Gwen the Splash
The Perils of Unofficial Nicknames
After the milk incident, Gwen hoped the hidden office opposite the staff kitchen would leave her alone.
Unfortunately, a bin man has vanished from payroll, everyone calls him Desmond, and Annwn has started filing him under Mist.
Gwen the Splash
Gwen found the Naming and Reclamation Office because a man who had vanished from payroll was still turning up for work.
The email arrived at 8:58, marked urgent, confidential, and not Gwen’s problem. But as Gwen worked for the council and was now on secondment, that meant it became her problem at 9.00.
Subject: Missing employee.
Gwen clicked into the email.
Kevin Probert, Waste Services, employee number 4118, vanished from Payroll.
This would have been worrying enough on its own, but Gwen could see him from the fifth-floor window.
He was in the yard below, wearing orange waterproof trousers and waving both arms at Dai, who was reversing the bin lorry, guided entirely by vibes.
Gwen leaned closer to the glass.
Dai stopped an inch short of the bollard, climbed down from the cab, and shouted something Gwen couldn’t hear through the rain pattering against the window.
The man in orange shouted back.
Then Gwen’s email pinged again.
Follow-up: employee may also be absent from Council Tax, pension records, emergency contact file, and possibly his own mother’s Christmas card list.
Gwen stared at the screen.
“That feels above my pay grade,” she said.
The office printer coughed behind her and spat out a single sheet of paper.
It couldn’t be real, unless someone in the council had changed the default font to Unsettling Medieval.
She read the page slowly.
Naming and Reclamation Office.
Immediate attendance required.
Bring tea if emotionally available. it’s us, we change our name depending on the problem.
Gwen looked from the paper to the window.
Below, the bin man in orange flickered enough so she could see the rain showing through his left elbow.
“Oh, come on,” Gwen said.
Up on the Planning corridor, the door nobody used clicked open. The office door was opposite the fifth-floor staff kitchen, where ordinary council workers walked past it every day without seeing it. Their eyes slid over the brass plate and found a poster about recycling batteries instead. Gwen had been the same until the ‘borrowed’ milk incident. After that, the door noticed her noticing it, which was frankly rude of it.
Morgan sat at the back desk, perfectly calm, wearing square glasses.
Gwen Two was halfway inside a filing cabinet, muttering, “No, not Dai Bread. Dai Bread’s still breathing. We need Dai Dead Bread, different man entirely.”
Gwen paused. “Sorry, what?”
Emrys turned a page in the huge ledger. Names shimmered across it in brown ink. Some were proper names. Some were not.
Rhys Williams.
Sioned Davies.
Joe 12.
Marc 6.
Dai the Death.
John the Dogs.
Big Linda By The Bus Stop.
Gwen leaned closer. “Why is Joe 12 and Marc 6 in there?”
“Joe was angry so they nicknamed him after the film and then his younger brother joined so Marc 6,” Morgan said. “He was also angry.” She added as if that explained everything.
“Obviously,” Gwen said, because somehow that was easier than asking the next question.
Emrys tapped the ledger. “The birth certificate is your Real World name. Useful for passports, payroll, and disappointing bank letters. Your Annwn name is the one the land recognises.”
“My what name?”
“The name that sticks,” Gwen Two said from inside the cabinet. “The one people use when they don’t need to think.”
Gwen looked again at the ledger. “So Big Linda By The Bus Stop has a magical name?”
“Powerful one,” Emrys said. “There are three Lindas on that estate, two of them big, but only one who can stop a bus. Very clear identification.”
Outside, rain struck the windows and ran down the glass in tired lines. Far below, a bin lorry ground its gears on the hill behind the council offices.
Morgan glanced at the clock. “We’ve got a fracture.”
That made the office take notice.
The lamps burned lower. The filing cabinets clicked. Somewhere, far too near and far too far away, a dog barked once.
Gwen’s skin prickled. “What kind of fracture?”
“Naming fracture,” Emrys said. “Man from Waste Services. Payroll says Kevin Probert. Everybody else says Desmond.”
“Why?”
Morgan turned another file round for her to read. “Because he looked like a Desmond obviously.”
Gwen stared at him.
Morgan stared back.
“You can’t rename a man because he looks like a Desmond.”
“Of course you can,” Gwen Two said. “That’s most of Caerphilly.”
