Repro Man - stories from a reluctant reprographer.

102. Twinkle, twinkle, little star…

generallucifer — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:52:49 +0000

I imagine office life is a bit like prison life.
Not the stuff about getting savagely bummed in the showers or buying porn with batteries and cigs or having to make a knife out of a toothbrush and a razor blade to stripe a nonce, nothing like that.
I’m on about getting shoved in a big room with a load of strangers for much of the day, people you’d never actually choose to associate with if you weren’t forced to, and then having to get on with them, interact with them, avoid killing them.
Because office life is hopelessly inane.
I bet prison life is hopelessly inane as well, only you can brew your own hooch in a bucket under your bed in prison, or tattoo a tear drop onto your cellmate’s face with a rusty pin, and there is always that potential for spontaneous violence to add a little spice to the day.
I don’t think there’s ever been an office in the history of offices that’s had a lock down enforced after the staff kicked off because of a shortage of paperclips, resulting in a thirty six hour siege and shit smeared water coolers and a burnt out stationary cupboard and the work experience girl getting her throat cut in a bungled hostage situation.
don’t get me wrong, if it ever does kick off I’ll be the first on the roof with my shirt wrapped around my face lobbing tiles at the rozzers and demanding helicopters and pepperoni pizzas, but I can’t see it happening any time soon.
Or ever.
Office types are a docile bunch, generally speaking.
They live in a world that is obvious, predictable, inane.
For example, I grew a moustache. A great big fuck off moustache. Not a Movember thing, this one was big porn star/European partisan/finch-perched-under-the-nose size moustache.
An office drone trundled past to the tea urn.
He stopped in his tracks, double taking the moustache nestled under my sneezer.
He took a couple of steps closer.
He smiled.
I ignored him.
He kept smiling.
I kept ignoring him.
He cleared his throat a bit, so I looked at him.
He smiled again, kind of raising his mug to point at my face, so I said,
“Yes?”
He said, “You’ve got a moustache.”
I said, “Yes.”
I ignored him again, but he kept staring, and he said, “Moustache,” and I said “I know,” and he eventually fucked off.
He must have informed the other drones about the wondrous news, because this incident happened twice more in the day, word for fucking word.
Then I finished for the day and clocked out and went home and I had a drink and I shaved of my moustache, then got angry for doing so because I felt like the drones had somehow won.

But just like prison, not everybody in an office is an utter cunt.
There’s a bloke on my shift called Twinkle.
I’ve not worked with him before, he works in another department, but we all had a bit of a reshuffle so know I’m in a room with Twinkle.
Twinkle is gay. I mean really, really gay. I’ve met plenty of gay people, but Twinkle is by far the gayest. Everything he does gets that special sprinkle of magic gay dust, so that mundane things suddenly shimmer a bit.
What is it that makes one person gayer than another? If you know any gay people, or you’re gay yourself, let me know.
I like Twinkle. He’s really honest and open, not like the others. Maybe it’s something to do with coming out. Once your honest about your sexuality, maybe it’s easier to just be open about everything else.
Twinkle has a ruddy drinker’s complexion and I like him for that too. He won’t eat bread because he says it will make him fat, but he loves the vino tinto.
He calls everyone ‘captain’ in a way that suggests he’s hailing a large ship from on board a small dinghy.
I don’t really talk to him much, I don’t really talk to anyone much lately, but he came over to me the other day while I was working.
“Evening captain!”
“Now then, Twinkle. How’s it hanging?”
“Ooh, you know, little to the left and just North of the knee! Hee hee!”
“Nice. You busy?”
“No, Luci, dead quiet! Just been online, ordering a new collar for my little doggy.”
“What kind of dog you got?”
“A Chihuahua!”
“Figures, I suppose. You won’t have bought him one of those big studded collars then.”
“Ooh, no! This one’s lovely. Cost me over two hundred quid!”
“Two hundred! Fuck me, Twinkle, what’s it made of? Solid gold? You’ll break the little sod’s neck!”
“No, silly! This one’s got pearls on it. Real pearls!”
“Twinkle, does a dog really need a collar with pearls on it?”
“Whether he needs them or not, he almost got a pearl necklace last night when he jumped on the bed, so I thought I’d get him his own so we’d be matching! Hee hee!”
“Fucking hell, Twinkle, how come gay men are always so bloody randy? The chances of me getting my end away on Tuesday night are exactly zero, yet you and your bloke are giving each other facials with the fucking dog barking encouragement. I don’t get it!”
“The thing is, Luci, we don’t have any of that messing about like women do. I say to a bloke, ‘fancy a fuck’, he’s says, ‘go on then’, we fuck, I cum, he cums, we both get dressed, have a glass of wine and watch telly. Simple as.”
“Sounds ideal, putting it like that.”
“Exactly! Never fancied giving it a go?”
“What, being gay? Not really, no. The life style sounds pretty good, but it’s getting bummed that I’m not keen on.”
“That’s the best bit!”
“Each to his own.”
“What I want to know, Luci, is if you’re feeling horny and the wife’s not putting out, what do you do?”
“I do what the vast majority of the male heterosexual married population do when they’re randy. I have a wank.”
“Oh! Does the wife not mind then?”
“Mind? She encourages it! She sees it as one less job for her to do. It’s like her coming home and finding I’ve cleaned the oven. She’s pleased she doesn’t have to do it.”
“Seems a shame!”
“It is a bit, I suppose. What about your bloke, then. Does he mind you having a crafty wank?”
“Ooh yes! He gets terribly jealous! If I’ve been wanking then there’s nowt left for him, is there? Besides, I do get a bit… obsessive about it, when I start.”
“Obsessive?”
“yeah, I can’t stop myself! Hee hee!”
“Just out of interest, what are we talking about here? How many times are you doing it in a day then?”
“Fifteen or sixteen times.”
“What?? Jesus, your cock must be a wreck after that kind of session!”
“It is a bit red, yeah.”
“Red? I’ll reckon it looks like your chihuahua has been gnawing it!”
“I think that’s what pisses my boyfriend off most. He won’t go near it when it looks like that, you know, all weepy…”
“I can’t say I blame him. Seems like a sensible bloke.”
“Oh he is, he is! I’ve got a picture of him on my phone, if you want to see what he looks like!”
“Well… go on then.”
“Give me a minute.. on here some where… Here we go! This is Gary!”
Very nice. He keeps himself very neat and tidy, doesn’t he.”
Yes. I’ve always gone for the groomed look. Here he is on holiday in Marbella.”
“Lovely. When did you go there?”
“Last Summer. Oh look! Here’s Christmas! He’s wearing a Santa hat, see?”
“Yeah, so he is. Look, Twinkle, have you got any pictures of Gary’s face? These are all pictures of his cock, and while that’s fine and everything, it’s just not my thing. No offense.”
Twinkle flicked through the pictures on his phone.
“Hmm.. I could have sworn there was at least one… Nope! It’s all cocks I’m afraid! Heehee!”
“Oh well. I’m sure he’s… very handsome, or something.”
Twinkle was looking very intently at the phone.
His booze burnt face flushed and sweat beaded his shaved head.
His hand slipped into his trouser pocket, started to rummage.
I said, “Look, I’ve got some work to finish off here, Twinkle…”
“Oh. no problem!” he replied. “Listen, Luci, you’re not needing the lavvies in the foreseeable, are you?”
I kept my gaze fixed on the monitor. “No. You get in there and have yourself a party mate. Don’t leave an mess though, eh?”
“Cheers Luci, your a pal.”
Twinkle scuttled off.
I was left alone in the office.
Twinkle was gone for two hours.
At home time he still hadn’t surfaced.
I thought about knocking on the bog door, seeing if he was alright.
Then I thought about what I might see, decided to give it a miss.
I packed my things away, turned off the light, fucked off home.
-
I came in to work last Monday.
Where Twinkle should have been sitting there was a massive Christmas tree.
It was one of nasty silver tinsel plastic pieces of crap, dripping in neon baubles and lights, blinking dementedly at a frequency that would have given Stevie Wonder an epileptic fit.
I walked over to the nearest office drone, shielding my eyes to avoid spazzing out on the carpet.
“Here, drone, where’s Twinkle?”
“Oh, hi Luci. Twinkle got the sack.”
“Fuck! How come?”
“They said he wasn’t working hard enough, that he was always tossing it off.”
“Fair point, I suppose. What’s this fucking monstrosity doing here then?” I asked, pointing at the tree.
“Well, we had a bit of a think, and we decided we didn’t want anything quite as camp and glittery as Twinkle anymore, so we got that.”
I looked at the tree, started to feel all swimmy and sick, looked away.
“Poor fucker. Nice time to sack a bloke that, isn’t it? Right before Christmas!”
“Maybe he could get a part time job here Luci – we’re looking for a fairy for the top of the tree! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!”
“Fuck off, drone.”
“Oh.”
Drone looked hurt.
I went back to my desk.
For some reason I couldn’t help thinking of Gary’s cock wearing a Santa hat.

101. Birthday Boy

generallucifer — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 10:39:25 +0000

*Note: this piece was written for a writing group, to be read to a group. Therefore, it’s a little different to my usual writing. When I read out my other work I just sound like I’m talking and swearing to myself…
This incident occurred about nineteen years ago.

