by Dan Tyte
A bell rang an overly jolly chime and the hungry hordes started swarming in.
‘Right, Bill,’ he was barking at me now, ‘remember what I said; two scoops of soup into the pot, and one roll. We’re very clear on that. Just one roll. Remember.’ I didn’t remember he’d said this before but perhaps I’d blocked out his huff and bluster. Two scoops, one roll. I could cope with that.
Carol had directed the manky mass into an orderly queue with relative ease and an unfussy efficiency. The bums seemed to move as one whole bearded, tracksuited organism. The supplicating nature of the needy addicts was instantly evident. Whether the hit was methadone or minestrone, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was coming and things would be better, if only for a while. There were probably about forty or fifty of them in total, mostly male, mostly white, of indistinguishable age and undeniable sadness. They passed through the SoupMobile Station quietly, with eyes averted and thank yous mumbled.
I quickly got into the menial monotony of meal-time. Two scoops, one roll, serve. Two scoops, one roll, serve. And repeat. In another life, I reckon I could well have been happy as a fast food operative. In the new, cold, sober light of day, it seemed somehow more noble than pedalling propaganda for pay. Didn’t it? Of course, I’d expect to start on the bottom rung of the ladder, learning the till keys, the knack to salting the French fries, the secret to the perfect shake, the leading questions to ask to tempt the customer to super size. My name is Bill. How can I help you today? I’d relish the opportunity to expand my horizons by working alongside minority ethnics. Every day could be a cultural exchange. In a matter of months, I’d be eyeing up the next star on my badge. In the fast food world, first you get the supervisor role, then you get the pussy. There’d be a husky-voiced hussy on the drive-thru. A one-GCSEd goer. I’d lean on the boss to give her a rota which fitted in around childcare arrangements. Let her listen to commercial radio stations in the staff room. Our hands would touch as I dropped BBQ sauce in her brown bag. We’d both know what she really wanted.
‘What have you got today? Not that horrible muck we had last week, is it? I bleeding hope not.’ My mental meandering had been stopped short again, but this time by what could best be described as a fathoming homeless.
‘Erm, well I wasn’t here last week but I’m assuming there’s some menu rotation…’
He sneered back at me. Some snot dribbled out of his nose and swam through the patchy bristles on his red face. His tongue poked out, lizard-like, to taste the treasure. Perhaps a life of food servitude wouldn’t have been all that.
‘What’s going on over here then, chaps?’ The brigadier had smelt blood and left his station to investigate and be a patronising band-aid.
‘Well, this gentlemen here was wondering what the choice was tonight…’ I said.
‘Was he now? What we have tonight, as we do every night the SoupMobile Station is in operation, are foods that are rich in the essential vitamins and minerals these young boys and girls need. You don’t need me to tell you it’s tough out there on the streets,’ he paused at this point and looked me in the eye, ‘or maybe you do, but our emphasis is nourishing the mind, body and soul for the long, cold, lonely nights.’
‘But what fucking food have you got?’ the hungry one piped up.
‘Manners, young man, manners cost nothing. Just like this food to you. We have a tomato soup. A food stuff rich in vitamin C, essential to ward off scurvy and the like. Not to mention some brown rolls over there for a good bit of roughage.’
‘But I hate tomatoes.’ He was at it again. Derek tightened up like a school teacher about to hand out a beating to his favourite repugnant punch-bug.
‘It is not about what you LIKE, my dear boy, but about what your body LIKES. Do you understand?’
‘What about if you liven it up with a bit of seasoning, you know, spice it up with some pepper?’ I somehow felt it was my turn to step in and mediate. The NATO of the SoupMobile Station. Fucking hell, it felt a change to be the least fucked up person in the argument.
‘There is no pepper, Bill. No salt, no pepper, just vitamin-enriched healthy soup,’ said Derek.
‘Christ, I know they’re homeless, but they’re not animals. I’m going for a fag break…’
‘You don’t get “fag breaks” here, Bill.’ Derek did inverted commas in the air with his wiry fingers.
‘Well, I’m not being paid, am I?’
‘No…’
‘So then I’m taking a cigarette break. Thanks very much and I’ll see you in 10 minutes.’ A collective groan came up from the remaining queue. I undid the apron, threw the gloves on the floor and stormed out of there. Derek gave me a ‘You’ve won the battle but not the war’ kind of look. Fuck you, Derek, this’ll be your Bay of Pigs.
