The protagonist in ‘Grey Area’ is a young woman who works in the Department, at the Company. Charged with carrying out various administrative tasks for her boss, who is the Head of Department, she becomes sure that she is stuck in some kind of stasis – there seems to be no shift in the seasons, the sky remains the same grey colour, and her period, though due, stubbornly refuses to start. There isn’t a great deal that happens in this story, yet it’s shot through with Self’s darkly comic observations on office life; the tragedy of finding oneself in an uncanny limbo.
First published in Grey Area, Penguin Books, 1994
A Personal Anthology 