2: THE JOBFINDER BLUES


  As the bus pulled into town past the Tech, Kevin reflected that if he had stayed on at university he would almost be finishing his degree now, and wondered, not for the first time, exactly what it was that had prevented him from doing so.
   It had not been the most strenuous of courses: Media Studies, with not more than six hours lectures a week, most of which involved watching films and sitcoms. Too much to handle, apparently.
  He liked to think it had been the sheer imbecility of the topics that had defeated him. Drunkenness was the only way to complete essays with titles like 'Examine the Don Quixote-Sancho Panza motif in British sitcoms, 1960- present day, with special reference either to the Hancock-Sid James relationship or Harold and Albert Steptoe.' Extreme cannabis euphoria, or truancy, were the only ways he'd found of handling lectures on things like 'The hermeneutics of Come Back Mrs. Noah ' (BBC, 1978, Mollie Sugden lost in space). The only place for set texts featuring chapters such as 'Pencil-necks and desk-brass: the motif of betrayal from within in post-Vietnam American action movies' or 'Formal patterns in Flying Down To Rio ' was, he felt, the dustbin.
  'Was it for this the clay grew tall?' But what made him think he was so special as to be able to go through life avoiding everything time-wasting and unpoetic and idiotic and boring and wanky and banal? Practically all he'd done since dropping out was to watch films and sitcoms anyway; true, he was no longer required to deconstruct them, but against this he was being paid slightly less to do it and there wasn't the remote prospect of blagging his way into a job at Channel Four at the end of it.
  Apart from the fact that he was no longer able to skin up in comfort, he couldn't honestly say he missed living away from home, certainly not as much as he had missed home when he was not there. Your heart is where your treasure is, and Kevin had not felt able to take his books, his records, or his video collection, his posters of Monroe as little-girl-lost, Kim Basinger as temptress, and Winona Ryder as guiding angel, his girlie mags or his favourite mug, with him to the slum tenement he had moved into for university. Home, moreover, was where the food was. Home was warm and clean and the help was reliable. Home, unlike almost everywhere else he'd ever been in the world, was hygienic, safe, and aesthetically pleasing, in a pleasant part of the country with nice trees and clean air and friendly people. If he could only train the landlord and -lady to accept the sight of him walking into the lounge with a foot-long reefer in his mouth without throwing an eppo, he would have it made.
  Unfortunately, the landlord-and-lady were becoming restive. He knew he was only hanging on there by the skin of his teeth. There was the fact that he never paid any rent, for one thing. There was also the fact that, in the course of trying to enjoy a peaceful midnight spliff, he had last winter accidentally burnt down the garden shed; they had no proof it was him, but they had their suspicions. Above and beyond all this, there was an increasing general dissatisfaction with the way he was living his life - never getting out of bed before two, never going to sleep before four, not having done a stroke of work in eighteen months and not giving the slightest indication of ever intending to change the situation.
  It could only be a matter of time before, politely or not so politely, he was given notice to quit. So too, it was only a matter of time before the dole also lost patience and either cut off his money or else forced him into a job that would probably be far more soul-destroying than even his Media Studies lectures and would almost certainly involve more hours.
  The idyll would have to come to an end. He knew it. Things Must Change. He declared this solemnly every once in a while. Three weeks ago, for example, he'd ended up staggering round the garden at four in the morning clutching the remnants of a bottle of gin and roaring at a raining sky, a madman on a lawnmowed heath, Lear in a dressing gown, vowing that The Next Day he would take some action, The Next Day he would change his life, The Next Day he would get a job, buy a ticket to London, write a novel, find a girl, learn guitar, enrol in RADA, backpack to Mandalay... The next day he awoke with the hangover of the western world and there were no aspirin in the house. He took two of his mother's period tablets and a bottle of wine and spent the rest of the day on his bed masturbating gently.
