You don’t know heartache until someone sullies the reflection in the floor you’ve just shined to sweet and glorious perfection – five will get you ten that’ll get your goat. Or say you got a table to look just right with no cock-ups; before you could say “Bingo!” job well done, someone’s decided to improve the woodwork and your boss is out with his camera to swear evidence against you, damn the trouble of developing the pictures. Floors and furniture, the photo-man asks himself: “Who the rotten hell gets off on pictures of dirty tables?” If that kind of “thoughtfulness” didn’t breed morosity, then you’ve got water on the brain, my son. I don’t pretend that I’m sculpting an Ivor Lewis, but it’s my work, and to have it all of a sudden scuppered is the same lash of an insult as any other, be it by pen or sacrilege, don’t try to tell me otherwise.
It’s a thankless service in any event, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m racking my head on ways to get my own back – double, triple whatever I’m owed. I keep a log of every extra minute I put in at St. Albans and conversely, a record of how many hours I’ve stolen from those skull-grinding bastards. Twenty thousand two-hundred and eighty hours I’ve pocketed, which is one million two hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred minutes I’ve managed to regain for services bloody-well rendered. I’m not going to argue about what’s right or wrong in the world when I got the boot-heel grinding down the back of my neck; you couldn’t teach right and wrong if you tried (pity that do).
I’d like to tell those educated, dribbling pissholes that it was easy enough to bark orders until you were blue in the face, but if you were the ones actually bending your nose over the grindstone, you wouldn’t be in such a hurry to assign such impudent means of deposition, never mind the stupid, petty busywork. It still gets me all het-up thinking about every little thing they’ve designed for their amusement on this island of crooked misadventure they call St. Albans.
Sometimes I like to think of what it’d be like if my colleagues carried on like they were all one of Cary Grant’s pilots on Barranca Airways, ready to shave their peckers for any job, any job the Dutchman will send their way to get close to some of that heady empyrean. If they only make the right noises, then they’d soon thrill at gangdom highs. Can you imagine our bottom-feeding legion, tripping over dust mop and ratchet, clawing at each other to be the first to get at a blood clot on a toilet seat? Skipping to clogged trapways to get shoulder deep in adventure? Maybe then Jean Arthur would show them some tenderness in their cabins and reveal the secret of what it means to be a man. “They must love it,” she’ll cry, blubbering herself into pissing throes of deep emotion. “Cleaning, I mean. It’s like being in love with a buzzsaw.” This was my only type of confederation – the camaraderie of Terrence, Jeffries, and Van Leeuwen my only solace in dark and lonely hours. There were arguments between us, but there were no stakes, no sense of coming together for a grander design beyond unpacking supplies from the loading dock – no colour of danger and delinquency. The straight world didn’t make room for that. It pleated down your folds and smoothed you out for the rank and file, constellated the world with petit-bourgeois worry and called it paradise. But it was a reliable paradise at that. You just have to know what sort of blighter you’re going to be. That’ll keep them from screwing you deeper into the ground. I don’t need that spot of bother, the aggravation on top of the aggravation of living, and if I can add to theirs once in a while, well you can ask yourself again who’s the lucky duck when you tally your final accounts.
I made myself scarce from this women’s job well done, and I was reminded quite stabbingly of a few other jobs I’d been tasked to do, curse of curses. I ranked the jobs from most to least pressing in my head and then complimented my feet on carrying me to the site of the last task, because I’d spent plenty of loafing man-hours skulking about and extending the longest routes: relocate the deliveries for processing, shuffle some files in Accounting, and service the washrooms. I had learned how to arrange reality into doses that were manageable after all. I had just handled the washrooms in my own good way, so I hobbled over to Accounting where I knew some good tattle could be had. With all the work I’d expended, I deserved some sort of reprieve from the bit of gyp I’d subjected my eyes to.
Accounting and my deliverance was just a rag’s-breadth away when Jake swung around the corner in front of me, his eyes fixed on some colourful pasteboard in his hands. I considered pole-vaulting over a nearby cubicle, but remembering how only the angels had wings, I saw that the landing if nothing else would draw his attention to me, not to mention whomever I ended up flattening into chewing gum. I decided to stand still with my hands slapping the cubicle walls with a dirty rag I had in my back pocket, like pickle-faced Timothy Carey in Rio Conchos.
In the hollow space of remembrance which opened in my mind before Jake opened his mouth, I considered what differentiated me from my father. Because Jake was my Derwish in a sense, a constant thorn in my side, but not so easily fobbed off as an imbecile. He was a contender in his own way. But Serge wouldn’t have dealt with him the way I had done. Serge remade his world according to the discipline and form of cinematic injunction, as if its physics could be overlaid our own laws of nature. I merely looked to its formidable enchantments as a footnote to progress, or barring that, however far along my life had come. Serge would have brought off Jake’s elimination, whereas I had no hand of influence in that regard. Norman Wisdom was someone Serge propitiated for advancement in life; Timothy Carey, magnetic though he was, to me was little more than a haruspex’s homework: I derived no fortune-favouring from Carey, only his diagnostic of my torturous existence.
“Oh,” Jake said, interrupting my reverie. “There you are.”
