17 June 2012
Chapter 2.
The Good Times Are Killing Me
The day wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He was tired but not in an overly unpleasant way. The kind of tired that made you think less, so that the passage of time through banal activity seemed to go faster. He hadn’t sold anything but then none of the other battery chickens had either so at least there was safety in numbers. He’d allowed himself to be suckered into the usual spiel when he’d applied for his current job. The small, professional sales team description that suggested it might at least be semi-tolerable and a City centre location that meant at least he could be surrounded by the welcome bustle of civilisation during his brief lunch hour. Of course it had become all too clear very quickly that this job was exactly the same as the countless others he’d found excuses to walk out on in the past. The numbers game approach to sales, get a thousand monkeys with typewriters and hope that they write Shakespeare excepting of course in this case they had headsets. It wasn’t just the facts of his day to day job that disgusted him so much, the constant little lies and little manipulations, the false humility and deference, the pretence that you were acting in a strangers best interest, no, it was the people places like this attracted. The smell of failure clinging to the older ones, the undeserved arrogance dripping of the youngest, the wannabe yuppies who lived with their mothers, the casual misogynists, the chatter about whatever bullshit, soul-dead piece of televisual shit the newspapers had told them they should be obsessing over. These weren’t people; they were just nasty little cogs in some horrible machine built as a mockery of what people could be. He never told them this, he felt detached enough and to be fair he even liked some of them on a casual, personal level. He was quite happy to kill time chatting nonsense and subtly and not quite so subtly winding them up. But it still added up to some kind of slow inescapable poisoning of the soul. The trouble was he didn’t know what else he could do. He always felt he was smart enough to see the gaudy bars of his cage for what they were but he was too dumb to do anything about it. Maybe that was a cop out as well though. It wasn’t that he was too dumb, maybe he was too scared and besides maybe they were better off anyway? Was it better to think you could see the truth of a sickeningly wasteful situation but then be paralysed into inactivity by the revelation or was it better to try and make a life within the lie. Were the sales-monkeys he was surrounded by better off in the fantasy than he was outside it? Did they think these same thoughts or variations on them? Was his detachment even his elitism, if you could call it that, entirely misplaced? Maybe everyone thought like this they just kept their mouths shut. That would be even worse, self imposed solitary confinement through cowardice and a withering of the soul. It was 11.00 by the time he started to feel vaguely awake and normal and he’d already smoked eight cigarettes. He picked up his phone with his right hand and casually tossed it into his left, an effortless manoeuvre born of a life wasted in call centres. He was supposed to wear a headset but he hated the thought of being indistinguishable from the rest even in that small detail. He also suspected on a fundamental level that no one who really mattered spent the day with a headset on, so he refused. He bashed out the numbers for “Sunshine Florist”, the next prospect in his CRM. It rang out and then cut to a stock answer phone message. The dusky feminine voice, the same voice that tried to sell him car insurance, toilet tissue and he was certain after a trip to London, had told him over the carriage tannoy what the next tube stop was, informed him that they were not available. He dropped the phone back down. “Why the fuck do they bother having an answer phone and then not have their own message? It’s fucking lazy and it makes em look like dicks.” He wasn’t really speaking to anyone in particular. Nicki was flirting with a client and barely registered him, Ollie creased up and started laughing. Ollie was a chubby Ghanaian, bald with a wide genuine smile and a twinkle in his eye. John had asked him if he was Black Buddha once and got the expected stock response of spasmodic laughter and shiny white teeth. He liked Ollie, he laughed at pretty much anything he said. He spent a sunny Friday afternoon testing this to its limit once. He quickly established he would laugh at even a meaningless look and shrug of the shoulders. He’d obviously decided that he was a “funny guy” on first impressions and so now just assumed everything he said or did was a joke without necessarily needing to check the facts. This didn’t bother John. Frankly any escape from the monotony of his job suited him fine. He liked Ollie’s attitude as well, he had a kid from a failed relationship in his early twenties and because of this worked harder