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“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
A.C. Clarke
FRANK: So, let me introduce you. Er...that’s CHRIS, that’s MANDY...Hiya
That’s...over there, her…
SCARY MARY
Ask her about what she got up to before she found the Lord sometime. Not now
SCARY MARY: So I told her I was Bi, and she said, what, polar or sexual and I said, why can’t I be both? Anyway, they never found Dad, good riddance…
Really… Blood curdling stuff. We’re actually a pretty ironic, chilled bunch here you know, apart from SONYA, but nobody disses SCARY MARY’S faith. She’s terrifying enough when she’s got BABY JESUS telling her what to do
Let me see, who else
MARTIN HARMAN
Deputy area human, baldness magnitude 8.6
MARTIN HARMAN: You may not care what people call you on Twitter, FRANK, but you can bet your boss does!
‘ROD’ STEWART
World’s most filthy viewing history
MALCOLM
World’s most boring viewing history
Distressingly hairy ears
MALCOLM: The german for bagpipe is dudelsack
NICOLA
Pretty sure she would. Hostage proof
THE BUTTCRACK KID
You’ll learn
ANGE
Reptilette. Iguanatrix
ANGE: Fat chick on a doughnut. You snooze you lose
Got the decorators in
SUBJECT NINE: BARRY
Does an unspecified martial art. May have very hard feet
BARRY: Does ANGE mean it, what she said about overtime? Or was she just bein’ funny…?
HOWARD: There’s no such thing as a funny velociraptor, Baz
K2: Nice one, centurion!
MAUREEN
Unsafe after 4 units
DEBBIE
Unsafe after any units
SONYA: It’s called a fistula….
BECKS: But then I thought, perhaps he does...what do you think?
Never ever ask after SONYA’S health and never - never! - ask BECKS about her love life
KEITH 1 (AKA WORLD OF SPURT)
A character called Keith would strain anyone’s credulity, so it pains me to point to exhibit B -
KEITH 2
I think it was an eighties thing. Boys in the early sixties were pretty much all called Simon or Nick or Richard. What do you think - all these Keiths left over from the eighties? I dunno, Keith Floyd? No?
K1: I prefer doing DEBBIE to doing TRACEY. When I’m doing DEBBIE, that’s all I’m doing, yeah? I do her for a bit, then I come, sorted. But when I’m doing TRACEY I have to think about doing someone else or I lose interest. I have to think about doing Taylor Swift, or that one off the news
K2: Or DEBBIE
K1: Or DEBBIE, yeah
K2: At least you’re getting your end away, what’s your problem?
K1: Well, there’s only a limited amount of other people to think about doing
K2: Nah, there must be loads!
K1: Alright, who?
K2: Er, how about the England Lionesses world cup squad? That’s 11 right there, 22 if you go round twice
K1: Nah, I’m a bit of a boob man, you know?
K2: But DEBBIE ain’t got boobs!
K1: Yeah, but she’s DEBBIE, innit!?
THAT BLOKE FROM ESTATES WHO CAME ON THE XMAS DO
Super power = infallible sense of direction
Oh, you remember - the taxi, yeah? The driver had to ask him for directions
An infallible sense of direction is a wonderful thing, except when you have two people with an I S of D in the same car
That’s a no no, like crossing the beams in Ghostbusters
The eighties one
I know, with chicks. I think it was a couple of years ago, which means it’s probably been out for at least ten. When the calendar passed 2000 I think my sense of time just ran out of road, you know?
KEVIN
Comedy accents
JUSTIN
Only gay in the village
No, don’t be like that
Like a lot of old reptiles, it’s possible I seem a bit antagonistic to the whole warm, woolly, mammalian LBGT thing. I’m not, but I get very bored by it
HOWARD : Ennui
K1: That is yer actual French
To begin with, the joys of alternative sexuality was just one of my many, many BLIND SPOTS, things that just don’t do it for me
Like, I dunno -
BLIND SPOTS, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:
#1: jewellery, well, precious metals. They’re just shiny
#2 Flowers, very nice but so what
#3 The music of Prince, ditto
#4 Football. If you care about who wins a game of football it’s agony. If you don’t it’s very boring
#5 Cats, the animal or the musical
#6 Banoffee pie
#7 Formula one
#8 Wine
That’s enough BLIND SPOTS for the moment, but still
Indifference, call it what you will, but don’t knock it, it’s what keeps me going, allows me to endure the weather, the terrible food, the baldness, the teeth…
So yeah I’m not in any way against gayness, I just think it’s boring
VOICE: And this from a man who doesn’t like football
FRANK: I don’t have smelly feet either, I’m barely a man at all
HOWARD: Football, cheesy feet and innate ability to fix cars, they’re all on the same chromosome
FRANK: Look, imagine if instead of homosexuality, the bronze age nomads of the middle east had taken against golf - you know, the business with the little white balls, the sticks, the funny trousers
Nothing against golf, of course, except that on my bucket list it only just beats dying
Now, after millennia of persecution Golf Liberation has happened and they are free to party in the clubhouse and clench their buttocks while sinking a putt. You turn on the TV and there are golfers screaming at you. There’s a whole month every year when everyone affirms it’s OK to like golf and MARTIN HARMAN wears a rainbow lanyard in solidarity. Chasing the plaid pound, corporations shill their wares with videos of ecstatic golfers. Cara Delingwhatsit pretends to like golf
If you’re not interested in golf it begins to chafe
I suppose I wouldn’t mind if I thought it made any difference. It would still be a very brave pair of golfers to hold hands round here…
Same story with race. Obviously I hate racism because it’s cruel and stupid and spiteful and pointless and stupid but I also hate it a lot because it is so utterly boring. Why the fuck would anyone care about colour? I’m so tired of hearing it. Of course, not caring about colour is a luxury for white people who just don’t get it. I get that
The sad fact remains in a world rife with alternative truth, klansmen, cat stranglers, wife beaters, free market think tanks, perverts, poisoners and men in pink shirts, the people who I utterly despise, who have me frothing with bile, people for whom murder is too good are - slow drivers
Bastards
BRYAN
Delete as applicable sub/super/human
Deffo superhuman, runs, but much too fast to make my biweekly jog a possible excuse for mutually soothing banter. Actually, I may have given him the impression that I, too, have run a marathon. Cycles, but unlike the herd of freewheeling reptiles on the second floor he actually knows how his bike works and doesn’t stop for cake. Chats easily to NAT about social media stuff and would be a disaster except he has some fairly serious girlfriendage in the shape of JESS from Client Accounts. They’ve known each other since school and are saving up for a deposit. It would almost be worth losing NAT to him in order to see the ensuing alarm and despondency
BLIND SPOT #9 Social Media
Yes yes fairly predictable for an antique reptile but actually I despise old people who won’t engage with new technology
Funny, isn't it, all those chancers in the back of the colour section flogging books to help elderly coots grapple with smartphones, a case of buying a horse in the hope it will mend your car if ever I saw one
No, the thing is, all the FB and Insta etc just look like too much hard work
I mean
Did you ever look at a cow and think
Fuck, I hope it likes eating grass
Because a cow is so big and grass is such a shit food, the poor thing has to eat the stuff pretty much continuously what a chore it must be
I like a piece of toast, but I don’t think I could munch it nonstop hour after hour
I think of that cow when I see people compelled to spend their time scrolling, posting, looking for likes
Good luck to them, but phew
And as for when someone feels they have to show you a meme or a tiktok - having to look at stuff on other people's phone is even more boring than listening to their dreams
DEREK
Picking his nose while watching porn the closest he will ever come to multi-tasking
HOWARD
Resident alien. Divorced. Men like Howard have always been married
HOWARD: As Peter Cook said -
FRANK: What part of the spectrum were you on when you said that? As Peter Cook said, fucksake
HOWARD: I was telling her a joke, get her in the mood. It was the one about writing a novel, you know, “Neither am I!”
FRANK: Well let me translate. What you said to her was: I am a revolting old fossil. I am wittering on about something that was on black and white television, not that she’s ever heard of black and white, or television, for that matter. She couldn’t be more bored and repulsed by all your Peter Cook stuff than if she was actually stood behind your commode in the care home you will so soon infest. I can see her now, shifting from foot to foot, looking at the back of your head without seeing it…
It was this or working in a massage parlour, and when she has to listen to your antediluvian ravings as well as wiping your arse she wishes she was tossing people off instead. She’s on minimum wage, she’s made sixty p while you’ve been chuntering on about Peter bloody Cook instead of having your bowels open. I knew it was a mistake to let you off the leash. I know you don’t go to many parties. Hardly surprising
HOWARD sounds exactly like what he is, middle management, white bread, man made fibres, but oddly he’s the nearest thing to class we have
Yeah, the Rolex
No, not the Rolex - I mean he knows lots of feudal shit, stuff to do with the court of St James, precedence, flags, who’s the Sheriff of Worcester
His dad was in one of the London guilds, they eat posh dinners in some bejewelled cavern in W2
I’m petit bourgeois, me
We hate everyone, viz:
The Working Class - loud, vulgar, frightening, willfully stupid
The Middle Class - sharp elbowed wine guzzling greed merchants
The Upper Class - charming, faux-threadbare cannibal weasels
So, yeah, I’ve been watching HOWARD get nowhere with girls for years
Met him in the first week of uni at an impromptu party, he was already in full swing, hands flapping, spouting a load of fucking nonsense, face like a saucepan of boiling toffee. Never realised at the time just how unique and strange this new specimen was. I was living in my first student residence, stuffed with all kinds of people whose existence I hadn’t guessed. People who hadn’t even been to my school! Many of them girls!
Among this precambrian explosion HOWARD was just one of many creatures unknown to science. I have an early memory of him cooking, in the same flat, I think. He fried some mince, added a tablespoon of curry powder and several handfuls of sultanas and - eh voila! I’d never eaten curry before and almost never ate fruit, so this seemed both exotic and healthful to me, and made a change to my dinner of preference of the time, corned beef and rich tea biscuits
I haven’t told him about the CANCER
MELVYN BRAGG & GUESTS: Technically it’s the ‘Cambrian Explosion’
FRANK: I know, but pre-Cambrian sounds more sciency doesn’t it?
HOWARD: It was a good story, the Peter Cook. Her loss, for all she knows I could be dead rich
FRANK : Dressed like that?
HOWARD: Bill Gates doesn’t look dead rich
FRANK: Yeah, but he hangs about not looking dead rich on private jets and super yachts
Hence the Rolex. He says it’s science
HOWARD Now, mate, I did not actually say it’s science, it’s more psychology
K2: Psychology is a science innit
HOWARD: “It’s physics or it’s stamp collecting” Lord Rutherford, look it up
So - I just look like any ordinary bloke until, at the psychological moment, I casually stretch, revealing to the target my wristful of substantial material wealth
FRANK: You’ve got to stop referring to women as targets
K1: Register!
K2: It’s your round, get your wristful up that bar
CLIVE
‘The Bastard from HR’
Is a bastard
FRANK: So, yeah, slow drivers!
What. Is. It. With. Them?
The question is - do they know? I mean really, do they? Have they got, as the shrinks say, insight into their condition? Is it like booze - I mean, an alcoholic is anyone who drinks more than you do, right?
K2: Nice one, centurion!
FRANK: So by the same token, is a slow driver anyone who drives more slowly than you?
Anyone who drives faster - well, they’re obviously maniacs who will eventually have their lacerated corpses pulled from a heap of broken glass and twisted metal, sure. You know what I do when one of those lunatics appears in my mirror? I pull over and let them by
Slow drivers never do that
Do they ever look in the mirror - the rear view mirror - and say to themselves, or possibly their wife
SLOWY McSLOWFACE WHO LIVES IN SLOW COTTAGE DOWN SLOW LANE IN SLOW TOWN IN SLOWCESTERSHIRE: Cor, there’s a whole bunch of cars behind me…but there’s never any in front..always a clear road
MANAGER DAN
Official representative of the LIZARD OVERLORDS
Facial hair - not guilty
Unchallenged inappropriate joshing frequently observed
Super power = can send NAT home early. Mr Nicey Nicey!
Not clever, but can nod and pretend to understand extremely convincingly
HOGCHILD
Officially a nutter, I’ve seen it on his file
HOGCHILD: A man should always have the means to make fire...
NEVILLE
Everyone wants to be friends with NEVILLE
NAT
FRANK: Sighs heavily
NAT: Can you help me with the filing?
THE BOLDWOOD MOMENT
NAT: Can you help me with the filing?
I’d never even really noticed her before I had the Boldwood Moment
I mean, I’d seen her, obvs
I say I’d never noticed her, but I could have told you anyway that she had wide hips but almost no bust, that she had good skin but showed too much gum above her upper teeth when she smiled. What I mean is, I’d never thought about having sex with her. As a reptile I never usually look at a woman without thinking: if I could, would I?
I know, proper old Sid the Sexist. What I don’t do is sit around asking this out loud with other blokes
VOICE: So a secret sexist? That’s alright then
FRANK: Anyway it’s the mother of all hypothetical questions, like one of those Daily Mail headlines to which the answer is always ‘No’
Was Diana murdered?
Does broccoli cure cancer?
Does broccoli cause cancer?
Does anyone want to fuck FRANK?
TBH most of the time my answer to the question is No
But I always ask, I always go through the motions. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a reflex
HOWARD: The reflex is an only child
K1: Duran Duran, innit
K2: Ten points to Hufflepuff!
I’ll tell you how much I had not noticed NAT - I walked into the coffee room this one time just as she bent to retrieve something from a bag, and witnessed a whale tail of flimsy elastic rising from the band of her jeans. Normally this kind of thing really sets me off - I have a fierce knicker fetish - but in this instance the garment could not have seemed less interesting if it had been stretched across the hood of MARTIN HARMAN’S white series 3. I mean, that is some serious not noticing, yeah?! So, when she waved a cardboard folder at me and said
NAT: Er, FRANK, do you know where this one goes?
I had no idea what was about to be unleashed
She was a little flushed. The folder was fat, I recognised it as one of the Tantamount files, which actually have their own place in outgoings, a fact so boring I felt dimly ashamed of even knowing it. I explained this, my eye wandering absently down the splotchy, adolescent glow on her cheek and, out of nowhere, the voice in my head said
VOICE: She’s blushing, she must fancy you
That was just too funny, and I laughed silently at myself. The VOICE is droll, sarcastic (mostly at my expense) and frequently very entertaining. I don’t know whether this is for my benefit or not
It did give me the heads up about the CANCER, so there’s that
Why was it so funny?
