Black Market Prosthetics

When I woke up, I found myself with one foot inside my wardrobe.  On the other side of the room, the alarm was beeping.  It enraged me and I wondered what I was doing.  I had had a restless night.  

Pretty soon, my nose began to bleed.  I could feel its cold descent long before I watched with satisfaction the vibrant colour stagger down my filtrum and splash into the sink, dappling the white porcelain with its healthy rouge.  I was positioned in front of the mirror: partly so that my blood fell into the sink, partly so that I could watch my life essence fall out of my face.  I tired of this after a time and, leaning forward, pinched the cartilage in my nose.  This did nothing but block the blood flow, only unleashing a greater flow when I released my grip.  In the end I stuffed some tissue up there and hoped that it would dry up before I had to leave the flat.  It did, and I washed the brown speckles from my nostril and flushed the tissue down the toilet.

It was raining.  Heavily.  Big droplets like icy needles being plunged into skin that wasn’t ready for them.  God was a mean acupuncturist.  So I gritted my teeth and pulled up my collar.  A sheet of purple slate had enshrouded the world and the sun shone vaguely through it.  As I walked, the puddles merged into great, unavoidable lakes and I became more aware of the hole in the sole of my shoe with every step.  I imagined it getting bigger and bigger, exposing my frail sock to the elements.  My foot felt wet.  Traffic hissed by me, filling the air with biting moisture.

The bus was full of the same dour faces, of every day wishing their lives away working day by working day.  I occupied one of the dirty, unnecessarily psychedelic seats and tried to give off an antisocial air while staring out of the window at the grey, splashing world.  Nobody took the place next to me until there was no other option.  My neighbour became a gangly youth who had poured himself into an ill fitting suit for what was probably his first office job.  He was unfortunate looking, his mouth agog, his sable hair shaved and fluffy.  From his turkey neck protruded an Adam’s apple that looked painful and gulped helplessly as I stared at him, putting him into words.  The stigmatism of his nervous gaze never wavered from whatever was dead ahead.

*

Around the back of King’s Cross Station are a series of large, unremarkable buildings, one of which is the prosthetics factory I call work.  Steam ballooned out of a drain grate like picture house New York.  A door buzzed and I was in.

The factory I work in is a loud confusion, the colour of dirty metal and imitation skin, the smell of industrial grease and tanning leather.  The people who work there are stupid, unambitious and miserable.  Like me.  Joking.  I speak to nobody unless it is necessary.  Most people don’t waste their time embarking on relationships there.  It is enough to work there, to switch off, to get the job done and leave it all behind at the end of the day.  Only, I don’t leave it all behind.

At 4.30, I ambled past the uninterested security desk, my hold all by my side, and clocked out.  The sky was only marginally darker than it had been in the morning.  It had stopped raining but great puddles remained strained across the ground.  The smell of static sat heavy in the oppressive air and infuriated the looming clouds.  There would be a storm.

The bus weaved a random course through a tangle of traffic.  By the time it had negotiated its path to Edgware Road the sky was a black that cloaked the world and hid so much from view.  My first step off the bus was greeted by a long flash of lightning, a momentary pause, then an explosive roar of thunder that sounded like London crashing to the ground under the weight of the falling sky.  The rain began again: big, slow, sparse droplets, that fell with increasing regularity and hurried me on my way.

*

The Beirut Express is a restaurant.  It is always busy.  Its vibrancy and luminescence hum into the night like laughter at a funeral: out of place in this area, but welcome all the same.  People wait in the wings for a seat and passers-by dart fleeting glances in through the window and want to be inside.  The flats next door to The Beirut Express are its reverse.  A hooded figure drifted out of the building as I approached.  I breezed past him, through the open door into the ramshackle lobby.  The figure turned and grunted at me before he swaggered into the night rain.  The heavy door slammed shut and I made my way up the creaking, groaning stairs.

The door to flat 4 had been replaced many times, having been kicked in by police, thugs, dealers, whoever.  The door itself had changed since I had seen it last.  It was a heavy blue fire door, probably from a school.  There was a framed hole just below head height, where a pane of safety glass would have been.  Instead, a piece of wood prevented anyone from looking into the flat.  I knocked: three loud, slow knocks.  I heard the muffled panic of an unprepared home.  The wood slid away from the window.  A single bloodshot eye stared out of the darkness.

