Chapter Three: Weevil At Work

Alfonso, the small grey weevil who has made his home on my desk, reappeared this morning and said:

"Where are you going?"

I told him I was going to work, and he insisted on coming with me, so I carefully placed him in a small lacquered Chinese box left to me by my late great-aunt.

"It smells of death, I'm not going in there", he said.

"It smells of roses", I said, closing the lid.

"Death!" said a voice from inside the box.

On the way to my office, we didn't talk much. I flicked through a copy of a free newspaper, and I think I could hear Alfonso listening to his favourite album, "The Very Best of Berlin" - but I may be wrong.

Once at work, I tend to get down to it, and left Alfonso at my work station to his own devices. I checked my email, both work and personal, and browsed some online news sites, and deleted quite a few emails about missing pencils and meetings that had happened several weeks ago.

I opened a document that needed some attention, but didn't do much to it for a while.

I popped down to the canteen for a coffee, and then decided on impulse to buy a pain au chocolat as well, because it was Wednesday. Back at my desk, I ate the croissant and drank the coffee while leafing through some old glossy magazines someone had left there.

After lunch, I went to quite a long meeting about something or other, and when I got back to my desk, replied to some emails that had arrived during the meeting, and listened to some voice mails, but did not return the calls.

I closed down the document, checked the online news pages again, and noticed it was time to begin packing up.

It was then that I noticed Alfonso, who I had more or less forgotten about, watching me from the corner of a battered desk tidy, in which he made himself quite comfortable amongst a dirty eraser and three solitary staples. He was wearing sunglasses and a Hawaiian tropical shirt, and drinking a weevil-sized pina-colada.

And looking at me, in that way he has.

"Yes?", I said, half way through stuffing the old glossy magazines into my briefcase.

"I'm just wondering", he said, before taking a very long suck of his cocktail through a straw, "what it is exactly that you do all day long?"

So of course, I squashed him. But he'll be back tomorrow.