6: LUNCH ON PALMER

  "Excuse pliz, Jack, I am having a question."
   "Carlos! You are my cocksucker, yes?"
  "Oh yes, Jack, I am your very good cocksucker."
  "This is Kevin. He's my cocksucker too."
  "Then if he is your cocksucker he is my cocksucker also. We are all cocksuckers together, yes? But now I am having a question for you, cocksucker Jack. What in English is called this, pliz?" Carlos held up a tomato sauce bottle, eyebrows knitted worriedly.
  "This in English is called tomato sauce."
  "To-ma-to soss." Carlos opened his order book and wrote this down. "And this pliz?"
  "This in English is called brown sauce."
  "Brown soss." Carlos nodded and scribbled. "And what in English is called this?" He held up a paper napkin.
  "This in English is called a fannypad."
  "Fa-nee-pad." Carlos conscientiously wrote this down. "Obrigado. You are my best cocksucker in the world, Jack."
  "De nada."
  "Ah! You learn too. I go now to serve shithead peoples." With a final smile, which he covered with a hand over his mouth, and a nod to Jack and Kevin, Carlos beetled off.
  Carlos was an exceedingly eager and obliging young Portuguese boy who had joined the Chuck Wagon strength the day before. He had been booked to start work at the beginning of the season but had been lost in the wilds of Wales for several weeks after having badly misunderstood some directions. His knowledge of English was extremely fragmentary and because of this Jack had adopted him as a sort of pet. Thanks to Jack he was already labouring under the droll misapprehension that 'cocksucker' was the English word for 'friend' and 'shithead' that for 'customer'. He was a good-looking kid but had appallingly bad, almost non-existent teeth, and every time he grinned or laughed, which was frequently, he clapped a hand over his mouth, rather sweetly, to hide this fact. "What a simpering coquette that boy is," said Forbes before he realized why he was doing it. "He'd have been the Big Daddy's bitch at my boarding school easily."
  "Yes, well," Forbes said after he realized, "have you ever seen the equipment in an Iberian dental surgery? Long piece of string tied to a doornob."
  It was Kevin's fourth full day at The Chuck Wagon. Besides Carlos and Jack and Forbes and Brian and himself there were five other full time members of the dining room staff. There was a hulking Welsh lad named Evans who had the sidling movements and sidelong glance of a habitual poacher. There was a tittering oriental man of indeterminate age named Wang, and a grinning leprechaun of an Irish boy named Seamus who had briefly confused Kevin with a story of having recently returned from Toyland where he had had some incredible toy weed. There was Jack's erstwhile shag Veronica, and a local girl from the village, a pretty little raven-haired china doll called Rose who blushed demurely and lowered her eyes whenever anyone spoke to her; Kevin had already fallen deeply in love with her. There was also a man of thirtyfive or so known as Big Richard (he was not especially large but had apparently once been half of a pair with a slightly smaller bosom companion of his known as Little Richard) who was variously prep chef in the kitchen and dining room waiter as demand required; whatever he did, he charged around madly in a manic whirl of energy, flinging down and snatching up plates, chopping vegetables as though his life depended on it, eyes popping with hyperthyroidal distension, like some overwound clockwork toy. He was forever harping back to the golden days of a few weeks ago when Little Richard and an elite band of battle-hardened comrades known as The A-Team had been at his side: "By Christ, we served meals quickly then."
  One shift in every few Kevin, along with one or more of the others, was required to work in the kitchen, mostly helping the dishwasher, a truly horrendous ordeal when things got busy. The chefs were a couple of Welshmen who were possibly twins or clones or hatched from the same pod. They both had dark complexions and narrow eyes and long drooping moustaches and in idle moments were forever balancing knives on the tips of their fingers or throwing them to stick in wooden boards and generally looked and behaved like a couple of off-duty Mexican bandits. Kevin's chalet-mate Rasputin also worked in the kitchen. He washed the pots and pans and cleaned the cookers and mopped the floor and took the bins out. When he wasn't doing this he seemed to spend most of his time gazing doe-eyed at Kevin. Kevin had even spotted him staring at him from the serving hatch once when he was out in the dining room. It was a worrying situation, especially since Rasputin was so big, seven feet tall if he was an inch. Once when Kevin had been set to the task of peeling and chopping up some vegetables, which he was proceeding to fuck up in his usual fine style, Rasputin had loomed up behind him and taken Kevin's hand in his own, the latter almost completely enclosing the former, and had for some minutes held it like that as he guided hand and knife to show him how the task should properly be done. His voice when he spoke, far from the sepulchral whisper he had heard the first night, had been almost narcotizingly mellow and hypnotic, reminding Kevin rather of the voice of the bearded American hippy who had presented Fingerbobs when he was a kid. His eyes, too, when Kevin had finally ventured to turn round and rather queasily smile his gratitude at him, had been hypnotic, like those of the original Rasputin or indeed Charles Manson, and Kevin had been unable to tear his gaze away as Rasputin smiled gently back and mumbled, "No problem." Kevin had suddenly wondered whether Rasputin was the man with the twelve-inch cock advertised in the toilet graffiti and whether a chair propped against his door could possibly keep him in his room at night when Kevin was in bed. Fortunately, the next day Kevin and Jack and Rasputin had been transferred to the new luxury staff chalets on the other side of the camp, which featured individual rooms with proper beds and wardrobes and sinks, and an individual shower and toilet between every four rooms. Rasputin was still domiciled only across the hall, however, and neither the bedroom nor the shower door locks looked sturdy enough to keep out something Rasputin's size if he really had his heart set on getting in.
