then the purring began again – the bloody cat – and I looked down to see her rolling on the carpet beside the dark mess, as if the smell was catnip to her, and not the stench of the putrefying bodily fluids of a decomposing corpse.
Colin
I was eating cornflakes and reading jokes aloud from the back of the 1982 Beano annual when my father clutched his chest and dropped dead on the kitchen floor.
Looking back it almost seems comical, but I believe that this was the moment when my life took a change in direction. My father was the sort of person you could read jokes to. He would spend Sundays fixing the car and I would help him, learning where all the pieces went and what they all did. He laughed a lot and together we both laughed at my mother, who was thin, and serious, and bitter.
After he died, I couldn’t bring myself to read the Beano any more. I didn’t really laugh any more, either.
It’s grim, feeling like this on a Monday morning. Other people have hangovers, people my age; or they’ve spent the weekend caravanning, or shagging their girlfriends. Or shagging someone else’s girlfriend. I’ve spent my weekend writing an essay, and staying up too late with whisky and porn. As a result I’m finding it impossible to concentrate on the budgets.
The trouble is that I’m not sure I even want a girlfriend any more. I like my life the way it is, carefully ordered. I like my house the way it is. I’m not pathetically tidy – no visiting psychologist would have concerns for my sanity – but I think I would find it annoying to have to accommodate someone else’s things. Clothes finding their way into my wardrobe. Books on to my bookshelf. Food into my fridge. No, I don’t want that. I don’t have room in my house. And I don’t suppose I have room in my head, either.
Still, sex would be nice.
Garth has once again failed to bathe this weekend. He’s on the far side of the office yet I still catch a sniff of him every so often. As hard as I try to concentrate on happier things, I can’t help breathing in his direction, experimentally tasting the air again and again, incredulous that such a scent could possibly come from a normal, gainfully employed adult. He picks food out of his teeth, accompanying this with a sucking noise, and while this nauseates me I find myself glancing across at him, watching him rooting around the back of his molars with a probing finger and wondering what he’s eaten that could possibly become that stuck. He has ink on his fingers, too, like a schoolboy, and, whilst I loathe the man, whilst every second in his presence is a form of torture to my senses, I have this dreadful fascination with him – an unquenchable curiosity about how someone so repellent can subsist in the modern world.
Martha saunters in late. New shoes, I notice – the third pair this month by my reckoning.
‘Morning, Colin – good weekend?’
She doesn’t really want to know, of course. It took me a while to work out that the question is rhetorical, a ritual for a Monday morning. The first few times she asked, I told her at great length what I’d done over the weekend, carefully editing the details that even I knew were not appropriate to share with a colleague. She looked vacant after a few minutes. She stopped asking, after that, and only recently – I believe when someone else asked me the same thing within earshot and got a brief response – did she recommence with the Monday ritual.
‘Fine, thank you. And you?’ It had certainly been eventful, especially Friday evening, but of course I wasn’t about to supply her with the details.
On occasion I heard her telling one of the others all about her weekend – kite-flying or baking or hiking or going to a fête or watching football or visiting her cousin or landscaping the garden – but her reply to me was invariably the same.
‘It was good, thanks.’
Vaughn sends me an email asking if I want to go to the Red Lion at lunchtime. I’m tempted to ask if he wants to go now; I doubt things are going to suddenly get more exciting here in the next three hours. It’s sad that the thought of half an hour in a dark, mouldy pub next to the gasworks with