Sawn-Off Tales

by David Gaffney

  Some Call it Loungecore

  I CALL IT shite. A-plinking and a-plonking, a-twanging and a-trilling, kitsch Oxfam vinyl with titles like Hammond Interlude, Moog TV Themes and Test Card Classics, it’s all Roger buys. And if our mates come round (like we have any now) it’s Beatles Hawaiian Style or Sinatra’s Pan Pipe Moods and him sitting with a big grin on his face stroking his chin.

  Lounge music won’t do any lasting harm, the doctor assured me, though wearing a permanent ironic smile doesn’t help when you’re stopped for speeding. But Roger’s manager was worried. Sales were down and he blamed the easy-listening. ‘That Radio 2 mush,’ he said, ‘is chewing off your balls,’ and he forced on him some poodle-rock compilation.

  ‘Oh my fucking God,’ Roger said to me. ‘Music to Drive By. What does that even mean?’ and fed the tape into the waste disposal, meaning we had to call the engineer.

  Special Interest

  ‘EXCUSE ME,’ HE said. It was the bloke who‘d been creeping around behind me in Woolworths. He had haunted muddy eyes and his breath reeked of curry and tic tacs.

  ‘I was wondering, did you pay for those seeds?’

  He was right of course. Assorted Summer Blooms, palmed deftly into my secret pocket. But this guy didn’t look like security.

  ‘What seeds?’

  His eyes darted about. ‘Can we go for coffee?’

  His thumb stroked my finger where it rested against my Latte. I didn’t move it away.

  ‘I have a thing,’ he said, ‘for people like you.’

  I felt myself redden. ‘Like me?’

  He gripped my finger in his hand. ‘Women who steal.’

  I pulled my hand away. ‘So I’m just another?’

  ‘You’re special. I bet you don’t even have a garden for those seeds.’

  ‘One o’clock, B&Q,’ I called after him. ‘Nails and fixings.’

  We Are the Robots

  SHE WAS THE third girlfriend to ditch me this year. ‘We went to this club,’ I told Gary, ‘and at the end of the night she’d completely changed. She was distant, hostile.’

  He looked at me over the rim of his spectacles. ‘Did you dance?’

  ‘Well,’ I poked at a beer mat, ‘at one point I did throw a few shapes.’

  He tilted his head towards me. ‘Did you do the robotics?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘What was the music?’

  ‘Eighties techno.’

  Gary removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. ‘How many times have we been through this — you hear the music, you do the robotics.’ He picked up his coat. ‘No woman will stand for it.’

  Later I was on the floor. A Moog bass line squelched, a metallic snare ripped the air, I was part of a machine, a valve in the heart of a bleeping gnashing metal beast.

  Little Jan

  I WAS THE only Janet in the office until she arrived but there was no problem until one day I asked Harriet for the long stapler and she said she’d given it to Little Jan.

  Little Jan. She wasn’t particularly little and I’m not especially big. I didn’t want to be known as Big Jan, like some bull dyke prisoner. Harriet tried to reassure me; the new Janet was Little Jan, but I would always be Jan. But they might as well write fat cow on my forehead for all the difference that made. So-called Little Jan is a 12 at least, and not TopShop, more like Marks.

  So whilst recovering the long stapler I told Jan all about fast-track promotion in this place, the people to influence, and how to do it.

  Now I’m still Jan but she’s known as Stock­room Jan and she’s off long-term with stress.

  A Good System

  I WAS WORKING in Kendal’s café then. You had to assume the woman he came in with was his wife. They were given, as everyone was, a long metal stand with the order number on it. It’s a good system, we should have it here. Their little boy sat holding it.

  When you’re a waitress you don’t miss a thing. So I immediately saw his eyes meet the eyes of a woman in a black furry coat. Then I heard the loud rasp as she slid her chair back and the tick tick of her heels crossing the room. The man looked up at her — he was terrified, frozen. Then she punched him in the face and returned to her friend.

  I remember the silence in the room and the little boy holding the order number higher and higher like it was some sort of distress signal.

