A Fucked Up Life in Books (14 page)

I sat for a few minutes not knowing what to do. Fucking hell. This was my fucking manager, I had to work with him.

Then I very quietly got up from my chair and climbed under my desk.

Oh it was lovely under the desk. Quite dark. Quiet. Sitting on the floor. No one could see me. No one could know what a dickhead I’d been.

After a few minutes my Team Leader came over and asked my colleague where I was. My colleague told her where I was.

‘She’s under the desk.’

She crouched down and had a look at me. I looked back at her, silently.

‘Why are you under the desk?’

‘I did a bad thing.’

‘What bad thing?’

‘Look at my emails.’

She stood up and there was some clicking of the mouse as she worked out what was going on. She crouched back down.

‘Oh dear.’

‘I know. I’m a fucking idiot.’

‘Oh, it’s not so bad. Will you come out now?’

‘No.’

‘Okay. Stay there for a little bit longer then.’

Twenty minutes passed and I was still hiding under the desk. Under the desk had become the best place ever, my safe haven. Nothing could get me under here. Me and under the desk were meant to be.

My Team Leader came back.

‘Do you think you can come out from under the desk yet?’

‘No.’

‘Okay.’

Then she walked away and I heard the door open and close, and her footsteps go down the corridor. Five minutes later she was back with a second set of footsteps. Her boyfriend, my chum. She’d brought him back to get me out from under the desk. He crouched down and had a look at me.

‘You fucked that one up, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s not so bad, he’ll forget. It’ll be fine. Come out from under the desk.’

‘No fucking way. I like it under the desk.’

He pushed himself onto his hands and knees and crawled under the desk. I moved over a bit to give him some room. There wasn’t any room. We were practically sitting on top of each other.

‘Get your own under the desk. This is mine. Fuck off.’

‘You have to come out from under the desk now.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Look. Everything will be fine. You have to come out sometime. You should send him a jokey email back and pretend that it was a funny joke! That’ll work.’

‘That will not work.’

‘It might.’

I looked at him.

‘Fine.’

I came out from under the desk and sat at my computer. And then I sent the worst cover-up, that-was-a-joke email ever. It went like this.

‘Yeah! Here’s my tit!

His name is Titty!’

I pressed send. I sat still, mortified, until he replied:

‘Oh, hahaha. Okay.’

We didn’t really talk much after that.

Now, I know that not everyone who believes in a God is a fucking headcase. I am also aware that you should not tar every cunt you meet with the same brush, so I just thought it was worth saying here, before I get fucking verbally attacked, that I
know
that you’re not all crazy. It’s just my unfortunate encounters with Christians that have made me really fucking suspicious of people’s motives.

I used to work for a pretty big charity. Charity offices are fucking swarming with Christians, and this was no exception. On my team alone there were four. They all went to the same church, and it was one of those massive churches that looks like a warehouse where the people who go there are all happy-clappy and they print propaganda on shiny pamphlets to try and entice you in and make you think that they are normal. More than once, when someone at work was going through a hard time, one of the Christians would approach them, or take them for a coffee, and let them know that they could come along to church if they wanted, and the church would help.

It happened to me once, but as the shit I’m about to describe had already happened, all that succeed in doing was making me swear a lot and telling them to get their religious bullshit out of my face and away from everyone else as well, while they were at it.

One of the girls on my team who went to said church was about my age. We got on pretty well, and we both used to get the same bus into and back home from work. She liked reading, and I let her borrow a few of my books. One day she spent the entire day telling me how good
Twilight
was, and the next day she brought it in for me to borrow. I read it that evening and gave it back to her at work the next day. That afternoon, we walked the fifteen minutes it took to get to the bus stop together, chattering about
Twilight
.

Five minutes into our chat, she said to me:

‘How often do you think about killing yourself?’

How often?

‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘I don’t think many people think about killing themselves. Why?’

‘Oh, it’s totally normal,’ she said. ‘I think about it every day. More than once a day.’

I stopped walking and turned to face her.