  Also in the kitchen was an extremely skanky and emaciated old man named George. His function was uncertain. He seemed to have attained some sort of sinecure some years before and no-one, not even the resident bastard Desmond, had had the heart to turn him out to grass. He occasionally helped Rasputin lug the bins out and wash some of the bigger utensils and he occasionally made huge, foul-smelling vats of stock. He spent the rest of the time unerringly picking losers out of a racing paper or leering fixedly at the collection of yellowing topless pin-ups he had pasted in a lurid montage on the wall over one sink and added to regularly from the daily papers. He never ate any properly served food, either here or in the staff canteen, muttering enigmatically that he didn't trust the cooks ("Bah, bloodycowboys, they'venonotion, soonereatpigswill, I don't hold with it," he'd mumbled under his breath when Kevin sought an explanation for this phobia, shaking his head in disgust and glaring at the chefs with slitted-eyed hatred). Instead, he preferred to forage for his own food from the leavings of the kitchen, like some mansized urban rodent, subsisting almost entirely on a diet of left-over slops from the stock vats and, his favourite, the bread-and-butter pudding tray, which he would scrape out with his grimy and claw-like hands, greedily sucking his fingers clean with obscene slobbering noises an and even more obscene grin. "Look at him," said Forbes, repulsed, when he witnessed the spectacle. "He's pretending he's got Betty Grable's fanny batter on his hands."
  The dishwasher himself was a more presentable, in fact rather dapper, old man named Albert, who was possibly in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's but was at any rate the single most taciturn creature Kevin had ever encountered. The only words he would say to Kevin in the entire course of an at least three-hour shift would be, when things started to get busy, "Here comes the rush!" and then, somewhat later, "Looks like the rush is over." That was all. He responded to Kevin's every conversational gambit with the noise, "Um." To be fair, he sometimes also went "Um," when Kevin hadn't said anything at all, as if to keep the conversation going, or perhaps he was just reciting a private mantra with very long pauses. Kevin wasn't always a particularly loquacious person himself, and also knew that whenever he tried to talk and do manual work at the same time the work tended to suffer, so that ordinarily this wouldn't have bothered him. But he was nagged by an unaccountable sense that there was much wisdom Albert could teach him if he chose, even if it was only how to avoid being a dishwasher in a holiday camp when he was his age, and he was becoming obsessed with finding an opening that would engage Albert's interest. "Albert, my hair is on fire." "Um." "Albert, I have conceived a monstrous passion for you. I wish to take down your trousers, smear your cheeks with butter, and ram my throbbing cock into your gloriously yielding innards." "Um." Kevin had decided that if things kept on like that he was going to bring in a bottle of amyl nitrate and get Albert sniffing it; that way, he could at least say, "Here comes the rush!" several times an hour.
  Forbes, who had just been enjoying a monologue with Albert as part of his table-clearing duties, sauntered over to Kevin and Jack's slouch-station as Carlos departed.
  "I see you have again been educating our tame reffo in the joys of anglo-saxon," he said, nodding after the Portuguese. "A pity he only has you as a tutor, and so will only be able to dip a toe into the very shallowest sewage-strewn coastal waters of the rich ocean of the English language."
  "Well it's more than you're doing for him," said Jack.
  "Actually, this morning I endeavoured to teach him the meaning of two of my very favourite words, 'glaucous' and 'analeptical'. I believe he is positively straining at the leash to pounce on his first opportunity to use them in conversation."
  "Desmond has entered the building," said Kevin. "Look busy or he'll have us sweeping up or cleaning the ovens or something."
  "Look busy yourself," said Jack. "I'm polishing these sauce bottles, look. You're just standing there."
  "I'm looking busy with my eyes."
  "If he starts on me I'll fucking deck him. Docked us an hour again this morning for being five minutes late."
  "This Desmond does appear to be something of a martinet, doesn't he?" said Forbes. "That's 'cunt' to you, Jack. He has a positive hard-on for strict adherence to timetables and rotas and so forth. He's like something out of Zamyatin - I assume you're familiar with his work. Did you know he carries a pocket diary in which the scheduled dates of menstruation by the female staff are marked down?"
  Kevin did know. He had been sitting in the staff room the previous day when Desmond had burst in looking pleased with himself, waving his little black book at Mr. Palmer triumphantly.
