The Mole

by Peter Wild

Steve was actually a mole. Which isn’t to say that Steve was some kind of toadying industrial spy reporting back to the top brass about what the employees really thought about the recently announced changes to the dress code. Steve was actually a mole, of the family Talpidae, in the order Soricomorpha. Being a mole was not, however, what made Steve special. What made Steve special was the fact that he managed to hold down a pretty damn stressful job in PR for a huge multi-national business (predominantly ensuring that any criticism the organisation received in the press as a result of its involvement with dodgy governments overseas was spun so it reflected well on both Steve and the aforementioned organisation) and a long-term relationship (with Claire, a bright young woman from Chorley who held down a similarly stressful PR job for a charity dedicated to the eradication of mines) without anyone knowing that he was in fact a mole. In order to maintain the elaborate hoax that Steve was a person, Steve employed a wide range of distraction techniques such as ensuring that he changed the frames of his spectacles every six to eight weeks and quietly putting about rumours that questioned his fidelity to Claire (his thinking, quite correctly, being that a change of appearance and a rumour as to whether he was in fact a bit of a bastard were more than enough to throw the majority of people off the scent).

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Peter Wild, author of To My Crap Mistress, is the editor of The Flash & Perverted by Language: Fiction inspired by The Fall. You can read more here.