“Devil.”

I looked down at the floor and then straight at the eye again.

“Are you going to let me in?”

“Devil.”

Spat the voice again.  I turned to walk away.  As I did so, the door creaked open and I turned back, smiling as I did so.  Linus stood in the doorway, steeped in aggression.  Crack had drained the Caribbean from his face so that he was a deep shade of jaundice.  He hissed at me as I walked in to the flat.  I ignored him.  He was not a threat.

*

Linus lived with Albert.  A couple of years ago, Albert bought some particularly brown smack from a relative he no longer trusts.  Only half an hour before he began cooking up, the pair had been all smiles and jokes before he ran home with the excitement of an adolescent boy with pornography.  He cooked up a large dose.  As his hungry vein twitched and swelled, he shuddered and breathed deeply, almost erotically, in anticipation of what he was about to do to himself.  With gentle pressure the jagged needle penetrated the soft skin of the aching vein.  Perhaps it was because his heartbeat was a galloping horse, or perhaps it was due to the potency of the poison he had just brought into himself, but Albert was gripped by the power of the drug before he could remove the needle from his arm.  Consciousness was replaced with insuppressable physical ecstasy.  Within minutes he began fitting violently, his pathetic body thrashing around the floor like a shark in the throes of a kill.  The needle thrust deeper into the frail arm until it had disappeared from view.  Then somehow, the plastic of the syringe began to enter the body as well.  As the limbs flailed, the syringe tore through the arm, rupturing veins and muscles, and the arm became more and more mangled.  Above his blue lipped foaming mouth his eyes were wide and glazed and his pupils, pleading pin pricks.  Then he lay still and began to breathe.

It was twenty hours before Linus returned home, enraged with the come down of a massive crack binge.  He found his friend lying almost dead on the living room floor, his tattered arm contorted beneath him.  In what he saw as a logical expression of his affection and concern for his only friend, Linus thrust his balled fist into Albert’s face.  His nose oozed thick dark blood and his eyelids opened to reveal unseeing eyes that had rolled far back in his head.  Linus grabbed him by the collar and, shaking him, began to shout:

“Wake up!  Wake up you fuck!”

Then he noticed Albert’s ravaged arm.  Linus slapped him across his ghostly face and shouted louder:

“You fuck!  I can smell almonds!  You hear?!  I can smell fucking almonds!  It will have to go.”

This last he said with cold authority.  He released Albert’s collar and his lolling head clunked to the floor.  In the kitchen drawer Linus found a breadknife and returned to Albert’s withered body.  Using a knife and a loose tile from the fireplace, he hacked and grinded imprecise surgery at the point just below where Albert’s shoulder became his arm.  I don’t know how that mess healed, but the severed arm went out with an old chicken carcass, newspaper and cigarette ash.

Linus kept Albert almost as a prisoner from then.  He was convinced that were he to go to a hospital, the authorities would become involved and would take away the lifestyle they so loved.  He wouldn’t allow him out of their flat.  At the vegetable distribution plant where Linus’s successful brother had given both of them menial but decently waged jobs, Linus protested of Albert’s long term illness.  Sensing his brother’s growing impatience with Albert, Linus sought me out, judging Black Market Prosthetics the solution to his dilemma.  He was just there one day, snivelling in the rain.  I don’t know how many of my colleagues had ignored him and dismissed his pleas, but the desperation that partners recurrent rejection possessed him like a consuming aura.  Detecting an opportunity for exploitation I accompanied Linus back to his desolate flat.  Upon inspection, Albert’s left arm was nothing more than a scabby stump.  I laughed when I saw him: this miserable, desperate, old, balding, one armed junky whose addiction was so resolute he had resorted to injecting his crotch.  But I saw my opportunity.  I stole a prosthetic arm from work and charged Albert a thousand pounds for it.  He winced as he handed over the cash.  