  "That skiving bitch Veronica tried to tell me she had boilerhouse trouble again," he had crowed. "But I showed her in me book, she's not due for another one until Tuesday. I told her, her cycle's quicker than a fucking Hotpoint."
  Kevin had soon got a line on the management infrastructure at The Chuck Wagon: Desmond, while technically subordinate to Mr. Palmer, was, in terms of the Vietnam films he had watched at university, the brutal sergeant who actually ran things, as compared to Palmer's ineffectual college-educated lieutenant. Desmond, in fact, was the personification of all evil. Kevin had quickly been relieved to discover that Desmond showed no signs of intending to hold that unfortunate set-to the first day against him and Jack: Desmond hated everyone. Again in terms of Vietnam war films, many of the staff, most notably Jack, spent much of their time plotting to frag Desmond.
  When Jack suddenly moved off now and started to wipe down an unoccupied table across the room, it was almost certainly not out of any fear of the wrath of Desmond but rather because a couple of fit girls had just sat down at the next one. Kevin himself was nominally a waiter today, but it was a very slow afternoon and most of the dining room staff, waiters and busboys alike, were ranged around the walls like the boys at a 1950s dance. Whenever there was something to be done the British-born contingent tended to hang back and courteously allow the foreigners to handle it.
  "Look at the hustle on Wang," said Forbes as Wang set plates down at one table and then moved quickly to take the order of the girls Jack was ogling. "His feverish industriousness is a perfect metaphor for the way the Asian tiger economies outperform sluggish old Britain, don't you think?"
  "How old would you say Wang was?" Kevin asked.
  Forbes shrugged. "Hard to say. I'm with De Quincey on this one. 'The youngest oriental seems to me an antediluvian renewed.' John Chinaman is a slippery customer."
  "I'd say he's got to be forty at least. What's he doing working in a place like this at that age? The same with Big Richard. I mean it's not too bad people of our age doing this kind of work, or even old farts like George and Albert - well, it's bad enough, but imagine working here when you're Wang and Richard's age. What did they do to end up here? Actually, no, fuck it, what did any of us do to end up here?"
  Forbes shrugged again. "The people here are shiftless, no-account types for the most part. Epsilon-minus semi-morons and tired old lags looking for a quiet rest before their next stretch inside. If it wasn't for institutions like this, they'd be out dismembering old ladies. What should interest you is how someone of breeding and erudition like myself ended up here amongst these slum children."
  "Well, why are you here, then?"
  Forbes sighed. "Suffice it to say it is a sordid tale of mishaps and missed opportunities, of a boy of shining promise who could not find his niche in the modern world. It is the saddest story I have ever heard, and reflects poorly on our society. And, since you are so obsessed with chronological age, it may interest you to know that I myself am in my twenty-seventh year on this godforsaken planet. I will now pause for you to say, 'God, Dad, you're so fucked up, I'm never gonna be like you when I'm your age,' to which the answer of course is that I didn't plan on it, I just drifted into it."
  "You could pass for twentyfive in a dark disco."
  "Thankyou...The one I cannot bring myself to call Big Richard is quite an interesting case, actually. He is here because of an acte gratuite comparable, in its way, to the killing of the Arab in Camus's L'Etranger, or the incident on the train in Gide's Les Caves du Vatican. As he tells it, he had his whole life mapped out for him. He had everything - a wife, a kiddy, a good job in an insurance company. The insurance company is a nice touch - I like to think of him poring over the actuarial tables and suddenly being overcome by a sense of the randomness of life. But he makes no mention of that. All he says is that he realized that his life had been mapped out for him. As he describes it, one day, for no particular reason, with no particular trigger, he punched his wife, his kid, and his boss, got on a random train with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, and eventually ended up here."
  "Wow."
  "Now, of course, he wants it all back. That's why he's so wound up. He's working frantically to get a stake in order to buy a partnership in this dry-cleaning business he's heard of, and return to his suburban rut."
  Kevin was enthralled by Forbes. He'd never heard so many gratuitous literary references from one person. What the fuck was he doing here? And how could Kevin avoid being here when he was Forbes' age? Come to think of it, how could he avoid being here next week? Or next month? He was suddenly very depressed.
  Forbes gestured towards the staff room. "Let's go for a sit down."
  Kevin nodded distractedly. "You go. I'll be in in a second." He had just seen that over on the other side of the room Desmond was bawling Rose out for something. If he didn't stop in a minute Kevin was going to march straight over there and ram his craggy fucking Yorkshire son-of-the-soil face right through the plate-glass window. How dare he? How did he even dare to look at the sweetest most angelic creature on God's earth with anything other than worshipful respect and humble veneration?