  Kevin leaned his head against the shuddering window as the bus pulled up at the traffic lights and had difficulty keeping his eyes open. He wasn't used to seeing mid-morning, and last night he'd been awake to see Jobfinder again. Jobfinder, like the dawn chorus, was how you knew when you'd fucked up another night's sleep. The jobs advertised all seemed to be for company directors at £50,000 a year: Kevin had to wonder how many suitable applicants would be watching telly at five in the morning. Yawning, he tried to remember what had so enthralled him to keep the box on until that hour last night. The Chart Show, he seemed to recall, and then - oh, yes - some sort of pan-European young person's magazine programme. The theme of the programme had been underwear: there had been a series of reports from different European capitals, in which a succession of ditzy blondes with microphones and camera crews had toured nightclubs persuading people to lift up their skirts or pull down their trousers for British TV. Underwear throughout Europe showed a remarkable and slightly disappointing homogeneity; there was also a uniform surfeit of people only too willing to expose their undergarments for the cameras. Lying there numbly absorbing this, invested with the pink glow a couple of libations from his secret under-bed gin bottle had provided, he had felt a vague itch to visit these exotic places, but not too strong a one, he realized, as he tended to feel that the salient bits of them could be brought to his bedroom. Besides which, if the programme was anything to go by, they seemed mostly to resemble the town high street on a Friday night anyway. He had been singularly unsuccessful at coaxing people to show him their underwear there; he saw no reason why things should be any different in foreign climes. About the only place he felt any real longing to visit was Amsterdam, but he couldn't honestly see himself getting his act together enough to get tickets, accomodation - visa? shots? - whatever the fuck else you needed to travel.
  Kevin got off at the bus station, cut through the churchyard, and headed towards the dole office.
  The streets heading to the dole were as full of shabbily-dressed gargoyles and deteriorated schizophrenics as ever. A trip to the D.S.S. always had the effect of making Kevin feel incredibly handsome and dynamic. It was possible, though, he reflected, that the shamblers were all looking at him and thinking exactly the same thing. Passing a couple of vagrants, he wondered how they had ended up on the street and whether he would one day. He regarded the prospect with equanimity: tramps at least had no pressure on them, although admittedly the idea of having to live without a bed was the greatest horror imaginable.
  In the D.S.S. office, Get On Your Feet by Gloria Estefan was pounding optimistically out from the sound system. This was standard fare for the dole office, although there had been a brief, bizarre period at the time of his last interview six months before - coinciding, it transpired, with his case officer Mr. McReady's return from an out-of-season Hellenic sojourn - when they had experimented with a diet of Greek bazouki music - not the most inspiring and upbeat rhythm there was, Kevin felt, and which had the effect of making him feel like he was inside the Monty Python cheese shop sketch, particularly when it came time to catechize McReady about the vacancies that weren't available to him: "Packing work?" "No." "Clerical?" "No." "You do have some jobs here?" "Oh, yes, sir. This is a job centre. We've got-" "No, don't tell me, I'm keen to guess."
  He was a few minutes early; he gave in what he belatedly realized was a partially roached-up appointment card at the desk and decided he had better go and look over the bulletin boards and leaf through a few job papers to make a good impression on McReady when he called him. It was purely for show, a futile exercise. He was too young, too old, unskilled, unqualified, overqualified, badly located, unable to drive, type quickly, wrangle computers or call strangers over the telephone. There was the occasional opening for dishwasher or vegetable chef for which anyone with limbs was eligible, but he had had his fill of kitchen work during the year in which he had farted round before going to university and had taken the precaution of writing 'Buddhist vegetarian' on the 'Any other information' section of his application form this time around to prevent McReady steering him in that direction.
  If there were any job descriptions among the bulletin boards or newspaper advertisements that even vaguely, theoretically appealed to Kevin - and there were not many - then they also seemed expressly phrased to deter him from applying. They all wanted go-getters, outgoers, team-players, self-motivators, none of which could Kevin honestly say remotely described him. He had yet to see an advert that made him feel he was the man for the job. 'Alienated? Angst-ridden? Apathetic? You could be part of our team for the next decade.' 'Inveterate masturbators wanted.' 'The successful candidate will be a reserved, bookish pothead in his early twenties, who will not have worked since school and who will know all the lyrics to "How Soon Is Now".' His heart had leapt one day when he had come across an advert in the paper which began 'IF YOU HAVE NO AMBITION...'; unfortunately, it had continued '...then don't call us. If, however, you have the will to be a winner, etc.' He had been angry at this cruel hoax for some time afterward.
