Daniel and the Wine Stain

A short story by Fletcher Kovich

 

Four weeks ago, Daniel began working as a junior officer in the Human Resources department of Stoke City Council. It was his first job. Gail Harris sat opposite him and seemed to be the source of the office’s sunlight—for an intangible energy seemed to radiate from her and warm the atmosphere for a fifteen yard radius. Gail was twenty four and always wore bright colours—with lipstick to match, which on her seemed to work, since she also wore a glowing, child-like complexion which gave her the appearance of an eight-year-old girl who was forever emerging from her mother’s bedroom modelling an experimental selection from her mother’s wardrobe and makeup box. In Daniel’s first three weeks she had regaled him with stories of her cat’s digestive problems, a list of her top five most weirdest boyfriends, and the tale of her last three disastrous hair cuts, at which point she lifted her wig to prove that her beautiful blond curls were “manufactured in an Indonesian sweatshop” as she put it. And in less trivial moments, she had casually but expertly tarnished the reputation of “Nipple-face”, which was her usual nickname for Wendy Jenkins, their office manager. Wendy sat in the corner of the office, about twenty yards from Daniel and beyond the reach of Gail’s radiance.

Daniel had been assessing a job application from a disabled candidate, and, with his eyebrows raised, he typed his conclusion: “The candidate seems to fulfil all requirements and would make a valuable contribution.” He was about to close the form when he noticed the words changing on his screen. His comment transformed into: “The candidate seems too fat and would require an equally large amount of retraining before she could make any contribution,” and then the form closed by itself.

Daniel’s eyebrows dropped and his mouth hung open. He tapped his screen and asked Gail: “Are you sh—— sh—— sure you’ve not had this problem?”

Throughout his childhood, Daniel had suffered from a stammer, which had been absent for several years but during the previous week had started to return.

When he had explosively shouted: “sure”, Gail had jumped. She said, “Daniel, I’ve told you before, if you can’t get the words out, just send me a message on my screen.”

He looked at her purple top and matching lipstick and she was that eight-year-old girl emerging from her mother’s bedroom. As she glanced at him, the twinkle in her eye seemed to say: You and I know that I’m really a girl; keep my secret from all the others, Daniel; it will be our secret; look at what fun we’re having, deceiving them all. He could forgive her anything, forgive the fact that she did not understand the torment within him, had no idea of the turmoil of his schoolboy years which had triggered his stammer, nor that his worst nightmare had returned only the previous week—yes, there was no way that she could understand the way he felt at that time, yet whenever he saw her, he found himself forgetting all his woes with a smile. She fixed him with her twinkle, as if bestowing a sprinkling of angel dust upon him, then returned to watching her screen, telling him:

“And speaking of dry rot,” which he wasn’t, but she was not one for allowing such niceties to pose an obstacle to the spilling out of her bustling scuffle of thoughts—like a drunken mob evicted from a pub—into the office ether, to there circulate as a happy virus would, passing from person to person, sometimes with only a few seconds life but at other times living for months and months and sometimes even for years, all the while mutating into ever more virulent forms and eventually seeming to have taken on a vibrant life of malice which was apparently of its own invention and was certainly beyond the comprehension of—and at that stage even beyond the knowledge of—the innocently rambling mind that had so effortlessly given it birth in the first place. Such was the power the Gail’s utterances.

“And speaking of dry rot,” said Gail, “Geek-hair is smugging it around the office today.” (Geek-hair was her term of endearment for Raymond, the Network Administrator.) “Just look at him,” she continued, all the while her fingers dancing on her keyboard, as if her work were nothing more than an aerobic workout for her hands. “Just look at him—he thinks he’s so pleased with himself. Well, I don’t think his hair’s a mess, even if he does. Just look at him, creeping from table to table with that stupid walk of his. Well, he can think what he likes, but I know he started to mess his hair up on purpose, just to mock my wig,” tap, tap, tap. “I don’t care what Nigela said. Anyway, she only said that because she’s on the warpath with me. And all because she took my comment the wrong way,” tap, tap, tap. “I simply said her earrings were nice, which they were, but she thought they were cheap, so I said, ‘Well, why did you wear them, then?’ and she said they were all she had and I shouldn’t look down on her for that, and I said I wasn’t, and she said she knew I was lying because she could see it in my face; and why was I such a cow to her? And I said I wasn’t a cow and she said I was and now she’s on the warpath and that’s why she said Raymond’s hair had always been a mess,” tap, tap, tap. “But I know she’s lying—it’s quite obvious he’s messing his hair up just to mock my wig, since he’s only just started doing it since he thought I was making a pass at him last week and he snubbed me. Ha!—me making a pass at him; he should be so lucky!” tap, tap, tap, thump.