“Yes, fair cop. Nowhere for me to hide now.”
“There’s been an incident in the washroom that needs looking after.”
“Yes. It seems more than I can handle, so I asked Terrence to tough it out. It’s more up his alley I think. Can you believe it? Some slum-bitch didn’t rate two feet off the floor enough of a challenge, so she thought the sink would be more to her liking. Ha, ha, ha!”
“You know, it’s not our place to regard their respective struggles unfavourably.”
“Very high-minded of you. Though I suppose it’s easy to say that when you’re not mucking your hands in it.”
“But I thought Terrence was . . .”
“I meant figuratively. Figuratively, Jake, of course. We in the Maintenance Department have our share of stories, you know? Stories that would put hair on your chest.”
Talking to swankpot Jake was a bit of a gamble; on the face of it, you were almost sure to meet with a slippery kind of talk, where you hated yourself for being amidships the leaky starliner of boredom. Sometimes you’d approach him just to see how far you could go in those dithering circles to see if you did a loop back to the original article of discussion before you flounced off. I should know, not least of all because out of the four of us stalwarts in Maintenance, I’d very nearly done it. You were left with no bloody choice in fact, when you consider that a hundred dollars was at stake between us to the first of our department to do it, such was the reduced state of activity we were left to, having found no better rousing alternative to doing nothing. You had to practically invent your own adventures, what with the absence of the African sun and the misdemeanours of crime . . .
“Your hired hands are making a mess upstairs,” I said, laying out the board. “Cement lain everywhere, risers blown open. Did you talk to them yet?”
“I was meaning to, but I haven’t had the chance. I’ll talk to Jeffries about it tonight. Maybe he’ll be able to have a word.” Second move.
“They won’t listen to him, dammit. They’ll lock him in the boiler room and throw away the key. It’s got to be you if you want some traction.”
“I’ll tell them they’ll have to clean up after themselves so that it won’t make more work for you in the morning. I understand when you’re doing that kind of
back-breaking labour all night, the last thing on your mind is cleaning after yourself when you know someone else is already being paid to do that, but I also see where you’re coming from, because I’m, convention would have it, supposed to be protecting your interests.”
God, how I hated dialectical cobblers.
“It’s not about my work outright,” I offered dryly. “I hardly have the tools to take cement off the walls, right? It’s a plus that it will come right off as soon as the mess is made, you see what I mean? Those grog-heads took one of my shirts I was drying to clean up their sodding mess. Can you explain that one to me then? Five years I’ve had that shirt. Five years it’s survived our washers!”
Jake winced at the suggestion. For as wide a gaping hollow of what he did not know about building maintenance could fill, it did not fully escape his horizon that we washed all manner of sin and filth in those washers, not least of all the mop heads that absorbed all the happy accidents of the day . . . When you’re hard-up, you give serious credence to some strange notions, though less strange than what little alternatives are already afforded you.
“I’ll get you a new shirt. Don’t concern yourself about it. Medium will do?”
“You’d better make it a bloody large. I’ll want to breathe for a change.”
“Large, then.”
“Hey, you want to know what else is bloody and large, Jake?”
The temptation to bring the conversation with Alpha Prime, as we called him, to a new town record was fierce, though rules directly forbade influencing the momentum of discourse by suggesting the recurring topic, in this case Custard’s Little Bighorn and the Peristaltic Wave from Hell, as I had just done, damn my stupid slack-jaw. I suppose even I should have anticipated the limits of my own cunctation, especially with six o’clock fast approaching from nowhere the blue and my services being sorely needed.
For you see, you could only palm off your work for so long before it acquired a – let’s call it – undesirable quality. You must be able to make out the rough distinctions of your own face in the waters of your bucket as a rule, if you are wanting to escape a charge of dereliction; that is where you must draw the line, and not at all, I think it right to add, for fear it reflect the darkness of your own blighted soul.
“Is there anything else?”
“No . . . that’ll be all, Wing Commander.”
In the Accounting Department, I found Adrienne and Martine gabbing away about what I presumed had absolutely nothing to do with the numbers. I knew their racket well enough, having taken my liberties thumbing through the boxes they would have me trudge down to storage when the fancy overtook them. They were so full of deferred work that you could not deny that we were all the natural inheritors of a very distinguished tradition tracing all the way back from George Puttenham and right on to Huck Finn; but you have to tip your hat to someone else’s brilliance when it finds you, and the system Accounting had set up for themselves was not something I could faithfully reproduce in my job description: I couldn’t stomach, and nor was it right feasible, to tip buckets of bilge water all over the floor, only to mop it right up so people would see that your livelihood was all but justified.
Adrienne grew accustomed to the distinct sounds of my chewing – I had pulled out an eggplant that I’d brought for lunch and taken along for the ride sidesaddle of my flathead and Robertson – now that her office was temporarily housed in the anteroom where the lobby of the shelter had once been, its small rotunda amplifying sounds irregularly but to some discerning effect. I gave an inconsistent patter about my legs to try and throw her off; maybe she wouldn’t recognize the sounds of sloshing food against my gums and might think that one of my legs was slightly shorter than the other, chalking one up to crooked chromosomes. She continued with her perfected strain of stuff with Martine, as I contemplated these laggards at play.