The arm itself was faulty.  I had seen to this by loosening a bolt and removing a crucial washer in the complicated wrist joint.  It was a couple of months before I was called upon again following an embarrassing incident at work that almost caused Albert to lose his job.  He called me himself to make his request.  His voice shook with emotion, full of the embarrassment and indignity of his predicament.  Then he began to cry, his tears taking over his words with erratic breathing and incomprehensible babbling.  I couldn’t help but laugh.  So I brought him a new arm, making sure that this time, the joint around his stump was a little too big.  He bore it with remarkable stoicism for, again, no more than a couple of months before I received another call.  And this is how the cycle continued: their desperation causing me to make defects in my own product causing their desperation and so on.  Tonight I bring Albert his ninth prosthetic arm.

“The last one was too big.  It was about six inches longer than my right arm.”

Said Albert with a snigger, trying to lighten the mood and raise an amicable reaction from me.

“It was all I could get” I muttered.  It was a lie.

“I’ve got a good mind not to pay you for this one” he said, sniggering again.  

I stopped fitting the new arm and stared into his shallow yellow eyes.  The smile left his drooping face and he looked down and nodded.  My mind laughed and I continued to fit the arm which had, incidentally, a small cube of broken glass under the material of the socket fitting into which Albert’s stump slotted.  After, say, a couple of months this would irritate so much that I would be receiving another call.

The index and middle fingers on Albert’s right hand were yellow, an indication of yet another vice.  They clutched the wad of cash as my own hand rose to meet it.  Then we were both holding it.  Albert wouldn’t let go.  I looked at Albert’s face; at his weary eyes where tears formed in gaping pink ducts.  I was suddenly reminded of summer holidays when my grandfather would give me money for sweets.  Albert continued his silent plea.  I snatched the money from his frail hand and turned towards the door.

“Devil” spat Linus one last time as he opened the door for me.

“Fuck off” I said and marched out of the flat, the door echoing an aggressive slam behind me.

*

Finding a body isn’t the shock I expected it to be.  I was on the flaking groaning stairs that led me up to my flat when I saw the protruding foot and immediately resigned myself to having happened upon a corpse.  I was not disturbed and intrigue had vanquished any murmurs of fear – murmurs I thought I should have had, but murmurs I, in reflection, did not for an instant feel.  The foot itself was connected to a trousered shin.  But that was all.  Before the shin had a chance to stretch into a knee, it dribbled into a shimmering pool of deep cherry blood.  A very clean cut, the leg had been severed without complication or hindrance, like the deft slice of a butcher’s cleaver through a bleeding raw ox tail.  It lay on the floor like a stick of rock, the bone and the marrow on full display.  I kicked the leg down the stairs I had just ascended, enjoying the comedy and complex irony of kicking such a dismembered limb down a flight of stairs.  I stepped over the rippling puddle rouge and opened the door to my flat. 

Crossing the threshold it occurred to me that somewhere, somebody was missing a significant portion of a leg.  If I could find this somebody, I stood to make money by finding them a false limb.  Unless of course, this was the kind of person who would visit a hospital for such an injury.  I hoped that it was a junky or a lunatic and that I could find whoever it was.  But as I shut the door behind me, it started to eat at me.  Why should I rely on anybody else to drum up business for me; why should I rely on anybody else to lop the stricken limbs off hapless heroin addicts?  I had stumbled upon a wealth of opportunity.  I would create my own clients for Black Market Prosthetics.  I smiled.  I would buy a machete.

A Christmas Story

This is life on the edge.  I take two identical Christmas cards from the sharp edged plastic packet and write them.  In one I write, To Maria.  The card itself deals with the pleasantries.  It says, Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! in swirly grey letters laden with serifs.  Every time I write a card, a pang of anxiety shoots through me at the sight of the exclamation mark and the sporadic capitalisation.  I should be used to it by now.  I’ve written cards to everyone on my team.  And then I write, from Adam.  Like I have in all the others.

In the second card I write, To Maria, I fucking hate you.  I hate working with you.  I wish I’d never known you.  I just fucking hate you.  If you could find it within yourself to die over the holidays, that would be the greatest Christmas present anyone could get me.  I never want to see you again.  Go fucking kill yourself, Adam.  I scribble all over the Christmas message.

Then, I take both cards in one hand and throw them over my shoulder.  They land, their spines sticking in the air like two little mountains.  I pick up the one nearest me and without reading it, put it straight into the envelope marked Maria and seal it in there.  I pick up the second card and hold it shut while I tear it to pieces over the bin, my face turned away in case I see anything that might ruin the surprise.  I make myself a cup of coffee.