She paused her typing for a moment. “And I’ll tell you another thing, Daniel,” she said, then fixed him with her child-like gaze and sagely informed him: “He’s as sly as dry rot, that one.”

For the moment, Daniel had forgotten his own concerns. He looked back to his screen and felt as though he were sinking back down into a quagmire. He had been given the task of assessing job applications from disabled candidates, but since then the database had developed the curious tendency of spontaneously transforming the entries on any application form he opened, so as to reject the candidate. He thought about Nipple-face, who seemed to keep hovering over him, whispering strange comments to him, which he could never quite understand the purpose of, except to realize that she was obviously “on the warpath”, as Gail had put it on several occasions, and on one of those occasions she had then sagaciously informed him that—if he were asking her, which he wasn’t, but if he were, she would say that—he had gone too far the previous week when he had stood up to Nipple-face; though—she had told him—he was rather impressive; when she had paused—which was quite rare for her—and had watched him for a moment, meaningfully, which meaning he had misunderstood to be alluding to the great peril he was under, being a “combatant” of Wendy “Nippo” Jenkins, their nipple-faced office manger who whispered her attacks to her victims in such a way as to leave them clueless as to the nature of her attack, but in no doubt that they were most definitely under attack.

Yes, Nipple-face had it in for him and was hovering over him, waiting for any mistake she could pounce upon, and at the same time, every application form he opened seemed to adopt a mind of its own, and that mind was bent on self destruction, as though his computer screen had become the chosen cliff-face for a lemming happy-hour and the application forms were cleverly disguised lemmings.

Daniel looked up at Gail, whose fingers were happily dancing on her keyboard as she recited the spectacle of her previous night’s date, recited to no-one in particular, as far as Daniel could tell, for no-one seemed to be listening to her and she did not seem to be addressing anyone in particular. He thought about repeating his last question to her, but he could still feel the repressive pressure he had felt within him as he had attempted to pronounce the word “sure”, so he typed a message to Gail:

“So the answers no is it?”

Gail’s monologue stopped mid-sentence and she looked up at Daniel as though stunned, and perhaps a little afraid. He thought he could detect a blush on her child-like cheeks. She said, in a lowered voice, “This is out of the blue.” She watched him for a moment longer and then even her fingers stopped typing.

Daniel, weighed down by the memory of his childhood traumas, and now also by the whispered attacks of his office manager, started to say, “This p—— pro——” but the words seemed too heavy, as though they were great boulders that he could not move, and all he could do was nod towards his computer screen.

Gail said, “There’s no rush; take your time,” and her fingers resumed their aerobic workout. “—I’ll get back to you. But in the meantime, I’ll just tell you what Nippo said to Nigela this morning. I couldn’t believe it. I know we’re always fighting, me and Nigela, but she’s my best friend. Do you hear that, Nigela, my best friend. Well, Nippo only went and whispered to her about the size of her ears. Said one was bigger than the other,” tap, tap, tap. “Well, we can all see that, but there’s no need to point it out. And the way Nippo whispers about it, seems to make it worse. If she’d just come out and say it, it wouldn’t be so bad. The woman needs a damn good— good— masculine intervention,” wink, wink; “that’s what she needs. Come to think of it, that’s just what I need. How about you, Daniel? Whoops, I didn’t mean you and me having a damn good masculine intervention, though I’m not saying it would be unpleasant. I might even enjoy it,” tap, tap, tap. “Yes, you never know, and you wouldn’t have to speak much, so you needn’t worry about your speech problem—except to tell me how lovely I am, something like, ‘Oh, Gail, you’re beautiful, oh, oh, how have I lived without you all this time?’ Or perhaps that might be going too far; yes, perhaps just something like: ‘Oh, Gail; oh, Gail,’ Yes, that’s all you’d have to say and I’m sure you could manage that, when the moment came. What do you think, Daniel. Whoops. Did I just say all this out loud; I didn’t realize I was speaking. Ha! God, that’s funny; my mouth volume was switched on and I didn’t even know it. Nigela!—what’s the shortcut for ‘normal’ format again?”

Nigela said, without looking up from her screen, “I’m not telling you until you apologize.”

“For what?”

“You know for what.”

“No, I don’t.”

Nigela simply said, “Huh!” and carried on with her work.