  Kevin stopped reading the notices and concentrated on merely walking round the boards in such a way as to keep as far away as possible from an undeodorized man in shellsuit bottoms, trainers, and singlet, and keep close, but not greasily close, to a fit blonde teen number with visible nipples, tight jeans, and a fuck-off-world attitude; presently he found himself standing next to her staring at the Care Work vacancies board.
  "Mr. Kilroy?"
  It was McReady; what's more, he was close behind him.
  "Care work, Mr. Kilroy? I didn't think that was up your street."
  McReady's voice was rich and fulsome; if port wine could speak it would sound like him. He was an immaculately turned-out fat man with an aftershave that smelled like incense.
  "You know me, Mr. McReady, I just want to work."
  "Of course you do," said McReady kindly with his cat-that's-got-the-cream smile. "Of course you do."
  Kevin followed McReady over to his desk.
  "Well, Mr. Kilroy, how goes your JobQuest?"
  By and large Kevin thought he and McReady had a pretty good relationship, based on the fact that neither shitted the other much beyond the bare minimum that their respective roles required, but if McReady did have a fault, apart from a tendency to play Sydney Greenstreet, it was this habit of referring to Kevin's unemployed status as if he was engaged in some sort of role-playing game called a JobQuest. It was his adaptation of the D.S.S. official terminology of JobSearch. At their last meeting McReady had elaborated on the joke, giving a great wheezing elephantine chuckle and adding, "Still valiantly hacking your way past the dragons of Lack of Opportunity? Still tirelessly scheming to storm the castle of Work Experience?" This had amused McReady immoderately for several minutes, until tears had run down his cheeks which he had removed with a billowing mauve handkerchief while sighing, "Dear me. Dear me."
  Today, though, he seemed ever-so-slightly less amused, although Kevin's file still produced several appreciative chuckles as he leafed through it.
  "At our last interview," he said, "you were entertaining me with an account of several of the avenues of enterprise you were so assiduously investigating, which I assume have yet to bear fruit. Your plan to hawk sandwiches and refreshments to passing cyclists from your living-room window, for example: whatever became of that?"
  "Unfortunately, I just found out we live in a green-belt area," said Kevin, "so that's out."
  "Tragic. Still, we must protect our countryside against the ravages of industrialization. And your brave dream of opening a stall in the Manchester Victorian market, selling friendship bracelets and home-made fudge? That too was crushed?"
  "The finance fell through," said Kevin.
  "The pitfalls of big business," said McReady lugubriously. "The first million's the hardest, eh, Mr. Kilroy?"
  "You see my partner backed out, Mr. McReady, and it was his fudge recipe. And he was also the one who could make the bracelets. But I might still get a stall, selling books or records or something - er, personalized tape boxes, possibly. You know when someone tapes something off someone else, well I make personalized covers for the cassette boxes, out of, you know, little collages of pictures of the artist, and sparkly dust and sequins and that. I'm quite good at that." Kevin wondered why he never bothered to work out his spiel before he actually sat down with McReady. Possibly he enjoyed the panic-thrill of frantic improvisation and the incredulous widening of McReady's eyes. Or maybe he was just stupid.
  "Sounds like a definite gap in the market," said McReady drily.
  "Yeah. So I'm trying to see if I can get the backing to do something like that. I've got some phone numbers."
  "He has some phone numbers," said McReady, writing these words down in the file. "And, ah - oh yes! Any word from your good old Uncle Leonard?"
  "Who?" Kevin was mystified.
  "Your Uncle Leonard. If all else failed you were quietly confident he was about to offer you an executive position with his publishing company, which was why you felt justified in turning down the trainee position I could have got you at Asda."
  "Oh. Uncle Leonard. Yeah. The thing is, his company have had to kind of retrench a bit lately, so he couldn't offer me the job he had earmarked for me, which was actually a new position they were gonna create especially for me. But a job with him is definitely still on the cards. He's going to let me know in a few weeks. That's still a possibility."
