never been so badly betrayed by such an annoying, pretentious dick head as Damian.
She thought about the last time they had engaged in a frenetic public display. That time only three weeks ago when he'd slobbered all over her for the cameras, the perfect portrayal of the glamorous couple, the perfect piece of performance art, the perfect lie. The cameras never saw the aftermath – Damien snorting coke off the breasts of a nineteen year old art student while he thought Sandra was asleep in the next room.
Nobody knew about that yet. Nobody knew anything. The poor student had been so out of her tiny mind and now even tinier nose that she didn't even remember the disgusting things he did to her, in her, on her.
Nobody knew about all the other things Sandra had discovered from the private detective she'd paid to follow him for a week.
Nobody knew.
Except of course the two people at the News of the World she'd sold the exclusive story and photos to three days ago. They were holding back, more than Damien had ever managed, until the day after the exhibition on Sandra's insistence. A hideously delicious scandal published the day after the public humiliation of Britain's leading young artist at his very own exhibition was too much to resist. The fact that they had been given two dozen highly graphic photos of a completely naked, nubile, pretty young art student was just the sort of trouser-bulging prospect tabloid journalists simply had to learn to live with.
Anyone less self-absorbed and coke-addled than Damien would have noticed her distance over the last three weeks, but Sandra was confident that he didn't have a clue as to the fate that was about to befall him. She felt the knife again and half opened the zip on her jacket pocket for easy, quick access to the weapon of her revenge.
The time was drawing near, and so was the end for Damien and his sham of a career, his sham of a putrid, repulsive life. This poor girl hadn't been the first, Sandra new that; the same inexplicable powerlessness that befalls so many women had landed on Sandra and, for reasons she still couldn't understand, she'd stuck with Damien through all his coke hazes and drink binges, his not-so-secret affairs, the orgies, the prostitutes, anything he could get his hands or his dick on. However, Sandra knew, with a finality that sadly gave her little pleasure, that she would be the last. The final act in a career and a life that would doubtless continue to fascinate the prurient and the simple minded for decades to come.
Sandra briefly wondered who would play her in the film that some unfeeling bastard would one day doubtless make of todays events.
She was woken from her melancholic reverie by a limp-wristed clapping of hands. That meant the gallery owner was about to make his speech.
Sandra switched off for most of it, as she'd been switched off from reality for most of the last three weeks.
All too soon it was time for her and Damien, arm in lying, cheating arm, to approach the, she could hardly bring herself to even think the word, masterpiece.
Being the egotist he was, Damien of course unveiled the painting himself. It had already been bought by a Japanese collector for nearly two million pounds and he had promised Sandra a luxury cruise on the proceeds but she now knew that his promises were emptier than his prodigious testicles.
She waited for what she adjudged to be the right amount of time – fifteen seconds – before producing the knife and slashing the painting to pieces. Strangely enough everyone present was so surprised at her actions that nobody thought to try and stop her. Some undoubtedly thought it was a piece of performance art.
Even when she then calmly unzipped her other jacket pocket and pulled out the gun, nobody tried to stop her, so she had no problems at all in shooting Damien in the head, his brains and blood spraying themselves over the slashed canvas. It would undoubtedly sell for twenty million now.
Sandra put the gun down on the floor and waited for somebody to say something.
MICHAEL AND THE BOSS
The lift seemed to take an age – an ice age. In some ways this was a welcome illusion: curious as I was to ascertain the reason behind this unexpected summons, I was equally as fearful and keen to delay it as long as possible. In the eighteen months I'd worked for the company nothing like this had ever happened to me. To be honest, I was beginning to wonder if any of the supervisors had even noticed my existence.
Nothing about the manner in which I'd been summoned gave any indication as to the reason my presence was required this morning.
I straightened by tie, checked my flies, adjusted my cuffs, took a deep breath and knocked on the door. I'd never been summoned to the seventeenth floor before and it could only mean very good or very bad news. It wasn't my boss I was meeting, it was the boss, the head of international operations. He had a mysterious reputation: most employees never met him and he was considered a recluse. Even his first name was a mystery.
