Coffin Dodgers (2 page)

"Haven't seen that one." I give her an incredulous look. "Come on, let's see it then."

I select the programme and grainy underwater footage fills the screen. Something dark and sinister-looking enters the frame. It isn't a shark.

"Oh, for God's sake," Amy says. "It's a bloody submarine. Next!"

I spend a good five minutes searching the programme guide, but all the sharks appear to be hiding.

"Sod it," Amy sighs. "Stick on a music channel."

I skim past the easy listening stations and nineties classic rock documentaries until I spot an old Nirvana video. "How's this?"

"Ach, it'll do. What time is it?"

"Nearly nine."

"Shit. We'd better think of something fast, then."

Calling Dave to save him from the trauma of dodgy dates wasn't Amy's only idea. After three or four dates she realised that the calls were an excellent opportunity to mess with Dave's head. Now, when we call to give him an escape route we do our very best to make him laugh. It's all the more fun because we know he can't laugh. If he does then it's clearly not a serious work call -- so if he tries to leave it'll cause all kinds of unpleasantness, and if he stays he'll be really pissed off. We haven't broken him yet, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop trying.

"Okay," Amy says. "Any ideas? He needs to come back to the casino because..."

"Alien invasion?"

"We've done that."

"Earthquake?"

"Not funny."

"Invasion of the pod people?"

"Nah."

"Monkeys?"

Amy smiles. "Monkeys are good. Will I do the talking?"

"Naturally."

"Okay. Is it nine yet?"

I check my watch. "Another minute."

I start the countdown at ten. When I reach one, Amy hits the speed dial and puts the phone into hands-free mode. Dave answers on the second ring. That's not a good sign.

"Hello?" Amy says. "Is that Dave?"

"Speaking," Dave says in his most official voice. Things clearly aren't going very well.

"Dave, sorry to call you so late, but I'm afraid you need to come back."

"Come back? Why? What's the problem?"

Amy looks at me and raises her hand, making her fingers into the shape of a gun.
 

"Dave, we're under attack," she says. "We're under attack from --"

Amy pulls the imaginary trigger.

"Monkeys!" she bellows.

I'm bouncing up and down on the sofa making monkey noises. "Oo! Oo! Oo!" I yell.
 

Amy takes a deep breath and unleashes a blood-curdling scream.
 

I'm bouncing around the room, yelling, and Amy is screaming like someone from an old horror movie.

We're laughing so much that we don't even notice Dave hanging up.

"You utter, utter bastards," Dave says. It's just after ten, he's on my sofa and he's drinking the bottle of beer I handed him as he walked through the door.

"Good night?" Amy asks, putting on her most sympathetic expression.

"Hellish," Dave sighs. I catch Amy's eye. She's trying not to laugh.

"Hellish why?" I ask.

"We went to Tosca's."

"Good choice." Tosca's is friendly, intimate and cheap without being cheap, if you know what I mean.

"Yeah, that's what I thought. But when we were looking at the menu Pamela started looking really unhappy."

"Was it something you said?"

"No, no, it was the food."

"She doesn't like Italian?" Amy says.

"She's vegan. Can't eat anything that an animal's looked at, that kind of thing. There wasn't a single thing on the menu she could eat."

"So did you go somewhere else?"

"I suggested that, but she said Tosca's was fine. I asked again and she started getting annoyed."

"So what did she have?"

"Green salad."

"Anything with it?"

"Couple of olives."

"Cheap date," I say brightly, but Dave doesn't find it funny.

"It was a nightmare," he says. "I'd ordered a cannelloni, and every time I took a bite she looked at me as if I was murdering a cow right in front of her. She's sitting there, munching on a leaf, and I'm feeling like I'm Hitler."

Amy's trying to be kind, but I can hear the wobble in her voice. "So what did you talk about?"

"We?" Dave says. "I hardly said a word. She spent the whole time telling me how evil eating meat was. I'm trying to eat and she's talking about abattoirs and fleshing machines. She was pretty intense about it, too."