A deserted road ran down the side of the print factory, leading to a sad, forgotten industrial estate lined with sad, forgotten units.
I say units, but they were more like corrugated iron barns, rusted and patched, their colours faded by the elements and by neglect, rotting hulks washed up on a cracked concrete beach, lapped by the relentless tides of time.
Crooked tin chimneys poked from hacksawed holes in the rusty roofs, farting bitter fumes into the sluggish air where they would drift a while before settling on the ground as a sinister grey silt, choking even the weeds to death.
The cars abandoned beside the units were as tired as the units themselves, chiefly held together with masking tape and cable ties, snarled curses and muttered prayers, the tape and ties and curses and prayers of the men who worked in the units.
Unit 13 was only different in that it emitted a churning chatter from within, a noise at a pitch that you never got used to, a biting sound, a hook in the ear, digging and probing.
This unit, unit 13, was owned by the factory. Inside, they made envelopes.
To the outsider this seems ordinary. A print factory needs envelopes to put their printed things in, so they make envelopes.
Simple.
Well, up to a point.
Envelope men are a strange breed, unpredictable.
That was why they were down the road in a draughty rattling shack, rather than being housed within the warm confines of the factory.
Envelope men were risky.
Inside unit 13 the envelope machine hammered and clamoured and stammered, spitting out stuttering stacks of crisp new envelopes, the folds fresh, the gum damp, the ink tacky.
A labourer on one end of the machine pressed a pedal that opened a door in the machine, a machine mouth that released the full force of the machine’s voice, a voice loud enough to make your eyes vibrate, your teeth ache, your hair dance on your scalp. No living thing had such a voice. It was a machine’s voice.
As the machine howled the labourer fed it a great stack of flats, blank shaped sheets the machine would eat, before quickly releasing the pedal to close that machine mouth, quieten that terrible machine shout. The flats disappeared into the metal maw where the machine began folding them with it’s machine tongue, gumming them with it’s machine saliva, stamping them with it’s inky machine teeth, before shitting stacks of envelopes from it’s machine arse.
A shovel pawed labourer crouched by the machine’s arse and grabbed these stacks of freshly defecated envelopes, two hundred deep, and wedged them in a box.
Then another two hundred envelopes, another box.
And he did it again.
And again.
He did it all day, every day.
For ever.
Feed the machine, clean the machine, care for the machine.
Mad Mick cared for the machine. With inky spanner, greasy spike and oil can he strode to and fro along the machine’s body, tightening and untightening, jabbing and poking, lubricating and soothing, and all the while the machine yammered and gobbled and shat, blind to the care and love that it received.
Mad Mick shouted and howled but no-one could hear, the labourers bellowed and laughed, but no-one could hear, all of them deaf to anything but the machine’s mindless voice, howling and chattering, more, more, more.
Twelve hours a day and more, six days a week and more they fed the machine. Mad Mick sometimes worked right through the night, refusing to go home, ramming in flats on one end before running round to scoop envelopes from the other, working like a maniac, wild eyed, wild haired, a gibbering slave to his beautiful, terrible machine.
Smith the forklift driver whirred from delivery truck to the machine in an endless loop, dumping stacks of flats to feed the machine, lifting palettes of envelopes onto trucks, stacking used palettes in a great rickety tower in the corner of the Unit. He worked in muffled silence, his ears carefully plugged and covered by defenders, his face swathed in cloth to keep out the worst of the fumes. On the steering wheel there hung a wooden crucifix. Smith protected himself from Unit 13, body and soul.
When twelve o’clock came, Mad Mick pressed a button on the side of the machine. It stopped eating, it stopped shitting, it stopped shouting. For half an hour the machine died.
The silence was louder than the machine’s voice, a force so powerful it left the labourer’s staggering. They stumbled towards Mad Mick like men fresh from a sea voyage, unused to the calm, and Mick handed out cigarettes and patted their broad inky shoulders and they shouted into each other’s deaf ears.
Smith did not join them. Jesus Smith, they called him, on account of his religious devotion. He wasn’t one of the boys, one of them. He did not love the machine, he hated it, saw their greasy fawning to the machine’s cold needs as something monstrous, idolatrous.
He would not join them in their sandwiches and cigarettes, their smutty sniggerings over The Sun and The Sport.
Removing the cloth wrappings and ear defenders, Jesus Smith walked towards the tower of palettes in an unlit corner of the unit. He looked back at make sure he was unobserved, before ducking through a narrow gap in the palettes.
On hands and knees he shuffled quickly through a wooden warren of his own creation, until the space opened out into a chamber within the heart of the stack. A simple cushion was positioned on the floor for kneeling, a small crate draped with a scrap of green velvet served as an altar, a crucifix lovingly whittled from split planks graced the back of the chamber. The grimy light leaked through the pine slats to penetrate this hallowed place, a haven for the spirit in an industrial Gomorrah, and it was only here that Jesus Smith felt at peace, felt able to turn his carefully protected ear to catch the quiet murmurings of God’s voice.
He lit a tea light with almost theatrical care, painfully conscious of how dangerous a naked flame was in such a place, but willing to take the risk in the name of Christ. With His care, Jesus Smith knew that no harm would come to him. Of that he was certain.
So he prayed, moving his lips silently, eyes half closed, swaying before the cross, listening for His word.
And it came.
Jesus Smith’s eyes clicked open, his heart almost stopped. The voice, THE voice, was here! He listened again, more intently this time, and he heard words.
“Happy birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you…”
It was his birthday! Jesus Smith had almost forgotten that it was his birthday that day. Twenty five years on God’s planet, and at last, the Lord had chosen that day to speak to him.
“Thank you, Lord,” he murmured.
“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you…”
The voice seemed to be nearer, within the palettes, close by.
Jesus Smith’s joy quickly curdled in his gut. He blew out the tea light on his altar and tried to turn in the tight confines of his chamber, but he wasn’t quick enough.
Strong hands grabbed his ankles and yanked, hard. He fell forward across his altar, scattering the cloth, upsetting the crate, dislodging the crucifix.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU, HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR JESUS, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!”
The flat shouts of deaf men boomed from the tin walls.
He was dragged backwards through the the gap in the palettes until he found himself sprawled out on the floor of unit 13, squinting up into blinding light.
The roller shutter door was open and the dusty noon light spilled into the unit, temporarily blinding him after the meek gloom of his makeshift chapel. He squinted into the light, and could just make out a figure.
“Lord?”
Laughter erupted around him.
The figure stepped nearer, out of the light.
“I’ve been called many things, love, but never Lord?” she said, “I suppose there’s a first time for everything!”
First time for everything, indeed.
Jesus Smith had kept himself pure, saved himself for an angel who he had yet to meet, but industrial estates are no places to find angels. Darker denizens dwell where the machines grind and the fumes puke.
The woman stepped out of the light, and he saw her, saw her lace and leather and so much naked flesh, the black and red and quivering pink, a trailing whip and a can of cream.
Jesus Smith let out a low moan and squirmed in the dust.
“Harlot!”
She smiled a sad, tired smile.
That’s more like it. Now come and get your present, Birthday boy.”
He could not escape.
Men from the factory had drifted along to watch the spectacle, and strong hands held him and stripped him. To the howls and laughter of the watching men the woman rode Jesus Smith like a donkey, whipping his buttocks to make him shuffle faster. With eyes tight closed he felt cream pressed into his face followed by the warm smotherings of her enormous breasts, the heady scent of perfume and cigarettes and sherry on her breath, her nails trailing across his goose flesh, the blood hammering through his pure heart, the stamping boots of the baying crowd, his lips sucking for breath against her slick, slippery skin.
Happy Birthday Jesus Smith.
He fell to the ground, head swimming, thoughts muddied by something new and powerful, unfamiliar and terrifying. He opened his eyes slightly to see money changing hands, crumpled notes and coins from torn jeans and overall pockets, and then once again he was hauled to his feet.
This time the strong hands did not let go.
The cheers became louder, his eyes closed tighter, and he gasped as a blast of cold cream was squirted over his exposed genitals.
And then there was sudden heat. A writhing, tingling heat at his crotch that sucked the strength from his legs and the light from his soul. The clapping and jeering and cheering grew in it’s intensity, a tribal frenzy rising to a terrible crescendo, a godless voodoo demanding sacrifice. Jesus Smith tried to resist with all his strength and all his faith, but his strength and faith were naught compared to the skills of the woman.
The rising within him was unstoppable, guilty spasms of ecstasy wracked his body as the men howled and laughed and screamed. His eyes never opened, but tears squeezed past the clenched lids, tears of humiliation and guilt, one fluid following the other, lost forever.
And then she kissed him. That same scent, roses, smoke and strong wine, a sad, comforting smell he would remember forever as her red lips brushed his salt stained cheek.
“Happy birthday, lover boy.”
And she was gone.
He dropped to his knees, his overalls thrown over him to hide a modesty that was long gone, gone with the woman, gone with the factory men returning to their work, gone with the light as the roller shutter door clanked and clattered closed.
And in the stygian gloom Jesus Smith crouched like a child, his body racked with sobs, moaning and muttering as he rocked back on his heels.
Mad Mick readied the machine, the men got into position, ready to feed, ready to clean, ready to care.
He bellowed to Jesus Smith.
“Get on the fork truck, y’ blubbering puff! What’s up wi’ yer?”
Jesus Smith turned on him, his face smeared with cream and tears and lipstick and shame, “I’ll tell you what’s up!” he screamed. “For what’s just happened I’m going to Hell, y’hear? Hell! I’m damned!”
Mad Mick’s laughter echoed around the rusting hulk, rattled off the body of the machine, gibbered through the palettes.
“Going to Hell? Don’t be fucking daft! You’re already in Hell! Where do you think you’ve working for the last nine years!”
And he stabbed the button and the machine began to howl, drowning out the sobs of the damned, the laughter of the damned the hopes and fears and dreams of the damned and the machine babbled more, more, more…

100. Double Drunk Friday

generallucifer — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:28:32 +0000

Friday morning.
5.57am.
It is cold, it is dark, the roads are greasy, the fallen leaves clogging the gutter in a rotting sludge.
I’m shivering outside the factory, under the buzzing tangerine glow of the sodium lamps, stood in thick dew sodden grass, plucking up the guts to walk in again, clock in again, jump on the conveyor and go through the same shit routine again.
it’s times like this I wish I smoked.
Tear of the plastic, pop open the carton, tear off that foil and fire up a coffin nail.
just stand there, smoking.
The thing is, if I had just one smoke out there in the dark, just paused long enough to take it down to the filter, I don’t think I’d go into the factory. I’d just turn around and go home, crawl back into bed, lay in the dark with my eyes wide open, smoke on my lips, waiting for the world to come crashing round my ears.
The beginning of the end.
It would be the beginning of the end because I know I wouldn’t go to work again, I just know it. Maybe that’s how a breakdown begins. Maybe that was what leads to shuffling around the house in threadbare y-fronts and an egg stained dressing gown,
using final demands as coasters for cracked mugs of piss-weak tea,
shouting at Ken Bruce’s Pop Master on Radio 2,
wanking mechanically at the sight of Lorraine Kelly on daytime telly, laughing at the tragic stories on the news,
crying at the happy stories on the news,
cowering on the stairs pretending to be out when the window cleaner comes around,
getting the feeling you get on an airplane when you hit turbulence and drop a thousand feet but you’re just sitting still on the sagging couch with cup-a-soup,
staring out of the window wishing a runaway juggernaut would plow across the front garden and smash right into the living room, just to relieve the dread-filled tedium…
No, maybe it was best I didn’t smoke.
I trudge across the grass in sodden shoes, go into the factory.
Loud hissing of compressed air, strip lights, the chung chung chung of perpetual motion machinery churning out endless reams of flimsy personalised crap.
I walk to the scrum of workers surrounding the clock machine, struggle through to peg in.
There is a buzz of barely contained excitement, strangely jarring at such a grim hour, such a grim place.
Peel blunders into me, skipping from foot to foot, tittering like a loon. Peel is six feet six, wild eyed, built like a giant stray labrador, always on the edge of genuine madness. He worked long hours, twelve hour nights and weekends too, shoving palettes of paper around the factory, driving the forklifts like a maniac, striding around looking happily bemused.
“What’s going on, Peel? You lot should be knackered after the week you’ve had. You’ve not had a break in three weeks.”
“I know Luci! That’s why we’re giddy as bastards! no work this weekend, so you know what that means! Double Drunk Friday!”
A small cheer goes up in the mob.
“Double Drunk Friday? What’s that about?”
Peel winked, tapped his nose, grinned a knowing grin, made a clicking noise.
“Ah, Double Drunk Friday is ace! It’s the best! What you do, you go home, get parked on the couch and fire into the piss of your choice. Me, I like sherry, I do. I only drink for an hour though, any more than that and you’re a fucking alky!”
He nodded knowingly before continuing.
“So I fire into the sherry as quick as fuck, get as much as I can down me in an hour. By seven thirty I’ll be arseholed!”
“Sound like heavy going. So what happens when you’re that fucked on a Friday morning? What do you do?”
Peel shrugged.
“Dunno. Watch telly, computer game, have a wank… then I go to bed.”
“Sounds like a riot.”
“Yeah! It’s ace! So I goes to bed, sleep it off, get up in the afternoon, come round a bit, have a bite of summat, then…”
He looked at me with puppy like eagerness, urging me to finish it off for him.
“You get fucked up again?”
“BINGO! Another sherry hour! Double Drunk Friday!”
The bell rings.
A mad scrabble of clock cards and work boots and car keys, then they’re gone.
Gone to get drunk.
I felt like joining them.
Nearly did.
But didn’t.
I went to work.

