"Eeee," sighed Brenda, "put the kettle on, Kevin, there's a good lad. We're due a cuppa."
They were long overdue, Kevin thought as he got up from his desk and went over to the kettle. Twenty minutes was a long time between cups of tea in the Happy House office.
"And put the gramophone on again while you're up, there's a dear. We'll have the other side this time."
The record player was exceptionally antique. Kevin had no objection to the word gramophone being applied to it. He obligingly reversed the record and put the needle on. The sound of The Ink Spots singing 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love' filled the room.
Brenda sighed contentedly and Kevin sat back down and added another paper-clip to his sculpture.
"That's nice, love," said Brenda looking over approvingly. "What is it?"
"A windmill."
"You've got a flair for that. You should sell them to people."
"Is there any work I should be doing?"
"Have you done that adding-up I gave you?"
"Yes."
"Already? Eeee, what do they teach you at schools these days?" she said admiringly. It had been less than three hours ago that Kevin had been given a column of ten two-digit numbers to add up. "Have you checked it?"
"Twice."
"Eeee, you're wasted here, you, love. You should be doing that Carol Vorberman's job. Eeee. You might sharpen some more pencils if you've nothing to do."
"There's a box of a hundred already sharpened."
"Well do a few more. You can never have too many sharp pencils in an office. Eeee, no, I'll tell you what, love. You can help me with the C52 forms if you like. Now where are the blessed things? Honestly, you can't find anything. He wants to get someone in to tidy this place up. Can you see the C52s anywhere?"
"They're under the cat."
"Oh yes. Come on puss. Actually there's no point starting on them now. A Country Practice is on in ten minutes and then it's only twenty minutes until the film starts. They'll keep till tomorrow, I don't fancy the film tomorrow. Eeee. Have you seen me puzzle book anywhere?"
"It's under the nether-spindle."
"Oh yes. Whoops. Now look what's happened. Why do they have to make them so fragile? Eeee. What a thing to happen. Some days it's not worth getting out of bed, it really isn't. Life is just one damn thing after another, as me father used to say. I'd better hide the pieces in case His Nibs finds out. Here, put them under the complaints files, he never looks in there. I'll put the cat on top of them just to be sure. Eeee. Now then."
Brenda worked happily at her puzzles while Kevin equally happily sharpened pencils.
"He wants to get you one of those automatic pencil-sharpeners," Brenda murmured presently. "You'll be getting that repetitive injury strain if you're not careful. Eeee," she sighed as she hauled herself upright, "ehh, me feet are plaguing me. I'm call going to a new chiropodist at the weekend, I don't think as this one knows his business. Here, love," she said as she shuffled past Kevin's desk, dumping her ring-a-word puzzle book in front of him, "use your brains, find the backwards diagonal ones for me. I don't know why they put them in, it doesn't seem proper to me. I'll make the tea for us. Now where's the blessed spoon gone?"
"It's in the radial-arm sprocket."
"Oh yes...Eeee," she sighed as the phone rang. "If it's not one thing it's another." She shuffled over and picked up the phone. "Wrong number," she said before the other person could say anything. She replaced the receiver and then took the phone off the hook. "What kind of person rings up when A Country Practice is coming on?" She shook her head at the depravity of the world.
Brenda made the tea then turned the Ink Spots off and turned the television on. They watched A Country Practice and then discussed it for a while. Then Brenda turned the Ink Spots on again, collected the cups and refilled the kettle.
"After the film I'll nip down and buy us some remaindered cakes," she said. "Then it'll nearly be home time. Eeee, are you warm enough, you, love? I think we need some more heat in here."
Sighing and shuffling, Brenda heaped some more coals on the coal fire and attacked it with a poker. Then she tore a strip off one of the C52s, lit the end from the fire, and used it to light the gas heater. On her way back to her desk she turned another bar on on the electric radiator.
"That's better," she sighed.
Just then the door at the end of the office opened and Paul Stockton, the manager, ventured out of his inner sanctum. Kevin had expected this for some time. Shortly before he had heard the door handle rattle and seen a shadow lurking behind the frosted glass panel, but Stockton knew better than to disturb them when A Country Practice was on. Stockton was a small, permanently worried-looking man. He came over to Kevin and extended his tongue.
"Can you see any spots?" he asked anxiously.
"No."
"Take my pulse, would you?"
Kevin took his pulse. "Seems normal to me."
