Folk'd Page 6

  Danny looked. There was a sin bin list on the note of unrecyclable materials and someone had ringed "plastic bags" with what looked like blood.

  "There's no plastic bags in it!" he protested. "Look!"

  He opened the bin lid to prove his point. Plastic bags sailed free in their droves, whirling out into the chilly morning air like happy little polyurethane helicopters. All that was missing was a "yippee, freedom!" style cartoon sound effect. A particularly delighted Asda bag, whipped by a spirited breeze, whapped through the air and attached itself to Mount Binman's north face. A hand with fingers like aerosol cans reached up and removed the offending object.

  Danny closed the bin lid.

  "Ah," was all he said.

  The walk of contrition back to his back yard was long indeed, made all the longer as he had to pass several of his neighbours out to collect their freshly emptied bins. Danny prayed to the Gods that they would all curl up and die horribly somewhere, and then a presence at his left arm and a distinctive smell of Shake N Vac made his heart sink.

  "Ye can't recycle the wee plastic bags, son."

  "Yes thanks Mrs Dunwoody." Fuck off Mrs Dunwoody.

  "They give ye a wee list of things you can recycle. I think I have a spare one, if you need-"

  "No thanks Mrs Dunwoody." FUCK OFF MRS DUNWOODY.

  "You should-" but the rest of her latest pearl of wisdom was swallowed up by the door separating his yard from the alley scraping shut in her wizened old face. Gah! Did she seriously think he was that daft? His eyes flashed. Speaking of daft-

  "Ellie!"

  She poked her head over the landing as he called upstairs, her hair wrapped in a towel. "Did you catch them in time?"

  He took a breath. "Yes I did - for all the fuckin’ good it did me! You put plastic bags in again?!"

  Her head drew back defensively. "No! I put them in the black bin!"

  "When?"

  "A few nights back!"

  "In the dark...?"

  Realisation dawned on her. "Did I pick the wrong bin," she said, grimacing. "Oops...sorry love."

  "Ach it's alright, no problem," he retorted, his tone indicating it was anything but, "we'll just have to phone them for an extra collection. Which means I'll have to run the gauntlet of the alleyway of doom for a bonus round probably tonight or tomorrow night - as if I don't love doing it enough the first fuckin’ time around. Thanks for that."

  She rolled her eyes. "Jesus Christ!" she exclaimed. "It's bringin’ a bin out to an alley! I'll do it if it bothers ye that much!"

  His jaw set. She'd pulled that bluff before. Not this time. "Righto," he called up. "Glad we got that sorted. Enjoy."

  The head and towel flounced from sight above. He trudged upstairs, taking off his makeshift bin-chasing outfit he'd thrown on in a panic when they'd espied the lack of emptying going on from the window. It was 8.21; one of his least favourite times, all horrible browns and greens. By all rights he should have left for work ten minutes ago, which meant he was going to be late and in all likeliness have to endure another one of Boss Thomas' mystifying lectures. Wonderful. Superb.

  She was in the bathroom, the door shut, making approximately 40% more noise than was necessary just to let him know she was, in fact, fucked off with him. Luke was lying in his cot, awake, sucking mightily on his fist, baby spit covering everything around his head like a deleted scene from Ghostbusters. He gurgled in Danny's direction as his Daddy swept this way and that above his head, but Danny was too busy trying to find a work outfit to pay much heed.

  Ellie emerged from the bathroom, discarding her towel and walking in front of him naked, not even looking in his direction. She smelled of apricots. He could practically see the beckoning fingers of aroma curling under his nostrils, pulling his head up, making him look.

  No. No. He'd told her a million fuckin’ times not to throw stuff out in the dark because the two bins sat beside each other (they'd little choice given the size of the yard) and a blue bin looked like a black bin in the darkness. She never listened. She just nodded and absorbed what he had to say and looked cute and he thought it was going in, but in truth she was too busy thinking of what she was going to say when his lips stopped moving and merely biding her time until that happened.

  And he was sick of it.

  Sick of her not listening. Sick of her fuckin’ parents making him feel like a piece of dogshit that their daughter had unwittingly stepped in whilst out shopping in her Jimmy Choo's, to be scraped off at all costs.

  Sick of having to find a white shirt with as little visible creases as possible (because she hadn't time to iron and he baulked at the very notion) to go to a job he despised.

  Sick of being talked down to by people who, rather than inquiring of him whether he was serious about managing his fucking utilisation levels, in a fairer world, in a just world, would instead be asking him if he wanted fries with that.

