The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

  Only ever follow a person to play a practical joke on them or engage in a similar harmless activity. You and you alone are responsible for your actions. Using these instructions to commit a crime does not void you of responsibility for your actions, nor does it annul the damage you have done to the lives of other people.

  Well, this is just a harmless activity, isn’t it? I won’t be damaging anyone’s life. I just want to know what he gets up to. It’s not like I’m going to blackmail him or stalk him or anything, is it?

  So, as Churchill once blethered, the era of procrastination is fast disappearing down the resolutional plughole. It’s Saturday morning. My clock radio says 8:04. Time to get on with it.

  I don appropriate clothing (black jeans, grey T-shirt, green hooded top, black woolly hat), knock back a cup of tea and a piece of toast. Polly is still passed out on the kitchen sofa from last night (we have no lounge) but briefly raises her head to utter a few words of encouragement (“Don’t do anything stupid”). I climb the metal steps from our basement flat to street level. It’s a little chilly, but not raining. I look up and down the street. No sign of anyone. Hope I’m early enough. 8:15. Settle myself on the second step. Reasonably good view of the steps coming down to the pavement at number three. Wait.

  Wait.

  People walk past occasionally. No one seems to take much notice. Around nine, an old lady I’ve never seen before looks quizzically at me as she shuffles along, then stops to ask if I’m all right. I reply that I am. Her next question is surprising.

  “Are you a terrorist?”

  For some reason, maybe because I’m already bored, I say yes. She hurries off looking concerned. Perhaps that wasn’t the best thing to do. It’ll give her something to talk about on the bus, though.

  More waiting.

  9:45-ish, Polly emerges blearily with a cup of tea—which I think is for me until she sips from it, informs me that my mother has just been on the phone (“You’ll be pleased to know I didn’t tell her what you were really doing”) and unsmilingly disappears back inside.

  Some brief action occurs at 10:25, when a male figure trots down Webster’s steps. The music to Mission: Impossible strikes up in my head as I scramble to my feet and sprint after him. Hearing the flat-footed clatter approaching from behind, my quarry, who is clearly not Lance Webster, whips around and frowns at me, startled. With very few other options I carry on running past, mutter a feeble “Sorry, mate” and streak round the corner of the adjacent street.

  Fuck it. I’m going to have to get a whole lot better at this.

  I hide in the newsagent’s until the faux-Webster has left the scene, then return to base, my dress rehearsal complete. This time nothing remotely relevant happens until around one, when Polly, in a rare fit of being-nice-about-my-bloody-silly-ideas, brings me a Marmite sandwich and yesterday’s Evening Standard.

  Over the long, uneventful course of the afternoon I rattle through several stages of doubt about several different things, starting with this project and why on earth I am bothering, then my life in general—how I managed to reach this age with so few career prospects and pounds in the bank—then my ex-girlfriend and why it didn’t work out, then my trip to New York last year and why I decided it was tall but overrated, then my visit to Lisbon the year before and why I decided it was completely underrated, then back to what I’m doing right now (if I had an ounce of sense I’d have made myself a little survival pack with some fruit, water, at the very least a Thermos of coffee like they do on TV), then finally, as usual, my job.

