For a week things were calmer.
The full bladder thing forces Martin John to walk even more circuits on the job. The only way to ascertain it’s truly full is to walk and live that pressure from above.
The original reason for the circuits now has a double purpose.
Each circuit would arouse him more and more.
Until he’d “Bucket It.”
Now with the full bladder and the increased circuits he is sexually higher than he has ever been.
Thanks to mam.
Thanks to not going upstairs.
Thanks to not being able to use the lavatory.
Thanks to avoiding Baldy Conscience.
They caught him.
She caught him.
Sarah caught him.
Called his name.
Followed by:
For fuck’s sake.
He turned, trousers down.
He could have pulled them up. He had the choice. Could have pulled them up. Could have pretended he was looking for something in that bucket.
But no. He turned, trousers descended, defiant.
Enjoyed it.
SUSPENDED FROM JOB PENDING INVESTIGATION.
Check my card was all he said, when she screamed at the sight of him.
It was in the report. Typed out as her testimony.
Sarah said she did not wish to say out loud what she had seen Martin John doing up in the rafters of the building where they both worked. She said for private religious reasons (all security guards resort to religion when trouble brews) it would pain her to use the language required.
First she said private.
Second she said religious.
Third she combined the two.
Doubled her conviction.
Martin John maintained he was caught short and innocently piddling into a bucket that happened to be lurking under the roof beam up there. He claimed a bent kidney. The Manager fella said he’d never mentioned any bent kidney. Martin John agreed and said Ya, right you are, he had no bad kidney. He was just “caught short.” The Manager fella looked puzzled by the admission.
Sarah said this is some high tale and he should tell the truth of what he was doing. Martin John said the woman had a vendetta against him and she needed to drop it. Check my card, Check my card, he added.
Nobody ever understands Martin John’s instruction to check his card. They usually ignore it. If they asked to check his card, Martin John would present an expired Travel Card. All parties will examine it blankly and this is the most likely reason nobody asks him to expand on the demand to Check My Card.
The card that he is actually referring to is the card he believes registers his circuits of the building. The card he is confused about. Is it deliberate, this confusion? He knows there are cameras. He knows they are spying on him. He knows Baldy Conscience has likely made contact with the people behind the cameras. He likes to make this easier for them, by tapping his Travel Card on the light switch of every floor.
He is not truly sure if those behind the cameras are his employers, yet he does believe in the rumoured machine in the office that they are never allowed to enter. This rumoured machine, which logs all of their movements. The machine that primarily Martin John has rumoured. The threat of the rumoured machine that records what the manager cannot see. Martin John has become so confused about what is where and who is watching him that from the moment he lifts his head off the pillow, he understands he is being watched. This is why he knows that the many times he does the thing to the women’s legs and feet or has his trousers undone and it out he will be seen. He has told himself he is doing these things to register to them that HE KNOWS THEY ARE WATCHING HIM. I’ll give them something to look at, these bread-stealing fuckers. This is partly how he resolves what he’s doing. I am letting them know I know they are watching. I know that Baldy Conscience has been sent.
This doesn’t explain to him or any of us why he has a history of doing these things. A history that began before Baldy Conscience and a history that commenced before he had any notion of “the trackers” and “their tracking.”
This falls into Harm Was Done over Check My Card.
When Martin John admits harm was done, when that refrain circles his mental turntable, it can cause him pause.
The pause quickly fills with self-appeasement. I had an opportunity. I coulda taken full advantage of the Estonian when she was up there. She was up there waiting on me. She wanted me in a way none of the others did. She offered herself to me and I didn’t touch. Well not entirely. I touched a bit. Same as any man would. I took her to the hospital, I bought her a magazine, I took her home. I nodded.
Sort of. But not exactly. There had been some time before he called the ambulance. He had cleaned her up after he had delivered on her. He had cleaned himself up. He remembers clearly the upward strokes with the bunched-up toilet paper. Wipe. Swipe. Wipe. Swipe. Afterwards he worried. Was there a smell? Did the ambulance men suspect something? He thought maybe they might. But he’d checked her pulse and had been quick about it. How quick had he been? He noticed a stain on the roof while wanking over her and made note to check the loft for leaks. He had made himself come by repeating the words jammy jank, jammy jank, jammy jank. He worried now. He had rolled her over facedown to be relieved of her eyes, lifted her dress, yanked down her tights and faded knickers to give him bare bum to toss over. He knew this because he kept one hand pushing resistance against her skin, propping himself over her and his arm had protested his own weight, which only intensified his primary pull. Was she still facedown when the ambulance men arrived? He was worried now. But she had come back, she had returned to the house into the room. She didn’t want to leave. He had forced her out. Had she not wished to leave because she liked it? He would never know. Did she know what he’d done? She must have known. She must have liked it. That was it. That was that.
