Gary Raymond

A Day in the Life of Dermot

My name is Dermot and this is how I sleep: one arm folded to a thirty five degree angle tucked under my temple and upon a thin clean pillow, the other arm is stretched along my ribs to my hip where my hand splays over the hard bubble of joint. My one leg curves lovingly over my duvet, or a woman, or in the winter my dog, Vermin, when I have been unable to pay the gas bill for us and the cold creeps in. (If there is a woman in the winter then Vermin can have the duvet – which is a true sacrifice that he will never fully appreciate as I am allergic as hell to dogs. But some things you don’t do in order for the sacrifice to be lauded.) My other leg is straight, my foot poking uncomfortably between the slats of the bed frame. It echoes a foetal position on one side – which some girls find cute, of course - but on the other side, I seem to be rather at attention. Do I want to return to the womb or join the army? Some things like this bother me from me time to time and I wonder if any scientists would be interested in studying me.

My alarm clock scratches nails down the blackboard of time at seven every weekday morning and I use the snooze button (which stretches the silence for a peculiar choice of nine minute segments) on average six times before I walk to the bathroom with my eyes closed, having carefully tucked the old fella into my boxers should I encounter my flat mate Ralf in the hallway. Ralf works shifts – and drinks in shifts – and I have long ago given up trying to keep up with his sleeping patterns, as has his line manager and his girlfriend, Jannel, who I am to believe has woken up on more than one occasion to find his cock between her breasts. She’s a nice girl but she forgets whose milk is whose and I still am not comfortable with the fact I am thirty in two weeks and the tampons in the bathroom do not belong to my wife. It is like her sanitary products are there specifically to remind me that my life didn’t turn out like I envisaged it when in college studying Geography and taking long walks with Anna Pufferman. In the bathroom I sit on the loo with my eyes closed for about ten minutes but rarely shit, then wipe my arse regardless, wash my hands, brush my teeth – which I hate because mint makes me gag but I appreciate the importance of looking after your teeth, like the lesser of two evils is gagging every morning for five minutes for all your life rather than having to wear these weird little prosthetic pegs in your gob for the last thirty years. I suppose they are the worst years, traditionally, but still I would like them to be as comfortable as possible. Every morning I eat breakfast after brushing my teeth, which I promise to myself to swap around the next day but never do – more chance of swapping the kitchen and the bathroom around. I have toast, which I burn because Ralf normally has used the toaster last and he likes burned toast – the fucking freak, he doesn’t like undercooked chicken or soup with skin on the top – and coffee that tastes different every single day. We have the papers delivered because we both want to believe we have reached a place in our lives where at least one person in the city can do something that we demand – even if it is a fourteen year old boy on a BMX saving up for Glastonbury tickets – but this means I can sit with my burned toast and strawberry cheesecake flavoured coffee reading about how the government is ignoring us, laughing at us, performing sodomitic acts upon each of us without the necessary lubrication, while all the time being reminded that we have it pretty good considering. Today a man has swam one hundred and eighty miles to protest against carbon monoxide emissions. I fail to see the connection and get jam on my tie. As I scrub rather than change I notice that that world is coming to an end from the Middle East out and that Graham Gooch recommends a new hair replacement therapy. I recall in school that the “gooch” was what we called the area of skin between the scrotum and the asshole and this is exactly what the ex-England captain’s scalp now looks like. And that you don’t see many bald Arabs.