It wasn’t just because a young woman like NAT wouldn’t fancy a decrepit reptile like me - I mean, the question would never arise. I’m in better nick than some tail end boomers, but to someone NAT’S age I must look like something dug up in the Valley of Kings. To her I was just another lump of office furniture, you might as well ask if she fancied the printer
It was funny because it was mocking me, mocking my 6music dad pretensions, my complacent assurance that when it comes to the hurly burly of social interaction, because I have opinions on which Fall line up was best I am somehow above the fray
For a week or so after this, things were calm. Something had changed, but it wasn’t clear what. Whenever I saw NAT around the department I would think of the VOICE’S sarcastic quip again and, like all my favourite jokes, it just got funnier for relentless repetition. I put my sustained lightness of heart down to my capacity for inner amusement. Get me, I thought, all sophisticated and self aware
One afternoon I saw her by the photocopier as she talked to BECKS and the stab of humour made me actually smile on the outside. NAT smiled back. It was obviously just an instinctive response, a smile that went nowhere near her eyes or brain, as she stood processing the details of BECKS’ latest one night stand. A smile, though
The next day I went for a break
She was sitting in the corner of the coffee room scrolling her phone
NAT: Hey
She said over the phone. She raised her eyebrows and smiled as she said it, but did not look up. Still - Hey
I threw some coffee powder and hot water into a cardboard cup with the abstracted air of a busy man. When I turned from the sink, she was looking up at me. I held her gaze, blowing on the cup of filthy coffee. Mr cool, calm & collected
She smiled again
NAT: You’re staring
FRANK: You started it
She snorted, and moved her bag, inviting me to sit
I’m kidding, she remained glued to her phone. I took the filthy coffee to the other end of the low table and pretended to do the crossword. It felt like my heart was trying to turn itself inside out
FRANK: Hang on! I’ve got a crush on her - that wasn’t supposed to be the joke!
VOICE: Yeah, but it is a joke, though, isn’t it, cocker?
FRANK: Oh shut up
When I went home on Friday, I was more irritated than anything else, irritated to have my inner school boy squeezing my endocrine glands like a spiteful monkey. If it had been some other woman in the department I might have run with it. I might have screwtaped it into the ground and got it out of my system. I have had the occasional erotic daydream about BECKS, but I think she’s fair game. BECKS comes from the days when to be considered an attractive young woman all you had to be was young, and a woman. No fabletics, no social media presence. I think BECKS would be mildly surprised if her male coworkers weren’t fantasising about her.
Oh, I also have a bit of a thing for NICOLA, but only because she’s called NICOLA. It’s just one of those sexy names, like JENNIFER
Or SUSAN
Oh yeah, and girls with boys’ names: SAM, EDDIE, CHARLIE. Bit like when a woman is wearing a man’s shirt
Sort of smoky and post coital
Unsexy names:
All those weird Victorian virtue names
CHARITY, PATIENCE, CHASTITY (obvs) HONOUR, DILIGENCE, etc. Have I forgotten anyone?
PRUDENCE: What about me, you horrible old man? After everything I’ve done for you!
NAT was younger than BECKS, a tiny bit younger than PRUDENCE
PRUDENCE: Marge Simpson noise
Quite a bit younger than me, but not so young that I’d be joining HOWARD on that hypothetical sex offender register
HOWARD: Have you seen JANINE’S top this morning?!
ALL: Register!
HOWARD: She’ll have someone’s eye out if she’s not careful
FRANK: And then there’s drivers who will not overtake cyclists
I think some motorists assume that the very act of climbing aboard a bike indicates a deathwish, and if they get too close the cyclist will hurl themselves under their wheels in a lemming like suicidal frenzy
Others have been brutalised by JEREMY VINE, and are under the impression one cannot overtake a cyclist without first obtaining their signed consent
So, yeah, NAT isn’t JANINE young, more the old half your age plus seven formula
I know
Over the weekend I went for a walk, and tried to point out to the VOICE what an enormous stupid heap of stupid stupidity the whole NAT thing was, but at the shops I was passed by a girl out for a jog in some of those skin tight leggings and I got screwtaped into thinking about her arse all the way round the pond and back. Those yoga pants that cling to every dimple and hummock of a woman’s lower body trigger mechanical reptilian behaviour, like the automatic aggression of a stickleback confronted with a red stick, and set my weary libido shuffling through the steps of the mating dance. It’s the lingerie effect - a virtually naked woman is infinitely more arousing than a completely nude one
Still, to be fair to nubile young women, short of the full burqa there’s probably no outfit they could run in that wouldn’t excite a loathsome reptile like me
Having evaded serious thought, I went to work the following week still under the impression there was something optional about the NAT situation, and if I just got a grip I could shake it off
On Monday mornings the company likes to hold a training session first thing, with all the possible horrors of getting yourselves into small groups or, god forbid, role playing. It’s a cruel practice, a mental keel hauling, leaving you raw after all the fluorescent lights and attempts at sustained concentration. No matter what the rest of the day held you’d still feel queasy. It was like that team building trip when BAZ put a urinal cake in the breakfast buffet for a bet
Tainted
We were enduring fire training in the seminar room, standing, watching as the grizzled safety officer fiddled at an extinguisher, while those people who could be embarrassed into participating were mumbling the responses - “Heat…fuel…oxygen…powder….cee oh two….”
NAT came in and stood a few feet in front and away to one side from me. She didn’t look round, but stuck her phone in a back pocket, yawned, and stared blankly at the fire officer. He was beginning the audio-visual portion of his performance, kicking off with a slide show of the most cretinous violations of basic fire safety, common sense and human decency he’d come across at the company. To be fair, they are quite amusing, especially the one with the toaster where DEREK’S bare feet are in shot
As I watched the back of NAT’S neck, something happened to me. It was like being outdoors in a thunderstorm - the air pressure in the room seemed to change and static electricity was making the hairs on my arms stand up
The arm hair was not the only thing standing in response to NAT’S presence
To my utter consternation, I had become spontaneously, magically, cripplingly erect. It was like something in a dream, but the sort of dream you have when you’re fourteen
Now, don’t get me wrong - even in my extreme old age, I’m still firmly chained to the idiot, no little blue pills for me, but usually it does take a little while to get up steam. This was instantaneous, supersonic
VOICE: This isn’t a crush, it’s a voodoo curse!
FRANK: Why?
Why now?
Why bloody now?
I mean, you can get away with behaving like a character in a french novel when you’re seventeen, sure, but when I was seventeen my sex life was blind fumblings, my love life dramas adolescent posturing
Now here I lie, purblind, dribbling, incontinent and absolutely swept away. An old git swept away by infatuation - life changing, existential infatuation
HOWARD: Actually, that makes you a character in an Iris Murdoch novel
FRANK: How do you know about Iris Murdoch?
HOWARD: Read a couple to impress this bird at Uni
Used to be partial to the odd novel myself, when I still had an attention span. Unlike the young, who have had theirs sputtered away by the pitter patter of social media serotonin hits, my attention span has been compressed as the Grim Reaper looms over the horizon, and I realise how much time I really don’t have left for ploughing through a book
TBF anything written much before 1930 is yet another one of my BLIND SPOTS anyway
Also
BLIND SPOT #10: poetry
#11: reality TV
#12: gambling and
#13: fellatio
Yes, I know but
It’s like breakfast in bed, better as an idea
Wednesday was SONYA’S birthday, and the coffee room table was laden with any amount of trans fats, palm tree oil and fructose syrup
SCARY MARY was talking at MANDY, beaming benignly as she explained that THE POPE was really THE ANTICHRIST. MANDY hovered from foot to foot, her desire to escape SCARY MARY’S explanation of why Italians dying like flies on the news was GOD’S will tempered by her urge to be within striking distance of the Colin the Caterpillar cake, which SONYA had yet to cut
MALCOLM, who was supposed to be on a diet, was sitting against the far wall, staring at the food with the pained expression of a labrador that knows it is about to disgrace itself
I had already eaten two mini flapjacks, horrible, sugary excrescences that had burned my throat and now formed a pool of acid and regret in my stomach. I reflected glumly on the transitory nature of bodily pleasures, and the very lasting nature of my love handles. It was so depressing I had to have an own brand hobnob to cheer myself up
MALCOLM came over and stood next to me. He raised his eyebrows in an absent minded greeting, while one of his hands darted off sideways on a secret agenda of its own and snaffled a biscuit
MALCOLM: They’re reorganising the teams again
FRANK: Yeah? We were about due
MALCOLM: It’s mission creep
He looked sceptically at the hobnob in his hand, as if there was nothing further from his mind than biscuits, then chomped ruthlessly down
MALCOLM: And talking of creeps, COLIN wants to see you
COLIN is a creature of the third floor, sitting in glory at MARTIN HARMAN’S right hand
Said third floor is notoriously infested with lions, leopards and she-wolves. Its denizens are in direct contact with the LIZARD OVERLORDS
Only the week before there had been a Meet & Creep with the SUPREME LIZARD COMMANDER for Basingstoke and the Andromeda Galaxy, second only to the IMPERIAL LIZARD himself, mouthpiece and representative on Earth of SMAUG the Insatiable who basks on his bed of bonds and share options in the glowing heart of the City, and the corporate groupies were still spent & quivering. Not yet fully paid up members of the Vampire Class, they are its acolytes, lost souls who have tasted the Turkish Delight and now believe they too deserve SUVs with tinted windows, McMansions, yes men, proteges and a personal chef
The LIZARD OVERLORDS themselves are ravening fiends and no amount of benefits, bonuses or junketing can ever slake their greed. Faery gold has banished their sense of shame, bedazzled their eyes and bewitched their reason, so that they can tell what’s left of their conscience: hey, I must be really great - why else are they giving me all this money?
FRANK’S LAW: In any organisation there is someone who earns less than half the CEO’s salary who could do the job just as well
To get to COLIN’S office you first have to pass the door to ANGE’S lair. ..
WOOSTER: Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came!
Although technically a woman, ANGE is the most desiccated specimen of blood thirsty saurian in the reptile house. She got where she is through ambition, M&S ready meals, lipstick & heels, an iron liver, at least two abortions and utter unsparing efficiency
I was picking my way through the dislocated rib cages, decomposing skulls and bat droppings outside chez ANGE when she appeared, ushering MAUREEN out of her office. MAUREEN was looking a bit crinkly around the edges
ANGE saw me, nodded towards MAUREEN behind her back and rolled her eyes
We watched MAUREEN wobble down the stairs
ANGE: Compassionate leave for the death of a pet, I ask you
FRANK: You’re a hard woman, ANGE
ANGE: What’s wrong with you, time of the month?
I actually get on OK with ANGE, I think because she sees me for the hopeless, lecherous old goat I am. Sexism, the patriarchy, whatever you want to call it, is her ecosystem, an ecosystem where she has found a niche and prospered. She resents modern ideas about equality, of having her protective scales, her crimson talons and her venomous bite, all her formidable adaptations made obsolete
For a crazy moment I considered telling her about the Boldwood Moment, about the volcanic lust because she would understand…
ANGE: I understand you’re all bastards! Men, they’re like lorry drivers - shameless swines who’ll park it anywhere!
FRANK: …because in her own warped way she could respect that. She considered most millennial men hopelessly effete, she despised them because they had squandered being male
If ANGE had been a man she would have ruled the world. She would have kicked her way to the top and left a trail of broken hearted bimbos in her wake. As it was, she was born into a world where girls either married or became a secretary, a nurse or a teacher. She went the secretarial route, eventually becoming the kind of PA who actually runs the company. I’m guessing about twenty years ago, some executive confided in her about his lust for an underling, and ANGE had the girl in question delivered to him on a tray - and has her fangs in him to this day. So perhaps I won’t tell her. Not that I’ll ever be important enough to blackmail…
ANGE: You looking for the head honcho?
FRANK: Everyone knows you’re the only alpha male around here. Looking for COLIN, actually
ANGE: In there, reorganising your arses for you
FRANK: Oh, you know about that?
ANGE: A.K.A. baby, ANGE Knows All
I don’t think I ever met COLIN but he told me to try something
COLIN: Time for a cheeky cheese and pickle sandwich. Are you a devotee of the gherkin, FRANK? No? You should try them, full of nitrite, good for your heart
Who did you get in the sweepstake? Not a gambling man, Lord FRANK of Frankfurter? You should try it, establish some risk tolerance…
I wouldn’t mind, but he does it in the tone of voice which identifies someone who doesn’t know the difference between giving advice and telling people to do stuff
And he wears braces
Bit of a cunt
COLIN: Ah, FRANK, my lad, got a little job for you
Rows of foolscap paper adorned his desk in orthogonal glory, many of them festooned with colour coded post it notes. He slid one over to me
COLIN: Meet Team Tiddlywink
FRANK: Oh dear God, what fresh hell is this?
VOICE: You should, like, actually say that
FRANK: His sense of humour is atrophied. He watches Last of the Summer Wine and Diagnosis Midsummer Murder She Wrote on a platform for gits called Chuff or something. He’s two years younger than me, there’s no excuse
VOICE: And yet he calls you My Lad
FRANK: I know, I could kill him
COLIN:…schedule it for after that
I pretended I had been absorbing the information on the paper and looked up with a mock start
FRANK: Say again?
COLIN: The Team Tiddlywink team building social event. It doesn’t have to be anything grand, but MARTIN HARMAN is adamant that if the taskforce - he nodded to the the paper - is going to clear the legacy cases, morale is key
This time I really did look at the paper. It was a list of names. Two jumped out at me: mine, at the top and, halfway down, NAT
FRANK: Can I at least change the name?
COLIN: No can do, laddie, orders from on high
To MARTIN HARMAN belongs the East and West - whichever way you look, there is the face of MARTIN HARMAN!
