Just another day in paradise

‘Just another day in paradise,’ Hamish hummed as he entered the state-of-the-art council buildings.
With his nose in the air, eyes averting the openly hateful stares of the two receptionists, he walked with the assurance of a despot, smiling inwardly at his conscience.
As head of planning, Hamish had been almost entirely responsible for the design and construction of the £15.5 million monstrosity, which in its first year was voted the second ugliest building in Britain, pipped at the post by Tower House in Colliers Wood.
‘We are the world, we are the children,’ he whistled as he walked towards the lift. Todd from finance waited next to him, but neither man said hello. Hamish sighed dramatically and then continued whistling. ‘We are the ones who make a better day, so let’s start living.’
When the doors opened jauntily (‘teething problems,’ the installers had said), Hamish sauntered in, laughing to himself, but Todd stood still.
The thought of getting into the lift with Hamish made his skin crawl, and as the doors squeaked closed he whispered the word ‘cunt’ under his breath as he half-smiled goodbye to him.
Another challenging day awaited Hamish.
When Tina, his PA noticed him meddling with the Gaggia cappuccino machine, she went to greet him.
‘Morning, Hamish,’ she said, clearing her voice abruptly to interrupt any of his usual remarks about her waistline or dress-sense. ‘Bit of bad news. The Carsley team had another knockback yesterday.’
‘Not again?’ replied Hamish, fiddling with the steam funnel of the machine that makes the milky froth. A few specks of bubbly milk settled on his jacket. ‘I still can’t get the hang of this thing. They make it look so easy in the cafés, don’t they?’
The jacket would have to be dry-cleaned, he decided, reminding himself that there must be at least twenty Sketchley receipts that he could put through to accounts.
‘I received a fax this morning. The family of the little girl who broke her leg in the forest were awarded £52,500, and you know what the insurers said last time.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ replied Hamish, giving up on the froth. ‘We’ll have to find another insurance company soon anyway. Their premiums have shot up since the Taplow case, the greedy bastards. No big deal. Anything else?’
‘Yes, U-Turn, the environmental group you don’t like are suing us over our dealings regarding the dumpings.’
Hamish turned to face Tina with a look of lazy indifference. ‘Bloody U-Turn. Why should I give a flying fuchsia about a bunch of ancient hippies on a power trip?’
‘They’re a bit more than that, Hamish,’ said Tina, raising her eyebrows, ‘their solicitor’s letter’s on your desk. You might want to have a look at it.’
Hamish waddled away with his prized Starbucks mug.
The problem was this; in order to fund the construction of the council’s new buildings between 2005 and 2007, certain measures had had to be taken to save money.
One of these measures was to start charging for white goods and furniture to be taken from the largest council estate in town, the Carsley estate, which housed over five thousand people.
In 2006, Hamish ordered his environmental team to sack the four employees that carried out the task of removing the unwanted household items with a month’s notice. Their vehicles were sold off and the small warehouse that they operated from was put up for rent.
The upshot was that the four men sued the council with the help of U-turn, the environmental group whose letter sat on Hamish’s desk, and were awarded three years’ salary from the council in compensation. Instead of being sold, the vehicles went missing according to the local van dealer who was put in charge of their sale and so they were written off with no further questioning.
The small warehouse was eventually rented to a recycling charity in 2008. Coincidentally, the charity dealt in donated household goods that were sold on to needy families.
Unfortunately, the charity, which had been part-funded by the council, was forced to close for business in July 2010 after the government cuts were rolled out locally.
Today, the warehouse remains empty, the four men are claiming Income Support and the vehicles are still missing.
The really big problem, which seemed to get bigger and bigger as time went by, was how this particular measure, that was projected to save the council a mere £210,000 a year, had impacted on the estate’s residents at the Carsley estate.
After the four men were sacked, back in 2006, a local businessman spotted a gap in the market when the charges were announced and cut a deal with the council to remove household goods form the Carsley estate as long as the council paid him a small fee for each of the items removed, which would have halved the saving the council were making, had the businessman taken anything away.
Alas, even with his reasonable prices, the tenants refused to pay, so the vehicles that he’d bought from a local van dealer, which looked remarkably similar to the council vehicles, were sold off and the business quickly folded.
