The Fag Packet

The guy on the box with the Zapata moustache doesn’t look too good. He looks as though he has had his throat cut. Well that’s how he appears to me. I have collected six cartons so far, some of which have just photos on them whilst others, have messages and phone numbers on them. But no matter how graphic the picture, or how bold the message, they don’t frighten me enough to quit. I have tried to give up so many times but I can’t. It’s impossible. I have tried everything; patches, inhalers, lozenges, gum, spray, and always failed but now that Katie has quit  I suppose I should at least make an attempt to stop. I should do it for the kid shouldn’t I. Yes the kid. Who would have believed that John H. Dempsey would one day become a father? A Dad.  How ridiculous that word sounds to my ears. Do I really want the family thing, the tethers, the duty and the sacrifice? I like Katie but I am not sure whether I love her. I don’t love Lydia but that’s different. Christ, I don’t know what love is anyway. Cue a song. Recite a poem, it’s all bollocks anyway.

Hilton Services. Stop then start sit and think.  Push a pedal and turn a wheel. Press a button and watch the little glyphs light up, and tell the ever-compliant BMW 520i what to do next. I loathe this show pony of a car that the company foisted on me as a symbol to show the Northerners that we meant business. Oh yes, we meant business alright, in the shape of one hundred redundancies. I have overseen all of them bar one – men and women reduced to tears, begging for crumbs of work, watching them pass through the stages of DABDA. I know, the bad news man but every company has one. I don’t enjoy what I do but I don’t hate it either. Someone has to do it. Don’t they? However, this one has been tough and sits bad. I don’t know, there’s something I don’t like about this strip. It does not feel right; it’s  like I have overstepped a line, gone too far for the first time but I have to stick by my maxim ‘that the ends always justify the means.’ Machiavelli. ‘The Prince.’ One of my favourites reads.

Walsall. Bescot stadium quiet as usual just like on match days. Thoughts of Lyd ia begin to flood my mind. This happens daily as she reaches up from nowhere and overwhelms me with memories of our secret assignations and petty perversions. Lydia and I met on the road. We were motorway lovers, shacking up for a couple of hours in cheap hotel rooms. We don’t know each other outside of the corporate life, outside of the speak, the sharp suits, the heels and ties. You know, I don’t even think that we are having an affair sometimes it’s just a release for the both of us, a loosening of the tourniquet of corporate pressures and frustrations. I know at some point, that I will have to leave her, but I cant’t, not now.

I exit the M6 at it confluence with the M5 at Great Barr. I point the car in the direction of the BT Office tower that shoots up on this clear Birmingham day like a giant minaret. I am doing a steady 30 miles an hour on the A34 when the call comes in. Deep in the driver’s side door pocket, amid the empty fag packets and sandwich cartons, I search blindly for my Bluetooth dongle.

‘Johnny boy. How you doing?’ His overfamiliarity puts my hackles up straight away. It’s half past eight in the evening and I really don’t need this. I stop at the traffic lights and I turn Miles Davis down.

Deadbeat, tired and insincere I make a laboured effort to converse with him, ‘Hi Lewis,’ my monotone drone echoes back into my earpiece.

He starts, ‘Big day tomorrow and since I am the last man standing, I think we could have a champagne breakfast to celebrate our new working relationship. What do you say? I’ve finalised everything thing and the factory will be formally closed at twelve. Sad I know but that’s business.’ I don’t know whether it’s the Irish brogue or his unerring self-confidence which is annoying me. Silent, I wait for him to start again.

‘She’s talking to me again. She called me last night.’ I open the top button of my shirt and remove the tie that had been around Lydia’s neck at dinnertime and cast it on to the backseat. ‘I think that Sue and the kids will come back. I’m sure they will. Sue will see it as a fresh start.’ You see, Lewis Hyde has a problem that will become very apparent to him tomorrow morning when I inform him that there is no fresh start for him back in Birmingham.  I was under orders anyway, Forsyth and the Chairman, after only one meeting, had taken an instant dislike to Hyde and his fawning attitude, ‘he’s weak John but his poor management is his folly and our boon.’ I seconded their observations and carried on with my work.

