The Nice Man

The Nice Man
Paranoid rain fleeing in terror from the psychopathic wind. Idiot leaves leaping and jumping insanely until they are beaten, insensate, to the wet pavement where their twitching corpses are ground to slush beneath the myriad feet that crush them unheedingly in the urge to be ever moving. Moving on and moving fast and then faster until the headlong rush becomes a headlong slither; shoes and boots no longer able to grip the slimy surface. But still the rush goes on.
But on to what? It is evening and the mad scramble is to get home. Home? What is home? To you? A box with dividing partitions? Or just one of those black holes ~ a hollow vacuum? A vacuum devoid of feeling, of emotion, well almost any emotion apart from a sense of loss. Just… nothingness. You might fantasize that he got there first and has opened the fire, turned on the heaters, put the kettle on, even thrown the washing from the machine into the tumble dryer. But the flat is dark and cold and smells of wet dhobi and… and of loneliness. A dryad whispers in your ear that even if he could ever come back again it would still feel the same. The only difference there would be is the beeping and click the joystick as he played his computer games, his Wii connected to the television, his shoes lying in the little hallway and his jacket on the floor. A lover’s clothes hurriedly discarded to submerge himself in the warm cocoon of his adored, to bury his head inside some sad fantasy just to see if he can use the new cheat that he learnt by the coffee machine at work to get beyond level nine or whatever.
Of course, there is no fire to open. The flat is all electric. When the power fails, as it does all too often, it means sitting in the dark ear to the battery radio with, maybe, a candle for comfort and company. Or, when it’s too cold, just go to a solitary bed until the shivering stops and the frosted sheets of glacier ice become a little warmer. Just as you do get warm, properly warm, the travel alarm clock shrieks its hate of living and it’s time to get out, into the chill, wash in the water that’s barely tepid after a night with no power, (they only go on strike in the winter), and then off to work again without even a warm drink. Can’t fill yourself up with toast because there’s no power... and you certainly cannot afford to pay almost four pounds for two slices of bread with some mush spread between and a cup of coffee. Just tell them that you’re on a diet and drink the freebie tea and coffee at work and try to see how you’ll manage the last eight days to payday.
It’s not quite that bad now. All the bills used to be due two days before payday and the smarmy berk at the bank used to charge you twenty seven pounds a time not to pay them. Then the nice man ~ you call him that because you don’t even know his name ~ anyway he found you crying, gave you a clean handkerchief to dry your eyes and blow your nose and he talked to you. He took you to the bank and it was the first time you have ever seen one man beat up another by just standing with his hands in his overcoat pockets and heaping technical and legal derision and scorn in such bucket loads that the bank had quietened and everyone listened in. Listened in and watched as the smarmy berk was reduced to tears and then you discover that he wasn’t the manager he claimed to be, just a glorified clerk. And the actual manager? Whatever it was the nice man said to him, you got back a lot of twenty-seven poundses and the man took a ‘few days sick leave.’
***
Now you’re alone in a dark flat. The power is back on but the darkness is somehow comforting. You drink your hot tea and wonder why you behaved today the way you did? All the tables in the works canteen had been occupied. Not fully. Just singles, along with the occasional twos or threes. Is it a British thing, this not wanting, not liking to share with each other? The nice man, you still don’t know his name, with his saucered cup of tea had looked around for somewhere to sit. You panicked. O God, no! Not with me. What’ll they all say? The truth, the dismally sad truth is that they’ll all say… nothing. Wouldn’t even notice. He had seen the rejection. You know he had. But he understood. The Fear. Your Fear. An irrational terror of... of Nothing. But he did understand. His head was tilted slightly and he just nodded to himself and had taken the seat at the large table with Melissa.
She never noticed, poor love. Just sat drinking her tea or coffee or khaki water, lost in her thoughts or worries of … of? Who can know? He didn’t intrude. He never intruded. In the six months or so he had been with the company he had helped solve the problems of life for at least one each week but… he never intruded. Nobody was even sure of his name. It was printed on the card sat on his computer on his desk but no-one ever took the time to look. Just like you they accepted the help and were grateful when he quietly melted away.