I walked back down the stairs from COLIN'S office carrying the fateful piece of paper
Team Tiddlywink
Fucksake
Naturally, the first person I met was NAT
Of course it bloody was
Immediately my throat tightened, and I swear I could feel the skin of my chest vibrating against my shirt, as my heart tried to knock its way through my ribs to get at her
Oh well
I now had a papal dispensation to scratch my itch
I’m officially sanctioned to talk to her but what
No hang on
Wait
NAT: Oh, Hi, FRANK
FRANK: You look very smiley
NAT: We won our match
FRANK: ?
NAT: The netball. We won the league
FRANK: Oh, well done
NAT: Yeah!
FRANK: Of course, being number one means every punk in a pleated skirt will be looking to bring you down
NAT: (texting) Hmm?
FRANK: Never mind
VOICE: NAT. In. A. Pleated. Skirt!
FRANK: Not now
VOICE: NAT in a pleated skirt. You are so screwtaped
FRANK: Later
VOICE: You betcha
FRANK: Um, we’ve got to have a meeting. Like a social…thing
NAT: (pressing send) What?
I dangled the sheet in front of her
FRANK: MARTIN HARMAN has reorganised the teams. We’re now in some sort of backlog task force, and he wants us to have a morale boosting social gathering. Got any ideas?
NAT: Well, who’s gonna be there?
FRANK: Er, let’s see, me and er, HOWARD, SONYA, NIGEL, fuck, all the old codgers…hang on, BRYAN is in there, oh yeah, and NICOLA…MANDY
She brightened a little
FRANK: So where do you think? Where do you go, with your friends?
Fucksake, I sound like my grandma
FRANK’S GRANDMA: Cheeky monkey!
NAT: Well…clubs, and that. Mostly
FRANK: Yeah, clubs, of course
Why? She’s not particularly physically attractive and as for her personality…why does she take my breath away?
VOICE: Pleated skirt
At this point I did in fact have a mental image of NAT in a sodding pleated skirt, and felt a tingle in the loins. I had to do a quick reverse screwtape
CANCER: Would now be a good time?
FRANK: I just need the antidote to an inappropriate erection. A picture of Aunt Dolly would do the trick, though - obviously - death, yeah
CANCER: Well you’ve been very coy so far, why do you never introduce me to your friends?
FRANK: Because I want to have friends. Talking about you is, you know, a bit of a dead cat on the table
CANCER: Oh don’t be such a baby
Also CANCER: I am the Kraken. I live in FRANK’S deepest corners. Far below the froth of his infatuations, under the black and white bedrock of his 1960’s memories, below even the cogs and wheels of his brain, obsessively mining its environment for patterns and pleasure, that is where I am. I swim in the bladder, I lurk in his rumblings, in the gutters and gullies where sedition brews, where matter ferments, where the creature is
FRANK’S body never ceases to flirt with me, it conspires with me to betray him. One day FRANK will come home to find I have taken the occupants hostage and opened the door to the wolves
FRANK: You can see why I don’t bring this stuff up?
CANCER: Of course, FRANK was a hypochondriac long before he met me!
VOICE: And in his honour, here are…
FRANK’S TOP HYPOCHONDRIA TRIGGERS!
It’s a new entry at Number Thirty: Blood in the stool
Beginners’ stuff, it’s always piles. Go back to Start
Welcome return of Old Favorite! Here’s Right Iliac Fossa pain
Probably just wind
Probably…
The New Mole. It’s actually a pigmented keratosis AKA Mr Burns’ sign
Mouth Ulcer. Could be from eating Salt & Vinegar crisps, or it could be an oral cancer that will mean having half your face cut off and replaced with bits of your forearm or shin, leaving you with a truncated future that will involve constant drooling and shaving what you are pleased to call your tongue
Globus. Something, something there when I swallow…
Classic go to for the worried well. You can have a nasendoscopy and a barium swallow if you insist on proving the strength and persuasiveness of your imagination. If you do get oesophageal cancer it will probably be much lower down and you won’t know until you can’t swallow by which time it’s probably all over because it’s one of those pushy, aggressive cancers. Smokers and drinkers should worry about this, but hot liquids are a risk factor too, so tea drinkers, knock yourself out
Tickly cough. Tickly unproductive cough
Asbestosis no 1 workplace killer. Still. And all those fags. Jesus
Honourable mentions:
Actual hypo (below) chondria (cartilage), viz pain inside the rib cage. The nebulous, bloviating grand daddy of them all. Possible cardiac knell of doom, but probably indigestion. Tons of interventions for heart disease, so doesn’t have quite the capacity to induce the 2 a.m. cold sweat that is the hallmark of your sexy, modern somatic illness. Go to the gym, do not collect £200
Celebrity Pancreatic cancer. Everyone knows that by the time you get symptoms from PC you’re already a dead man walking, but every time someone famous goes down with it advance three spaces…
FRANK: House! I’ve got the lot
VOICE: Advanced 12th Dan hypochondria:
One day you will really actually get ill, after all the years and years of crying wolf
Ask yourself: is this that time? Hmm?
On the bright side, you might fall under a bus. Or be murdered! There, isn’t that better?
FRANK: I’ve certainly detumesced
NAT: We sometimes go to the Admiral Nelson before the clubs. It’s alright
FRANK: OK, good, right, the Admiral Nelson it is, then
NAT: For a morale booster?
FRANK: Well, I suppose we could go on somewhere else later, if people are in the mood…
NAT: Well, what do the rest think?
FRANK: The rest? Oh, you’re the first one I’ve asked
NAT: Oh
She looks worried
VOICE: I’ve given you the honour of first refusal
FRANK: Even worse
VOICE: (Bored) You’re first on COLIN’S list
FRANK: Would have been better
FRANK: I’ll ask the rest what they think, build a consensus
NAT: A what?
FRANK: What day is good for you
NAT: Uh…the…8th?
FRANK: Really?
NAT: Yeah, I got a doctor’s appointment, and…a few other, you know…
FRANK: The 8th it’ll have to be, then
NAT: (Looking at phone) It’s a Tuesday. Won’t they mind?
FRANK: It’s a company morale building exercise their spirits are supposed to get crushed
BLIND SPOT #14: Computers
Until computers came along I had no idea of the huge range of things I was uninterested in
Of course these days everything is a computer your phone, your car, your fucking toaster
I’m thinking of the first ones I ever saw a box on a desk
I was a bit of a sci-fi fan, as many teenage boys are - by rights I should have creamed my jeans when the future came calling, but somehow didn’t
It’s like SPACE
The reality - various combinations of rock, dust and ice - just doesn’t measure up to the fiction. Why bother going to Mars when you know there won’t be any green skinned chicks who say
GREEN SKINNED ALIEN: Tell me about this thing you Earthmen call love
Computers never morphed into a Cylon uprising
They played a long game and conspired to have us masturbate ourselves into oblivion
SPOCK: Fascinating!
Talking of which
By a miracle of compartmentalism, I managed to get home that night carrying the vision of the pleated skirt in my heart without actually touching it. Obviously, the temptation was there to make it the subject of that evening’s sherman, but something stopped me. I remembered HOWARD saying
HOWARD: Yeah, sex is OK, but it’s no substitute for the real thing!
FRANK: Oh…I thought it was something more helpful than that
Well, yes
I used to think wanking was just the Methadone to actual sex’s Heroin, but HOWARD is right, they’re completely different activities that just happen to use the same muscles
K1: Madame Palm and her five lovely daughters!
FRANK Thanks, KEITH, we get the idea
Sex is like humour, yeah - explaining it destroys it, dissolves it. After a few half hearted attempts to stick your old chap up some chick’s Gary Glitter she says “We need to have a conversation about anal sex..”
and that salts the slug of your back door man right there
These days of course sex is just a handful of pixels, but it started as topography…
It must sound like living in the Middle Ages to young people these days, but when I was at school it was really really hard for a keen young onanist to find pictures of naked women
There might occasionally be toplessness on Play for Today. There was the lingerie section of the Littlewoods catalogue
VOICE: Explains a lot
FRANK: There was a boy in fifth form, JEWEL, who used to sell porn mags. I bought one off him, but then the hiding place I found for it was so labyrinthine it was more bother than it was worth getting to it
INDIANA JONES: I’ve got the jazz mag! Start the plane, start the plane!!
My early impression of the female body was exactly that - a 3D model constructed blindly from the brush strokes of my hands as, beneath a pile of coats at a party or in the back of a parked up car, they traced the flanks and flaps of warm, cigarette smelling girls
Over the years my sexual topography has expanded. Like a starling who can sense magnetic fields, I never pass that place in the park where once I saw a woman sunbathing without sensing again the voodoo thrill with which a white, tie-side bikini had hallowed the ground. The years go by, the Our Prices and Prestos and Etams become Safeways and Tie Racks and Maplins and eventually vape shops, tattooists and blokes with phone accessories, but I never forget the site of a lingerie shop, or even that brides’ boutique which had a picture in the window of a woman in a slip with the thighs of a figure skater
The way NAT made me feel was an offshoot of this Deep Magic, it connected directly with my source code
That feeling, that your insides were brimming with electrified butterflies reminded me how the whole sex thing had felt as a teenager…the anticipation of it, the tingling possibility of it, years before it became a chore, a compulsion
Because it is a compulsion, a curse
I have an external haemorrhoid that itches like a mother fucker. Giving that thing a scratch is by several orders of magnitude the most sustained, satisfying, visceral physical pleasure I’ve ever experienced. It’s like fireworks going off outside the Sydney opera house during the 1812 overture compared to the phut, whoosh…pop...yeah..okay…whatever…that is orgasm
Hedonistically, even going at your ear with a Q tip gives sex a run for its money
And yet I don’t obsess about scratching my arse, I’m not compelled to think about it
DR PAMELA STEPHENSON: There’s more to sex than orgasm
VOICE: You wouldn’t think that listening to women
FRANK: Now then, you two
She’s right, of course. That’s why I don’t want to turn the way NAT makes me feel into a wank
VOICE: You’re not fantasising about NAT because you don’t want to scare the butterflies? That’s actually what you’re claiming?
FRANK: Well, that and
VOICE: Guilt
NAT: It is pretty gross, he’s about a hundred
Also NAT: And even if he was my age, he still shouldn’t be thinking these things
FRANK: I’m not thinking them!
HOWARD: Well, why shouldn’t you? Listen, look at it from an evolutionary point of view…how old are you?
No shit
Well, in the pleistocene a man your age would have to be one tough hombre to survive that long. Genetically, you’ve got the golden ticket! Now, nature wants you to pass those genes on, and who are you going to do that with? A young woman who’s going to conceive easily and have the physiological resources to bring a pregnancy to term. Keep your feelings to yourself by all means, but don’t beat yourself up, they’re completely natural!
FRANK (googling): If only I’d met NAT 2.58 million to 11, 700 years ago
BLIND SPOT#15 Being Clever
Being clever is like being tall - sometimes it comes in very handy but it doesn't make you better than other people
It's not just the ghastly middle class mums braying and humble bragging at each other
The LIZARD OVERLORDS have promoted being clever as a virtue, as a quality making a person more deserving. They have defined cleverness as narrow academic achievement requiring tutors and tennis lessons and used it to ring fence the goodies. They have made a nest for their offspring at the summit of the great pile of guano that is meritocracy
VOICE: Feeling better now?
The next day I saw BRYAN in the canteen. He nodded and gave me a crisp Good Morning
Everything about BRYAN is crisp: the product in his hair, the creases in his new shirt, his just so tie, his handshake, his boxer’s shoulders, that crunching sound his shoes make…
FRANK: Did you see the reorg?
BRYAN: Sure
FRANK: You OK for a Team Tiddlywink knees up evening of the 8th?
BRYAN: That’s a Tuesday
FRANK: How does he do that?
Also FRANK: So, you in?
BRYAN gives me a look
BRYAN: FRANK, do you ever even open Outlook?
FRANK:?
BRYAN: Tuesday 8th is the Regionals . Everyone will be at head office
FRANK: Fuck!
BRYAN: Been on the calendar for months
VOICE: (Worried) Oh shit
FRANK: I hate it when the VOICE is worried
I wandered around on autopilot, looking for somewhere to log on
OK, I should be able to do it on my phone, but that was several forgotten passwords ago
Blundering into the resource room I sat down at a terminal, belatedly realising that I had stumbled into a nest of mouth breathers
MO: Where's DEREK?
CURLY: Havin' neurodiversity training
MO: What does he want that for he's mental enough already
FLIRTY GERTY: Hiya FRANK
FRANK: Hiya
FLIRTY GERTY: Alright?
Thankfully at that point GREG from bookings came in, and she flitted away to bother him
FLIRTY GERTY will always concentrate on the highest status man in the room, and her ability to navigate the hierarchy is a thing of wonder
I was unsurprised to find that GREG outranked me, he is a member of a racquets club and has met Andi Peters
Her place was taken by FIONA, a dumpy posh girl from marketing. She had a small, triangular breasts which hung from a barrel chest and very fine, fly away hair which she grew long
She obviously felt she was slumming it in marketing, and I listened distractedly while she bad mouthed her manager, the other women in her office and the company in general
Everything she said was true, but I ignored it - she hadn't worked here long enough yet to earn moaning rights
Using a string of characters long enough to identify individual protons, I logged on and found that several of my invites to the social bloodbath had already yielded out of office automatic replies. Others had left highly equivocal messages to the effect that they would try to be there babysitter/sick cat /significant other allowing…
I now had the delicious prospect of a social occasion that I would both dread attending and at the same time dread no one turning up
VOICE: We're very shy
FRANK: Bad case of ingrowing shyness - I'm infuriated when people don't pay me attention, flustered and self-conscious when they do
VOICE: Shy and cowardly
FRANK: I know. I make myself do things to prove I'm not afraid of them
VOICE: Doesn't work, does it?
FRANK: No. And all the effort I put in being socially brave leaves me no will power left for being good
BLIND SPOT #16: Hands free calling AKA talking to yourself in public
Not so much a BLIND SPOT, I suppose, as an actual aversion
I find it had to even make a regular phone call in public, and not just because I can’t hear anything, even on speaker
How do you learn not to care about having a private conversation in public?
Is it just me who thinks that people who speak loudly into phones in public are cunts?
Do you just pretend the people around you don’t exist?