  "I see." McReady made a great show of scrawling three elaborate question marks next to the words 'Uncle Leonard' in his file. "And are there any other employment possibilities on your horizon?"
  "Oh. I did have this one thought, another kind of business idea I was investigating. You see, me mum and dad went to the South of France on holiday last year, and they met this guy who went round giving people massages on the beach - 'Massage a la Plage' he called it. So I was thinking, you know, what with the summer coming up, maybe I could so something similar on Ainsdale or Southport."
  "Interesting. Do you actually have any experience of giving massages?"
  "Er - no. That's one of the things I'd have to investigate. Maybe you've got some sort of pamphlet you could give me?"
  McReady smiled thinly. "Regrettably not...Mr. Kilroy. Galling though I realize it would be for a natural born entrepreneur like yourself to have to enrich another man by the sweat of your brow, are you at least considering the possibility of finding salaried employment to tide you over until one of your admirable if thus far ill-fated business ventures succeeds?"
  "It's the goal of my every waking hour, Mr. McReady."
  McReady gave him a withering look to warn him not to push it.
  "You're looking in the Job Centre, papers, sending your CV to companies?" he yawned.
  "Yeah," yawned Kevin.
  McReady made a line of ticks and sighed.
  "I don't suppose I could persuade you to give the Job Club another try?"
  "Oh, no, Mr. McReady, not that. There was-"
  "I know, I know, graffiti on the blackboard, it offended your sensibilities, quite."
  The Job Club he'd once been browbeaten into attending had been run along the lines of a particularly patronizing inner-city activity centre for malcontent youths. There had, for example, been false graffiti around the edge of the blackboard, saying things like 'We Rool!' 'Stay Off Our Turf!' 'MUFC!' 'Jez + San 4Ever!' 'We R Kool!' The team leader hadn't quite come in wearing a back-to-front baseball cap and going, "Hey kids! Where's the party?" but he might as well have done. He had made them play touchy-feely co-operation games to get acquainted and foster group spirit and had then had them stand up in turn and talk about their interests, hobbies, and goals in life. Kevin had been entertained to watch the reaction to all this of the 50-year-old ex-miners and carworkers and so forth who comprised most of the group, but not enough to go back a second day.
  "It's not that I don't enjoy our little chats," said McReady, "but unless I get you off the books soon, even if it's just for a week, I'm going to start to look bad, very bad indeed. It's not as if you're a moron. If you were a moron it wouldn't matter so much. But there are all these A-levels, you see. If you were going to make a career of delinquency, you should have started earlier and stuck to it. And you don't even look the part. Lord knows I wouldn't be caught dead with you in a social situation, but you're more presentable than half the cretins I manage to fix up. No, no, you can't tell me you're unemployable."
  Toying with the image of McReady in a social situation, Kevin said:
  "What's the big deal about me getting a job anyway? I'm not a delinquent, Mr. McReady, I'm playing a vital role in the economy. I'm part of the labour market surplus. I help keep wages down. Or are you some kind of Keynesian subversive?"
  "Don't try me, Mr. Kilroy," McReady muttered.
  "Why don't you give me a job here?" Kevin suggested.
  McReady roared with laughter.
  "Poacher turned gamekeeper, eh? Poacher turned gamekeeper! By gad, sir, you are a character. No, I don't think you would quite do for us."
  "Well, then."
  "There must be something here." McReady was flipping grimly through a rolodex full of job vacancy cards. "Maybe there's an opening for a bed-tester or something."
  "I don't suppose you've got any vacancies for dishwasher repairmen?" Kevin said idly.
  McReady frowned.
  "Dishwasher repairmen? No. Whatever made you think of that?"
  "Never mind."
  Kevin had long harboured a fantasy that, after you had signed on for a certain length of time, the government sent you to work at Happy House with all the other Darwinian rejects. But it was an idle dream. Happy House was probably just a form of state-sponsored therapy for people who were scared of dishwashers. He would never find such congenial employment.
  McReady had discarded most of the vacancies and was left with a poker hand.