99. A Strife Aquatic

generallucifer — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:05:35 +0000

“Watcha doin’, Lucifer?”
“Holyfuckingshit! Don’t creep up on me like that, Scorcher! I swear, you’re going to kill me one of these days!”
“I can’t help it, mate. Stealth is in my nature. They reckon I could have made an ace assassin, what with my stealth and that.”
“They reckon, do they? Who are ‘they’, hmm?”
“You know. ‘Them’.”
“Ohh, them! Why didn’t you say!”
I turned back to my computer.
“Yeah, they said I’d be a perfect killing machine, being a person naturally gifted wiv a silent approach and a steely calm.”
I looked at him again.
Steely calm. He had a face like a bloodhound on morphine and he was picking his undies out of his arse.
“So how come you work in a shit hole like this, Scorcher, rather than swanning around Europe bumping off heads of state?”
“They said it would be irresponsible to put such power in the hands of a man of my potential. They were frightened that if I turned double agent, I could’ve killed the whole government within firty days. Tony Blair wouldn’t know what fuckin’ hit ‘im.”
“David Cameron.”
“Wot?”
“David Cameron. He’s prime minister now.”
“Is he? Well ‘im then.”
Scorcher mimed creeping up on David Cameron and slitting his throat.
“I’m sure he’s breathing a sigh of relief as we speak.”
“Yeah, I espect so. So wotcha doin’ then, Lucifer?”
“Funnily enough, I’m looking on the internet for a new job.”
“Watcha wanna new job for? What’s wrong wiv this one?”
“Because I hate it, because I’m rather shit at it, because they’ll probably fire me soon.”
“Fair enough, I suppose. What sort of job you want then, Luci?”
“I’m not sure Scorcher. I’m just looking, but I don’t see anything I actually want to do. I’ve never known what I want to do, if I’m honest.”
“Why not be a frogman?”
I didn’t even bother looking at him this time.
“The list of reasons why I’m not going to be a frogman are endless, Scorcher. I’m not going to even try to list them. I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you fuck off and be a frogman?”
“I’ve tried it, Luci, but to be honest frogmanning is a young man’s game.”
Here we go.
“Are you honestly trying to tell me you were a frogman?”
“Yeah, fifteen years, man and boy.”
“Go on then. Where were you a frogman? Bahamas? Great barrier reef? Galapagos?”
“North Sea Ferries.”
“Oh. So you were a frogman for North Sea Ferries?”
“Not for them. Off them.”
“What? You’ve lost me now, Scorcher.”
“Well, y’see, we was part of this little treasure hunting team, but we reckoned we didn’t need all that outlay on boats and shit, so what we’d do is board the North Sea Ferry to Rotterdam in Hull as a passenger…”
“In your frogman outfits?”
“Yeah, in our frogman outfits, then we’d wait until we were in the right place out in the North Sea and over the back we’d go.”
“Off the back of the ferry. You just lobbed yourself off the back of the ferry.”
“Yeah.”
“And the captain and the crew weren’t the slightest bit suspicious that the blokes in rubber who boarded the ferry in Hull had gone missing by the time they’d got to Rotterdam?”
Scorcher tapped the side of his nose.
“The skipper were in on the game. Owt we found we split with him and his crew. Besides, we needed them to slow up a bit when they were on there way back to Hull on the return leg.”
“Why did you need him to slow up?”
“So’s we could grab a hold of the anchor as the ferry went by, and get a tow back to shore.”
“Fuck off.”
“For real! Look, I found this on the last dive I did. I kept it as a memento. I always keep it wi’ me as a reminder o’ those days at sea.”
Scorcher dug around in his pocket. Found something, dropped it in my hand.
I looked at it.
“Scorcher, this is a pound coin.”
“Aye. But look at the date, it’s an old’un.”
“It says nineteen ninety one.”
“Yup. They don’t make them no more.”
I gave him it back.
I put my fingers in my ears and closed my eyes tightly.
I stayed like that for a bit.
When I opened my eyes Scorcher had gone.
I carried on looking for a new job.

98. Dead Wood

generallucifer — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:19:09 +0000