"Shit," I say. "Did it put you off your food?"

Dave looks at me as if I'm crazy. "Of course it didn't," he says. "Tosca's cannelloni is brilliant."

Amy's still trying not to laugh. "So... when are you seeing her again?"

Dave gives her an angry look and Amy cracks up.

By midnight Dave is waxing lyrical, as he tends to do when he's had a few beers.
 

"You know what I'd do?"

We've been imagining what we would do if we had a billion dollars.
 

"I'd build a time machine and go back in time!"

"That's amazing, Dave," I say. "Most people with time machines use them to mow the lawn. But you? You'd use a time machine to… travel in time!"

Dave tells me to get stuffed and keeps talking.

"I'd go to the sixties, or the seventies!" he yells. "Or the eighties! The nineties!"

Amy spits out her beer, shouts "flares! Leggings!" and dissolves into fits of laughter.

Dave isn't for stopping. "I mean it! You've seen all the stuff online, the stuff from, you know, before. They had movies, and raves, and rock clubs. People would go to gigs and surf on each other's heads! Can you imagine that now?"

We shake our heads, although Amy is still smirking. "You wouldn't be able to hear the music for the sound of hips cracking," I offer. That sets Amy off again.

"Exactly!" Dave's built up a head of steam and I think he's tuned Amy out altogether. "It's all completely screwed up now. Then, there was stuff to do. There were TV programmes for us, magazines for us, places for us. What have we got now?"

"Not a lot," I agree. "But then, there's not a lot of us, is there? And even if there was stuff for us, we couldn't afford it."

Dave takes a long swig of his beer. "This sucks," he says.

"Yeah," I say. There's a long pause.

Amy gives Dave a sympathetic look. "It's not all bad, you know. I mean, yeah, they had lots of stuff going on, and yeah, it does suck a bit, but you've got to be thankful for one thing," she says.

"What's that?"

"You'd look terrible in flares."

CHAPTER TWO

You're probably wondering about all that stuff earlier, writing "old farts" on the bowling green lawn -- and it was writing, not anything else; I know what the paper says, but we didn't cut anything into anything. We did it with weedkiller. The words wouldn't even have appeared for a couple of days, so the photo they ran was completely false.
 

It's not the first time we've done something like that (or the first time the paper's exaggerated it to make us sound like a menace to society, some kind of crazed terrorist group striking fear into the heart of the city). We'd never do any serious damage to anything, or do anything that could end up hurting somebody.
 

It's like Dave was saying last night. Everything sucks. There's nothing for us to do, so we have to make our own entertainment.

It's a kind of revenge on the customers, too. You'd think owning everything might make them lighten up a little bit, but it doesn't. When the men aren't creeping out the waitresses they're trying to tell us the secrets of their success; the women talk to us as if we're badly behaved children who've let them down personally. Apart from the really scary ones, who talk about sex. So from time to time, we let off steam by, well, acting like badly behaved children. And it's usually a laugh. The other night was an exception, because we're usually a long way away before anybody spots our handiwork. That's probably the closest we've ever come to being caught.
 

I'm not kidding, there really isn't anything for us to do. There aren't many of us, and the few places that did cater for people who still have their own teeth went out of business ages ago. There just weren't enough of us with enough money to keep them going, so one by one they either shut up shop or decided to focus on a different market. As the joke goes, they stopped catering for the hip crowd and went for the hip replacement crowd instead.

I don't remember things being any different, but things were different, not that long ago. Amy explains it better than me -- she's scarily smart -- but I can give you the basics. If you want to know more, Amy can fill you in later. I'd tell you to Google it, but you know what that's like. Most of the sites that talk about this stuff are written by crazies, conspiracy nuts or both.
 

Anyway. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

Once upon a time, the world didn't suck. The whole climate change thing was a bit of a pisser, I'll give you that, but things carried on pretty much the same otherwise.
 

It was something of a golden age, if you ignored the weather. Medicine got better, people lived longer and everybody watched a lot of TV. Everything was just dandy.
 

And then women stopped having babies.
 

