Worst Case Scenario - Being Peter To Save Paul (Part Two)

His world was falling apart. Everything he knew to be true, everything he believed in and was certain of, was a lie. What was the world coming to, when your shares in Woolworths were now so worthless they’d been posted back to you, scribbled on the back of a used napkin? When your BHS pension had been siphoned off to cover the credit card bill of some bloated CEO’s expensed mistress? And when threatening a customer service agent with the act of making an official complaint, they don’t give the remotest of shits?

He’d clearly forgotten that he’d talked to me a few weeks back, and that it was indeed me that had added the items to his order that he “DID NOT CONSENT” to being delivered. I hadn’t sent them by mistake, I’d sent him the extra items meaning to cause the very inconvenience he was now faced with, on account of calling me a ‘mumbling idiot’, thinking our call had disconnected. Now a couple of degrees off boiling point with my faux understanding of the problem, it was the offer to send him the unwanted pillow protectors in the correct size (“Ah, yes, not to worry, Sir, that often happens to customers of a certain neck girth - I’ll send you the large”) that got the kettle whistling…

“NO, I DON’T WANT THE BLOODY THINGS REPLACED!!!…I DIDN’T…RIGHT, I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS! ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS! I’LL BE WRITING TO THE HEAD OFFICE… CAN I TAKE A NAME?” 

“Of course, Sir… it’s Martin Dale”

 

“WHAT? NO! NOT MY NAME!! - YOUR NAME!!”

 

“Oh right, I see, yeah…my name is Pete Baby”

 

“PETE BABY…?”

 

“Yeah. Pete is short for Peter….

 

“OKAY…”

 

“and Baby is short for Babylegs”

 

“....HOW DO YOU SPELL IT?”

 

“Spell what, sorry? My first name? Pete?

 

“SURNAME!”

 

“Oh, right…so it’s S.U.R.N.A.M.E…”

 

“....OH, YOU THINK THIS IS SOME BIG JOKE DO YOU? RIGHT, I WANT TO SPEAK TO YOUR MANAGER - NOW!”

 

“No problem, Sir. Can I speak to yours?”

 

“...EXCUSE ME?”

 

“Your manager. Are they there?”

 

“....I WANT YOUR REAL NAME! NOW!”

 

“As I said, it’s Pete, short for Peter… and Baby, short for-

 

“Peter…PETER - PETER!!!!” came the booming voice, snapping me back into the present. I wasn’t back home in the call centre, winding up customers and sending them items they never asked for, but stood in the dry, dead garden of a soulless house mid-renovation, albeit overlooking a picturesque bay in South Sydney. I was beyond remembering why, when stepping in for my cousin on this job, I’d decided to take his name. Maybe I thought that by becoming someone else entirely I’d inherit their strength, affability, and good looks. But it wasn’t to be. No, Captain Buy-To-Let had been landed with a weak-chinned Peter, who despite the 36 degree heat had turned up dressed like he was trying to get the band back together, and was so stunted he couldn’t even respond to his own name. He’d hoped for a Peter with hands embedded with years’ worth of hard-earned splinters. He was saddled with a Peter with long, soft fingers, and was clearly the kind of man who buttered both sides of his cheese.

Back in reality, Major Equity Release demonstrated, at great theatrical length, how he’d supposedly been trying to get Peter’s attention for a highly unlikely five minutes. He wanted the scaffold moved, and the heavy sections out back hauled to the front driveway to clear the way for the rest of it to come down. But as it had taken Peter a full thirty seconds to realise he was the one being spoken to, it was quietly agreed that he wasn’t fit for anything involving height, weight, or responsibility, and that he should stick to cleaning the scaffold that’d already made the journey, leaving the sentient human beings do the rest.

—-----------------------------------

My first efforts weren’t satisfactory, apparently. And you’d think not. Scaffold cleaning isn’t something covered in the mainstream British education system - unless you pick Scaffold Cleaning as a GCSE elective, which to my knowledge, nobody ever has. It would also be a deeply rare hobby to pick up as a young man, what with so many end-of-terrace walls bearing goalposts to kick footballs at, and an insurmountable amount of internet pornography to work through.

