Over the past year there had risen within me a terrible horror of the world and I was frustrated with everything. At odd moments it felt like I had a slow puncture deep inside and was deflating into a shriveled up husk.

Everything is somehow wrong and to say so or to try and do anything is hopeless.

The bus came, it was full of ugly phantoms. All I could think about was that my electricity bill was unpaid so they had cut me off. There was a newspaper on the floor at my feet. I picked it up and read about how an old man who was nearing retirement died at his desk in an office he shared with four other people. They didn’t realize he was dead for a week, until he began to rot. His colleagues said he was always quiet and kind of slumped over and sometimes he even went to sleep. Even the cleaners dusted around him, corpses were not part of their contract. Everyone was low paid, that seemed to be an important point to the story.

I could understand it. I’d spent my whole adult life working with corpses. They might have actually been able to move their limbs and suck back a cigarette but they were already dead. Disappointment washed out of them like a river of shit. Not bad people but so far from the spark of life as to make waxworks of pointless celebrities seem vital and alive.

When I got off the bus the chip shop queue ran right out outside into the wet night. The FAT BASTARD from up the street bought the last two battered fish before I could get served. How he could afford it was beyond me. He doesn’t work, probably claims sickness benefit for obesity. I felt a rage within me but suppressed it quickly. Before you know where you are you find yourself turning into a Nazi and longing for a strong fascist government to beat him into shape. All it sometimes takes is a sleight disappointment at the dinner table, the shape of someone’s body, an imagined sleight. There is a well of hatred sitting in all of us.

I got home to a dark empty house. The electricity bill was unpaid and they had cut me off. I lit some candles and put some batteries in my transistor radio. I got wet feet from a puddle on the kitchen floor where the fridge had defrosted itself. I cracked open a bottle of cheap bourbon I’d bought from the corner shop. Back in the living room a DJ was gibbering on like a simpleton. I ate my chips and curry sauce and poured myself a tumbler full of bourbon. I left the saveloy. Don’t know why I bought it, odd tasting dubious meat.

After my meal I lit a cigarette and lay back on the settee. The drink slipped into my gullet like a lazy fire through damp twigs. Thoughts circled my head like vultures. I began to feel my loneliness like a heavy oppressive force. Impulsively I went and picked up the phone and trailed it back across the room to the settee. I thought about everyone I knew.

I settled on Bob, my old work mate. We didn’t work together anymore but we’d always gotten along. I dialed his number, I was going to tell him about the beggar I’d watched for about three or four hours in the town centre that afternoon until it had started to rain and I’d gone in a pub near the financial district. The phone rang and rang. He lived alone, he never married but he did have a son somewhere up north. He was originally from Newcastle. He didn’t talk about his old life much, I never asked. I let the phone ring for a while before I hung up. He was probably down the Builders Arms, it was his local. He was a member of their pool team.

I thought about who else I could ring instead. There weren’t many. I didn’t have many friends, none in fact. It was too late to ring Dr Santos at his office. I had his home number, of course, but I wanted to save it until I really needed it. I began to think about everyone I knew. It was a short list so I thought about all the people I didn’t know. They seemed like a much more attractive bunch since talking to them would not involve managing the weary resume of myself. Who was I to those people anyway? None of it made any sense.

I picked up the phone and dialed six numbers at random. I was lucky and made a connection. As the phone on the other end began to ring a strange laugh echoed into the receiver from the back of my throat.

No one answered straight away. I let it ring. Maybe there was nobody home. I began to wonder what I would say if someone picked up. Since I had no actually plan it would probably be determined by the sound of the person who picked up. I’d have about three or four seconds of silence to play with, to stay within the boundaries of normal conversation once the other person picked up and said hello. Any longer and I’d probably not be able to sound right. Not able to sound right? I laughed again, that strange alien sound.

The phone continued to ring. It might be upsetting someone at the other end of the line. With every ring the call was becoming something else, it was growing old, and would be perceived as having lost its innocence. Persistent ringing signals dire circumstances. It is serious enough to interrupt the bath, the lovemaking, and the coma. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was only half- nine so it wasn’t too late.

I let it ring for another couple of minutes and laughed again. If someone picked up I decided I was going to say ‘Is That the Coastguard’ in a panic, as if I was clinging to the hull of a sinking boat. I began to guffaw at my own humour like a stoned teenager playing pranks with the phone book.

I stopped laughing a little while later and hung up. I’d been locked in a game of telephonic chicken with an empty room. I finished my glass of whiskey and poured another. The radio was now playing a ballad from a boy band. I got up and turned it off. When I sat back down I picked up the phone again and dialed another six numbers at random. This time a man answered it on the fourth ring.

“Yes?” he said in a dry raspy voice.

“Hello,” I said. “I was wondering if I could speak to the master of the house.” The words fell from my mouth automatically, gaining me some time.

“What?” said the man shifting the phone from one ear to another. He coughed to clear his throat. I pictured him in my mind’s eye: old, frail, long time smoker, tattoos, eyes narrowing.

