Ugly Things

by Mark Yarwood

  While happily pouring through his digitally recorded images, my ex- solicitor tells me about the several letters that they had been receiving for the last few weeks. At first, they were quite polite, but firm, saying how mistreated the writer felt. Soon, he said, they were coming every day, addressed to various members of the management, full of abuse and rage. Some of the language, he told me, was quite disgusting. They were post marked from this place, he said. The envelopes had my fingerprints all over them. They had got a policeman friend to match the prints on the envelopes to the ones on my stationery in my old office. They found no other prints, he tells me, after I ask.

  Picture Kevin using my envelopes and probably my laptop to write a few threatening letters, his hands tightly sealed in surgical gloves.

  ‘The letters will cease,’ my former solicitor says, not even looking at me. ‘There will be no more contact from you or we go to the police with the letters we already have. You will not try and get any more money from the company either. Or the letters will end up in the hands of the proper authorities. Is that understood?’

  I nod as he shows me a photo of he and his wife on a boat trip, their arms wrapped round the shoulders of a weather- beaten fisherman.

  There’s no point denying the letters were sent by me.

  I can’t say Kevin wrote them. That would be just as pointless. If he hadn’t written those letters, maybe a close friend he once had at school, or a neighbour’s cat, might have died. You can’t blame Kevin.

  I hope it rains for the rest of the solicitor’s bloody holiday.

  I hope they go on another boat trip and some very rare, but not unknown, great white sharks eat the boat and them.

  The solicitor doesn’t need to sell this product. This kind of deal sells itself. You don’t have to be a salesman to know that.

  ‘I think I might take my wife out tonight,’ the solicitor says and puts away his camera. ‘Have you been to Pete Hallow’s restaurant by the harbour?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘My wife really wants to go there. She wants to hear him shout at his staff, bless her. It’s supposed to be expensive, but I think I might take her anyway.’ He gets up and puts on his sunglasses. ‘Yes, I think I’ll treat her. It’s only money after all.’

  Like a Greek or Shakespearian tragedy, I had brought along my own downfall. If I hadn’t befriended Kevin, had not felt sorry for him, and let him move in, I wouldn’t now be broke.

  My stationery, my laptop, my envelopes. Kevin’s dirt fearing little hands.

  Kevin was becoming a disease in my life, an infection like the one in my beard, eating away at my dignity. I might as well have piled my money in the middle of my lounge and given Kevin a box of matches. I wonder how many times he’d have to strike a match before actually setting fire to the cash. I wonder, if he didn’t start the fire in the right way, which person in his family or life might die.

  All the thousands of pounds the credit card companies have loaned to me, have now been spent on home improvements. One card is the roof, the carpets and the furniture. Another Platinum card is the carefully landscaped garden, the new bathroom suite and some lovely rendering to the exterior of the house.

  I look at my beard in the mirror. Already I can see great improvement. The blistering and the puss are subsiding. It’s not great, and, if I shaved, I would open the wounds again. Soon, I won’t need this beard, but I’ll be worth as much as a tramp. I’ll have a roof over my head and that’s about it, thanks to Kevin.

  The solicitor, who is now firmly in the pay of the company, looks at my new furniture. ‘You’ve spent a lot of money on this place.’

  I smile.

  ‘I bet it’s all on credit cards.’ He examines every stick of furniture. ‘The interest will be building. Debt is such an ugly thing. Do you know that interest-baring debt is illegal? Under our country’s constitution, I mean? But you stop it now and the whole world’s monetary system would collapse. Capitalism, you see, it’s unstoppable.’

  A solicitor with communist leanings and I never knew.

  ‘You give the company anymore trouble and well get the banks to foreclose on you.’ He smiles, his pink head sticking out of his bright shirt. ‘We can do that.’

  I ignore him the best I can and pretend to look through some bills on the kitchen table, but this just depresses me.

  The solicitor puts a fatherly hand on my shoulder. ‘I can tell the police you threatened me today. You threatened the company and its employees. It’s your word against mine. With the letters, it wouldn’t look good.’