Stockton shook his head. "I'm not well. I'm not well at all." He peered vaguely around the office. "Is everything...er...ticking over, Brenda?"
"We're just starting on the C52s."
"Good. Good. Has that nether-spindle arrived yet?"
"No sign of it."
"Hmm. Well, give it another couple of weeks and then send the warehouse another letter. Quite a strong one this time. No, on second thoughts, just make it politely enquiring. No sense in getting their backs up."
"Is there anything I should be getting on with?" Kevin asked.
Mr. Stockton frowned. "Have you finsihed that adding-up Brenda gave you?"
"Yes."
"Already?" At times Mr. Stockton seemed appalled by Kevin's efficiency. "Well you'd better sharpen some more pencils then." Mr. Stockton paced around the room aimlessly, staring in vague dismay at the mounds of neglected paperwork covering the two desks and most other exposed surfaces and overflowing onto the floor and crammed inside several large cardboard boxes shoved against the far wall. "I was thinking of buying another filing cabinet the other day," he said. "That might help us get rid of some of the, ah, clutter. In the meantime, I'll get hold of another couple of cardboard boxes." He nodded decisively to himself.
"Perhaps we should just burn some of it?" suggested Brenda hopefully. Brenda already burned much of it while lighting the fire every day.
"We probably could," said Mr. Stockton. "But that would probably mean we would have to go through it first to see if there was anything important." He frowned again and sucked his cheeks in. "I suppose I should really - no, it'll keep. I'm not well enough today." He spun on his heel and went back to his office. "I'm going to have a lie down," he said. "In fact I might have a sleep with any luck. If anyone wants me on the phone, take a message. No, better still, tell them to write a letter."
He closed the door.
"He doesn't feel well," Brenda muttered scornfully. "He's fit as a fiddle. What does he ever do not to be well? I'm the one who shouldn't be well."
"You don't look well," said Kevin. "You should take it easy."
"Thankyou, love. I'm glad as someone's noticed. I have been a bit run down actually. Now you mention it, you don't look well yourself. You're overworking yourself. You should take it easy too."
"Actually I have been feeling a bit peaky," said Kevin.
"You're run down, love. We both work too hard. Don't do anything for the rest of the day. Get your head down on your desk and try and have a nap. It'll do you a power of good. Eeee. I might have one meself if the film's no good."
The Inkspots sang 'Up A Lazy River.'
As it turned out Brenda didn't find the film any good and she was asleep at her desk almost before the titles had finished. Kevin only held out a short while longer, idleness and the heat of the three fires making him drowsy. He folded his arms on his desk and rested his head on them. Soon all three occupants of the office were snoring peacefully.
Kevin was awakened a while later by one of the shambling creatures who worked downstairs in the garage maintaining the engineers' vans. He came and stood in the doorway and coughed apologetically until Kevin stirred, then made a forelock-tugging gesture and said something long and complicated which Kevin didn't catch a word of because he had a terrible speech impediment. Kevin thought that the man had either said that one of the vans needed a new part or that the building was on fire but he wasn't sure which. Whatever it was, the man looked terribly anxious and unhappy about something. Kevin nodded solemnly and thought for a moment.
"Take the rest of the day off," he told the man with the speech impediment generously. This was what Mr. Stockton usually told him when he was forced to deal with him.
The man looked mildly surprised, touched his forelock and left.
Kevin smiled to himself and got his head down again. "Eeee," he sighed.
It was a typical day at the offices of the Happy House Dishwasher Service Corporation.
As Kevin had long suspected, Happy House was a haven for gimps and rejects, fuck-offs and misfits of all categories. Only a small fraction of the Happy House workforce were ex-jailbirds, he had discovered in the course of stowing some personnel files in a cardboard box his first week there. Many more had spent time in psychiatric hospitals or similar institutions. Mr. Stockton himself, for example, had been recruited directly from what seemed to be a sort of rest home for the congenitally anxious. Others had chronic learning disabilities or suffered from narcolepsy or ME or similar debilitating illnesses. A tiny minority had nothing physically or mentally wrong with them but were just wrong for the job, like the two Eastern Europeans who had recently been hired as engineers, neither of whom spoke a word of English or had ever mended anything more complicated than an ox-yoke before. An exception to all of this was Mr. Roberts the shitkicking engineer, who had told Kevin that God had come to him in a vision and told him dishwashers were to be his life's work.
