This very Wednesday was my weekend; My last day off before eight straight days spent in the call centre which I affectionately refer to as “work”. What did I do with my day off? I’d be delighted to report of hours spent painting grim northern landscapes, writing impenetrable prose, expressionist portraits of the working class, or even crocheting Christmas presents, but in reality I did none of these things. Today I did fuck all.
Actually, that is a lie. I did lots of things. It might not have been the creative endeavours that I dream of undertaking on daily basis whilst providing premium customer service to middle class consumers, but it was something.
My mother has been bedridden for a number of days with a myriad of illnesses stemming from, she adamantly claims, a vaccination she received last week. Coughing at a murmuring television from behind her bedroom door. “Anyone who says the flu jab can’t make you ill is talking out of their arse.” Her incapacitation provided an excuse for me to put pants on and see daylight as I found myself spending £1.24 on a whopping two First Class Stamps.
“Oh dear.” I said to the grey haired lady at the Post Office counter as we made the transaction. She pretended not to hear me. I was not, however, referring to the price. I begin to wonder of conspiracies involving the injection of carefully selected imagery into the public consciousness by proxy of postal stamps. A stamp to the heart. Is this how we truly immortalize a person, by having them pasted onto the corner of envelopes? Is that how we know we have achieved something and made a dent in the world? The state of my account balance crossed my mind as I used the cash machine unceremoniously installed into the exterior of the Post Office to lean upon whilst I affixed images of Margaret Thatcher to my Mother’s letters. The correspondence itself was addressed to both the County Court and to Wirral County Council, supposedly allowing them to dock my Mother’s monthly wage to accommodate repayments of her outstanding Council Tax bill. As the brackish adhesive slid over my tongue, the image of licking the face of the Iron Lady molested my mind. Seeing her smirking up from my Mother’s partial surrender of her earnings seemed pant-shittingly ironic.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw somebody waiting to use the cash machine, so I darted around them and fed the letters into the Post Box before turning back to form a one man queue. I’d might as well assess the damage I’d inflicted on my account in the past week. There was an older man stood at the hole in the wall, wearing a leather jacket, faded jeans, and a bandana, reminding me more of a war veteran as opposed to a biker. I groped in my coat for my bank card and stared at the dents and peeling layers of plastic, at the jagged crack running through the expiry date and the brown parcel tape keeping the microchip in place. A visual representation of the current state of my finances.
I glanced up and made eye contact with the aging man, now with his back to the machine.
“Are you still using that?” I asked awkwardly as he gazed.
“Just waiting for it to catch up with itself.” he slurred, pivoting only at the sound of the beeping behind him.
“Ah, yeah, the Post Office ones take forever.” I shuffled uncomfortably before he turned towards me again and remarked upon how he just likes to know who’s standing behind him.
“Got a lot of men at my back already, like.”
The suspicion that this man could have been an ex client of my Mother’s crossed my mind. Actually, client probably isn’t the appropriate term.
The main reason for Mum’s need to move away from the local area is due in part to having worked in Care in the Community for a few years. To summarize, it involved dishing out meds to people with varying degrees of mental illness, some of whom live as close as six doors away. Despite having changed her occupation, this place holds too many ghosts for her. She has been behind the filthy front doors of the crumbling little flats in the arse end of town, waded through living rooms riddled with excrement and trash to administer Lithium to one of the many men perched on a stained sofa amidst a haze of skunk smoke, knowing too well that this person receives more in benefits than she could ever hope to earn in that line of work. My mother is haunted by the things that go on behind closed doors and now she longs for the open country, carved with raw coastlines offering the catch of the day and a place to walk the dogs. There would be no doors to hide behind and no men at her back.
“Can you believe that?” his bony finger pointed at the machine.
Out of service. The text on the cash machine glowed green like an eighties futurist technological vision. I blinked at the aghast expression on the greying, wrinkled face of the suspected mentally ill veteran, and made my way towards Tina’s Treasures on the immediate left. Regretting the missed opportunity to check my account balance, I stood among kitsch wonders, old picture frames, wicker baskets and rusted tools. Half of me suspected he had deliberately fucked with the cash machine, as mentals are probably want to do, since there had been no plastic in his hand. The other half of me held the image of Margaret Thatcher and all the men at her back.
The rest of the day was spent staring at a screen, as usual. I made Leek and Potato soup but I wont go into that. Over the sounds of my Mother’s coughing could be heard Valerie June, someone who makes music that breaks me open.