  He moves away and looks ready to walk out the door and then chuckles to himself. ‘You might want to get yourself a lawyer.’

  After the solicitor leaves, I take a walk to Janet’s craft shop and find her putting sticks of rocks on the shelves. She smiles and hands me one. It reads: I want to suck you off.

  I put the stick of rock back on the shelf. ‘I’m in trouble.’

  Janet goes and sits behind the cash register and picks up her latest trash novel. ‘Do you know what happens to this sort of trashy book? The ones they don’t sell, I mean? There are piles of this type of book and they are stored in massive warehouses. Someone poured their heart and soul into this crappy book. Do you know what they do with the ones they don’t sell?’

  ‘They burn them? Recycle them?’ I say, impatiently.

  ‘They build roads on top of them,’ she says and nods, flicking through the pages. ‘They take all the shitty novels that no one wants to buy and the publishers can’t be bothered to store anymore and use them as filling for roads. Every major road built these days has old shitty novels under it. Every time you travel anywhere these days, you’re cruising over someone’s imagination.’

  ‘I’m in trouble,’ I say.

  ‘I like your beard. Please don’t shave it off.’ Janet turns another page and laughs.

  ‘I’m going to be broke soon. The company I work for…well, they’ve fucked me over. Soon I’ll lose everything.’ I put my head in my hands, leaning on the counter.

  ‘You’ve got a nice house. How can you be broke?’ Janet puts down the book and strokes my beard.

  ‘I used most of my money buying it and doing it up. Now I’m fucking broke,’ I say, but she just smiles at my beard.

  ‘You’re a young man. I take it you’re healthy. I mean, everything works okay?’ She looks down at my crotch.

  ‘Yes, what the hell are you going on about?’ I bury my head in my hands again.

  ‘Fit and healthy young men never go broke. You have assets.’ Janet licks her finger and turns another page.

  ‘Are you suggesting I sell my body?’ I look up from my hands and show the disgust on my face.

  ‘Maybe. In a way.’ She puts down the book and leans toward me. ‘I could help you, and in a way, you’d be helping me. I can make us both rich.’

  ‘Really?’

  She pulls at my beard and nods. ‘I just need your spare time.’

  ‘And what do you expect me to do?’

  She smiles again. ‘Nothing much. Just fuck my brains out.’

  Chapter Five

  I go to eat breakfast after soaking my skin in soapy water for ten minutes, only to find a stick of rock on the kitchen table with the words: I want to kill you, written through it.

  While staring at it, I take out a bowl and some cereal and then some milk. Is this a threatening note, I ask myself? Could something so sweet be so evil? I stare at it as I spoon cornflakes into my mouth, feeling the milk drip into my beard. When you have a beard, you can save food for later, however, a dried cornflake in your beard makes it look like your flesh is rotting away.

  Kevin isn’t in the house. I try and turn on the tap to drink some water, but I find them too tight. Kevin has obviously been spending the morning making sure they were off before he left. It takes me five minutes to turn on the tap, using a cloth and pure will power.

  This is my house and shouldn’t have to fight with the taps. This is what
it must be like living with The Hulk.

  My house is more like a cottage. It has low ceilings and you can guarantee that you’ll smash your head on the low beams every day. When I arrived, the windows were old and the paint was peeling off and there was a lot of seagull shit on the glass. Of course, there’s more seagull shit on the windows now. Possession being nine points of the law, it’s my seagull shit too.

  I pick up the stick of rock and read the words again.

  They make sticks of rock by layering the different coloured candy on top of one another: White on red, red on white, until the words form through the middle and they roll and stretch until it’s thin and round. Then it’s cut into sections, ready to harden and sell to people with strong teeth.

  In Kevin’s room there are already several sticks of rock on the window seal and on the shelves, which someone put up a little lopsidedly. I pick a stick of rock off the floor and read the words running through the middle: You’re a wanker, one says, so I look at another, which tells me to: Fuck off and die.