“Don’t worry, Lucifer, you’ll get used to it.”
“I’m not getting used to it. I’ve worked in this office for weeks now and I’m no nearer to getting used to it.”
“I’m telling you, you’ll acclimatise. It might feel a little strange at first…”
“Strange? Getting used to this shit is like getting used to a chronic debilitating disease. Getting used to it is like getting used to… I don’t know… cock tumours or something.”
“Cock tumours? What are cock tumours? I didn’t know you could get tumours on your cock!”
Billy wriggled his hand nervously down the front of his work issue stay-pressed pants and fumbled carefully with his cock.
“Jesus…” I looked away. I had no desire to sit there watching a workmate massaging his cock in search of cancerous growths.
I stabbed some keys and blinked at the monitor.
I’d made a mistake. I’d taken my eye of the screen for one fucking second, suffered one momentary lapse of concentration, and I’d made a mistake.
Again.
The tab keys and delete keys on my keyboard are fucked, worn away, illegible.
It happened all the time. Not big mistakes, just stupid little errors that would be easy to spot if I wasn’t so fucking jaded.
I never felt fresh and ready for work, keen as mustard. I always felt tired and my stomach lurched whenever a new job flopped onto my desk with the wet slap of a heavy plastic wallet filled with some deluded fool’s idea of what might deliriously excite Joe Public when it drifted onto his doormat on a Tuesday morning.
Junk mail is never welcome. Ever. The jobs I work on are shit, the printed product is shit, the dinky little envelopes that leave the factory filled to the brim with impersonal personalisation are shit.
“Dear Keith Ringworm we are delighted to inform you that you have been chosen out of the billions of writhing nobodies on the planet to qualify for a grand prize of £50,000 (or an Elvis tea cosy)…”
A waste of trees, a waste of ink, a waste of fucking time.
Job after job, day after day, year after year, relentless piles of direct mail.
I couldn’t see an end.
“Do you think Amoxicillin will prevent cock tumours, Luci?”
I looked up.
Billy still had one hand rummaging around inside his pants while the other fumbled with scores of foil covered blister packs of pills inside his rucksack.
“Jesus Christ, Billy! Don’t let any fucker in this office catch you doing either of those things. Wanking and popping pills are not considered suitable occupations for an office worker.”
Billy gasped in panic as he realised what he was doing. He pulled his hand from out of his pants too quickly and caught his watch strap on something delicate. He let out a shrill whimper and crumpled to the floor in a glittering rainbow of anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants, anti-biotics.
I carried on punching the keyboard. “Good work, Billy. You’re the only bloke I know who can start out giving himself a preventative medical examination for cock tumours only to end up accidentally circumcising himself with a Sekonda. Well done.”
Billy scrambled on the floor, desperately shovelling prescription medication back into his rucksack before anyone noticed.
I saw that I’d made another mistake. I swore, jabbed delete.
Billy hauled himself painfully back into his seat, washed down a mouthful of various pills with cold decaffeinated tea sweetened with Canderel.
“I’m already circumcised.”
I looked up again.
“What? I really didn’t need to know that, Billy.”
“My mother thought it would be best if I was circumcised. You know, for hygiene. I didn’t need it doing for any medical reason, but my mother thought it would be more hygienic.”
“Hygienic? What’s wrong with just giving it a scrub with a flannel like everyone else does? Anyway, how old were you when she got you circumcised?”
“Twenty seven.”
“Fucking Hell. I don’t even want to know why your mum has an opinion about your dick when you’re that kind of age, never mind why you listened to her.”
“She’s a nurse. She gets me my medicines.”
“I see. So your mother plies you with medication that isn’t even prescribed to you, then she wants to look at your cock. That’s quite a relationship you’ve got going on with your mum, Billy.”
“It’s nothing weird! She’s a health professional!”
“Health professional my arse. Remember those pills you took the other month? They were so powerful we all thought you’d had a fucking stroke. You couldn’t talk and you slobbered on your keyboard and your left eye went all droopy. It was only the fact we found that packet of horse tranquilizers, or whatever they were, that we didn’t ship you off to Leeds General Infirmary fucking pronto. I still think we should have sent you anyway!”
We lapsed into silence, me struggling to focus on a job, him struggling to get eye drops in.
Billy was obviously uncomfortable with silences.
“What do you reckon the big meeting’s about, Luci?”
Sigh.
“Fuck knows. It won’t be good news though.”
“It might be.”
“It won’t be.”
There’s always meetings. All the little supervisors and managers are regularly summoned around a big desk behind closed doors to discuss new and improved ways of kicking our arses. One time it was a big reduction in overtime pay, another time it was a ban on mobile phones, yet another time they decided to dress us up as clones in itchy little uniforms. The Holy Grail was to find a way of sacking people without paying them a fortune in redundancy. They hadn’t found a way of doing it legally yet. It was the only thing that saved my sorry hide.
“But it might be good news, Luci. Maybe they’re gonna give us our overtime rate back!”
He wouldn’t give up!
“Christ, are those eye drops rose-tinted or something? Those bastards take, they don’t give, Billy. You can forget them giving us any overtime money back, you can forget them giving us a long overdue pay rise and you can most definitely forget a thank you for all your hard work at Christmas. You wait. The news will be shitty.”
Billy shook his head, pulled a sad face.
“I feel sorry for you, Luci. I mean, how can you go through life being so negative? Everyone’s got to come here and do their job, get on with it, so why can’t you do your job with a smile instead of a scowl?”
I stabbed the keyboard harder, trying to get the job to do something that it clearly did not want to do.
“Maybe it’s because I’ve usually got a massive fucking hangover, Billy. Maybe that’s why I scowl.”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t drink quite so much then…”
My screen froze, keyboard and mouse became useless. I pushed away from the desk and grabbed hold of the partition that separated me from Billy.
“What? What did you just say? That I shouldn’t drink so much? That’s fucking rich coming from you! At least I’m honest about what I use to numb the grim tedium of everyday life, but you hide your poison in shiny foil packets and call it medicine! I’ll show you medicine…”
“Luci, your shouting!”
“Fuck it Billy, I don’t care! None of these fuckers can hear me! Just look at him!”
I pointed across the room at Soulless Boss.
“Look at him! That black-hearted bastard used to be ambitious, driven, a real go-getter! See him staring at that laptop? Know what’s on the screen? A flower. A picture of a flower! He’s been staring at that picture for nearly two hours! He’s fucked! Know what’s made him fucked? Medicine! He’s ripped off his tits on medicine! He’s staring at that flower but for all I know he’s got Jesus Christ and a choir of fucking angels singing to him!”
I waved an arm, taking in the rest of the office.
“Now look at the rest of these drones, Billy. Just you stand up and take a look at them. What do you see? Tell me what they are doing.”
Billy half stood up and looked around the room furtively. He sat back down with a shocked expression on his face.
“Most of them are asleep, Luci! Why are they all asleep?”
“Medicine, Billy. They’ve taken their medicine. Look at that weird little fuck downstairs, Burrows. Off on permanent sick with stress. What about Mallett, hiding in his office all day? Check out his desk. You’ll see a box of tissues. Why? Because he can burst out crying at the drop of a fucking hat and he doesn’t know why! And there’s a reason why every single bloke on the night shift goes home at six in the morning and starts drinking, and keeps drinking while their wife and kids get up for work and school, and they wave them off at the door with a tin of Kestrel Super Strength in their hand. That’s not normal behaviour, Billy. It’s fucking wrong.”
Billy looked shell shocked. I felt like a bit of a cunt for ranting at him.
I felt tired all of a sudden.
I needed a drink.
“Look, Billy, the bottom line is, this place is no Center of Excellence. The cream of the crop do not aspire to work in a Northern factory producing junk mail. Those guys are working for NASA, or finding out the breeding habits of octopi on the reefs around the Galapagos Islands, or discovering a miracle cure for cock tumours. It doesn’t take a genius to blanket bomb the nation with cheap pamphlets selling double glazing, Sky television deals and life insurance. The reason why everyone here is on industrial strength booze and tranquilizers is because they woke up one day and realised they were in a hole, a deep, shitty hole, and they couldn’t find a way out so they started to panic, and the easiest thing to stop the panic is to go back to sleep again, numb the pain, pop a pill, crack a beer. They all knew they were never going to do that dream job on the Galapagos Islands, or in space, or cure the sick. That kind of realisation comes as a shock, a disappointment. Sometimes the only cure for disappointment is to get all fucked up.”
I pressed the restart button on my computer.
It made a happy little pinging noise.
Billy looked up at me with fear in his eyes and a Vicks inhaler up his nose.
“Luci, is everyone like that? Everyone in the factory, I mean? Are they all on drugs and booze to shut out how they really feel?”
I shook my head.
“Not all of us, Billy boy. Some people actually love this shit. It’s all they’ve ever wanted. You’ve got to be a cold hearted fucker to thrive here though, with zero imagination. Someone like Jekyll.”
Jekyll was my new boss.
He was ten years younger than me, about four stone lighter and eight inches shorter.
You wouldn’t look twice at the little cunt if he passed you in the street, but that was his secret weapon. He slipped under the radar. He was fucking brilliant at his job, he had a photographic memory for every little detail that passed under his nose and he never, ever made a mistake.
Oh, and he was also a total fucking sociopath.
His capacity for cruelty knew no bounds. He genuinely seemed to relish humiliating his staff in front of others. He was notorious for being incredibly rude and arrogant with everyone, regardless of rank, and he suffered from a monstrous vanity. In his creepy world every woman who spoke to him was desperate to fuck him, every man was in awe of him.
Truly a wanker of the highest order.
Credit where credit is due, he’d managed to topple Soulless Boss from his perch. I had been glad to see that bastard get his comeuppance, but Jekyll made Soulless Boss look cute and cuddly in comparison.
He had it in for me. Mistakes offended him, and in his eyes I was one big mistake. He’d been turning the screw on me for weeks, letting me know that he was the boss at every opportunity, trying to grind me down to the point where I snapped. Nothing would have given him greater pleasure than to see me just fold, go on sick with depression or stress.
I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Twenty two years of getting trodden on toughens you up. Not always in a good way, but you find strength where others might crack.
I could take it.
The door opened and Jekyll glided in.
Billy scurried to yank the Vicks from out of his snout and look busy.
I kept prodding the keyboard, shoving the mouse.
Jekyll was smirking. I didn’t like that.
“Gentlemen, I’ve just come from the board meeting. I have some good news…”
Billy’s jaw dropped, then his face lit up. He shot me a look.
I didn’t react.
“It seems that the factory is thriving! While other print works are going into administration we are going from strength to strength.”
I still didn’t react.
“But we can’t afford to relax. We still have room for improvement…”
Jekyll was staring right at me. This was the crunch.
“We are introducing a new system. Any mistakes, no matter how small, will result in a ticket. You get three tickets and we all have a little meeting to find out what’s going wrong, and how you can be helped.”
Me and Jekyll were in a staring contest now.
“The company line is that this is being introduced to help you boys, to find out where training is needed, but I think I can let you in on the real meaning of this. You see, there’s a lot of lads out there in the trade who are looking for work. Good lads, with experience. We get dozens of C.V.s a day. Dozens. This got the bosses thinking. If we can get rid of the people we don’t need, the dead wood, then we can get some of these experienced lads in on a cheap rate. They’ve looked into it. This ticket system is fail safe. You get too many tickets and we start writing warnings. Three warnings, and you’re sacked. Simple!”
Jekyll grinned at me. I’d seen a grin like that before, on the faces of kids who liked setting fire to cats or kicking dogs to death. It was the grin of seeing someone in a bad situation, relishing the misfortune of others.
I knew that I was fucked.
He did too.
They’d found the Holy Grail.
While me and Jekyll stared each other out, Billy was quietly going to pieces. He blubbered and gibbered, babbled about how much he needed that job and how nobody was perfect and mistakes were going to happen.
Then he grabbed his bag and ran for the door.
He’d gone.
Jekyll watched him go, amused and puzzled by his reaction.
“Why’s that pussy getting worked up? He’s got nothing to worry about. The only people who need to worry are those that make mistakes, the dead wood.”
He was staring at me again.
I felt my heart thump a bit harder. I forced myself not to grip my pen too tightly.
“The reason why he reacted like that, Jekyll, is because you’ve just told him that if he makes the slightest mistake he’s going to get the fucking boot! Billy’s a bit of a fragile character, threats like that get to him!”
“That wasn’t a threat, Lucifer. You’d know about it if I was threatening you, believe me. Like I said, Billy need not be worried, he’s not dead wood.”
He smirked at me.
The pen snapped in my hand.
I smiled at Jekyll.
I could hear the blood rushing in my head. It sounded like the sea.
“Just supposing I were to kick off right now, Jekyll. I mean, really kick off. Do you think there’s anything you could do?”
Jekyll blinked, stepped backwards.
“What?”
“Theoretically, I could twist your fucking head of like a bottle cap, you know. Your neck isn’t much thicker than my wrist. I reckon if I got a good hold on you I could twist it clean off. Now, how might you stop me doing that?”
Thump thump thump, the blood was really pounding now. It felt pretty good, to be honest.
Wait to get sacked, or blaze of glory.
Heads or tails.
Jekyll glanced around.
“Well. Lucifer, first thing I’d do is smash that monitor into your face. Then I’d throw as many things as I could at you to buy some time.”
“These new monitors don’t have much weight behind them, Jekyll. A couple of keyboards and a desk tidy are not going to slow me down a significant amount. And besides, take look around the office. Do you really think any of these lot could help you, even if they wanted to?”
“No, I suppose not.”
Jekyll stepped closer.
But it doesn’t matter, does it Luci? Because we both know you’re going to do precisely fuck all, aren’t you?”
And that blood sounded louder in my head, and little bits of shattered yellow plastic crunched together in my fist, slippery in the sudden sweat, and I chose the fastest point to clear the desk and get a grip, brushing aside computer and screen and tea mug and telephone, moving quick with the weight of my body bearing down on that thin neck, being careful not to let him gouge at my eyes with anything like a pen or his fingernails which I noticed were quite long, and the thump thump thump of my heart in my chest changed gear, and I felt a strange elation, a feeling of ‘fuck it, just do it’ flooding my system, and I could actually feel the sensation of gristle and muscle and cartilage and larynx collapsing beneath my fist, cracking and clicking and snapping like the ruined remains of the pen…
“No, you’re not going to do anything.”
Jekyll smiled his shitty smile and walked away.
“Jekyll.”
“Yes?”
“This place can get rid of all the dead wood it likes, but all that will happen is that it will collapse. Dead wood is what’s holding this place together. Dead wood is all it can get. Without dead wood, this place would be fucked.”
Jekyll chose to ignore me.
He left me alone at the desk in the corner, left me to make mistakes, one at a time, until I earned my first cozy chat with the management.
I stabbed the delete key until it broke.

97. The Outsiders.

generallucifer — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:24:01 +0000

I drained my whiskey and soda, sat back, lit a cigar.
I listened.
I could not hear the traffic outside, the shouting and the swearing and the constant hum of inane chatter that fills the streets, the chatter of people talking but not listening, wanting to be heard without wanting to hear.
The soft sounds in the hotel bar were very different. Polite murmurings, muffled laughter, the slippery chuckle of ice against good glass.
A piano! I could hardly believe it. There he was, the man in a sharp suit, tickling the ivories. I honestly thought it only happened in the movies, but no, there was Sam, larger than life.
I left my chair for the fifth time walked to the bar, ignoring the bustling waiter who tried to take my order at the table. I got my drink the way I always got my drink. I wasn’t a fucking cripple.
“Jameson’s with soda. Ice? A couple of chunks.”
I paid, returned to my chair. The waiter sulked. He’d been busy though. The ash tray was clean but my cigar still rested there, burning. The torn beer coasters were miraculously whole again, waiting to be slowly plucked apart for the fifth time.
Each time I’d returned from the bar he’d performed that same trick. I’d not seen it happen. I asked the bartender for my drink, paid, turned around and voila! My table was new again.
If that waiter ever got laid off, he’d have a fine future on the cabaret circuit.
I sucked up some whiskey, drew a lungful of smoke and blew it at the room. Those that had been looking at me looked away. This had been going on for over an hour. I knew what they were thinking. What is he doing here? What does he want? He does not belong!
They were right, of course, those grey suited heart attacks with thinning dead hair and their far too young secretaries flirting for a rise, those older women of leisure with spun-sugar hair in pastel clad covens huddled around glittering glass cauldrons of export strength gin.
I didn’t fit, I was an outsider.
I had no right being in that fine hotel bar on that pale August Thursday afternoon, smoking their cigars, drinking their fine whiskey.
I was sick, I should have been in bed.
That’s what I told my boss, anyway.
The usual shit.
I’d phoned him, told him I can’t come in, it’s my guts, gonna stay in bed and sleep it off.
He’d hung up in disgust.
I had put down the phone, showered, pulled on my black jeans and cowboy boots, black shirt and jacket. I packed a bag, called a taxi.
Told the driver to take me to The Grand.
-

