by J. S. Mahon
She convinced me in the end, mainly by reminding me about the repair bill that I’d paid in order not to lose my no claims, but there was another good reason for using the staff car park that I thought of myself. By taking my car out of the equation – the car park having high walls and two cameras – anybody who wanted to get at me would have to take a more direct approach. Any coward can scratch a car, but to face up to me man to man was another ball game and I doubted very much that any of them would have the balls to do it. Still, they’d scored a victory by making me miss my little walks, which as well as being refreshing also cut out two sets of traffic lights each way, and I couldn’t let them get away with that. My only option was to slap sanctions on all three of them and on anybody else who I suspected the tiniest bit.
I started my campaign the day after I got my car back as just driving into that damn car park made me thirsty for revenge. I made myself a strong coffee, ignored the usual chitchat in the staff kitchen, and made a beeline for my desk. By the end of the day I’d stopped seven people’s money for a total of eighteen weeks and that weekend was much more enjoyable than the one before.
I ought to point out that it’s not simply stopping their benefits that’s so satisfying, but the reasons that I come up with for doing it. When you sanction someone for a good reason, like not having applied for any jobs or turning up twenty minutes late, they tend to take it fairly well because they know beforehand what’s going to happen. I also think that plenty of those people are working on the side and it’s not the end of the world if they lose their dole money because they still get their housing benefit, which is much harder to touch, although, God knows, I’ve tried often enough. No, it’s much more fun to pick people up on a technicality which deserves no more than a rebuke and a warning to buck their ideas up. They come in with loads of jobs written down in their booklets and walk out wondering what’s hit them. I particularly like to get them that way just before Christmas to ruin the celebrations that they don’t even deserve.
On Monday I carried on where I’d left off on Friday and by the time I saw Afzal K. on Wednesday morning I’d already broken a few hearts, but hadn’t really come up with any more serious suspects. I’d decided to treat all three of them the same that week and to make no reference to the car graffiti business at all. If I mentioned it before stopping their money any or all of them might make a complaint, tying the two things together, and that wouldn’t look good at all after my recent sanction spree.
I put my hand out for Afzal’s booklet without so much as looking at him and checked the jobs that he’d applied for, fourteen in total. I looked at my computer screen to see if that was enough, which it was as his ‘agreement’ was for a minimum of six a week, before checking the three job categories that he was supposed to concentrate on, always a good way to catch them out.
“It says here that you’re supposed to apply for retail jobs too,” I said, still looking at the screen.
“Oh, man, I can’t see myself sitting at a till. I look for factory and warehouse jobs mainly. I prefer physical work,” he said, which was true if you counted lifting weights up and down all day long while the rest of us maintained him.
“There are no retail jobs here,” I said, tapping the open booklet.
“OK, I’ll start applying for them, Darian.”
“Too late, I’m afraid. A two week sanction,” I said, beginning to type.
“Oh, shit!”
“Don’t make me call security again. Off you go.” I pushed the booklet towards him and turned back to the screen, watching him storm off out of the corner of my eye. If it had been him he’d think I was sure of it and if it hadn’t he’d just have to sell more pills to the neanderthals at the gym.
The next afternoon Malcolm D. came in dressed in a tracksuit, of all things, and looking less flushed than I’d ever seen him before. When he sat down and smiled at me I saw that the whites of his eyes actually had some white in them and that he wasn’t at all shaky. I held out my hand for his booklet.
“I’ve quit the booze, Darian,” he said.
“Right.”
“It’s been over a week now. I’ll be fit for work in no time.”
“What? You mean you weren’t fit for work before?” I asked, looking at his drunkard’s nose that a few dry days had done nothing to improve.
“Well, yes, I mean, I’d have given it a go, but I’ll soon feel really up for it,” he said with a euphoria that I found nauseating. “I want to get my life back on track.”
Give him a week, I thought, and he’ll slide off the wagon like they always do, but my main concern was whether it had been vandalising my car that had given him this new lease of life. Perhaps something had clicked in his addled brain and the first drink after defacing my car hadn’t tasted quite the same. It didn’t seem likely, but hours of thought had put him in my top three and there he was staying. I studied his booklet and the computer screen. I didn’t find what I was looking for but there was always a way.
“Well, Malcolm, it’s great that you’ve knocked the drink on the head,” I said with my most charming smile.
“Thanks, Darian.”
“When do you think you’ll be really ready for work?”
“Oh, I’d say that in a couple of weeks I’ll be fit enough to start. I walk a bit further every day,” he said, patting his flabby thighs.
“The trouble is, Malcolm, that your jobseeker’s agreement states that you are fit for work now.”
“Well…”
“You’ve just declared that you’ll be fit for a work in a couple of weeks. That being the case, that’s when you’ll start receiving your payments again.” I started to type, as I often do after I’ve dropped the bombshell.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, the blood draining from everywhere except his nose.
“Rules are rules.”
“I’m going to make a complaint.”
“What? After you’ve just told me that you’re not fit for work?”
“This sort of thing is what starts folk drinking again. It’s a trigger.”