Maria hates me.  She hates me in a way so obvious and objectionable that I hate her in return.  She hates me at work of all places, somewhere our lives and actions take on the boring, insignificant, inconsequential characteristics of administrative processes: I am a databank, I can interpret this information for you, I am every email I send, devoid of my character.  Work is a series of personality sapping processes.  Of all the places, of all the contexts in which to hate me, I find it unreasonable that she hates me in the place where I am least myself.  Not that she’d like me outside of work.

I understand.  I took her job.  Maria was there when I started.  She wasn’t lovely, but she wasn’t unpleasant.  In another life, she could be considered attractive, even if the sum of her willow thin frame plus her relentless eating habits equals extreme bulimia.  Suspected.  She got on with whatever the fuck it is that she does while I learned the ropes.  A year later and I’m promoted to her equal but she doesn’t flinch – that prozac smile etched on her pock marked face while she rocks hypnotically back and forth in her chair, mouth open just a touch, headphones in, one hand on the mouse, the other resting in her lap like it’s crippled, working so slowly, with such a lack of urgency that I want to slap her and scream in her face: What are you doing?  Don’t you realise how easy this all is?  If you just pulled your fucking weight around here everyone else’s jobs would be better.  How can you bear it, taking forever over your pathetic workload?  How can you not try?  But she has her job and I have mine.

And then our boss, our nice, stupid, inept boss dies, his eyes staring accusingly up at me from the bottom of the fourth floor stairwell, his head coming to rest on the faux marble floor as the shiny dark pool eeks out from under him.  When they find him, I am back at my desk and I am as shocked as anyone as the news spreads.  When the police come in for an informal one on one with each of us in a closed office, they seem satisfied that I was in a toilet on the first floor.  Yes I have witnesses.  No I cannot tell you who because I don’t know everyone in the building and I didn’t take note of the people I passed.  As far as I was concerned, it was just another visit to the toilet and not an alibi.  I don’t see them again.  It blows over.  Just another tragedy.  Just another misnomer.

So all of a sudden there’s this job available and I’m glad handing my dead boss’s boss and stepping up.  It’s not that I care.  It’s not that I’m driven.  It’s just that this could be fun.  We’re laughing, we’re getting things done that my dead boss wasn’t capable of, we’re informing each others’ opinions in hushed voices in his office with the door closed.  And Maria sits there rocking gently, looking round her like she’s lost in a storm.  Our once scant interaction has become nothing but a seething contempt from a few desks away.  For my part, I couldn’t give a fuck.

Of her interview, my dead boss’s boss tells me Maria was an embarrassment.  She failed to answer questions, she refused to answer others.  In the several impossibly long silences, Maria rocked back and forth as if she was alone in a cell, mouth agog, eyes ceilingward.  The word my dead boss’s boss uses is painful.  Another word he uses is excruciating.  I wear a Ted Baker suit and shirt and gamble with the absence of a tie.  A tie, I feel, would detract from the elegant and elaborately stitched detail of the shirt which I am certain will draw comment from the panel.  And indeed it does.  Despite almost zero preparation, my answers are thoughtful and considered, delivered articulately with subtle emphasis placed on eye contact and appropriate hand gestures aimed at all members of the panel who nod and write each time I finish speaking.  When I deliver a point that my dead boss’s boss has primed me on, he nods emphatically, looking side to side at the other panel members, encouraging their nods to become all the more animated.

My dead boss’s boss delivers the good news.  And now he is no longer my dead boss’s boss.  He is my boss.  And I am Maria’s boss.  Maria asks him what qualifies me to get the job over her.  My boss says he’s not going to talk about any other candidates with her.  I would have screamed, PEOPLE SKILLS BITCH.  Plus an eye for an opportunity. 

