Holiday Snaps

HOLIDAY SNAPS

The brass bell didn't used to offend Jamie Roberts. It was fun in a
being-whacky-at-work kind of a way. After a couple of months, he barely
noticed the ringing of the bell and the whooping and clapping in the
open plan office whenever one of his fellow recruitment consultants
made a deal. That had changed recently. When the bell was rung and he
saw the smiley, joyful faces of his colleagues he told himself he
wanted to "end them, right then and there".

Sam, who sat opposite him, hung his tasteless, wanky Burberry trench
coat up and clicked his fingers and pointed at Jamie. "Guess what
happened to me?" said Sam.

"Enlighten me," replied Jamie, who was studying his fantasy football
team. He had named his team "Greed is Good United" and their form was
woeful. Having boasted about studying the Opta form stats of the
players he had purchased at the start of the season, it was humiliating
to be almost bottom of the league table that was blu tacked to the
wall. When the transfer window opened he would have to get rid of the
prima donnas in his squad. The success of his fantasy football team was
the one true thing that Jamie felt passionate about in his life. More
so than the real team he supported, Tottenham Hotspur.

"Are you listening to me?" said Sam.

"No," Jamie answered.

"You're such a dick. Right, guess how I was woken up this
morning?"

"By an alarm clock?"

"You dick."

"Sam, what is this?"

"Think, Jamie."

"I don't know?.Let me?okay?Got it: a Hispanic weightlifter with
piercings named Bubba made you his bitch and you had to give him a rub
down in the shower."

"No, almost though. It was your momma."

"She is shameless."

"The worst."

"Suck a golf ball through a hose pipe, that woman."

Sam walked off.

Jamie could feel himself perspiring. He switched on his fan, setting it
to speed 4. If he was smart, he would tell Joyce he had a touch of flu.
She would forgive him. He was one of the company's star recruitment
consultants. He'd won them contracts with Discovery Channel, Knight
Frank, the BBC. He could go home. But then he predicted what he would
do when he got there. As much as he assured himself he wouldn't, he
knew the coke would come out of the drawer and he'd squat in his
leather and chrome swivel chair, the curtains drawn, listening to Clash
albums and snorting like there was no tomorrow.

He felt rough. He looked at a CV of a media studies graduate from
Middlesex University. In other words, he thought, a moron without any
skills. "Who put this on my desk?" he said, getting angrier the longer
he inspected the document. "Who put this piece of shit on my
desk?"

The office went quiet. Jamie made a paper aeroplane with the CV. "What
am I going to do with an arsehole like this?" he said, launching the
plane towards a recruitment consultant who was new and on a three month
trial. "That's for you," he said, sniffing and rubbing his nose. It was
half eight. He checked his e-mails, immediately regretting what he had
said about the CV. He would speak to the new girl later. He was, in
theory, very busy. But he couldn't bring himself to pick up the phone,
reply to clients, open his post.

A coffee, he said to himself. That was what was needed. But then who
was standing by the kettle?Jeremy. A man besotted by cars. Fucking
cars. Siama and her haircuts. Arnold and his killer halitosis. While
they stood their chatting, coffee was not an option.

He clicked on the Easyjet website. His plan was to sell the flat, the
furniture, hand his notice in and disappear. Prague first, because
there was something about that city that he loved. Then Barcelona. Then
India. He hated hippies, new agers and travellers with their positivity
vibe and India tended to attract a hybrid of all three that forged the
nastiest kind of wanker. And yet the country was different class.
Varanasi in particular, with its funereal pyres, corpses in the river
wrapped in linen, the winding streets and the blokes sauntering up to
you, offering a handshake like they were ambassadors of human kindness
and then trying to con you into a "very good" hand massage or, failing
that, some "very good Manali hashish".

Sam was at the desk, swigging from a bottle of the company's branded
water. "Right," he said, perkily, "I was woken up by Jenny giving me
the most fantastic blow job. Magnificent, it was. I tell you old buddy,
old chum, that is how all men should start their day."

"What," said Jamie, "getting a blow job from your girlfriend?"

"Fuck you," said Sam, switching his computer on.

"Well don't tell me about your bullshit sex life and girlfriend. I'm
not interested."

Sam picked up his phone, flicked a finger at Jamie and said: "You smoke
blokes."

"That's right, because your papa pays a fortune to watch," answered
Jamie, wiping the sweat off his forehead. He always brought some coke
into work. Not too much. Enough to give him that edge when on the
phone, in meetings, a video conference, when doing a fourteen, fifteen
hour day. His personal rule was "never a line before lunch time".
Invariably, he didn't touch any until noon. He looked at the clock at
the bottom right of his computer screen: 8:43.

Fuck this, he thought, rising from his desk, feeling nauseous when he
saw the brass bell on Jeremy's own desk. Jeremy couldn't get enough of
that bell, everyone had to know he had made a deal. He was like a town
crier. The lack of modesty, said Jamie to himself, and the thrill money
gave all of his colleagues was obscene.