  God, I hate it. It was only meant to be for a week when I started, and that was three years ago. Now I’m like some fucking senior there, without the benefit of really being in charge of anyone. It’s the most ridiculous setup. Ron and Michael, the two owners, are like a comedy double act minus the comedy. Ron’s a diminutive, bespectacled fifty-something divorcé with high blood pressure; a trained accountant from a relatively humble background, who in the eighties managed to make a lot of money, all of which he’s gambled on this funny little glorified telesales business. He mooches about at work, apparently channelling all his energy into the most menial of tasks-emptying the recycle bin, ripping up cardboard boxes, hoovering the meeting room—then suddenly pounces on one of your documents to pick a thousand holes in it, or yells at everyone for chatting too much, or sacks a secretary. He’s fairly unnerving. On first meeting him you think his sense of humour has been wiped out by some freak mental accident, then you realise it’s not so much absent as dry as a Mormon’s birthday party. Sometimes you find him alone in a far corner of the office, laughing at one of his own jokes. The only other human who gets them is Michael. Michael is the kind of man who I’m sure would be hysterically funny if he wasn’t your boss, or your friend, or in the slightest bit connected to you. He’s a painfully old-fashioned Chelsea-dwelling upper-class Hooray Henry; again, made a load of cash in the eighties, added it to his sizeable pot of “old” money, fulfilled his every geek-boy fantasy, dated a couple of models, married and divorced one of them within a year, then went rather publicly bankrupt after the ex got a big settlement out of him. He’s still only in his late thirties. He’s a blond giant, about six foot six, totally manic and overbearing, has absolutely no sense of personal space whatsoever and possesses a razor-sharp, ruthlessly logical business mind of the sort that would have come in very handy in 1987 (he refers to the Internet as “the connected computer”). He is occasionally capable of hilarious wit, but is generally pretty charmless. In fact, if you want a good description of Michael, have a listen to the Blur song “Charmless Man,” which I’ve always been convinced was written about Michael—the bloke in the song is identical in every way (Michael also hangs out at the Soho House members’ club, as Damon Albarn did around the time the song was written—they could easily have met). Michael and Ron understand each other in a puzzling way that somehow works, inasmuch as they haven’t murdered each other yet. You’ll sometimes walk over to their part of the office and find them working, ostensibly in complete silence, until Michael will suddenly exclaim, “Ron, I’ll tell you a fourth time if you wish,” continuing a debate that has probably been simmering for hours. Once an argument exploded over whether Markham Street in Chelsea was the ninth or the tenth street on the right as one travelled down King’s Road. Unable to quench their excitement by consulting the A-Z, they jumped straight into a taxi and raced over there to prove one or the other wrong.

  “I must insist, Michael, that although Markham Square has two exits, it can still only be counted once,” Ron calmly stated upon their return.

  Michael laughed incredulously.

  “You still can’t accept that I’m right, can you, Ron? What an extraordinary way to behave.”

  In terms of employees, the pair favour a ragbag of misfits and occasionals, often advertising vacancies in the Stage, they being of the shaky belief that underemployed actors are reliable and have a good telephone manner. Various other weirdos drift in and—often very swiftly—out: musicians, students, travellers, general under-achievers, attracted by the reasonable hourly rates, flexible shifts and relaxed attitude towards contracts of employment. An actor, for example, can bugger off for a month to appear in a Christmas pantomime, then slot straight back in come the New Year. The advantage of this arrangement for Ron and Michael is they have absolutely no responsibility towards their employees: no holiday, sickness or maternity pay, and they’re free to hire and fire with little or no red tape. But the downside, which in my three years they’ve never come close to grasping, is that no one who works for them gives the slightest fuck about the fate or fortunes of the company, each person doing as little work as humanly possible (the weekend shifts, with Ron and Michael rarely there, are an absolute joke); the only motivation for anyone’s presence is the cheque they are grudgingly presented with at the end of each week—or, in my exceedingly unusual case, month. I alone managed to negotiate what passes for a full-time salary a year or so ago at the insistence of my th
en girlfriend, for I had progressed to what Ron and Michael laughingly describe as a managerial role. This consists of little more than showing new staff the ropes and then ploughing on with the same tedious old shit as everyone else: answering the phone, talking to corpses all over the country—Grantham, Horley, Bideford, Dumfries, Wantage, Bingley—jotting down the crap they witlessly spew on badly photocopied pieces of paper. I say and hear the same words every minute of every hour of every day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks per year. It’s hell. My fellow losers are inoffensive enough—we all get along, to a degree—but since everyone is timetabled to arrive, go to lunch and knock off at completely different times, no one really knows. I suppose things could be worse, but I frequently find myself going home angry, tired and despondent. If things don’t change soon … well, I may be forced to do something about it.

  Sorry. Don’t mean to moan. But as it’s nearing four o’clock and Mr. Webster still hasn’t graced the outside world with his presence, there really isn’t much else to talk about.