Mam does not like the talk about Beirut. She has made this very, very clear. Abundantly transparent. She has told him not to mention the place again. You have never been there, she has been heard to say. Very loud. Very frustrated. Very angry.
You’ve never been anywhere, except Noanie’s!
She is wrong.
Martin John has been to Beirut.
He just can’t prove it. The way they can’t prove anything about him either. They just know what they know and he knows what he knows and what he knows is he believes he has been to Beirut.
The Manager fella sat between the two of them stated he was not present and therefore reliant on witness statements and repeatedly queried the two of them in rotation as to the activity that Sarah saw and that Martin John insisted she could not have seen.
Sarah requested to speak alone to the manager.
She expressed to him what she had seen.
Martin John was suspended from work for two weeks. It suited him as he was behind on collating his Eurovision files.
Sarah was triumphant.
Martin John was more triumphant.
There’s misery in triumph, thought Dallas, having endured the dual carriageway of bickering in each direction.
—I have a confession to make, Martin John eventually said to the Manager fella.
—Right.
—I was having a problem, but it is all finished with now.
—Right.
Martin John did not expand on the problem. The Manager fella repeated the word Right. It ended the way these conversations always ended between the two of them. The Manager fella reminding him he was the most reliable person who worked for him and Martin John maintaining he took great pride in doing a good job.
Martin John again to the Manager fella.
—Could I have a word?
—Yes.
—I was having a problem, a medical problem.
—Right.
—I was having a problem like you know, going.
—Right.
—So that was how I was caught short.
—Right.
—It is fixed.
—Right.
Martin John supplied no further details. The Manager fella said Right one more time. His phone rang. He disappeared. He returned. Martin John made no further effort to converse, choosing to announce he was due a circuit and wouldn’t want to get behind.
He left with his pretend swipe card, faster than the Manager fella could express confusion or muddle out words such as What exactly are you on about?
Martin John realized on the 23rd floor that the Manager fella had returned to speak to him after the phone rang. He interrupted his circuit to go and find the man. Arrived at the 13th floor on foot and changed his mind. He climbed the stairs again to the 23rd floor repeating the words Rain will fall, Rain will fall, at the summit of every floor ascended.
Complaints were subsequently raised about Martin John’s personal hygiene. Martin John maintains poor hygiene because he wants the putrid smell off him to drive Baldy from his house. If he smells bad enough, the man will have to up and leave. This olfactory battle strategy seeps into his day job where smells trail him and oust him there.
Because Martin John had worked 7 days that week, including one double shift, the Manager fella did not pass along the complaints to him. Instead he did what the dentist does and put a watch on the tooth.
Martin John observes the Manager fella leaving the office much more than usual. Each time the Manager fella approaches the guard’s desk, Martin John—never doing anything more illegal or illicit than reading the Bible to keep Dallas happy—brightly tells the Manager fella that Rain will fall.
Rain will fall, he’ll announce even when rain is indeed falling and has been falling for the past 7 hours. His choice of the same statement troubles the Manager fella, who is actively patrolling for signs of poor body scent. Martin John is onto him. And onto them. And onto talcum powder. Lily of the Valley. Every orifice dusted with the stuff. Shoes lined with it. He is springing lily puffs, if he moves swift. Martin John is onto them. He even pats a layer of it into his underpants.
The thing none of them factor in is the thing none of them know.
THEY DON’T KNOW THAT BALDY CONSCIENCE IS AFTER HIM FULL-TIME. He is on the run from Baldy Conscience even in his own home. Baldy Conscience wants to be the landlord. He doesn’t go upstairs because mam said she didn’t want to hear another word about him upstairs. Gary told him to tell Baldy Conscience to move out. They don’t understand Baldy Conscience. He will never move out. The earth could stop spinning. It could turn upside down and that fucking flump will remain at his kitchen table.
This is why he has stopped washing.
This is why he is holding in his urine.
The plain person cannot understand the punishing details of what the random man who has Baldy Conscience AFTER HIM must endure.
Martin John comforts himself with the prospect that Baldy will ever be after someone, someplace, thus any man or woman who scorned or doubted Martin John was a mere spot behind him in the queue. I’m keeping the fucking seat warm, he would tell them if pressed. It’s a fucking charitable act. This man would have his hands around your neck if he did not already, metaphorically speaking, have his hands kept busy around mine. You understand me now?
All Martin John’s sentences start terminating with you understand me now? If he’s buying a ticket or asking the time or even saying hello he leaves nothing to false interpretation. Occasionally a person will respond that, in fact, they do not understand him. He will nod a few times and immediately make haste. It indicates Baldy’s gotten to them. They’re tainted. Stained with Baldy’s stump if you like.
He has made mistakes
Baldy Conscience was a terrific mistake.
He was a blood clot of a mistake.
On account of Baldy Conscience
He only rented if he had to.
He only rented if he had to.
