
turning up every day, emailing my colleagues Danny and Harper who
work there with the same vicious abandon that I do, and occasionally
interacting with clients who should know better than to pay me for my
so-called services.

3. 2 I got this job soon after I finished my MSc in European Public Policy at
UCL, which I only took on just to delay getting a job another year (and
it seemed like a good gateway to living in London). My first degree,
a BA in Medieval and Early Modern History from Durham University
was just about as useful as it sounds and it only served its purpose as
a means for my Mum to show off to her friends. Admittedly, pointless
arts degrees do sound quite impressive and I’m not going to pretend
I won’t push my children into something similar; if nothing else, just
for the prestige. Any degree that’s practical or pragmatic or actually
useful indicates that you need the work it’s likely to get you, which is as
unattractive a concept as I’ve ever heard.
It took me just a couple of months in my current job to realise that
working in an office is a wonderful thing, if you want to lose your self-
respect and dignity nice and quickly. I estimate that people who work
in an office doing something as tenuous as ‘consultancy’ die inside
approximately 34 years earlier than people who have other, meaningful,
worthy occupations.

4. 3 In my brief office career, I have come across two types of people:
those who don’t give a toss, and those whose lives are otherwise so
empty that they do. The latter group is usually made up by people who
are good at this. I’m not very impressed – being good at your office job
is about as admirable as being good at wearing a hood and pointing out
members of the resistance to Nazi officials in Germany circa 1939.
People who like working in an office get a huge sense of
accomplishment and gradually develop a very smug, superior attitude.
I come across those people occasionally. My boss’s boss, Jonathan,
once mentioned in casual conversation that he gives ‘100% to
everything he gets involved in’ (verbatim). I find it very hard to take in
such a concept, considering that I haven’t given 100% cumulatively to
everything I have ever gotten involved in grouped together.
In my lovely office, which occupies a provocatively gigantic building
just off the Strand in central London, some people go into work early
and leave very late, in order to impress their manager and benefit from
future promotions, pay rises, bonuses, etc. The last time I had to play
games like these, where I tried to appear busy in order to deceive

5. 4 somebody who held power over me, was when I was 11 and I had to
run, open a textbook and pretend I was doing my homework every time
I heard my Father come home. I am not pre-pubescent anymore, so I
won’t play along.
Soon after I started working there I realised that in an office
environment, the variety of topics you can discuss with your colleagues
in a social manner is both very limited and predictable. Having had a
lobotomy will help you answer questions such as: ‘Any plans for the
weekend?’, ‘How was your holiday?’, ‘How did your client meeting go
yesterday?’ and ‘Have you got any annual leave left?’ for the millionth
time in a manner that’s friendly, neutral and non-offensive. In fact,
perhaps lobotomies should be offered upon joining my consultancy
instead of the usual pension scheme contribution. I know which one I’d
benefit more from in the short term.
I do know of three or four former colleagues (of the same graduate
intake as me) who tried to break free after deciding that their current
role was not fulfilling, so they tried to get out of it and pursue a career
change. Three months later, all these people found themselves working

6. 5 in a different office down the road for a rival consultancy, still wanting
to kill themselves, but earning £10k less.
In the mornings, as I walk into my office, I often recall the Smiths’ lyric
about looking for a job, finding one and still being miserable. But this
does seem awfully pessimistic. It’s not all that bad. I try to keep in mind
that working in an office will only take up – on average – 9 hours a day
for 43 years of my life. Then I will suddenly be 67 and I’ll have the rest
of my life ahead of me to do whatever the hell I want.
I’ve worked here for just over two years, but I think they regretted
employing me right about the second week. I don’t see this as
a personal failure though; I blame my lack of work ethic on my
upbringing. When I was younger, every time it was mentioned in
conversation that a friend of mine had got a part-time job after school
or college or even university, Mum and Dad would sneer that theirs
must have been a poor family, that they had to resort to pushing their
kids into child labour, that it’s generally an embarrassing situation to find
yourself in. Consequently, the lesson I took away from my parents was
that work equals humiliation. And in terms of lessons that I’ve learnt

7. 6 I’m not willing to ever let this one go.
There is just one time when I tried to escape this embedded
psychology of idleness and that’s when I was doing my post-grad
degree, soon after I moved to London. I had plenty of free time, so
I enrolled in a lifeguarding course which I thought would be a good
way to impress new friends, potential girlfriends, random people I
met in bars, everyone really. When I finished the course and took a
ridiculously undemanding part-time job at the university swimming
pool, which involved sitting on an elevated plastic chair for hours and
watching people I recognised from the student union walking around
half-naked and wet. Dad eventually found out and threatened to cut
me off unless I gave it up immediately. As the lifeguarding job was
paying £4.28 an hour before tax and Dad provided £2,500 per month
straight into my bank account, I decided that my loyalty to my family
was stronger than my commitment to working the Wednesday evening
shift when the university’s female swimming team used to train. My
career as a lifeguard lasted a glorious two and a half weeks. I’d never
worked before and I never worked again until I graduated and started
my current job. Dad predictably also disapproves of my position as