I stepped off the SoupMobile Station, reached into my pocket and realised I didn’t smoke anymore.
Fuck you, Rule Number 4.
Ah, one wouldn’t hurt, would it?
Baby steps, Bill, baby steps.
Outside the safe confines of the ex-burger van I felt a little like a honeymooner who’d escaped the security of a shark cage midway through a 14-day break in Sharm El Shiekh, figuring that now everyone had enjoyed the big day, getting out early was better than a lifetime of limp sex and white lies. The scene before me was an uneasy mix of feeding time at the zoo and mid-morning break at a special school. Now, where was the damaged kid with the cigarettes? Looking around you’d have to say it could have been any of them. I picked out my benefactor, got ready to drop my aitches and approached for a nicotine hit.
‘Why should I?’ Christ, I’d picked an existentialist.
‘Out of the milk of human kindness?’
‘I ain’t got none of that, mate.’
‘Because I’ve just served you some soup?’
‘If it wasn’t you it would have been someone else…’ Although relatively minor, the decision to negotiate with this particular bum looked like the latest in a long line of bad decisions.
‘Okay, it’s like that, is it? Well how’s about this, pal? It was my idea to set this place up over three years ago to help people like you get some hot food in their stomachs. Surely that’s got to be worth a smoke?’ Okay, I’d used some artistic licence. And the kitchen was technically on its way out. But nicotine was on the line here.
‘You set this place up?’ He emphasised his first word a little too much.
‘Yes.’
‘Personally?’
‘It was my idea.’
‘So why have I never seen you here before then?’
‘I’m more of a behind the scenes kind of guy.’
‘So what’s this then? Undercover Boss?’
‘How do you even know TV programmes? You’re homeless.’
‘Don’t judge me just because I’m taking your handouts. I’m a lot smarter than you think.’
‘Right…’
‘You know who else set up a soup kitchen? Al Capone, that’s who.’ Fucking hell, I was arguing with some trivia tramp for a cigarette. Not drugs. A CIGARETTE. We picked our own battles, I suppose.
‘Right, here’s a fiver. Give me one NOW.’ His face lit up. Well as much as it could for a man who shat in a department storey doorway.
‘There…’ He passed me a soggy box.
‘My brand too.’
Victory.
Light.
Inhale.
What I’d have given for the hit to be harder than a Golden Virginia.
My head rushed and thoughts followed. I’d spent far too much time with this city’s underclass for a man that pulled a wage that could have put the Brady Bunch through college. Sure, you could buy drugs from flash wheeler-dealers or other bored executives, but moving amongst the street people offered an anonymity appealing to someone prone to blackouts and the black dog. Too many times doing too much coke with alcoholics in alleyways. But tramps couldn’t afford beak and beak wasn’t brown. We’d all always known this. Our little secret.
&
nbsp; ‘Right everybody, grab-a-garment will be starting in a few minutes over by the First Aid station. Be sure to get some warm clothes, guys and gals, Jack Frost is going to be out in force over the coming weeks.’ Nick projected like an over-friendly politician desperate for your cross in his box. The bums sprung to life, albeit a low level one, the sound of rustling shell suits, wheezing lungs and petty squabbling bouncing back off the tarpaulin roof.
I was suddenly flung forward by an unexpected force from behind. My hands reached out to soften my fall and took the bulk of the blow. Blood gushed from my grazed palms and brought tears to my eyes, visions of playgrounds past flashing through my mind.
‘Get up, man. You shouldn’t have been leaning against the bloody door to the Station, should you? Ridiculous place to rest yourself.’
Derek.
Fucking Derek.
A few stopped their rush to the hobo Harrods sale and gathered around me. I pulled myself to my feet and felt a calmness come over me. I rocked onto my right foot and directed a left hook at Derek’s ruddy right cheek.
All 200 pounds of the 60-plus retired military man and part-time volunteer hit the deck. I think punching a senior citizen probably outweighed the good karma I’d earned from my earlier contribution this evening. Yin and yang. Ringside let out a demented yelp. The others had now swelled the Madison Square Concrete crowd. Before I knew it I was lifted onto shoulders. I was the Rocky of the Reprobates. The Sugar Ray of the Underpaid. As they spun me around, faces flashed by. Nick – angry, Carol – stunned, the bums – toothless and happy. Then I saw him. The one from outside the office. The one with the sad, ravaged eyes. The one who looked like he’d once known life. The one who looked like he knew me.