  We Like it Here

  THE SORTING HALL was said to be a special department where people with no useful function were sent. No-one knew if it really existed. One lunchtime he scoured Industry House, from the rooftop to the basement, looking for it. He saw suited executives nibbling biscuits, girls tapping at computers, men at drawing boards and, in a room marked Training, a group building a structure with toilet-roll holders. But there was no trace of the sorting hall.

  Back at his desk they had already brought the afternoon’s bins. He looked forward to examining the contents as there was always something exciting. He began to classify, measure and catalogue. A tissue, which he placed in a twizzle bag and labelled. A crumpled A4 sheet to be smoothed out and placed in a file. A crisp packet.

  He enjoyed his job. He would leave Industry House altogether if anything ever changed.

  No Turning

  THIS STREET IS a dead-end and people are always using our drive to turn round when they’re lost and it does my dad’s head in. This family reversed up, but instead of screeching off again, they sat for ages arguing over the map. So my dad went out. The bushy-haired driver smiled. ‘We’re looking for the ferry.’

  We never went to the ferry, we never went anywhere.

  ‘Can’t you read?’ my dad moaned, pointing to his slapped-up NO TURNING sign.

  The man shrugged.

  But he was surprised when my dad screamed down the road in mum’s car to stop in a cloud of dust and block them in.

  We kept them for two hours. The girl was my age and she hated these holidays, driving for miles in a steaming car. I let her have a go of my Gameboy. I’m glad my dad kidnapped them; I hope he does it again.

  Last Chance to Turn Around

  SHE’D BEEN COMING every week. Late forties, right age for the hey-day, had some of the moves as well, a slide and a nifty shuffle on the backbeat. She was normally with a bloke, but she was alone tonight and after my set she beckoned me over, handed me a scratched 45 and said, ‘ I’ve been meaning to return it.’ It was Tobi Legend, Time Will Pass You By.

  ‘You gave it to me.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Twisted Wheel, 1974.’

  Something about the way she sipped her wine struck a chord and I suddenly remembered her.

  ‘I’ll never forget that night,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a fair exchange.’

  I stared into the hole in the centre of the disc as if it was a time-tunnel, sucking me down thirty swirling years. I had nothing to give her back. We sat and soaked in the songs till the landlord chucked us out.

  Mask

  HER NOSE HAD a cute little ridge and he stroked it with his thumb. ‘I think Sharon suspects,’ he said.

  She looked into his eyes. Tips of her red hair clung to his face with static. ‘As long as we’re careful, Richard.’

  Driving back, Richard couldn’t stop thinking about her. The car was bathed in her perfume, Hugo Boss surrounded him like a Ready brek halo. That’s when he panicked. He sniffed his fingers and rubbed them on the seat, but the smell wouldn’t shift. What could he do? Sharon would be onto him like a hyena. His eyes fell on a half-eaten cheese baguette sweating on the dash. He stopped the car on a dark bridge, removed his shirt and, remembering something about pulse points, applied slimy sandwich filling to his wrists, throat and under his arms. He relaxed and shoved his seat into recline. Below him chains of crimson tail-lights danced and he felt he was floating over a fairy grotto.

  The Kids Are Alright

 
WHEN I HEARD about the boy whose parents dressed him as a girl till the age of twelve I thought, lucky kid. My parents dressed me till I was thirteen as popular crooner Perry Como. They even encouraged me to carry, but not smoke, a beautiful briar wood pipe and I would stab the air with its stem to emphasise a point and suck on it when deep in thought. Yet I wasn’t unhappy; it was normal. My cousin had it much worse, as Max Bygraves.

  One day I was house-training the dog. The sleeve to Swing Out Perry was on the floor and before I could stop him, Engelbert squatted and squeezed a neat little turd right in the middle of Perry’s polished inane features.

  The next day my mother let me have my fringe cut like Dave Hill out of Slade. Kids have to be allowed to express themselves.

  Tasting Notes

  HERE SHE COMES, Rentaghost Girl. Every month it’s the same. She lifts it, eyes it, sniffs and slurps, then scribbles some twaddle about eighties cop shows, psychedelic garage bands, and Rentaghost. To her, every wine tastes like seventies kids’ sitcom, Rentaghost.