The reason I was in that bar drinking whiskey and smoking cigars, the reason I’d lied to my boss and dressed in my good boots and jeans, the reason why was the usual reason for me doing anything back then.
A woman.
Or to be precise, two women.
I had been in bed with one of the women, Delila. She was someone I saw sometimes, neither of us laying any claim to the other but once in a while we’d meet for one thing only.
After we’d done that one thing twice, I sat in bed, smoking and drinking a beer.
She called through from the bathroom.
“I wondered if you’d do me a favour?”
“Depends on the favour.”
“Just say yes.”
“I’ll say yes when you tell me what it is.”
“Ok. Promise you’ll say yes though?”
“I’m not promising anything.”
The toilet flushed. Delila walked back into the room naked.
“Promise.”
“Ok, I promise. What’s the favour?”
“I want you to have sex with someone.”
“No problem. Hop back into bed, someone. I’m just about ready…”
“Not me. Someone else.”
This made me pause.
She saw the expression on my face.
“Don’t worry, the someone is a girl.”
“I’m only slightly less worried.”
“She’s gorgeous. Late twenties, slim, big tits, pretty face, brunette.”
“If she looks like that, why does she need you to shop around for her?”
“She’s married.”
“That doesn’t stop a lot of other wives fucking around.”
“She’s different. Her husband is a real bastard. He drinks, he puts her down all the time, he hits her. She told me that one time he came in drunk and raped her.”
“Shit.”
“She’s frightened of him, wants to leave him, but she’s got no confidence. He’s the only man she’s ever been with. He fucks women all over the place, he’s fucking women right under her nose, she knows about it but doesn’t dare say anything.”
“He sounds like a real catch. Why don’t you help her? Why don’t you help her run, give her a place to stay while she gets on her feet? It wouldn’t be too difficult. Wait till the bastard is out shagging one his other bits, get all her stuff in the car and go!”
“It’s not that simple.”
“No?”
“No. Her husband is my brother.”
“Hmm. It really isn’t that simple. Well, the obvious question is, why are you looking for a fuck for your brother’s wife? Surely you should be rooting for him and not her.”
“He might be my brother, but I know a rotten bastard when I see one. He’s been a rotten bastard all his life. I know it better than anyone. And besides, she’s a woman. That makes her a kind of sister.”
“Fair enough.”
Delila slithered across the sheets to me. She took the cigar from my hand and put it in her mouth, slowly inhaled, the ember crackling and flaring in the darkened room. Thick smoke billowed as she spoke.
“So will you do it?”
The smoke, her words, drifted through the light leaking between the limp curtains where they writhed as if burned, burned by the ember, burned by the light, twice burned.
“Will you do it?”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re kind.”
“Not because I’m a great fuck?”
“That too, but that’s not what she needs.”
I held up my beer bottle and looked through the warped green glass at the light and the smoke. I realised that I didn’t know if the light was morning light or afternoon light. I didn’t really care. I felt her hand moving beneath the sheets. I felt myself move. I couldn’t help it. I took a long drink of beer.
“Will you do it?”
The man sounded like an arsehole. The girl sounded hot.
“I’ll do it.”
I put the empty bottle on the sideboard, rolled over to face her.
“What’s her name?”
“Gabrielle.”
“Ok.”
In the smoky light of the afternoon or morning, we did that one thing for a third time.
-
I went to the bar for the sixth time.
The barman had stopped asking if I wanted to open a tab after the third drink.
I made out that I went to the bar because I liked the exercise.
The truth was I wanted to watch what I spent. I’d paid for the room up front, but this left my wallet conspicuously slim. I didn’t need the embarrassment of calling for a bill and not having the funds, so I paid for each drink, one at a time.
I didn’t tip.
I let the heart attacks and the pastel witches do the tipping.
Miracle Max had performed his usual trick with my table.
I sat down, reached for my cigars.
And as I started that sixth drink and calculated how much was left in my wallet and lit a cigar and killed off some stares with a stare of my own, I saw her.
She strode into the bar from the lobby, between the two huge palm trees that were some fool’s idea of class. And just for that moment, maybe they were class.
The effect she had on the room was like a gun shot.
Long black hair, long black boots, short black dress. She moved through the room with a purpose, an unstoppable force. She swept the room with dark eyes, saw me, homed in.
I saw the heart attacks stare, saw how they ignored their secretaries and filofaxes and drinks and just stared.
I rose from my chair and took her hand.
“Gabrielle.”
She smiled a small smile. “You must be Lucifer.”
I nodded. “Drink?”
“Vodka.”
I beckoned the waiter. He scampered over like a whipped dog who’d been offered a bone.
“A vodka with…?”
I looked at her.
“Another vodka.”
I looked back at the waiter.
“Double vodka.”
He hurried away.
Gabrielle sat down, opened her purse and lit a cigarette.
I watched the men watch her smoke.
They knew that she was an outsider too, but with her it was different. She made them ashamed of what they were, made them loosen their grey ties and pat their dead hair and kick their briefcases behind their chairs. They wanted to be like her, to be accepted by her, and suddenly that plastic secretary and the fat wife cooking dinner at home was no longer enough to make them happy. They wanted her.
The women looked at her with nothing but hate.
She ignored everyone.
Everyone except me.
And the strange thing is I can hardly remember what we spoke about.
It wasn’t the drink that made me forget. I drank a lot back then, I could really handle it. I remember being with her, talking to her, I remember us getting closer. I just cannot remember the words.
But then again, what are these conversations ever about? He says, she says, polite chatter and interesting anecdotes. Of course I never mentioned the drunk husband, the violence, the rape. I’m no councilor. I’d rather talk about the weather than the girl who set us up to fuck.
It was never mentioned because it did not need mentioning, we already knew that we both knew everything. The knowledge was as solid as the chairs, the table, the ashtray. If it had been mentioned, it would have ended there. We would have stood up and walked away.
We didn’t.
I could see that her confidence was a front. It was thin and brittle. Her beauty was real enough. but the front was a sham. I did my best to put her at her ease. The vodka helped.
The windows slowly changed colour from pale to dark, a steady stream headlights sweeping the ceiling until the gaudy chandeliers started to glow and the piano man changed his set.
My slim wallet got slimmer, the easy talk got easier with each drink.
Then it was time.
The vodka made her lips wet, her dark eyes glitter. Several glasses of bravery had done the trick. She leaned towards me.
“Ok. Let’s do it.”
“Alright.”
I checked my wallet for the last time. Five pounds. It was all that was left.
I put it on the table as a tip.
The dog had finally got his bone.
The ladies of leisure were curled up on their couches at home, the heart attacks were attacking the dried dinner that had been left in the oven, the secretaries were painting their nails, ready for battle the next day.
None saw us leave, walk to the lift, up three floors, enter the room.
At first nothing happened.
I didn’t lunge at her. Perhaps I should have done, but I didn’t. It was like we were both suddenly lost, blinking at a stranger across an unfamiliar room, unsure of what was to come, even though we both knew the script.
I brought a bottle from my bag.
“I have wine.”
She smiled. It was a slightly tired smile. I poured us a glass each and we sat on the bed. The script said we have should be lying on the bed, but fuck the script.
We spoke some more. We looked at ourselves in the long mirror above the dressing table.
What the fuck were we doing?
I drained my glass and she drained hers. Then she looked at me.
“Ok, let’s do it,” she repeated, resigned.
“Alright.”
We did it.
We followed the script to the letter.
We went through all the moves, all the expected positions. Like two marionettes we fucked, the lights of the city piercing the room, the only noise coming from the streets far below.
-
Some time in the night she stopped pretending to be asleep.
She rose, dressed, and slipped silently from the room.
After a while I stopped pretending to be asleep too.
I sat up in bed, poured a glass of wine and lit another cigar.
I smoked and drank in the dark by myself.
Until it started to grow light.
-
I stood at the desk wearing blue jeans, scuffed boots and a beat up corduroy jacket, waiting to check out.
My good clothes were in the bag.
The desk clerk scowled at me, at my clothes.
He snatched my key and turned away.
I was an outsider again, but without her I was a leper.
I wondered if she’d gone back to her husband last night, or if she’d gone somewhere else.
Had it made a difference?
Probably not.
Out on the pavement amongst the bustle of commuters and the rude blare of traffic, I realised I had no money. It was all behind the bar. The clock above me said 7.45am.
Fifteen minutes to walk three miles to work.
I was going to be late.
I shrugged, started walking.

96. Yosser Hughes Eat your Heart out.

generallucifer — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 11:47:52 +0000

Christ, fiction is so much harder than the truth.
I’ve spent three days working on the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever written.
Two pages of lies, fabrications, grandiose exaggerations and utter bollocks.
I have sweated, I have cursed, I have stared blankly at the screen until a fine layer of dust has settled on my eyeballs and they have dried like the eyes of a fish in the sun.
Every word had to be dragged out of me like a diseased molar from an abscessed jaw.
No flow, no skipping sentences dancing across the page, no playful double entendres or bleak flashes of painfully remembered horror.
And the title of this masterpiece?
What could be worthy of such pain, such tortured creation, this literary golum molded from naught but my own sweat and sacrificed hours and the very writhing of my tormented soul?
Two letters:

C.V.

Yes, that’s right.
I am trying to escape.
Like a downed pilot ensconced behind the grey walls of Colditz Castle, I am quietly making plans.
My hair is short and it is smart and my face is cleanly shaved.
My suit is pressed and my shirt is fresh and my tie is confident yet conservative.
I have a number of days leave squirrelled away should I need to attend an interview.
I have vacuumed the crap from the insides of the family car and I have paid six pounds for Eastern European men to wash and wax the exterior until it gleams.
I have cut down on the booze.
I am prepared.
All I need now are the necessary faked documents and I will be ready to flee for the border.
And this is where I come unstuck.
The C.V.
It is pitiful, it really is.
When I list my professional achievements with brutal honesty it is enough to make me weep.
Twenty two years of doing the same job, in one guise or another.
There are only so many ways you can fluff up the sentence ‘career history: reprographics, from 1989 until 2011′.
Fuck me. I’ve just realised that my working life spans four decades.
That’s a long time using an NT cutter – surely by now I’m adept enough to painlessly open up my fucking wrists?