8. 7 a consultant, mainly driven by the fact that I’m not making as much
money as he was at my age. Perhaps his mind would be more at ease
if he knew that at least I do very little work for the pittance that they
pay me.
On this Monday morning, I walk through the revolving glass doors, take
the lift up to the 6th floor, lower my eyes to the floor and walk to my
desk. The beginning of a good day is one where no one says ‘Good
morning’ from the moment I enter the building to the moment I sit on
my chair. Today has been awesome so far. I turn on my laptop, open
Outlook, ignore three client emails and make the executive decision to
prioritise an email from Danny, a workmate I actually like, who joined
the same time as me, is sitting three desks down and is one of the few
people in the office who’s making my work ethic seem unbeatable.
Danny has written:
‘Have you seen the video of the guy who was killed last February at the
Olympics? I’m about to watch it on YouTube.’
‘Wait, somebody was killed six months ago at the Olympics? This is
huge. I need to turn on that TV more often.’
‘Yes, I’m watching it now. It’s horrific.’

9. 8
8 ‘Is there blood?’
‘No.’
‘OK. I’ll watch it anyway. Link?’
He sends me the link and a few minutes later I write back:
‘Right. You had made it sound worse. You don’t really get to see
anything.’
‘Well, how often do you actually see somebody die?’
‘Every day; when I look in the mirror.
’
I spend the rest of the morning locked in the bathroom talking to
Sadie on the phone and then back at my desk reading Wikipedia entries
on Albert Camus, Melissa Joan Hart, the TV show The Big Bang Theory
(which I’ve never seen), Kelsey Grammer, Franz Kafka and Coca Cola
Zero, which brings me to 1255, so I head out for a walk. During this
walk, I listen to the album Elastica by Elastica in its entirety whilst
pacing up and down the Strand and eventually go back.
In the office again, and while I’m actually busying myself with some
work-related tasks, I receive the following internal group email from
Luan, extravagant South-East Asian and self-appointed social secretary.

10. 9
9 Luan tells us:
‘Hi Guys, due to popular demand I’ve provisionally booked the Charlito
restaurant on Friday 17th September at 7–9pm. If you haven’t been
before it’s basically a mix of Mexican, South American and Spanish
food in a fairly lively atmosphere. Can you let me know if you’re keen
so I know how many people to confirm?’
This email, which has gone out to all 45 people making up my
department, is obviously hilarious and needs to be analysed in depth,
so I look over to Danny’s desk and – disappointed that he’s not there
– start to email Harper instead, who’s sitting at the other end of this
open-plan office.
I write:
‘“…fairly lively atmosphere” I hear’
,
Harper replies:
‘Exactly. I’m definitely out. That’s like saying someone is fairly sexy, it
just doesn’t work, does it? Other examples:
‘“He is fairly suicidal”
‘“She is fairly pregnant”’

11. 10 Then I write:
‘“He is fairly paralysed from the waist down”
‘“She is fairly a bitch”
‘“He is fairly shocked to his core”’
Then Harper writes:
‘“I’m fairly having a mental breakdown”
‘“Their marriage is fairly on the brink of collapse”
‘“He is fairly willing to die for the love of his life”’
Then I write:
‘“He is fairly in love and regretting the rest of his life so far and all the
choices he made”
‘“They are fairly married”
‘“She is fairly lobotomised”
“She is fairly dying to see her boyfriend”’
Then I get bored of this game, plus I think we’ve killed it a bit, so I
write:
‘Hi Harper,
‘I wanted to ask you:
‘What were you doing on this date, at this time last year?

12. 11 ‘What were you doing on this date, at this time two years ago?
‘What were you doing on this date, at this time three years ago?
‘Oh, you were sat at the same desk doing the same thing, you say.
‘I just wanted to check.’
Harper lives in Whitstable, a small seaside town in Kent, which makes
her total commute per day approximately two hours each way. She
has worked here two or three years longer than me, but she recently
got married and rumour has it that she’s about to hand in her notice to
stay at her lovely seafront home and prepare to start a family. This is
the lamest excuse for quitting your job that I’ve ever heard, not that I
blame her one bit.
ENDS

13. Maine Hudson has a high tolerance for
pharmaceuticals and a low tolerance for
everything and everyone else.
This includes his Greek parents, who bankroll
his glorious isolation in London.
This includes his career as a consultant, his
clients, his boss, the majority of his colleagues
and people he sees on the way to work.
This includes the dumb model boyfriend of
the American girl that he has decided to fall in
love with.
This includes her also.
When Maine fails to obliterate himself through
drug overdoses, the obsessive changing of his
legal name and half-hearted thoughts of suicide,
it falls to his central nervous system to pick up
the challenge of trying to kill him off.
Can Maine survive with his lack of values
intact?

14. North Morgan was born in 1980. In 2007,
he created the fictional blog London Preppy,
which has been featured in Dazed &
Confused, Time Out and Attitude amongst
other publications. London Preppy has been
an international success, attracting over
1.5 million hits by the time North published
his first short story as part of the Boys &
Girls anthology, launched at the London
Literature Festival in 2010. He currently
lives in central London.
Exit Through The Wound is his first novel.

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