  Look at her. An angelic little girl-child, timid as a mouse, scarcely ever daring to meet anyone's gaze, her skirts long and her sleeves almost covering her delicate little hands, the embodiment of all purity and virtue and innocence. Yesterday, to Kevin's delight, she had blushingly but firmly rejected the bantering sexual advances of Jack, who was otherwise cutting a prodigious erotic swathe through the ranks of the female staff and holidamakers alike. Kevin himself had not dared express his admiration for Rose. His devotion at the moment largely took the form of running errands for her, taking her uniform to and fetching it from the laundry, nipping out to buy her cans of coke at break-times, etc., the only reward he sought being to bask in her shy smiles of gratitude. He was not worthy of her, of course, but perhaps one day she would allow him to live in a cupboard in her house and come out to do the hoovering and other household chores for her.
  He had other more ambitious fantasies too. In the most lurid of them, he and Rose married and went to live in a small cottage in a small Welsh village. He would come home at night after a hard day tending sheep or gathering peat or whatever it was Welsh people did, and she would pull his boots off for him in the kitchen and serve him some of the wholesome Welsh food she had been preparing in his absence. After supper Rose would play the piano and he would stand at her side, one hand on the shoulder of her muslin dress, and sing traditional Welsh hymns - he was somehow transformed into a big stout man with muttonchop whiskers and a great booming voice for this bit. Afterwards they would sit on either side of a roaring coal fire, Rose doing her needlework, smiling tranquilly and gazing lovingly at him from time to time as he read her bits from the local paper. 'Outbreak of foot-and-mouth over at Abergaveny, I see.' 'Really, dear?' 'I see Pastor Williams is installing a new pulpit. He's a bit too High Church for me, that one.' 'You know best, dear.' 'Says here a fellow called Hargreaves has invented a thing called a Spinning Jenny, going to revolutionize the weaving industry.' 'That'll be nice, dear.' He would never dare to broach the subject of sex, but one day, when she asked where babies came from, her mother, a sweet-faced white-haired old lady who was forever baking cakes for Kevin, would delicately leave a book for Rose to read. She would be shocked, even revolted at first, would possibly even cry. But he would be tender and patient, and one night, gently, ever so gently, he'd ease it in. 'Ah, there's lovely, now,' he would murmur. And then gradually stoke the fires of her latent Celtic passion until she became a real tiger in the sack.
  "A word with you, boyo." Sidling crabwise over to him, Evans came breaking into his reverie, staring across the room and speaking out of the side of his mouth like a convict in a prison film planning an escape while the bulls were watching. "You still interested in this television set?"
  Kevin considered. "It's definitely not knock-off?"
  "Oh, no, boy, I wouldn't do that to you. My old chalet-mate left it behind for me, only I need the money, see."
  "How much?"
  "I'll take thirty quid for it. It's a good one, mind, colour and what have you."
  "All right. It'll have to be pay-day, though."
  "Pay day it is then." Evans sidled off.
  Kevin had decided to buy Evans' television as an economy measure, in order to facilitate a regime of quiet nights in. The prices even in the staff bar were comparable to those in the flashier night-spots in his home town; weed was plentiful but came in very poor deals for weight; at present rates of consumption his meagre wages would barely cover his tab for alcohol and cannabis each week. If he carried on like that, he would never be able to save enough money to get away from here. Not that he had a clue where he wanted to go, but definitely away; away from the camp in particular and Wales in general. Rose fantasies notwithstanding, Wales in Kevin's mind simply equated to 'nowhere'. It was Exile, East of Eden, a desolate limbo equally far removed from the warm comforts of Home and the bright lights of The Centre Of Things. As for the camp, he reckoned he'd already sampled all the good and bad things it had to offer, mostly the latter, in the five or so days he'd been there, and the cosmic joke could now be declared definitely over. He must escape forthwith.
  Desmond had moved on from Rose and was now shouting at Brian, apparently rebuking him for feeling his dick while on duty; at any rate,as well as cruelly mimicking Brian's vacant and slack-jawed face and apathetic posture, he was currently making huge double-handed masturbatory gestures in front of his own groin, which was causing a certain amount of consternation and raised eyebrows among the nearby diners. Kevin went and got a coffee and entered the staff-room.
  Inside, Forbes was reclining in his chair in an attitude of graceful repose, reading Memoirs of an Aesthete and listening to opera on a small tape player he had taken to carrying about with him for this purpose, while Mr. Palmer was wrestling manfully with the Daily Star crossword.
  "'This pop group gathers no moss?'" he muttered as Kevin sat down. "Three, seven, and six. Any ideas, boys?"
  "I'm not well up on cheap music," murmured Forbes.
  "It's a difficult one, that, Mr. Palmer," said Kevin. "Could it be an anagram of some sort?" You darling man, he thought.
  "It doesn't say anag," said Palmer unhappily, gnawing fretfully at the end of his pen. "If they don't gather moss, presumably they do gather something else - crops of some sort, possibly." He frowned in concentration. "Isn't there a pop group by the name of The Harvest Bunch, or something like that?"
   "It doesn't ring a bell, Mr. Palmer."
  "I think there is, you know," Palmer insisted, starting to fill it in. "The Harvest Bunch. I'm sure there's a pop group of that name." His face fell. "Bunch doesn't fit," he said gloomily.