I keep all my private stuff in a box
If I have to make a call al fresco, I try and find a nook or cranny - ideally an old phone box - to do it in. It’s like when you get caught short on a country walk - you don’t just unzip in the middle of a field, you find a tree or something to pee on
TUESDAY NITE
"If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
Thomas Szasz
The Admiral Nelson is a moderately nasty pub in Station Approach. I don’t mind it myself - it doesn’t try too hard. It does a brisk trade in long distance dipsomaniacs who make a lunge for its bar as soon as they get off the 17:43 from Waterloo. By 8pm on a Tuesday night the commuters had evaporated, leaving a thin scum of tourists and teenagers. I cast a jaundiced eye over the latter
Although actually
I’ve got nothing against teenagers - after all, I was one myself until I was thirty
Growing up with the Sex Pistols swearing on telly and androgyny and tartan flares I used to wonder complacently just what the young people of the future could possibly do to shock us tail end Boomers
Well
Turns out nose studs and auto tuning was all it took
So, the jaundiced eye was just the way old codgers are supposed to look at the - hem hem - yoot
Askance
The young, meanwhile, have their own language, to show they don’t care
Doesn’t bother me I don’t know what peng means or melt. I’ve lived through enough youth subcultures to know it’s all disposable. Who would say epic or sick or tubular or hep or gear now?
Nothing uncool as yesterday’s cool, eh, blud?
VOICE: At 19:50 hours a visibly ill at ease middle aged man enters the Admiral Nelson. He wears jeans, a suit jacket and a black linen shirt which is buttoned all the way to the top because he flirted with a bolo tie before deciding it was too out there. Despite being the only customer at the bar, he struggles to get the attention of the three staff. After a short discussion his pleas for old guy beer are rebuffed, and he leaves the bar with a pint of Hipster IPA
FRANK: This stuff tastes like very cold washing up liquid
VOICE: He sits down at a table that could hold at least a dozen people. It’s obviously going to be quite the party
I have my younger self to thank for the knowledge of what washing up liquid tastes like. Also that if you eat a cigarette it will make you feel really sick, and that you can’t spend a night in the open just by finding some comfortable looking grass and lying on it
Looking back at that younger self I see someone with all my faults plus lots of extra ones that have since got knocked off along the way
TEENAGE FRANK: But I get so little useful information, how was I supposed to make rational decisions?
FRANK: Yeah, but it wasn’t just that you didn’t have the information to support rational decision making, you had no capacity for rational decision making, and absolutely no real interest at all in rational decisions period
TEENAGE FRANK: Who’s that?
FRANK: Oh shit she actually showed up
TEENAGE FRANK: Pretty lady!
VOICE & FRANK: Shut up
NAT was tastefully made up, medium heels, a smart pinafore dress over some kind of long sleeved top made of black mesh; all in all a pretty modest outfit but still - black mesh…
Several of the teenage lads looked disappointed when she scanned the bar, then came and sat down across from me. She looked puzzled as she took her phone out of her bag and laid it on the table
NAT: Er, Hi, FRANK. Where is everyone?
FRANK: Looks like we’re unfashionably, er, on time. What’s your poison?
NAT: What?
VOICE: Must you talk like that, old chap?
FRANK: Can I get you anything?
She asks for and I buy a blue, fruit flavoured concoction
It’s alcoholic, thank god
VOICE: Twelve percent. Have another Hipster IPA yourself. Getting pissed may be the only way out of this
Of course, obtaining the drinks involves attracting the attention of the bar staff all over again, so it’s some time later when I sit back down, the kind of interval you might reasonably expect a few more people to arrive
NAT: I mean, really?
FRANK: Glad you showed up, I was doing my nut sitting here waiting
VOICE: Shit, doesn’t nut mean something else now? She looks queasy, say something
FRANK: So how about that reorg? I don’t know what COLIN was thinking!
NAT: Is he coming?
VOICE: COLIN, here? Jesus nobody wants that, she must be desperate
FRANK: No, he’s at the Regionals
COLIN: I’ll be at the Regionals, along with most of the team. Schedule the social for after that. I think you’ll find that’s what I said, laddie
VOICE: That is what he said
FRANK: Oh crap
NAT: What do they do at the Regionals?
FRANK: (Looking at watch) Right about now they’ll be at the 80’s disco. I reckon COLIN was a bit of a New Romantic, yeah?
I was hoping the vision of COLIN with a rat tail and suede pixie boots might amuse her, but instead she had glazed over
FRANK: I was more New Wave and synth myself
My 80s reverie did nothing for NAT
NAT: That’s forty years ago!
TEENAGE FRANK: It’s like telling me about Glenn Miller
It was just so much old guy stuff, I could probably tell her about my memories of trams and horse drawn hackney cabs and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid
VOICE: So…your mission, should you choose to accept it: to talk to this young woman about something other than work which doesn’t make you sound like your grandfather asking if you’ve seen the latest Norman Wisdom film
FRANK: Look, I only know about Norman Wisdom films because they repeated that kind of thing all the time on 70’s TV
All of three TV stations and they only broadcast from teatime on, but they were still so short of content that they had to fill it with ancient black and white movies: Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin
VOICE: So not grandfatherly at all
I point to NAT’S phone
FRANK: Did you know
VOICE: Here we go. You should leave this stuff to HOWARD
HOWARD: Where do you think he gets it from? This is a good one, blow your mind
FRANK: Cleopatra - you know, Egyptian queen, eyeliner devotee and milk enthusiast - is closer in time to the iphone than she is to the building of the pyramids?
I love that one, also the fact that T Rex is nearer in time to the iphone than it is to the Stegosaurus. 67 million years back from Steve Jobs to the T Rex, then another 85 million back to the Stegosaurus
85 MILLION years
About the time I was a sprog watching repeats of Way Out West, the word million was synonymous with an unimaginably large amount
A million years, a million pounds - an infinite amount of time, an unspendable amount of money
Now there’s a house down the end of our road that’s a million quid and it’s not even got a tennis court or a pool or a stables or anything
I’d expect Bond villain lair for a million, but there it is
As for a million years
I could manage that
Psychologically at least I feel I could just go on and on
OK, physically, I’m slowly wearing out, admitted. Apart from the CANCER, my default setting is tired and headachey
It’s true that so far my repertoire consists mainly of comedy-old-guy stuff - for instance I can either not fart or I can not pee myself, but not both at the same time, if I need to pee I can’t hold a fart. Lesser of two evils
Still, well into my second half century, the mouthfeel of a hundred years seems doable, ten times that, a thousand years not too much of a stretch. A thousand times that again is a long time but…
The strata of the past get more and more compressed, and when I throw my mind back over the geological record of my life I find gaps and inconsistencies, but I know the general drift
I absolutely can imagine pottering on forever, having a vague idea of what I was doing three hundred years ago. It would be a mind fuck remembering a world of Cnuts and Constantines, but not much more than coming from a time of smoking, sexism and rotary phones. We reptiles are already used to being propelled unwillingly into the future - indeed, some cannot bear to drag their sagging carcass through the sand any further and find themselves fossilised in nostalgia, I’ve seen it
Take this specimen, Coprocephalus. Once he and his kind roamed the prehistoric landscape in herds
Now he wanders a scorched desert where ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ isn’t funny, Winston Churchill is a war criminal, John Winston Lennon is an irrelevance, you can’t say anything and people just spend literally their whole time staring at their bloody phones
In despair it stops reading the paper, lies its weary bones down and is smothered at the hands of time, its soft tissues imprinted on the sediments, its bones mineralised…
The years march on
After many aeons the creature realises that the disappointing fourth album that its favourite band released in 1987 was in fact a golden age compared to the new stuff they insist on playing these days
The world has changed, continents have drifted, baby faced top of the poppers are now puffy and wan - and if you hear that 10CC are touring with two original members it just means Graham Gouldman hasn’t had his knees done yet
The Cleopatra thing didn’t work for NAT. She came here expecting a crowd, people she knows, people from her own peer group, and all she’s got is this sus old bloke who only speaks pig latin. What’s his game? She’s been hoodwinked, ambushed
Perhaps I’m the kind of man who has a secret room where the walls are covered in blow up photos of her
I don’t know how the stalkers and serial killers do it, it must be time consuming enough planning and committing abductions and murders without turning it into an A level art project
And how do they always know exactly when a person is leaving a building or walking across a carpark? Do they have to wait around a lot?
NAT: Or do they trick people into turning up for imaginary work socials?
FRANK: Bollocks. How do you put a young person at their ease?
VOICE: Soothing behaviours
FRANK: Aha! I know, got just the thing
I dig out my Samsung and start scrolling and scowling, poking bad temperedly at the screen as if this is all the phone’s fault
VOICE: Yo, check out me and my mobe! How’s this for totally normal behaviour?
FRANK: Just have a look at whatsapp, see where they’ve all got to
Hmm, few apologies, a few running lates…
When I look up she’s smiling
NAT: Might have been simpler if you’d just asked me on a date?
She leaned in closer, and for the first time I noticed she had one of those dark flecks in her iris, a soft rhombus of charcoal nestling in the grey striations. It was the last detail, making her utterly perfect
Intense gravitational lensing flexed the space between us until I could smell her breath
Sometimes a woman’s breath smells like mischief, like a low D, like a whiff of wild garlic, like the hollow funk of an empty wine bottle
Perhaps it’s when they’re ovulating
I inhaled deeply, utterly possessed
VOICE: That’s just the pheromones talking, none of this is happening
FRANK: Why can’t it bloody be happening! I mean, just for once
Just once
Why does fate let me bumble along for fifty years then set fire to my trousers?
NAT: Give it another ten minutes then perhaps I ought to get
FRANK: I’m just going to pop to the…yes, OK…
Thank god, there was no one in the gents (cf BLIND SPOT #16). This was an emergency, there was no time for pussyfooting - I was going to have to do something most civilised people would think was quite beyond the pale - and actually ring someone
Luckily HOWARD was unaware of modern etiquette
HOWARD: What, tonight? It’s tonight?
FRANK: Yes, it’s fucking tonight! Where the fuck are you!?
HOWARD: Oh mate, that was too easy! Of course it’s tonight
FRANK: (Counting slowly)!
HOWARD: Keep what’s left of your hair on, I’m just round the corner
When I come out of the gents NAT is at the bar chatting to the teenagers. I don’t know if she’s gone back for more blue drink or has abandoned ship altogether
Do I sit by myself or hover around NAT? Both options are ghastly
VOICE: This has surely got to be Peak Awkward
One of the teenagers approaches me. He nods towards NAT
LAD: Who’s the MILF?
Before I can think of a reply there’s scuffling outside, and HOWARD is falling through the doors, closely followed by MANDY and CHRIS, then K1 & K2
I go over to the bar so I can have a sort of ‘well there we are, then’ moment with NAT
VOICE: You know, just for the record, it wasn’t a kidnap attempt
FRANK: Quite
But as I approach she heads over to MANDY, so I detour round a table and give HOWARD a welcoming shrug
K1: Wotcher, cock!
K2: Who’s round is it?
K1: Make mine a large one!
K2: Make mine a stiff one!
I’m so grateful to be delivered from the NAT psychodrama I hustle them straight up to the bar, then stand there like an idiot holding my card between two fingers in a state of passive-aggressive frustration waiting to be served
FRANK: I am literally the Invisible Man. It’s like a reverse super power
K1: Oi! Darlin’! Over here. Three pints, innit
I married an invisible woman and have several invisible children. The children have taken the family curse to a new level. As a young father, I was forever having to wade into the play park and get all Clint Eastwood on some poor toddler’s ass
FRANK: Excuse me, young man, but I think it’s this little girl’s turn on the slide!
Now they have all but evaporated into the ether
There is still the spectral remains with a gadget in the corner of the couch, but their real selves are dancing beneath the rainbows in some netherworld
HOWARD: To be actually invisible, photons would have to pass straight through you, so they couldn’t interact with your retina and you be blind
Oh, cheers
Ironic, eh? Anyway, what was all the panic about?
FRANK: Didn’t think anyone else was coming, it was just me and, oh…her, the one from records
HOWARD: Her? That’s NAT, good kid
FRANK: I’m going out for a fag
HOWARD: I thought you’d given up
FRANK: He says that every single time
I’m standing on the pavement outside The Admiral Nelson. It's windy, getting dark
There’s a stream of tail lights as the taxis drift back to the station after evening prayers at the mosque in Market Street
BECKS : Hi, FRANK
FRANK: Oh Hi, are you…?
BECKS: We heard there was a party tonight
FRANK: Well, it’s supposed to be a team building thing, but what the fuck, the more the merrier
BECKS: That’s my boy
FRANK: Who’s this?
BECKS: DAVE - we met on Hinge
VOICE: Yargh! Prepare to be boarded!
FRANK: Hiya, DAVE
Back at the bar Team Tiddlywinks had blended with the teenagers, plus a couple of other miscellaneous apparatchiks like BECKS who tended to turn up at any company do
DAVE: So cut a long story short, he shit himself
BECKS: Oh no
DAVE: Yeah. He managed to clean himself up, but his pants were a write off, so he just had to go commando
MANDY: Cheeky
DAVE: So the next night I see him at the bar, and I go up and smack him on the back and say got your pants on mate and it’s a totally different bloke
Thought he was going to chin me, but then he saw my Chelsea tat
BECKS:(Running her hand down his forearm) Nice!
To my enormous annoyance and envy, HOWARD was engaged in a lively debate with the lads and NAT. He turned to me with a self-satisfied grin
HOWARD: Get your coat - we’re going clubbing!
K1: Here, get one of these bad boys down your neck
He had a palmful of white gelatin capsules. He nodded towards the lad who had called NAT a milf
K1: Young man over there sorted us out some looseners. Can’t go clubbing on an empty stomach
K2: What’s it say on them?
In large blue letters, the capsules bore the legend MONAD
K2: What the fucks MONADS?
HOWARD: It’s what Spike Jones calls his crown jewels
FRANK: Fuck sake. Doesn’t make sense. Anyway How do you even know about Spike Jones?
HOWARD: I used to go out with a professor of film studies
FRANK: Really? How long did it take her to rumble you?
HOWARD: She was putty in my hands when I did this…
He picked up one of the MONAD capsules between finger and thumb and rolled it under my nose
HOWARD: If I dose you, you’ll know you’ve been dosed!
He said it in his Danny from Withnail voice
HOWARD: Which I do really well
K1: He’s not wrong
K2: Nailed it
FRANK: It is uncanny, full of adenoidal menace, like Keir Starmer
FRANK: Oh well, chin chin!
