by Peter Marks
In regard to his profession Wright had only one complaint - his clients. His clients had only one complaint - him. Too often his clients had more complaints than Wright had excuses so they made his career tougher than it should have been (had he been unemployed, female, handicapped, horrendously fat or ugly for instance. Or of an unacceptable race or colour for good measure).
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Wright’s business was his but he worked with others, defraying the mounting costs and a chronic discontent with two other designers, one finished artist and an immigrant illustrator.
Five egos at five desks trying hard to be humble.
‘Mornin’ boys,’ the sprinkler Wright yelled, shedding the just left weather on the school grey carpet, busily munching his peculiar idea of a nutritious breakfast; a jam doughnut which was wedged tight between sugar addicted molars (so that his greeting sounded more like ‘Mawnin Bwwoyss’).
Fangs flapping, he was surprised at how much wetter he’d gotten coming from the car-park and decided that next time it rained he’d borrow the wet suit Jenny used for her sexual perversions. Wet, he was dripping the deluge on the mottled, carpet standing in the deep end of the office he’d made pool so Nathan swam to his desk and began drying a sponge head on the dry fabric of a navy blue drafting stool. Attempting arid, he rubbed the soaked scalp against the course cloth before standing to attention, still damp, rain washed clothes shedding translucent pools of dead water onto squelching shoes. No-one acknowledged his damp so he did what he usually did to gain attention. He picked his nose and flicked the diggings at the others to draw attention to his irrigated presence. Colin, noticing the nasal frenzy, finally nodded hello. Greg, Mark and Alan just ignored the crass greeting.
Colin had been hunched over a cluttered drawing board hastily drafting a letter to a piranha solicitor about his wife’s impending divorce from him when he’d noticed Wright and his flying breakfast and suddenly felt hungry himself so he sent a furtive finger to his nose silently wondering if a meal of nasal scrapings was more nutritious than whatever he’d scoffed that morning (like the bran his wife fed him to keep him regular. Regular enough to leave her it was now clear).
He only stopped mining when he saw a grinning Wright watching him pick the left tunnel and Colin quickly returned the shovel finger to the .25 Rapidograph pen deciding not to test the diet to get back to writing. Still hungry.
Colin’s desk, the second in a row of four that stretched from one picture infested wall to the other, crouched work laden in front one of the eight large windows that provided much of the illumination to the large studio, was next to Alan’s which was next to Wright’s.
Colin turned gradually in his chair, gazing up momentarily from the desk, to squint at Wright before grabbing for the ever empty coffee mug which Wright had foolishly given him as a souvenir from his last trip overseas. The mug was a memento of the English soccer club Nathan supported and was striped in thick blue and white horizontals with a Queens Park Rangers logo plastered across it. Colin, in supplication, bowed forward to offer Wright this bottomless pit.
Wright, in wet shoes, offered him this:‘Piss off..’ he advised. ‘Get your own fix. You’re a bloody addict Colin,’ he added. ‘Have you got any idea how bad the mega-litres of caffeine you distil a day is for you? Hell Colin, it’s a wonder you’re heart hasn’t hijacked you to heaven,’ Wright warned, thinking here we go again, another mindless foray into the jungle of creative invectives. This was the grammar of the grumpy, the vocabulary of the vacuous. And typically Wright. Thus far today the extent of Wright’s attempts at English had been minimal and feeble and an all too common manifestation of early mornings; that period of the day before his head awoke. That time of day when his mouth was forced to go solo and in consequence, mindless, so would utter only pallid attempts at social interaction which mainly involved swearing, grunting - basically the dialect of the pig ignorant.
At the breakfast table a few hours earlier Wright’s hostile grammar had received its first airing for the day when, with a plate of purloined porridge idly steaming on the table before him, he’d asked Jenny to pass the sugar. Jenny passed wind instead and Wright passed out. Momentarily. Before recovering sufficiently to scream curses at her through the vile smog of her noxious release. She just laughed and told Nathan that friends were people you could fart on so Wright told her he was no friend of hers and demanded she never fart on him again so she told him she also farted on enemies, parting his hair with another boisterous breeze. Wright swore and cursed and chased her and her hurricanes from the kitchen screaming that flatulence was a particularly primitive and distasteful form of communication.
