... semi is a semi is a semi (5)

A couple of lads in the next cubicle chopped lines and snorted.

Sitting on the bog, Pete checked his phone for messages. It occurred to him that he had no male friends. They had disowned him or drifted away. He was at that age where they had bought places with their partners (with the help of parents), got married, had kids and become fully-fledged adults. They couldn’t be bothered with his drama anymore. Moved on from hearing him whinge about trying to save a deposit for a mortgage and hating his job. Sick and tired of him causing scenes. They were off on holidays to Italy, Spain, Greece. Fun in the sunshine. Their wives getting boob jobs, filler injections and crap tattoos.

It was creepy how blokes took up golf when it was obviously the game of choice for capitalist and fascist alike.

He heard the snorts and aahhhss.

There was a sharp pain in his belly and a long squeak from his bum, followed by diarrhoea. “Christ,” he said, leaning forward, realising his forehead was sweaty. The booze from last night and today’s shenanigans had finally caught up with him. The body could only take so much of a battering before it held up a sign and stated enough is enough.

The floodgates opened.

He braced himself as liquid squirted out. He was a human power-hose. 

The lads in the next cubicle complained.

“Flush, you dirty bastard.”

“That’s fucking rank.”

It made Pete laugh.

He heard one of them try to snort a line, only to gag and retch.

Their cubicle door banged as they scrambled to escape his stink.

He laughed hard, turning to push the button for the flush. Raising himself slightly so his bum cheeks were not splashed by the water. He waited for the next evacuation. Knowing there was more to come. Feeling the poison in his body. He’d never been a huge fan of the marching powder. Did it if some was on offer but not fussed enough to score for himself. Mainly, he’d toot to keep boozing. It gave him a cloak of invincibility. Pills too. Could stay on the lash for three days straight. Pretty much until the drugs ran out and then it’d be the tailspin of legend. Hangover + Comedown = Despair. That sluggish creeping dread of the light of morning and the realisation that the party was well and truly over.

The phone in his jean pocket vibrated. It set off a feeling of hope. This was going to be Mandy, asking if he was alright. Communicating. And with communication came an olive branch. Diplomatic negotiations. The potential for reconciliation. A peace agreement. The end of the Vietnam war. Gulf war. The war in Afghanistan. Ukraine. Yemen. The Moon and Mars—all the wars of the Past, Present and Future.

The dead don’t care about truces.

Declarations.

Signings.

Fuck sake.

Boyfriend and girlfriend back together.

Pete, come home. Let’s talk.

Unlikely, though. Not after cheating on her so blatantly.

A hangman’s noose for war crimes.

At the least, it would be his mother texting him with her awful spelling. She had made the sofa up for him. Messages. Human contact. It was a rescue mission. A boat coming ashore to save him from his desert island of starvation. The prospect of being eaten alive by wild animals. Drowned in a tsunami. Burnt in a forest fire. Frozen in an ice storm. Something weather / nature based. Whatever it may be. Unlikely though, given how his mum had said she was tired of bailing him out of trouble due to his boozing. Drug taking. Cheating. Work-shy attitude. Poor decision-making. Ill-considered choices. Unkempt hair. Shabby dress sense. Halitosis. Haemorrhoids. Inferior chromosomes.  

He pressed his thumbprint and tapped the app and there was Samantha’s name, or Sam as it was on his phone. A small photograph of her holding a baby monkey when on holiday somewhere… Maylasia. Indonesia. South-east Asia. A beam of a smile on her tanned face. He was halfway through thinking she wanted to meet when he processed her messages. 

How’d u enjoy snogging Irene last night? She’s got a pic of you with your wanger out. Sent them to the group a few of us are on at work.

I absolutely hate u.

A sharp pain cut through his abdomen and he leaned forward. He had to shut his eyes, briefly wondering if this was something more serious and requiring a trip to the hospital. He started to feel desperate. An appendix. Hernia. Ruptured spleen. What was a spleen? He didn’t want to go to A&E by himself, pissed out of his head. A doctor with a stern expression and dandruff speckled hair asking for a contact name, friends and family, and he wasn’t able to think of a single soul. This was the kind of future that lay ahead for him. Lonely. One of the living dead. Alienated. Isolated in a city of millions. A Joy Division song made flesh.

The stomach pains eased off.

He re-read the messages and tapped: I never snogged Irene. I don’t know what you’re on about. Can we meet and talk? 

She swiftly replied. It was a forwarded photo of him standing in an alleyway with his trousers and boxers round his ankles. Hands on his hips. He couldn’t help thinking that his cock was a decent size. The pic would’ve been sent to every twat in the office, probably David Rockbridge too, his boss. So, it was a bonus that his semi seemed respectable. The last thing he wanted was everyone thinking he had a tiddler. He knew that wasn’t the reason Samantha had sent it and she would argue he was missing the point, but still. There was that poor sod who used to work in procurement who ended up in the hotel room of one of the girls from marketing at a company team-building trip. When she saw how small he was, even when hard, a part of her died inside. “I’m not lying Pete, it was like this,” she said, making a tiny gap between her thumb and finger. “Erect, it was no bigger than a cocktail sausage and I swear I’m not lying. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” He remembered how shocked she looked when telling him the story in the pub over a few hairy dog G&Ts.