Sitting on the lid of the toilet, head in his hands, Jamie thought
about the two newspaper stories that stuck in his memory. The first was
about a man who ran screaming from a house in Cheshire with half of a
broom stick poking out of his backside like a wooden tail. The rectum
was punctured and the man died in hospital. A surgeon at the hospital
had said: "We don't believe he slipped, as he alleged, while using the
broom to gain leverage to open a sky light in his bathroom." It was a
standard tabloid story but, although it was 1986 and Jamie was only
thirteen when he read it, he couldn't figure why the surgeon needed to
say what he did. The guy was, after all, a goner.

Unless the paper had made the quote up.

The second story was from 1993 when he was nineteen. An Oxford
undergraduate, supposedly a mathematics wizard (they were always some
kind of prodigy from the Oxbridge set so as to make the loss extra
tragic for the reader) placed his head on a railway track and was
decapitated by a train. Beside his body, spelt with stones, was the
word: "BORED".

This was around the time Kurt Cobain had blasted his head apart with a
shotgun. Jamie hadn't felt any level of empathy with the deceased. But
of late he had thought about them and the stupidity of what they had
done. People annihilated themselves and that didn't make any sense.
Animals cared for themselves better than people, and when people did
look after themselves, such as the surgeon who was either interviewed
or invented by the hack, there was something mean and cruel - superior
about them.

Tania was in the corridor. She was thirty-two and married to a man who
specialised in monitoring sounds. A soundologist, apparently. Jamie had
slept with Tania when the office had gone go-carting in August. They
had talked in his bed until it was light outside but it wasn't intimate
or a meeting of hearts. All he could remember was she did Pilates twice
a week, she was shy about the three webbed toes on one of her feet and
she hoped to learn to scuba dive. When she told him about the scuba
diving, he had linked it in his mind with her webbed toes. There was no
logical reason, he knew, for that connection.

Tania had wanted to confess to her husband but Jamie just about
persuaded her that such honesty was a misguided notion. As far as he
could tell, no one else knew about the fling. Sam had, however, made a
few saucy, Kenneth Williams style innuendoes.

"You look dreadful," said Tania.

"Thank you," he replied.

"Were you out last night?"

"I stayed in," he said.

"Did you watch Eastenders?"

"No, I didn't."

"Oh, I forget, you don't watch soap operas, do you?"

"I'd rather spoon my eyes from their sockets," he said, rubbing his
nose, sniffing.

They didn't speak for a while, then Tania said: "Would you like to see
my holiday photos, I've brought them in?"

The two of them hadn't discussed the fling since the week it happened.
Seeing photographs of Tania on holiday with her four-year-old daughter
and husband was not overly appealing.

"On second thoughts, I don't suppose you do," said Tania, understanding
his delayed response.

Abruptly, Jamie realised he did want to see her husband and child and
he said: "No, by all means show me them. I'd like to look."

"I'm not sure," she said.

"Yeah, Tania, show me them."

"Jamie."

He poked Tania's arm playfully. "Don't be a wuss," he said.

They went towards her desk. He felt improved. The sweating had stopped.
As had the sickening sensation of an egg in his chest about to hatch.
Now he would see the soundologist in the flesh.

Tania handed him the wallet of photographs.

"Where did you go?" he said.

"Capri," she replied, picking up her telephone and getting involved in
a serious conversation with a client about a temp.

Holiday snaps were a chore. People spent hundreds of pounds on cameras
but the price tag didn't create the talent to take photographs. Tania's
family pictures were like a million others he had seen and therefore
dull. They did seem a happy bunch, though, and Jamie had to suppress a
sentimental craving for a family of his own. The little girl, standing
on the sandy beach was sweet. The husband wasn't the nerd Jamie had
envisaged. Capri appeared pleasant. It had the views, the weather. A
while ago, Jamie had brought his India photos in and had to take having
the piss ripped out of him solidly. The general office verdict was:
"It's a shit hole." He tried to explain there was more to it than that.
But he couldn't convince them, and to his own ears his argument didn't
sound too strong.

Tania was putting on her sarcastic voice to the client on the phone. A
strict no, no.

He visibly jumped as if he was frightened by the photograph of Tania,
in the hotel bedroom, getting screwed by her husband. He didn't know
where to look. Another three photos were of the same subject matter. He
composed himself, had a think, then he grinned at Tania and raised an
eyebrow in the manner of Roger Moore, something he had practised with
discipline to near perfection as a teenager and still used.

He waved a photograph at her to gain her attention, wiggling an
eyebrow. Tania paused, registered what she was seeing and then chucked
the phone like it was burning her hand and lunged across the desk for
her pictures.

Jamie bounced backwards, waving the photo and then dropping all of them
onto the floor. Tania was on her knees, scooping the pictures into the
wallet.

Someone, not Jeremy for once, was ringing the bell.

"FUCK YOU ALL," yelled Jamie, getting his jacket from his chair. "FUCK
YOU AND YOUR MONEY AND YOUR BULLSHIT LIVES."

Sam flicked him the finger.

Jamie left the office. Not speaking to the receptionist and calling the
prospective temps waiting to be interviewed a waste of space. He knew
he didn't mean what he was saying. But then part him did. He couldn't
help himself.

That was the thing. He could not help himself.