On account of Baldy Conscience
He only rented if he had to.
No more women.
No more women.
There would be no more women.
This was how Baldy Conscience slipped by him.
He preferred the upstairs empty with the windows wide open. Rooms free: life good. He shut them only if he used the telephone, after which they would be promptly opened again. In the empty rooms he walked in circles. Sometimes he just stared at their ceilings. A negotiation between him and the plaster: Do you see you are empty? You are empty because I have made you that way.
When things were going grand:
The upstairs rooms were empty.
Each day he followed his rituals on time.
Letters and circuits matched as they should.
His walks were a pleasure.
The newsagent had his papers.
The pork pie did not leave a greasy taste on the roof of his mouth. His urges stayed quelled. Hidden deep under a mental duvet.
He knew things would be grand if he put his head down, kept to himself and stayed in at night as she had told him to. Then they would not come for him because there was nothing to come for.
When things were bad he felt they were coming for him. He felt it every minute of any day when things were bad.
Whenever things sour down on the job Martin John heads to Euston.
Whenever Martin John is anxious about going home to face Baldy Conscience, Martin John hits Euston station. Rabbits go home to their warrens. Bus drivers take the bus to the depot. Martin John, in a state, takes his state to Euston. No one is entirely sure why—including Martin John. It’s where I got my head screwed on about what was going on with him—do you understand me now?
That’s all he’ll say on Euston.
At Euston, opportunities prevail.
Legs, flesh, feet and trains.
Circuits.
Rain can’t fall indoors.
All this heading to Euston means Martin John is sleeping less and less.
Walks more. Sleeps less. Walks more and more. More and more walks with a full bladder. More and more full bladder. Less and less sleep. He has started drinking certain types of water. Believes it fills his bladder faster. More and more he likes his bladder stone-full, pressing against the band of his trousers. Sometimes he pushes it to insist upon pain.
Once he carried an empty water bottle inside the band of his trousers. The top of it peeking up like a reminder. He begins travelling this way, several water bottles sticking out of the top of his waistband. People eye them, they look at the bottles. He smiles. He has caught them looking. I have you now, he thinks. He has their gaze away from Baldy Conscience. Sometimes he’ll rapidly rip a bottle up and out and towards his mouth, while looking at the looker, who inevitably looks alarmed, then looks away. Once a woman held his gaze. He didn’t like that. She forced him to open the bottle and drink from it by looking and continuing to look at him. One of Baldy’s team. No doubt.
Passengers left the train. She did not. Two seats either side of her. He moved over with a plan, but she was onto him. He doesn’t recall exactly her words but something along the lines of fucking, bursting, pervert. She put an elbow up to his throat and it threw his head back. He scrambled towards the door. Exited at an unintended station. He didn’t think women could do that.
Only women on Baldy’s team could do that. Baldy’s plants were closing in on him.
Once he has them with the spout of the water bottle above his trousers, he inches another step further. He lowers his zip. Leaves his fly undone.
They see it.
Of course they see it.
He registers the gaze, the eye-corner glance to confirm. I have you now, he thinks.
Next he removes his underwear before the zip is low
ered.
Easy: hide it behind his coat, reveal and let them have it. Give what is wanted.
They have it. They have what it is they want.
Coats can drift. Open. That’s what coats are like. That’s what women like, open coats and a quick face full of him.
He likes it too. He likes what they like.
Sometimes though if it’s raining, it’s not enough. He wants more.
The other thing is at him again. The thing his mother won’t say aloud. So he’s not saying it aloud either. The thing she says he has stopped.
He’s doing it again.
Now it’s feet. He’s started pulling slip-tricks with his foot and their foot, your foot, woman-foot and women-feet and sometimes even woman-legs. Legs are daring. Legs are especially daring on the Underground. Mam told him I don’t want you on the Underground, don’t go on the Underground. She wants him overground where he supposes she can see him. People make things up on the Underground, she told him cryptically.
Martin John is back on the Underground. It cannot end well.
He wants to go between their legs.
He wants to post a letter there.
A letter P, not a B.
There are certain types of footwear it proves easier with. Boots. Flip-flops and sandals he does not like. He likes that they show flesh, they prove there is a foot, but you cannot allow your foot, or his foot, to drape against a foot or leg without acknowledging it. It will hurt. It will hurt if you wear solid work boots like Martin John wears. All year. All weather. Same type of boot. It’s the lower leg he is after; he wants his calf against her calf, whoever she is. Or knee to her flesh. Doesn’t matter who she is. Doesn’t matter who you are, love. You’re incidental. You need only be on the Tube when Martin John’s on the Tube, if he decides it’s the day to cadge a rub. His leg against a woman’s leg. You need only be a woman with a leg. You aren’t special, you aren’t chosen, you are a woman with a leg. That’s it. A leg he finds access to. A leg that happens to be available. That’s all you are.
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