 Daniel had returned his attention to his own screen and was again wrestling with another “lemming” application form. The candidate’s qualifications, while Daniel read them on his screen, seemed to transform from glowing jewels into the rotten teeth of a cackling, aged tramp. He overlooked the rotten teeth, imagining them a mirage induced by the terrific pressure that now seemed to be permanently bearing down on him, and he had just finished typing his summary: “Ms Stewart has demonstrated outstanding skills in all the appropriate areas and was very personable at interview,” when he noticed his own words transforming on the screen, as though the database knew his thoughts better than him and were kindly editing his words to read: “Ms Stewart has demoralized her astounding skirt by appropriating areas of it to store perishable vegetables, which might account for her smell.” And before he could take in the meaning of his own bizarre summary, the form had saved itself and closed.

Daniel watched his blank screen, stunned.

Gail said, “Did I tell you about Jack?—the one who was playing with my hair when I woke up one night—that was before I had my wig, of course. Well, I turned to him and he said, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ then he turned over to go back to sleep. I said, ‘Who did you think it was?’ and he said, ‘Never mind,’ and I said, ‘Did you think it was someone else?’ and he said—wait for this, Daniel; this is so funny—he said, ‘No, I thought you were a broom.’” She paused her typing for a moment and said, “And the funny thing was, he was obsessed with housework.” She stared into the distance for a moment and then her fingers resumed their aerobic workout as she told Daniel, “Don’t know what made me think of that—probably Nippo. I don’t think she has any hairs in those warts, but it won’t be long before they sprout hairs, if you ask me.”

Which, of course, he was not. No, Daniel had no room in his troubled mind for such concerns. The problem of whether or not Wendy Jenkins’ facial warts sprouted hairs had never once crossed his mind. But as for the warts themselves, that was another matter. Though, it is possible that if Gail had not so expertly highlighted Wendy’s warts, then Daniel may not have even noticed them, but now, whenever he looked at Wendy or even simply heard her name, all he could see in his mind were those two nodules of rebellious skin, sitting there on her face like carelessly placed nipples. Thanks to Gail, Wendy was now defined by her warts—and since Daniel’s “outburst” of the previous week, those warts had come to cast a sinister shadow over his desk.

Throughout the first two weeks, Gail had painted a picture of Wendy the whispering manipulator—who wore nipples like other women wore makeup. On one occasion, after Gail had depicted the agony her cat had endured the previous night when a bunch of her newly-fitted hair extensions had fallen into the omelette she had hurriedly made but had had no time to eat due to her already being fifty minutes late for a date, so she had left it aside and returned later only to find that her cat had taken a fancy to the omelette and was then in the throws of a near-death experience whilst it danced around her kitchen in its last desperate attempts to expel the said hair extensions from its throat; after she had depicted this delightful scene of domestic cabaret—tap, tap, tap—she glanced sideway at Wendy and said, “It makes me shudder whenever I think of those facial nipples. It’s not normal. I bet she doesn’t have any nipples further down,” tap, tap, tap. “No wonder she can’t get a boyfriend—they like that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?” asked Nigela, who had only just put her phone down.

“Nipples,” Gail told her, tap, tap, tap. “—As long as they’re in the right place, that is.”

Nigela asked Daniel, “What’s she talking about now?”

Daniel had opened another application form and had begun wrestling with a new set of electronic lemmings. He glanced up at Nigela, considered—what seemed to him like—the mountainous task of relating Gail’s last few comments, which he had only half heard, anyway; and he decided to simply shrug in reply.

In the first two weeks of his employment,  he had often found himself wanting to laugh out loud at “Gail’s Tales” (as the other girls in the office fondly referred to them), but some painful memories from his own childhood had often seemed to stifle his laughter, and he found himself torn between his attraction to Gail, his unease about her condemnation of Wendy Jenkins—apparently simply for having facial warts—and the distasteful image in his own mind of Wendy “Nipple-face” Jenkins, which he could not now escape.

At the start of the third week (before those lemming-inclined application forms had began flooding the database), a curious sequence of events had began. Daniel was walking across an office that opened onto the Council’s reception area, when he heard a sound that filled him with dread. It was a short scraping sound followed by a creak, which then repeated again and again—scrape, creak, scrape, creak—and each repetition seemed to further drain the colour from his face. In his mind he could see his crippled father walking—scrape, creak, scrape, creak. The sound stopped, Daniel looked up, and across the office he could see his father stood at the reception desk, collecting an application form. Daniel made a rapid exit and sought ten minutes refuge in the toilet before returning to his desk, possibly more disabled by what he had seen than his father had ever considered himself to be. And when Daniel next attempted to speak, he found that his own emotional disability had surfaced in the form of his childhood stammer.