We each necked a MONAD, washing them down with anything to hand on the bar. I found myself with a mouthful of blue hooch. As I swallowed and tasted her DNA I saw NAT across the bar, her head thrown back, laughing at something DAVE had said
Oh well
Look
I’ve been around the block
I’ve got a hinterland
This isn’t my first rodeo
But I have to admit it’s been a very long time since I lived the life style where you take unidentified pills on a Tuesday night
VOICE: Let’s see…
Item 1: Overpowering fascination with a young, fertile woman
Item 2: Risky behaviour viz fags
Item 3: More risky business, the taking of illicit drugs
FRANK: It’s probably aspirin
VOICE: It all adds up to a three-quarter life crisis
FRANK: You made that up
HOWARD: No, really, it’s actually a thing. Which is to say it isn’t a thing, but it is a way to sell weekend supplements in once respectable broadsheet newspapers. Let’s face it, anyone who reads a physical newspaper these days will be geriatric, but it’s too depressing if they’re just full of turmeric supplements and stair lifts, so they spice it up with guff about wearing jeans and catching clap for the over 60’s
K2: Blimey is this place still open?
MANDY: What did it used to be called?
K2: Chez Nookie
HOWARD: Cinderella’s
BECKS: It was the Pink Flamingo in my day
K1: No one ever went down the basement room without copping off
K2: No lights down there
BECKS: These stairs are just as smelly as I remember
HOWARD: Were they always this steep?
K2: (pretending to sway) Nah that’s just the pills kicking in
VOICE: I feel great!
HOWARD: Hullo, someone’s feeling the benefit
K1: Sh, the bouncer’s looking lairy
Alright, bruv?
BECKS drags DAVE onto the small, sticky dance floor
HOWARD: Look, there’s a table yonder on the other side of the so-called VIP area. Unless you gentlemen are keen to dance, I suggest we establish base camp there
VOICE: NAT’S here already
HOWARD: Oh, you know who she is now? You lot bag the table, I’ll try and get a round in
K2: What do you mean, try?
HOWARD: I’m feeling slightly discombobulated. Not unpleasant, but still
VOICE: Hello again
NAT: Oh, hi
VOICE: Sorry about earlier
NAT: I don’t
VOICE: It was weird, wasn’t it?
NAT: Are you feeling alright?
VOICE: Never better. Think I might go and shake my stuff
MANDY: Look at you! Are you having a good time?
VOICE: Fucking. Marvellous
CHRIS: Careful, mate, you’ll do yourself a mischief!
VOICE: I think I might
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN
Ammonia
Water on my face
Wait
FRANK: Come on, back in the box with you
Wait
HOWARD: Ah, welcome back. Now then, men, I have successfully achieved congress with one of the humans and, if I say so myself, left them wanting more
He put down a tray of pints
K1: Never mind that, where are my peanuts?
HOWARD squints at the bar
HOWARD: You want me to go back?
FRANK: Do you think you can sustain another act of congress this soon?
HOWARD: I don’t know, I haven’t been this fucked up since Anabelle’s wedding. At the bar I had this overpowering feeling of intense telepathic connection with whoever I was talking to
K2: Kinnell! You were in the corner with SONYA for half an hour!
HOWARD: The first million years were the worst
I don’t mind, I can take it. But I think it makes other people uncomfortable, just popping up inside their head like that. I could see the fear in their eyes
FRANK: So you’re not going back?
HOWARD shook his head. I got to my feet
FRANK: It is settled, then. The Ring goes South!
I stand up
I sit down
I stand up again
FRANK: I’m just going outside. I may be some time
Wait
FRANK: Hi, DAVE
DAVE: Hello, mate
FRANK: Got your pants on?
DAVE: What
FRANK: You know, got your pants on
DAVE: What pants
FRANK: Never mind
Poison Arrow by ABC was thudding through the air. BECKS must have got to the DJ. Relax and Making Your Mind Up could not be far behind, so I fled to the smokers’ area
BLIND SPOT #17: Absolute Bloody 80s
The older I get the less nostalgic I am. The less christmassy
Songs I was already sick of in the 80s:
Cum on Eileen
Karma Bloody Chameleon
Whole of the Effin’ Moon
Walk Like a Sodding Egyptian
I Think We’re Arsing Well Alone Now
I Will Always Bloody Love You
Girls Just Want to Chuffing Well Have Fun
Don’t You Want Me FFS
The Whole of the Moon again, because ugh
I copped all that lot, I’ve heard them so many times I feel bilious when they come on - and yet some of my contemporaries want to endlessly regurgitate the stuff they were jumping up and down to at the sixth form disco, that time they almost got off with SUSAN DAVIS, and now there’s a sodding radio station to help them do it
All Night Long
Not the Rainbow song, the Lionel Ritchie. Cf Hello and Say You, Say Me
Nothing against Lionel, a master of his craft
I’ve just heard them so many times
The Rainbow All Night Long is a ludicrously puffed up slice of cock rock that will have your red corpuscles doing wheelies down your arteries, fantastic stuff
VOICE: So you were some sort of precocious musical connoisseur back then?
FRANK: No, no, I was there too, jumping up and down at the Sixth Form disco - but that was then and this is now
K2: ABC again!
HOWARD: Best Bond theme we never had
For me, music year zero was 1979. I was vaguely aware that there had been the Beatles who were good but then it was chirpy chirpy tweet tweet and the wombles
Everything came into focus when I heard the disco dalek stomp of Are Friends Electric?
That would have probably been on the radio one chart show. If I’d been one of the cool kids, I probably would have heard it months before on Peel or the OGWT
TEENAGE FRANK: Come on, Peel is weird shit for old people
I love all this electric stuff, me
FRANK: I would never actually have put ‘me’ on the end of a sentence like that. I barely even suspected the existence of Manchester, I just had a vague idea of somewhere in the North that was Mordor with chips
PEOPLE: You are aware that Kraftwerk & David Bowie have put in a lot of
work in the field of synthesised music?
TEENAGE FRANK: (Shrugging) But they’re not as cool as Gary Numan, though, are they?
Duh
Grandad
FRANK: I wouldn’t have thought to say ‘Duh’ either
So, yeah, I wasn’t any kind of connoisseur - Peel was just something on the radio at the end of the day like Sailing By
SIMON HILL FROM 5B: Oi! Wanker! Gary Numan is a wanker and so are you!
TEENAGE FRANK: (Whitely) I wish I could kill him
VOICE: Why not? Go on, stamp on his head!
FRANK & TEENAGE FRANK: Back in the box with you!
Anyway, then GAZZA rocked up and I imprinted the way teenagers and newly hatched geese do and said:
Yup, that’s it, I want to be just like him over there with the plastic tie!
Listening back, I have to say the old boy sounds a bit tinny, although he’s Pavarotti compared to Toyah
Lammo played ‘It’s a Mystery’ the other day and she honks, shouts and squeaks her way through it
I must emphasise I can’t sing a note
Well that’s not true, I can sing one note down there and another one up here, but none of the little black and white fuckers in between
I am a hopeless singer, I mean, I’d have to get ten times better just to be terrible
Do wish I could take Numan aside and say, not another character wandering the dystopian wilderness, why don’t you write a nice song about how you met your wife?
The trouble with apocalyptic fantasies is that the end of the world looks like this shitty smoking area, broken fairy lights and ashtrays full of rain, not some bloke in eyeliner pouting in a radioactive desert. That future is over
I can see myself reflected in the blank glass of the fire doors - a rind, a rictus nailed to a chair, a scrunched up piece of paper, cramped and kinked, fingers knotted and toes curled, like my nerves are too short
As I exhale my chest rattles
CANCER: Well, this is nice
FRANK: Oh, for fucksake
VOICE: Look at yourself
FRANK: Dear god, look at me
WHEN WILL YOU FUCKIN LEARN
Before it was a smokers’ ghetto, this was supposed to be a sophisticated terrace garden
It had a view of the sky until they built the office block next door
In the 80s it was all fresh, a haunt of new romantics, cold warriors convinced they lived in the teeth of the biggest, badddest NOW there had ever been, historic years when mighty super powers bristled with technology, when the world faced actual armageddon
No really
We would either die in a nuclear fireball or go to Mars
We were all doomed but in quite an exciting sexy way
VOICE: Come on, Frank!
VOICE: Coming!
Mammals
Sweat on my face
Danger high voltage
Danger, Will Robinson!
Did you know your robot can hum Pink Floyd?
Resistance is futile
Schwing
Ooh you are awful, but I like you
Stupid boy
You were born to rock, you’ll never be an opera star
Fire in the hold
Wait
The pot bellied bouncer moves in with the surly grace of a silverback
K1 regarded the severed finger
K2: Put it in a glass of milk
K1: That’s teeth, you wally
K2: Teeth is in coke, innit
Wait
Stinging bright lights
Wait
HOWARD: Your hypochondria
FRANK: What? When did I tell him about that? Why did I tell him, he’s only a quasi-benevolent non-human after all
HOWARD: Your hypochondria is part of your emotional thermostat, it’s a way of radiating superfluous happiness
Hard wet streets
Geosmin
You say you’ve been here before
Yeah it’s just round the corner
£100?
Yeah, Uniforms and shit is extra, obvs
Sounds like he’s dying
Dying of sexual ecstacy!
HOWARD: (shrugging) It’s what he would have wanted
It turns out that the best thing about knocking shops is they’ll let you smoke
While Howard chats to the maid, I fish out a shop worn B&H and spark up
FRANK: It’s too late to stop, won’t make any difference
But the smoke insists on coiling its way over to the maid, so I stub it out anyway
No point in making her ill too
The young already have to live in a bilious yellow smog of elderly middle aged ennui and acidie
Your actual zeitgeist is an old bloke on a smelly sofa having a cheeky fag while the world chokes on CO2 and apathy
I’m sure it wasn’t always like this, though I’d have trouble proving it
It’s just that when I was growing up, everything was always getting better
Wasn’t it?
There’d be ups and downs, sure, but the trend was always up…from human sacrifice and black death and pit ponies to the flush toilet and universal suffrage and antibiotics
And even better than antibiotics - astronauts and angel delight
When we were young we flirted with disaster because we had too much life, risking our necks to impress friends, to impress a girl, because the uniform was cool, to show the Ruskies who’s boss, because it’s there, for the sake of honour, riches and the love of women
Now, trying to rescue a few positives, I feel like a man trying to snatch sticks from a fire
My generation can’t walk upstairs, we’ve made a world of colonoscopies and wide fitting shoes
That world is grey, and the grey world is frightened
While half of it is reluctantly realising that all that guff about eating right and occasionally getting some exercise might have been true, the other half are realising that despite Park Run and kefir and sleep hygiene and intermittent fasting they are still slowly but surely wearing out
The warning signs were there
If we’d stopped burning oil before the permafrost melted, if I hadn’t smoked my way past the packet of fags, that particular cigarette, that very breath that did the damage
But at this point, what is the point?
I’m fucked, the world is fucked, and what difference now will a bowl of bran flakes or a community battery recycling hub in Ipswich make?
If only I’d been born ten years later, I’d probably never have smoked, would I? Twenty years further on, and they’d probably be able to grow me a new pair of lungs. Another fifty and you’d be living forever. Ours are probably the last few generations to miss out on eternal life, what a pisser!
No
Of course, I don’t really believe that
Let’s face it, in fifty years time we’ll probably be back to living in caves, let alone growing lungs. I didn’t used to feel this way. I’m stepping off the great engine of human progress just as it runs out of steam and starts crashing back down
Born exactly now
I was being stalked by an epiphany
It suddenly leapt out at me that this was more than a coincidence, that my fate and that of the world was linked
Yes - I am what HOWARD’S film professor girlfriend would call a synecdoche
The world is sick, and its sickness is exactly as advanced as mine - when I go, they all go!
Well fuck
That the world will tick over quite nicely without you is part of the sadness of death, but also one of its great consolations
But the world will die with me
The gorillas, the elephants, the pandas, the glaciers, human beings who haven’t been hollowed out by porn and algorithms, they’re all about to lose their grip and sink into darkness
MELVYN BRAGG: So your position is Hard Solipsism?
HOWARD: Look it up
I wish I had been born in deep time
Before Captain Cook arrived, people had been living in Australia for sixty thousand years, just doing their thing
They’d got there by sailing across the ocean, with no promise of a landing, so they weren’t short of smarts, and yet they spent millennia after millennia without inventing leaded petrol, low fat food or bluetooth headphones that won’t pair, without feeling the need to watch xmas commercials two months a year
Imagine living in the middle of all that Everwhen, part of a nation stuffed with years, comfortably smothered in ages piled on ages
From dreams you come, to dreams you shall return
What time is it?
K1: ‘bout half past six
K2: I’m getting another cup of rosie, anyone else?
ALL: Yeah
I stroke the table. My fingers are hungry, nothing feels big enough
I am the world
I must keep going, so everything can keep going
What
HOWARD: (Into his phone) Hi, Mo, yeah…Market Diner…No, into work. I know, right
MOHSIN: Seat belts on, lads. Is he going to be alright? You want some fresh air, fella? Want the window down?
FRANK: Never better
Indeed, once I’d splashed some water on my face and been sick and had another cup of tea and been sick again I was right as rain
FRANK’S GRANDMA: Right as Ninepence
I went to find SONYA for some paracetamol - I had the beginnings of a three day headache, but the mezzanine office was empty - everyone was crowded in the lobby
It looked like the final scene in one of those old Agatha Christie films in which the entire cast of slumming Oscar winners gather for the denouement
At the epicentre of the ogling circle of grotesques Hercule Poirot was being played by MARTIN HARMAN, who stood glowering over NAT
Her eyes were downcast, her face sodden with crying, her arms hanging loose at her sides a tissue in one hand and the inevitable phone in the other
MARTIN HARMAN: What can you be thinking, hmm? Come now, it’s no good just turning on the water works, this is a serious matter. Well?
VOICE: Oh leave her alone why don’t you
MARTIN HARMAN & NAT & FRANK: !
FRANK: You know the rules, you know the rules - you’re never out of the box when there are other people there!
VOICE: Coming down here waving your cock around!
ALL: !!!