  Now, I know what you’re hoping. Thirty seconds before I decide to call it a day, maybe around six, Lance Webster finally emerges from his lair and mooches off down the street, bowls into the nearest pub, orders himself a cider and settles down in front of the football, whereupon I station myself locally and strike up idle banter. If only. What actually happens is hardly as straightforward, possibly more interesting.

  Ten past five, I am visited by a traffic warden. A male one. Fifty-ish. I am still dressed in woolly hat and hooded top and seated unsteadily at the top of our metal steps, so I suppose I still look like an outside bet on a burglar, or a granny-basher, or at the very least someone who should soon be taking his evening medication. The warden asks me several questions, some of them stupid, most of them slightly bemusing, all of them tempting me to ask, “Why do you want to know? You’re a traffic warden.”

  “Hello,” he begins.

  “Hi.”

  “Can we help you?”

  I look around him a bit, and further down the street. He is alone. Perhaps he is royalty.

  “Erm … no?”

  “Just wondered what you were up to, y’know. Sat there. Second time I’ve seen you today.”

  “Oh, yeah? First time I’ve seen you.”

  He is not smiling. “What are you doing?”

  “Erm … just chilling.”

  “Bit nippy today, yes,” he laughs humourlessly “Seen anything interesting?”

  “No. You?”

  “Hmm,” he replies, biting his top lip and frowning down the street. “There’s been a couple of complaints.”

  “About me?”

  “Well, about people like you.”

  God knows what he’s meant to be doing. Happily, however, at that moment he must start being a traffic warden again, for who should we see—I mean, really, who the arse should we see—but Lance Webster, frantically jingling a set of car keys, cantering up from the other end of the street towards a nondescript vehicle.

  “I’ll move it,” he shouts.

  All right. Again, I must apologise. You understand. Three words. Three everyday words. But that voice, that slightly harsh but impossibly articulate intonation, that hint of Berkshire accent (if Lennon had been from Reading, etc.)—I know, I know … take a cold shower, get a hotel room, whatever. But. When you’ve spent your life hearing that same voice spitting out those glorious lyrics: “I can’t recall if we really have sex, all I can feel are the after-effects;” outsmarting interviewers on late-night radio: “No, no, hang on, there seems to be some theory that being taken up the arse at boarding school disqualifies you from making valid rock music. Well, I dunno. Ask Kurt Cobain. I’m quite sure he’d have preferred being occasionally buggered by a prefect than the mountainload of shit he had to put up with as a youth;” berating the crowd for sluggishness: “Oh, what’s the matter, did [support band] Daisy Chainsaw tire you out, little children?”—you can’t ignore a little tingle down your spine when you hear that voice again, even if it is employed for something as mundane as telling a traffic warden not to ticket his car. Which, as it turns out, is too late.

  “You got a ticket anyway,” states the warden, ambling up to him.

  “Aw, come on, mate—I live right there. I only parked outside so I could take my cat to the vet. I’ve only been there five minutes.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe, sorry, but … look, I had to dash to the shop to get some pet food, because otherwise I can’t get her into the box, but I didn’t know I’d run out, and … oh, it’s complicated.”

  “Nothing I can do. Once I press the button, that’s it.”

  Webster huffs and rips open the little plastic packet placed under his windscreen wipers.

  “Eighty quid!”

  “Forty if you pay within a fortnight. There’s an address on the back if you want to appeal.”

  I’m hiding further down my stairwell while watching this riveting exchange. I can just see Webster’s lower half, his carrier bag (Kent’s—“Everything for Your Pet”) swinging as he hopelessly stamps his feet. I didn’t really have him down as a cat lover, but there you go. I cast the obvious thought aside (how the hell did I manage to miss him leaving his flat, retrieving his car, parking outside, going inside and coming out again, when I’ve been sitting here patiently since eight o’clock this bloody morning) because an idea has just struck me. Probably the first genuinely astute idea I’ve had all day. I pull my hat down, hurry back up the steps and stride purposefully past the warden and the still fulminating ex-pop star, continue up the street, do a left onto the main road, cut down the little alleyway which chops off the one-way system, then out onto the high street and stop by the pub next to the Morrisons. There, a comfortable distance from the homeless dude who sits next to the cash machines, I wait.