“Well you’d better not pull it then, after what you’ve just told me. All these months you’ve tricked me into thinking that you were job ready. (‘Job ready’ is one of the quaint little phrases we use.) If you start drinking again I hope you’re friendly with your doctor because if he doesn’t put you on the sick there’ll be no point coming here.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“You’ve already said that. Now off you go and test that willpower of yours.”
I felt so good when I finished work that day that I didn’t even mind the queues at the traffic lights. Two down and one to go and now they couldn’t even get to my car.
The next day I had Peter B. sat in front of me for five minutes while I looked at his booklet and his computer file. He’d applied for over twenty jobs and had covered all three of his categories, so it didn’t seem like there was much I could do, but I’m an old hand at this game and where there’s a will there’s a way.
“This job here, Peter,” I said, pointing to one that he wouldn’t have had much chance of getting, “How did you apply for it?”
“Let’s have a look.” He put on his glasses and peered at his writing. “Oh, I sent an email about that one.”
“Right.” I twisted the computer screen round and slid my keyboard over to him. “Just get your emails up and we’ll have a look.”
“What for?”
“Just to check.”
“You don’t believe me,” he said, shaking his head and sighing. After he’d typed in his details, with one finger like a monkey, he pointed at the email. “There it is.”
I clicked it open with the mouse and tutted slowly. “Where’s the covering letter?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not a job that I’ve much chance of getting, so I didn’t write much.”
“No, no, ‘Please consider me for the above post’ and this other little bit is just not good enough. You’re suppose
d to write a couple of paragraphs selling yourself. It’s rubbish like this that shows why you can’t get a job.”
“I got one five months ago. It just didn’t last,” he said, a bit too petulantly for my liking.
“I’m stopping your benefit for a fortnight, so go away and practice writing proper letters,” I said, pulling the keyboard back towards me and closing his emails.
“You’ve gone too far this time,” he hissed at me.
“I’m just helping you to help yourself,” I said, which is one of my favourite lines.
“I’m going to complain. This is victimisation.”
“They’ll only want to look at that pathetic email – which I’ve just printed out, by the way – and then where will you be?” I said, holding my palms face up and shrugging.
“Ah, but I’ve been making a note of all the times you’ve stopped my money and the stupid reasons you’ve given. When I point out that I’ve been in work three times in the last two years they’re going to start asking questions.”
“Go ahead.”
“And if I don’t get any satisfaction I’ll take it higher. I’ve been round to the Citizen’s Advice and they know you,” he said, pointing at me as if I might not have been sure who he was talking about. “They know what you do to people and they’re more than happy to help me.”
“Dear me, Peter, it looks like you’ve really got it in for me,” I said quietly, but with a savage stare and grimace that had made some people literally shake. “You look like a man who’d stop at nothing.” This last statement extinguished a stare almost as nasty as mine and replaced it with a perplexed look.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked in a far less belligerent voice.
“I don’t know, Peter, but I’ve had a flat tyre and my car bonnet badly vandalised all in the space of a week. Whoever did it must really want to get back at me,” I said, raising my eyebrows and puffing out my cheeks in a clownish way intended to show him the versatility of my acting skills. “I went to the police and they asked me to think long and hard about who might have done it. Now I’ve got a name to give them.”
“You’re off your bloody rocker,” he said, more hoarsely now.
“The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that it was you. I hope you’ve got an alibi for both of the time periods that they’ll be asking you about.”
That seemed to do the trick, but after shielding his face with his hand for a moment he lifted his head and gave me a look that I’d have been proud of.
“You’ve gone too far this time, Darian Devlin. I’m fifty-eight years old and my police record is as clean as they come. I’m going round to the CAB right now and when the police come round I’ll be ready for them. You’ll be kissing goodbye to that chair,” he said, waving his finger somewhere around my lower regions. I looked round to check that my nearest colleague hadn’t returned to his desk.
“Do your worst you fucking loser,” I whispered, “and we’ll see who comes out on top.”
He stood up and left the job centre like a man walking into a saloon with two six-shooters primed for action. I despatched my next customer in less than a minute, locked my computer, and walked out to the smoking area. I don’t smoke, as it’s a disgusting, lower class habit, but I felt like a breath of air.
Despite bringing up the subject of the damage to the car, which I hadn’t planned to, I’d been fairly happy with the way things were going right up until the last statement he’d made. When his hand went up to his forehead I thought I’d beaten him, but he rallied like a good ‘un and I almost felt like shaking his hand. All this drama is a game to me, you see, and nine times out of ten – no, ninety-nine times out of a hundred – I come out on top when the curtain falls. Peter B. had weathered one of my virtuoso performances and come back fighting. I couldn’t help but admire the man and I won’t say that what he intended to do didn’t worry me, but at the end of the day it was his word against mine and that counts for a lot in my line of work.
I wouldn’t be going to the police, of course, which was a point in my favour because when the management questioned me after receiving the thorough complaint that I had no doubt he’d write, I would don my mask of astonishment and stoutly deny having mentioned the car business. I’d shake my head and scratch my chin and say that it was certainly true that my car had been vandalised, but that I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even my colleagues. How, I would wonder, had he found out about it?
