Scum


I had time to kill. And so I wandered. To call my activity ‘wandering the streets’ would have been rather misleading. But I did have some time to kill before my train was due and I figured the best way to pass that time was in a pub, wherein I could sit and read my book in peace, accompanied by a pint or two. But I’m a fussy drinker and not such a fussy dresser. I look out of place in those trendy wine-bar type places. Besides, they rarely sell proper beer, instead catering for the lowest-common-denominator market with their electrically-pumped overpriced pissy lager chilled to some unnatural sub-zero temperature at which your lips stick to the glass and your bladder contracts in shock the moment the hyperchilled fluid hits your gullet.

A tap on my shoulder. “Excuse me, young man, you’re in my seat.”

Without turning I clambered down from the usurped bar stool and gathered my bag, repositioning myself at the bar with my book.

“Sorry, I didn’t know you were there.” I thought you’d left.

Without replying, the phlegmatic old cunt recovered his stool, dragging it back to its previous position in front of the cigarette machine and about six feet away from the bar itself. The old bastard coughed, a loose, hacky cough, as he clambered aboard, then lit a roll-up.

As I recovered my place in South of No North, still a little flushed with embarrassment and unease at the exchange and finding myself to be the sole person standing and drinking at the bar, I noticed a sign before me which read ‘no smoking at the bar. Thankyou.’ That explained why the old duffer had situated his stool there, then. Presumably the six feet represented an agreed ‘safe’ distance from the bar at which one could chuff. My feet ached. My mild was too cold and a little gassy, not to mention a little bland. But it went down well enough and quickly enough to enable me to finish reading a three-page short and make a swift exit. Back in the street, the dazzling daylight stung my eyes. What now? More aimless wandering? I decided to cut my losses and head to the train station – not a particularly inspiring or restful place to while away the hours, but at least there was little chance of missing my train if I was already there almost an hour early.

As I made my way to the station, I found the streets lined not with the noble poor or bums trying to pick a living from the bins and the gutters, but seething masses of the ignoble rich, wannabe rich and would-have-you-believe-they’re rich. I had to wade through a crowd of kids to enter the station. It was past lunchtime, and their school uniforms suggested they should have been elsewhere. Instead, they hung about, all fags ‘n’ chuddy, the boys with their baseball caps pulled down low and their jeans and tracksuit bottoms even lower, the girls with their large hooped earrings, ties knotted short, blouses loose and miniskirts tight against roughly-shaven sausagey thighs.

“’Ere, can yer crash us a fag?”

“Fook off”

“’Ere, mister…”

“You fuckin’ startin’?”

“I aren’t bothered.”

“Me neiver…”

A few points and hushed snickers, perhaps, but I slipped past them almost unnoticed for a change, willing myself the ability to exist if only temporarily as el hombre invisible… I had made it to the station unscathed.

The platforms were clogged with them. Not school children, but them in general. The scum of the earth: people. An obese teenager pushing a pram, cigarette in the one hand, guiding the child’s buggy, mobile phone in the other, raised to her ear.

“‘Cause”, she bellows with a coarse swagger, “it wan’t me ‘oo went thru’ customs wi’r an ‘arf up me snatch!”

Skip forward five years, the only dope-smoking year one sits in the playground, her knees too weak to support her enormous frame. The other kids point and laugh, for despite their own obesity, little Chardonnay who ain’t so little remains something that must be beheld, marvelled at, ridiculed.

“Wot you lookin’ at?” she yells at the closest gawping fat kid. “Come ‘ere and I’ll kick yer in the snatch.”
“I just want to be your friend.”

“Yeah? Got any blow?”

Back in present time, another mother, this time dragging a toddler by her side as she waddles to and fro, her flip-flops flapping against the yellowing soles of her feet, crosses my line of vision.

“Nathan! Shut up, or I’m going to smack you so hard….” She bawls at the child who is in turn bawling, its face red and chocolate-smeared, its fists clenched and also covered with the same sticky brown gunk that is slaumed not just on its face but also its clothes. The threat just brings more intense, raw-throated fraught wailing and a new intensity of combined anger and anguish to the flow of tears and snot, the reward for which is a sharp blow to the buttocks, with the inverse of the desired effect. “I fuckin’ warned you!”

Businessmen, everywhere, crawling like ants or rats across the concrete concourses, scurrying between the shops and vending machines, clutching briefcases, mobile phones and overpriced coffees with the flavour of mud housed in plastic-lidded cardboard beakers.

“Yeah… yeah… tell Phil I need those figures by 10am tomorrow,” a flash git in a grey pinstripe suit hardballs into his mobile telephone the size of a matchbox and he breezes past me.

