Humor (5 page)

I reach the wall opposite and haul myself into a standing position. I am now dry retching, and my first meal in some time is mingling with the lake of effluent at my feet. As I try frantically to work out what to do, I hear a roar from the kitchen. The griddle! I wade through the disgusting goo to the kitchen door and push it open, inadvertently allowing the backed-up sludge to pour through. To my horror the entire griddle area under the extraction hood seems to be on fire, my burgers barely visible through the flames. Without hesitating I splash back and grab the bucket, scooping up about half a gallon of slop from the floor, and rush back into the kitchen to fling it at the griddle. To my relief the flames die back a little, so I repeat the exercise several times more until the fire is completely out. I stand there, the empty bucket dangling from my hand, surveying the full horror of the situation. I have never seen anything even remotely as disgusting as the scene before me.

I tell myself that this is impossible. How can a long-handled teaspoon from a Knickerbocker Glory glass have caused this devastation? The kitchen and back room are flooded with the foulest liquid imaginable, the griddle and the walls adjacent to it are splattered and flecked with the same, the griddle itself is probably beyond repair, and I myself am covered almost head to toe in mashed, rotting leftovers and my own vomit. The smell is horrendous, and I cannot help but notice that the flood is seeping into the dining area under the swing doors that separate it from the kitchen. And, of course, The Pig is still broken.

I cannot stand it. I am incapable of anything except escape. I leave, slamming the back door behind me. The wind has stopped, and with every step the stench wafts up to my nostrils. Eventually I get home, and with incredible relief turn on the shower, peel off my sodden clothes and stuff them into the bin. I stand under the shower for what could be hours, then dry myself and fall into bed, and then into sleep.

In the morning it takes a while for the gravity of my predicament to sink in. I cannot decide what to do, and the fact that I am afflicted with a ravenous hunger does not make clear thought any easier. At last I decide to turn up for work at one o’clock as normal, and feign complete ignorance of what has happened to the restaurant.

When I arrive I am considerably disconcerted to find the premises cordoned off with police incident tape. The staff are huddled outside, talking urgently, and I walk over, and innocently enquire about what has happened. The waiter who intends to become a comedian tells me
that the restaurant is now a murder scene. He says that the early shift arrived to find the place in complete disarray, that there had been a fire, and something like a burst sewer pipe had flooded the ground floor. It had been the sanitising contractors who had raised the alarm when they found what they thought were human finger bones in the sewage. The police had arrived, and sealed the building with blue-and-white tape. No one was allowed in.

Overcome with conflicting emotions I walk a short distance away and sit down on the pavement. Human finger bones? It is all rather too much. After the trauma of the previous night I cannot take this new development in. I have to eat something. I walk back over to my colleagues and broach the subject of our wages, and what is likely to happen now that there will be no work at this establishment for some time, or, more likely, ever. The other chef, the one whose aspirations I am unaware of, tells me that there is little chance of getting paid now. No one has been able to contact the manager, and in any case it is doubtful, even if he were to arrive, that the police would allow access to the safe.

I’m not feeling very good. I leave, and then remember my friend, the one who recommended that I get a job at this restaurant. I walk over to her house, and she lets me in, looking very concerned and asking if I’m all right. I answer that I’m not, not really, and recount my awful experiences since I last saw her. And I ask her if she has any food.

After eating a sandwich and drinking a brandy I’m beginning to feel a little clearer. My friend has heard about the murder/restaurant business on the radio. I ask her if
she thinks that I will be a suspect, because I must have left fingerprints all over the place last night. She doesn’t think so; she tells me that all the staff will have done the same. And in any case, she says that the radio said that the police are treating the disappearance of the restaurant’s manager as ‘suspicious’. Apparently he first went ‘off sick’ when she was still working there, and no one has seen him since that time. I ask for another sandwich.

We listen to the radio, but apart from what the Chief Superintendent calls ‘significant developments’ and an ‘ongoing investigation’ nothing much has happened. The corpse has been partly reassembled and ‘is thought to be a male in his mid-to-late forties’, which my friend tells me fits the description of the manager. I think of The Pig, and those bone-crunching sounds it made. I had almost come to feel affection for it, but now my feelings are more of revulsion. The fact that I have been sprayed with the decomposed and macerated remains of the manager makes me feel quite horrible. We get the brandy out again and I’m afraid that I drink most of it.

