Like all city buildings, the insurance office had a basement which was essentially an executive car park, but there were also a number of storerooms down there. Now, over the period of years, Standard Household, Fire and Accident had taken over a number of smaller liquidated insurance companies and with them their customers and records, and with each an archive of old or outdated policies. These archives consisted of boxes and boxes of proposal forms, generally in no order whatsoever and all had been lying unattended for years in the largest storeroom, which happened to have shelves all the way around the walls. My task then was to bring order to this chaos.

I suppose it must have been because of my low expectations of life, but somehow Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich completely failed to shock me the way it was supposed to. I think it was because, prior to reading the book, I imagined life in the Gulag’s to be unbelievably unbearable and indescribably cruel. Which it was, in the dreadful cold, under brutal circumstances, eating gruel and fish heads, the monotony, bloody horrible…  But survivable. I mean, the way the author painted it, the character (always called Shukhov, even though Ivan Denisovich is his name – Russian nomenclature will always baffle me) does survive. It’s awful, but apart from the cold and the poor food, not much different from the Moorabbin Tech Schoolyard and certainly not as cruel as the trailer factory. You could live through this, if you had to. Really, there are plenty of impoverished people completely free in Melbourne and other western cities who live lives just as bad. And as for the peasants in India and Africa, far worse. I think Solzhenitsyn had the reverse effect to the one he expected – an unreal horror is far more dreadful than a real one that you can cope with. And he made it real, and therefore, somehow, normal.

Now the outdated records were from time to time needed, to check the history of a client or the original amendments to their policies, but always in the past the answer had been: “Sorry sir (or madam), all of our back records have been destroyed in a fire.” The exact details of such a fire a decade before in the Condor Insurance Building on Bourke Street were even appropriated to give the lie credibility, but in fact all those records were in the storeroom. I was given the key and a dustcoat and told to put them in order.
“What order?” I asked hopelessly, floored by the awesome proportions of the task.
“Any order you like,” Slimy Duggan laughed, a handkerchief held to his face to spare him the effects of the explosions of dust that arose from everything you touched in that room. He immediately fled back upstairs, perhaps confident that he might never see me again. And, more or less, he was not mistaken.