  I go to the pub for lunch and see Kevin sitting by the window. The window, which you can only slightly see through, because of the ancient naval memorabilia in the way, faces the craft shop. Janet’s craft shop. Kevin has acquired some binoculars and sits pointing them towards the shop.

  Nobody in the pub is fooled by his bird watching story. The only birds around are the seagulls swooping down at the fishing boats.

  I found a stick of rock that said: I want you now big boy. There was also one that read: cum on my face. The Love Hearts inventor must be green faced by now.

  Kevin has his eyes stuck to the binoculars and when he eventually puts them down, he has red rings round his eyes, like that old joke.

  Should I be worried about his obsession? Should I be worried that I knew about it, but let her seduce me anyway? What sort of friend am I? A horny and bearded one, I guess.

  In this pub, the Nelson, it’s all right to have a beard. The fishermen come in here with their fish smelling clothes and their silver beards. They see me and wink as if we are in some secret beard club.

  I introduced Janet to Kevin, so his obsession is my fault. Yes, technically he found her first in the art class, but I actually had the courage to talk to her. It was in this pub, some nights ago, where all three of us sat and got drunk. That night, you could almost see Kevin’s mind working behind his brown eyes, putting everything together, attaching words spoken to him to emotions that don’t exist. It’s like simple mechanics to him; he just sat and built a connection between he and Janet in his head.

  She smiled when she said hello to him. To Kevin a smile means affection. After a time, she may smile a few times. In her drunken state, she may have put a hand on his knee by accident. In Kevin’s world they are engaged.

  I sit by Kevin and he turns to face the rest of the pub. ‘Mate, I think this may be the real thing.’

  Janet makes sticks of rock for her craft shop. In fact, she makes them for her mother’s craft shop, but since her mother is bed ridden from the ears down, Janet has to sell the stuff. Her mother showed her how to make rock. She soon got bored with the ‘I love this’ and ‘Welcome to’…so she started to make messages of truth. The things people mostly don’t say, but would like to. Just buy a stick of rock and hand it over: Merry fucking Christmas, I want a divorce.

  ‘Maybe you should slow down,’ I say to Kevin.

  ‘Slow down? Slow down?’ His eyes widen.

  ‘Perhaps you’re not ready for a serious relationship.’ I smile.

  Kevin starts to tell me about how Janet found him walking past her shop and invited him in. Walking by wouldn’t be the correct term. I had seen him myself walk past her shop repeatedly, in the hope that she would see him. Once I stopped him and asked him what he was doing.

  ‘Mate, I want to bump into her, but accidentally,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll walk past one more time.’

  ‘Yes,’ I began, ‘you know what they say, seventy fifth time lucky.’

  The first time I slept with Janet, she asked me if I had been phoning her and then hanging up. This, apparently, had been going on since I arrived.

  When Janet showed me her full vocabulary of sticks of rock, my eyes popped open when I saw how far her filthy mind could stretch. In the middle of reading through them, she puts an extra special stick of rock in my hand. It’s brown. Through the middle, it reads: Do me up the arse.

  Kevin has been spending the money I gave him on sticks of useless candy with rude words written through them.

  Kevin told me Janet did eventually see him outside the shop, just passing on his way home. She invited him in and showed him her sticks of rock collection. She also showed him the CDs she makes and that are selling particularly well. Some hippy shops sell CDs of the sounds of the sea, or streams, or whales calling out to each other. Janet makes CDs of people having sex. People can play them while they’re having sex, perhaps to make it sound like they’re in the middle of an orgy. A single man can play it while he masturbates, she tells Kevin. Surely, this is classed as mental torture.

  Janet shows Kevin a pink stick of rock with the words: I want to kill you on it.

  If you think about it, you should really feel special to be having sex with someone that another person is obsessed with, but you don’t because she’s weird and more than a little messed up in the head. She’s not the girl you want to look down at and see poking her tongue out at your little soldier. Close your eyes and picture your blonde ex-girlfriend with the large breasts. Try and recall the smell of her expensive perfume.

  Janet smells of hay that’s been dried in the sun.