Brenda's file had been almost entirely eaten by rats at some point prior to Kevin's being hired, which was a shame as he would have liked to have known something about her previous employment history, or alternatively where she had escaped from and how she had found the energy to do so, and whether her official typing speed was one letter per minute or two. She was less a hunt and peck typist than a hunt, sigh, get up and put the kettle on, hunt again and peck typist. "Where's the blessed w gone?" she would mutter plaintively. "Who designed these things, I'd like to know. Why can't they be in alphabetical order instead of all jumbled up so you can't find anything?" The typewriter was a huge pre-war manual job and was, anyway, generally only used for Brenda to write letters to TV companies complaining about changes in the casts of her favourite programmes, her cretinous handwriting being considered good enough for most business communications.
In appearance Brenda was plump and motherly and in attitude resolutely cheerful in the face of the terrible burdens she had to bear, namely her servitude to a slavedriver like Mr. Stockton and her martyrdom to her feet. Brenda's feet were her main interest in life and a rich source of conversation between her and Kevin. Their various ailments had consistently baffled the succession of podiatrists she spent most of her free time consulting. "He said he'd never seen a fungus like that before," she announced proudly one day. "He said it might have to be named after me." Apparently Brenda's feet had been the envy of her neighbourhood in the bright springtime of her life back in the late 1950s, but, tragically, she had not taken care of them. "Never neglect your feet, love," she warned Kevin sternly. "You'll pay for it later." Kevin felt there was much he could learn from Brenda.
Her first act of the day after huffing and puffing up the stairs each morning was always to exchange her comfortable furry zip-up boots for an even more comfortable pair of furry slippers. Her second act was to take her puzzle book and her fat orange cat out of her voluminous raffia bag. The cat would be placed on top of the nearest pile of paperwork and remain there all day, unmoving save to lap apathetically at the occasional saucer of milk, unless Brenda or Kevin moved it onto another pile of paper. (The cat was quite invaluable as a paperweight and Kevin had been considering nominating it for the employee of the month award which Mr. Roberts usually won. However, he supposed that the cat would have little use for the prize that went with the award, a small metal comb in a plastic sheath emblazoned with the company logo of a smiling house, even less use than Mr. Roberts, who was bald.) Brenda's third action was to put the Ink Spots on and her fourth was to make a cup of tea. Then she would nip down to the baker's next door to buy some cakes. Then she would make another cup of tea. As starting time in the morning was whatever time after ten o'clock they could make it in, by this point it was generally felt that it was so close to lunchtime there was no point in starting on any work.
After lunch there would be another cup of tea or so and then A Country Practice. Afterwards, if there was no film on that Brenda fancied, they would make appointments for the engineers to visit customers or make up excuses as to why they could not do so. Kevin would file the many complaints letters and even more numerous sicknotes from the engineers into a cardboard box or an overflowing tray, and Brenda, with a sigh of, "Eeee, no rest for the wicked," might work through a few of the C52 forms requisitioning parts. Then they generally took a nap. Then there was the remaindered cakes and more tea, and then it was nearly home time.
The main challenge of Kevin's working day at Happy House was filling up his time. Things which could even loosely be counted as work generally took up no more than half an hour or so. There were only so many naps you could take, cups of tea you could drink, and pencils you could sharpen in the course of one day, and the entertainment possibilities of paperclips were quickly exhausted. He tried bringing books in but it was difficult to concentrate to read while the Ink Spots were singing 'Up A Lazy River' or 'Shine On Harvest Moon' or Brenda was talking about her feet. Eventually he had a happy inspiration. He bought a big colouring-in book and a box of crayons. As a final touch he bought a smart leather briefcase to take them to work in.
One morning Kevin arrived to find Mr. Stockton in a fine fluster. He was pacing agitatedly around the office alternately flinging neglected paperwork about and sucking on the knuckle of his index finger making whimpering noises.
"Look at this pigsty!" he cried. "We've got to tidy it up! Oh, why did I ever think I could handle a high-pressure job like this?"
It turned out the big boss had called to say he was making a visit to look at the books.
For the next two hours Kevin and Brenda laboured frenziedly to make the office presentable. They burned much of the backlog of paperwork and shoved the rest down the back of the filing cabinet. Meanwhile Mr. Stockton sat in his inner sanctum frantically attempting to bring the accounts up to date, his piteous moans and whimpers occasionally audible through the door. The cat was put back in Brenda's bag for the duration and the cardboard boxes were transported down to the garage. When Kevin returned from this mission he reported that, as he and Brenda had forgotten to arrange any service visits for that day, all the engineers not on sick leave were hanging around downstairs wrestling each other, tormenting the mechanic with the speech impediment, and attempting to build a woman out of old dishwasher parts. In a panic Mr. Stockton despatched all eight of them, in separate vans, to attend on a customer who had reported a faulty soap dispenser. He gave them strict instructions to make the job last for the rest of the day. This was the only work he could find for them as Brenda had just burned the rest of the customer files.