Before my second attempt, I was granted a lesson in what I imagine Sir Rental Yield has gone on to coin as ‘gold standard metal hygiene’. School was back in, as he performed a demonstration that while only lasting two minutes, must have shortened my life by at least forty-five. Aiming to claw some of that time back, I immediately reverted to cleaning the scaffold exactly the same way I’d done it the first time around, giving it the old ‘left to right, that’ll do’ the moment he sauntered off to deliver more of his wisdom to a captive audience plastering the hallway. “Ah, much better” he nodded on his return, convinced I’d adopted his patented Dual-Phase Dirt Displacement Technique™. “See mate, if you do something properly the first time, you save everyone the hassle” he said, definitely not for the first time - and likely most recently to his wife, after she gave birth to their second child in complete silence.

The rest of the day I was assigned to other small, deliberately made-up-on-the-spot tasks such as: “go the shop will ya?”, “bring the radio through from the kitchen”, and “stop talking to the ladders”. Most of the time he struggled to hide what an inconvenience I was, and when I was handed my pay at the end of the day I was well aware it was the most begrudging amount of money Admiral Portfolio had ever handed anyone. 

‘If only I had somebody turn up who was forward-thinking enough to unload the cement plaster from the car’ said his face.

‘If only I could send you a 16-by-16-foot metal shed you didn’t ask for, you’d be getting fucking three of them’ said mine.

—--------------------------------------------------------

A week or so had passed when it became clear that not properly cleaning scaffolds for $60 hadn’t effectively leveled the finances as first hoped, and so reluctantly I made myself available for a second day's cash in hand work. “It’ll be different this time" I told myself, “you’ve got experience now. ‘Go the shop’ means the one literally at the end of the road. Not the one you know of, about 11 mile west as the crow flies. Taking breaks on the way there and back because you thought you saw a parrot in a tree”. This time I was to be performing under my own name, as Peter himself was to be the other half of the double act. The hallucinogens long worn off and no longer a corridor stalking carnivore, he would be attempting the day on approximately minus two hours sleep and a head full of ‘Goon’, a cheap Australian spirit that came in a space age silver bag and tasted like something impersonating wine, if you closed your eyes hard enough. 

We readied ourselves in silence in the communal hostel bathroom - a pair of shell shocked conscripts heading back to the cash-in-hand trenches. The quiet shattered when Asian Joe burst in, demanding reassurance about the DIY haircut he’d given himself ahead of a full-time job interview at a factory that imported hoover parts. He looked like the victim of a stag-do prank head-shaving - patches of pale scalp glaring through what was otherwise Vantablack hair. The language barrier didn’t help, and he mistook our fits of laughter for wholehearted approval, smiling proudly as he left repeating his mantra of “Uh-huh, YES!”. We found out later he never made it past the security gate - of course he didn’t. Frankly, I’m surprised he wasn’t detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 on appearance alone. “You can’t go for an interview like that!” I finished laughing to Peter - before remembering to fetch my flip-flops for another day on a construction site.

We took the train to Caringbah Station and alighted for our organised ride to the work site. It was a pleasant, affable middle-class suburb - all clean cars, packed lunches and families heading off to school. I’d just started to relax, briefly entertaining the fantasy that the day might not properly begin at all, when, from somewhere in the distance, came the unmistakable sound of Lucifer’s Chariot approaching. Rust screamed against rust and metal barked on metal, and like a pair of spooked deer our necks snapped toward the sound like prey clocking a predator. “Ohhh shit,” we harmonised, somehow already aware not to rhetorically question for whom death on wheels had come for, it had come for thee. And thee, alas, was us. 

Frankenstein’s Monster Truck crawled up the street like a curse, completely at odds with everything light, law abiding and innocent. It lurched to a halt, exactly level with us, and in the driver’s seat sat the man with the wild in his eyes. He leaned out the window, looking us up and down, drinking us in, and growled:

“YOU THE BACKPACKERS!?”