Daniel’s childhood memories were dominated by his parents’ disabilities. From as early as he could remember, his father had worn a hollow, steel left leg, whose chime Daniel had at first found entertaining but later his memory of that sound would come to haunt him. His father transported himself in an outdated “invalid carriage”, as they called them in those days, and in Daniel’s later school years, when he had come to wear his family identity like a leper’s sore on his chest which must be kept concealed at all times, he came to hate the sight of that carriage, which, in his eyes, only served to broadcast the fact that his father was a cripple and thereby amplify his torment at school, as if his father were colluding with his tormentors. And Daniel’s mother had been equally blessed with ripe pickings for the schoolboy satirists. From birth, one half of her face had been adorned with a port-wine stain whose shape seemed to map some desert island which no man would ever visit voluntarily. At school, two of his best friends mined all this material mercilessly, producing satirical gems that openly delighted the idle crowds of break-time schoolchildren and, despite themselves, secretly amused a handful of the less sensitive teachers. Their most popular routine was to act out a particular scene, which became ever more exaggerated the more they repeated it, where Daniel’s father would limp into view carrying a glass of red wine. He would then trip and spill his wine over his wife’s face, and her anger would cause the wind to suddenly change direction, leaving her face stained for life.

It was throughout this period that Daniel developed his stammer, which grew in severity as each school term progressed, as if each lesson he learnt added weight to some invisible veil that was slowly suffocating him and which his speech found harder and harder to penetrate. His growing discomfort was not without its benefits though, as—on days when it seemed that the satirists had wrung every snigger of life from their sketches—Daniel’s stammer could always be relied upon to inspire a brilliant new walk-on role for his satirized self; and month after month their performances would stir up a storm of delight which would eventually drive Daniel into complete isolation. He broke off his friendship with the satirists and also with every member of their audience, and in his solitude he became the brightest pupil in the school and escaped to university, where he continued his conquest of academia. When asked about his family, he did not mind telling his new friends that he was an orphan, for he knew how hard they would need to study and he kindly decided to spare them the effort of having to invent sketch after sketch depicting the comical spectacle of his upbringing. Yes, he spared them that effort, and in this new spirit of generosity he found that his speech had become clear and fluent, as though some great weight had been lifted from his heart. He graduated with first class honours and some six months later found himself working in his first job, which, by an unkind twist of fate, happened to be back in his home town of Stoke.

He took lodgings within walking distance of the Town Hall, which was miles away from his parents’ home and, he supposed, beyond the range of the satirists’ barbs. For the first two days of his work, his veins seemed to pump a curious cocktail of excitement and foreboding, but after the third morning, he found that his speech was still clear and fluent and he felt only the excitement, which lasted until the start of the third week when he had heard that old familiar scrape, creak, scrape, creak, and  the foreboding returned in floods, as if he had suddenly recalled a blood-curdling nightmare from the night before which had lain dormant at the back of his mind.

Daniel returned to his desk, accompanied by the horror that he thought he had escaped. It seemed to be engulfing him, like a malicious, invisible cloud that clung to his outline and could not be shaken off—as though an impish child had draped over him a cloak woven from fear.

Gail told him, without looking up, “When I grow my hair back, my luck should improve. I think there must be something genetically wrong with men who are attracted to bald women,” tap, tap. “One day science will find the answer,” tap, tap, “and be able to genetically modify them,” tap, tap, tap. “Now that I think about it, that last one must have shared the genetic makeup of a basset hound,” tap, tap. “When he kissed me, it was like a dog lapping up water—and he had such big ears!” tap, tap, “Oh! sorry, Nigela; I wasn’t talking about you,” tap, tap, tap, pause. “Daniel, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Is it something you’ve eaten?”

Daniel tried to say, “I’m alright,” but he could not seem to force out the first syllable; it lay upon his tongue like an animal scared.

Gail said, “You look ill. You should go home.”

For the following hour, Daniel worked in silence. He was afraid to try to speak, lest he found he was unable to and his disability provided Gail with material for a future episode of Gail’s Tales. For the moment, at least, he wanted to hold on to his affection for her, to enjoy this feeling, before he was robbed of it by her satirical instinct, which, he thought, she would surely be unable to resist. And then he found Wendy standing over him and leaning close to him to whisper something. He glanced up at her and his eyes were drawn to her two warts. This was all he could see, as though someone were holding a magnifying glass before his face and the glass were trained on her warts, which, he thought, he could now definitely confirm, did not have hairs.

She whispered, “I have a relative who’s disabled. He walks with a limp.”