And now it is nearly Christmas, I am several months into the job and I do not want Maria around any more.  It’s a difficult job.  Lots to learn, lots to try and change.  Lots of meetings where nothing is decided apart from the date of the next meeting.  Maria communicates mostly through tightly worded emails.  Face to face conversation is limited to exchanges in which she questions my every decision, declines my every request, picks me up on every error, the whole time looking me like every word I say is inappropriate for the workplace.  I feel small and inept.  She hides her workload so no one quite knows what she does and refuses to let me know what she’s working on.  She blanks me in the corridor.  She does it in front of other people and I am tired.

There is blood on the tissue.  There always is these days and I am convinced I’m dying.  I blot another Japanese flag onto a sheet and look down between my legs into the bowl.  It looks like a scene from Jaws.  I drop the tissue in.  I pad my fingers around my puckered arsehole and in my mind I am picturing the Tudor Rose.  My finger slides in the slick of blood when it reaches the cut.  I dab again and hold the tissue there.  When I drop the tissue and feel again, the blood is still coming.  I ignore the literature that has told me a painful bowel movement and vibrant red blood are indicators of anal fissures and slash or haemorrhoids.  I ignore the fact that both of my parents have been openly beset by haemorrhoids their entire adult lives.  I ignore the friends who’ve said Yeah, me too.  I ignore the fact that I can feel exactly where this blood is coming from and the fact that no, it is not a cancerous growth.  Instead I allow myself to become terrified and desperate.  I am dying.  I don’t have to take any shit from anyone.  And I won’t have to live with the consequences of my actions for very long.

The day of the office Christmas party, no one does any work.  Later this afternoon, colleagues will begin to drink themselves blind in honour of the birth of Christ or the Winter Solstice or Father Christmas or whatever people choose to believe.  This year, again, the head of IT will be escorted from the premises after drinking too much and proceeding to grope everyone and anyone he comes into contact with.  When the building closes tonight, it won’t reopen again until the new year.  Outside it is snowing but it doesn’t settle.  Snow never settles in Central London.

I hand out my cards.  A rush of nerves surges through me as I hand Maria her card.  She says a hushed thank you and looks as though she is preparing to snigger as she takes it.  The snigger never emerges but incrementally, this is one down from her rolling her eyes at me.

I am rooted to the spot.  I can’t help but watch her open it.  I am standing over her and yes, this must seem weird to her and look weird to anyone else but I can not go anywhere.  There is a heartbeat in my head.  My eyes feel like they are opening wider and wider.  They are stinging but I can not blink.    I am breathing heavily, my chest heaving, and I hold my breath for a moment to calm it down because this should not look like arousal.

I didn’t come here with a plan.  I am relying on the hope that I will know what to do if Maria opens the right slash wrong (delete as appropriate) card.  If she picks the card professing my hatred, I will be forced to react.  I’m dying and I’m taking her with me.  If she opens the other card, nothing needs to happen and I’ll see how that makes me feel.  The decision is out of my hands.  I grip the heavy duty hole punch on the desk in front of me.  I see myself smashing it into Maria’s temple, shattering her eye socket and whatever else is in there.  After that, I don’t know.  I’ll see what happens.  One step at a time.

Her frail hands fumble with the envelope like its heavy and she opens it like the effort is exhausting her, like she’s tearing sheet metal.  I want to rip the card out of her hands and open it myself, just to satisfy my raging curiosity.  But instead I close my eyes and count slowly, fingering the hole punch.

Thank you says Maria.

I open my eyes.

Her mouth stretches in an elastic band smile that snaps back to its shapeless lipstick mess when the moment passes and she stands the card with the others on her desk.

That’s okay I say and I’m trying to understand if the feeling that’s settled in me is relief or disappointment.  Either way, I stay standing a minute longer, just holding the arm of the hole punch, thinking about what might have been.

At the Christmas party, we hang around the darkened conference room in little huddles, catching up with colleagues we like but never see, force mingling with others, joking awkwardly with superiors and the ones we don’t understand and do our best to ignore the ones we hate.  For some reason, wherever I stand, I can see Maria and over the course of an hour or so, I catch her eye three or four times.  I start to wonder if this is down to a decision I’ve made on some subconscious level.