than most. He wasn’t a great salesman, he was pretty mediocre, but he worked harder than the rest because he had something he was working for. John respected that, and he was also envious of it. He was aware that all the most meaningful accomplishments he’d ever achieved were for something bigger than himself and he longed to have something like that in his life again. Something real, something important, something true. Plenty of the others seemed to be working hard enough to afford shit watered down coke at the weekends and the occasional sly lunchtime session. He couldn’t get his head round the appeal of doing a line in the office toilet. To him drugs had always been about context, surrounded by people you had a bond with, shared music, shared experience, above all an escape from the shitty nine-five. It just seemed to him pointless posturing to do it at work and anyway it’s not like you could fully cut loose and make the most of the experience anyway. Like an erection in a strip club. Pretty expensive way to get hard and then not be able to anything about it, what was the point? “Don’t you dare use that language in front of me.” Nicki was off the phone. She was very good at her job, John suspected because she was too dumb to fail. The fact she mostly sold to men in garages helped. She was from somewhere in the north east and was certain that she was very glamorous. John couldn’t help winding her up at every opportunity but somehow that had developed into a strange camaraderie. She didn’t have a clue what John was, she didn’t meet men like him in the circles she moved in. She associated with bouncers, petty drug dealers and wannabe rappers. She didn’t have a clue how to file john. “Fuck off Nicki. You coming for cig Ollie?” I can’t do this anymore he thought to himself as he stood up and sighed. ** Before he knew it, it was lunchtime. He made his excuses for the usual pub invitation; he rarely savoured being lightly drunk at the office it just made him tired and want to be there even less. He wandered the back streets of the old light industrial parts of town that skirted the centre. They were quickly becoming largely empty flats for young professionals. Any character and history ground down and homogenised in some desperate naive assumption that this was “The London Of The North”. No it fucking isn’t he thought to himself every time he heard the phrase. Or if it is it’s the shit, soulless bits most Londoners couldn’t give a toss about anyway. They were remaking the world in someone’s image and that someone was clearly a cunt. All glass and what he assumed were supposed to be exciting angles. He was pretty sure that the tower blocs that blighted the skyline, which went up in the 60’s and 70’s, were thought at the time, by a similar breed to whoever spawned their current analogues, to be modern and chic. There was probably some bitter loser much like himself, decades before him, who saw them for what they were. Cathedrals to mediocrity and despair, the chrysalises for slums in the sky yet to be born. He probably had bigger side-burns though. There must have been some tipping point in the not too distant past. A peak whereby change had stopped being something good and stopped being something that showed forward momentum for mankind and just became a way for things to get slowly, inevitably worse. He knew this to be true, it seemed obvious to him. Things were getting worse, people were getting worse, he was getting worse. He used to be fiercely proud of where he was from, but that was when he felt he had a stake in it. The people he cared about had mostly gone, the places he remembered fondly had been changed beyond all recognition. The faces he was surrounded by seemed to get younger and younger and more “Hollyoaks” everyday. He couldn’t decide if this alienation was because he was genuinely detached from the world due to some suspected but unconfirmed superiority or just because he was turning into a sad, miserable old fucker. Probably a bit of both. Even before he’d run out of women he had any interest in fucking he’d started to feel like the oldest swinger in town. In his early twenties he had to admit to himself he hadn’t been that choosy when picking partners but the parameters for holding his attention or even his interest seemed to get narrower and narrower by the day. He tried being his old self, but it just made him feel paper-thin. Maybe he was, maybe all this introspection was just vanity to cover the fact he was a creature of no substance. He had gone for a drink with an old friend from a previous job not long ago and had admitted to him after his most recent dalliance with a girl he neither wanted or needed, that what he really truly longed for was a punk, supermodel, genius. He didn’t think his prospects for finding such a woman were that great here, they probably weren’t great anywhere and he also suspected that such a creature would be unlikely to be interested in him anyway. W
La Folie à deux - Part One Chapter Two • Opuss № I