Twitter and Bisted

I had two work-related calls for the first time in hell knows today.

I was at a charity shop in Fulham, stoned, rummaging lazily through CDs and books, killing time without a dime.

‘Hello,’ said the private caller. ‘Is that Redburn and Penny?’

‘Well, erm,’ I replied. ‘Actually, the business doesn’t exist any more but I’m Rich..’

She hung up and I immediately felt like an idiot.
My first enquiry of the season and I’d fluffed my lines.

It was true that the company had ceased to exist two Decembers ago, when work dried up in the bitter winter and the economy twisted its melon.

I conceded that I’d dealt with the call badly. I should have played the whole thing down, let her do the talking, but I was too busy being paranoid, imagining that the dole people were checking up on me to find out if I was taking jobs on the side.
Whichever way I looked at it, I’d fluffed it.

I thought of the huge job I’d surely missed out on, the mountains of work, the one big deal that would see me off the dole and back into a flat.
Angry and hurting, I decided to ease the pain by imagining that the woman was probably just another penny-pinching, Pole-seeking, paper-pushing pilferer, a time-wasting bargain-hunter in search of a quote to make a dodgy insurance claim with.

I let it go, promising myself that when another call came in, I’d be all ears.

I didn’t have to wait long.

The call came in the afternoon as I was carefully wiling away more time at the library to hunt down a cheap car on the internet.

I ran outside to take it and tripped up on the lip of a badly laid mat at the door, banging my head on its thick glass.

‘Hello,’ said a woman with a very deep voice. ‘Is that Redburn and Penny? I need a quote for painting my walls.’

She seemed to be laughing at something.

‘Oh, Ok,’ I replied, rubbing my head better, looking for blood.

‘Do you think you could come and do my walls, then?’ she went on. ‘I’m so desperate to have them painted. It’s been such a long time.’
I could hear someone in the background trying to stifle a sman without much luck.

‘What sort of walls are we talking? Inside or out?’ I asked, scratching the surface of the enquiry, keeping it professional, but these few select words made her chunder with laughter.

‘Oh, they’re definitely inside walls, my love. I really want them painted. They need a good lick all over,’ she said, before bursting into uncontrollable laughter.

‘So this is a crank call, right?’ I said. I’d finally got the joke.

‘No, ‘course not,’ she replied. ‘I really want you to come and paint my walls for me. I’m desperate!’

I’d had enough so I hung up.
The world seemed paved in shit.

Across the road, an altercation had erupted between an old man and a parking warden.

‘Thirty pounds, sir,’ said the warden, walking away from the stick-wielding gentleman. ‘If you pay in the next fourteen days.’

‘You’re a crook, a vulture, a ghost,’ replied the old man.
He was clearly beside himself with anger but all the warden could muster was an upheld hand.
The ticket had been issued. He’d got what he wanted.

It was all too much for the old man to handle, though, and he went to ground with a weak thud.

I ran over to him and saw that his head was bleeding slightly, so I asked if I could look in his car for something to put against the wound.
He mumbled ‘yes’ so I rummaged around and found a cushion, for his head to rest on, and a handkerchief and a scarf to tie around his head.

As I returned to the old man lying on the pavement, I noticed a policeman running frantically towards us.
He must have seen me with my legs out rummaging in the car like a tea leaf with the old man knocked out. He’d thought the worst.

‘Hold it right there!’ he shouted, still running towards us, pulling out something from a pocket.

When he got to us, I was busy wrapping the scarf over the hanky, in place upon the wound.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the policeman.

‘He fell over and smashed his head. What do you think I’m doing?’ I replied. Surely it was obvious enough.

‘Why were you in the car?’ he barked, CS gas in hand.

‘I was getting these,’ I said, pointing at my haul.
‘Now would you please call an ambulance.’

Finally, he clicked back into the closest form of reality he could find in his numb skull and reached for his phone.

‘Thank you,’ I said, tending to the old man.

‘There’s no need to be facetious,’ said the policeman, waiting for an answer on his phone, looking important. ‘And why have you got that bump on your forehead?’

‘If you must know, I smashed it on the library door.’

Taking a quick look at him, I noticed that he was a PCO. It wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t been trained up properly.
Once the PCO got off the phone, he calmed down.

‘I thought he was being robbed,’ he admitted.

‘He was,’ I replied, ‘by a parking warden.’

‘What?’ said the PCO. ‘Are you suggesting that a parking attendant robbed this man? That’s a pretty serious allegation, sir.’

‘I was joking,’ I said. ‘He got a ticket. Get it?’

The plump PCO was amazingly thick so I started talking to the old man again.

When the ambulance arrived, I saw the old man off and the PCO locked the car.

I walked back to the library and found a Fiesta for a hundred quid on Gumtree, so I went back outside to call and see if it was still for sale.

‘Have you still got the Fiesta?’

‘No, it’s gone.’
He hung up before I could say ‘thanks anyway’.

Meanwhile, the parking warden had crept back to the old man’s car and was happily issuing another ticket.
I shouted over to him.

‘He’s been taken to hospital, mate,’ I said, ‘fainted from talking to you when you gave him the last ticket, but don’t lose any sleep over it.’

The parking warden gave me a little look and slowly put his paraphernalia away. He would let this one go.

As he started walking away, I couldn’t resist.

‘You’re a crook, a vulture, a ghost and a parasite!’

All he could muster was the lazy hand up without looking back.