MARTIN HARMAN:(With cold fury) That’s unacceptable, FRANK. I’m disappointed. Why would you use such unprofessional language, and in front of witnesses?
FRANK: Well, if you want to make a fuss, those witnesses will have to confirm that language, which means you’ll have to make SONYA & MARY say that I said that you were waving your cock around
MARTIN HARMAN: They won’t say I was actually waving…
FRANK: No, but the image of you waving your cock around will be in everyone’s mind
MARTIN HARMAN: Will you stop saying about me waving my cock around
FRANK: Well you started it
NAT let out a sob then scurried away
MARTIN HARMAN watched her go with a frown, then turned to me, mouth half open, a finger in the air
Before he could pronounce judgement, however, he was scooped up by MANAGER DAN. It appeared that the Chinese Situation, whatever that was, outweighed his wounded corporate ego
K1 & K2 were hunched frowning over a phone
FRANK: What the fuck is going on?
K1 turns the screen towards me and thumbs past a few pictures. They’re nudes of NAT
K2: Revenge porn, innit?
FRANK: And MARTIN HARMAN?
K1: Saw her looking at her phone and crying. Only went over and looked at it himself
K2: What a cunt
I got MOHSIN’S number off HOWARD, then went in search of NAT
I found her at her desk, still crying. ‘ROD’ STEWART looked on from behind his monitor, a lupine grin on his face
FRANK: Are you, um, alright? Did you get home last night?
NAT: Stayed at MANDY’S
VOICE:(Firmly) I think you should go home now, I’ve called a taxi
NAT sniffs and nods, then heads for the loos
NAT: Just going to blow my nose
I wait while ‘ROD’ STEWART leers from his desk
‘ROD’ STEWART: Taking her home then, FRANK?
FRANK: Yeah
‘ROD’ STEWART: Give her one from me
MOHSIN: Only just dropped you off!
FRANK: One of those days, Mo. Where do you want to go, NAT?
She gives an address, then spends the journey staring at her phone
Not sure it’s even turned on
BLIND SPOT #17: Electric cars
80% of my self worth as a human being is tied up with being able to drive stick, as the yanks have it. They don't enjoy it, but then the wheel is on the wrong side for them. You need your nondominant hand on the stick - no point performing the perfect gear shift if you’re driving through someone’s living room at the time
Rather to my surprise MOHSIN pulled up on a broad avenue in the Waitrosy side of town by a grey stone detached house shielded by stolid green hedges
FRANK’S GRANDMA: Oh look, they’ve got a controversy. Bet it’s cold in winter
There was a garage off to one side and a small stretch of yellow gravel with a Volvo parked on it. One of the old, square ones
NAT: Mum and Dad’s
Mum and Dad must have been on the look out - the front door opened as we got out of the car and they came crunching across the gravel towards us
The woman, a shorter, plumper and generally more desiccated version of NAT put her arms around her. NAT burst into tears again
NAT’S DAD wore half moon glasses through which he looked peevishly at this enormous and irritating intrusion into his perusal of the Daily Telegraph - his wife, making a scene, his daughter, causing a scene, some ghastly man, far too old to be up to any good with his daughter and a middle eastern cabbie, probably unlicensed, possibly illegal
NAT’S MUM shepherded her daughter inside
Her father continued to regard me balefully
NAT’S DAD: Are you NAT’S manager? What’s going on?
FRANK: No, I’m just a…concerned co-worker
NAT’S DAD: What does the company think it’s doing, hmm? Are you referring her to occupational health?
Realistically he can’t be that much older than me
He must be a fellow boomer but, while I can remember Dunn & Co he seems to have actually shopped there. Like COLIN he’s found a shortcut to old age
He smacks of vests and marmite and insurance premiums and ointment and actual letters written to actual local newspapers with actual stamps
Now he had been roused him from his reptilian torpor and I must face his flinty eye and thick, restless tongue
FRANK: I have no, ah, pastoral responsibilities for NAT, I just thought she looked upset and thought, you know, best get her home
He snorted
NAT’S DAD: You’d better come in
FRANK: Oh no, I really ought to get back
NAT’S DAD: I thought you were concerned
VOICE: In for a penny
MOHSIN had taken in all this, and showed no surprise when I gave him a tenner and waved him off
NAT’S DAD dumped me in one of those sad, unused front room dining rooms and stomped off. Soon I heard his voice raised in exasperation somewhere upstairs
On a heavy, dark wood sideboard that smelt of Mackeson stout were some framed pictures including, fascinatingly, a school photo of NAT There she was in her V necked pullover, there was the fleck in her eye, there she was before phones, before periods, before horrible old men putting her in taxis
There was a skittering of claws on the floorboards and a fat, shabby looking dog rolled into the room, followed by the lord and master
NAT’S DAD: What do you know about these nude pictures?!
FRANK: Well, only that some reprobate has sent them round at work. Bad business
NAT’S DAD: How many copies are there? Have you got any of these pictures in your mobile phone?
He looked like he was within a whisker of demanding to see my Samsung
FRANK: No, I don’t - well, not unless somebody’s forwarded them to me. I wouldn’t look at them even if they had
He gave me an acidic look
VOICE: TBH, I don’t believe you either
NAT’S DAD: She was never the brightest, but why, how, could anyone be so stupid? Why would you allow anyone to take these oh god
A sour, oniony dog fart filled the room. NAT’S DAD tries to ignore it then, with the air of a martyr, pierced to the core by the arrows of what now and oh for godsakes threw the door open
The dog pottered out, wagging vaguely
NAT’S DAD: Having the pictures taken in the first place was stupid, but then allowing them to be handed around - who in their right mind couldn’t see that would end in disaster? What a fiasco! Her mother’s packing her some things, we’re going to drive her down to St Anthony’s
FRANK: Sorry, what
NAT’S DAD: It’s a psychiatric facility. One of my wife’s cousins is a doctor there, hopefully they’ll get her admitted. Perhaps some ECT…
FRANK: She’s not mentally ill, it’s just what they do these days, the nudes, they just want young men - other young people - to notice them
NAT’S DAD: ‘Other young people’ is it? Well, that’s very ‘Right on’ - you’re one of them are you, the Woke?
Amazing
A moment ago he was willing to believe that I was implicated in some shady pornographic jiggery pokery and now he has me as a radical culture warrior. He would have disapproved of the former, but was creaming his jeans at the prospect of getting his teeth into a wokeflake
VOICE: Look, you silly old-
NAT’S MUM: She wants a word with you
She was standing in the doorway giving us the Lead Paint Stare
NAT’S MUM: It’s second door on the landing
FRANK: Oh, she wants to talk to me?
She nodded miserably; her husband snorted
I left Mr & Mrs Pounds Shillings and Pence to it and legged it upstairs
NAT was sitting on the corner of a bed, sharing it with one of those enormous, floppy teddy bears. Her eyes were raw and her nose bubbled slightly when she breathed. She looked completely beautiful
VOICE: Snap out of it
NAT: Thanks for bringing me home
Her voice was flat. Her phone lay beside her staring blankly at the ceiling
NAT: My dad wants to have me sectioned
FRANK: I told him you weren’t mental
NAT: Do you think I am?
FRANK: You did something a bit reckless because of sex. Lots of people do that. Maybe not your dad
She managed a watery smile
NAT: Actually, I’m not really the kind of girl who sends nudes. I thought it would get him back
FRANK: ?
She sighs
NAT: You remember that last audit? Lots of us were working late. You know NICK?
FRANK: Oh you didn’t
She nodded
NAT: We finished about 8 o’clock one night, and he said was I hungry, and he took me to that French place down the High Street
FRANK: Fucksake, NICK’S only a couple of years younger than me. If I’d have known it would only take a crepe to turn her head
VOICE: Yeah, well, talking of heads, NICK’S is still covered in hair, unlike yours. Lots of hair and absolutely no shame
This was true - his neediness is actually a kind of superpower
I think it’s because he wants to be loved
It’s a craving
It’s not like he’s making up for a deprived childhood or anything
He comes from one of those upper middle class families in which children are constantly told that they can do anything and be whoever they want, and when they turn out to be duffers without an ounce of talent or ambition, are hugged and adored all the more ardently
Perhaps that’s it, he was overloved and bedazzled at an early age, his emotional thermostat set much too high. As an organism he has one simple need, to be loved by the maximum amount of people with no thought to tomorrow
People say his affairs are messy, but he moves from A to B with single minded determination
If he thinks that going to bed with a woman will make her love him, then he will go to bed with her - but equally, if he thinks playing canasta will make her love him, then he will play canasta
Or Minecraft
NAT: It was lovely while it lasted, but he went on what he said was a family holiday with his parents, but then I saw him tagged on Insta with JUSTINE
FRANK: Even younger. Lucky sod
NAT: So I sent the nudes cos I thought I could get him interested again
FRANK: So why’s he posting them now?
NAT: He’s not, but he did show them to CLIVE
FRANK: He showed them to CLIVE ‘The Bastard' CLIVE? What was he thinking?
CAPT MAINWARING: The man must be a blithering idiot!
NAT: Now CLIVE’S got all the pictures
FRANK: How many are there?
NAT shrugged miserably
NAT: Lots. CLIVE says he’ll post more unless I make him some videos
FRANK: Some - Oh
A large tear hesitated for a moment on the top of her cheek, then gathered up its skirts and fled to the corner of her mouth
I was uncomfortably aware that mixing with my pity for NAT and my contempt for the bastard CLIVE was the stubborn snake of my own low desires
Given half a chance I’d ravish her next to the giant bear
VOICE: Yeah apparently it’s not about you
FRANK’S GRANDMA: Help the poor little thing out, FRANK
FRANK: You should go to Management
NAT: He uses a VPN there’s no proof
FRANK: Well
CAPT MAINWARING: Come on, man!
FRANK: Well I suppose I better go and have a word with CLIVE myself
VOICE: That’ll show him
NAT: Would you?
She sniffed and drew the back of her hand across her nose
NAT: I’m a mess. Perhaps Dad’s right, maybe I am a bit mental
FRANK: All the best people are. A bit
NAT: What about you?
FRANK: Me? Oh…well - I think I’ve got cancer
NAT: Oh my God! When did you find out?
FRANK No, er, I haven’t got cancer, at least, I don’t think I have, I mean, I do think I have, that’s the problem, but I don’t, actually…as far as I know
She looks puzzled
FRANK: I’m a terrible hypochondriac
She looks worried
FRANK: It’s not catching. Look, if he contacts you - stall him
VOICE: Always wanted to say that
FRANK: But I’ll see him in person when he gets back from the Regionals
The girl from the school photo looked up at me gratefully
VOICE: CLIVE, you bastard, how could you
FRANK: Yeah
VOICE: Oh, there you are, Mr Moral Highground
Come on, let’s go home
I rang in sick the next day
And the day after that
You know, I actually was a bit feverish
As predicted, my headache lasted three days. So it was a real sickie, albeit a sort of ironic one because well
Fessing up to the hypochondria with NAT had loosened the nuts and bolts of my psyche a little
Actually felt a bit less cancer ridden
GODZILLA V KONG
Friday
A day for big decisions
I snuck up the backstairs and sidled into HR
I didn’t really need to sneak because, you know, invisibility
I suppose I should be grateful it occasionally comes in useful
Perhaps I should use my super power to set myself up as an international playboy jewel thief
Perhaps I should eschew passive-aggressive throat clearing and wounded sarcasm and actually be properly present
You know
Get out of the box now and then
Of course, there are some who spend their entire lives outside the box, but most people don’t even know they’re in it
Getting out of the box is like breaking the fourth wall of life. It’s hard work - it makes the audience nervous and calls for slick ad libbing skills
Anyway
Actually
There was no one about
It can take months from a new hire signing on the dotted line to finally being given the green light to work, HR having lovingly crafted an elegant process by which all human elements of common sense, judgement and initiative have been expunged
HOWARD: Good word
All that is left is a conveyor belt, and on Friday afternoons HR can confidently piss off down the pub, knowing that any poor soul caught in their toils will continue to plod round a mobius strip of proofs of address, two forms of identification from group A and one from group B, no photocopies and references back to the cretaceous
The doors in HR are wood, but they have a thin, upright rectangle of glass let into them, and through this I could see that the heir to Kafka was sitting behind his desk eating a sandwich
His jaws were moving unnaturally fast, like an insect. His phone was in his lap
CLIVE: I’m having lunch
FRANK: I need to talk to you
CLIVE: Any HR enquiries through the service portal
He took another bite of sandwich, and his eyes went back to his lap
FRANK: It’s about NAT
CLIVE ‘The Bastard’ scowled ferociously
That’s him all over. Chews vigorously, scowls ferociously and, I’ve no doubt, masturbates furiously
CLIVE: Yeah? What about her?
FRANK: You’ve got to stop posting those nudes and delete the rest
CLIVE: Oh this is good. What are you, knight in shining armour? I know your game, chum, you’re after fucking her yourself, think she’ll put out if you do her dirty work?
His eyes glinted through heavy lids, puffy circles sliced by cunning
FRANK: Dirty work? You’re the blackmailer
CLIVE: You’re just as bad - look at you, up on your hind legs. You think this is going to get you into her knickers and it’s making you all hot and sweaty
He was right there, I was sweating like a proverbial
CLIVE: Anyway, what are you going to do? Go to HR?!
FRANK: I’ll go to MARTIN HARMAN if I have to
CLIVE: After your little stunt on Wednesday? Don’t think so, matey. Telling him not to wave his cock around? Oh, yes, everyone heard about that. He’ll never forgive you, you’ll be lucky if you’ve got a job on Monday, let alone be having a cosy chat with MARTIN HARMAN about your little bit of skirt
FRANK: Well, I’ll go to the sodding police, then. Quite apart from anything else, revenge porn is against the law
VOICE: Is it?
FRANK: I’m pretty sure. He seems to think so
CLIVE had risen and come round the desk, jabbing at the air in front of my chest with a fat, hairy finger. Classic escalation, just like in the Anger Management e-learning
CLIVE: Go to the police with what? My word against hers. Got no proof I’m anything to do with it
FRANK: Unless I’ve been recording
I flourished the Samsung
CLIVE started, then giggled
VOICE: Yuck!