It wasn't that women stopped wanting babies, it was that they stopped having them.
 

At first, nobody thought there was anything wrong. Most people thought it was just them, that they'd offended God, or broken a mirror, or stepped on a crack, or done something else to bring bad luck. They changed their diets, cut back on the drinking, exercised more and kept on trying, and trying, and trying.

It was only when the statistics people looked at the big picture and did things with calculators that they realised something bigger was happening. The number of babies born each year had been on a downward trend for a while, but then it just dropped off a cliff. I don't know the numbers, but it pretty much went from loads to hardly any in the space of three or four years.

It was ironic, really. The papers had spent years banging on about men's falling sperm counts causing an infertility crisis, but in the end it wasn't men's fault. At least, it wasn't their fault directly.
 

They're still not sure about the "why" -- believe me, there's serious money being spent on research into this; whoever finds the problem and a way to fix it will be rich beyond their wildest dreams -- but the consensus seems to be that a food additive or something in food packaging or something in the water supply or death rays from the Planet Zog threw a great big spanner into women's reproductive systems. That spanner meant that women -- black women, white women, Asian women, rich women, poor women -- more or less stopped ovulating. Men's little soldiers could swim all they wanted, but while the lights were on, there was nobody home.

Not all women were affected. A tiny minority was fine, and that tiny minority became very rich very quickly, selling eggs to the highest bidder. Doctors made a packet too, because the demand for fertility treatment went through the roof. They could charge as much as they wanted, and most of them did. That's your supply and demand right there.

So, what do you get when nobody's having babies and everybody's living longer? If you answered "a world that sucks", you win the prize. This world is an old world. The elderly run the show, and the rest of us, the massively outnumbered rest of us, run after them.
 

It's not a generation gap. It's more of a Grand Canyon.

I've been on shift for about an hour when Amy comes over.

"If one more ugly --"

"decrepit --"

"shaky --"

"rheumy --"

"Rheumy? That’s a good one," Amy says.

"Thanks. Where were we?"

"Yellow --"

"Not the Yellow Man again?"

"Yep."

The Yellow Man is one of the regulars. We call him the Yellow Man because he's yellow. That's not a euphemism, or a metaphor, or some other kind of nickname-related cleverness. He's a funny yellow colour. There's something seriously wrong with his kidneys, or his liver, or something like that.
 

Amy looks more serious than usual -- and she usually looks pretty serious. "You know he's always been creepy, right?"

I nod.

"I think he's been down to the Creepy Mart and ordered a special delivery of Captain Creepy with his Creep Card."

I nod again. "That's pretty creepy."

"It is."

"So what's he done now?"

"Well, you know he's always giving me the chat about how if he was thirty years younger, that kind of thing?"

"Yep. I still think you should stab him with something."

"Yeah. Tonight was different, though, it was worse. He told me that his 'ship' was 'gonna come in' any day now" -- yes, Amy's doing the finger-quote thing. I never said she was perfect -- "and that when it does, he's going to come back here and sweep me off my feet."

"In those exact words?"

"Don't be silly. You know what he's like." I do indeed. "He stood up and did a couple of pelvic thrusts."

"Ugh."

"I know! Then he fell over."

I try to stifle a laugh. I don't succeed. Amy tries not to laugh at me laughing. She doesn't succeed either.

The rest of the shift was uneventful. Work was steady but not too little or too much, tips were okay but not spectacular, Amy was only goosed once and Dave only had to eject one person. It was hardly a test of his physical prowess. The culprit had sparked up a cigarette at one of the roulette tables. The host asked him to put it out for the sake of the other players' health, and the man embarked on a big rant about smoking Nazis that was only interrupted by a coughing fit so epic that he nearly lost a lung. By the time Dave got to the table he was slumped on a chair, wheezing. "I felt sorry for him," Dave told us. "I think he was just trying to get some attention."

He isn't the only one. After we've clocked out and started to walk home, Amy is all serious again. "Guys, the Yellow Man is really starting to freak me out," she says.