A Smaller Hell Read online

  ‘They cost more than your house. You did that on purpose,’ she raged as I walked to the bus stop, shards of polycarbonate in my sole scraping the pavement with each step.

  ‘Sorry,’ I shouted over my shoulder as I boarded the bus back into town.

  Walking from the bus stop, I came across a tyre-fitting garage advertising part-time work via a hand-painted sign on their gates. I wandered up the steep incline, past the rubber graveyard and the treadless corpses piled high in the corner, past a few dirty looks and into the huge corrugated iron shed. Men wheeled tyres in and out of the building while they clamped their cigarettes between their teeth and spoke to each other in a language that sounded Russian to me.

  Inside the giant corrugated shed was another shed, built entirely of wood and inside sat a balding man in his thirties with a white shirt and square glasses. Even he was smoking as he held the phone between his shoulder and chin and flipped through piles of documents on his desk.

  ‘What you want?’ he asked as I lifted my hand to knock on his door.

  ‘I’m here about the part-time work.’

  ‘You work in tyres before?’

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Garage?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fix your car?’

  ‘I don’t have a car,’ I said. ‘But I have a licence.’

  ‘Let me see,’ the man said, putting out his cigarette.

  ‘I don’t have it with me.’

  ‘I think you find work someplace else, my friend,’ he said, putting another cigarette in his mouth and closing the plywood door in my face.

  I got back to my boarded-up house and set about making myself comfortable. I started by heating a pot of water over the fire and having a stand-up bath before the freezing night air started blowing through the cracks in the window frames. Once I’d dressed again, I heated up a tin of curry, eating it with some naan bread toasted over the fire, the spice of the food creeping into my stiff bones as I reclined on my puffer jacket.

  Chewing the final mouthful, I heard the front gate to the house creak open and footsteps walk up to the front door. I tried not to make any sound as I reached for the table leg and walked into the hallway, trying not to slip on the piles of ancient flyers for taxis, takeaways and escort services. Whoever was delivering this latest one must have been tall, because it came sliding through the crack at the very top of the board and tumbled on to the pile like a dead oak leaf. The gate creaked again and the heavy footsteps faded back down the street, so I picked up the flyer and took it into the parlour to read it by the fire.

  Temporary Christmas staff required for Tanner’s busiest time of the year.

  No qualifications or department store experience necessary.

  All applicants considered.

  Wide range of positions available.

  I checked my watch and ventured back out into the cold dusk to make a phone call from the booth outside The Captain’s Rest, a derelict pub near the river. The vast wastelands stretched like fields of illuminated amber under the streetlights, beyond which I could see the odd light in a window or two on the estate in the distance. I folded up the flyer and stuffed it in the pocket of my reefer jacket until I reached the phone box. It stood alone and illuminated, blushing a flaky shade of red and pink as if embarrassed by its spray-painted panes of glass, rusty hinges and the dandelions growing inside it.

  I opened the door and picked up the receiver with two gloved fingers, trying to avoid the patches of dried bodily fluid. I paid the tariff, dialed the number on the flyer and waited for an answer.

  Good afternoon Tanner’s Department Store how may we help you?

  ‘I’m calling about temp work over Christmas.’

  Hold the line please.

  Something moving about under the bridge way down the street.

  A squeal of tyres in the distance.

  Hello? May I take your name?

  I thought about hanging up.

  Your name?

  ‘Tony Black,’ I replied.

  Please hold the line.

  Shouting from the amber meadows by the estate. An old tyre up in flames.

  Several shadows coming this way from under the bridge.

  ‘Hurry up,’ I whispered away from the mouthpiece.

  Please report to Ms. Doyle’s office at 11 a.m.

  ‘Thank you bye,’ I said and hung up. The rusty hinges of the phone box squeaked loudly, causing all the shadows under the bridge to break into a run towards me. My trainers were light and almost silent as I took off running down the labyrinth of alleyways and backstreets to shake off my pursuers before I went back to the house.

  Pipe Smoker

  The following morning, I caught the bus back to the village charity shop to see if I could find a shirt, suit and tie for the interview, but it was closed. Up at the other end of the village high street, I found another, from which I bought a whole outfit for ten pounds. It was no Hugo Boss and it fit my pocket better than it fit me, but it was better than the jeans which were covered in oily mud from the puddles I’d splashed through the night before. She wished me luck as I ran out of the shop to catch the bus to the department store.

  On the way, I looked up from the left-behind newspaper and sniffed the air, trying to work out what the guy was smoking. He sat two rows ahead on the left side of the bus, fumbling in the pockets of his dirty jacket every five minutes to produce a small glass pipe, but I could distinguish no smell above the bus' bouquet of black smoke, oil, urine and vomit. His swift capping of the pipe with the lighter after smoking made it all the more difficult to work out. He was amazingly adept at hiding his habit even in the condensated quarters of a crowded bus.

  No-one cared enough to risk becoming a statistic.

  I looked at the newspaper on the vacant seat next to me and saw a sketch of my own face: Police want to question this man in connection with a murder. I was already nervous about the job interview and reading the article made me feel as if I couldn’t breathe properly.