The spinning began to make me feel sick. I got down and ran all the way home.
Chapter 18
Ring, ring, rrrrrrrrrrrrring.
I reached through the darkness for the Flakberry. The yellow backlight showed a withheld number. Pre-revelation I’d have never answered a call like this. A random signal bounced to my cell by a satellite thousands of miles from my bed which could only lead to threats or regret. Time to face the world head on though, William. I pressed the green button. A voice sang down the line.
‘The Candyman can….’
‘What?’
‘…cos he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good…’
‘Who the fuck is this?’
‘Billy boy, no need for such coarse language. Where have you been all this time? We’ve missed you. We’ve got some new stuff in. I’m calling it the Economy Seven. It’ll keep you going all night for fuck all.’ It was one of my old dealers. No, one of my ex-dealers.
‘I’ve lost my sweet tooth.’
I hung up and switched the phone off. I rolled over. My bedroom was hot. And not Swedish-blonde hot. More Turkish prison hot. I’d tossed and turned and turned and tossed each and every night since I’d been on the wagon. My sleep for the past forever had been sponsored by stimulants and I’d always passed off into the land of lucid dreams drunk and dying on the inside. But asleep. Always asleep. I’d forgotten what it was to drop off as I was constantly drugged up. It felt like learning to ride a bike again. A really rusty piece of shit bike with no saddle and handlebars made of broken glass. The thoughts that pinballed through my mind when the light went out ranged from the insightful to the banal: from Christy to a contemplation on the rights and wrongs of my parents’ divorce to a Madonna lyric. Fucking Madonna.
My bed felt like I’d pissed it. Now, it wasn’t like I was a stranger to waking up in my own juices. The unfortunate by-product of a boozer’s lifestyle was – how do I put it? – that sometimes the tap was left running when the bath was already full. The worst incidents come when in company. The man who can retain a shred of dignity after his dick showered the satin when with a sleeping ladyfriend is a more diplomatic one than I. While those days could be behind me, the alternative wasn’t much better. I hoped it was an interim state of affairs. Sobriety had so far been characterised by sweating. Heavily. Suspiciously. Caught out by nature’s flushing away of the things I took to fuck myself up. A walk into the office would be rewarded with fresh, damp, ominous patches like moody cumulous under the arms of a button down collar Oxford blue shirt. The anti-perspirant applied an hour previously was rendered redundant, the field test biting its thumb at the scientifically proven stamp of approval positioned by pay-rolled physicians in column inches secured by the consumer team in aspirational men’s lifestyle magazines. Whether selling in a story to a hardnosed hack, dispensing of a high protein low carb lunch at an overpriced eatery, or sat in my pants mulling over which direction to take the evening’s online erotic voyage, an ever-present bead of sweat sat on my temple. You’d have seen cooler paedos at a Boy Scouts’ parade. This corporeal detoxification gave the outward impression I had something to hide, at the one time in my life when I actually didn’t. It was worst at night. If you could have bottled the stuff up and sold it then you’d have had a distillation of dangerous fucking proportions.
I rolled over to try and find a dry patch. No dice. I was an obese man in a broken down sauna. Dressed in black. In the middle of the Serengeti. There was a light tap on the door. Someone was trying to get in.
‘Bill… Bill… are you in there?’
I grunted affirmative, a tea deficit doing for my vocal chords.
It was Connie’s squeaky voice. I cleared my throat. A hard phlegm lodged itself behind the teeth on my lower jaw.
‘Would you like a cuppa?’
‘Yes please, that would be lovely.’ I fought the urge to be pedantic about the brewing process. Christ, I had changed.
‘Should I make two cups?’ she threw into the air.
‘What…? Oh, I got you. No, no need. I’m home alone.’ She squeaked a rodenty laugh.
‘Thought it was best to check, hey?!’
I faked a laugh. I was awful at faking laughter. Daytime-Soap awful.
‘What time did you get in last night? You must have been as quiet as a mouse. We didn’t hear a thing.’
‘I, erm, didn’t. Go out to come back in I mean. I came home straight from work and went straight to bed.’
‘Jesus, Bill. Are you feeling alright?’
‘Well, yeah, I suppose…’
‘Well the ravens truly have left the tower. Bill McDare tucked up early on a weeknight… stranger things have happened at sea I suppose.’
Connie poked her head around the ajar door.
‘Tea and toast for one coming up!’