  This one was a pinot noir with no grand cru status, but a nice jagged aftertaste, owing to the vine’s roots struggling deep through limestone rock. I jumped in first. ‘I get Harvey Kietel, late James Ellroy and a John Zorn sax solo.’

  Rentaghost Girl flapped her notebook. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I have a cold tonight and everything tastes like Pardon My Genie, but I do think you might have this wrong. Open your mouth.’ I did, and she dipped a finger into the wine and rubbed it over my tongue, gums, lips and around the insides of my cheeks. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘can you taste the seventies?’

  Wednesday Night’s Alright for Fighting

  ‘ACCOUNTANCY’S NOT AS boring as everyone thinks. There’s lots of testosterone. They shout, actually shout at each other, and someone once got punched. Physical violence, that’s accountancy nowadays. So it was always a tough week for him, I knew that, and normally we’d only meet at weekends, but I rang him one Wednesday and said, “Do you want come over?” — he was only down the road in Didsbury — and he says no, he’s got early meetings, he can’t drink or anything, and I said not a drink, just come and see me — you know, see me. And he says, “oh,” goes quiet, then says, “I don’t do that during the week, normally.” Can you imagine? Doesn’t do it during the week? The bloke I’m with now goes like a ferret.’

  ‘What’s his job?’

  ‘Sales. It’s all about presentation skills, apparently.’

  Contact Time

  I SEE MY kid every weekend, but it always ends in tears. When I told him about the man with one ear who went into a pub, he didn’t laugh, he cried. What happened to his ear? Was he the same man who bought the slippers off the bloke with no legs? Was the pub the one with the microwave where they put the poor duck to make it into Bill Withers?

  So I gave him maths instead. I told him about a farmer with three lengths of rope and we worked out the average length, then calculated a 20% reduction on a shirt in last year’s style. But this troubled him too. What was last year’s style? And was it bought by the farmer with the rope showing his ignorance of fashion?

  Now we play ‘snap’. If we stay away from the picture cards, it’s fine.

  Enclosures

  I SAW HIM every day, sucking on a tube of Superstrength or curled up like a foetus in his tattered sleeping bag and I thought about our armadillo munching his vegetables, our pumas tearing into slabs of glistening steak, our zebras in their warm straw beds and I called him over and said come with me.

  I placed him in an empty orang-utan unit and told him to stay out of sight during opening times. I put two solvent abusers in with the giraffes and the muttering shopping-trolley woman onto gibbon island.

  But the shopping-trolley woman kept showing her bottom to school children and the boss called me in. He was pleased with my intervention, but could the new guests be given educational classes like art, music and dance so that the public could watch? This would be the zoo finally putting something back into the community.

  New Best Friend

  AFTER THE CONSULTANT left, Tim called us into his office and handed round a packet of Marlboros. ‘Take one, light it, and inhale,’ he said. I immediately had a coughing fit, and Julie was sick in the bin. ‘I haven’t had a fag,’ she protested, ‘since I was fourteen.’ Tim ignored her and prodded on the PowerPoint. Lines of text slid on and off. ‘Smokers,’ he said, ‘change things. Smokers are clued up on office affairs, know what staff think of the company, are less risk averse and more alive to the moment. They’re sensualists, pleasure-seekers and,’ he snapped off the machine, ‘never defer gratification. Smokers take action so from now on, the members of this management team are smokers. Tomorrow we’ll look at lighting and holding, disposal of stubs, and when to offer and when to accept. And I have a few things to say about lunchtime drinking.’

  Potato Smiles

  WHEN DEBBIE LEFT I ate nothing but potato smiles with no-frills ketchup. One day I looked at the fluffy orange discs grinning up at me and decided to save one. I stuck it to the wall next to my bed and it cheered me up. The next day I saved another, but I’d had one of my funny days, so I stuck this one upside down, to make a frown. I did this for years and the pattern reminded me how well I was doing.