  The darling, darling man, Kevin thought, and wondered again how on earth he could possibly have missed Palmer's ears on his first appraisal. Study of them now took up much of his waking life. Not only were they different sizes and shapes, but they were stuck onto his head at different levels. Kevin had decided they were the most beautiful and poignant things he had ever seen and that he would like to run his tongue around their edges just to show Palmer someone would. The urge to hug, lick and frot Palmer was intermittent but at times almost overwhelming in its intensity. Although it could strike at any time, had just struck now at the sight of Palmer's forlorn struggle with the crossword, it was generally at its strongest in the mornings, when Kevin, who had still not adjusted to early rising or waking up in hell instead of his bedroom, was so flooded with compassion for himself that it could not but overflow onto other unfortunate, ill-used creatures. Entering the staff room before the breakfast shift yesterday to hear Desmond witheringly shoot down some harmless suggestion of Palmer's for rearranging the work roster, and behold Palmer's resulting look of wretchedness and apologetic blush, he had wanted to rush over to Palmer, throw his arms around him shieldingly, and urge that the two of them should engage in a suicide pact, leave this cruel world together with their naked bodies intertwined.
  Kevin gazed at Palmer fondly now. As Palmer was sitting at right angles to him and only one of his remarkable ears was visible, Kevin found himself leaning forward and craning his head to one side in an attempt to bring the other one into view, so as to be able to savour both in all their adorable mismatched splendour. Before long he was leaning as far forward as he could go, and slightly to the side, and had his head twisted round at a highly unnatural angle as he stared at Palmer with tenderness and adoration and a dreamy smile. Just then Palmer looked up from his paper in time to catch him like that, and gave a small start of alarm. Kevin turned the smile into a grimace of distress and started to rotate his head and shoulder-blade as if trying to massage a crick in his neck; Palmer didn't seem to grasp the meaning of this pantomime until Kevin groaned, "Oo, crick in me neck," and at first this spectacle alarmed him even more.
  "You boys shouldn't be on a break now, should you?" said Palmer uncertainly, still eyeing Kevin with some nervousness. "It's the peak of lunchtime."
  "It's dead out there, Mr. Palmer."
  "A Bernard Manning gig in Hampstead."
  Palmer scowled. "It's that bastard Dai Thomas. He's got a special promotion on over at The Gastrodrome."
  "This Thomas is something of a bete noire to you, isn't he?" murmured Forbes without looking up from his book.
  "Slimy little sod, I hate him. He gets all the pretty girls to waitress at his place. Lords it over them like a bloody pasha, he does. Droit de bloody seigneur he thinks he's got there. Bloody whoremaster he is. And he fixes senior management up with them. He's after the promotion to Head of Catering that was all but promised me six months ago. Pushy little sod, he's two years younger than I am."
  "We are all organs in the same corporate body," said Kevin, "and no one organ is more humble or more exalted than another." Palmer glared at him. "You said that yourself," he added.
  "So I did," admitted Palmer morosely.
  "I took it to heart. I find it an inspiring philosophy."
  Palmer looked pleased. "I made that one up myself, you know. Glad to see you're taking it on board, er..." He looked at Kevin's name badge for inspiration. "Glad to see you're taking it on board, Wang." A ripple of momentary surprise and confusion passed across Palmer's brow, then disappeared leaving it as smooth and clear as before. There had been a badge-swapping session a few days previously and Kevin had ended up with Wang's. He had noted before that Palmer had trouble remembering the names even of those members of staff who had been with him since the start of the season without consulting their name tags. Desmond had no such problem, addressing everyone as 'sunshine' or 'girly' or more usually 'Oi you.'
  Men, thought Kevin, smiling dippily at Palmer. The brute doesn't even know my name; and yet I love him till I die.
  Palmer had plunged into a state of gloom again. He suddenly brightened and assumed a crafty expression.
  "Listen here, boys," he said. "Are you game for something slightly underhand?"
  "We could be," said Kevin cautiously. Forbes put down his book and looked over with interest.
  "Listen here, Wang," Palmer said with mounting excitement, leaning towards Kevin conspiratorially, "what I've got in mind is for you and, er," he squinted at Forbes' lapel, "Veronica? to get changed into your civvies, go over to The Gastrodrome, order a load of food, and then sneak out without paying before they bring it. How about that? Order food for about ten or twenty people, say they're coming in a minute. Then when the waitress has gone wait a few minutes then just walk out the door. How about that, eh? That'll teach him."
  Forbes and Kevin exchanged glances. "This is highly irregular, Mr. Palmer," said Forbes. "We could be jeopardizing our careers here."
  "There's no way they'll catch you. If you sat there and ate a lunch they'd be watching to make sure you paid at the end, but they won't be expecting anyone to just walk out without eating what they'd ordered. Worst comes to the worst and the shit hits the fan I'll protect you. Worst that can happen I'll have to own up and say it was a joke."
  "I don't know...What's in it for us?"