CLIVE: You stupid old fart, you can barely turn that thing on, let alone record anything
FRANK: Oh yeah?
I twiddled the phone under his nose. This enraged him, and for a moment we tussled, breathing heavily
FRANK: Look, all you’ve got to do is leave the poor girl alone
VOICE: Sounds reasonable
FRANK: I like to think so
But they don’t call CLIVE ‘The Bastard’ for nothing
CLIVE: Leave her for you to sniff around - or are you fucking her already?
FRANK: No, I
CLIVE: Back off, or I’ll finish you
FRANK: ?
CLIVE: I have your staff engagement survey, chum
Oh yes. Remember? Question 16? ‘which sex do you identify with?’
FRANK: Oh that
Ah, the yearly staff engagement survey when, like a cat licking its own arse, the company tries to persuade itself it cares
Most of the questions can be answered by selecting a frowning or a happy face, so it’s hardly surprising most people don’t even notice the language, they’re just clicking their way through to the free lunch at the canteen for all completed surveys
With grim inevitability, Q16 asks what sex you might care to identify with. You can’t submit the survey without entering a response, so I’d printed it off and written
FRANK: I don’t ‘identify’ as anything, I just AM a man
CLIVE: You’ll be tarred and feathered if I put that up online
FRANK: OK, this has finally come up - I know you’ve been dying to ask, so here goes
Look, it can’t be easy being a trans woman, let’s cut them some slack. But unless you’ve tried taking your exams with a period or been upskirted or was the first girl in the class to get tits or became menopausally invisible or waited 20 years for an endometriosis diagnosis or had to remember which of your male relatives you should never be alone with, or had an ectopic pregnancy, or any bloody pregnancy, if you’ve never dealt with this shit, no matter how womanly you may feel, you’re just a tourist
I know, worse than Hitler
HOWARD: Didn’t know you felt so strongly
FRANK: I’m a scabby, lecherous, smelly-
VOICE: Mansplaining
FRANK: Thank you - old reptile. But I’m not blind
K1: Child of the eighties, innit
CLIVE: NAT still think you’re so great when she finds out what a nasty, transphobic old scrote you are?
VOICE: Kick his head in!
The VOICE lives in a world of cartoon violence where the bad guys really just stand there and let you hit them instead of biting your ankles
CLIVE had an ape’s comic ugliness and barbarous strength
The VOICE meanwhile was still basing my capacity to go mano a mano on 2015, the year I did that DVD workout every morning before breakfast and reached the state known as 'quite buff, but not quite buff enough'
So
Of the two of us I don’t know who was more surprised when I punched him on the nose
Look, I don’t want you to get the idea I’m down on cyclists
I afford them exactly the same courtesy and consideration I would any other road user who is forcing me to drive at 12mph
BLIND SPOT #18: The Royal Family
BLINDSPOT #19: Republicanism
BLINDSPOT#20: Conspiracies. It’s not a zero sum game. Just because the government are a bunch of greasy lipped loose trousered spivs who would sell their grannies to the Chinese doesn’t make your bonkers paranoid fantasies any less bonkers
EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENTS
It was obviously no surprise when I got to my desk on Monday morning and MANDY stuck her head in and said I had an invitation to speak to MANAGER DAN at my earliest inconvenience
Being fired would be a relief. The sweating sickness I had been feeling on Friday had only got worse
CANCER: Ta Da! April fool, I’m leukemia!
Meanwhile, unusually so soon after a regular three day headache, I had a new one which was even more impervious to painkillers
CANCER: Or am I a brain tumour? I’m mad, me
I got a black coffee, necked a couple more pills and dragged myself up to the third floor
MANAGER DAN was looking serious. He did it very well, and I suspected he had been practising. It helped that he was flanked by a couple of Health & Safety heavies, and they looked serious too. All of them shifted uncomfortably when I came in, retreating away from me by a step
VOICE: Cool. I told you - should’ve started punching people years ago
FRANK: This about CLIVE?
MANAGER DAN: You’ve heard?
FRANK: Yes. What?
MANAGER DAN: He’s been admitted to hospital
FRANK: He seemed…OK when I last saw him
VOICE: Covered in blood and threatening to sue
MANAGER DAN: That’s just it - records show you buzzed in to HR on Friday. We’re warning everyone who has visited the department. CLIVE’S been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus
FRANK: The Chinese thing?
MANAGER DAN: Can you smell OK?
FRANK: Can I…
HOWARD: Top smells?
FRANK: Let’s see
Steam from a rubber hot water bottle
Somebody else’s cigarette smoke on a cold, sunny Friday morning
Cut grass
Road works
Oh go on then bacon
Creosote
NAT’S breath
H&S HEAVY: Do you have a cough?
FRANK: Hmm? Oh, a dry, unproductive…
CANCER: She doesn’t mean me
FRANK: No. I’ve got a bit of a temperature. And a headache
VOICE: Oh he’s always got a headache
MANAGER DAN was consulting some notes
MANAGER DAN: Doesn’t say anything here about headaches. Perhaps you should go home anyway, let us know how you feel in a day or two
I went home via Boots the Chemist. CANCER suggested I buy one of those thermometers you stick in your ear. I think CANCER would actually be quite disappointed if I died of septicaemia or something before it had a chance to off me itself
Standing in the kitchen I screwed the device into my lughole and pressed the button while wondering just how instantaneous it really is when someone shoots themselves in the head
38C
FRANK’S GRANDMA: Have some paracetamol, dear, it’s antipyrexic
CAPT MAINWARING: Have a cold shower
SCARY MARY: It’s too late for cold showers, he’s being consumed by the fires of lust, consumed
I took the pills, and my temperature dipped a bit, but by the evening it was 40C
My head felt sick, distended, full of membranes, nauseous darkness and nauseous light
Red clouds, black lightning
Sleep was impossible, when I laid my head on the pillow the entire contents of my skull sloshed backwards, seasick, self-hating electric jelly
I dozed in a chair all night
In the morning the pain behind my right eye made it water uncontrollably. Sodden faced I squinted at my phone and thumbed the app for my GP surgery
I’d used it before, my habit being to book an appointment then cancel it at the last moment when I realise my so-called symptoms will not survive an encounter with reality
There must have been some glitch, as it showed every single appointment taken for the foreseeable future
I tried ringing the practice
Like all organisations, before it would even allow you anywhere near an automated menu the doctor’s phone system would make you spend five minutes listening to a recorded message asking whether you’d ever heard of computers, laboriously spelling out their url and suggesting, in the tone of ‘many people nowadays like marmalade instead’ that you may care to take your enquiry online
Your response to this message depends which group of people you fall into, viz
Group A: includes pretty much everyone who is a functioning human being in the beginning of the 21st century. Group A went online in the first instance, because what else are you going to do, and would not be making a phone call if they had found the answer with a web page or an app or a chatbot
Result = Group A become extremely irritated
Group B: people, possibly of mature years, who cannot work the internet and who, if they are not clear on the concept now, never will be
Their preferred method of communication would be a candlestick phone you wind up and then ask for Walmington-on-sea 166
It’s utterly pointless telling them to go online
Result = Group B become extremely irritated
Like our old friend the slow driver, you have to ask yourself - do the slack jawed fuckwits behind these recordings know they’re doing it? Do they set out to drive their fellow human beings mental with frustration? Do they care either way?
As you know, I’ve no time for conspiracies, but I’m sure stuff like this is more than just stupidity, it’s about pretending, pretending to offer a service you don’t really want to deliver and then making it so awful people give up and go away
Toilet paper dispensers in public loos work on the same principle. They can’t not give you something to wipe your arse on, but they can make the process of extracting the paper without tearing it to shreds so fiddly that you won’t have the patience to take more than the bare minimum necessary for basic hygiene
I hung on grimly through the invitation to explore the wonders of the internet, the dire warnings of long waiting times and lack of staff and the stern admonishment not to abuse what staff there were should it ever be my fate to speak to one
And after all that, after navigating the options of repeat prescriptions and appointments with the practice nurse, after a long, deep dive into the closed-yet-infinite loop of the dial tone, instead of the grumpy harridan, the troll under the bridge over whose face I had expected to ejaculate my frustration and rage, the surgery had the temerity to connect me to a charming and sympathetic receptionist who patiently explained there really were no appointments and made me promise to dial NHS direct
Bastards
NHS Direct wondered whether I was having a stroke. We both agreed this was highly unlikely
And yet
Could I make my own way to A&E or would I like them to send an ambulance?
I was flat out slammed shut shagged, so I almost looked forward to slumping in a plastic chair for a few hours but instead I was pounced on by a nurse in a surgical mask who aimed one of those radar guns at my head, frowned, and sent me to the Red Zone
VOICE: That can’t be good
I tried to explain about the headache, but all anybody wanted to know was whether I’d been to China or skiing in the Italian Alps. They shoved giant cotton buds up my nose and down my throat and put a clip on my finger which made a machine go bleep, but apparently the wrong kind of bleep - heads were shaken and foreheads creased
FRANK: You know, I am beginning to feel a bit, er, breathless
VOICE: But you’re a hypochondriac and very suggestible
FRANK: This nurse doesn’t look suggestible and she’s frowning at me
PRUDENCE: My feet hurt, is all, I’ve been running around all day
FRANK: So I’m alright?
PRUDENCE: No, you’re not
FRANK: I’ve had a stroke?
PRUDENCE: What? No, no, dear…you had a rebound headache
FRANK:?
PRUDENCE: One of the side effects of painkillers is headaches. Every time you took one you were making it worse
HOWARD: Now then Morissette, that’s ironic!
PRUDENCE: Your respiration is not good, not good. I’m moving you downstairs as soon as there’s a bed
And that is how I came to find myself in…
GAMMON HELL
It was a space large enough for half a dozen hospital beds with all the tubes and trimmings and a nurses’ station, a square arch at one end letting on to another identical room. Judging by the Disney characters smiling from the walls as they urged me to have my shots and eat my greens it was some kind of waiting room for a kids’ clinic that had been repurposed. At the top of the wall opposite were some of those little windows which let you see the ankles of passers-by outside
In the beds around me were variations on the theme of stricken middle-aged man
They all looked like guys who owned vinyl, guys who remembered when Bat Out Of Hell first charted but had stopped counting actual meatloaves a long time ago - pale, puffy, flaky mounds served up on white table cloths
Some, myself included, were breathing through little masks of clear plastic like kids playing fighter pilots
Others had a corrugated contraption strapped to their head like those face huggers from Alien. Now and again I caught a glimpse of them through the face plates, saw eyes moving, still awake, awake but afraid, hag ridden
Finally the sleepers, tubes disappearing into their mouths or burrowing into the front of their necks
One of the sleepers was CLIVE
Well well
I am standing on the shore
Salty, fly blown
I should be more afraid, but I’m not. Listen to this -
CANCER:
See what I mean. It might be the sedation. I’m hooked up to a syringe driver doling out a comforting trickle of Midazolam
HOWARD: Same stuff as Rohypnol
FRANK: How do you even know that? Don’t answer
But it’s not
It's not just the drugs
For a hypochondriac there’s some terrible relief in finally being down here, in this place, no distance left to fall
No alarms and no surprises
My physical state is no longer the product of a hypersensitive imagination but an array of hard facts inscribed on a piece of graph paper the size of a tablecloth, every heartbeat, every breath I take, every millilitre I excrete, it’s all there
So yeah - someone else is worrying about my health, that's a full time job they’ve taken off my hands
Around my mechanised bed terrible events are unfolding
Virtually every day some poor sod kicks the bucket
And yet
I float past it all, lost in the froth, soothed by the white noise of rustling plastic aprons, the bored sigh of the ventilator, the inquisitive gurgling of the suction machine clearing a throat, a constant background hissing and swishing
The sea creeps in over the shingle, restless brimming waters
Take a couple of steps from the shore and suddenly it is cold and deep and beyond that black and bottomless
VOICE: Totally the drugs
Standing on the shore the sky is green and I hear the rusty honking of the geese
It’s not geese, it’s the monitor alarms do they ever fucking stop; their screens write the same word in an alien language over and over in neon ink
Tides turn
The rising of the lights
The change of shift
In the morning a monkeys’ wedding, the ward round
Minions poring over paper observations charts
Like Royal astrologers analysing the significance of Saturn returning for the House of FRANK
The syringe drivers blink as they count out the sedation, micrograms per second, milligrams a minute, a dozen life times sweated out each unforgiving hour
The eyes of the men in the face huggers
The guy next to me was blond, a Pole, I could see his monitor - he was breathing thirty times a minute
Think about that
In for a second
Out for a second
Try it
A man running a continuous marathon day after day, running to stay ahead of the grey hag that stood behind the head of his bed
CLIVE is lying on his front. Proned, they call it. A pack of nurses came, more like Star Wars extras than anything human in their visors and gowns, came and surrounded him and gathered up all his wires and whatnot, the hose pumping air in and the tube sucking shit out, and made a sandwich of all this chaotic junk between two sheets and flipped him over. Now his great hairy back jerks up and down as the machine struggles to ventilate him, to find hidden pockets and pouches to fill with air
CLIVE THE BASTARD in the house of Baba Yaga
Then it was my turn
I don’t remember when they put the face hugger on me. Now every time I took a breath the machine would seize the chance to cram air into me. It inflated my reluctant lungs like someone blowing into a rubber glove
Stuffed with gas there was no room for blood in my body and it was banished to my extremities, the bits of me that could do nothing to save me but only looked on. Well, sorry, they were on their own. I knew only the turbulence of my breath and the pressure of the faceplate and the hurtful, hot grasp of the straps binding it to me, wrapped about my head and grinding into my scalp
FRANK: DOC, this thing…is so frigging uncomfortable…Can’t do it…just stick… a tube down me…put me to sleep
I could see only her eyes wrapped up as she was in layer after layer of PPE
She looked exhausted too
DOC: FRANK the CPAP machine is your best bet
She looked around
DOC: Right now, if we intubate you’ve got a 50/50 chance of waking up again
50/50
FRANK: Well…at least up the bloody sedation
She nods
More drugs
They’ve put CLIVE back the right way up, but he’s in this bed with chunks you can take out, the Jawas have made a CLIVE shaped outline like Wile E Coyote going through a wall, so they can stand him right up or flip him head down, angling his bastard body this way and that like someone playing one of those games where you roll a little silver ball through a hole, trying to find the combination to his lungs
SCARY MARY: Behold CLIVE THE BASTARD crucified for lookin’ at all them dirty pictures on the internet, all them videos of women that weren’t into it, that were too young for it, for all his nasty little whatsapps and thumbnails and memes
Good old bonkers SCARY MARY. Yeah, it isn’t hard to see Gammon Hell as some kind of voodoo curse enacted on middle age men
BLIND SPOT# 21: Religion
Once when I was in my twenties, a sweet old lady asked me if I would be going to church on xmas day
YOUNG FRANK: Ah, no, I'm not, um, a believer
OLD LADY: (fascinated) Oh, you're Jewish?!