  The man from environmental health had a big oblong body built for blocking doorways. ‘The neighbours are talking about a smell,’ he said.

  I locked the door and made him sit while I removed the smiles and heaped them on a plate in front of him. The sauce bottle was rimmed with decaying ketchup scabs. I squeezed, squeezed hard till his plate was full.

  Shop Talk

  SHE DIDN’T WORK with people, she worked with structures. She talked their language, knew about business growth models, could joke about the inverted triangle of the not-for-profits, worked strategically, never operationally.

  So why was she in bed with this ginger man, shagging a person not a structure, growing a relationship, not the growth model of a relationship, getting her hands dirty with service delivery?

  I’d flown down to surprise her on her Managing Change course. And here she was. The woman who had written “Do Not Resuscitate” on a subordinate’s personnel file, who shouted, ‘Does the Pope have a wooden dick?’ at the Regional Development Agency, who would rather grind monkeys than talk to organists.

  Their heads touch on the pillow, his hog-orange bristles mingling with her chestnut locks. The contrasting shades remind me of exotic snakes, spiders as big as hands. It is the warning pattern of poison.

  Until You are Happy

  HE SAT IN the Photo-Me and read the instructions. Tilt your head to the side or sit at an angle. Point your shoulder towards the camera. He tried all this, but couldn’t relax. He looked as though he was holding a contorted poise for an invasive medical examination. His face wore the expression of a startled comedian trying to look zany. Then he saw the sign. Keep taking your picture until you are happy. He stayed in the booth all day, striking a pose, taking the picture, looking at the preview screen, starting again. But each time the morose face staring back said the same thing. There is no escape. There is no way out. You can get a travel card, but you’ll never get away from me.

  Floydy

  FRAGGLE-RALPH WON a competition: the Sugababes play live in your living room. No-one had heard of the Sugababes and neither the word ‘living’ nor ‘room’ could describe our living space; sofa criss-crossed with masking tape, TV balanced on a toilet, a pyramid of Superstrengths in a shopping trolley.

  Ralph sucked on his joint. ‘Aren’t they sort of, like, Floydy?’

  Sugababes.com confirmed that the girls were not ‘Floydy’, nor would they be comfortable in a shabby house with two unemployed alcoholics and a bi-polar with anxiety episodes. But Fraggle-Ralph rang the number and you know the rest: street blocked with do-not-cross tape, counsellors crackling through loud-hailers, milk-faced publicist Sellotaped to a chair,
and Fraggle-Ralph bawling, ‘Sugababes now!’ waving his .22 about.

  At night the pigs blasted thrash-metal from a helicopter. Some of it sounded all right. The publicist kept crying, that was the problem. If she’d stopped crying everything would have been OK.

  The Habits of Unstoppable People

  ‘LET’S WORK ON your narrative arc.’ I looked blank so she took me to a party. It was all razor-edged suits, high-drain hairstyles, people who could slip in and out of social interactions like Porsche gear movements, who knew when to sip, nod, nibble, laugh, all to a background wash of clinking percussion and meandering oohs and aahs, like a music therapy class.

  My mentor raced about, cheek-kissing and hand-pressing, between each blipvert tête-à-tête consulting a stopwatch on the underside of her wrist and muttering things like ‘five seconds too long’ or ‘excellent closure.’

  ‘Your narrative arc is your life,’ she explained. ‘If a relationship isn’t pressing forward your personal narrative, cut it off. We are trapped in a narrative trajectory.’ She described with her finger a tangled racetrack in the air. ‘We cross, we mingle, but wait,’ she glanced over my shoulder, ‘someone’s coming, act normal.’

  The Way you Say ‘Park’

  HE HAD BEEN listening to her voice for years; the percussive, slightly guttural approach to Newton-le-Willows, the gorgeous ripe burr in the vowels of Hazel Grove, the absolute absence of sarcasm when she apologised for cancellations. Today he was singing along in his head as usual when he heard her inject a new enunciation into Eccelston Park, giving the word ‘park’ greater emphasis and putting a little suppressed laugh at the end of it.