Daniel could not believe his ears. Her words held his attention as the headlights of a speeding car might hypnotize an unsuspecting child who had strayed into the road.

She continued, still whispering: “In fact, it’s my father who’s disabled. But I don’t tell anyone about it,” and she waited for a response from Daniel, but he remained transfixed by her warts—or by those fast approaching headlights.

She whispered, “What do you think I should feel about that?” and she watched the startled, dumb-struck child who simply sat there, motionless, as though he had been faced with the evidence of a lie that he could not manoeuvre his way out of and the inquisition was assembled before him, demanding his explanation: “What do you say to that, Daniel. Come on, what do you think I should feel?” and Daniel was, indeed, back in childhood; he was stood in the playground at school, watching the satirists latest production and it seemed as though the whole world were weighing down on him and crippling his faculty of speech; he could feel all the words that he wanted to say, or that he should say, but they were buried beneath this great weight, beyond his reach, helpless, trapped—as that startled child was trapped in those glaring headlights, or as a wild rabbit might be trapped in a snare that had been expertly laid in the path of its play by some human adult with grown-up intentions, with their own agenda to satisfy, their own survival to fight for, and that adult had stood over him, whispering her trap, whispering her own satirical production. “Daniel,” she whispered, quietly but expertly, as a hunter stalks a timid bird who could bolt at any moment, “Daniel, tell me, do tell me; what do you think about that?”

Daniel looked up into her face and his mind was filled with those two defining features of hers and he had to shift the great, suffocating weight that was still pressing down, heavier and heavier, onto all those words that were dying within him and needed to be said; if ever he was going to breathe again, they needed to be said, and he stood up and shouted, “Get your warts out of my face!”

Mary Jenkins, also now startled, said, “My what?”

“Your warts!”

“What——?”

“You’ve got warts! Haven’t you noticed?”

Shell-shocked and pale, she withdrew and wandered back to her desk in an apparent daze. The whole office remained hushed for several minutes, as though Daniel’s words had, indeed, shaken the fabric of the office as the shockwave of a bombshell would have done.

For the following two days, Wendy hardly left her desk. She sat there, doodling on her notepad, watching her screen, watching the ceiling, and at other times sitting with her eyes closed and her brow furrowed as if an army of thoughts were parading through her mind and she had to sit patiently until the last straggling foot soldier had passed before her, which he seemed to have done by the morning of the third day when a cloud had then seemed to suddenly lift from above her desk as Raymond, the Network Administrator, entered the room and sat beside her. For two hours he worked at her computer while she listened intently to his every word, as though he were revealing to her the secret entry code to the doors of paradise.

Gail could keep quiet no longer. “Just look at them,” she told Daniel, tap, tap, tap; “they make the perfect couple.”

Daniel looked over at Raymond as he sat there instructing Wendy. Raymond kept playing with his hair, which was sticking up like a roughly hewn hedge of golden hay, as if he were constructing some strange form in his hair that no-one but he could understand. Wendy glanced at his construction, examined it curiously for a few seconds, then smiled. This was more than Gail could bear; she went on: “I can just imagine them in bed. He’ll be lying above her and his geeky hair will be hanging down and covering her facial nipples, so they’ll both be happy,” tap, tap, tap. “Just look at him now,” tap, tap, tap. “He’s telling her what he’ll do to her in bed. That’s why she’s smirking. She’ll start giggling next,” tap, tap, tap. “I’ve never seen her looking so stirred up with repressed excitement. Look at her, she’s imagining what she’ll be saying to him: ‘Oh, suck this; suck that; like me up here’—it doesn’t bear thinking about,” tap, tap, tap. “No, I can’t stand this; it’s making me sick. Please stand in the way someone, so I don’t have to look. I can’t help myself——” She paused her dancing fingers, looked away and took a drink to steady her nerves.

The following day, which was a Friday, Wendy assigned to Daniel the task of assessing all the job applications from disabled candidates, with a view to hiring a new member of staff for their department. He began his assignment on the following Monday morning, and it was then that the database seemed to adopt its lemming tendencies.

Gail had, needless to say, had an eventful weekend, which she began relating to Daniel on the Monday morning. By Wednesday, she still seemed to be finding fresh angles from which to appraise her latest companion’s nocturnal habits, as though Gail’s Tales were the outpourings of a puzzled anthropologist who was striving to uncover the curious mating habits of some primitive tribe.