He was still there burbling away in the background but I had lost his track. ‘See you nice and early John.’ I hung up and took a circuitous route around the city that took me through Hamstead, Handsworth Wood, Ladywood and the backstreets leading to our duplex flat that overlooks the canal basin at Brindley Place.

 In the inky blue glare of the Hyatt Hotel, I make my way across the residents’ car park, always mindful of the shadows, and enter the vestibule leading up to our apartment. I forego the lift under the misapprehension that the climb will somehow remedy a wheezy chest and a curved spine. But that’s not to be, as I stagger onto the landing and clumsily unlock the front door. Steam rolls from the crack beneath the bathroom door and I hear her shout a muffled ‘welcome.’ The smell of Bolognese sauce eats into the air and triggers the nausea that I have been suffering from throughout the day. I open the balcony door and the noise of the city floods into the room but the air is cold and refreshing. On the glass coffee table, there is one book, ‘The Pregnancy Bible,’ that is lying open with at chapter six, ‘Week Twelve End of the First Trimester.’ Katie emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a white bath sheet and looks down at the thick tome and then back to me.

‘Have you read any of that yet? Darcy recommended it to me.’ Darcy is Katie’s secretary, a mother three times over and always ready to offer Katie a bilge of maidenly advice about how to conduct her private life and how Katie should be more assertive and ambitious in her work. Given half the chance, it wouldn’t surprise me if Darcy were there at the birth of our child. I can see her now, eagerly waiting to catch the head of my newborn child. By the way, I have never met Darcy but the way in which my solicitor girlfriend reveres her so much makes me thoroughly hate and despise her.

My image of Darcy disappears. ‘Is that a no or a yes John?’ I fail to answer and she storms off to dry her hair. It’s not that I am being wilfully ignorant toward my girlfriend but the pain is my skull has grown so acute that it feels as though my head has been immersed in a bucket of polar ice. In the medicine cabinet amid all her unguents and the out of date drugs, I find a partial sheet of paracetamol tablets. I quaff four and return to the living area with my yet unformulated apologies.

We sit down to the dinner that I have served up. She pinches a piece of garlic bread from the baton I have somehow managed to burn.

‘Bad day?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

It doesn’t take much to start me off. The headache has disappeared but Lewis Hyde hasn’t. He is by my side all the time, interrogating my conscience, crying on my shoulder asking me why I have done this to him, to his family and to their future. Katie gets the barrage full on and then we fall silent over the food.

‘John it’s your job. You buy up ailing companies keep the best bits and make us some money. It’s simple. It’s just business. You could always look for something else?’ She’s right I know but looking is not having. The moneybox needs to be filled and the souls have to be collected and dispatched. I clean the plates and ask her if she wants a drink, ‘decaffeinated coffee with skimmed milk.’ The pregnant lifestyle is kicking in now and the ‘Bible’ is open. Oh fuck.

‘Just twelve weeks after conception the foetus is fully formed. By now almost all the baby’s organs and structures have formed and will continue to grow until delivery. The baby is already moving about but, the movements cannot be felt.’

‘Can you feel anything Kate?’

‘I thought I felt a slight flutter in my stomach this afternoon.’

Katie has a delicate frame unsuited to pregnancy, long legs, light olive coloured skin and big black eyes, which expand when she gets angry or frightened and shrink to almost nothing when she cries. Men crave her I know but I find it hard these days to touch or make love with her. The mystery has gone; the excitement never arrives but it’s okay, together we are steady.  She carries on reading with the tenderness of a young mother to a small child. We are in the story together, I have my part in the narrative, and then Lydia’s face emerges from nowhere and rips our little fairy-tale into pieces.

‘I’m off to bed John I’ve got a heap of work to do tomorrow. E-mails, who needs them? Are you back up North tomorrow? We could go to see a film if your back before six. What do you say?’ I nodded and watched as she climbed the spiral staircase and disappeared.