The music is being played through speakers that aren’t powerful enough to handle it so we’re blasted with the treble of a treasure trove of Christmas standards at full volume.  But I seem to be the only one who notices and while people chatter happily and lean into each other so they can be heard, I am developing a headache.  So far I have avoided the hot cider, mulled wine and assorted warm bottled beers that are being distributed by catering staff who refuse to make eye contact with anyone.  In my experience, alcohol is best  avoided when consorting with colleagues.  So it can’t be to blame for the pulse behind my eyes.  It must be the music.  As the shrill, scratchy sound of Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree tears into my skull, I make my excuses.  On the other side of the room, I see Maria doing the same thing.

I follow her.  This is not something I’ve done before but I think I make a pretty good job of it, striking the correct balance between maintaining an inconspicuous distance and staying close enough not to lose her.  It helps of course that she moves so slowly – like every step is a work of art – and is so self absorbed that she never looks around.

I follow her off the tube and out of the station.  So this is Highgate.  I’ve never been here before.  Up here, the snow has settled and as Maria leaves the main road and walks up the slight incline of a residential street, I’m charmed and impressed by our surroundings: the bare, snow laden trees; the tall, homely looking houses with decorations in the windows; the peace of the place uncommon to London.

Ahead, I watch Maria, her progress even slower in the snow.  There’s nobody else around.  This is it.  This is what I fucking want.  I am going to grab that bitch and punch her to the ground.  I am going to punch her in the face until her lips are mashed and I can see broken teeth and gums marbled with blood; until her mouth is so full of blood that she can’t make a fucking sound.  Then I am going to snap those stick thin wrists of hers and wrestle her arms from their sockets.  I am going to rip her apart, wrench the hair from her head, kick her in the face until her features invert and her neck snaps backwards ending it all.  I’ll take her purse so that the police think it’s a robbery gone horribly wrong.  Only I won’t throw it away and get caught by my fingerprints or whatever.  I’ll keep it.  I’ll keep it as a fucking trophy in my home forever and whenever I want to remind myself of my great credentials as a problem solver, I’ll take our her driving licence or any other photos in there and chuckle to myself.

I’m picking up speed.  My heart is racing.  This, now this is life on the edge.  I feel so alive.  Rush after rush of adrenaline and I am ecstatic.  Fuck the blood on the tissue.  If I was dying, I could never feel this alive.  I am fine.  I am alive.

I pull my scarf up over my nose and mouth.  I am nearing her and she must sense something, hear my footsteps or my breathing because she starts to look around like a little bird, not quite able to bring herself to stop and look at me.  She quickens her step and just as I reach out to grab her, she changes direction sharply and steps into the road between two parked cars and starts to cross.  She catches me off guard and my momentum carries me past her along the pavement.

Perhaps it’s because she’s too concerned with what’s behind her but she doesn’t seem to see the headlights or hear the car as it comes flying round the corner.  It hits her just before she reaches the opposite kerb and I see her feet leave the floor as she flies backwards and comes to rest in the twisted shape of a squashed mosquito on the snowy road.

The car spins so it is side on in the road and comes to a stop.  The driver and passenger doors open and the driver, a young man, runs towards Maria and kneels beside her, his hands at the ready to do whatever.  Except he doesn’t know what to do.

Hello?  Hello? he says.  Miss?

The street lights glint off Maria’s open eyes but she isn’t moving.  She’s just lying there, her body impossibly contorted.

The passenger, a blonde woman in a woolly hat, stands behind her open door like it’s a shield.

Oh god.  Is she breathing? she asks and holds a gloved hand to her throat.

The driver puts his head close to Maria’s, wincing as he does it.

Is she breathing? the passenger asks again.

I don’t know! shouts the driver.  I don’t know!  Call an ambulance.

Check her pulse.

Call an ambulance!

The passenger reaches into the cat and takes out a phone.

Check her pulse she says again.

The man takes off his gloves.  Maria hasn’t blinked and I’m guessing Maria doesn’t have a pulse any more.  This is exam results or medical test results or last minute of the cup final or whatever it is that matters.  The driver winces and gags as he moves a tentative hand into Maria’s neck, probing, searching for any indication of life continuing.  He looks up and sees me watching.

I can’t find one he says and waits for a reaction.  I shrug.  I just lost control he says.  The snow.

He stands up.

I can hear the passenger still on the phone to the ambulance people.

Can you feel a pulse? she calls to the driver.  He shakes his head.  Can you feel a pulse? she asks again, more firmly.