An old college mate has contacted me.
He runs a studio, a slick professional outfit.
He wanted to know if I was still in the trade, if I was interested in applying for a job.
I said yes and yes.
But when I got to my C.V., dusted off an old mac that still had a fucking floppy drive, and I looked at what I had listed as my great achievements in this most prestigious of career choices, I realised there was only one thing I could add to it.
Years.
All I did was press tap…tab…tab… until I got to the part about years-in-service and changed the number from 14 to 22.
22 years.
In eight years I’ve achieved the princely sum of FUCK ALL.
The years before that are not much better.
And as those years sneak past, my urge to leave is slowly overwhelmed by the bleak fact of my increasing unemployability.
Any employer worth his salt is going to look at a C.V. that reads ’22 years in reprographics’ and think ‘what the fuck is wrong with this bloke??’
It’s a question I’ve asked myself many, many times.
So what do you do if your C.V. is a perfect study of minimalism?
You lie.
Everyone lies on their C..V., of course, to one extent or another, but nothing compared to what I’ve got to do.
So I’ve been inventing lies for three days and now I have a horrible taste in my mouth, the taste of concentrated bullshit.
I look at what I’ve written and I gag.
Am I writing about me? What happens when I get asked a question in an interview, and my mask slips to reveal my real face pulling spaz faces at my prospective employer?
I’m fucked, that’s what.
So I’ve decided to write an honest C.V., a C.V. I can put out there and honestly claim it to be mine, a C.V. packed full of achievements and life experience.
Here it is.

Name: General Lucifer

Address: The City of Dis,
Fifth Circle,
South of Heaven.
email: g.lucifer@rocketship.com

I have been employed as a reprographic mac operator at The Factory for twenty two years now, and in that time I have achieved naff all. I have shown great consistency and diligence in irritating my supervisors to the point of complete nervous breakdown, and I have successfully avoided a much deserved sacking on any number of occasions.
My wealth of knowledge and experience will prove beneficial to any prospective employer, as long as that employer is in the business of having sex with drunk women, hiding in the toilet for prolonged periods of time, drinking vast quantities of tea and seven different styles of malingering.
I can also offer a broad range of other skills, such as Eating Bacon, drawing cruel cartoons of fellow employees, griping, talking rubbish and tossing-it-off.

CAREER HISTORY
Four colour planner (1989-1996)
I started work at sixteen on a five year apprenticeship that took seven years to complete and by this time I was already drinking quite a bit. I had not started fucking anyone yet, apart from myself, but I was a very keen learner and considered fucking to be a skill that I had a very great desire to master.
At work I was making tea, cutting up film and shit, and using paint the colour dog crap to spot out negatives.
An old man shoved his cock in my ear.
I consider this to be the moment I lost my virginity.
It was disappointing.
I grew my hair really long and started listening to rock music.
I started drinking a lot.
A girl finally let me fuck her but it was quite a let down. When I tried to massage her clitoris she said, ‘Ow, give over, your trying to frig me, not remove a fucking stain.’
I shot my bolt too fast.
I realised I’d need a lot of practice to get good at this.
At work I was sleeping in the darkroom and lusting over a girl in accounts. I took her on a date but made the mistake of treating her with respect so she dumped me. It turns out she was wanking off all the printers in their cars after work.
I didn’t have a car so I never got wanked off.
It is against the law to be wanked off on a bus, I think.
the seven years of my apprenticeship finished and I was finally a fully qualified four colour planner.
Everyone in the factory gathered round and cheered as they stripped me naked and threw me in a massive vat filled with cold water, piss, glue, ink, rotting food and mashed paper.
After I got clean I discovered that they were getting rid of film planning and were buying Apple Macs.
Seven years wasted.
Fucking typical.

Apple Mac Operator (1996-present day)
I trained to be a mac operator under the expert tutelage of a man in his fifties who had messed about with a mac for a few weeks and who now considered himself an expert.
He had a big moustache and he picked his arse and sniffed his fingers and he didn’t wash and he thought that the only thing you needed to disguise the smell of shitty fingers and body odour was the sweet smell of a sucked fruit Polo.
I used to like fruit Polos.
Now the smell makes me dry retch.
The man with the moustache used to say, ‘One of the things I really hate about you Lucifer, is…’
Insert what you like. He really hated me.
I bought a house and fucked girls in it.
I started getting pretty good at it, and even started fucking other men’s wives, I got that good.
I was drinking more by now and I’d also started smoking cigars the size and colour of Linford Christie’s cock. I’m guessing.
By now I had A Reputation, both at work and locally.
Locally I had A Reputation for being drunk and for fucking.
At work I had A Reputation for being hung over and for being fucked.
Both were true, after a fashion, but not as bad as people made out.
Not that I can remember.
I was pretty drunk, after all.
Then I met a girl and settled down a bit and got thrown out of America and went to Italy and got drunk and got engaged then got married then had some kids.
I happened just like that.
It’s all rather a blur.
And with a house and a wife and some kids I couldn’t afford to fuck about so much.
I actually started to try.
At about this time I started writing.
So I put the hours in, worked hard, lost a bit of the reputation as a drunk trouble causer and got a couple of breaks.
I was given a nice little design role, and at the same time I was made a kind of assistant studio manager.
I liked the design part because I’ve always been a bit artsy craftsy glue and bits of paper. I liked the managing bit because I got to chat to the office girls and dress a bit dapper and I got a good wage by taking the piss with the overtime.
The skills I can bring to a management role are the an ability to laugh loudly at shit jokes, to nod seriously like I have heard important information when I’m actually listening to music in my head, and I am also very good at prioritizing work according to the amount of thigh or tit the account executive has flashed at me.
The skills I can bring to a design role are the ability to dress up a crappy piece of direct mail like the cheap whore it is, make it tacky and gaudy and appealing to the sort of person who chooses to advertise their product with something as hideously ugly and crass as a direct mail marketing campaign.

I am no longer a designer, and I am no longer an assistant manager.
I got rather good at laughing loudly and whoring my art and ogling tits and thighs and nodding seriously, so good in fact that people made noises about giving me a permanent job.
So my boss got cross and demoted me.
I lost a lot of money, and I lost my house, but I was allowed to keep my wife and kids.

So I’m just a reprographic mac operator again.
I’d rather be a writer, but I’m not.
Yet.

Now are you going to give me a fucking job or what?

95. Coffin Todger

generallucifer — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:26:21 +0000

I saw Coffin Nail today.
This surprised me, because I thought he was dead.
By all rights he should be dead, but I saw him, so that means he’s still ticking over.
I was riding my bike along a nice little lane, the kind of lane where you ride slowly so you can have a good nosey up the driveways to see what kind of car the rich people are driving, or what kind of wallpaper rich people hang on their walls, or with any luck, the kind of underwear rich women wear as they get changed by the bedroom window.
I didn’t manage to quench my grubby voyeuristic thirsts, but I did notice something.
A crumpled shape, withered and bent, a fucked up old gargoyle of a man struggling to breathe, clinging to the gatepost of a fancy house like a drowning man clinging to a broken mast.
Coffin Nail.
I’d not seen him since they retired him from the factory on medical grounds. None of the managers wanted him to die at work because it would have cost them – death-in-service payments really piss off the managers.
I pulled my bike over to the kerb and waited politely for the old goat to stop coughing what was left of his lungs up and wipe his puckered mouth with a darkly stained handkerchief.
He stared at me with runny eyes, gasping and fighting to get a trickle of clean air into his raddled lungs.
I decided to open the conversation.
“Hi Coffin Nail. You’re looking well.”
His lips curled back to reveal long, stained teeth protruding from withered gums.
“Fuck off, you sarcastic little arsehole.”
“I’m not being sarcastic!”
“Yeah, not much…”
“Really I’m not. See, I heard you were dead. You look a lot healthier than dead.”
I don’t know if the noise he made was a laugh or a wheeze.
He nodded at my bike.
“What’s that silly fucking thing you’re playing on there?”
“It’s called a bicycle, Coffin Nail. It’s a wonderful new invention.”
“Once a sarcastic arsehole, always a sarcastic arsehole. Take piss again and I’ll knock your fucking teeth out!”
He held up a shaky clenched fist of parchment and liver spots. “What I mean is, what the fuck are you doing on that thing? A bloke doesn’t fuck around on a kid’s toy like that! A bloke should have a motor!”
I shrugged. “I’ve got a car, I just let my wife use it.”
“Wife? WIFE? Fucking Hell, lad, you dress up like a ponce and piss about on a push iron, whilst your missus swans around in your fucking motor? You want to have your fucking head examined!”
He pointed a bony finger at me.
“There’s a term for blokes like you, lad. Cunt whipped! You’re cunt whipped, that’s what you are! Your missus get’s the car and you get a fucking kid’s toy!”
I thought about that. I didn’t feel particularly cunt whipped. If I’m honest, I get whipped from so many other directions I wouldn’t notice if I was cunt whipped or not.
Maybe I’m just plain whipped.
“I don’t mind the bike,” I replied. Cuts down on pollution…”
“Pollution’s a fucking myth. Never been proven. I’ve worked in all kinds of places that are supposed to be bad for your health. Never did me any fucking harm.”
I couldn’t quite believe what he was saying.
Coffin Nail quickly looked up and down the road, those rheumy eyes full of shifty intent.
“Listen, lad, you wouldn’t have any smokes on you, would you?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, Coffin Nail. Can’t help you. I don’t… oh, wait a minute!”
I rummaged in my bag, found a tin of small cigars and a mauled book of matches. Christ knows how long they’d been there, but they were there.
Coffin Nail raised an eyebrow.
“Cigars, eh? Lah-dee-fucking-dah. You couldn’t have just had a packet of Benson’s like a normal bloke, could you?”
“You’d have felt let down if I had. Are you sure smoking’s a good idea, you know, in your condition?”
Coffin Nail lit up and pulled smoke deep into his diseased lungs. He had chronic emphysema. It was so bad he had no right being alive now, but he was. Fair play to him.
“I haven’t had a good idea in forty years, lad,” he murmured as smoke curled out of his mouth like dragon fire. “I’m not going to start having any now.”
There were two bags of shopping on the pavement. I hooked one bag over each of my bike’s handlebars, and we set off walking slowly towards Coffin Nail’s house.
I thought, what the fuck, and I fired up a little cigar of my own. It felt good to be ambling along, smoking a cigar.
I fired a quick glance at Coffin Nail. He looked bad. His face looked like it had been folded up a dozen times and kept in the loft for fifty years. I felt a bit guilty about giving him a smoke.
“Here, you’ve got your medicine on you, haven’t you?”
Coffin Nail patted his pocket.
“Full inhaler. Brand new. Don’t worry lad, I promise not to die on you.”
He frowned.
“What you said earlier, about thinking I was dead. What gave you that fucking daft idea?”
“I saw your missus walking up the road with a black armband on. I thought you’d snuffed it.”
“Nah, that wasn’t for me. It were for the dog. It were getting old and it’s back legs were fucked and it couldn’t see much any more.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that. You take it down the vet?”
“Nah. I drowned it in a bucket in the garage.”
“Oh.”
As we smoked and walked I noticed two crossed knives tattooed on his forearm. It was an old tattoo, blurred and blue, but they were unmistakably Gurkha knives.
I nodded at his ink. “What are they, Coffin Nail? They’re Gurkha knives, aren’t they? Kukri. That’s what the proper name is, isn’t it? Were you in the Gurkhas?”
He yanked his sleeve down and scowled at me. “Bit fucking nosey, aren’t you?”
“Sorry. Just wondered.”
“Aye, well don’t wonder. It’s not something I like to talk about.”
I decided to leave that particular subject alone.
If a man has a something he doesn’t want to talk about, but he’s happy to let you know about drowning the family pet in a bucket, then it’s best not to delve too deeply.
I blew some smoke. “So, if you don’t like to talk about that, what do you like to talk about?”
Coffin Nail thought for a minute.
“Cunt. I like to talk about cunt.”
I coughed on my cigar. “Well, I don’t reckon you’ll get on Mastermind with that chosen specialised subject, but I’m ok with that.”
“I’ve just come back from the hospital, lad. Been to get this new medicine, and all my other medicine, for that matter. Fuck me, there’s some fit nurses there. Gagging for it, all of them. Tits bursting out of those uniforms, arses tight as drums in those blue strides they wear. It even got a twitch out of me, lad, and that’s saying summat, nowadays. Well this young nurse tells me the name of the medicine I was getting and I misheard her, coz I was looking down her top, so I looks up and says, ‘What’s that new stuff you’re giving me? Viagra?’ And she laughs her head of and says it’s Valium, they’re giving me Valium, so I shrugs and says, ‘I’d rather have the Viagra!’
“Well, these nurse are all laughing so this female doctor comes out and says, ‘What’s all this? what’s all the laughing?’ So these nurses tell her what’s been said and that doctor gives me this right dirty look! She says, ‘I don’t think Viagra will do you any good!’
This got right on my fucking wick! I grabs myself by the tackle and gives it a right good shake at her, and says, ‘give us a couple of those blueys and I’ll see if I can do you any good!’ She says that she doubts it, so I says, ‘Try me! I’ll provide the donkey derby if you’ll provide the jockey!”
Old Coffin Nail really had me laughing. He was stood in the street with a cigar in one hand and the saggy crotch of his trousers in the other. When he let go of his crotch a small wet patch started to spread across the fabric. I pretended not to notice and carried on laughing.
“Shit,” he muttered, and pulled down his shirt to cover the piss patch.
At the top of his street an old woman shuffled towards us. She was fat, really fat, and gripped onto one of those four wheeled tartan shopping carts for dear life.
“That’s more like it,” muttered Coffin Nail, eying her up. “Look at that, lad. Gagging for it, she is.”
“What, Mrs Frobisher?” I asked in disbelief. “She’s well into her seventies, Coffin Nail. The only thing she’s gagging for is a pot of tea and a fig roll.”
“I’ve got a fig roll she can have!” His bony hand strayed towards his crotch again, then slipped into his pocket. He must have remembered the damp patch.
We stepped off the pavement to let Mrs Frobisher get by. There wasn’t room enough for us all. To be fair, there wasn’t enough room on the pavement for anyone except Mrs Frobisher.
as she passed, Coffin Nail mentally undressed her with his runny eyes. I mentally dressed her again as quickly as I could.
“Look at the fucking rig on that, lad! A bloke could have some fun on that!”
“Jesus. No, I don’t really see it, Coffin Nail. She’s not my type…”
“Fuck off! With a couple of those Viagra in me it would take half of West Yorkshire Police Force to get me off of her…”
“It would take the other half to get her off of you if she rolled over. She’s fucking massive!”
Coffin Nail wouldn’t have it. He watched her limp away down the street with an expression of raw lust on his haggard features.
“The thing is with you young ‘uns, lad, is that you want something you can’t have. When he’s hungry, a poor man doesn’t dream about caviar, does he? Nah, he’s never tasted it! He wants summat he likes.” Coffin Nail nodded after Mrs Frobisher. “He dreams about that.”
“If Mrs Frobisher isn’t caviar, then what is she?”
“She’s Spam.”
We finished our cigars and walked to Coffin Nail’s gate. I gave him his shopping bags. He leant close to me.
“Here, lad. You haven’t got any mints on you, have you? It’s just that if the wife smells cigars on my breath she’ll go fucking scatty.”
I got a pack of gum from my pocket and gave him a couple of sticks.
I decided to needle him again. “So I’m cunt whipped, am I? Who’s the one scared of his wife catching him smoking?”
Coffin Nail chewed the gum carefully. He didn’t want to lose the few teeth left in his head.
“You’re a bloke, I’m a bloke, every bloke who’s ever lived. We’re all cunt whipped, lad. That’s what it is to be a bloke. Cunt whipped. It’s why we die first and they live for ever.”
He took his shopping, nodded at me and shuffled to his front door.
I made sure he got his key in ok.
Maybe a Viagra would help him with that.
He shut the door.
I got on my bike.