  "I'll put you both on busboy for a week."
  "Two weeks."
  "Done."
  "Very well then." Forbes rose. "We are your creatures and must obey. We have our orders, Kevin. I don't know what will come of this mad, glorious adventure, but what we do, we do for The Chuck Wagon, and our own lives count as nothing. I must say I never suspected this Till Eulenspiegel streak in you, Mr. Palmer."
  "I owe that flash bastard one. Order a shitload of food, lads, everything you can think of. And listen, lads, when you leave there hold your stomachs and stagger around as though you feel sick, put people off going in there."
  "For you, Mr. Palmer, we shall crawl out writhing in agony and toss our cookies into the nearest litter-bin."
  They left Palmer smiling happily to himself.
  "That'll teach him," he said, attacking the crossword with a new zest.
  "Well," said Forbes as they left The Chuck Wagon.
  "Well," agreed Kevin.
  "I suppose healthy interdepartmental rivalry trims the fat from the corporate body, or something. I did quite like the way you threw all that corporate body schreck back at him. That pep-talk this morning...his whole corporate-man kick is becoming insufferable. I half expect him to get us to sing a company song next."
  "Yeah. 'We're shit, and we know we are.'"
  "Perhaps we could get The Harvest Bunch in to help us sing it. We really should have encouraged him to sing one of their songs."
  "'Hey hey we're The Harvest Bunch, we gather crops but not moss.'"
  "I suppose it would be possible not to have heard of The Rolling Stones, if you had been kept in a dark cellar in one of the remoter parts of the world for the past thirty years. If such was the case, and it can by no means be ruled out, it would explain much about him, although not perhaps his ears."
  "Leave Palmer alone. I find myself strangely drawn to him, like a moth to a flame."
  "How macabre." Forbes glanced at his watch. "Now you beetle along and change into your going-out togs, and I likewise, and we shall rendezvous outside The Gastrodrome in twenty minutes."
  Kevin was surprised. "We're not really going in there, are we? I thought we were just going to dick around."
  "Your simple-minded naivety fills me with pity and lust. Now hurry and make yourself beautiful, and don't skimp on the lip gloss."
  Twenty minutes later Forbes led the way into The Gastrodrome. He peered around keenly for a bit and then approached a rather louche-looking balding man in a staff jacket who was lounging at a table by the wall flirting with a couple of teenage girls.
  "Excuse me," Forbes said to him, "I see by your name-tag that you are the redoubtable Dai Thomas, oberleutnant of this fine establishment. I am Forbes, a minion of the rival operation known, revoltingly, as The Chuck Wagon. I believe we share a mutual whipping-boy in Mr. Palmer, my superior in that department if in no other. Mr. Palmer, fiend that he is, has sent us here to play a trick on you. Consumed by an insane jealousy of your managerial acumen and sexual charge, the wretched Palmer came up with an ill-conceived and altogether feeble scheme to score some kind of counting-coup against you by sending us here in mufti with instructions to order vast quantities of food and then leave without either consuming or paying. What I propose instead is that me and my lovely assistant Kevin should while away a pleasant afternoon here, sampling your wares at our leisure. We will then return to Palmer and tell him that you forcibly prevented our premature departure, recognized us as Chuck Wagon staff, and in due course extracted the whole sorry story from us, and that he will be expected to pay for all the food which he had us order,and which you forced us to consume to teach us a lesson. You may of course pad the bill in any way you choose. You will thus have turned the tables on the Machiavellian Palmer, while my fidus Achates and I will have enjoyed an afternoon's idleness and a Lucullan repast gratis. I take it you are amenable to this plan?"
  Thomas took a moment to decipher all this and then grinned broadly. "You mean you two eat a bloody great meal and Palmer pays?"
  "Admirably succinct."
  "You're on."
  The Gastrodrome was a distinctly posher venue than The Chuck Wagon. It was a spacious arena full of scrolled and latticed metal chairs and tables and clinging vines žon trellises and huge potted plants. It specialized in dustbin-lid-sized pizzas and wine could be purchased there. Kevin and Forbes sat down near a fountain in the middle and ordered three of the former and four bottles of the latter, just to be going on with.
  "Isn't this a tiny bit disloyal to Palmer?" said Kevin guiltily around a gobful of pizza.
  "It's enormously disloyal to Palmer," said Forbes. "But Palmer is a born patsy. A Darwinian reject. To side with him against Thomas would be going against the forces of nature."
  "Palmer's like us then."
   "What on earth are you talking about?"
  "We're Darwinian rejects too. We're doing the lowliest job in the worst place on earth. We're the lowest of the low."
  "I'm more intelligent than anyone in this blasted camp, management included."
  "Possibly. You're certainly better read. But you lack other qualities. Your intelligence is of a non-useful kind. You're an unsuccessful organism. Like me."
  "Let's drink to that."
  "So," said Kevin a while later, getting stuck in to the second bottle of the Bulgarian Merlot which he found perfectly delightful and which Forbes had wrinkled his nose at but was knocking back with commendable gusto nonetheless, "what are you doing here then?"