There was no sign of the boss by the time Kevin went to get his lunch. On his return, however, he found a large Mercedes parked outside the garage doors. In the office Brenda was scribbling industriously at something and motioned for him to do the same. From behind Mr. Stockton's door was coming the sound of hearty booming laughter from someone other than Stockton.
The laughter went on for quite some time, periodically subsiding into quiet chuckles and then flaring up into gales of merriment again, punctuated now and then by anxious-sounding murmurs from Mr. Stockton. Finally it stopped and the door opened.
"Don't worry about it," said a voice that was desperately trying to keep itself from laughing again. "Everything's in order. Keep up the good work."
Mr. Stockton emerged, pale and sweating but trying to smile. The other man had his arm around him and was wiping tears from his eyes with his other hand. It was Mr. Big.
"Hello," said Mr. Big in surprise when he saw Kevin. "Who's this?"
"This is Kevin," said Mr. Stockton. "Brenda's new assistant. A very bright lad. Very conscientious."
Mr. Big clapped Kevin on the shoulder. "Walk me down to my car, Kevin."
Kevin walked downstairs with Mr. Big.
"Christ," Mr. Big sighed as soon as they were out the door, "I should open this place to the public as a freak show. I always come here when I need a chuckle. That poor bastard's book-keeping..." He started to laugh again.
"You own this place?" said Kevin.
Mr. Big nodded. "One of me legit fronts. Nice little money-funnel, this. You'd be surprised how much this place makes officially. Also some of me boys are officially employed here, not that that clown has a clue about it. But the visible source of income is the main thing. That and the fact that I'll go straight to heaven for giving those two retards somewhere to go during the day." Mr. Big studied Kevin thoughtfully as he unlocked his car. "And you, of course. You've done all right for yourself in the end, haven't you?"
"I suppose so," said Kevin.
"No suppose about it," said Mr. Big firmly. "You've found a comfortable little niche here. Stick to it."
Mr. Big got in his car and drove away.
Kevin went back upstairs to find Brenda doing her puzzles and Mr. Stockton having a well-earned lie down. The Ink Spots were singing 'Nice Work If You Can Get It.'
Yes, he thought, he had certainly found a comfortable little niche here.
One day when Kevin had been there several months Mr. Stockton came and smiled bashfully at him and complimented him on the neatness of his colouring-in. This was the usual prelude to a humble request by Stockton for Kevin to perform some simple task for him, such as changing a lightbulb in his office, finding the end of a roll of sellotape, or helping him with a tricky bit on one of the Airfix models he spent most of his time constructing when he wasn't lying down. This particular day, however, he needed a much bigger favour, and before coming out with it spent several minutes loitering by Kevin's desk commenting favourably on Kevin's choice of colours and the way he always managed to stay within the lines.
The thing was, due to an oversight more than half of Happy House's current roster of service engineers were on holiday at the moment, and the rest had either called in sick or simply gone missing. Stockton suspected it was due to a combination of the clement weather and the European football championships being on telly. Even Mr. Roberts was on a month's sabbatical, working on his long-awaited theological treatise Zen and The Art of Dishwasher Maintenance. Apart from the psychotic Thompson, there had been no Happy House operatives out in the field for almost a fortnight, and several of the customers had become extremely irate. Brenda had been subjected to a number of very impolite phone calls and had broken down crying twice. She had been making Stockton's tea subversively weak and had even threatened to quit. In such a dire extremity, could Kevin see his way clear to stepping into the breach and making a couple of token calls as a service engineer?
Kevin chewed on one of his crayons and thought for a moment.
"I don't know anything about dishwashers," he said.
"Oh, God, don't bother about that," said Stockton. "Just take a quick look and say you'll have to order a part."
Kevin thought some more.
"I haven't got a driving licence."
Stockton frowned vaguely and said he thought it was all right under the law to drive without a licence every now and again as long as you were going to put in for a test soon. He took Kevin for a practice spin in the town suburbs, declared him the safest driver ever to don Happy House overalls, gave him a van and unleashed him on an unsuspecting clientele.