In hot pursuit, chasing her about the house for what seemed hours but was actually only five minutes, the wind-blown Wright finally cornering her by the towel rack. Jenny, undaunted by this pursuing argument, stopped in the far corner of the bathroom and started laughing. And farting the national anthem. Nathan stood to attention, saluted and left. Verbally, it seemed, this Thursday was going the way of most.
Badly.
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‘I’ll still be here when my voodoo has worked and sent you scuttling to Haiti completely zombified....’ Colin chuckled, shoving another drawing pin in the small doll of Nathan he’d made from scraps of paper and glue and kept in the drawer of the filing cabinet by his desk.
‘Go fuck yourself’’ Wright recommended.
Sadly, the scavenger of sinuses didn’t even flinch as the pins skewered the dummy which really pissed Colin off so he tried again. This time he impaled the doll Wright with a knitting needle he’d extracted from the Wife doll he kept under the bed at home. No luck, Wright was already zombified so there was little or nothing voodoo could do to change or alter his state. It was then that Colin decided to tie Wife doll to Wright doll and let ‘em fuck each other instead of him. Empty mug still in hand he tried to get Wright to do his duty. Fat chance.
‘Jesus Nathan, its easy. You just place some coffee in this cup, add a little water, a squirt of milk and spoon in some sugar. Voila. Coffee..’
‘Go fuck yourself.’
Colin’s response to Wright’s expansive vocabulary was immediate. He fell immediately silent, bending his thin frame further over the steel framed desk then started shuffling pieces of copy trying to rearrange them into some rational order not yet finished with Wright but content to bide his time.
He would wait another 3.2 milliseconds before renegotiating for his cause was just (just pitiful Wright thought).
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Colin was old. As old as 43. As ancient as Wright soon would be and Nathan resented this constantly stooped memorial to his own impending menopause.
Spaghetti thin (long past al dente) Colin was balding, hen pecked and caffeine addicted but worked diligently at his job and growing old. (Usually diligently doing the tasks Wright couldn’t be bothered with which was almost everything so Colin was always busy while Wright wasn’t).
In essence Nathan believed that Colin was ill-suited to the creative arts believing that his general demeanour was all wrong for this trade thinking that the human pipe cleaner was better suited to undertaking and undertook to remind him of this. Repeatedly.
‘You should be a mortician,’ Wright would proclaim.
‘..and you’ll be my first stiff,’ Colin would promise, scalpel in hand threatening to vivisect the careers advisory consultant.
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This particular morning Nathan wouldn’t remind Colin of anything (aside from bacteria that is) as wet and weary he at last relaxed, collapsing head first onto the desk.
Colin seized the opportunity.
‘It’s your turn,’ Colin reminded him yet again, grinning wildly and still clinging to the ever empty blue and white stripped mug. Wright buried his head in an armpit and mumbled that Colin would receive last rites, not coffee, if he didn’t shut up. Which Colin wouldn’t. Kept demanding his fill for a
full ten minutes before finally comprehending that he was fighting a losing battle and gave up on the coffee and caffeine to donate some phone messages to a dozing Wright.
‘Nikkie from I.P.R. rang, said you were a lazy buggar...’
‘Is that a message or an opinion?’ Wright queried, momentarily lifting a jelly brain from the laminate desktop.
.’....the truth,’ Colin stated.
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It was the late ‘40’s.
On a boat steaming for Sydney, Colin entered the world via a swing hammock which had been precariously stretched between two fresh water pipes on the lower deck of the P & O Oriana, a large white cruise ship loaded to its bilges with dark costumed migrants and black history refugees. As it ploughed through the sweltering tropics the mother bound male became a Tarzan Colin.
He was delivered dangling on a vine umbilical above a hot plate floor.