  Sick of falling asleep half-propped on a headboard at ridiculous o’clock in the morning because he’d unleash an air-raid siren if, God forbid, he went three feet to the right and tried to put Luke where he belonged.

  Sick of the smell of night-old piss greeting him every morning.

  He stood up, and felt something. Ellie had reached out a hand and touched his arm. He looked across and her face had softened, and her lips were parting, and he could tell she was going to attempt to quell the disagreement before he left for work.

  "I don’t know if I can do this," he said, before she could speak.

  And with that, he walked out of the room, out of the house, closing the front door behind him, slamming the gate latch shut.

  ***

  " …no, sir, you have to click twice…"

  "...what's your contract number...?"

  "...is that N for November? Okay."

  As his mouth moved, he watched Alice and Cal. She would take calls, and be all business, but her eyes would drift to him repeatedly, over and over. He was doing something similar, and occasionally, the oh-so-casual sweeping glances they were casting into the waters of each other's attention would lock, and for a moment they would stare at each other and both would falter for a heartbeat on their by-rote scripted speech to the customers on the telephone.

  He wanted to reach across the table and shake them.

  A3. Mars Bar. As he watched it uncorkscrew lazily from its holder, he could feel the weight of his mobile in his back pocket. All morning he'd had it sitting on the desk in front of him, in a mild flagrancy of the rules, awaiting it lighting up and dancing minutely across the polished, sterile tabletop. But it had remained steadfastly immobile.

  He'd been composing replies to the inevitable text from her all morning in his mind, ranging from rude to conciliatory to long and rambling. And now it seemed the inevitable text wasn't quite living up to billing. And why would she? It was you who came out with it, wasn't it, and then walked out like a big yellow bastard...

  In the time it took Danny to stoop down and stand back up from retrieving the Mars, a reflection had appeared in the glass of the vending machine.

  "Hey, Thomas," Danny said, without looking around.

  "Danny. A word?"

  "I just want to get back on the calls," he said weakly. He nodded in the direction of the wallboard, reflecting how ridiculous this all was as he did so. "The queues are up to sixteen minutes and-"

  "I know what the queues are, Danny," Thomas said quietly.

  They walked away from the main bank of desks and to the inactive part of the floor. There wasn't even a room you could go into for a chat in this place - only the Chief Exec had one, and that was on the floor above.

  Danny hovered over the usual area they stopped, but Thomas was walking past these chairs. He stopped only when he reached vacant desks and chairs adjacent to the windows overlooking the City Centre. Danny felt his stomach knot. He sat down anyway.

  "Sorry about coming in late there," he said as offhandedly as he could manage. A feeling of numb inevitability was spreading thro
ughout him. He wiggled his fingers on the desk below, to ensure he could still feel the realness around him. He cast a glance around the floor. He wanted to stand up. He just wanted to take a call.

  "Danny, your probation period was extended because of your lateness and your sick record. We're going live with the biggest contract in Lircom‘s history in two days time. Management doesn‘t want anyone who might prove to be a liability. Your probationary period expires on Friday week. We’re not going to renew it. I'm sorry."

  Thomas the laughable wanker. How they'd sat around the desks and chuckled at his antics. Thomas the worst manager ever. And he was looking at Danny with sympathy in his eyes. No, not sympathy.

  Pity.

  ***

  If he’d considered himself as going through the motions before on his service calls, what he was doing now would have made his previous form look scintillating. Nothing like hearing you were going to be sacked for putting some verve into your voice.

  As his mouth moved, Danny found himself looking out of the windows at the Belfast vista outside. That a callcentre he mostly viewed as a prison should have such glorious wraparound floor-to-ceiling views he’d always found grimly amusing. About a hundred yards outside, a railbridge leapt gracefully across the Lagan. Sometime during the last few minutes, a train had ground to a halt upon it, placing it exactly in the middle of the bridge’s river-span. Suspended like a fly in amber over the waters below.

  Not a regular train traveller by any means, Danny knew in some distant part of his mind that trains had to stop occasionally to allow trains using the same track ahead of them to switch. It wasn’t the first time he’d looked out to see a train parked across the river, in fact. And yet the sight never failed to raise an everso slight chill of excitement within him. There was something inherently wrong about seeing a train immobile over a river. From this distance, he could just about make out heads at windows, the occasional trickle of movement within.

  While telling someone how to reinitialise their network connection, he imagined that somehow it had all ended, that the maniacs had blown it up. Trains stopped mid-track, their passengers rotting corpses on chewing-gum laden seats. A time capsule of humanity, strewn with copies of the Daily Express and half tubes of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles. How long would it remain there, before a combination of wind and wave eroded those bridge supports and it came tumbling down into an indifferent river below…

  “…and that,” he concluded to his caller, “should solve your problem. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  As the caller mumbled something or other in reply, the train began to pull away. His Apocalyptic vision took a little longer to do the same.