94. Office Politics.

generallucifer — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 18:35:50 +0000

I have moved.
After nearly twenty years in the same shitty space, the same off white walls and scuffed linoleum, the same fucked chairs and knackered desks and flickering fluorescents, I have finally picked up my keyboard and computer and moved.
From one end of the factory to the other.
I am now in a bright, breezy office that feels like an airport terminal. I have a new desk and a new chair and fluorescent tubes that do not flicker.
Gone are the stuttering whirr of dying cooling fans in the back of ancient, dust-clogged PCs. Gone are the vacant, staring faces of inquisitive morons peering through fly shit-speckled glass at us, gawping in wonder at a job they perceive as exotic and aspirational simply because it doesn’t involve getting covered in ink or listening to the deafening clatter of aging print presses.
No, in the airport terminal it is deathly quiet. All sounds are magnified to an excruciating level. I found myself actually sucking crisps the other day, because the crunching was exquisite agony and people looked up owlishly from their desks to find the source of the hideous din.
I am not alone in this cavernous office.
Curious creatures dwell here, have dwelt here for decades. People who have never, ever set foot on the factory floor, have never seen a printer or a print press or reams of paper or squat tubs of dark ink. These be-suited bovines shuffle slowly to work through quiet corridors that avoid noise, dirt, sweat, work. There are stairs to the office, but they drift upwards in a shiny steel lift, jostling into the metal box on one level, belched out on the next carrying tupperware and biscuit tins, cake boxes and pie. They arrive at nine, yawning and bleary, meander towards their twee-cluttered terminals and fire up the blinking screens.
I have already been working for three hours.
As their computers come to life the office workers fill an over worked fridge with their wares, and begin to boil gallons of water for the onslaught of endless tea breaks to come.
They always arrive at work at the same time, move around at work together, murmuring reassurances to each other, repeated phrases that induce polite laughter or resigned sighs. They are an odd shoal, a troop of shaved and nervous apes wearing expensive spectacles and crisp shirts, smelling of lovely cologne and a hint of red wine from the night before.
My new desk is clean and flawless, empty of everything except a screen, a phone, a keyboard and mouse, a pen, a ruler, a cup.
I have been sterilised.
I now wear a dinky little uniform consisting of blue polo shirt with a cheeky gold logo, blue stay-pressed pants, a blue jumper for when I get chilly, and if I turn up without any part of this uniform on I get told to fuck off home and I’m not allowed to return unless I’m dressed like everybody else.
The office bovines do not have to wear the dinky little uniform.
They can wear whatever they like, as long as it is officey and smart.
The male of the species wear shirts of various hues and ties ranging from ‘sober’ to ‘wacky’.
Smart trousers of grey, black or brown sheathe their weak lower limbs, shiny shoes finish off the ensemble.
The females are more flamboyant. Bright swathes of aquamarine and azure waft around their sagging, bulging forms; arms that flap with excess fat are caressed by pastel chiffon; goiters and scrotum-necks are coyly draped in crushed silk scarves.
The currency of this curious community is food. They arrive every morning rich, they leave each evening poor. I can honestly say that I have never seen such unashamed gluttony in all my life. It never stops, never ends, they never get full, they never tire. The mornings are crammed with an orgy of conspicuous gluttony, from trips to the canteen for pale, quivering bacon in bland baps, to the microwave ping of porridge, scrambled eggs, beans on toast, pastries. Wednesday is pork pie day. An especially rotund woman takes a list for pies on the Tuesday.
“How many pies do you want, love?”
“Sorry, pies?”
“Yes, pies. How many?”
“Erm… what sort of pies do you mean?”
“Pork pies, love, baked fresh. Wednesday is Pork Pie Day. Every Wednesday is Pork Pie Day. I fetch pork pies in, fresh from the butchers, still hot. How many would you like?”
I like pork pies, but it’s a slippery slope. I like scotch, but I try to avoid it at breakfast time.
“No pies, thanks.”
“No pies?? But Wednesday is Pork Pie Day! Every Wednesday is Pork Pie Day! Now don’t be silly love, how many pies?”
“No pies.”
She scowls at me with undisguised suspicion, then waddles away to the far end of the office.
I can hear her muttering with her clan:
“Mumble mumble… no pies!…mumble.. but it’s Wednesday!…mumble… bit strange…mumble… ooh, bit of brown sauce…”
They are staring at me over an ocean of monitors and blue partitions. They look shocked and afraid, as though I have rattled their belief in religion, questioned their faith and found them without an answer.
I stare back at them.
They look away.
I go back to my work.
-
The next day Pork Pie Wednesday goes ahead, as it does every Wednesday.
All the great traditions are observed.
The Passing of the Brown Sauce. The Drinking of the Salty Liquor from the Bitten Pie. The Consuming of the Second Pie then the Third Pie, The Rapturous Enthusing over All Things Pie…
The clan are comforted by their rituals, the Gods of Pastry and Mechanically Recovered Meat are appeased.
My own liking for pork pies has diminished quite considerably through witnessing the tragic spectacle that is Pork Pie Wednesday.
-
The clearing of a throat in this silent world is like a gun shot. To cough is to sin. Laughter is sacrilege.
But there is one who wallows in the discomfort of others, one who has taken the art of throat clearing to a new rarefied plateau, one who clears his throat with the ostentation of a judge attempting to quieten an unruly courtroom.
I don’t believe that silence should necessarily be observed in silent places; quiet should not demand quiet. We should be able to talk, cough, fart, sneeze, laugh and curse as we see fit, as long as it does not offend others too greatly. This cough, however, this throat-clearing that drifts on the air conditioned breeze of the deathly silent office is too much. It is a throat clearing that demands attention, a throat clearing of the sort you might make if you were trying to draw a friends attention to their open trouser fly, accompanied by a subtle downwards glance to their pants.
And who is this Craftsman of the Cough, this Pharaoh of Phlegm?
The Bog Wanker, that’s who.
Not satisfied with flagrantly masturbating in the toilet cubicles of the factory, this utter fuckwit takes his antisocial behaviour out of the bathroom and adjusts it for the consumption of a wider community. His curious tred is accompanied by that attention demanding ‘aHEM’, triggering something deep in the subconscious to involuntarily swivel the head around in his direction, and feast your eyes on The Bog Wanker.
He is portly and balding, hunch shouldered as though he doesn’t want the gazes and attention his ‘aHEM’ demands. He walks in a very strange way, as if he is wearing skis. Little steps, lifting each foot with care and effort before placing it carefully on the ground a little way ahead, moving his torso with the energy of one speed-walking, though he is in fact moving with painful slowness.
He is carrying either a cup to make tea, or a huge plate of random foodstuffs to place in the microwave.
I have on one occasion watched with teeth grinding irritation as he boiled a kettle, *aHEM* poured it into a Pot Noodle cup, *aHEM* and while it bubbled and festered he carefully chopped fresh mushrooms *aHEM* before lovingly garnishing that grim, rehydrated crap with them.
Why? Why why why??
I haven’t had him wank next to me in these new toilets yet.
There is still time.
To think that he travels the long distances between toilets in this huge factory, propelling himself with that painfully slow, invisible-ski walk, all the while intending to have a wank when he eventually reaches that distant destination, well it quite frankly boggles my mind.
-
The mad scramble of five o’clock has passed now, and it is quiet. It is always quiet, but now it is a very different quiet. This huge room is empty now, except for me. The silence is of my own making, to be broken as I see fit, not by the cough of a chronic masturbater or with the unwanted offer of pie.
The gaggle of chipper shirts and skirts waddled their merry way to the door at five-on-the-dot carrying empty sandwich boxes, flaccid carrier bags, vacant tupperware, full stomachs.
I watched them go with a flood of relief, glad to see the back of them, just as I’m sure they were glad to see the last of me.
Because this is their domain, not mine. I am the one shunning the Sacrament of the Pie, I have rejected their tentative, food-based offers to become one of them, to join them.