He was being made redundant anyway. A semi is a semi is a semi. Ce la vie. The main concern was why he was flashing his old chap to Irene. This accusation of snogging, a claim that was given credence by the photographic evidence, made no sense. They worked together in accounts and not once had he considered copping off with her. Not even when suffering from hangover horniness. She was a forty-four year old divorced mother of two. There was nothing wrong with that per se. She just wasn’t his type. He liked blondes. Curvy figures. Mandy was twenty-eight. Samantha twenty-four. Irene was a couple of decades older, rake skinny with brown hair and a recovering alcoholic. She believed in horoscopes and thought those two bellends on the tele, Ant & Dec, were funny. Fuck sake. There was no attraction. No connection. Snogging her and doing god knows what in the alleyway defied all reason. He was certain she felt no attraction to him either, thinking he was a rude, arrogant twat. And yet she must’ve been the one who whispered he was The King last night, not Samantha. And now she was sending round pics of him with his trousers and boxers round his ankles. The whole thing made his head spin.

The Government-led investigation into this scandal will have to go away to consider the new information that has come to light.

The Metropolitan Police may be called upon for assistance. 

The Vatican has refused to comment.

As far as he knew, Irene was loved-up, dating a bloke with a pacemaker who installed satellite dishes.

He pictured bringing Irene round to his mum’s, watching her reaction when he said, “Meet my new girlfriend.”

Samantha’s profile pic with the monkey disappeared.

She’d gone and blocked him.

He began the laborious process of cleaning himself. He was glad to see there was enough spare bog roll to do the job properly. Needed a delicate touch in parts due to sudden soreness in his ring-piece vicinity.

At least he’d made it to the toilet.

He wondered if Irene had seen him mess himself last night. Now that would not have been a good photo for the whole office to see. He had a tired, low-level panic attack that Irene had the pic or worse, a video, and that she was going to use it against him.

He was a walking disaster.

“You’re your own worst enemy,” his mum liked to say.

Chill. Chill. Stop with the spiralling. Calm the fuck down.

If there was a picture of him soiling himself, it would’ve been sent already with the other one.

And he was being made redundant.

Their opinions didn’t matter.

The company was on the fast track to insolvency with or without the redundancies, so they’d all be jobseekers or, what was the term on social media, Open to Work, soon enough.

Going through their CVs. Writing meaningless nonsense for the box-tickers of HR.

Team player. 

Blue-sky thinker. 

Picker of low-hanging fruit.  

He checked to see whether he had Irene’s number. Wanting to ping her a message. Get the lowdown on what had really gone on between them. He didn’t have it and Samantha was incommunicado. He left the cubicle, washed his hands in the rancid sink and went to the dryer. It didn’t work so he wiped his palms and fingers on his jeans. He realised he was operating on a higher, almost spiritual plain of drunkenness, where he felt like he was sober but another part of him knew that he was annihilated, on the verge of being unable to speak, and that he should be in a bed and sleeping off the harm he had done to himself.

He opened the door, expecting to see the footie fans in the pub frustrated by a game that needed a goal.

It took him a second to register that the layout and lighting had changed.

He was standing in a roomful of desks.

It was the office where he worked.

Through a window, the familiar spire of a Hawksmoor church poked out above the uneven blocks of flats of Old Street. A landline phone was ringing and he walked towards the noise. The office was deserted. It was the weekend. He went by the printers and cardboard bins for recycling. The bins were a source of arguments because some people felt passionately about recycling paper and others couldn’t be bothered and said it was a nonsense. It became an existential debate between employees about the probabilities of planetary extinction and related causes. He chose the side of the recyclers, noting that it was mainly those in sales who rejected the company’s efforts to support sustainability.

He headed to the finance team section and saw the ringing phone was on his desk, except his stuff was missing and there was a photograph of the baby from Nirvana’s Nevermind album and a packet of liquorice. He couldn’t stand the aftertaste of liquorice. He wasn’t sure whether to pick up the phone. It was almost as if he was in danger. Like he was being watched. Lifting the receiver and answering would bring him into touch with evil.

The phone kept ringing.

He couldn’t stop himself. He had to find out who was calling. “Accounts,” he said.

There was the sound of snorting, followed by a gasp.

Pete repeated himself.

A man spoke. “You’re late.”

“For what?”

“Your disciplinary.”

There was a strong smell of liquorice coming through the phone. He was distracted by a piercing, high-pitched yelp and he looked up to see a monkey jump onto Irene’s desk, bearing its teeth and waving its skinny, hairy arms. 

“Come to the canteen immediately. We think your lateness for this meeting is indicative of your overall poor attitude and decline in professional standards.”

“But I’m excellent at management accounts and credit control.”

“Who are you bringing with you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Check your email. You may bring another independent to sit in the disciplinary meeting with you. Do you have somebody?”

“Yes, I have someone to bring.”

“Who?”

“The Coco Pops monkey.”

“I think not.”

“Well, it’s a monkey of some kind.” 

There was a delay. A long sound of sniffing and a gasp. The stranger said, “That’s very disappointing, Peter.”

“It is what it is.”

“We will see you and the monkey imminently.”

“But there is no canteen,” said Pete. “Do you mean the kitchenette?”

“Canteen.”

“But I don’t…”

The person hung up.

Fuck sake.

 

(Part VI here https://www.abctales.com/story/mark-burrow/rules-tea-must-always-be-obey...)