Mum was sweating, the crowd that had gathered clapped while Colin shrieked and kicked in blue birth. Not Neptune, a just hatched Colin was totally unprepared for this ceaselessly rolling tin crib that bobbed lonely through the Indian Ocean on its way to Oz. So Colin was sick. Continually and repeatedly gurgling foam innards onto the frying pan floor. (Because of this, he’d remained sea sick ever since. Even on dry land).
His mother was a large woman with nomad hair that clung to parts of her vast landscape not intended for habitation. She was then, and still was, twenty years her husband’s junior who’d escaped the dour mining villages of Northern England when his father, a recently released and pensioner ancient kleptomaniac, had interceded in her underwear by a wall overlooking the Clapham Junction rail yards. So with her pregnant, them unmarried, morals still mid-Victorian they left, migrating to Australia where his father expected to locate the illusive good life and a wax job for his wife who’d shipped out with him in anticipation of a marriage license and a life tough enough to kill the old inseminator off.
Wright was surrounded by ex-English.
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‘Sid Foyle called to tell you something. Bad I gather, something went wrong with that brochure they’re doing the colour separations on...’ Wright groaned, Colin continued. ‘Your mom rang, your sister rang, the bank rang.’
Colin laughed while Wright decided to have an affair with depression.
‘Did Kelly ring?’
‘No’
‘Bitch’
‘All not well in fairyland eh? Don’t tell me yet another girlfriend has bitten the dust.....?’ Alan asked suddenly interested in Nathan’s loss.
‘Who knows?’ Wright answered in all honesty for he didn’t have a clue what was going on. Or if she’d gone off.
‘Dumped eh?’ Greg decided from the safety of a far corner, again checking the menu with a chop stick finger of the take-away in his nose.
‘Dumped my arse, just a slight disagreement.’
‘Like McCarthy’s with Communism,’ Greg added, sneeringly intellectual in his boredom with Wright’s love life.
Nathan sighed, gave up explaining and went silent. Sat quiet and still eyeing off the brick barrier that stood quite still outside the window in front of him. It was a pathetic plane and a poor substitute for scenery.
The phone rang. ‘Yeah,’ Wright answered still verbally inefficient. It was some-one trying to sell him insurance so Wright immediately lapsed into the standard salesman deterrent mode.
‘W..ww... ha... t.......’ He stuttered waiting for an answer. ‘N...N... n.. no.... I...d..d...don’t....nnnneed...any..’ He continued when the fool on the phone wouldn’t take a speech impediment for an answer, stuttering more and more incomprehensibly with each question the salesman asked until this purveyor of the unwanted gave up. (Stuttering was an efficient way of getting rid of such unsolicited attentions and Wright used the ploy with great frequency and to telling effect).
‘Another salesman?’ Colin asked amused by Wright and his disintegrating English.
‘Y...y..ou..b..bbb...bet,’ Wright sniggered then went back to the wall and began counting the jigsaw bricks that interlocked in neat patterns before him. This at least kept him quiet for five minutes calculating.
At the next desk, Colin had retrieved the letter to the solicitor and was busy correcting errors on the page. On considered reflection he decided it may be diplomatic to alter ‘Dear Vulture, tell that scumbag wife of mine she’s not getting a penny..’ to something less aggressive.
Something like: ‘Dear Sir, in reference to my wife’s demands, tell her to coat herself in honey and go sit on an ant hill...’
Chapter Nine
AGENT ORANGE
COLIN WAS HAVING a hard time of it. He’d been married to the same wife for twenty years and had been a good husband and father; kind, gentle, generous and loved by his kids so she had every right to leave him. He’d been appallingly well behaved but she no longer wanted these qualities. She wanted excitement instead. He’d given her security, solidity, and too many sleep filled nights so she’d traded him in on a new model, begun a lube love affair with a twenty year old grease monkey from the garage down the road where she got the car serviced. Then herself.