  "You first."
  Kevin told him briefly about Mr. McReady and his arrest and edited highlights of his previous work experience and his media studies course and other things.
  Forbes nodded. "Mine is much the same story as yours, except perhaps that after a fairly early age my parents, my father anyway, couldn't seem to tolerate my staying at home for two days at a time let alone two years. I never knew what I wanted to do, only what I didn't want to do, which was more or less everything, everything I was capable of, anyway. I've drifted along from one ill-paid job to another, with a few lengthy holidays on the dole in between. All the jobs were of equal horrendousness in different ways, and I never really had any particular incentive or inclination to move on from one to the next. All that would happen would be that after a few weeks or months at one place I would fuck up, consciously or unconsciously, and so be forced to leave. My last billet, for example, was a rather responsible position running the newsagents in my home village; my mother had obtained it for me through her influence in the local Women's Institute or bridge society or some other cosa nostra. It was a rather cushy number which in many ways I now quite regret losing; I even had my own little flat above the shop. I was a successful manager and, I believe, a popular shopkeeper. 'Good morning, Mrs. Crabshaw, and how are your bunions today?' 'Lawks, bless you, Master Forbes, they're playing me up something rotten, so they are.' 'Quarter of sarsarparilla, is it?' 'Yes, Lord love you, and a copy of that magazine that's got Katy Boyle in it. You know the one.' 'I know the very one, Mrs. Crabshaw.' Something like that. But one day the old imp of mischief arose from his slumbers. Among my responsibilities was that of arranging for the delivery of newspapers and magazines and so forth. One day a Colonel Massingham, one of our oldest and most esteemed customers, struck down by computer mania in the senescence of his life, decided to start taking, along with his usual Telegraph and Angling Times, a journal of the cybercowboy fraternity by the name of PC World. An amusing thought occurred to me...
  "By way of a digression which may serve to throw some light on my deep psychological motives, I should say that I positively loathe and detest everything to do with computers, video games, word processors, and most other new-fangled technology. I hate them more than life itself. It is my fervent hope and belief that the internet and the information superhighway and all the rest of it is merely a passing fad, like the hula-hoop or the Rubik's Cube, which will go away the quicker for my ignoring it. I shall rant on about this at greater length some other time. I will just add, by way of a further digression, that I once had a D.S.S. officer, my equivalent of your Mr. McReady, whom I used to madden to the point of despair by steadfastly turning down all he had in the way of Information Technology courses and asking instead if he had any training schemes for coalmining or typesetting. I affected an earnest passion to find work in such fields and looked suitably heartbroken when he gently tried to impress upon me their lack of a future. He was also the soul of regret while trying to steer me away from a career as a commercial haulage-barge operator. It was only when I mentioned an ambition to become a dray-horse driver that he finally began to twig.
  "But to return to the amusing jape I decided to play. Instead of delivering PC World to Colonel Massingham as requested, I sent him a copy of a rather esoteric specialist publication by the name of PVC World, which a fetishist acquaintance of mine had once brought to my attention. This did not go down too well. I had not deemed it necessary, in this day and age, to bother with plain brown wrapping or any such nonsense, and as fate would have it his wife was the one to pick it up off the doormat. I had fondly hoped that PVC World might have some rejuvenating effect on the Massingham marriage, but such was not the case. Mrs. M. immediately began screaming hysterically and commenced to belabour her husband about the head and neck with a large stuffed trout, the first weapon that came to hand, and announced her intention to institute proceedings for divorce. Before the Colonel's innocence had eventually been established she had shown the offending publication to every one of their friends as evidence of his degeneracy, adding her belief that he and Molly, a feeble-minded cleaning girl with whom she had long suspected him of carrying on a dalliance, were dressing up in PVC daily and performing hideous acts of fornication, possibly on a chesterfield sofa upon which she had once found a glutinous stain of unknown provenance. When the finger of blame came to point at me, my protestations that it had been an honest mistake availed me naught. I was unceromoniously ejected from my job, and, in fact, there was nothing for it but to flee the area immediately. For one thing, Colonel Massingham was scouring the county in search of me, brandishing a horse-whip, and I was cut dead in every tea-shop in the village. Some days later I wound up here. I cannot help thinking that, however monstrous the nature of my crime, the punishment is rather harsh. You are free to disbelieve such details of that narrative as you may choose, by the way, particularly the bit about the trout, but the essentials are true. Now kindly pour me some more of that wine. It is vulgar but it grows on one, rather like a Cyndi Lauper song."
  Some time after that Kevin said: "We're sort of - well, I know it's a judgemental word, but we're sort of stealing the cost of this food and booze off Palmer, aren't we?"
  "The gulag makes brutes of us all, Kevin," said Forbes sadly. "Have just one more banana split?"
  "I couldn't possibly."