To get to my job I have to get a bus from the top from my street that on this day – as on most days – hides around the corner until the rain stops and then chugs up to me with a sarcastic wheeze. The driver even drops the wheels the way he does for old people and the disabled – I wonder briefly which he thinks me to be. I am not allowed to give my fare to the driver as his employers have deemed him so untrustworthy as to separate him from my one pound fifty by a glass cage, but he is fine to drive me around the city like a genetically modified being that was born in a huge crop field of bus drivers and is fine with the laws of the road but if you let him see a shiny little coin he turns into a psychotic maniac. Luckily today I get to sit by a fifteen year old girl whose hair is tied so tightly back into a bun that I can see her liver – she has a baby on her lap that has food so encrusted on its face that skin has began to grow over the crumbs. The girl is probably high and the baby drunk so I use the age old technique of looking straight ahead and thank the God of public transport that at least I am not sat next to the pissy old man who fought the war for my sort and was rewarded with a weak bladder, big brown facial spots and an anaemic pension. I wonder briefly if you encounter old men like this on German buses. People get on the bus and off the bus in the same place everyday – sometimes I like to get off two stops late just to emphasise my rebellion toward this tepid zombie like existence I have been shoehorned into. The one stop before the secondary school a ginger girl gets on who looks like she might be some kind of low rank junior manager – she is pointy of the face and very tightly buttoned and every time she gets on I look at the back of her head and think about doing her from behind. Because of this I know that if she ever sat facing me I would probably shit. I wonder briefly if this is because I have a fetish for junior management rather than prissy tightly buttoned catholic looking ginger girls.

For work – to earn a living – for a career – to pay the bills, rent, buy cheese and milk for Jannel, I sit at a desk in a corner I have earned where no one can see my screen and even though us sad little proles are not allowed to have internet access in rather the same way that Communist China does not trust its children I recently found out what my line manager’s password is so not only can I read the paper on line and keep up with the footy scores but I have recently been surfing child porn sites in the hope of completely fucking up his life when they randomly check to see what sites he has been looking at with his log-on ID. Some people – and this counts for ALL lower management of corporations – need moments like this in their lives just to be shown that weekly stats are no reason to walk that fast across the floor of an open plan office. The main task I have responsibility for involves taking a pile of applications for finance and inputting all the corresponding data onto a computer system which then comes back and tells me… anyway, it really doesn’t fucking matter because I know for a fact that labour on a Gulag must have been more rewarding. At least if you are cutting down trees in Siberia you have a pile of wood in the snow to show for it. All I have is a wage that pretty much spells out in numerical code on the last day of every month: “FUCKING LOSER!” while my bank manager throws all kinds of credit offers at me like a slathering pimp who prefers to kick the shit out of people than benefit from his whore’s tricks. Everywhere I turn in this life people are pretending that they are helping me out. My company really thinks I am benefiting from being part of a team, three of which I swear are still virgins, two work late every night because their husbands either a) beat them or b) bore them, and my manager who (unbeknownst to him) is a closet paedo. Then you have the banks that just want to wear your skin they want to be so far up your rectum, the bus driver who snarls at me when I don’t thank him – making me forget that I paid for the scabby shitty ride in the first place – anyway, this is drifting from the notes. This is not about my life – this is about the thousands upon thousands of identical days that make it up.

At about half nine I go for a shit. I rarely need one but occasionally my head is awoken from the pillow I make from the toilet role holder on the wall next to the shitter by an almighty biological eruption that catches me as unawares as were the residents of Pompeii. But on the whole I manage to get about seven to eight minutes sleep before people start to wonder if I’ve done a Dave. Dave was the guy on the complaints handling team that went for a shit one day a few years ago and never came back. There were rumours of a Reggie Perrin, rumours that he fell down the toilet but I still think it is more of a Tron thing and he’s still fighting some horrible virus dressed in blue fluorescent tubing trying to get out of his own complaints database.

I try and hang on till half past ten for my first cigarette break but am normally hanging around by Maggie’s desk by quarter past. Maggie is a proper friend that I knew before life took over, and like me she is far too good for this shit hole and is just using it as a stop gap while she figures out what she really wants to do with her life which will probably involve building orphanages in Burkina Faso or inventing a new type of stop cock. Can’t help it, just always tend to think of cock whenever I think of Maggie. She is funny, really great looking in a proper classic way, dark curly hair like Merle Oberon (after I found out Merle Oberon was a woman but before she died before I was born – if you see what I mean) and breasts that Hannibal would have settled on. So we spend ten minutes stood in the car park ignoring the fact that we do less work for our sins. I actually didn’t smoke before I started working here but the proposition of refereeing a race between death and my retirement age was too tempting – if smoking crack would get me out of that building for ten minutes a day I could have signed up with Sly and the Family Stone by now as on tour skag bag man. Maggie always says something that makes me laugh out loud later on in the day when I am back at my desk and today it is a comment she says about that guy who sung Aint No Sunshine When She’s Gone, a microwave and a duck. Fucking classic.