  "Now. There's some kitchen work at-"
  "I can't do kitchen work, remember, Mr. McReady, it says so on my form. I'm a Buddhist. The smell of those meat juices-"
  McReady glared at him and flipped two cards aside.
  "You must explain for me, one day, the mysteries of the Eightfold Path. These sandwiches you were planning to sell the cyclists-"
  "Cheese and pickle."
  McReady glared some more and glanced down at the remaining cards.
  "Delivery work for-"
  "I can't drive."
  "Silly me. I would advise you to learn, unless it's another religious scruple." He dropped the card and looked at another. "Packing, Mr. Kilroy. Putting things into boxes. You specifically asked me about that sort of work last time."
  "Let me see."
  McReady turned the card over.
  "Er..."
  "Well?"
  "It would take me two hours to get there from my house, and the same back. I'd have to get up at six in the morning. And after you'd knocked my bus fare off I'd be getting less money than I am now. I do want to work, Mr. McReady, but-"
  McReady sighed.
  "Frankly, Mr. Kilroy - oh, let's drop the music hall act, shall we? - frankly, Kevin, without wishing to hurt your feelings in any way, I don't believe you. It is my belief that you make no effort whatsoever to look for work. It is my belief, furthermore, that you devote all your time, energy and intelligence to the avoidance of anything that looks, sounds, or smells like work. You have somehow achieved the truly remarkable feat of existing for over a fifth of a century in a still quite heavily industrialized country without acquiring a single saleable skill. This, surely, is no accident. You, sir, are a bum, a natural born, dyed-in-the-wool idler. Do you know what I would like to do with you? I would like to send you to a camp." He turned over the last remaining card. "This camp, in fact. The Elysian Fields holiday camp, North Wales. They are desperate for staff and will take absolutely anyone, maybe even you. They have vacancies for waiters, barmen, binmen, ride operators, security guards, swimming instructors, office staff, dishwashers, cleaners, street-sweepers, entertainers, clothes launderers, shop assistants, photographers, equestrian grooms and popcorn-makers. There must be something there suitable even to your atrophied abilities and hypertrophied sensibilities. Now do you really want to work? Here is work."
  Kevin was dumbstruck.
  "It's a bit of a commute," he said at last.
  "The idea, Kevin, as you have already worked out, is that you live on the campsite."
  "In North Wales?"
  "A beautiful part of the world."
  "But I don't want to go to Wales. You can't send me to Wales, can you?"
  "Please, Kevin, make a fat man very happy. Just fill out the application form, that's all I ask."
  "Wales is a desolate place. And a camp?"
  "Just make this one token gesture so that I'm not forced to reduce you to penury."
  "It's like that, is it?"
  "Are you really that stupid? I'm trying to give you a chance. What do I care whether you want to work or not? There aren't enough jobs to go round so they might as well go to people who want them. All I want is to be able to write down on this report that you asked me for the application form and that I gave it to you. All I want is to be able to say, with evidence, that you were so keen, nay desperate to work that you were even willing to consider this menial labour in some godforsaken gulag in the middle of nowhere. All I want is to be able to point to just one job I can prove you applied for in the last eighteen months. All you have to do is take the application form from me, apply for some position for which you are totally unsuited, and bring me the letter of rejection next time you see me. It's that simple."
  "Ohh...So, like, give me the application form."
  "Christ Jesus, I got through to him."
  "You're pretty cool, Mr. McReady."
  "Good luck with your JobQuest."

  Kevin felt lighter than air as he left the dole office. He had had a reprieve, and no pardoned death-row resident could have been more exhilarated. He felt born again. He seemed to see and smell and hear everything in the street with a supernatural clarity. He almost started skipping.
  He suddenly realized the blonde from the vacancy boards was walking just ahead of him and slowed so as not to overtake her. She was dawdling along glancing in shop and office windows and holding a cigarette more coolly and sexily than he had previously thought possible. He hadn't actually seen her face properly yet, but she seemed to be having a ridiculously distracting effect on the passing drivers and loitering workmen who could see it. He wondered if there was any way he could introduce himself into her life. But at the top of the street she turned left where he was going to turn right; briefly he considered turning left too, but in the end, with a melancholy sigh and a familiar pang of regret, decided against it.