Colin couldn’t compete. The mechanic was young and virile and capable of climaxing five times in a three hour period while Colin’s comings were going. He could barely manage to do her once a week and even that was alcohol assisted so Colin was redundant - so summarily dismissed.
At home his three kids wondered why mum had suddenly taken to wandering about the kitchen half naked wearing a hypnotised grin plastered across an ever made up face singing songs of love and carrying on about liberation and freedom and the cost of motel rooms for brazenly, to reinforce her married repression, she’d put all her extra marital expenses on their Bankcard. Damn impudent slut forced Colin to pay for her mechanic interludes as the years of brutal discontent surfaced and exploded and Colin was culled.
Now it was divorce, now not even a cupboard full of vibrating, sigh-inducing sexual accessories could save him.
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Wright finished counting the top three rows. Bored with bricks he replaced silence with senility.
‘I killed a mouse this morning,’ he announced suddenly, turning toward the others, straightening in his stool. ‘Yep, poor little bastard pushed me too far this time. Found the ravenous runt having a banquet with my biscuits. The buggar was shitting in delighted pellets at the feast. Hell, it looked like some shit had tipped a cement mixer of tiny turds into the pantry. God, he must of been at it for weeks to expel that much crap on my shelves....either that or he’d invited thirty thousand others to his kid’s Twenty-First birthday celebrations in there. fuck, what a mess...’
‘Must have been a rat,’ Colin interjected, ‘mice don’t live that long.’
Wright looked stupefied, wondered what the hell Colin was on about but smiled satisfied that at least he had the makings of an audience for he could never be sure when he started these monologues if any-one would listen. Some days they did, some days they didn’t though usually he talked so loudly that they had no choice - they’d have to listen, or leave under threat of imminent deafness.
Mark chose sanity and the latter. And left.
‘It was a mouse,’ Wright reiterated calmly, gazing out at the Police helicopter that, carrion like, hovered above the terracotta skyline,’ .. rats are mean and far too serious a creature to whoop it up. They’re cannibals and cannibals aren’t renown for their merrymaking,’ Wright felt. ‘Genus Rattus aren’t party animals, nor are they prone to levity unless they devour your mother-in-law ....that’d certainly be a laugh,’ he laughed. ‘Rats are big and horrible. Bloody carnivores, meat eaters who’ll swallow you whole, or leave bits of you in the freezer to snack on during the late night movie... they’re all razor teeth and snapping jaws. Turn your backside on a rat and you can kiss your arse good-bye,’ he advised, standing up and pointing to his bum. Then waving it good-bye.
/> ‘Mice are small. Tiny really. And they’re cute. Furry midgets all preened and cuddly, small brown balls of hair-borne mayhem who rely on guilt to stay alive.’
A voice croaked from two desks away.
‘Why guilt?’ It was Alan. Alan was yet another immigrant. Yet another pom. (Wright was beginning to think the Australian race had vanished into the Simpson Desert like their Aboriginal predecessors). Alan was a young illustrator who’d left his homeland two years ago in search of the golden buck and a better life (and obviously not for the standard of conversation on offer here).
‘Well, every-time I found one of the things it’d just park itself. It didn’t try to run or escape when I caught it red handed dipping into my food supply or wiping its bum on my Corn Flakes. The dopey little buggar just applied the brakes and sat there amongst the pebbles of its pooh staring back at me, its white whiskers waving in friendly greeting. Dumb fucker just sat there on the shelf settled smack in the middle the evidence refusing to hide. Or run. Hell, there shit everywhere. When I confronted it, asked it why it was eating me out of house and home it just fixed its two beady eyes firmly on me pleading innocence...’
Alan considered the scenario. ‘Sounds like a woman I know...’ he decided, deciding to partake and was quickly joined in rasping grunts of affirmation by the entire population of the studio who’d suddenly come out of a collective coma to voice an identical view. Wright tended to agree but also knew more than his fair share of girls who were more rat than mouse and with a deft flick of the wrist, he chased an infringing gathering of still damp hair from two tired eyes before continuing. Or he would have but for the Englishman who did.