At six we turn on the television set to watch the news, but I am a little too drunk to focus on it properly. I fall into a doze, but my friend wakes me by shaking my shoulder. The television screen swims into view, and I watch with shock as I see the assistant manager, screaming in a most familiar way, being manhandled into the back of a police van, lashing out and spitting at the police. The reporter announces that she has been arrested on suspicion of murder, then tells the viewers how it is alleged that she dismembered the manager and fed him to The Pig, which
the reporter refers to as a ‘waste-disposal unit’. It further transpires that she has been raiding his bank accounts to make a deposit on a rural property and to invest in a prestigious ballet academy.

I am astounded. I feel almost like an accomplice, especially when I think of The Pig. I think I am in some sort of shock. I fall asleep again.

When I awaken it is the morning, and my friend has gone to work. She has left me a note, saying that I can stay there and to help myself to anything in the kitchen. I trudge desultorily to the refrigerator and drink some milk. I realise with a dreadful empty feeling that I still have no money. There is a local paper in the sitting room, and I sit on the sofa, leafing through the ‘situations vacant’ pages, imagining what appalling horror will befall me when I next try to earn a wage.

There was disaster coming; that was obvious. Life had been almost ridiculously easy, and now things were going to get worse. Much, much worse. I couldn’t believe that I had ever thought otherwise. I couldn’t believe that I’d ever thought that there could be any other outcome.

But I had.

I had disregarded a thousand different types and variations of warning for years.

I had believed implicitly in the power of the Authorities to deal with any situation that may have worried me.

My bookshelves were full of books, packed with scientific explanations, and I had taken out a variety of insurance that implied my life was worth money.

I did not think that my life or, more precisely, the manner in which I lived it was effectively an inexorably lengthy suicide, although, of course, it was.

Small things were changing, but I had preferred to remain oblivious.

I did not much miss the butterflies, and birdsong had only reminded me of mobile phones or car alarms anyway.

Disaster I thought of in inverted commas:

‘DISASTER’.

It was something that, if it were to happen, would look
like extremely expensive special effects.

Because the world was big, and seemed to alter only in the details, I slowly became comfortable in many assumptions. I fossilised into what I saw as an eternally stable sediment.

In this state I engaged actively with property, clothing, money, culture, and had a vested interest in continuing to do so.

In this I was not alone.

Even though I had often observed newly born swarms of mayflies smashed to pieces by a sudden and unexpected showers of hailstones, I often used credit cards.

Even though I myself had mercilessly crushed legions of ants beneath my feet, I took out a mortgage on a house that I then renovated, decorated and bought furniture for. And even though I had seen on the television many harbingers of disaster, I carried on acting as if nothing was wrong.

All of this was an error.

No. Not just an error; it was an immense mistake.

When, at last and unequivocally, I had to admit to my deeply comfortable self that disaster really was coming and that its coming was inevitable, I took certain steps.

Everyone that I knew of lived in houses, and it rapidly became clear that all of these houses were either too old, too dangerously situated, or in any number of other ways inappropriate. We used our diverse and highly developed skills to research the question of what to do.

We decided to build a new house that had none of the drawbacks of previous habitats. We selected a site and had the house built. The disaster was definitely coming, but money still worked as it always had, as did credit, mortgages, property, and all the other things we clothed ourselves with.

There seemed to be no particular urgency regarding the disaster; only a dull sort of inevitability. Our new house fulfilled all the requirements we sought, but there was one thing we had not thought about.

One thing we had not got right.

We built a house with too many shadows in it. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you notice at first; oh no.

The shadows did not become evident until it was too late.

Of course. Not until it was much, much too late.

And soon it was clear to us all that the disaster was almost upon us. This we deduced from the undeniable fact that many of the things to which we had become accustomed began to stop functioning.

The telephones became unreliable, and there was often no money in the holes in the walls. There was no more petrol, which led to some very unpleasant scenes, both on the roads and elsewhere. People had certainly been guilty of selfishness before, but the stoppage of petrol made a lot of people act extremely thoughtlessly.