He got private mail at the office. Three days ago he’d had four or five square, white envelopes, obviously cards… birthday cards perhaps? Brightly coloured stamps said they came from strange places. The envelopes now all lay in a neat pile, unopened, on his desk. Or they had until this afternoon. He’d bought a plastic box file in WH Smith’s, or The Works, or some such store at lunch time and the cards, if that’s what they were, had been clipped inside, still unopened, and the file box dropped into a drawer. With an almost terrifying clarity, you realize that he doesn’t open the cards because they’ll lay bare the hollowness of his own life…and then, panicking again, ‘but I can’t do anything. Nobody can ask me to do...’ You hear his voice. “It’s alright… really. No-one is asking you to do anything. It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. Just try to ... live.”
Live? You tried to live. Thought you were living. A stormy relationship, everybody called it. You’d had to wear long sleeves even in the summer to cover the marks. Never went on holiday. Never any money for that. Wouldn’t have been able to wear any sort of swimsuit if you had. And whom did you have to talk to? Your mother told you to stop whinging and ‘make the dear boy happy.’ His mother had called you a lying cow and told her darling son what his slag of a whore was saying about him. When you had seen your mother-in-law again the older woman had turned away guiltily from the yellow black eyes and the split lip and vindictively muttered that you deserved it for telling lies. After that, she would always telephone first and ask her son if it was alright to come round?
He told everyone that you used drugs and were always drunk. He’d either scared off or warned off any friends you had once had. He took… he spent all your money, so how could you? But he did. And then that night when he told you he could fly and was going to soar over to the flats opposite to the girl on the top floor ~ the pretty girl on the top floor ~ you just walked away. Ran away really but walked. So Richard flew. He flew over a hundred yards. Of course, it was all downwards, but he did fly.
You told the nice man. You told it all to him. He bought you cappuccino, proper cappuccino with wonderful chocolate all over the froth and he got you to eat something warm. Something Italian and tasty.
You asked him, ‘Why do I tell you all this?’ but he just smiled and said,
‘Because I’m a stranger and I don’t count. Family? You can’t tell them. They’d use it against you. But me? I’m just a shadow. I don’t really exist.’ Afterwards he took you to the bank and used words you had never heard. He’d left the bank his card and they knew. Knew what he was and what he could do and what he would do. So they rationalized your account, madam.
***
In the office the other women all whispered that the nice man had used words to ‘Groper Fergus’, the admin manager, after one of the younger girls had been left in tears with what he wanted from her, if she wanted to keep her job. Words, they said, that would have made a Mafia hitman blanche.
Little Robert, from the post room, said that Mr Drew (so that’s his name!) had picked Fergus up by the throat with one hand and held him against the tiled wall and explained what plans he had for Fergus if Fergus was still in the building after lunch. Little Robert, frozen inside one of the cubicles, terrified his magazine might rustle and invite attention, heard Fergus actually cry and he knew that Fergus had peed himself as he hung there in the sky. Robert had seen the puddle spread. He never told you this, but the laughing voice had called, ‘Don’t be in there too long, young Bob, you’ll go blind!’
Fergus left the building. Never did come back. A nervous breakdown they said.
***
He left shortly afterwards. Mr Drew. He left. You wanted to say so much but you didn’t know how. None of you knew how. He brought lots of cakes and some fizzy white wine that tasted a lot better than the usual plonk that got brought in and you knew it was his last day. He hadn’t said he why was leaving or where he was going. He told you all he really liked you all and just to remember what She(?) had taught him. ‘If we all spoke less but said more, the world could be happier.’
In a couple of months or so someone would pin an obituary from The Times or The Telegraph on the board and you would all read it and discover what he had been and what he was when thugs had machine gunned him from behind in Kosovo. You’d all be quiet for a while but he had told you, separately, life always goes on. No one of us is really that important, not in the grand scale.
And then, in two or maybe three years time, you’ll find someone to love and who does really love and care for you and you might be on holiday in Spain and go to see the town of Altea, near Valencia, where so many Vikings and Cossacks and Prussians and Weavers seem to have made their homes. And in that peaceful old Spanish town with it’s Norwegian University you might hear a quiet, laughing voice and see a nice man who now walks using a stick and has his arm around a very pretty girl with green eyes and white blonde hair, years younger yet a millennium older than he, who smiles at him with that sort of smile that can tear a man’s heart out and you’ll know then what he had meant when he said we each get what we truly deserve and that there is a God and that She has such a wonderful sense of humour.