Back at my desk my manager, Tony the scrote as we all affectionately call him, who is twelve next birthday and has more spots than a Frenchman’s arse, hair too greasy to clean the toilets of a Hamburg brothel and a nervous twitch that guarantees he will never get laid in his life – or at least finish off – well, he normally comes over to tell me I’ve barely been at my desk all morning and I normally make up some story about having to talk to Amos in accounts about an IS54EQ – Tony knows no one in accounts, probably couldn’t even find the office, would never know that Amos is the name of the broken air conditioning unit in the accounts office and that an IS54EQ is actually the license plate of his own Citroen Spree. As he mumbles something I snigger slightly thinking about the ferret raping website he doesn’t know he’s just ordered a bondage catalogue from.

So, I can only admit that the amount of work I actually do of a morning is far smaller than what is recorded on my stats sheet – but if you do a job like this for long enough there are many ways that you can avoid doing work whilst clearing piles of it at the same time – and most of these ways involve a subtlety that would have most middle management sat in a dark room sucking on thumbs as they crumble under the desperate realisation that everything they stand for means nothing and can be fabricated by a college dropout who still occasionally masturbates watching Top of the Pops on UK Gold. The ultimate fob had to be the guy who knows a guy in some department who was fired when it was discovered that for six months he had been hiding his work in the air conditioning unit behind his desk. Simple but quite brilliant if inevitably short term. Other techniques can range from the low-brow (making all stats sheets illegible so that when the line manager gets round to checking them four or five days after they should have done they are too embarrassed to come back and ask you what each hieroglyph means), the high-brow (designing your own stats sheet that is more cost effective and innovative and introducing it at the next team meeting, convincing the line-manager that this will improve the stats and thus his career opportunities when all along you have created a fool proof fob sheet that means nothing other than that you are a fobbing genius) or the mystical (getting a gypsy witch to cast a spell on the stats sheet that creates the illusion to all management that they have been filled in when in fact they are blank).

So having received my daily e-mail incantation from gypsywitch.org/statssheetspell/html, I lock my monitor and head for the canteen that has a remarkable resemblance to the mess hall in MASH due to the bizarre green décor and wooden benches that were no doubt nabbed from a local closing grammar school. The selection of culinary delights is spine tingling, to say the least. I usually find myself going through the same process every day – the length of the queue to the “hot” food counter sends me first to the fridge where I look at the sandwiches each one straining to be more exotic that the last (Asparagus and duck, Brie and Penguin liver, Diced artichokes and the webbed musings of a Renaissance philosopher and so on) I almost always decide against it on the grounds that the term “pre-packed sandwich” fails to specify which paleontological era the embalming of the goods actually preceded – examining the queue once more I brandish my ubiquitous brown tray like a highlander squaring up to the redcoats and join the long tired queue – the first third of which fall into a sausage meat processor and are used to feed the following two-thirds. In the end the low dirge that is hummed forth by the queue destroys all reluctance in my soul and I end up paying four pound fifty for something that has been lazily labelled “lasagne” which appears to be nothing more than ketchup spread between two small pieces of balsa wood topped with packet cream-cheese. It tastes better than it sounds when covered in enough salt to give an elephant asthma – I am slightly annoyed that Maggie has had a jacket potato which comes from a small counter in the far corner that I always forget exists until I sit down with Maggie. I wonder for a moment if I have some kind of brain retardation brought on by years of cerebral neglect brought on by years of societal down-grinding brought on by years of a youthful and innocent disinterest in education and activism. But thoughts like this depress me as I can only look forward to complete mind oblivion and premature dementia that will blissfully cloak me in ignorance – similar to the state of mind as Neil in IT. It is round about the penultimate mouthful that it occurs to me that I am one mouthful of ketchup balsa wood from having to go back to my desk and sink into the deep irreversible stodginess of the afternoon shift. There is no let up from this. It is the ultimate hell for the end of the day seems to get further from you rather than closer as physics once promised were the laws of the man made universe. Added to this is cruellest jibe of all – the pub is now open and non-alcoholics can drink in them without fear. I wonder if Maggie would like to go for a pint after work as we often do but she has a date with some guy from Fasttrack and this is the first time that Maggie fails to amuse me and instead I see a bright and luminous being release her final sprouting of light turn a dour shade of brown as she settles into the rest of her life. Even if I am to be here until the walls come tumbling down, I have promised myself to never stop fooling myself into thinking that my potential has something other in store for me. I shall never give up. As a true believe that the dreams are always far more fun than the achievement of dreams I am more than happy to live my life this way.