I had no idea what the offices were like up here but it's safe to say I wasn't expecting the site that greeted me when I was eventually ushered in.
The room was in darkness, lit only by the muted daylight forcing its way in through the windows that occupied the whole of the far wall.
Standing at the window with his back to me, looking out over the city landscape, was a man bathed in shadow. He appeared to have his arms folded but I couldn't be sure – the room was enormous and I was at least 60 feet away from him.
“Take a seat,” said the boss. He spoke so softly I would have missed it completely had I not been concentrating so keenly.
I looked helplessly around. The room took up about half of this floor so it was at at least 300 feet wide. There were no tables or desks, no filing cabinets or computers, no office equipment of any kind, no kettle, nothing on the walls, not even any carpet. The only non human object in the room was a small plastic chair of the sort we had in infants school. It had been placed, rather too deliberately for my liking, in the very epicentre of the room. As I as gingerly and noiselessly as possible sat down I couldn't help looking up at the ceiling to see if there was a Monty Python style 15 tonne weight suspended from it. I felt like a cow in an abattoir who's just worked out what the big cross bow thing is for.
I nervously crossed my legs, causing the impracticably lightweight chair to scrape about two feet across the floor. In the ominous silence it sounded like a combine harvester scraping down a blackboard.
“Sorry,” I muttered, so quietly I'm not sure he even heard me. I was about to repeat myself more loudly but then it ocurred to me that that would seem weak and I really didn't need to give of that impression any more than I already was.
After a while I realised that it was now about two minutes since he had told me to take a seat and that, thunderous chair scraping aside, nothing further had happened. My throat felt dry and I wanted to cough but that would have sounded like a jet engine coughing in this place.
“Do you like snooker?” he suddenly asked.
“What the fuck?” I said, thankfully to myself. Was this some sort of corporate mind game? Or worse still, was 'liking snooker' some sort of public school euphemism? I tried very hard not to think about all the possible ramificactions of a pink nudging into a brown.
I became grotesquely aware of myself not replying. On balance I considered it far more likely that the boss had a liking for snooker rather than a disliking as he had introduced the subject so I went for it.
“Yes, I quite like it.”
Name a player, I thought, and not an obvious one. Come on, I thought, I've seen it on the telly often enough, name any player outside the top six.
“I like Stephen Lee,” I blurted out. Okay, he may have been a top six player a few years ago but that should get me some sort of kudos if the boss likes snooker. Of course, if he hates it then I've fallen into his trap, whatever a trap that was baited with pretending-to-like-snooker could possible involve.
He swung around suddenly to face me.
“He should have won a world title ten years ago,” he said.
“Yes, he should,” I agreed.
More uncomfortable silenc
e followed.
“Michael,” he said, almost imperceptibly.
I waited for the rest of the sentence for twenty seconds, but nothing materialised.
“Yes?” I squeaked pathetically. This was the corporate equivalent of water-boarding – I noticed with horror that I was wearing an orange shirt. I began to tremble uncontrollably. This wasn't why I went into insurance. My mother was right, I should have become an estate agent.
“Michael, I have some bad news...”
WHAT'S THAT SMELL?
"Travelling overland to Morocco... would be infinitely preferable to this," thought Peter as he squatted over the public urinal in Newport town center. Others thought his personal standards had dropped alarmingly, but this was one task he just couldn't give up.
"What I wouldn't give for a pair of rubber gloves," he muttered, extracting another cigarette butt from the urinal. His knees ached from sustaining the crouch and he felt an overwhelming urge to run through a field of wheat with Bamber Gasgoine. He gritted his teeth, before putting them back in his mouth and refocusing his attention on the task before him.
It was a hot, sticky afternoon, like elbows congealing in a frying pan, and the job was made more arduous by the stench which assailed his nostrils like an Australian with a cricket bat. A carefully arranged copy of 'Caravaning Bi-Annually For Bi-Sexuals' now contained three sodden dog-ends - one
Ethelbert's Sunday Morning Page 7