No! he shouts.

Okay okay she says and listens to the phone.  Is there any sign of breathing?

No he whimpers. 

In the sick yellow of the street lights I see movement in the glaze of his eyes.

The passenger passes the message down the phone and hangs up.

They’ll be here as soon as they can she says.

She walks over and looks down at Maria and shivers from something other than the cold.  Then she starts to cry and driver and passenger embrace, visibly shuddering with sobs while on the floor beneath them, the eyes of the lifeless Maria stare out at me.  I give her a wink and walk on.  I don’t want to be here when the ambulance arrives.

The stars flutter behind a thin veil of cloud.  What a beautiful evening.  What a gift – Christmas and birthday combined.

Blind Guy

A guy called Raymond started at my work. He was from South Africa and he was blind. He was tall, with black hair, grey at the temples. There was always a patch of his face that was unshaven but other than that he was always immaculately turned out, always smart, always sporting a shirt and tie.

I would watch Raymond at his desk with his headphones on so his computer could talk to him. I couldn't tell what he was doing; his computer screen looked different to mine. A few times a day he would make phone calls, always laughing, always managing to charm whoever was on the line, always getting what he wanted and saying thank you a million times for it.

When we spoke, I would stare hard at his deep-set eyes, wondering what it was about them that had failed him. They would dart all round the room like he was taking everything in. It made me wonder if he wasn't really blind at all and that it was just a ploy for sympathy and attention from the ladies.

He was a good-looking guy. The ladies loved him and he loved them. They doted on him and would say his name over and over again when talking to him, just in case he thought they were talking to someone else. There was always a lady or two on hand to help him walk anywhere.

"Jeez mite," he said in his thick South African accent, "usn't ut grite working wuth all these beautiful ladies?"

That convinced me he really was blind.

"You should see them," I thought, but I just said, "Yes."

Within a couple of weeks, Raymond had revolutionised the finance department. My boss, who seemed to think she was my friend, came in raving to me about how this was the most efficient the department had ever been. Even the college manager had praised her for the smooth running of financial procedures. All I knew was that my workload had become smaller and I was glad about that.

There were two urinals and I was standing at one of them, waiting for something to happen. I have trouble sometimes. Raymond came clattering through the door, white stick in hand.

"Hi Raymond," I said, just to let him know I was there.

"Hi Dan mate," he replied. Then he said some shit about the ladies.

I'm not one of those guys in toilets who sneaks a glance when you're at the urinal, sizing up the competition. But something made me look down at Raymond's. And since he was blind I figured it didn't matter. I think it was the distinct red tint of what was splashing against the clean white porcelain that made me do it. I stood watching, staring. Raymond appeared to be pissing blood.

I lost myself in that for a minute before I realised my own piss was squirting out at an angle and had gone all over my trousers.

"Shit."

"You alright?" asked Raymond.

"Yeah. Just pissed on myself."

"You wanna watch that," he smirked.

"Yeah."

He finished, washed up and clattered out of there.

I finished up and washed my hands. I splashed a load of water on my trousers where I had wet myself. I don't know what for. I guess I was going to make up some story about the taps coming on too fast and splashing me. It was better than saying I'd pissed myself. But no one noticed anyway.

Later that week, I was having lunch with Will from marketing and I told him I'd seen Raymond pissing blood. He chewed like a cow and looked at me. Then he put down his fork, opened his mouth and roared with laughter. I could see the rough pâté of his half-chewed food clumped behind his bottom teeth. When he composed himself he finished chewing and swallowed. Then he went back to his food.

"Well should I say something or not?" I asked.

He smirked at me.

"How do you tell someone you work with that they're pissing blood?" he asked rhetorically, patting his fork against his closed lips. "You don't," he said and went back to his food.

"But he's blind! I might be the only person who ever sees his piss!"

"Would you tell him if he wasn't blind?" Will pointed his fork at me.

"No. If he wasn't blind he'd be able to see his own piss."

This was news to Will and he mused on it for a second.

"Oh yeah. But you can't tell him." He returned to his food.

"Why not?"

"It's not a question of why not, it's a question of how would you."

That made sense to me. I had no idea how to tell him. And that was the problem. I decided to forget about it.

