The appraisal

Fiction, about two adults over 18. Everything about it was cardboard and both of them knew it, which did not stop it working on her in a way she is still slightly annoyed about.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

The desk is a dressing table. That is where we have to start, because that is where the whole thing starts falling apart and also, somehow, where it starts working.

It is my grandmother's dressing table. It has a little curved front and a drawer that sticks and a mirror we took off years ago, and it lives in the spare room under a pile of things that need to go to the charity shop. On the Thursday he cleared it, put a laptop on it that he does not use, and set out a printed form and a biro.

I came in at half past eight to find my husband of fourteen years sitting behind my dead grandmother's dressing table in a tie.

"Take a seat."

There was one chair, from the kitchen, positioned at an angle to the dressing table with what I can only describe as intent. He had thought about the angle. Somebody had stood in this room, alone, on a Thursday evening, working out where to put a chair.

I sat down. I was already fighting my own face.

"Thanks for making the time," he said.

Reader, we live together.

There had been a self-assessment. I want that on the record. On the Tuesday he emailed me a document, to my personal address, with the subject line Ahead of Thursday, and I had to fill in four boxes rating my own performance, and I sat on the sofa next to him while he watched a programme about bridges and I rated myself.

You cannot do it honestly. That is what I learned on the sofa. Either you go in too high and you know you have gone in too high and you will have to defend it, or you go in low to be safe, which is its own kind of grovelling and which he will see through. I sat there for forty minutes on a Tuesday agonising over whether I was a three or a four at something we had made up.

He had printed the form. An actual form, four sections, with the little boxes down the right-hand side and a scale of one to five and a heading in bold that said PERFORMANCE REVIEW: MID YEAR, and I know for a fact that he made it in Word because I found the file three weeks later called form final v3, which is the funniest thing that has ever been on our shared drive.

Version three. He did two drafts of a fake appraisal form.

He went through it in order. Objectives, review of the period, areas for development. He used the phrase "areas for development" twice with a completely straight face and I had to look at the carpet.

Then, about six minutes in, he said, with no warning whatsoever: "I do want to say I think you have really stepped up on the stakeholder side."

That is a real sentence. That is a sentence a man called Gareth said to me in an actual review in an actual office in 2019, and I came home and repeated it to him at the kitchen table in a voice, and he has kept it for four years like a squirrel.

I made a sound. He made a sound. Neither of us looked at the other for about eight seconds while we both stared at different parts of the room and breathed carefully through our noses.

He said, "Shall we go again from stakeholders."

I said, "Yes please."

And this is the part I do not have a good explanation for.

It worked. Not despite all that. I have gone back over it and I do not think it worked despite the dressing table and the tie and Gareth. I think it worked because we both got over the giggling early and then there was nothing left to hide behind, and what was left was a man reading out a list of things about me in a room where I had to sit still and answer.

Because he had not made the content up. That was the trick, and I do not think he knew it was a trick. The form was cardboard. The four things on it were not. They were four things I actually do, that we have actually talked about, that I have actually promised to sort out twice, written down in a box with a number next to them.

"Section two. You said in January you would stop doing work email in bed."

"I have got better at it."

"Have you."

Silence in a small room with a kitchen chair in it. Nobody performing anything. Him waiting with a biro. The little tick of the radiator.

"No," I said. "Not really."

He wrote something down. He did not say anything while he wrote it, and I sat there, in my own spare room, in front of my grandmother's dressing table, aged forty-four, being marked.

My face was so hot I could feel it in my ears.

Here is what surprised me most, and it is not the shame.

It was how fast I started wanting to do well.

Two minutes in I had privately dismissed the entire exercise as a laugh with a prop. Ten minutes in I was sitting up straighter and giving considered answers and feeling a real, hot, entirely genuine disappointment when he said, "I am going to have to put a two for that one."

A two. Out of five. On a form he wrote in Word on a Thursday.

I minded. I minded enormously. Something in me that has been chasing a good rating since my first job sat up, looked at a piece of A4 with a made-up scale on it, and said yes, this counts, this is a real assessment, we are doing this.

That is what I mean about cardboard. The frame is cardboard and you know it is cardboard, and some part of you that is much deeper and much stupider than your opinions simply does not care.

The end of it was brief. The detail stays private.

He said what the outcome was, in the same admin voice, and had me stand up and bend over the end of the bed in the spare room, which had a folded towel on it because he thinks of things like that. Twelve, and he counted them out loud, which I had not expected and which made it worse in the way I had wanted it to be worse.

At the eighth one the kitchen chair, which he had put back badly, fell over. Neither of us acknowledged it. It stayed on its side for the rest of the evening like a witness.

Afterwards we sat on the floor of the spare room with our backs against the bed, and he had taken the tie off, and I said, "Version three?"

He said, "The columns were wrong on version two."

We are doing the next one in October. He has told me the four objectives in advance, which I insisted on, and one of them is the work email thing again, and I have been shutting the laptop at half nine for eleven days.

Not because I am frightened of a hairbrush. I am not frightened of a hairbrush. Because I would like a four.