  The centre of town was full of girls anyway. The world was full of girls. He wondered again why he was never able to get one when every other goon in the world could. He didn't think it was anything to do with his face. Kevin's own assessment of the situation was that he missed being good-looking by a narrow margin, although not nearly so narrowly as he managed to avoid being fuck-ugly. Despite sometimes impressive evidence to the contrary, he continued to fancy himself as being at the very least interesting-looking. He was fairly sure that looks weren't crucial anyway. His friend Hamish had a face like an unsuccessful souffle but seemed able to nail anything that moved. He suspected that he himself lacked a certain something that was vital for seduction, possibly just energy. He recognized that, as with most things he wanted in his life, he had a cargo-cult attitude towards women and on some deep level truly expected one to just drop from the sky one day without any effort on his part, just fall into his lap like a ripe fruit, and he got a certain charge out of these bi-weekly trips into town from lazily checking out whatever talent was around and wondering idly if today would be the day when one of them came up to him and asked him where he'd been all her life.
  Not that, even in his fantasies, they would actually waylay him in the street. A slightly less impossible scenario that he sometimes envisaged was that he would be sitting on a bench somewhere, in the town park, say, or perhaps Albert Square in Manchester, dressed in black and looking moody and mysterious, reading a book, looking thoughtfully and soulfully at his surroundings and the passing scene from time to time, and smoking a spliff, when a heartbreaking young fox would come and sit down next to him and pertly say, "Can I have some of that?" (meaning the spliff rather than his cock, at least at this point). He would give her some of the spliff and then she would ask him what he was reading and he would show her. It would, for preference, be something of the order of Gide or Nabokov rather than, say, Garfield To The Rescue. It would turn out that she, too, was a frustrated would-be intellectual and they would discuss literature, philosophy, and the fine arts for a time. Then she would say, "Would you like to come back to my house and make love to me for the rest of the day?" and Kevin would say, "Oh, go on, then." Up until not so long ago, certainly as recently as when he had been at sixth form college, Kevin had in fact spent a fair amount of time loitering optimistically on one bench or another, wearing black, ostentatiously reading modern classics, and smoking himself tubercular, not precisely expecting to be picked up in this way but definitely telling himself that it might happen, and although he had eventually abandoned this practice as being flawed in its basic premise he still looked back fondly on those happy hopeful days and from time to time wondered if he should give it one more try.
  Asexual he wasn't, apathetic he most certainly was. It cost too much money to run a girlfriend anyway. They were like cars. Still, he should probably at least make the effort to learn to drive. Pass his test, so to speak. Get his M.O.T. He could probably afford some clapped-out old banger just to have lessons in. A bike would be cheapest but there was the danger of falling off and he'd definitely need a crash-helmet. He amused himself for some time by developing this metaphor at length.
  He checked out the girls a while longer then wandered into Smiths and started to browse through the books. Standing nearby were a somewhat unusual family unit, comprising a little old man and a little old woman and a rather peculiar-looking son in his late thirties dressed in a too-small tanktop, who were looking at some jigsaw puzzles. "Buy the baby a jigsaw puzzle, Father," said the little old woman. "I don't want one!" the man in the tanktop yelled very loud. "Here's one with Take That on, look," she persisted. "Go on, Father, buy the baby a jigsaw." "I don't want one!" her son kept yelling. Kevin made a mental note to leave home by the age of thirtyfive at the latest.
  He arsed round a couple more shops, debated whether to get the train into Manchester, decided against it, went and bought some cannabis and caught the bus home. He was certain there were several other things he had intended to buy or do while he was out of the house but now they could wait until his next signing-on day in two weeks' time. Having to come into town every fortnight to sign his name on a piece of paper was in many ways a pain in the arse but, he would say this much for it, it broke the month up nicely.