I must have drifted off because I awoke to a lukewarm tea and cold toast on the bedside cabinet. It was hard to work out if this was the dream or the wake. Lines blurred. I needed caffeine, at the very least. Disregarding my usual fascism against non-scalding drinks I held onto the cup and tried to take in its restorative brew. Emphasis on tried. My hand shook and spilt the tea all over the bed. Twitches and tremors were becoming increasingly commonplace. It’s not like the bed was dry anyway. I was unaware of the time. It seemed less on my side, as underneath me, all around me and on top of me. Now I wasn’t drinking, I had so much of it. The daily struggle had become not how to hide the hops on my breath but how to fill time interestingly enough to banish thoughts of the bottle to the back of my head. Everyday tasks were stretched to fit a diary window with no Outlook alarm to signal its end. The brushing of teeth had become a multi-layered and methodical task, ticking off ten rotations prior to moving onto the neighbouring incisor, avoiding the bitter alcoholic mouthwash like never before.
Mornings no longer meant hangovers and racing against the clock to avoid a bollocking from Miles, but wide awakenings, updates on the Flakberry’s 4G and broadcast bulletins. I’d never been more over the news agenda. 24 hours, online, offline, blogs, microblogs, tweets, tumblrs, radio debates, morning briefings: give or take the odd serial killer or presidential pardon, it was a blurge of soon-to-be forgotten information. Tomorrow’s chip paper didn’t half fill cold turkey
. I could spend forever following headlines and hashtags, which was useful, as without having the booze and blow to lean on, forever was what I had. My personal professional stock, which had previously been strained through a sock, was done no harm by my new found awareness. I’d alert clients to upcoming governmental economic announcements on which to piggyback news of jobs growth. I’d flag up the latest environmental disaster to colleagues – be it an oil slick the size of Wales off the Cape of Good Hope or a melting ice sheet in Greenland – so they could align their strategy with the corporate social responsibility cause célèbre de jour. My finger was the fucking pulse.
Speaking of pulses, my room looked like it had one. The half full cups, scattered shirts, crumpled clothes and greasy pizza boxes gave the ten by eight shoebox a beating heart, a warm, damp haven where civilisations of cultures were born, lived and evolved. The people of the green moss in a Cup-a-Soup left to dwell on the dresser had reached their Iron Age and recently started worshipping false gods. It was time for a tidy, a spring-clean regardless of the season. What I needed to do was first step back, move from the microcosm to the macrocosm and strategise. A Gannt chart with each and every constituent task broken down into rows and columns of collective time-killing. Being sober was fucking dull.
I was midway through allocating a traffic light system to the stinking sundries of the room when it happened. No, not (another) spiritual awakening or a eureka moment when the answer to the world’s energy crisis suddenly illuminated my grey matter, but a violent, post-ominous bowel movement. I needed to unload, and now. Poo had become a protagonist of my alcohol-free life, elevated from basic human need to overriding raison d’etre. At least now I was at home, well, as at home as number 35 could ever be. Close to the reassuring porcelain. This hadn’t always been the state of affairs. The worst incident had happened during a beauty parade for a new washing detergent. The potential client was a dour, Presbyterian Scot, who looked like she’d last smiled during a bout of unexpected childhood flatulence. She had a sharp black bob which the dark wrinkles under her eyes told was dyed regularly and efficiently. The air conditioning in the small rectangular boardroom was broken, or being conserved, leaving the smell of latent booze sweating out of my system to battle with the stench of bleach for scent superiority. The ammonia needn’t have bothered. Miles was a third of the way through the PowerPoint slides when I’d tried to eke out a non-squeaky fart. My stomach had been performing somersaults more fitting to a circus with a poor safety record. First I had felt the release then the relief, before the realisation. Someone or something had let the safety off my trump trigger. I was damp and an unsettling aroma of inner decay unleashed itself around a room hitherto rapt by Miles’ deconstruction of brand loyalty to FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods for the acronym illiterate) in the Baby Boom generation. It was imperative I remained steadfast. Emotionless. Kept a straight face. What this situation called for was a good old-fashioned stiff upper lip. The sweep it under the carpet, say nothing, do nothing and be content, if only outwardly, in your ignorance approach. Hopefully, the rest of the room would fall into line, repressing the urge to speak up deep down inside them so it could well up for 30 years before exploding into a brain tumour or a cardiac arrest on a golf course in the Mendips on a pleasant autumn morning. There was ALWAYS a payback.