I’d rather fucking starve.

93. What’s the big flap…

generallucifer — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:03:07 +0000

I walked in off the hot street for a cold beer.
I knew they sold cold beer. The sign, written in faded chalk, said “COLD BEER”.
It also said, “WORK WEAR WELCOME”. I wasn’t wearing work wear, but it was good to know.
It was dark inside the pub. I stood in the doorway and allowed my eyes to adjust to the gloom, to the sour beer smell, to The Eagles on the jukebox.
Dull shapes moved slowly in the perpetual twilight.
Gradually the dull shapes turned into people, and some were actually wearing work wear. The advertising was obviously effective. Other people looked like they’d never done a day’s work in their lives.
I say I wasn’t wearing work wear, but that’s not strictly true, as I was on my way home from work and I had been wearing the same clothes that day.
My clothes didn’t count. Grimy overalls, scuffed rigger boots and jeans thick with plaster dust constitute work wear.
My clothing was conspicuously clean and fresh.
I walked to the bar, ignoring a few side on glances, and ordered one of those famous cold beers. Like I said, the advertising was effective.
Someone further down the bar called out:
“Aye up, our kid!”
It was my brother, Devil.
I wasn’t really surprised to see him there as it was his kind of pub.
He used to work at the same factory as me, but he jacked it in and tried being a barfly instead.
It was a career change that suited him, perhaps a little to well.
He moved down the bar and sat on the stool next to me. He was grinning from ear to ear, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world.
It made me think about quitting my job and becoming barfly too.
I said, “Now then Devil. Keeping busy?”
“This and that, Luci. This and that.” He caught the bartender’s attention. “Deano! Get my brother a beer, will you?”
Devil talked to Deano like he was a friend. Deano didn’t look like he was friends with anyone.
Deano dumped my beer in front of me. He said, “You’re too late, Devil.”
Devil winked. “Better get me one then, Deano!”
Deano glowered, and slouched back to the pump.
I said, “So what are you so happy about, Devil? Been getting your end away?”
“Ha! Just the opposite, our kid! I’ve got shut of that crazy cunt, Scarlet!”
“Scarlet? I don’t know a Scarlet…”
“What? Come, on, man! Scarlet! That mad bird I’ve been banging!”
I shook my head. “Nope. You’ve not told me about her. Remember, I’ve not seen you in a few months.”
“Shit, I could have sworn I told you about her…”
An old man with no teeth nursing a half of mild leaned across to me. “He’s told every other bastard in this place about her!” he cackled.
Deano came back with a beer. He dead eyed me. “That’ll be four sixty.”
I looked at Devil.
Devil looked preoccupied.
I paid for the beer.
Devil sprang back to life. “Anyhow, this Scarlet lass. I started seeing her a few months back. Can’t remember where I met her, it just sort of happened. She’s a bit posh but lives in a block of flats. I don’t know how that works, but that’s how it is. Bit of a student type. Really dramatic about everything, you know? Anyhow, I starts seeing her. We go out for summat to eat, like for a pizza or something, and she’d say, “Devil, oh Devil, I’m not wearing any panties!” and I’d think, ‘fucking hell! Randy bitch!’ and I’d take a look under the table, and I wouldn’t want mi dinner anymore.”
“Why didn’t you want your dinner anymore?”
“Coz of her fanny, that’s why. See, Scarlet’s a ging, so she’s got ginger eyebrows and ginger eyelashes and ginger hair and ginger pubes…”
“I get the picture.”
“Right, well, she doesn’t like the ginger pubes so she always shaves the lot off, which is all right, you know? But what’s not alright is that her fanny is bright red and she has this one massive big flap.”
I snorted, and beer came out of my nose.
“Don’t laugh, y’bastard!” laughed Devil. “It was horrible! Flapping around down their while I’m trying to tuck into my pepperoni! It put me right off!”
I composed myself, wiped beer from my nose onto the beer towel. Deano looked disgusted, but I didn’t care.
“Two more beers, Deano. One massive big flap and a bright red fanny, Devil? That sounds bleak.”
“Bleak it was, our kid. Bleak it was.”
“I’m interested, just how big was this massive big flap? I mean, compared to normal flaps, that is.”
Devil took a drink. “Ok. Do you remember when we used to queue for the school bus?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Right, well you’ll remember that on Tuesdays the Special Bus would go past at twenty five past eight and everyone in the school queue would go quiet and look away?”
“Yeah…”
“And do you remember why everyone would go quiet and look away?”
“Yeah, because there was a that old bloke on the Special Bus with no teeth and a red face who would always lick the window and he had a massive tongue… oh fucking hell no…”
Devil nodded, drank his beer.
I shook my head in stunned silence.
The old man leaned across to me again. “Disgusting, isn’t it?”
“Fuck off, Tommy!” yelled Devil. “You’re not much better looking than he was, than that fanny was!”
Tommy went back to his beer.
“Any road,” continued Devil, keeping one eye on old Tommy, “I tried to break up with Scarlet. I really tried! I was really put off because of the… you know…”
“Massive big flap?”
“Yeah, that. But I’d have a few beers, then she’d ring me, begging for a fucking, and before I knew where I was I’d be round there banging her! You know what my problem is, Luci? I’m weak, that’s what it is. Just plain weak…”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Yeah, you’re really fucking weak, mate.” It didn’t help.
“It wasn’t just the massive big flap though. She was really kinky! You know what she had me do? She had me tie her up with nowt on and put tape over her mouth, sling her in the boot of my Ford Fiesta then drive around for miles and miles before pulling into a lay-by, open the boot, roll her over and bang her right there, in the boot, in a lay-by in the middle of fucking nowhere! If that’s not fucking kinky then I don’t know what is!”
I said, “Yeah, that’s pretty kinky.”
“And then this other time she phoned me and says for me to come over to pick her up. I got to her flat and she’s waiting in the lobby, wearing this mad robe. You know, like a king’s? All red with this big furry trim! So she gets i the car and tells me to drive. We go out into the countryside, miles from anywhere, and she tells me to pull over by this gate. I stops the car and she suddenly leaps out of the car and throws off this robe! Underneath she’s got nowt on! Totally in the nuddy! And she goes belting off across this field, waving her arms about screaming ‘Rape! Rape!’ “
“Fucking hell! That’s mental!”
“I know! I had to go after her to try shut her up! I was bloody knackered by the time I caught up with her!”
“What did you do?”
“I gave her a slap then bummed her in the woods.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t proud.”
I ordered two more beers. It looked like I was paying.
I said, “So how did you get rid of her then?”
“Well, last night, enough was enough. She wanted to try that trick again with the daft robe and the rape fantasy thing. It’s just not my cup of tea. Honest. So off we go to the arse end of nowhere in my Fiesta, but this time she’s in the boot. I mean, I ask you. What kind of lass likes to be driven round in the boot of twelve year old Fiesta? So off we go to the woods and out she leaps and goes scampering off into the woods, and I noticed that she’s got a really red arse.”
“A red arse? What, like sore or something?”
“Nah, just bright fucking red! You know how her fanny is bright red, well, so’s her arse. So she’s running off into the woods with naff all on and her bright red arse wobbling about like fucking baboon’s, and I thought, ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers’ so I chucked her daft cape over a fence, put the old Fiesta in gear and fucked off.”
I was shocked. “You left her?? You just drove off and left her? A girl on her own in the fucking nude in the back of beyond and you drove off and left her?”
“I chucked her daft robe on the fence, mate. She wouldn’t technically be nudey if she had that.”
“That’s not the point! If she goes and get’s raped and killed then you look like the prime fucking suspect! What if she dies of hypothermia or something? Or falls and breaks her leg? Jesus Christ, didn’t you think it through? Why didn’t you just phone her and tell her ‘Sorry love, you’re chucked’ rather than leaving her for the badgers??”
Tommy leaned over again. “That’s just what I said to him, kid. The foxes and rats will be gnawing that poor girl now…”
“Rather them than me, Tommy,” Devil said into his glass. “They’ve got enough to feed ‘em for a week just with that massive big flap.”
I shook my head. I felt like I should do something, alert the police. What if she was injured out there, lost and alone in the woods?
Then Devil’s phone started ringing.
He checked it.
“Shit. It’s her.”
A said, “What, her…as in, her?”
“Yeah. It’s ‘The Flap’.”
“Well at least she’s not dead…”
Devil took the call. I tried not to listen, but I couldn’t help it.
“Oh, hi babe! Listen I’m sorry…. yeah… yeah? You liked it? It actually turned you on? What’s that? You’re doing what right now? You dirty little… Ok. Yeah, ok. I’ll be right over.”
I looked down. Devil was absent mindedly rubbing his hard on through his pants. I looked away.
Old Tommy sipped gently at his half. “Some people,” he mumbled, “have no moral fibre.”
I said, “Tommy, I’ve noticed that you’ve been topping up your glass from the drip tray. You’re in no position to judge, mate.”
I saw Devil heading for the door.
“Where the fuck are you going, mate? I guess she’s not dead then!”
Devil looked sheepish. “Nah, man. She fucking loved it, the crazy bitch. A van driver picked her up and offered to take her to the coppers, but she ended up wanking him off in a truck stop, you know, as a thank you. She wants me to go over and fuck her, then drive her across to Doncaster.”
“Why, what’s at Doncaster?”
“Nothing, that’s why she wants me to kick her out of the car there.”
Devil disappeared, and a minute later I heard a shitty little car speed out of the car park before fading into the muffled rumble of the afternoon traffic.
I ordered another beer, and when it came I slid it across to Tommy.
“Have a pint of moral fibre on me, Tommy.”
I walked out into the shimmering heat of a dusty Friday afternoon, and headed for home.