“I’ll ring through with the stats when I’m on the train,” another voice swerves from behind me. He passes me, then halts abruptly to check his watch, check the departures board and then his watch again. He is wearing designer glasses, his hair his gelled to a perfectly coifed flick upwards at the front. He is using his mobile on a hands-free set, which leaves him able to cart his laptop bag and briefcase about freely. “Yeah, yeah, I have them. I’ve got them with me, but I need to get into my briefcase and I’m just on the platform waiting for my train… it should be here any minute. Yeah. Yeah. Er… yeah, yeah yeah. Right, ok, I’ll talk to you shortly, mate. Alright, yeah. Ok.” He looks around, a look of panic in his eyes.

An announcement comes on over the tannoy, and after another glance at his watch and the departures board, he’s off, at a jog, up the stairs two at a time, appearing on the opposite platform just as the train pulls away… I watch him, amused. He’s back on his mobile again, although this time he’s beyond the range of my hearing.

The platform was becoming crowded following a near-subliminal influx of suits. A mobile phone rang and sent everyone rummaging through their bags and pockets. A barrel-chested businessman took the call and began to belt out instructions, projections, measurements and directions.

“Yeh. Tell John he needs to get onto Andy about the contractor’s quote. Yeh. He’s got all the details down…”

He paced up and down the platform, twelve paces forth, twelve paces back, a pudgy finger upon the hand which did not hold the receiver, crooked yet half-pointing, was brought down at around chest height as though punctuating the close of each sentence or independent clause. “Yeh. Call Steven Thompson right away:” (finger) “get him to make the reservations.” (finger) “Club class flights for all of us.” (finger) “Yeh. From Gatwick.” (finger)

He was wearing a double-breasted suit, fastened and straining around the girth of his midriff. The ensemble also featured a grey shirt with fasten-down collars and a garish tie and was accessorized with brown brogues. Brown brogues! I’m no fashion guru by any stretch of the imagination, and nor have I the means to be hip with it even if I did have the inclination, which, of course, I don’t. However, at least I know bad attire when I see it, and suffice to say, sir, that brown brogues are a serious style faux-pas in any circle. Always have been, and one would suspect, always will be. Especially in a ‘business’ context. Especially when the wearer’s clearly trying to look chic, monsieur. Really, the only people who can even get close to getting away with brown brogues are academics, of the tweedy variety. Brown brogues are an acceptable accessory to, say, a tweed jacket and trousers combo (if you really must), or a brown corduroy and cream or mustard cable-knit sweater getup. Yes, the jacket will ideally have leather, split hide or suede(ette) elbow pads. At least in this setting, the brown brogues compliment the rustic / eccentric look. At least the kind of people who dress in this way aren’t out to impress, and if they do have designs on being impressive, it’s for their academic prowess, rather than their presentation and corporate marketability.

My train pulls in and I board. Most of the seats are occupied by lone travellers, but none of whom I fancy sharing my journey with. Some make it quite obvious that they do not want the ‘spare’ seat to be taken by some random stranger by placing bags, coats, books or various other personal belongings in the space. So territorial: ‘this is mine.’ Unless you have two arses, you only need one seat, but I do understand the traveller’s wish to avoid being hemmed in by some smelly, sweaty fidgety tossbag who spends the duration of the ride with dance music or lamecore shit-hop bleeding from their headphones at PA volume, breaking only to bawl into their phone about what they got up to the night before.

“Yeah, it was wicked. I was fookin’ mashed, hurhurhur! Did yer see Jonesey? Yeah, when ‘ee came out of the ‘ospital. ‘Is shoulder’s bust, hurhurhurhurhurhurhur!”

I bypassed the occupied seats, the ‘don’t sit here’ seats, the reserved seats, the seats taken by middle-aged, middle-England women with middle-class aspirations as they poured over their Sudoku puzzle books rested upon a strategically-placed copy of the Daily Mail.

I managed to find an empty seat and slid myself into position, just ahead of a deluge of Oxbridge-type students all wearing tweed jackets and woolen scarves, lugging huge rucksacks and instrument cases down the carriage aisle.

“Mahst be seats for Durham hyaah!”

“Yah. Jast keep going a little further, Piers.”

As they ponced up and down the carriages in search of their apparently non-existent seats, accusations of double-booking and demands for a compensatory switch to first class were toffed about with increasing frequency and aggravation.

“No, if we’hh not able to be provided with ahh reservations, they mast put ahs into first clahrse,” one toffee-nosed tithead in a mauve velvet blazer spiffed.

“Oh, absolutely,” a snake-belted inbred spastic lolled in a tone which dripped caviar.

It took them until after the train had pulled out to get to the end of the carriage and I just knew I’d not seen the last of them.