The residents, whose every penny had a home before they even received it, had their own ideas about how to deal with the situation and set to the task of dumping their white goods and old furniture in the picturesque forest behind the Carsley Estate, which had now, in 2011, become the most picturesque junkyard in the entire world.
After three years of indiscriminate dumping, very serious insurance claims had started to pop up from the families of the children who had always used the forest as their very own playground.
In the last year, four claims had been put through for an enormous £4,700,000. These included one death from chemical poisoning, two cases of tetanus that were misdiagnosed at the local hospital, causing two children to have a total of three limbs amputated, and one death from a single wound to the upper-thigh of a fourteen-year old boy who had snagged himself on the jagged edge of a vandalised dishwasher.
Twelve dogs and six cats had died from unknown causes, while the stream of claims rose every day from new injuries sustained in the forest.
That wasn’t the only problem.
The National Trust, whose land backed onto the forest from the other side, had started to complain that the white goods and gaudy-coloured furnishings could be seen from afar and that the overall appearance of the forest and its environs had become a dreadful blot on the landscape, causing a fall in the number of visitors.
The forest had always been a place for the kids to play. It was their only respite from grey tenements of home.
Now that the white goods had rusted and the furniture had been smashed and burnt, serious allegations as to the children’s health and safety had prompted the leader of the council to call for an investigation.
When the local newspaper made it front-page news, the letters-page of next week was filled with words from angry parents whose children could no longer play in the forest for fear of injury.
Like all deluded heads of department at plush new council offices, Hamish had ignored the problem as much as he could, using his elaborate set of coping mechanisms to deny any wrongdoing and delay reprisals, hoping that a solution would present itself before the whole thing blew up in his face.
After the first claim was awarded in August 2009, the council’s insurers issued new restrictions for cover to remain effective, and ordered the council to build a fence (that would have to be sturdy enough to resist vandalism of any sort) to deter children from playing in the forest if they wished to continue with their policy.
Needless to say, Hamish ordered the construction of a costly fence, which took months to install and proved to be completely inadequate. It was burnt down after only one day of service.
When the insurers heard about the fire, they cancelled their policy and Hamish was forced to erect a ten-foot steel fence with a complex arrangement of CCTV cameras at enormous cost under new restrictions set out by the new insurers, but a day or two after it had finally been done, the cameras were smashed and some local metal workers made three walkways big enough for a double bed to pass through with a torch and some circular saws.
The council’s only remaining option had been to remove the fence and build a reinforced wall of ten foot, the whole cordoning escapade totalling over a million pounds.
In compliance with the wishes of the residents of the estate (and to soften the insurers), a state-of-the-art playground had been built at a cost of £145,000.
The children, clearly upset without their forest, set up a petition for its re-opening, which was backed by Lord Tressell, the owner of the National Trust land, and the local newspaper.
The petition was signed by almost every person in the county and it was whispered that the prime minister wanted his own children to open the forest up as a PR stunt to make jolly the lower end of the voting lot.
Hamish sat at his desk reading the letter from the solicitors of U-Turn, the environmental group; his face growing paler with each revelation discovered.
U-Turn had somehow got their hands on all aspects of the debacle in plain financial terms.
To his horror, it appeared that the £15.5 million he’d spent on the new council buildings was now likely to be surpassed, if not dwarfed, by the resulting costs attached to introducing charges for the removal of white goods and furniture form the Carsley estate.
When he’d finished reading, he looked up and saw Todd standing by the door of his office.
They hadn’t spoken for weeks.
‘It might be a good idea to resign now, Hamish?’ he asked.
Hamish gritted his teeth. ‘Why should I give them the satisfaction?’ he replied.
‘Because you fucked up,’ whispered Todd.
As he said this, Hamish’s intricately devised denial-system fell apart and he found himself slumped in his Milanese swivel chair.
‘Oh, take me back, Todd,’ he beckoned, trying to hold out a hand without looking up.
Todd walked slowly over to Hamish’s desk and stood behind him. He placed a hand on the broken man’s shoulder and knelt down to say something in Hamish’s ear.
‘Go fuck yourself, Hamish.’