Pete gulped. I nodded. Pete farted. ‘How many murdered backpackers’, I thought, ‘have heard that exact sentence before being driven into the middle of nowhere and eaten?’. The truck rolled forward another 20 feet or so before performing the slowest, most ominous U-turn imaginable, before finally settling again where we stood. He didn’t invite us to get in. There was no struggle. Those watching the inevitable ITV Drama reconstruction of our murder in a few years time will deduce that we sort of deserved it. I lost the improvised stare off between me and Pete to settle who’d be sitting up front. Not that the back seat was any more reassuring, what with half the space taken up by a machine that looked like it would be having our remains fed into it later on. I slid into the passenger seat trying all at once to seem assured of myself, yet not actually touch the leathery protective seat covering, which was 100% going to be made out of his own mothers skin. If there had been any doubt our kidnapper would be picking a tough bit of Ged out of his teeth shortly, those doubts were quickly put to rest when I noticed that he was driving in his bare feet. A nervous glance in his direction also confirmed that the tattoo on his arm was of a tiger that was being viciously strangled by a pair of invisible hands, its eyes both bulging yet resigned to its fate. ‘Christ’, I thought, ‘even in his chosen body art he has to be strangling something to death. There's no hope for us.’

As we drove and drove my survival mode kicked into play, and I tried to start making mental notes of our route and our surroundings - the left turns, the foliage - the nondescript newbuilds Australia is full of - in case we got our movie moment and he somehow got distracted long enough for us to escape. Then magically somehow getting a phone signal in the middle of nowhere on our burner phones and calling for help.

 

Me: "We turned left and then right… no! It was left again!"

 

Emergency Operator: What can you see now, Sir?" 

 

Me: I see a tree! I see a tree - I see a few trees!

 

Emergency Operator: Okay, we're going to need some more detail than that' -

 

Me: I don't know - er, there was a road and then, er, a tree - but like, a big one followed by some smaller ones and…and a house, with a car outside…I can see something really bright when I look up!

 

Emergency Operator: Sir, we'll do our best to get somebody out to you on the road, by the house, with the car and the tree somewhere under the sun…

 

Me: Yes, please hurry!

 

Emergency Operator: (Pulling a face to his colleagues and pointing to the phone) Yeah, no worries mate!

 

Redback Russ started to warm us up. “Are ya fit? Strong?” he said, with a grin that didn’t need explaining. It dawned on me. ‘Of course. He wants us to try and escape. He prefers to chase his food. I imagine backpacker tastes better when it’s ran for its life and wound up on the motorway trying to wave down traffic - ultimately tenderised by fear and the front bumper of a Ford Ranger.’

 

But when we got to the worksite, there were already two guys there, very much not dead - in fact they were the opposite of dead - professional rugby players. So that’s what he meant by “fit and strong”. Once again, I was destined to disappoint. These behemoths were used to punishing fitness regimes; I was still recovering from a stitch I had just from thinking about running for my life. The job itself was simple but brutal: running mulch from the bottom of a hill, all the way up 50 odd stairs to the top. We got stuck right in, if anything just to be more than stabbing distance away from our killer in waiting.

 

Predictably, after just one vertical climb I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth, everything in my vision had gone purple and I couldn't feel my shoulders. Peter hadn't fared much better, I turned to find him bent over with hands on knees, throwing up and shaking his head in surrender. After dry heaving the worst of it up, he turned to me and burped “I can't do this...”

 

I agreed.

 

We stood at the top of the hill camouflaged by overgrowth, reacquainting ourselves with oxygen and brainstorming some ideas. “Let's just fuckin’ leg it!” was Peter’s sole contribution, which he offered twice - like the naughty scouse kid who’d just ghostied his bike into the neighbour's car and knocked the wing mirror clean off. 

 

I disagreed.

 

“We're in the middle of fucking nowhere, we'll die!” I wheezed. “I’ve worked it out, he’s going to eat us. He'll enjoy it more if we're scared, yeah? Let's at least not give him that! I at least want to be hard to digest! Look, I'll go talk to him, explain - you just stay here and see if you can throw up on anything else”.

I treated myself to a moment. And it suddenly felt like this was going to be one of those moments - a crossroads. The sheer devastating humiliation of quitting after just one trip up the hill was almost too much to face. I stood there, looking down toward the bottom of this hill, where it appeared my dignity had come to die, and I saw my entire future unfurl in front of me…