Now it is important to remember that I was a staggeringly average student in a pretty good secondary modern which would place me above average for may age group in my area and yet I am a white-collar drone who has nothing whatsoever to look forward to other than the weekend which invariably, but for the few hours of drunkenness on the Friday night, is filled with the cloud of dread that is the coming Monday stood there on the horizon, red-eyed and hissing like one of those less creditable Hammer vampires. Anybody who enjoys his or her work, or has the brain muteness that has been installed into our education with the veracity of a Reichean indoctrination programme, will not know how dreadful this existence really is. It is this dreadful for many reasons not least because it moves so slowly through your life as to render all sense of fun meaningless. Imagine how unfathomable being a character in a Bosch painting is, then move it from beyond unfathomable to somewhere else where unfathomable is an academic subject under review – remembering all along that to be an inhabitant of Hell a la Hieronymus Bosch’s vision you must have had to go through some kind of vetting process, had an evaluation of events and decisions taken in your life, maybe even some demon remembers your name, and not in any single painting – of which he made hundreds – will you find an out tray or a file with a stats sheets in it. I wonder why there is a train of thought throughout our society that wants to make me feel guilty for failing to be inspired by my life. Hell must be relative otherwise I would own Celine Dion albums and get up early enough on a Sunday to watch Countryfile. I think of the relativity of hell as I go for a cigarette and pass a fat grey haired man in a grey suit and a policeman entering Tony the scrote’s office. It’s unlikely they are couriers for the Bondage Catalogue Company.

Maggie is already outside talking to who I assume is Some Guy from Fasttrack. She looks very different. She is attentive and totally bereft of that sassiness that marks her out from the crowd. She introduces me to Mr Fasttrack who I immediately dislike and not because he is obviously intimidatingly handsome and intelligent but who is clearly one of those types that really will move on from his stop-gap job and build an orphanage in Burkina Faso or invent a new kind of stop cock. And he’s taller then me and has no stain on his tie. I drag my cigarette out in two and go back to my desk and google image Merle Oberon.

Tony the scrote looks is even more pale than usual, I notice through the window to his office. Perhaps the day is not such a waste after all. I wonder if I should own up, tell them that it was a joke and that I will hand in my resignation, go travelling around Mexico, write a book, marry a petite cotton picker from Tijuana with a scar on her belly, apologise to the scrote as he aint really all that bad just a nervous little man who is the most pathetic creation of and awful victim of Thatcher’s radio-politico half-life. But I’m one of them, too, regardless of my unique understanding of my situation and use the opportunity to have a round of Corey Pavin’s Virtuo Crazy Golf on-line as the grey suited grey haired man leads the scrote away in handcuffs leaving the uniformed copper to wrap his computer up in plastic.

The hands on the clock trickle round to five o’clock like a fourteen year old feeling his way up some girl’s summer dress knee, and I watch it angrily – angry at me, angry at Maggie for betraying our unsaid pact, angry at something as blameless as time – and am out of the building and standing by the bus stop by five to five. It is difficult to describe how a place can be so fucking mind-numbing that a grown man would prefer to leave five minutes early to stand for ten minutes in the rain rather than leave on time to stand for five minutes in the rain. I wonder for a minute if this is some loud gazing sign of senility or perhaps a mild social madness that will slowly have all the working classes queuing for days in the rain as open plan offices sit as empty as all the churches. They say that pandemics, for all the destruction, are like human forest fires and that without the odd bubonic bout we will all end up eating each other’s babies and living in each other’s sock drawers. I may be paraphrasing there but it was in the New Scientist or something or another periodical I have only ever heard of and never actually seen on a newsagent shelf.