I glanced about me to discover that the two sets of tables, in front of and cross-aisle from my seat were occupied by a collective of business delegates. They were removing their jackets and rolling the sleeves of their shirts, some of which were striped, others of which were in pastel shades with white collars. So last century. Some of them were unveiling their laptops, while other piled their Filofaxes on the tables before them. Every last one of them had their mobile phone either in their hand or in front of them. The older ones were talking across one another, vying for the position of alpha male. They all nodded vigorously as they made cases in the most vociferous of terms, proffering forth the pros and cons of various locations, budget plans and which person would be best suited to which position. It was all meaningless, and I deduced that subconsciously some of them knew it. But they weren’t going to give it up, as this was their life. Cross-aisle from me sat a balding man in his late forties. He had a convex face, which sloped down from his forehead into a hooked proboscis of gargantuan proportions and dominated his facial landscape which sloped away into a weak mouth and almost non-existent chin. Glancing through his spectacles at the open Filofax before him, it must have occurred to him how empty his week, and, by association his life was. I was able to make out the entries for each day of the week:

Wednesday: meeting 1-2, 3-4.
Thursday:
Friday: Charity dress-down

He picked up his pen and scribbled something in for Wednesday before picking up his mobile and dialling up someone, anyone, who would talk to him and make him look important, or at least busy.

“Hi… Dave? It’s Nigel here…”

The younger ones, too were immersed in business-related topics of conversation, all desperately trying to prove themselves worthy, and to show to their elders that they should be their next in line, throwing out the corporate speak at nineteen to the dozen.

“Until that time… I just feel as though I’m one of the girarffes…” The Southern elongation of the second syllable of the word ‘giraffe’ stood out above the gruff, broad-vowelled intonations of his more northern colleagues even more than the strangeness of the analogy being made.

“Do you know what kind of utilities they’ve got in place for this project? I hear Jack Nosegay’s the project manager, and then when it’s done he’s going to step aside for Matt Beckham to take the role of Head Of.”

“I’d heard that too, but I was speaking to Steve Swinton and he was saying that Matt might manage the project and then stay on.”

“Ooh… I think it’s a really interesting project. But it’s been really hard to move forward on until now because in the early stages it was… well, there was a lot of chefs on it and it was hard to make headway. But now we’re starting to capture the soft knowledge and people are starting to buy into it more. I just hope we get to move quite quickly now.”

“Me too. It’s such a great building.”

“Oh yeah, it’s so much better… it’s awesome, innit?”

“Do you know where your desk is?”

“Not yet…”

Feeling nauseous I buried my head in the Bukowski until the train pulled in at my station. I disembarked, although not without difficulty. A clamour of thickwits wanting to board the train hadn’t the sense to let passengers off before trying to wrestle their way on, thrusting suitcases and rucksacks up the step and against my shins the moment I opened the door.

The smell of chocolate with a minty undercurrent met my nostrils as my feet met with the pavement. The batch of confection being produced marked a change from that rolling off the conveyor belt that morning as I had made my way toward the station: then, my sense of smell had been pleasured by the aroma of chocolate with a caramelly undercurrent. It was hard to decide which I preferred, although I reminded myself that it mattered little: production of chocolate here would soon cease as the lines were due to be closed in favour of large new factories on the mainland, with more modern machines and a cheaper workforce. Ultimately, it all comes down to economics: fuck a century and a half’s chocolate-making tradition and a small city’s employment levels, it’s money that counts. There’s no room for emotion or sentimentality. The shareholders don’t get dividends in compassion.

I turned a corner and the breeze carried a different aroma in the form of the sickly-sweet earthy smell of sugar beet. That too would soon be gone as the beet factory was scheduled for closure, with the loss of several hundred jobs, if one considered the associated growers, hauliers, etc., who also relied on the processing of this popular crop, although British production was becoming, like everything else, threatened by cheaper imported goods. Factory smog was once a sign of progress…. Casting these thoughts from my mind I continues to make my way homewards.

There was simply no escaping them. Passed by a school, the noise of children thronging in my ears. Children, abandoned by their parents and coming a close second to work sit stone-faced as they pass in taxis their surly demeanours set in imitation of their perpetually grizzly mothers. Other mothers who have made the time or effort to turn out to collect their offspring stand in clusters, straddling the pavement and blocking it to regular pedestrians who have somewhere to go and aren’t only using the footpath as a runway between school and SUV beefing vociferously about the cost of shoes and school clothes in an attempt to justify their working lives to the mothers who stand around in cardigans and sandals, making like their kids are their priority and they’re willing to sacrifice career and working for the man in favour of some hippie ideal while their husbands work for IBM and arrive home in the BMW to readymade by M&S dinner on the table. And their lives were just so much better, and they wanted to make sure everyone knew it. But such displays of one-upmanship had to be conveyed subtly, of course, there could be no literal climbing on the shoulders of the others and tugging at the hair as they scrambled their way to the top of the social heap and its microcosmic reflection as stood on the peripheries of the playground, for that was no example to set the children.

“…Well, yes, John’s working away a lot now so I’m having to do everything myself… he’s involved in a major project. Yes, he’s in energy…”

“Ooh, really?” Must keep her talking: her husband’s rich. Maybe we can be friends. Perhaps we’ll get invited round for dinner. Maybe John’s a mason and would be able to recommend my Alex…"

“Yes, yes…”

“It sounds fascinating.” Forced enthusiasm.