  ‘You shouldn’t be selling this filth,’ an angry woman tells Janet, as she stands with her husband in the middle of the shop. The woman’s jowls shake with every word.

  Kevin tells me that the woman was holding a stick of rock that read: Fuck my pussy.

  ‘You should buy it and give it to your husband,’ Janet tells the woman and watches her face grow purple as her crusty top lip quivers.

  ‘Didn’t Mrs. Cole used to own this shop?’ the man asks, his plump body wrapped in a brown bobbly jumper. He looks round the shop, perhaps looking for Mrs. Cole. ‘I don’t think she would like this at all.’

  ‘She dead,’ Janet says and hands a CD of sex music to Kevin.

  The woman’s eyes become a little more careful, while her tone becomes more cautious. ‘That’s a real shame. But she wouldn’t approve of this…these sticks of rock.’

  ‘Brain dead,’ Janet almost shouts, as she takes some money from a customer dressed in a wet suit.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ the woman asks, cupping her ear.

  Janet smiles. ‘I should’ve said she’s brain dead. Sorry, my mistake.’

  The woman looks at her husband for confirmation, but he just shakes his head and tries to direct her from the shop. ‘Let’s go, Ivy.’

  ‘Your mother was a good woman and she wouldn’t approve of this filth,’ the woman shouts as she’s pulled from the shop.

  Janet looks at Kevin while playing with a strand of her blue hair, and then suddenly jumps up from the chair behind the counter. She pushes out a hippy looking couple and grabs Kevin. She hangs the CLOSED sign on the door. She marches Kevin down to the beach and makes him sit down on the sand. Apparently, she didn’t bat an eyelid while Kevin danced between the sand and the stone steps for a few minutes, his head bobbing up and down, counting each hop.

  Kevin sat and watched the foamy water rising up the sand about three feet away. He had heard horror stories about pollution and the fact that sewerage is poured out of pipes straight into the salt water. He crawls back a little.

  He once listened to surfers talk about turds and used condoms floating by them. He won’t even pass by surfboard rental shops anymore, not now he heard they piss inside the wet suits for warmth.

  Janet pulled her black shirt over her head and revealed her white, full breasts in a black lacy bra. They shook for a moment then stopped. She l
ooked at Kevin and smiled. Click. Smile equals affection. Click. Breasts equal food. Nourishment, affection. Click. Mother and child.

  Janet lay back against the sand. Kevin wanted to join her and started to lie back, then jumped up again into an upright position, his legs crossed.

  As Kevin tells me this story, as he sips from his special bottle of water, I know this is not good. This is bad and it’s my fault. I told him that the water might cure him too. The water in this town can make you better. I don’t know if it’ll work on Kevin, it probably won’t. I shouldn’t have given him hope.

  Janet sat up from the sand, pulled something from her pocket and said, ‘I thought you might like to have this.’

  Kevin takes the blue piece of rock from her and reads the words through the middle. I want you, it says.

  Kevin takes out the stick of rock from his bag and hands it to me. Exhibit one. I hold it and read the words.

  ‘Mate, I think she loves me,’ he says.

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘That’s great.’

  Chapter Six

  I get a fax from the company, from my old boss, who only ever sits in his huge corner office, phoning his other big boss friends and arranging to play Golf.

  When I get up in the morning, I ignore the paper hanging out the fax machine like a large white tongue. I ignore the large black letters written in some large important looking font. These were the sort of faxes he’d send me when I worked for him. Even though his office was down the corridor from mine, he’d send me faxes and emails and text messages all in huge capital letters written in the same important looking font.

  I NEED THOSE FIGURES NOW.

  WHERE ARE YOU HAVING LUNCH?

  WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO SHAVE OFF THAT STUPID BEARD?

  My boss is the sort of person who sends text messages written in capital letters, each character a thousand feet tall. When people send those sorts of messages, it’s like they are always shouting.

  I didn’t tell anybody why I had the beard. Why would I? I had my horrid little secret kept behind the fence made of barbed human wire and that’s the way I had to keep it. I was trying out a beard. I wanted to know how it looked.