  Kevin sat on the top deck of the bus and had skinned up by the time he got off. He was mildly worried by the amount and frequency of his cannabis intake. He had a definite psychological dependency exacerbated by the fact that, since he couldn't smoke when his parents were around, he felt compelled to cram as much into his lungs as possible every second he had to himself. Still, it was good to have a hobby. Halfway up the lane home he ducked into the woods and lit up. He looked at the trees and the fields and thought of how the trees had seen the Cavaliers and the Roundheads and would be here after he had gone, and that people came and went but the harvests kept on coming, and similar commonplaces. Somewhat depressed by the banality of his thoughts, he headed for home.
  His mother wasn't in when he got home anyway, but the Happy House man was still there, sitting in the kitchen reading his mother's Bella magazine with his feet on a stool and a contented smile on his face and the remnants of various cups of tea, biscuits, and cigarettes on the table next to him. The dishwasher was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor with various bits hanging off it. At Kevin's entrance, the Happy House man sighed wistfully and turned and gave him a smile full of inner peace.
  "Hiya, mate," he said warmly. "How'd it go?"
  "Okay," said Kevin. "You didn't, er, fix it, then?"
  "Bit of a snag," said the Happy House man. "Problem with the nether-spindle."
  "What sort of problem?"
  "I stood on it," said the Happy House man cheerfully, indicating the nether-spindle lying on the table snapped in two. "Bit of a sickener, really. But I mean, why do they have to make them so fragile? I mean look, look at it, it was asking to be broken. But I daresay Muggins here will get all the blame. Anyway, I can't do anything with your dishwasher until I get a new one. I thought you'd want to hear it from me so I hung around until you came back. I'll be off now," said the Happy House man, gathering up his tool box and preparing to take his leave.
  "Aren't you going to put the dishwasher back?" Kevin asked.
  "Not much point, really, I'd only have to get it out again next time I came. See yer."
  Now there went a man worth emulating.
  Kevin stuck the kettle on, poured a bowl of cornflakes, and settled down at the table. Munching cereal, he pulled The Times over to him. It was his habit while breakfasting to fill in the answers to the easy Times crossword and fill words of an appropriate length into the spaces of the difficult one; left around in conspicuous places, he hoped these would encourage his parents to think of him as a wayward talent that had yet to bear fruit rather than just a vast fucking disappointment and waste of labour pain.
  His breakfast completed, he made a cup of tea and reviewed his options for the day. He had had a strenuous morning and clearly owed it to himself to make the afternoon as gentle as possible. Another joint might be a good place to start.
  He sat outside at the patio table and set to work. The weed he'd bought was a dubious resin fortified with plastic which required a lot of burning and there was a slight breeze which kept extinguishing his lighter and messing with his skins. In the middle of the operation he heard a noise and froze like a rabbit before headlights; a panel of the garden fence had rattled. Maybe it was just the wind, or maybe Mr. Nettleton, his next door neighbour, was on the prowl. Kevin was an exceptionally paranoid skinner-up, knowing his residency in the house would be terminated if he was busted, and had once hurriedly extinguished a joint when a low-flying light aircraft flew over the garden in case it was one of those planes that took pictures of your house and he showed up on the photo when they came round to flog it to his mother. He had good reason to be wary of Nettleton: he was the neighbourhood snoop and self-appointed watchman, a paranoid suburban viper's worst nightmare. A demented ex-headmaster and former Monday Club activist, Nettleton spent a great deal of time peering over the fence and had been known to stand at an upstairs window scoping the area with a pair of binoculars.