Daniel, meanwhile, was merely wrestling with the question of his own sanity. He had just finished assessing an impressive application, in which, as usual, the candidate’s exam marks had decreased while he watched them, and he had gone on to quickly type his summary—typing feverishly to attempt to outwit the lemmings, he wrote: “Mr Fowler possesses the appropriate skills and interviewed flawlessly,” and he was about to close the form when his comment transformed into: “Mr Fowler is possessed with inappropriate skulking and his views are flatulent,” and the form then closed itself. So exasperated was he that he momentarily forgot his stammer and shouted at Gail: “This can’t be right. How can anyone work like this!”

Gail barely interrupted the flow of her anthropological observations, tap, tap, tap.

Daniel opened the records of the next applicant and broke out in a cold sweat, for the applicant was his own father. He glanced over at Wendy, who was sat at her desk working at her computer. All week, she had been watching her screen intently, making entries to whatever she was working on, and then occasionally she would pause and a smile would caress her face, as a rare glimpse of sunshine through a brief break in the thick clouds momentarily bleaches a landscape of its brooding complexion. Then the clouds would close again and she would resume her typing.

Daniel worked through his father’s application, barely able to believe his eyes. In the record of his father’s previous employment, every entry transformed into a completely different job, but in contrast to every other application he had assessed, his father’s transformed in a positive way. Daniel felt that he was about to pass out. It was as though the Council’s database had set out to torment him. He felt like screaming, or tearing open his chest to let out all the demons that seemed to be eating him alive from within. He had to do something about this database problem; he could take it no longer. He glanced over at Wendy, whose dark, sinister cloud, at that moment, seemed to have lifted, as she was wearing an unusually wide smirk. He looked back to his screen, and, with some relief, he read the interviewer’s notes: “This candidate may be capable of tending the Council’s floral displays and undertaking light caretaking duties.” And he was about to close the record when the entry transformed into: “This candidate would make a valuable contribution to the efficient running of the HR department.” Daniel began hitting his delete key and—he could not help himself—shouting, “No, no, no,” and then—having damaged his finger—he began banging his fist down on his keyboard.

Gail said, “That’s exactly how I felt when I saw what my cat had done to my wig,” tap, tap, tap. “She’d only gone and pooped all over it, but I could hardly go on a date bald-headed, so I had to wear it,” tap, tap. “It was one of my shortest dates on record,” tap, tap, tap. “At first I thought he was just snooty, but then I realized he probably had a keen sense of smell.”

Two weeks later, Daniel found himself working alongside his father, for Wendy had assigned his father the desk next to Daniel, whispering to him how cosy it would be—home from home—and how much she knew he wanted to help out his father. Over the following week, the office staff all noticed a change in Wendy’s character. That dark cloud seemed to have lifted and she could be seen more frequently wearing a smile, though it was curious in its nature and no-one could work out its significance. Of course, Gail’s Tales ran to many soap-opera-like episodes about Wendy’s bedroom gymnastics with Raymond—tap, tap, tap.

After a further week, Wendy asked Daniel—with some apparent relish—how he enjoyed working with his father. Daniel told her, with undisguised sarcasm, that it was absolutely delightful, which seemed to plunge her back into the shade of that dark cloud. She returned to her desk and it was not until several hours later that the cloud had seemed, once more, to have cleared.

A further three weeks later, Daniel was summoned before an internal enquiry. They had discovered the measures he had taken to ensure that his father was hired, including modifying the records of over thirty job applicants, who would have otherwise been suitable candidates, and making outrageous claims on his father’s application. Daniel was immediately dismissed, though his father was aloud to continue in his employment, since it was found he was genuinely unaware of his son’s fraudulent activities.

At the start of the third week of Daniel’s employment, Wendy Jenkins had been in the Town Hall reception area talking to a staff member about her holiday entitlement when she noticed a middle-aged man limping towards the reception desk. It was obvious that he was wearing an ill-fitting or outdated prosthetic left leg. Wendy’s heart welled up with compassion for the man, in a way that she had seldom felt. The previous night, she had watched a documentary about amputee children in Africa who either wore no prosthetic limbs, or ill-fitting or badly designed limbs, or, in some cases, even home-made limbs. It had not occurred to her that citizens of her own town could suffer the same plight—but now here was the startling reality. She watched the man limping towards reception and she felt the urge to rush towards him and hand over the cost of the best replacement prosthetic limb that money could buy. Of course, it would have been most improper for her to do that and she suppressed her emotions, turned away and pretended to cough while she wiped away the tear that had momentarily clouded her vision. And as she look back up, she noticed Daniel gazing at the man, open-mouthed. Daniel seemed to be in a state of shock, or disgust, or some other such state. He then turned away and made a rapid exit. Wendy was as much offended by Daniel’s reaction as she had been moved by the man’s plight. And when she then questioned the receptionist and discovered that the man was Daniel’s father, she found herself even more stunned by Daniel’s reaction. She wondered whether he was embarrassed because of his father’s disability, or whether he found all disabled people distasteful, and as she wondered this, she found that she was not alone. For her mind was occupied by the images of those limbless African children, whose big, humble eyes had reached out to her and still continued so to do; she could feel them watching her, even though they were thousands of miles away; somehow they were still watching her, sitting there within her mind, totally accepting those stumps that were in place of their legs—the legs that, on the other children in their village, carried them to their games—but her children—which they had seemed to have now become—had no such legs and humbly accepted their plight as they watched her, saying nothing and wanting nothing and just sitting there and watching her and she could not bear it. She had to satisfy her mind about this; she owed it to those children.