Emrys closed the ledger with a thud that made the biscuit tin jump. “The trouble is, nobody’s called him Kevin in eight years, and now the official systems can’t hold him. Payroll says Kevin. His mates say Desmond. His mother says Kev when she’s cross and love when she isn’t. Annwn’s got confused and started filing him under Mist.”
Gwen looked towards the hidden door. The corridor beyond had gone dim.
“What does that mean in normal words?”
Morgan stood. “He’s fading.”
They found him in the fifth-floor staff room, though found wasn’t quite the word. The room was where it always was. But the far end of the room had stretched.
The table seemed longer than it should have been. The shadows beneath it deepened into something with distance. Gwen heard water dripping, but the tap was dry.
A man sat by the window in orange waterproof trousers and a council fleece. He was broad, tired-looking, and flickering slightly around the ears.
Gwen swallowed. “Kevin?”
He didn’t move.
Morgan stepped forward. “Kevin Probert?”
Nothing.
Emrys tried next, voice firm and formal. “Kevin Anthony Probert of Llanbradach, employee number 4118, Waste Services, round six.”
The man’s outline blurred.
Gwen Two hissed through her teeth. “Too official. You’ll lose him into HR.”
The room stretched another inch. Beyond the window, instead of the car park, Gwen saw a grey road curving through grass white with frost. Something padded along it, pale and long-legged, then vanished behind the reflection of the vending machine.
Gwen grabbed the back of a chair.
“Is that one of the hounds?”
Emrys frowned at the window. “Only a small one.”
“There are sizes?”
“Everything has sizes.”
The man by the window lifted one hand. It faded at the fingertips.
Gwen’s heart jumped, could a man vanish between a staff fridge and a broken blind because the world had mislaid him?
“What do his mates call him?”
Morgan checked the file. “Desmond.”
“Only Desmond?”
“Des. Desmondo when he reverses the lorry badly. Desmond Bach when he’s bought chips.”
The bin lorry outside groaned again, and Gwen heard men shouting in the yard below.
“Where’s Desmond, then?”
“Tell Des his shift’s starting.”
“He’s got the keys, mun.”
The flickering man stirred.
Gwen stepped towards him. The floor felt soft under her shoes, as if the flooring had remembered being marshland.
“Desmond,” she called.
His head twitched.
Emrys nodded. “Again.”
Gwen filled her lungs.
“Desmond, your shift’s starting, and they’re saying you’ve got the keys.”
The man snapped solid so fast the chair legs squealed.
“What?” He blinked at them. “I haven’t got the keys. Dai’s got the keys. He always blames me because he can’t organise his own bloody pockets.”
The room shrank back into itself. The grey road vanished. The fridge gave a disappointed clunk.
Gwen let out the breath she’d been holding.
Desmond looked around the staff room. “Why am I on the fifth floor?”
“Blame the weather,” Emrys said.
Desmond accepted this with the weary calm of a council worker who had seen worse things happen during budget week. He stood, patted his pockets, and frowned. “I was meant to be on bins.”
“You still are,” Morgan said. “Try answering to Kevin now and again, just to keep the records fed.”
Desmond pulled a face. “Don’t feel like a Kevin.”
“No,” Gwen said before she could stop herself. “You don’t.”
He brightened. “Thank you.”
After he’d gone, the hidden office felt warmer. Gwen Two wrote Desmond in the ledger beside Kevin Probert and underlined it twice. Morgan stamped the page with a seal that smelled faintly of coal smoke.
Gwen watched the ink sink in. “So nicknames are protection?”
“Sometimes,” Emrys said. “Sometimes they’re cruelty with a laugh stuck on. We check.”
“And sometimes?”
Morgan slid the ledger shut. “Sometimes they’re how a place says it knows you.”
She looked at the list again. Joe 12. John the Dogs. Big Linda By The Bus Stop. Desmond, who wasn’t Kevin enough to stay real.
“What’s mine, then?”
The office went quiet.
Emrys looked at Morgan.
Morgan looked at Gwen Two.
Gwen Two looked towards the staff fridge.
“No,” Gwen said.
Morgan removed his glasses and cleaned them with terrible care.
“No way!”
Emrys coughed into his fist.
Gwen pointed at him. “Don’t you dare.”
The ledger opened by itself. A wet blue mark spread across the page, neat as a splash of milk in tea.
Gwen read the words upside down.
Gwen the Splash.
The office held its breath.
Then the kettle clicked on by itself, laughing in steam.