  ***

  When lunchtime rolled around, some indeterminate amount of time later, Danny logged out, ignored Cal and Alice and their quizzical looks, and walked from his desk to the common room (Lircom was far too achingly hip to call its canteen a canteen). He sat on one of the ergonomically moulded chairs supposedly designed for comfort, but really designed to induce crippling back pain in any staffmembers tempted to lollygag there for longer than their alloted break, and he stared into oblivion.

  He had five days holiday left from his allocation. He'd planned to take them in July. He and Ellie and Luke would get one of those bus & rail family tickets and just go somewhere, even if it was some shitty wee one-street resort town, even if it was mizzling with warm rain most of the time. It would have been their first proper family holiday, and he'd been looking forward to it. But by the time July rolled around, he'd be gone.

  Thomas had told him he could either take the leave, which would make tomorrow his final day in work and give him next week off, or he could work right up to his final day and get the holiday money as extra. He hadn't been here long enough to qualify for any sort of severance pay.

  He wanted to take the leave. He wanted to walk out of here, right now. And yet there was a huge cloud of panic all around him that kept him nailed to the chair on which he quasi-sat. He felt as if every door he opened, every corner he turned, he'd be face to face with that panic cloud and it would rush into him, envelop him, overwhelm whatever rationality he had remaining and make him give in to the urge just to sit and wallow in misery.

  His brain kept presenting him with facts he didn't want to think about - the state of the job market, the fact that he didn't have a degree. He kept visualising the awfulness of what lay ahead. The final day. The card. Starting to look in newspapers for jobs. Going to a fucking recruitment agency and filling out those fucking forms and doing one of their fucking typing fucking exams to see how many fucking words he could fucking type in a fucking minute-

  But it was more than that. And he knew it.

  He was right about you, wasn’t he?

  He was right to look at you that way.

  He had dialled the number before he quite knew what was happening.

  "Hello?"

  "Hey," he returned.

  "Oh," Ellie hesitated, clearly wondering what voice or tone to adopt. He sighed. He felt so tired.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "So am I."

  "What are you sorry for?" he asked her.

  She didn't reply for a moment, which only made him feel worse. She was obviously trying to think of something to be sorry for, something beyond throwing a few plastic bags in the wrong bin. Dear God. That seemed like a lifetime ago now.

  “Just…” she sighed. “Just, I’m sorry.”

  "I love you," he said, and realised with horror that he was crying. He tilted the receiver away from his face a little and swiped quickly, ashamedly, at his eyes with his sleeves. How am I going to tell her? How am I going to TELL her?

  "You won't believe what happened this morning."

  He tried to clear his throat as quietly as possible. Keeping his voice steady was key. And in a flash of relief, or pragmatism, or just plain cowardice, he realised that he couldn't possibly deliver the news over the phone. He would wait until tonight. Or maybe - yes, maybe he could look into a few new jobs between now and the weekend, line up an interview even. And then when he told her, he could seem proactive, already on top of it.

  "What?" he asked, almost absent-mindedly, all of this whirling around in his head.

  "Guess who said Daddy."

  He blinked. Had she just...?

  "Luke?" he said. "Luke said...?"

  "Aye," she confirmed.

  "You're sure? It wasn't just baby babble? He didn't have a mouthful of food at the time?"

  She laughed. "I sat him on his arse on the sofa and he just looked up at me, looked out the living room window, and said it, plain as you like. Da-ddy? He was asking where you were."

  He might be seeing a lot more of me. He submerged that thought quickly. "Put him on," he said urgently. "Put him on, see if he does it again."

  Ellie assented, and in a few seconds heavy breathing replaced the sound of her voice on the phone. Danny knew this was his cue. He talked baby-talk down the phone and Luke's breathing stopped for a second (he knew from long practice that this was because he'd be looking around him, puzzled, for the source of the voice) before, after much prompting from stage left, he eventually let loose with an ear-splitting shriek of delight and frantic babbling, all of it cute but none of it intelligible.

  "Sorry," Ellie's voice returned. "You know our Luke. He's no-one's performing seal. Anyway, how's the day at work?"

  Just like that, reality came flooding back in to his momentary oasis. "Ach...alright," Danny said carefully. No. It wasn't cowardice - you didn't impart news like this over the phone. Besides, he wanted a wee while to get his own head wrapped around it and dispel the panic cloud. No sense in both of them flailing around...