Later that day, she questioned Daniel. As best she could, she raised the question of his father being crippled and wondered what he felt about it. But Daniel made no response. She tried again and again, making her point as best she could, and then he stood up and started shouting that he hated the sight of her warts.

She returned to her desk, shocked that a member of her staff would embarrass her in this way and also shocked that he would so openly reveal his prejudices. As she sat there, shell-shocked, she found that his words had seemed to open up her most deepest of wounds. She found herself plunged into a parade of her most uncomfortable, and, for her, harrowing memories. She recalled how, throughout her teens, she had attempted to have her warts removed, trying every method that was suggested, however unpleasant or improbable, but nothing worked. Finally, she even subjected herself to several bouts of surgery, but each time her warts were removed in this way, they would return within weeks, only bigger than before, so she stopped trying and decided to live with them. She had long-since assumed that no-one would be attracted to a girl with facial warts, and her assumption had seemed to ensure that no man was attracted to her. She resigned herself to a life without love and instead she developed a relationship with her work, which relationship could not be described as “love”, excepting a love that was possessive and—though with only good intentions—destructive through ineptitude. And she “loved” her staff and her work and every process that her department breathed. She loved them so much that her department had long since ceased to function in any meaningful way. But her love was so great that she could not stop herself, nor see how her actions were merely stifling the department, instead of enabling it to flourish. This department was her loved one—and she would love him, come what may.

For years, she had focused her love on her work, and she felt secure in her “relationship”. And for years, no-one had even referred to her warts, so, as unlikely as this may seem, she had come to truly believe that people simply had not noticed them; she somehow imagined that her warts were invisible to everyone in the Council. Of course, she told herself, while conversing with her bathroom mirror, she herself could see her warts; but perhaps, she reasoned, they seemed much bigger in her own mind, and to her own eyes, than they did to all other people. No-one mentioned them, so it seemed that they had not even noticed them. And her relationship was sound and, to her mind, flourishing.

And then Daniel had stood up and, with those few words, had shaken her to her foundations. And what was worse, he had shouted his insult so that the whole office could hear. It was as though her loved one had suddenly declared that, not only had he never loved her but that he also found her detestable. She sat at her desk with her life in shreds and she plotted her revenge. She needed to damage him, to destroy him, to inflict pain on him in any way she could. But what weapon could she use? She watched him within her mind, her whole awareness overwhelmed with this single desire, to destroy Daniel, to somehow wrench his personality from him and mutilate it, to lay open the intestines of his very soul on the office floor and dance upon those hated intestines for the whole office to plainly see his worthlessness, and then she realized, in one blinding flash of inspiration that was so exhilarating it took all her remaining composure to keep from shouting out, “Yes! I’ve found it; that’s how I can destroy you.” For she had realized that she could use his own prejudice as a weapon against him. She would use his distaste for his own father—his very prejudice that had struck out at her. It seemed beautiful, perfect. She would somehow ensure that his father was hired by the Council—No! even better; he would be hired by her own HR department, so that Daniel would have to work alongside his hated father. Daniel would have to stew in his own prejudices day in, day out.

She began wondering how to bring this about, which problem, this being her speciality—the hiring of staff—did not take her more than a day or two to solve. First, she recalled how, some six months previous, they had been experiencing a network problem and Raymond had set up her computer so that she could monitor her staff’s usage of the database. She arranged for him to set up her computer in this same way again—claiming that she suspected the problem may have returned. And this was how she managed to alter the job applications that were opened on Daniel’s computer.