At that moment, seeing the interest in her face I wished I was Jewish and not a po faced atheist
I was a pompous young man, alas
VOICE: Whereas now you're the kind of old man who uses words like 'alas'
FRANK: Alas!
VOICE: Fucksake
I think I could do Jewish, the sort that doesn't worry too much about God
You know, like
How does God decide what is good? He can’t consult a higher power, he can’t look at a chart, he just has to say what’s good and bingo! It is
If he said wearing your pants on your head was good, then it really would be. Not wearing your pants on your head would be a sin
Is he just winging it?
GOD: Mind if I come in?
ADAM: Looks like you already did
GOD: Well, just thought I’d see what you’ve done with the place. Those your posters?
ADAM: (Eye roll) Yes, those are my posters
GOD: Neat. Er, listen - about Eve. I’ve just had a word with myself, and apparently you may stick your penis up her vagina, but nowhere else
ADAM: OK. Hang on, where-
GOD: Nowhere else! And don’t walk over her blanket
ADAM: Sure. Wait, what?
GOD: She could have menstruated on it, or something…
ADAM: Don’t they have stuff for that?
GOD: You can’t be too careful
ADAM: Dad, you’re making a fuss!
GOD: Look, we only got her because of you! You were supposed to be looking after her, but as always around here it ends up being my responsibility
ADAM: I didn’t ask for any of this. I’d be quite happy-
GOD: I know, I know, you’re going to be in a band…
ADAM: You don’t have to say it in that tone of voice!
FRANK: What if God doesn't wear his pants on his head? God can’t want to do bad stuff, can he? But he’s God, he can do anything
GOD: I’m God, I can fuckin do anything innit
FRANK: Thanks, K2, you can take the beard off now
I think the answer is that the rules are localised
Referring to Him as him, by the way
He drowns everyone, plays mind games with Isaac & Job, smites whole cities
What’s that you say, innocent children? You’re getting starved, beaten and screwed? Well, them’s the breaks
Apparently
Why would you allow all that then be squeamish about God being
a) a bloke and
b) not a very nice one?
In that respect us middle aged men really did seem to be in his image
Then when people stopped looking up to us because we were in his image, we were the default human being
Which was nice
Now there’s a school of thought that holds that middle aged men are coarse, cold blooded creatures that don’t really feel pain the way higher creatures do
And speaking as a middle aged man do you know I think there might be something in that, what with all the BLIND SPOTS and the compartmentalism and whatnot
To be clear, we are human beings. Lumping us all together and saying we’ve had it our way much too long and we’re due a kicking is sexist and ageist
As HOWARD will tell you, a lot of what we do is biological programming - should we be punished for that?
Well
Technically that’s all true
But
I mean, you have to either be an incel or a GB News Father-for-justice not to see that the Epsteins and Weinsteins are not freak outliers, and that if they think they can get away with it, many of us will indulge in the most squalid sleaziness
Meanwhile CLIVE
Satan on the slab
VOICE: You know the videos he wanted NAT to do would only be the beginning. He was grooming her for other stuff. Had it coming
FRANK: What about me
VOICE: You are the lynchpin, the synecdoche, the monad, the world in miniature, you’re the risk factor, the disease and the symptom, you’re a 1:10 to the minus bajillion scale model of the world, you are the crux, you live in a world tailored to you, that both supports and reflects you. If you die, it dies
ALL: So don’t die, asshole!
I see - I have to keep going. Save everything, me
Well fuck a duck
How did it come to this?
I was born into an explosion of colour, of Yellow Submarine and What’s New Pussycat but my senses have become uncomfortably numb, threadbare
The rainbow has faded, been washed so many times
Repetition has rubbed the year bare
It gets hot, it gets cold, but the seasons have gone, blurred into one like the view from HG Wells’ time machine.
Easter eggs and Xmas Top of the Pops and It's a Knockout on summer evenings were sizable landmarks on the yearly journey, now they are almost smoothed away to nothing
SAD BEIGE MOM: Always winter, never christmas
Even the smells were smellier. When do you ever smell a fart with the sheer olfactory density of a 70’s fart?
K1: I’m getting a strong whiff of Irish stew with top notes of cholera
Or meet someone with BO that reeks of curry and baked beans?
I was born into the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, Johnny Morris and Animal Magic, chimps swilling PG Tips, elephants running riot on Blue Peter, a world brimming with life, but as my shanks have shrunk and my gums atrophied and my nerves have turned around and burrowed back into darkness, the natural world is correspondingly reduced to an orangutan with PTSD, to a dirty polar bear, all paws and ribs and ragged with hunger
Save them
Save the tiger, save the children, the date, the last dance. Save the fleck in NAT’S eye
Wait
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN
WHEN WILL YOU FUCKIN LEARN
The giant heaves itself over the horizon
Taller than Betelgeuse
It bends to reach for me, rummages through my innards, then pulls the screwtape out of me like a parasitic worm
EXHALE
It was sometime after they stopped the sedation that I even realised the face hugger was gone
VOICE: Something else has changed, what is it?
CLIVE
CLIVE had gone
K1: CLIVE snuff it, then?
FRANK: Yes
K2: Good riddance, innit
HOWARD: Lot of people in his Whatsapp group looking very uncomfortable
FRANK: But you had those nudes
K1: Oh yeah, whatever happened to her
HOWARD: You took her home and she was never seen again
FRANK: That seems a long time ago
HOWARD: It was a long time ago, I thought you’d never stop malingering
FRANK: I came to the zoom meetings
HOWARD: And sat there in your underwear coughing. Seriously, what did you do with her?
FRANK: You mean NAT?
HOWARD gave me a look
K2: Where’d you bury her?
FRANK: I took her home, to her parents
VOICE: Are you sure we didn’t imagine that bit
Or all of it
Crazy dreams, the sea, if I die the world will implode or something
Taking NAT home seems unlikely, but so much of the recent past seems unlikely doesn’t it?
The biggest riddle of them all, after all the death, the lock downs, the queues, the utter bollocks - how after all that, is it possible the status quo has become even more fossilised?
AGE OF REPTILES
When the mammals emerged from their burrows after the Chicxulub impact they were expecting a changed world. The terrible lizards would have gone, leaving gaps in the ecosystem which they could fill, where they would grow, would flourish
But the dinosaurs were not gone
They still lived in their half empty 4 bed semis in Wimbledon
Despite insisting the mammals spend months cooped up in their tiny, no garden burrows they still complained about snowflakes and banged on about interest rates in the 1980s
The young got such a shitty deal to begin with - the education system a treadmill, vindictive student loans no houses - and then saw some of the most important years of their lives cancelled, all to keep a few thousand octogenarians from falling off their perch
VOICE: Why aren't they burning cars in the street?!
K1: Just pulling your leg, we see her regular
K2: She’s on Onlyfans, virtue out of necessity, innit
HOWARD: Makes ten times what she used to
BLIND SPOT #22: Porn
The thing porn absolutely does get right is the male protagonist’s boredom, his ennui as he endures the mandatory 10 minutes of fellatio that begins any coupling whether the scenario is horny estate agents or amateur teen vixens
Because if you’re watching porn this is going to be you: bored mechanic test firing the system
Internet porn is both boring and the marvel of our age. Like Borges’ Library of Babylon it reveals infinities, the endless human capacity to find titillation in anything, seedy cubicles of specialised jazz mags stretching away forever until no one can remember what they came for in the first place
So, even before I had the screwtape pulled out of me I wasn’t much one for porn
Not because it was ugly which it is
Not because of the effect on the performers
But because it puts six million volts through your libido and leaves it smoking and necrotic
Because you will screwtape your life away
Because porn will eat you alive from the inside
I had a new laptop since Gammon Hell which hadn’t been besmirched by so much as a YouTube video of Legs & Co and bless me I actually did pause before I opened an incognito window and visited NAT’S new place of work
BTW honestly, really, Rosie dancing to the Gibson Brothers on Top of the Pops in 1980 is a jillion times more exciting than ‘Anal Intruder’ and ‘Anal Intruder II - This Time It’s Personal’ put together, and nobody needed an enema
Still, the laptop doesn’t appreciate that, and it led me straight to OnlyFans
From what I understood of the website, for a reasonable consideration I could enjoy many short films of NAT and make suggestions and requests for new ones. I made do with the still image adorning her home page
The old bedroom chez lead paint was gone, replaced by the usual aspirational magnolia shag pad
The big floppy bear had come along for the ride, presumably to give the scene that pedo tang that is the salted caramel of sex product these days
NAT looked expensive and available
But not quite like the girl I remembered
Not that I ever knew her
VOICE: Do we ever really know anyone?
FRANK: Shut up
I think, I hope, this meant she was keeping herself back
Out of our clutches
I wished her luck and logged off
Girls like her have tapped into the endless torrent of male lust and monetised it
Some of them stimulate business by simulating an interest in older men and the reptiles on the receiving end pretend to believe it
The who's milking who thing here gets a bit murky
But we started it, didn’t we
It does beg the question
Is male society riddled with porn and sexual abuse because men are naturally slavering depraved pest hounds, or are we kept in a state of hypersexualisation in order that advertisers have a lever to pull?
HOWARD: Zero sum smut, mate. In the seventies it was everywhere - Hai Karate, Manikin cigars, Lambs navy Rum, I’m Cheryl, Fly Me, that bloke with the teeth from On the Buses, wolf whistles, while you’re down there, luv, all that
FRANK: Nostalgic?
HOWARD: You can’t not be nostalgic about Caroline Munro in a cut off wetsuit
These days T&A in advertising is officially verboten, but the lack of sexist nonsense in commercials and sitcoms is more than balanced out by the ever ballooning fungus cloud of internet porn
HOWARD: It’s like one of those stress toys - you squeeze it one end, it pops out somewhere else. Zero sum smut
FRANK: So - if we still had Benny Hill, would we have needed Pornhub?
HOWARD: Discuss
Good luck to NAT and her fellows toiling on OnlyFans. Make hay while the sun shines, because AI is coming for you. Computer generated bimbos whose dimensions and responses can be tweaked to order, who can be made to do anything will take your place, and men will be lost in the rat maze inside their heads forever
Or at least until the oil runs out, the screens go dark and we start all over again
Future generations are going to want to know - was it worth it?
All the hydrocarbons and rare earths gone, all the charismatic megafauna, not to mention uncharismatic but very useful fauna, all the forests and fresh air and the clean water, what did we swap all that for, what did we get? It must have been fantastic, right? We’ll have to show them the adverts - sure, that was us. We all had white teeth and drove shining cars down empty roads through verdant mountains. We lived in happy, mixed race families in sunlit houses with our sparkling, fragrant white laundry billowing aesthetically outside in the exquisite gardens where we would sip ambrosia and nectar with our adorable relatives. Old people merely went grey and became wise and if anything even happier. No one really died. We ate French sticks and dips and surf n turf and chocolate made by chefs in floppy white hats and we never got fat. We had orgasms that lasted three days and never knew boredom
Yes, that’s what we’ll have to tell them. Not that we sold the world for a bunch of tat that was landfill five minutes after the Amazon driver dropped it off. We took the family cow to market, but instead of magic beans we came back with a handful of Britney Spears exercise DVDs, with half a bottle of Thank U, Next the fragrance from Ariane Grande, industrial foods extruded rather than cooked, intransigent printers that drove us crazy, shirts we wore once and structured reality TV
Don’t tell them about that shit
Let them envy us
Let them hate us - it will be kinder
K1: That it, then? Bit of a bummer
K2: What else you got?
FRANK: Oh alright you two
Also FRANK: (pulling up a chair) So, if there’s anything I’d like you to take away from this saga of late life nonsense it is this -
That if you’re going to overtake a cyclist then you must have the strength of your convictions and change gear
Yeah, I know, but sorry, it’s no good hanging back there in 4th hoping the road will be clear in both directions for five miles
The good news is that you’re in a car!
You’re the one with an engine!
Give yourself a pat on the back then change down and viff past them, like a harrier jump jet sidestepping an exocet, that’s the stuff
We’ve crunched the numbers for you - over to KEITH at the blackboard
K1 & K2: Thank you
FRANK: Loving the white coats
K1: Got them off DEBBIE she does that weekend job down the salon
K2: Things these coats have seen
FRANK: Concentrate
K1: So yer pushbikes what about 170 cms long
K2: 2 metres for cash
RAYMOND BAXTER: (to camera) Born and educated in the 1980’s these young men are using the metric system
NIGEL: I didn’t fight in two world wars to use the metric system! What's wrong with counting in twelves? If it was good enough for the Babylonians it's good enough for me
RAYMOND BAXTER: I've been dead for years and even I think imperial units are an anachronism. Carry on chaps!
K1: Say yer doing thirty
K2: (Writing on board) 48 point 28 Kilometres an hour innit, or in metres = 48 280
K1: So every minute
K2: 800 and 4 metres
K1: And every second
K2: (in a flurry of chalk dust) 13.4. Yer travellin 13 point four metres every second
K1: So to pass your 1.7m bike takes?
K2: (reading from phone screen) Just over a tenth of a second innit
K1: Sound as a pound!
K2: Good as gold!
FRANK: So yes, avoid running them over for a tenth of a second and off you go!
K1 & K2: Nice one
HOWARD: Anything else?
FRANK: Hmm - well, I don’t hear anything from CANCER these days but there is this guy
DEATH: Hello there
HOWARD: That makes you a character in a Terry Pratchett novel
FRANK: Who did you hope to impress with that?
HOWARD: Anyone who likes a good read
FRANK: Fair nuff
Yeah
Fair enough
To be going on with
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