  I put down the newspaper and took the flyer from my pocket to read it once more before I arrived at my stop.

  Temporary Christmas staff required for Tanner’s Department Store’s busiest time of the year.

  No qualifications necessary.

  All applicants considered.

  Wide range of positions available.

  I smoothed down the unruly lapels of the suit and loosened my tie before I was startled by the sound of breaking glass. I looked up to see the pipe smoker clutching his chest, the shattered pipe crunching under his staggering feet and drool spilling from his blue lips. He was trying to ask other passengers for help, but no-one would oblige. After a few seconds, he collapsed on to his back in the aisle.

  And still no-one came to his aid.

  They looked at him like he was getting what he deserved.

  I crouched down next to him and began CPR, the other passengers staring down at me out of the corners of their eyes.

  Fly in the Ointment

  The building was foreboding in a traditional, conservative way. Everything looked very clean and sparkly inside, whereas outside, detritus thrived and multiplied throughout the course of the day, like bacteria in a paved, illuminated petri dish. Observing the shoppers and the natives, it was easy to tell one from the other. It was tattooed into their faces, sometimes literally. There were subtle differences between the crackheads and the smackheads, the boozehounds and the pill-poppers, the jailbirds and the veterans. The shoppers were a different species altogether, armed with their 4x4s, credit cards and anti-depressants, they stormed through the town, taking whatever they wanted before returning to the safety of their gated driveways in the suburbs.

  I stopped at the main entrance of the store and looked up at the pale stone giant with square hulking shoulders and a tiny head. The automatic doors slid open and I was invited into the belly of the giant by the familiar refrains of an old Christmas number one, a galaxy of twinkling lights and the perfume counter, att
ended by assistants with rouged cheekbones, perfect hair and a catalogue of disapproving glances.

  The glare of the store lights and the tidiness of it all made me sweat. Goods were arranged in glass cabinets as if they were important and ancient artifacts. I was a spanner in the golden machine that sparkled and hummed before my eyes with its cogs and gears of baubles, trinkets, clothes and toys stretching as far as the eye could see.

  I followed the path in a circle back to the Cosmetics department.

  ‘Hello, I wonder if you could tell me where Miss Doyle's office is?’ I asked.

  ‘It's MZZ Doyle,’ she said, unwilling to disturb her high cheekbones to return the smile.

  ‘I'm here for an interview and I've no idea where I'm going.’

  ‘I don't know why you're bothering: you wouldn’t survive a day here.’

  The girl from the Chanel counter must have detected blood in the air because she came from the other end of the counter to join in. ‘Would you like me to call you a cab, sir?’ she stage-whispered.

  The pair of them downturned their smiles and tucked in their chins in mock sympathy as I walked away, somewhat bewildered. I followed the yellow brick road round towards Haberdashery, where I met Miss Allister for the first time.

  The department was a wasteland compared to Menswear and Cosmetics, its only occupants being the two elderly women working there. One looked considerably softer and frailer than the other, who resembled the angular, upright caricatures of Nazi officers I'd seen in old war films. The softer woman sank into one of the nylon, cotton, button-strewn recesses of the department and out of sight, leaving me with the harsh-looking sales assistant.

  Upon seeing me, the Nazi officer smiled so broadly that I thought her paper-thin, powdered skin might rip.

  ‘I'm here for an interview with Ms. Doyle and I'm not sure where to find her. Can you tell me where her office is?’

  The old woman stopped smiling, struggling to contain her contempt as she looked me up and down. ‘Who turns up for an interview looking like this?’

  ‘Erm …’

  ‘How old are you, urchin?’

  ‘30.’

  She was picking at my suit with her long, pearly claws, tutting all the while. She smelled like hairspray, perfume and death. When my answer registered, her eyebrows raised, revealing her antique eye sockets.

  ‘Well, no wonder you're still jobless. You can't even keep your breakfast off your lapels.’

  She licked her hanky with her lizard widow tongue and began wiping off the crusty stain. It only occurred to me after she began ablutions that it was most likely vomit or mucus belonging to the pipe-smoker on the bus. She licked the same spot on her handkerchief and resumed.

  ‘Erm, sorry but I don't think that's, erm …’

  ‘My name is not Erm. Call me Miss Allister from now on.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Allister.’

  She finished off the last of the puke and turned her attention to my hair. What I thought was a smile at first turned out to be a wince.

  ‘Well, I haven't got all morning. At least now you have a fighting chance. Perhaps if by some miracle you succeed in your interview, we might get you a jacket that fits and a shirt that isn’t made of plastic.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Allister.’

  She stared at me for a few seconds then asked me to smile.

  ‘Hmmm. Good luck. You’re going to need it.’

  Miss Allister pointed to the small brushed steel lift doors marked Staff Only.