She watched Daniel’s discomfort in the first few days of his father’s employment and the sight brought a warm glow to her heart. She relished his pain. It was as though she had regained her loved one; Daniel had taken him away from her, but now she felt that her love was once again secure. But then she noticed that, outwardly, Daniel did not seem to be suffering. She knew that he must be, since she knew how much he loathed disabled people in general and here was his own father, disabled, working beside him; he must be suffering, she reasoned, but she could not see any outward sign of his pain, and she needed to know. She asked him how he felt about his father working there and he told her he was enjoying it and her world was thrown into turmoil once again. She needed him to be suffering. This deep love within her was calling out to her to make him suffer; he had to suffer; she needed him to suffer, and after only a few hours of further plotting, she had compiled a detailed report and had then forwarded it—feeling duty bound to do so, as she explained—to the Council Solicitor. She stated that she had discovered many fraudulent amendments in the personnel database, and that all the amendments were logged as having been made at Daniel’s computer. All the amendments—she speculated—seemed to have been made to bring about the hiring of his own father. And, as her master stroke, she pleaded the case for leniency, secure in the knowledge that Daniel’s alleged actions could only result in his dismissal from the Council, which, to her immeasurable delight, was indeed the outcome. And as a mark of the Council’s gratitude for her courage in acting so properly in this matter, they handed her a bonus cheque. So pleased was she with the outcome that she was not even embarrassed to receive the cheque.

As she was walking home from work that evening, it really did feel to her as though the pavements were carpeted with the very intestines of Daniel’s soul, and walking upon those hated entrails felt good—it felt very good. With each step, she felt ever more elevated; she had seldom experienced such lightness of spirit; she felt liberated, exhilarated. But then, as she walked, she—reassuringly—told herself that she had not done this for her own pleasure or gain, no—and perhaps, she pondered, this was why it felt so good—no, she had done it for those poor African children, for her poor African children. Yes, she concluded, it had all been for them; and this was why it felt so good, so right. Her heart filled with a warm glow as, within her mind, she watched a smile appear on the face of one of her African children. She trod the pavement lightly, began humming a tune but then became aware that someone may be following her.

After leaving the Town Hall in disgrace earlier that day, Daniel had, himself, wandered the streets, processing his thoughts. And he was stood at the end of the street where his lodgings where when he noticed Wendy “Nippo” Jenkins walking from work. He found himself following her. And as he watched her in the distance, and slowly closed the distance between him and his tormentor, he was still searching for answers; had he—he wondered—gone mad; what other explanation could there be?

At the enquiry, he had attempted to respond to their questions, but his stammer had advanced to the point where he seemed to have completely lost the power of speech; he was able to make not much more sound than a few agonised moans, it seemed to himself—which moans had seemed to rise up from the bowels of his torment and force their way out through the crippling weight of his stammer. He wanted to shout out to the entire room: What’s happening to me; what is this curse; will it never leave me alone?

For a curse is what he felt he was under the influence of. When his father had collected that form from the Town Hall, it was as though the schoolboy satirists had found him again, and then they had seemed to occupy the body of Nippo, who had taunted him with her whispers, and they had then even managed to occupy the office database and contrived to place his father right there beside him at his work, as if their torment, throughout the whole of his childhood, had not been enough, and as their final deed, they had taken his new job from him and given it to his father, as though they did not want him to have that pleasure, that freedom, as though this job had represented his freedom from the satirists and so they had had no choice but to return and take the job from him, and he felt that he must, surely, now be insane—How could this state be anything other than madness; yes, I am mad, mad—he told himself as he walked behind Nippo, his own steps as quiet as her whispers—whisper, whisper—as he followed her into a narrow lane and his feet whispered along the pavement, his mind not registering that cheque that had fallen to the floor as she had taken her hand from her pocket, and he turned another corner and found that she was facing him; she had turned back and now she was standing right before him, walking into him, and his hands instinctively came up to protect himself and when their bodies had met, he found his hands around her neck, and as their bodies were falling to the floor, his hands only increased their grip, and as he lay on top of her, his torment was finally speaking fluently, eloquently, through his hands. And then he noticed that there was something in Nippo’s face, a spreading area of redness, a red patch like the image of an island on a faded map, which reminded him of his mother’s port-wine stain, and as his hands were eloquently wringing Nippo’s neck, in his mind all he could see was the sketch that those schoolboy satirists would perform of his father tripping and spilling his glass of red wine over his mother’s face, and now here the stain was again, growing brighter and brighter until it seemed to start glowing before his eyes, and his hands were, finally, fighting back at those satirists as he told them this and this and this and this.

Daniel stood up and walked away from Wendy’s lifeless body.

 

7 December 2009

 

Read my sketchbook entry on writing this story