“Hoi, you!” I called, tossing a memento from our supply shelves. “Something for when you’re up on blocks.”
“I should have known you’d run exactly at the moment we needed you most. Thank God for Terrence, or is it too soon to count our blessings?”
“Forget about that. You better watch what you say in front of staff when I’m around. They can’t see for looking most of the time, but when you point them in my direction, you’re not exactly doing me any favours.”
“You sad sack. How mortified do you expect us to be if we get wise to your bone-idling? ‘Caretaker in Flight: A Study in Inutility.’ We all know what you get up to on your own – you’ve got it written all over your face.”
“Alpha Prime is going to get on your case too if you’re not careful about those spreadsheets, you dirty bean-flicker. You’d best mind your own grotty self.”
“Alpha Prime?”
“Multivariate Marketing Analysis.”
“Oh. The mouthful,” Adrienne, catching on to my drift, responded. “Holly Blowlightly.”
“It’s no small wonder no one knows what he does around here with a title like that – he ain’t figured it out himself. Don’t think because of the new office he won’t come poking around you hags.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Adrienne here gave a start, having not heard the latest. “Since when?”
“Effective this morning, he has absorbed your department into his. For good behaviour. He is a Master Adept in the art of Unrocking the Boat.”
Martine at this time had scampered back behind her desk and began typing loudly. This should have been an indication of early onset for me: not failing to hear her typing, but for not tumbling its portentous significance – the Gloom of Doom himself, the Hour of Our Untimely Crossing, had returned.
“He’s going to bleed you out, Adrienne, slow and methodic . . .”
“Just who I’ve been meaning to see.” Alpha Prime’s slippery rendition crawled up the back of my neck and died there.
“Hello again, Jake,” I said, composing myself as best possible. “Which itch needs scratching this time?”
“Excuse me? No, I just wanted to talk to you about a few things.”
“All right then.”
Jake took out a fresh apple, an object with which he was unfailingly accompanied at all hours of the day, and rubbed it against his shirt where his kidneys were supposed to be: I was not completely convinced that he was not of a secret race of Moloch people sent to transmogorify our surroundings into the arid wasteland befitting the likes of the Loveland Lizard and Thulsa Doom.
“Well, first thing’s your performance review,” Jake said between munching mouthfuls of fruit. “It’s just been brought to my attention that we need to have a powwow because it’s been drafted for a few weeks now. You need to acknowledge you’ve received it.”
“I’m busy with that emergency on the first floor women’s right now, if you can’t exactly tell, but when I’m free, I can let you know.” Let’s see how you handle that, you etherealized pockmark.
“Okay, that’s great, that’s really great. But we have to get these rolled out by tomorrow afternoon so . . . So today is going to be much better for everyone involved, I think.”
“Well, I can’t make any promises, Jake. The building has to come first, and it’s almost suppertime for those swarming bints.”
“Right, well, if you’re not doing anything now, maybe you can step into my office for a light conference?”
Everything a question for this overthinking bastard. And for his every wrong turn, there would be Dr. No.
“I’m never not doing anything,” I corrected. “You’re busy or you’re not, and as it happens, the women’s lavatory requires my immediate attention, because Terrence has decided that he can’t go in there after all. Adrienne was just telling me about it, which is why I’m here.”
Jake turned to Adrienne, who at present was having a difficult time deciding whether to hang me out to dry or corroborate my story. It being not very likely that kicking away my ladder would mean a stay of execution for her departmental lapses, we could b
oth see that she was in a better position, vocationally speaking, with me on her side than against it. The only question that remained was how convincingly above the mark she’d be. Give me my bloody point spread, you Tuckahoe hayseed.
“Right, it’s a big mess, Jake,” Adrienne said with a croak in her voice. “Seven kinds of horrible. I won’t astound you with the details just this minute, but it’s certainly something that will go down in the history books of St. Albans.”
Kicked to touch you photo-finishing slag.
As I drifted away into the corridor, Jake called, “Before you go . . .”
“Yes?”
“I forgot to give you this memo. It’s about the rash of complaints that have been coming in. We’ll need everyone’s cooperation on this. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
“I’ll have a look at it.”
And so, though not without some considerable expenditure of effort, I was off, free from the glare of the scythe. If I’d had any ganglords to please, they would be slapping my back congratulating me at this very moment.
I trekked up the stairs to the second floor to show my face, before heading back down to make an appearance at the WC. I also wanted to give Terrence enough time to really get his hands in it, so that he wouldn’t suddenly decide to tag me in halfway through on the job or worse, pull a Sunset Flip. If you think something putrid would put us off hanging around in the WC to count down the clocks, you can think again, as I’m sure Terrence was doing right at that moment. There was a control room next to the toilet stalls that you could easily slip in that led to the water heater for the showers and the pressure gauge, where you could easily while away a few hours with a ripping Plastic Man 80-page giant or a good book on Neoplatonic philosophy. Nobody minded you when you were in there, and you could always excuse yourself if you passed people on the way out because you had to check the gauge. You just turned your radio down nice and quiet.
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