  Venetian Tombstone

  Like a stinking portal between cause and effect, success and failure, hope and despair, the waiting room was like every other I’d ever been in: drained of blood and tainted with body odour. The cheap Venetian blinds let in some of the grey light which danced on the dull, carpeted floor, refracted by the water cooler. There were two others waiting, one reading a book, the other doing the thing with her phone that people do when they want to avoid talking to anyone. Neither of them had really acknowledged me as I walked in, although the girl reading the book offered me a faint smile as I sat down. Neither of them seemed particularly nervous either. I’d never been so nervous about a job interview, but then I’d never been a fugitive, either. I also never thought that I would be hanging everything on Christmas temping at a department store. The porcelain foreheads of the other applicants seemed untroubled as I wiped away the beads of sweat from my own.

  I didn't even want the job at this point. It was all a dreadful mistake and I wanted to go home. Confusion and panic rushed from my feet to my hairline like an army of prickly insects scaling my body. My vision began to close in from the edges as I looked around for a window to open, but they were all beyond my reach. Who the hell would be tall enough to open those?

  I felt the eyes of the two candidates upon me as I stood on a plastic chair, trying to open the window, desperate for air. Reaching up for the handle, my shirt stuck to my back with cold sweat. The wintry sun, hanging low in the eastern sky, dazzled me through the slits in the blinds and suddenly black coffee and orange juice lurched up through my oesophagus as my ears began ringing. With an aluminium death rattle, I fell into blackness under the sad eyes of the porcelain onlookers; plastic carpet the soil of my grave, a broken Venetian blind my tombstone.

  The Wolves

  The cracked earth beneath my backside was still warm and dusty from the heat of the day's sun. In the moonlight, the network of small crevices in the earth appeared vast, containing all manner of scuttling and slithering things. Shuffling closer to the dying embers of the fire, I was careful not to hitch up the hem of my white robes around my backside, which would have given the poisonous creatures ready access to the fleshiest parts of my anatomy.

  I poured myself some more coffee from the pot hanging over the fire, wrapping my hands around the cup to fend off the cold wind that was howling around the desert. Something caught my eye, glistening on the trunk of the gnarled tree just beyond the light of the fire. I fashioned a torch from a branch in the firewood pile and crept over to the tree to investigate.

  Nailed to the bark I found photographs of various people who had come to visit me at my desert home. In some of the pictures, they were standing with one arm around me, smiling: in others, they were sat cross-legged by the fire, raising their cups of coffee to the camera.

  There was a photo of Simon, my old school friend with a cruel speech impediment, a blustery temper and an amazing vocabulary of swear words. We were both wearing camo t-shirts, sitting atop our BMX bikes, and our smiles were bigger than our faces, our hairstyles a combination of hair gel, mud and twigs. I remembered Simon's temper serving us whenever we would get picked on by the older boys. He would always stick up for me, never shrinking from an injustice. Although we probably took more beatings than we had to, we were still smiling and took no guff from anyone, especially Simon, because he was going to be a bawwister when he grew up.

  Next to Simon, there was Peter, who used to wear patches on the elbows of his blazer and, rather than going out at break times, would stay in the classroom and practise his Latin verb tenses. I chose the less constructive occupation of doodling on my textbooks. We learnt a lot from each other about survival. I learnt from Pete that if you managed to catch the six to seven minute window about forty minutes after the first bell at the dinner hall, you stood a good chance of getting your tray back to your table with most of your lunch still on it.

  Beneath a picture of my parents visiting me in this desolate place, I found pictures of friends from the boxing club. My old sparring partner and I were posing, pretending to uppercut each other, as boxers tend to do in photographs.

  The warm nostalgia was interrupted by a sound from the darkness. The embers of the fire provided little light, so I held the burning branch of firewood aloft to investigate the low-pitched, bone-shaking rumble. A pair of almond yellow eyes caught the flame from the torch, and began moving towards me.

  Then the darkness growled from the other direction.

&nb
sp; Turning around and raising the torch, I saw another shape moving closer. There were at least four that I could make out. I looked to the tree to see the photographs of my saviours blowing away in the wind.

  Having thrown the torch aside, I ran headlong into the darkness at the closest wolf, yelling and punching as hard as I could. The other shapes ran off back into the desert. There was yelping, thudding and gasping before finally, the creature was motionless. I picked up my torch to examine my kill and discovered to my horror that the animal was no more than a pup.

  I cradled his lifeless neck until the last embers died in the fire-pit, overcome by an inextinguishable emptiness.

  When I came round from my blackout, there was a cool, soft hand on my forehead. The porcelain young woman who had been reading the book was now fully animated, and her eyes were no longer beads of black. They caught the offending sun in them before glimmering green and hazel back at me. She had dropped her book on the floor, picked me up and sat me in a chair. I thought of the boxing club and the relief that came with the bell signifying the end of the round. The tiny wooden stool that was more comfortable than a bed. Her gentle voice and her sweet smell were as welcome as the icy sponge on my sizzling skin between rounds.

  She held my bleeding hand in hers and inspected it carefully. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘I may throw up.’

  Resting my hand on my knee, she fetched me a paper cup of water from the cooler. Producing a fresh tissue from her pocket, she dabbed at my injury.

  The other girl paid only token gestures of concern and resumed her phone gambit once responsibility had been shrugged off.

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘No, no. I think it’s just lack of sleep and nerves,’ I said and swallowed to stave off another balk. ‘I really need this job.’