by Chris Welsh
Chapter Four. 09:55am
NELSON, AHOY!
My trip to the elevators proved uneventful, though I did sneak in a quick trip to the bathroom and water fountain in a bid to 'freshen up'. Nothing in Susan's email suggested I would get lucky, but I reasoned that it never hurt to prepare. I may have been heading to a disturbing meeting where she asked me my clinical opinion on a monstrously hairy mole or played me some sort of rough demo CD she'd made by banging her face against tin cans and warbling, but also, in the back of my mind, I clung to the infinitesimal chance of a romantic liaison with Susan and her identical quintuplet sisters. It was impossible to know at this juncture.
The excitement at the unknown made pressing the button to call the lift a real joy. I enjoyed seeing the lighted numbers skip down from the ten to pick me up. My mood soured as something nagged in my mind, some unformed knowledge that spewed unease.
At this point I sensed something. My Wes-y Sense, if you will, bringing a stinging sensation to my eyes and instinctively curling my fingers into white-knuckled fists. A feeling of animosity brewed in my gut and a foul stench poisoned the otherwise conditioned air. A primitive hatred bubbled inside of me like that between Cat and Dog, or Cat and pretty much any other animal ever.
All of which signalled the approach of a beast named Nelson.
I watched the lift doors open like a gateway to the heavens and bounded in with frantic, determined leaps. I couldn't allow the Nelson to catch me.
"Door close! Door close, you bastard! Do what I tell you!" I muttered, attacking the golden circles like a mauling bear.
There's no positive spin to give this sweating ape and it would've reduced my brain to smouldering cinders if I were to even try. Nelson was, for want of stronger, fouler words, a terrible fat fuck whose ability to generate hatred compared only to the most murderous, pro-rape warlords. If someone sliced away the interesting parts of one hundred turds, then poured them into a human-shaped mould and magically imbued it with life, the resulting repugnant shit-man would be Nelson. He ordered the stationery I wanted. Or rather, didn't order the stationery I wanted. In fact he occasionally flat out refused to order the stationery because he was a jumped up prick of the highest order.
"Hold that door!" he said.
Hearing his shrill voice made me want to shove electric whisk blades in my ears and press the 'spin' button.
A small grubby mitt squirmed through the small gap between the closing doors and triggered the sensors, causing them to open again. The bastards. He sadly avoided the hand-caught-in-lift-door-as-it-rises bloodbath I'd hoped to see take place. In fact no physical damage occurred to Nelson at all, which was a shame.
"Oh. It's you," he said, speaking as if his tongue hated his mouth, or it didn't quite fit. A scent of decay flowed between his lips from his graveyard of a throat and an indescribable orange gunk layered his teeth. If it were up to me he'd wear a permanent mask or live in a sealed bubble made of black rubber. With no source of oxygen.
"No, it isn't me, it's somebody else. Please don't talk to me, Nelson."
"Yes it is. It is you. I can tell by your face. It looks like you. And no one looks more like you than you do. So it MUST be you."
Sherlock Pissing Holmes.
"Oh. Great. Congratufuckinglations. So your race of freaky mole people developed sight? What do you want? I don't have time for you, I'm going somewhere."
"I don't want anything. Not from you. I'm travelling up to the fourth floor toilets. The paper is...softer up there. And they have real Pepsi in the vending machines. No Popsi for Nelson, no sirree!"
I hated him. Such an astounding amount.
"Whilst I'm here with you though, I need to have a word in your lobes. PLEASE stop ordering things that don't exist. You're only hurting the company's reputation when I call up our supplies... supplier... and order an automatic pen switcher. It is neither big, nor clever."
"Like you."
"Exac...what?" He paused, staring at me with all the disdain his little pig eyes mustered. "Never mind, just stop asking for things you know full well I can't get. It's not fair, it makes me look silly and it proves what a big sausage you are."
'Sausage'. As an insult? It's down there with 'silly-billy' and 'nincompoop' on the offensiveness charts.
"I know," I told him, "I'm trying to ridicule you, to enhance your stupidity for my own enjoyment," but he didn't understand. After he finished scalding me for ordering staples twice a week instead of the designated, agreed upon, 'once', I punched him in the face.
Not literally, obviously - not 'in reality'. He'd probably have cried and made me feel a teeny tiny bit bad about it. But in my head I gave him the mother of all right hooks. Sent him flying, it did; arcing backwards through the air in slow motion, almost completing a full flip before crumpling up on the floor in hurty-faced agony with me towering over him, posing and screaming like a cheap anime villain. In my head I held the stance and said something belittling and badly-dubbed. Then, perhaps, I plunged my hand into his chest and wrenched out his still-beating heart.
I think he sensed my make believe scenario because he shut the fuck up quite quickly, turning his back on me while the lift slowed at his floor.
I fired a parting shot as he exited; I asked him to get me a few bottles of the tartan tipp-ex I'd heard all about. Said I'd read an exciting preview of it in Stationery Monthly magazine. He might have ordered it too, had I not also instructed him to drown himself in a pool of it.
My animosity towards Nelson stemmed from long ago, possibly even the dawn of time. Something in my DNA, perhaps, originating from an altercation our biological ancestors had when crawling from a puddle of primordial slime.
In the beginning, I didn't instantly dislike him; I merely thought of him as unnecessary. Not needed. Astoundingly pointless. I couldn't put my finger on why he existed or his purpose in life, so I comfortably ignored him like a scarf in summertime. But then he started being near me, engineering reasons to bother me in his uniquely unholy way by spoiling my breathable air with his waft of scummy underpants and digestive biscuits. He was a fly that chose to buzz around my face despite having the entire world under its wings.
THEN the scurvy son-of-a-whore got his 'promotion' to the position of Head Stationery Orderer which gave him cause to assume authority and begin telling me what to order, what not to order and when to not fucking order it.
Around this point something in my head clicked and I wanted to murder him and his entire extended family – pets included. I wanted to make duplicates of him to kill them too. Frivolous, maybe, but he shouldn't insist on being so bloody annoying. And he shouldn't call me a sausage. He was either a total idiot or a subversively evil genius. Possibly both. Oh, I also hated his mother, one of the many useless bosses that rattled around the building and the reason, I suspect, that Nelson had his job in the first place.
Fucking 'sausage'.