In addition to our frequent and increasing daily troubles, the always-awkward-to-reach call-centre employees whom
we relied upon for many things were frequently completely absent, and when the telephone systems did actually work we were usually rebuffed by recorded voices that enticed us through several options before becoming silent.

One evening the television had nothing to show us.

And then, almost suddenly, it was no longer possible to buy newspapers, or indeed many sundries including soap, dish-washing tablets, razors, light bulbs, vacuum-cleaner bags or toilet paper, as the family who had owned the shop had gone. We tried to find other shops, but the families who owned them had gone too.

We now had to think about the how of getting, rather than the how much to get. This was a strain. It occurred to me, not infrequently, that our civilisation had, of late, begun to make the simplest things extremely tortuous. We had perfected what now seemed a psychotic level of complexity around simple human activities like eating, keeping clean, and moving from one place to another.

Our supply of electricity became erratic. At the end of a day filled with minor panics of one sort or another it was apparent that there was no more of it at all.

That was where our real problems started.

Looking back, I can see that they began long before that. Our problems began a long, long time ago, when they were invisible, and continued during their gradual appearance.

The problems grew and were nurtured by our casual indifference, our sneers, and the ignorant manner in which we chose to live. Our gestating problems were the dark, inevitable spectre that accompanied us to the cashpoint, into work, to the supermarket, and into our gritty, tortured beds.

And after the end of the electricity, the shadows conspired against us.

The dark corners began to scare us more than the coming disaster. The disaster was imminent; that was clear from the disappearance of many things that we had assumed to be vital to our being. But the threat from the shifting shadows in our house was worse, far worse.

We began, almost imperceptibly, to panic.

However much we reassured ourselves that we were safe, that the disaster would flow over us, that we had stockpiled, that we were defended and guarded against every eventuality, the insistent shadows illuminated our vulnerability.

When night came, we fell to a brooding quietude, eyeing each other with suspicion, inventing justifications for our dark feelings.

We cloaked our hidden desires; we conspired with the shadows.

Nothing seemed to be happening.

The television, I realised, had been a sort of terminal that connected me to a wider understanding of events. And without newspapers it was impossible not to write my own internal headlines during my sleepless nights. Worry became constant; worry and enforced exile from everything I was accustomed to.

I had never envisaged a sort of loneliness that did not involve people. But in fact it was the lack of small items that I had previously taken for granted that made me lonely. I missed tea, toothpaste, remote controls, coffee, ballpoint pens, margarine, AA batteries, and easy credit in high-street stores. I missed my favourite magazines.

And the dead silence that encloaked the telephone and the television made me lonely. And the hollow look in the eyes of the people – oh …

After the end of electricity, the nights lengthened.

We had to wait in the dark, listening.

Life had quickly become intolerable for some of us.

It wasn’t that I found my existence more tolerable than theirs; only that I felt that I had a sort of fortitude, a sort of – wisdom.

Nobody was happy.

The light in the house became less and less; the shadows darker and darker.

Still we waited for the disaster.

And when I looked, when people moved in front of the windows in the grey light, their shadows cast quickly clattering dark talons across the floor. This only became worse as the light faded.

I forbade them from moving, as it had become impossible to tell shadow from shadow. Or shadow from human.

Mine was a necessary act, an act that intended to prove that we had to be strong and united against the looming disaster.

The man had always been unreliable, but certain events had proved to me that he was a liability. If it had not been me it would have been another who would have had to take that awful decision.

Nobody witnessed anything; not that it would have made any difference if they had.

I was not ashamed, and after a certain amount of uproar I explained my reasoning and my actions to the others. But I did not go into the details; if I had told them about his struggling, and how long it took, there would undoubtedly have been problems.

We carried his carcass beyond the perimeter wire and left it in a ditch.

Inevitably, there were people who objected, and they were next.

When disaster is coming it is difficult to see clearly, but somehow I could see through the shadows to the light.

A long period of unpleasantness followed.

As the people in the house became fewer the shadows seemed to increase in number and in density. Often I perused my fading bank statements, lost in a reverie of long-gone financial transactions. I disliked being disturbed. Yes. I disliked that.

The disaster was coming. That was clear.

There were shadows everywhere.

When I was at last alone, when the people were all gone, I waited for the disaster on my own.

On my own.