“I’d like to speak to the master of the house” I said again, unable to think of anything else to say. He grunted and put the phone down and I heard him pad across the room and open a creaky door. I realized it was an antiquated turn of phrase, something perhaps from the 50’s. That was why he was so wrong footed. If I had said, ‘home-owner’ instead of ‘master’ he would probably have been more comfortable. Unfortunately I felt myself adopting a role, a position that would make it perfectly ordinary and in the run of things for me to call someone I didn’t know out of the blue. I cursed myself. Why couldn’t I just say that I had hit some numbers at random because I wanted to talk to somebody?

After a few minutes someone else picked up the phone.

“Hello?” said a young boy unsurely. The older man, presumably his dad, had come to some kind of conclusion about me in the short time that we spoke. He’d taken ‘master’ to be his son perhaps. It was quite understandable.

“Hello,” I said. A long pause developed. I didn’t mean it to. I just didn’t know what to say and the thought of talking to a kid threw me.

“Who’s there?” the boy asked nervously. I thought about the question and whether or not I should just apologize and put the phone down.

“Can I speak to your dad please?” I said at last. The boy put the phone down and the man came back on.

“Hello?” he said again. This time he was stern. It would not take much for this man to drop from confusion to anger. He coughed and cleared his throat.

“Hi,” I said thinking fast; “I’m calling from Webster, Hume and Goldbuckle.” I paused and took a deep breath.

It came as quite a shock to find I was suddenly representing a firm of solicitors.

“Well whatever you’re selling, I can’t afford to buy,” said the man preparing to put down the phone.

“I’m not selling anything,” I said. “We’re solicitors. I’m calling to find out if either you or any of your family have been involved in an accident or something we could construe as an accident that has resulted in personal injury, memory loss, scarification, amputation, plastic surgery, nasal discomfort, fracture, bowel trouble, tightening of the lung, hearing loss, mummification, severing, fatty deposits, stretching, strangulation, depression, alcoholism, impotence, self-importance, anger, alien abduction, Ebola, scrofula, leprosy, cancer, deja-vu, timidity or any other symptoms of illness or discomfort?”

The man coughed. “How did you get my number?”

I stifled a small laugh and leaned away from the mouthpiece. I coughed and composed myself by pinching my leg and taking a deep breath.

“We’re calling everyone in the area,” I said. “We are looking for clients and we operate on a no win - no fee basis and we could earn you anything from five hundred pounds to seventy five thousand in a successful claim.” The man was silent. I could hear him breathing heavily. I waited.

“And how much will it cost me?” he asked.

“It won’t cost you a penny sir.”

The man was silent again. I could hear him breathing. “Well there is something,” he said, “well two things actually.”

“Good,” I said.

“I used to work at the car plant and well, the doctors are worried about my chest. I’ve never smoked and I’ve always kept myself fit. I think there might have been a faulty ventilation unit on my line or something.”

I froze. I had also used to work at the car plant. A lot of us had. Around a hundred thousand in fact. I worked on the Puma line. “Which car did you work on?” I asked.

“The Puma,” he said.

I didn’t recognize his voice so he must have been on a different shift to me. Maybe even in another area of the factory. You didn’t get to mingle much. Sometimes it seemed like half the city worked there. It probably did at some time or other. Still, even though I hadn’t probably met this man, I knew him. I had shared his labour, kept his hours, sweated in the same rut.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It err, sounds promising,” I said. The words stuck in my throat. “What was the other thing?” I asked.

“My wife.” he said flatly. He coughed and then continued. “We went on holiday last year to Spain and we went to these caves and it weren’t properly lit and she fell over and landed funny on her spine and she had to be flown to hospital and well, the doctors say she’ll never walk again.”

I put the phone down. I couldn’t take anymore. It was horrible. Everything was rotten to the core. Life was one long grim crawl in the gutter. To look at the stars was deluded, the kind of behaviour that leads you giving a shit about Oscar night, what the Queen wears, what the empty-headed braying DJ says about such and such a millionaire musician. The man on the phone had probably worked twice as long as I had at the car factory. Now he was stuck between colostomy bags and daytime TV, ministering to a crippled wife, fighting for breath with his bad lungs.

We used to work on huge dark automated construction lines that could have been designed for a Fritz Lang film. It was best not to think about it. If you had to think about it you just thought about the money. We built the Mercury Puma 2.5. It was tedious repetitive work. In my basic working day I had to repeat a very intense but simple action a hundred and twenty times an hour. I knew I had to do it a hundred and twenty times an hour because they got a machine to work it out exactly, ergonomically, what I could do. After I did my thing, the part was moved on a conveyer belt to Bob down the line who checked what I had done and filed down a bit of a sharp edge with callused hands. We were imprisoned in a very precise sequence of actions. We got paid for it and that was our motivation.

“Just think of the money,” we often said like a mantra to each other floating around the place like zombies.

I often found myself thinking about clean air, the countryside and rowing boats and how nice it would be if people could row places on lakes and rivers instead of driving everywhere on congested roads, spewing fumes into nature’s face.