The management don’t like me any more than the customers do, but the wet sods prefer a quiet life and I was sure they wouldn’t dare to accuse a staunch union man like myself of lying. At worst they’d give me some sort of verbal warning because they’d know that any scrap of paper signed by them would be going straight to my union rep who, as luck would have it, is an old judo pal of mine.
No, I didn’t have much to worry about on that score – I enjoy these little scrapes anyway – but how did it leave Peter B. as a suspect? If I had any faith in human nature, which I don’t, I’d have to admit that his sincerity seemed to put him out of the running, but if I was so good at deceiving people, what was to say that he couldn’t be just as astute?
I had a feeling as I drove home from work on Friday that the little soap opera had just about run its course and it was just as well that it had. They couldn’t get at my car and they wouldn’t dare touch me, so perhaps I should let bygones be bygones and find some other way to amuse myself. That’s what I thought then, but when I got up on Sunday morning I saw things in an entirely different light.
4
After scratching that very true sentence on Darian Devlin’s car, I hadn’t intended to take things any further. I’d already taken a big risk as it was and there was no point ruining my own life just to make that despicable man’s a bit worse. After the events of that week, however, I felt a compulsion to find out where he lived, not with any specific plan in mind, but just to know. I thought that by tailing him home that Friday I would give myself a little buzz that would help to get me through the weekend and also make myself feel that I had some sort of power over him.
Tailing a car is not as easy as it looks in the films and after I’d been lucky enough to get myself three cars behind him at the traffic lights, the danger was that we would end up bumper to bumper if the other cars took a left where he went straight on. Luckily only one did, but as we approached a roundabout on the edge of town, I feared that the opposite might happen; that too many cars would get between us and I would lose him. As it turned out, there were still three between us all the way along the road over the hill to the town where he lives, so I got as far as his housing estate without fear of being seen. When he turned onto the avenue it got a lot trickier, of course, as by then it was only him and me, so I let him get over a hundred yards in front and just hoped that he wouldn’t disappear up a cul-de-sac.
I needn’t have worried, as I saw him pull into a driveway on that same avenue, so I parked up behind a car for a minute and pretended to answer a phone call. When I drove past his neat semi-detached house I made a mental note of the number and carried on to the end. As I had to drive back down that way anyway I put my sunglasses on, like in the films, and found myself keeping an eye out for CCTV cameras. Neither his house nor his neighbours’ had them, but a house diagonally opposite possessed one which seemed to point right down onto their front lawn and I doubted that it would see much of Darian’s house, if anything.
As I drove back to town I really did feel that buzz that I’d been after and it was ironic that when I flicked on the radio they were playing ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen. I was having a good time, and knowing where he lived did give me that feeling of power that I had anticipated. Now, I thought, I could send him a nasty letter through the post if I wanted to, which would shake him up as I know that job centre workers prefer people not to know where they live; a bit like policemen, I suppose.
I decided to save that little treat for another time and just get through the weeken
d as best I could, using my new-found knowledge to cheer me up if I needed it. By lunchtime on Saturday, however, I was feeling quite low and I didn’t want to go to the pub and stay there all afternoon and evening as I’d sometimes done and then regretted it the next day. A bit later on I found myself rummaging around in the garage until I came across something that I thought was just what the doctor ordered, after which I sat down in front of the telly and tried to talk myself out of what I planned to do.
Whether it was because watching ‘The Untouchables’ made me feel brave or if it was for some other reason, I don’t know, but after eating supper and drinking some strong coffee I started pacing around the house until I thought it was late enough to set off. I was as nervous as hell as I drove out of town just after two o’clock, but when I parked up on the road near the end of his avenue I felt more determined than I had ever done in my life. As I walked up the avenue with my baseball cap pulled down fairly low, the sense of anticipation was tremendous, so much so that when a taxi came past I just strode on as if I was heading home after a night out.
With the taxi safely out of the way, I crossed his lawn and did the deed in about a minute flat, left another little memento, and walked back the way I had come feeling like I’d had a shot of some kind of drug. I didn’t get to sleep till daybreak, but when I got up on Sunday afternoon I felt like a new man. I went to the pub for a few drinks in the evening and my mates said that I looked like I’d had some good news, so I just told them that I was feeling a bit better in myself. I took heed of their reaction, however, and told myself that the next time I saw Darian I’d better not let my feelings show; not those feelings anyway.
5
I was glad that I was first up on Sunday morning as at least it gave me a chance to try to get the paint off the window with some turpentine that I found in the garage. When I drew back the living room curtains and saw the words, ‘A SADISTIC PIG LIVES HERE’ – back to front, of course – my first thought was that Helen would make me call the police. You’d think I’d have hit the roof, but my fury came later, in a simmering sort of way, and my initial reaction was to get rid of the paint and keep the police out of it. The police, you see, might spoil the game by making their own enquiries and I wanted to do things my way.