To my joy and happiness I am sat next to the pissy old man who fought the war for my sort who seems to just round-trip on this route all day because I can’t think of anything at the top end of town that would be of interest to him unless he has a fascination with carpet factories or dog pounds. I have the suspicion that he just does it in order to come into contact every day with people that owe him something but I have to remind myself that I would probably have been born regardless of his actions even if I would have blonde and speaking German wearing Hugo Boss uniforms drinking Fanta Orange all day long. I want to tell him that I agree and that I’m grateful for his efforts and that I would feel the same way were the tables turned but I am all too aware that I am fighting my own war here and now and that I am staring defeat right in the face – what can I offer the next generation if a day like this is all they have to look forward to?

I get off the bus one stop early thanking the pissy old man for his gamely aroma and generousness with his spittle and promise him that if any wars should crop up that would be overwhelmingly beneficial to bitter retired train drivers who smell of urine I will be the first in line with a rifle strapped to my back.

The mundanity of my life is put on hold for a few hours every day when I sit in the pub and do the first six or seven clues of the crossword, talk to some people who I have seen every day for the last ten years but whose surnames I have never had any reason to ask, neck about for or five pints and go home round the corner with that lovely frothy haze all around me that is created by the voodoo magic of early beer. The pub is a dark old wooden building that has been comically developed around and today reminds me for some reason of the pissy old man surrounded by the shiny sour faced kids who seem to convulse when they walk and blurt out words from pursed offended faces. It is the perfect pub to do a crossword, the perfect pub to wash away the day because time does not exist in there – and that’s what I’ve been after for a while now. There is something quietly beautiful rather than tragic about the drinking working man as though we all know this is how the bastards keep us under foot but really we realise we have it alright whereas all the bosses will burn in hell – it’s about dignity and self-respect and to the drinking working man the bosses, the government, the non-drinking classes, have none of this. They are empty craven nobodies without any spiritual awareness that will die in their pinstriped suits. And they are welcome to it, because nothing they do has any worth to humanity beyond the immediate whereas we know where we stand and it is a dignified place.

As I walk in the house Ralf is sat bollock naked at the bottom of the stares struggling to remove the only garment still models, his steel toe-capped boots. He sees me and screams that he was shat on by a seagull which I find hard to believe seeing as we have a distinction to the habits of seagulls in that do not live by the coast but he is adamant that it was a seagull and I see no reason why the type of bird should be important. He is a very angry tall thin muscular bearded man sat naked on the stares trying to get his boots off – and is also making me wonder if I once saw this exact scene in a Peckinpah Western. I just walk past him to the kitchen where Jannel is sat with a cup of milk and a cheese sandwich. She wants nothing to do with what she curiously calls Ralf’s “scatological ornithological adventures” as it is a result of him being shit-faced drunk and has allowed him to sit on the stairs naked fighting with his boots for some forty minutes now. I stop myself from suggesting to Jannel that for all of her hatred of men it is quite difficult to credit a man with enticing excrement from a bird’s arse, regardless of how much booze he has imbibed before hand. I get a can of lager from the fridge, which is not usual, as I prefer to drink in the pub to keep at arms length any drink problem I may have that the excuse of youth is slowly leaving me to have to deal with. I toy with the idea of sitting with Jannel for a moment but she is clearly in one of her man hating moods which, unfortunately, is almost always abated with the boorish window rattling sound of her orgasm just as I am about to fall asleep in the adjacent room. It really is all too hideous to contemplate but this is my life – I didn’t choose it but I did very little to fight it off and as they say there is just as much evil in the ignoring of the creeping of evil – or something like that.

Cold Pizza for dinner on my chest on my bed listening to Sonny Boy Williamson and reading Albert Camus but nothing goes in as I’m drunk now and for some reason my thoughts keep drifting to Maggie and Mr Fasttrack. Probably fast tracking her right now. Soon I am curled in usual position wondering whether to regress to the womb or seriously join the army.

This story was originally published in Beat magazine, December 2006