Still, it was a job and we were gripped by the thought that we were lucky. We couldn’t really afford high-minded environmental concerns, if we did then there were plenty of other people ready to take our place. I would have liked it if we had made something else though. Something that didn’t fuck up the environment so much.

It was a nice car, a top of the range run around with more than a nod towards sports car excitement without getting carried away. In the advert on television they had it rolling around San Francisco in the soft focus of an old film. The film was called Bullitt. The advert used modern computer technology to superimpose the car into it and at the end they made out it was the actual car from the film and had Steve McQueen climbing out of it and marveling at it with a weird fascination.

They can resurrect dead actors on film, they have the technology.

I don’t know what they were trying to say, they obviously weren’t trying to sell the car to Steve McQueen. I think they were suggesting that driving the car would be akin to being cool like Steve McQueen, not the real man with all his worries over his three wives and cancer, but his film persona. It was just a car though so I don’t know exactly what they were trying to say. I was part of it, the Puma, the dream car. That car that perhaps the dead actor Steve McQueen might like if he was a detective, not afraid to step out of line, in a seedy filmic milleaux.

“Just think of the money,” we giggled as we floated through our daily lobotomy. They name cars after animals because it is the thing to do. They wouldn’t call the car ‘Steve’ because there are lots of Steves in the world and it’s the wrong image. The same goes for ‘McQueen’ which sounds like a cheap fast food burger and also carries with it associations of homosexuality which might affect sales on the forecourt. They employ teams of people to think about these things. They have degrees thinking about these things. You would never find a car called the ‘Nazi Henchman’ or the ‘Fisting Pedophile’. It’s simple marketing. Steve McQueen would never look fondly at a ‘Fisting Pedophile’. Well, not unless they made him do it, after he’d died of cancer and was safely in the ground where he couldn’t sue. The beautiful young go-getter of today would never jump in a ‘Nazi Henchman’ to go down the shops. Well, not without all the right gimmicks anyway. Cars like the Puma took the names of animals to be associated with the animal’s imagined characteristics: strength, speed, ferocity etc. although the car is often stronger, faster and able to kill and crush with more ferocity. It must be a hang over from a previous way of life when we respected animals and had to live and hunt next to them for survival. Times when we couldn’t mess up the world with exhaust fumes. Whatever the advert was saying about the car, it obviously worked because the factory with day and night shifts working for five years had produced somewhere in the region of twenty million cars. It was best not to think about it but if you had to think about it then it was best just to think of the money.

With the money we paid for mortgages on our houses, drove cheap Italian cars to super markets for food, drank beer and supported football teams. We got a few weeks holiday a year and we went to sit on beaches in Greece or shopping in American cities where we compared the prices of Starbucks and McDonalds and brand name clothes with the ones in our own shopping centres at home.

Sometimes the work was easy and you got focused and put your back into it and the day flew past in the blink of an eye and you enjoyed the weight of your muscles and the warm sweat down your back. Other days were a living horror when the sun shone outside, cracking the flags on another day gone from your life and it was all you could do not to scream that you should be somewhere else, somewhere in the fresh air out of the factories fumes and it was only the thought of your family and the fear of failing them somehow and the fear of poverty that stopped you walking off outside. Those were the days when it was no longer a job but a prison sentence and everyone was stealing your time, stealing your life, in exchange for a mortgage on a house you didn’t really like and bad TV and beer. Those were the days when you wonder every slow crushing minute if there hasn’t been some god-awful mistake and you should be somewhere else doing something worthwhile in the fresh air. And you resent everything, the job, the mortgage, your life, the Puma, the fucking car that Steve McQueen might fondle lovingly if he was STEVE McQUEEN and he hadn’t died of cancer…

… But these moments passed and you got worn down into a routine like a cog in a cuckoo clock and somewhere over the other side of the world somebody is driving a car and imagining they are Steve McQueen without the wives and the cancer.

It was best not to think about it but if you had to think about it then it was best just to think of the money. But then the factory gets bought out and shut down by a Japanese company and you don’t even have the money. And then your wife gets crippled and confined to a wheelchair.

Everything is somehow wrong and to say so or to try and do anything is hopeless.

I drank more whiskey and tears welled up in my eyes. I switched the radio back on and was hit by The Rolling Stones singing ‘Tumbling Dice’, filling my head with a scabby image of some sad shanty town revelry and I found myself thinking about suicide again. Just lately these thoughts had been crowding into the small grubby lift of my mind and re-routing everything to the floor where they kept all the pills, razor blades and rope. It was the top floor and you could take the big jump.

I went and got my illustrated encyclopaedia from the bookshelf in the front room. Under knots I found a series of small diagrams showing me how to tie a noose. I cut the long extendible cord out of the vacuum and practiced a few times. It was good cord, not slippy and plastic coated but the old fashioned kind like wire rope. My mum gave me the machine when I’d moved into the place. I tied a noose and pulled it taut in my hands. It was going to be strong enough. It would hold. I unpicked the noose and climbed onto the coffee table and tied it again reaching up towards the ceiling to the dangling light bulb fixture.

That’s all of the novel that you can read at the moment. If you’re interested in seeing more drop me a line at newshooo@hotmail.com .