  I don’t have to wait long. Five minutes, if that. I actually spot him in his car, driving past and turning right before the MFI, finding himself a spot, getting out with the cat box and hurrying back to the high street. He reaches the vet’s, just across the road from where I’m standing, presses the buzzer and enters.

  As bright as my previous brainwave was, I’ve no idea what to do now. Okay, so he occasionally takes his cat to the vet. Great. There seems little to be gained from barging in there and trying to chat to him as he waits for his pussy to be dewormed, or whatever it is. Lacking any startling inspiration, I simply wait. This is not difficult. I’ve been doing it all day.

  But just in case life was getting too easy it starts to rain. That strange, jerky rain you often get in the springtime; oversized raindrops. Initially this is not a problem. Ten minutes later it’s a little bit stupid. The unremarkable assortment of Saturday-afternoon traffic, buses, screaming police cars and thundering HGVs continues for a short while longer until, thank Christ, Webster emerges and sprints back to his car. But there’s something missing. It takes me a few moments to spot what’s missing: something which, in a fairly tenuous manner, gives me my opportunity.

  He hasn’t got his cat with him.

  I hang on for a moment to check he’s not simply running back to grab something, but no; he drives off. I cross the road and look at the opening times tacked to the door. “Closed Sundays. Monday-Saturday, 8:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m.” Without thinking too much, I whip off my hat and enter. The small waiting room is mercifully empty apart from the blondy-grey-haired lady who sits behind the counter, surrounded by cash register, phone, toys, packets of catnip, photos of various animals (“A few of our furry friends”) and other assorted pet paraphernalia. I give her my best, non-nutterest smile.

  “Hello,” I start, wondering whether she’ll remember me.

  “Oh, hi!” she exclaims, looking up from some paperwork. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I reply. “Long time …”

  “That’s right,” she nods. “How’s—erm …”

  “Cookson?”

  “Cookson! That’s it.”

  “Ah,”
I shrug, mock-ruefully “I lost the custody battle, I’m afraid. He’s now in Camberwell with his mum.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I laugh. “He’s got a garden now. Cat flap and everything.”

  “Aw, good,” she beams, glad it was a happy, cuddly ending for the feline in the relationship. “So what can we do for you today?”

  “Well … a couple of years ago I remember you telling us it sometimes got pretty swamped in here, and you asked for people to help out?”

  “Oh, yes. Still do actually. Not that we’re inundated with volunteers …”

  “Well, I just thought … I’m free on Monday, and I wondered whether you could use any … you know …”

  Suddenly her voice takes on a tone of desperation.

  “Monday?”

  “Yes … I know you’re probably not terribly busy on Mondays, but—”

  “We are overwhelmed this Monday! There’s a full day of appointments, dozens of pets to be fetched from the surgery and I’ve got to go to pick my mother up from hospital.”

  “Ah. Where’s she in hospital?”

  “Bournemouth.”

  “Right—so, er, Monday would be good, then?”

  “Yes!” She stands up, reaches out and clasps my hand. “Oh, my goodness, we’re in such a spot! You couldn’t have come at a better time!”

  I’m not making this up, honest. In fact, her reaction is so embarrassingly over the top that I start backtracking.

  “But, surely … you need to be a current customer to volunteer?”

  “Oh, no! Don’t worry about a little thing like that,” she chatters, brushing the very thought aside. “Hang on, let me go and tell the vet; she’ll be thrilled!”

  She scampers off to the little consulting room. Shit. Of course, I’m assuming Webster actually needs to come and pick up his bloody cat on Monday. He’d damn well better do, as I seem to have inadvertently got myself a hard day’s voluntary toil. I’ll have to pull a sicky as well—from my real job. I must be insane.