Now, Ambler is a mystery to me. I can’t work out what he does and I can’t work out how he does it. I don’t know why he’s allowed to do it here. I find it hard to believe he can breathe unassisted. Sometimes I see him sitting on the floor and I wonder when he’s going to fall off it. I watch. And he does. He loses balance, he flails around and somehow ends up on something higher up. He can’t even obey gravity. And I’m told he’s the company safety official.
So he’s standing at my bench. And my bench is on fire. The flames, the flammable chemicals, the grinder and its razor-sharp cutting disk skittering around his ankles – all of this, or should I say none of this, matters to him. He doesn’t do ‘mattered’ because he doesn’t do abstract thought. He doesn’t wear safety goggles, either. It hasn’t occurred to him that a shard of metal skewering him in the eye might hurt. He just stands, watching the fire spread, watching me banging at the window and (almost) wondering what all the fuss is about.
There’s a vinyl disc playing – ‘Twenty White-Power Hammond Greats’, squawking from a tinny speaker buried somewhere in the great morass of spilt paint and charring debris.
I’m shouldering the door, kicking at the protruding part of the obstruction with my steel toecaps. But it’s the bottom of the door that gives in first. There’s a splintering crack and I’m in. I haven’t time to think and Ambler isn’t going to do it for me, so I dash forward and grab a fire extinguisher. There’s smoke, shouting, swearing, and I’m spraying like Neptune at a porno shoot. Water everywhere. The grinder shorts and I’m lucky not to get electrocuted. And finally, when the fire’s out, I spray Ambler. And I don’t stop until the extinguisher’s empty. And he just mewls over the wreckage of the whatever-it-is he was making.
Everything’s quiet now, save for the drip, drip, dripping and the soft splash of our work boots. And he turns to me, sooty-faced and sopping, squelching forward like a proud parent cradling some unidentifiable baby in his arms.
“Spice rack,” he says. Moron.
Now, what would life be without cruelty, irony and good things happening to bad people? I don’t know. Ask God. You pray hard enough, maybe he’ll take enough time off from wanking up tsunamis to answer you. I doubt it, though, so here’s my own little parable: The Story Of The Camel And The Erection.
Historically, people have taken their names from the things they do, sell, kill, kill for money or kill for money and then sell. With this is mind, it is entirely possible for a man whose ancestors traded hump-backed livestock in the Middle East to be called Bactrian. Or even Dromedary. And it’s not impossible to imagine later generations of folk with these camel-based names forming a humorous internet group. And it’s all such fun that they arrange to meet. And then they get drunk and they sleep with each other. Commit that to memory.
Now, Adrian Dromedary is a noxious specimen with a fat face and engorged cherub-cheeks crazed with a Rorschach pattern of burst blood vessels. Buckteeth? He’s got ’em. And bulging piggy eyes jutting from the collage of zoological atrocities he calls his head. His overall expression? Like he’s sucking on a rancid citrus fruit. Probably one of Richard Gifford’s.
More of a bipedal hippo than a man, he lives for the satiating of his baser urges. I’m talking food and ‘specialist’ magazines and taking an unhealthy interest in what the mailman might bring in a discreetly wrapped bundle. So you can imagine his surprise when Posty delivers an elegantly typed communication informing him that his entire life is a lie. His camel classification is wrong. His mother was a Dromedary all right, butMr Dromedary, never existed. He’s the bastard son of the late Lord Annadin Bactrian and half-brother to surfacing turd of politics, Humboldt.
So Dromedary’s been growing increasingly tired of his life of solitude and self-abuse. And his current profession just isn’t supplying those feelings of God-like omnipotence he’s after. Okay, his little, printed ladyfriends give him some sense of control but not as much as, say, firing off a .45 calibre pistol in a crowded restaurant. Or anywhere really, providing people die and he might feel like a man for once. So, we can say this letter is pretty well timed.
And so our bulbous friend takes himself off to the will reading, poised taut in some oak-panelled annexe of the Bactrian estate with a mercenary expression creeping over those already alarming features of his. The room’s packed with dozens of bastard progeny, evidence of His Lordship’s little extramarital sojourns and the sex games he liked to play with a turkey baster. But, by all accounts, it seems Dromedary was the first little bastard to shoot wombward from The Right Honourable’s testicles, so the cash gets carved up between him and the legitimate Humboldt – which is far more than any bastard has the right to expect. He walks away with enough money to buy Birmingham. Not only that, but his windfall gains him the friendship and sincere affection of his new half-brother. Well, you win some, you lose some.
Now, as I’ve said, Dromedary is an unpleasant, antisocial man with a bulk that can best be described as… well, terrifying. He’s a beast of the field in a suit. But, like the leech, he has his uses. He’s got brains. He’s also got a head for figures – both numerical and feminine – his days spent on stocks and shares and his evenings on stockings and shaven ravers, intimate evenings making papier-mâché with page twenty-two. These twin lusts have always driven him. Now he can consummate fiscal and physical conjugation in his own business. But what should this company do? And, more importantly, how can he get a lay out of it? Because big brains don’t always mean big ideas and Dromedary hasn’t had an idea in his life. Fortunately, his new brother is just packed with ideas – and they’re all Grade A filth.
So he’s at the Old Soaks’ Gentlemen’s Club, in Westminster, an austere establishment full of desiccated and depraved old geezers. Contrary to what you might think, women are allowed entrance but the house takes a percentage of their earnings. And to facilitate transactions of this type, the foundations conceal a little know extension of the London Underground subway system that goes direct to Soho and Dirtygirl Street.
So there’s many options available to members: you can sit back in a booth and eat rich food until you get gout; you can lie back in a leather armchair and drink brandy until you die; or you can participate in any number of orgies with the aforementioned ladies of the Soho district until you get gonorrhoea. The beauty of this last option is that sharing one’s paid companion with the other members of the club means infection for one is infection for all, which fosters a marvellous sense of community.
As a guest, Dromedary’s barred from the inner sanctums of the club, especially the notorious ‘Bodily’ Function Room. So he sits with Bactrian in an oak construction carved by Freemasons to look like a onion. The politician claps him on the back, calls him ‘Brother dear’, ruffles his hair, even. Then he’s pressing a glass the size of child’s head into his mitt and it’s gratefully accepted. And I can’t think why, in Hell’s name, Bactrian would want to talk to Dromedary, given as he’s taken half his inheritance. Or, perhaps, that’s exactly the reason? Or maybe he’s just a lonely, isolated drunk with no close family and no one to mourn him when he dies? And, after many, many refills, at least four bottles of God-knows-what and with the bodyguard on a toilet break, he leans in and beckons Dromedary close.