Kevin's first day as an engineer was, to his mind, a rip-roaring success. From talking to the other engineers and personal observation back in the old days he knew all the tricks of the trade. The calmer and more gullible people he would bamboozle with spurious technical jargon. The key was to imply that he was doing them a favour in not fixing their machine that day, to suggest that any of the other cowboys on the job would be only too happy to apply the dishwasher equivalent of a splint and a band-aid but that two days later their house would fall down and their children would be stricken with palsy. "You'd only be storing up problems for later on," was a key phrase. He put himself over rather as a brilliant physician called in to attend to a supposed case of measles only to find a far more serious condition less practiced eyes would have missed, which he was regrettably unable to put right just then as he had left his scalpel at the office. Sometimes he would ask customers various esoteric questions they were unable to answer, such as what was the precise timbre of the clicking noises the timer made during a cycle, or the pressure per cubic centimetre of their water supply, and then explain that it would be foolish of him to attempt a diagnosis without that information. "What kind of electricity have you got in this house, love?" he asked one dizzy-looking old lady. "It might be the wrong kind for the machine."
With the angrier and less complacent customers the thing was to turn the tables and blame them for the machine's deteriorated condition, to shake your head and mutter, "Dear oh dear oh dear," as soon as the machine was opened and then turn and ask a barrage of suspicious questions about what they'd been doing with it in the manner of a social worker scenting child abuse, as though the machine showed signs of having recently been sodomized or attacked with a sledgehammer or used in the production of moonshine liquor at least. "Some people shouldn't be allowed to have dishwashers," Kevin found himself muttering at one point. This kind of thing tended to make all but the most belligerent customers act guilty and defensive after a while. Some of the more experienced engineers had told him they carried potatoes or small children's toys around with them for use in such situations, which they would pretend to pull out of dishwasher drainage pipes with a triumphant and accusing cry of, "Now that's not going to help matters, is it?" and Kevin had sometimes been able to improvise something along these lines.
In all he visited twelve houses that day and, without trying to fix a single machine, managed in every case to leave his customers feeling either grateful for his brilliance or abashed by their own stupidity and negligence or at the very least depressed by their inability to make him repair their dishwasher. He had a definite flair for this line of work.
From then on it became standard practice for Kevin to fill in as an engineer when they were short-handed.
One day when he was on a call-out to a remote country house a momentous event occurred. He was seduced by a very bored and lonely Swedish au pair girl. Something about Kevin's frenzied paroxysms of worship and gratitude seemed to move her and she told him he could come and see her again.
Kevin started to take his role as engineer more seriously. He obtained his driving licence, taught himself enough about dishwashers to enable him to keep the Swede's employers' machine out of action indefinitely, and informed Brenda and Mr. Stockton that from now on he would be handling all calls in that area personally.
One day a few weeks later he got a call-out to another nice house in the country. A middle-aged woman with an iron-grey perm opened the door to him and immediately began to subject him to a tirade of abuse.
"Three weeks I've been waiting for this, someone was supposed to come last week, I waited in all day, I've been waiting since Christmas for the dishrack to be fixed, I've had it up to here with you, you're the most useless shower of...Kevin?"
"Hello Mum," said Kevin.
Kevin's mother asked him what he'd been doing and he told her edited highlights. She asked him where he was living and he described in truthful detail the squalid bedsit he had in town. Then he told her he'd have to order a part for the dishwasher and left.
On his second visit she said:
"Your father and I have been talking. We feel we might have treated you harshly in throwing you out." The upshot was that she asked him if he'd like to move back in, paying rent this time.
So Kevin moved back into his bedroom.
It had been kept exactly the same as he had left it, his books and posters and favourite mug all untouched. Soon it was as if he had never been away, and his rooms at the camp and in Amsterdam and at Darren's and his prison cell and his bedsit were all quickly fading memories, a nightmare from which he had woken up.
He started calling in sick a lot on the days when he wasn't scheduled to visit the Swede and lay in bed all day and stayed up all night watching television.
He still couldn't smoke in the house and, even though he didn't smoke cannabis any more, he still could only do it when his mother wasn't around, because she didn't approve of its effects on his health.
He sometimes got drunk on his own and ended up staggering around the garden in the middle of the night clutching a gin bottle and making vows to himself about things he'd do the next day.
Really, it was just like old times.
And Forbes' answer came back:
-June 1996
[end]