  One night the previous summer after his parents had gone to bed Kevin had been spending a happy interlude alternately skinning up in the shed by candlelight and pacing round the garden staring at the stars, when some ominous flashing blue lights had appeared. Nettleton, it transpired, had spotted him and called the police reporting a prowler. The police had roused his parents and conducted a brief torchlit search of the garden; Kevin, trapped outside, had burrowed halfway under the compost heap at the back of the shed in his desperation to conceal himself and had ended up being locked out for the night. Shortly after this Kevin had been in the local shop when Nettleton had rebuked the till girl, a gentle soul of plentiful bosom on whom Kevin had a crush, for an error in his change, and had been so harsh she had started crying. For some weeks afterward Nettleton had been an important outlet for Kevin's creative and destructive energies. His sporadic campaign of juvenile pranks had included phoning Nettleton and heavy-breathing at him and saying stuff like, "I'm watching you, you gorgeous man, I want your arse," sending him a letter purporting to be from the council informing him that he had been selected to take part in a cultural exchange scheme with a family of gypsies who whould be turning up at his place shortly for a two week stay, and, most successfully, moving a sign saying SHOW GARDEN, FREE ADMISSION, CREAM TEAS AVAILABLE from a manor-house up the road to outside Nettleton's gate; Nettleton had returned from walking his dog that Sunday to find his driveway choked with cars and a horde of tweedy botanical fanatics milling round his property criticizing his rather small and crap back garden and asking where the cream teas were.
  Kevin moved to sit with his back to Nettleton, if Nettleton it was, and quickly finished his business. It was starting to drizzle a bit anyway. He took the joint and walked to the derelict electrical sub-station just down the road. He lit up and went inside, startling and being startled by a pair of presumably truant thirteen-year-olds with a porno mag. Even given the embarrassment of the situation, they seemed unduly scared by his appearance. Kevin was aware that among the younger generation of neighbourhood children, those not old enough to remember the days when he used to leave the house quite frequently, he enjoyed a reputation similar to that of Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. They were emboldened, however, by the sight of the joint. The cockier of the two said, "Give us a bit of that, mate."
  "Certainly not, not after where your hands have been. I don't want your juvenile smegma all over it. Now go away or I'll eat you."
  They went away. Kevin leaned against the doorway and smoked his joint. It was heavily overcast now and the view across the fields was perfectly dismal. The cannabis, though, still managed to work at least some of its magic.
  He went home and jellyfished on his bed, unsure if he was happy or depressed. After a while he roused himself enough to put his Abbey Road tape on. Because McCartney, after all, sang it best, summed up his mixed emotions about the terrible beauty of his situation:

Out of college, money spent
See no future, pay no rent
All the money's gone
Nowhere to go

Any job I got the sack
Monday morning, turning back
Yellow lorry slow
Nowhere to go

But, oh, that magic feeling
Nowhere to go!


  But then McCartney had played the Palladium by the time he was Kevin's age. Guy Gibson of the Dam Busters was commanding a squadron. Even Morrissey had left his bedroom by this point, and Johnny Marr didn't bear thinking about. Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Christopher Hampton had had plays in the West End at the age of 21. On the other hand, Tennessee Williams hadn't known success until the age of 34, or 31 when he didn't count the three years he spent working in a shoe warehouse, and Bernard Shaw didn't even get laid until he was 29; but then by Kevin's age they'd almost certainly shown some sign of future achievement more impressive than once nearly having a letter read out by Annie Nightingale.
  Kevin wondered how old he would have to be before he finally lost his vague vestigial hope of one day doing something with his life and whether such terrible self-knowledge would destroy him completely or merely come as a vast relief.
  He took out the application form McReady had given him and filled it out in such a way as to make him seem the least attractive employment proposition possible. Neither McCartney nor Lennon nor Morrissey nor Marr nor Gibson nor Bader nor anyone else of any moment had ever done menial, manual, Manuel-work at a holiday camp in North Wales. Still, he owed it to McReady to make the gesture. McReady was some sort of Trojan fat man fighting the system from within and had given him a break. But instinct told him McReady could only cut him so much slack before someone sour and uptight standing behind McReady did them both in. The reprieve he had been given was a temporary one. Next time or the time after that - and McReady had warned him that his next review would be weeks rather than months away - it would be the gulag for real.
  Things Must Change. Now. Right away. He had the rest of the day ahead of him, and it was the first one of the rest of his life. It must not be allowed to slip fruitlessly and forgettably away as had so many others. He must take action, make plans, get his act together.
  In the event, though, he watched a Launder and Gilliat film on Channel Four, had another joint, and, the rain having stopped, wandered down to see if there was anyone in the pub. Well, there was still plenty of the day left, and it would help to clear his head to think. One drink wouldn't hurt him.




Chapter 3
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