  "Well I'm certainly going to have another chocolate sundae. In fact, I insist on you joining me. I've been thinking," he said as he signalled for the waitress, "Palmer may not be a Darwinian reject after all. He may simply be some sort of mutation which has arrived ahead of its time. A new stage in human development: the ego-less cell in the corporate hive-mind. Possibly in Japan he'd be a flourishing sarariman in some zaibatsu. Doubtless his day will come here, too, but not yet, thank God. Of course, if he is a mutation, it is our duty as members of the old species to kill him before he reproduces."
  "You're talking about the man I love. How could you even think of hurting Palmer?" Only yesterday Kevin had thought of putting a bullet into Palmer's head, but as an act of love and mercy, whilst cradling Palmer's head against his own naked chest and stroking his hair, and with Palmer's innocent brown eyes gazing trustingly into his, and with the full intention of taking his own life immediately after, their nude pathetic bodies and twin tragedies bound together in silent rebuke to the world. "Besides, how could he possibly reproduce?"
  "He may have the ability to divide himself at will, like an amoeba."
  After the meal, which they rounded off with a cigar and a snifter of brandy apiece, the waitress brought them a little card on which to write their comments on their dining experience, with little mouthless faces on it upon which they could either draw happy smiles or pouts and tears. Forbes filled it in as follows:

         AMBIENCE - Stygian
             SERVICE - Kafkaesque
              CUISINE - Coprophagic

  When the waitress collected it she stared at it frowning uncertainly, but as he had made the little circles into happy smiley faces and was smiling at her winningly himself she eventually said, "Oh, thankyou very much," and went and pinned it up on the wall with the rest of the favourable notices.
  "May as well do that much for Palmer," said Forbes. He sighed contentedly and patted his stomach. "Today was a day without a dark cloud, almost a happy day."
  Outside, the colours seemed to be brighter and more vibrant than they had been, and Kevin was filled with a great warmth towards the camp and everyone in it.
  They split up and went to their chalets to change. As Kevin unclothed he found himself thinking about Darwinism. Catastrophe was necessary for evolution. Coming here had been a personal catastrophe but perhaps it was the goad necessary for personal evolution. It all depended on whether he was a viable organism or a dinosaur. He was unable to pursue this line of thought much further but felt it was pretty damn profound.
  "I skinned up," he told Forbes when he met him outside Forbes' chalet, holding up a joint.
  "Ah," said Forbes. "You begin to interest me."
  Kevin's original teenth had long gone but he had scored an eighth the night before from the pixie, who was now no longer a pixie but a fairground ride operator. The ex-pixie had apparently been a member of a Merseyside drug gang in his previous life and claimed he was merely hiding out at the camp to avoid the repercussions of his part in a drug war that was currently raging, much in the way that Michael Corleone had hidden out in Sicily in the first Godfather film.
  They smoked the joint walking along towards The Chuck Wagon. Crossing the first chalet street they were jumped by a gaggle of chalet-maids, who started to shout abuse at Forbes, much more vitriolically than they'd done to Kevin the first night, seemingly with genuine loathing.
  "Christ," said Kevin when they'd gone, "what'd you do to deserve that?"
  "They have the slag's hatred of the asexual," said Forbes, apparently unperturbed. "They know they have nothing to interest someone who has no interest in their poisonous little quims. Actually I have an idea one of them propositioned me in the bar last night, and I may have been a trifle brusque with her. Besides, they resent everything I stand for - culture, breeding, erudition. I'm used to such abuse, anyway. The world is divided into people who take an instant dislike to me and those who grow to dislike me over a period of time."
  "I don't dislike you," said Kevin.
  "Then you belong to the second category. If it's all the same, I won't allow myself to become attached to you. It saves heartache in the long run."
  "Christ," said Kevin as he failed to navigate a course round a bin, "I'm really in no condition to go back to work."
  Forbes lurched unsteadily to a halt and clicked his fingers. "Wait a minute. We don't have to go back to work. What happened was, trying to salvage something from the debacle, we emerged from The Gastrodrome staggering and groaning and retching as per instructions...we were spotted by a high camp dignitary who insisted on taking us to the sickbay...where, so as not to give the game away, we continued to fake our symptoms, to such a degree that the doctor diagnosed food poisoning and ordered us to take the rest of the day off. Come on, let's go and see The Lion King." They turned round and started back the way they had come. This time Forbes walked into the bin. "Oh, it's like a fucking obstacle course," he groaned in disgust. "I might just rest here a moment actually."
  His inspiration had come too late anyway. Mr. Palmer had appeared at the end of the street and was hurrying towards them.
  "Palmer," said Kevin.
  Forbes raised his head off the bin and squinted. "There are two of him. He is an amoeba."
  "The joint."
  "Out, out, brief candle," sighed Forbes, stubbing out the joint. "Back to the grindstone, then."
  "Wang, Veronica, where the hell have you been?"
  "There's been a slight deviation from the plan, Mr. Palmer," said Forbes, laughing hysterically and throwing up into the bin.



Chapter 7
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