Alan is an Ambulance!

People are very careless when they want to be.
Take Alan, a friend who works hard and likes a bargain.
I needed his help to get my two-piece aluminium ladder back to another friend’s workshop, where they could be stored until someone miraculously needed some outside-work doing.
I said he could borrow them whenever he wanted if he’d just take them back to the workshop for me, but he wanted to buy them, and said he’d give me twenty quid.
‘Come off it, mate. They’re a hundred and fifty new,’ I barked back.
‘Yeah, but you made the mistake of telling me what you paid for them,’ he replied.
I’d found them at a garage sale in Surrey.
‘Yeah, but if I bought some shares and they grew in value…’
‘Twenty quid, take it or leave it.’
‘Thirty’s a giveaway.’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Go on then.’
So he came over to pick them up from my last job. The clients had taken pity on me as I was down on my luck and had had to sell my car to keep going. They’d given me two weeks to remove them from the garden and it was the last day.
Alan arrived looking pretty pleased with himself.
He’d bought a van a few weeks back and so I asked him how much he paid, knowing how he likes a bargain.
‘He wanted a thousand quid for it so I offered him six hundred. Got it for five-sixty in the end,’ he said, loading my lovely ladders onto the roof to bolt them down.
I couldn’t work out how he’d managed to shave another forty quid off the bloke, but that’s Alan for you.
‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ I said. ‘How many miles it done?’
I peered into the dash and found that it had done a trifling one hundred and thirty thousand.
‘Bloody bargain,’ I said.
He smiled in the way you do when you’re about to be very careless indeed, when you think you’re untouchable.
‘It’s a waiting game, Dicky boy,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is wait till you find someone desperate enough. There’s always someone who needs the money the same day as it’s advertised. I just pounce like a tiger.’
I thought about the ladders, and wondered whether it had crossed his mind that he’d just pounced on me like a tiger. I thought not, such is the power of denial.
Twenty-five quid, I thought, adding up what I’d do with it; Roll-ups for two days, Oyster card top-up for three, one decent sandwich, a takeaway cappuccino, a Grab Bag of cheese and onion crisps, and one pint of premium lager for later. Gone. Basta. End of.
He told me about the bloke who’d sold him the van, a gardener who’d bought it as a second van for his apprentice. He’d wanted to expand, thinking work was picking up.
When it didn’t, he had to sack the apprentice and parked the van in his mother’s drive, but it blocked the light in the living-room and she wanted it gone, pronto.
It had been there for far too long already.
Just as he could sense the desperate plight of the gardener, he knew that the same predicament had fallen on me. I had nowhere to put the ladders and now he could gobble them up from me.
I was desperate and, even when he was my friend, he still couldn’t see how insensitive he was being.
He then told me that he’d just come back from Hull, where he’d found someone desperate enough to sell a three-piece set of ladders of the exact same make as mine. He liked aluminium because they didn’t rust easily and were easy to move about, being light in weight.
I asked him how much he’d got them for.
‘Forty quid for the ladders and sixty quid in diesel. The van purred all the way. Four hundred and sixty miles round trip.’
The bloke in Hull had folded his business. Too many Poles, apparently, even in Hull. Another victim to be sucked dry.
Alan liked Poles. They were cheap, hardworking and easy to manipulate, especially on payday, when he’d invent a whole host of excuses about the client not paying up, to which they’d nod hopelessly.
It was all part of the learning process for them, he reckoned.
Alan beamed a smile to show how clever and shrewd he was.
‘Three hundred quid new, those three-pieces are,’ he said, tightening my two-piece on the roof.
So now he had the complete set.
I wondered why a carpenter like him needed ladders at all, and then I remembered that he’d come along with me to see a job I’d quoted in Barnes. I’d taken him along to quote on replacing some sills that had too much rot to repair. He’d got on with the client, a very picky English lady (the sort I don’t really get on with), and I realised that he’d probably gone back there and hacked my price down to get the whole job. He liked painting from time to time. Good for the soul, he reckoned.
‘There’s always someone prepared to sell for rock-bottom, Dicky boy. All you have to do is wait for the right moment.’ Like butter never melted.
I should have smacked him there and then, just to wake him up, bring him back to the real world, but he’s a judo whiz. There was also the fact that he’d lend them back to me for a job, if I asked nicely.
‘Yeah, you’re spot on. It’s all about timing,’ I said.
With the ladders secured, he came back down and gave me the money.
‘There you go, mate.’
‘Cheers, Al.’
Business is business.
‘Let’s go out for a drink some time, you know, when..’
‘I know, when I’ve got some bloody money.’
That song came to mind. ‘You can’t jive with no money, so take your broke ass home.’
We shook hands, as friends do when a deal’s taken place, and then he headed off. He was right; the van purred.
I walked off in the opposite direction and felt the money in my broke-ass pocket.
A sandwich, fags, cappuccino; big deal.
As I was feeling the cold hard cash, I heard a loud bang and turned around and up at the end of the road there was Alan’s van, snarled up.
I ran back to help.
Somehow, he’d failed to turn the corner and gone through the iron railings of a Georgian house. The van was stuck halfway down to the basement, at forty-five degrees, and the ladders had snagged on the sill of the ground floor living-room’s window, ripping the recently installed roof-rails clean off.
‘Are you alright?’ I said, climbing across the snarled up railings to get to him.
He was sat there, dazed. ‘The steering just went. Oh shit, I’m bleeding.’
There was a small gash on his forehead. Nothing life-threatening.
I knew he was already counting the cost, which was immeasurably greater than the amount he’d saved using desperate people to get what he wanted, because he kept swearing and gasping.
‘Call me an ambulance, will you, mate?’ he said, with his head in his hands. The van juddered and creaked down some more until it reached as far as it could go. Alan’s bewildered facial expressions were priceless. Each contortion wreaked of doomed desperation as the van fell further into the darkened yard.
I’d always wanted to say this joke ever since I’d heard it at school.
So I did. I just couldn’t resist. The ladders were fucked anyway, so I could never borrow them back from him, even if I’d asked properly.
Looking into his eyes, I held my breath and relished my moment.
‘Alan is an ambulance! Alan is an ambulance! Alan is an ambulance!’ I shouted, like a toe-rag in a playground.
He didn’t find the joke at all funny. Pinching his bloodied lips, he looked like he was going to kill me, so I ran away laughing my head off.
I got my sandwich and sat down to eat at my favourite bench. It tasted very nice.