"Of course," said Will without looking up from his plate, "he could be dying and you're the only person who can save him."

He looked up and smiled.

I decided to ignore that and tucked into my own food.

As usual when I don't know how to handle something, I tried to forget about it and hoped it would sort itself out. I never stood next to Raymond at the urinals again, but I would often go in there and see them spattered with brown red residue.

A couple of months went by and Raymond came to the end of his contract. A collection went round along with a big leaving card that everybody was signing. My boss brought it to me and hovered while I thought of something to write.

And then it struck me. I had a plan.

"Do you mind leaving it with me?" I asked her. "I have trouble thinking of things to write in these cards."

I smiled up at her.

"That's fine," she said and started to walk away. "Just leave it on my desk when you're done."

To Raymond, I wrote, Been great working with you. Thanks for everything you've done. All the best for the future, Dan.

In a different colour pen, in discrete block capitals that looked nothing like my real handwriting, my shaking hand wrote: RAYMOND, YOU ARE PISSING BLOOD. YOU NEED TO SEE A DOCTOR.

My face felt hot and my scalp itched. I looked around and with my hands still shaking, closed the card and slipped it into its envelope. I put five pounds into the collection envelope and felt generous. Then, making sure I walked like someone with a clear conscience, I went to my boss' office. She wasn't there. I put both envelopes on her desk and walked out, still doing my best to convey innocence.

At the end of the week we had Raymond's leaving do. It was one of those drab occasions where everyone piled into our office to drink tiny amounts of warm, tart white wine from plastic cups, and one of those occasions when I realise I'd rather be trapped at the bottom of an empty well at night than exchanging pleasantries with my colleagues.

My boss gave an awkward, uninspiring speech, thanking Raymond for everything he had done over the last few months and wishing him well with whatever he was moving on to. Then she handed a gift to him. It was wrapped and I wondered why.

"Heeeey! A bottle! Is it wine?" asked Raymond.

"Yes it's Merlot," said my boss. Around the room a couple of other people said Merlot too because they wanted to be the ones to answer him.

"Great. My favourite," he said and shone a smile round the room like a lighthouse.

He also got a new set of headphones and a couple of talking books. He seemed pleased. He was genuine and gracious and, for the first time, I was worried that he might really be ill and that my inaction might have hurt him.

"Aaaand," said my boss like a game show host, "we also got you this card that everybody signed. I'll read you some of the messages people have written, okay?"

"Yes, please, go ahead," said Raymond.

"Okay, there's one here that says, 'Dear Raymond, thanks for always being lovely and kind. You will be missed. Love Sheila in HR.'"

Sheila blushed and everyone went "Aww."

"Thanks Sheila," said Raymond. "I'll miss you too."

Everyone laughed.

"And there's one here that says, 'Raymond, you have been a shining light for us all. The very best of luck in everything that you do. Much love.' And that's from Linda in the press office."

"Thanks Linda," said Raymond.

He stood with his back to the wall, holding his white stick in front of him with both hands. He looked timid and smaller than usual, like he was dwarfed by all the people who were there for him. I don't know if I wanted my boss to find my secret message right there and then but the choice wasn't mine.

"And there's one here that says 'Raymond, you are pis…'"

Her lipstick smile, contorted into a lopsided smear.

"Right… well. Let's raise our glasses," her voice shook and squeaked suddenly, "to Raymond."

"To Raymond," everyone repeated like a congregation and drank from their plastic glasses.

Raymond gave a speech in which he thanked everyone for making him feel welcome. He gave special thanks to everyone in his department and named me. People looked at me when he did. He said the college was a great place to work and wished us all well for the future.

Throughout the speech my boss played with her hands, looked at her shoes and bit her lips. She smiled when she was required to and clapped when Raymond finished. As the murmur of many conversations started up again, my boss took Raymond by the arm, led him into her office and shut the door.

I said quiet goodbyes to the people around me and left. I hope my boss managed to pass on my message. She never mentioned it. I never saw Raymond again. I hope he wasn't really sick.

*

This story was published on The Guardian's website as a runner up entry in their 2009 Summer Short Story competition.  It's true.  Click this link if you want proof.  It's a while ago now so I should probably stop going on about it.