Apex Predator and The Black Method

Apex Predator

I’m at the top of the food chain, but you wouldn’t know it.  I hide in plain sight. There’s no one thinks I’m anything other than empathetic – you hear the Human part of my job title and not the Resources part.  Because that’s what you are.  A resource.

Your ineptness feeds me.  I consume your self-deceit.  I eat your self-pity.  All the reasons you don’t like your job. All the excuses for why you couldn’t meet the deadline and got so stressed you needed three weeks off.  Where is your backbone?  Where are your balls?

I politely ask you in to my office and I see you on the other side of the desk. Weak chinned, acned young man.  Gone to seed woman back from maternity leave.  Thrusting young woman, unsure whether to raise her skirt or lower her top to move up the ladder.    Whatever the body morph and the local detail, it’s pretty much the same though.  Meat in a suit, lying to itself about how hard it works.

I’ve seen you work.  Do you think the computers aren’t monitored?  An hour of Candy Crush, a couple of trading frankly unfunny jokes with your sister in Australia, some ebay and ASOS shopping up to lunchtime; then kittens in dresses on youtube until the afternoon tea break.  I iz so impressed by your work rate, I iz!

My actual cat works harder than you do.  At the top of the tree, looking down on the blackbird in its nest.  Stealthily waiting.  It’s at the top of the food chain too and it can wait for as long as necessary.  And do you know what?  So can I.

I usually let the prey do the talking.  You’ll damn yourself in the end.  Prey always does.  Six grandmothers’ funerals, your third brain tumour.  Please!

But I just listen, make notes and go to make you a cup of tea.  Or coffee – whatever you prefer.  It makes no odds to me.  In the kitchenette behind my office, I stir the pale brown liquid, spit in it and then offer it you with concerned, puppy eyes.  You thank me and I smile.

When you start snivelling, I pass you the box of tissues kept for the purpose and you artfully dab your dry eyes.  You’re too self-absorbed, though, to notice how I bare my teeth when I say “there, there.”  Or how I’ve got my fingers crossed when I promise not to tell head office about your latest fuck-up.

You think I’m a good listener too as I put my head on one side; hands crossed, index fingers over my lips, pointing upwards towards my nose.  Supreme communication as I store your failures for future use.

Sometimes, I think about you at night and my dreams become hot. And sticky.  Oh well, you have to have some fun in this life.

In the morning though, I’m suited and booted again.  Ready for the day, ready to eat you up.  Yum yum.

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The Black Method

Is there any bleaker pursuit in the annals of human existence than the Family Fun Day?  Fun decided by someone else at an appointed date and time. Enforced and scheduled.

Picture the scene.  A piece of scrubby grass wasteland, near Manton Pit in Nottinghamshire on a cold bank holiday Monday. As you walk up the hard-mud track, you hear a distant, monotonous braying sound.  It’s getting closer and then you see its source.  Two, battling marching bands. The Daffodils in lurid yellow and the Blackjacks imaginatively dressed in black and white. Children of six to ten, uncoordinated and untalented.  And the braying sound?  The desolate, relentless kazoo.  Instrument of the devil.

The Fun Day consists of a bouncy castle, lopsided and emitting the odour of rubber and little, sweaty feet. There are also various stalls and side shows –the face-painting stall with its gloriously untalented artist; creating freaky, little features on every child dragged there by their parents.  The white elephant stall with shit piled on top of shit, promising hidden treasures and giving, er white elephants. The 'guess the amount of marbles in the jar' table to win a cake of such dismal hue and proportion that I’d rather eat the marbles.  You get the picture.

So, I hear you ask, why do I go?  Don’t I understand the import of the words, their nuance?  Family Fun Day – event, description and instruction?  Well, I go because I have to.  Because my heifer of a wife and my chronically optimistic grandson love them and as it stands, I hide my feelings on the subject well.

So on a weekend when we have him and there’s a Fun Day near us, I grin and ruffle his hair.  I help my wife make a flask of tea and a few sandwiches and I get with the programme of F.U.N.

But I have a way of getting through the hours between the start of the fun and the car trip back, my grandson asleep in the back of the car, still clutching a pair of flaccid balloons in his near-obese fingers.  My wife sitting silently in the passenger seat, happy at the two new gnomes she’s bought from a bric-a-brac table and that she’ll use to relentlessly and maliciously add to her collection.

I call my way the Black Method.  Put simply, it’s just different ways I can ruin someone’s day while they’re at a Fun Day, without me being caught.

Here are my top three from the Manton Pit event:

1. Steal one of each child’s shoes they’ve left at the side of the bouncy castle as they’re jumping on it.  It drives the parents mad, particularly in these times of austerity.
2. Drop itching powder on the bouncy castle and watch the little buggers go
3. Threaten to shave a child’s hair.  Whisper it quietly and firmly while they’re alone in the ice cream queue (“I’ll shave all your long hair off and you won’t look like a princess then, will you my dear?”).  They never tell, particularly when you also whisper that if they do, their favourite pet will also be shaved.

When I’m alone, later in the evening, I record the successes of my Black Method in a MoleSkine book I’ve bought just for that purpose.  My hand-writing is precise, small and the book is always up to date.

At bedtime, I lie awake next to my gently snoring wife and I think about the fun I’ve had.  Well, at my age, it’s whatever gets you through the night.

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