‘It’s not normal,’ I said to her. ‘It’s horrible. You shouldn’t be thinking about things like that. If you are feeling miserable you need to go to a doctor and you need to talk to them about medication or cognitive behavioural therapy or whatever it is that might help you not have those thoughts.’

She looked quite thoughtful. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ve spoken to my Mum and she says that it is normal. She says it is normal to be miserable and that you just have to ignore it and get on with things. She says it’s not something that a doctor could fix, just going to church and loving God will make it better, but you know, everyone thinks about killing themselves. It’s normal.’

‘Your Mum is a cunt,’ I said. ‘It’s not normal. Go to a fucking doctor.’

‘Ah, I’ll be okay,’ she said. ‘Hey, do you want to come to church on Sunday? My Mum’s leading the sermon and it’s about sex and marriage and why you should wait. She runs the marriage counselling classes, you see, and she knows that a lot of marriages fail because people aren’t pleasing God by having sex before marriage. I think it’ll be really interesting.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ I replied. ‘You’ve met me, you know that I fuck everyone I meet and that I don’t believe in this shit and the last person, the VERY LAST PERSON that I want preaching to me about what is right and what is wrong is someone that thinks that thinking about killing yourself is normal.’

‘Oh, okay,’ she said. ‘I do know that you don’t agree, but I hope that one day you’ll come to church with me. I’ve told my friends there about you, they think you sound really funny.’

We carried on walking to the bus stop, but the conversation was over. I couldn’t believe that someone would tell their own daughter something like that. Later on, when she was drunk, she also told me that her brother had sexually abused her and her sister when they were younger; something that she had also told her Mum and that her Mum had said was ‘normal’.

At this happy-clappy church that looks like a warehouse that I mentioned earlier, this woman was second in command. She counselled people on their marriages, she told them that their problems would be solved by God, she
advised
them not to seek medical help, instead reading bits of the bible at them and giving her warped interpretation of what it meant.

I was brought up in a Catholic family. Nothing that I ever did was frowned upon by people that loved me, because they fucking loved me. Everything that this girl did, the answer she was given was to pray to God. Oh, and to give a percentage of her salary to the church, of course.

You can say whatever you like about religion. Love it or hate it, I don’t give a shit. But I will tell you what I think: if there is a God, he has fucking changed with the times. You’re preaching from a book that is thousands of years old.
My
God, if there is one, understands this, and loves you the same. And if you’re sick he wants you to get some fucking medicine down you. And if you are miserable he wants you to talk to other people about it and not just him. And if you decide that you’re going to jack in all this Christian bullshit and leave it behind then he’ll respect that too.

This girl was fucked up because of what someone had told her God was, and that makes me fucking angry. The same someone also forced the sanctity of marriage on her sister, even though her sister’s husband was beating the living fuck out of her every night. She counselled them through their marriage.

When me and that girl went to see
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
her Mum grounded her, because watching
Harry Potter
is as apparently as disgusting to her brand of Christian as making the devil a ham sandwich and asking him if he’d like a quick blowie under the table. Grounded her. She was 23 fucking years old.

The rest of the people who I knew that went to that church all had their own reasons for being there.

One used to be an aggressive alcoholic. None of us were invited to his wedding because his wife didn’t want anyone who wasn’t Christian to be there. They don’t fuck each other. She doesn’t like having sex.

Another guy, pretty high up in the same church, had not long been out of prison for doing time for fraud. Where I worked he headed up the team that dealt with sensitive information.

His daughter did her work experience there. She worked with me for a day. I didn’t have to teach her much, because she innocently told me she’d already been handling the work at home, stuff that her Dad had taken from the office. She also knew all about every piece of technology in the building, and when shown the warehouse said, ‘Oh yeah, this is where Dad gets our phones from.’

All these people have longer and different stories, but they all make me angry.

Now, whenever I’m home and I drive past that church I wind the window down and swear my fucking tits off.

That girl doesn’t speak to me anymore, maybe because I called her Mum a cunt or maybe because I’m not living a wholesome enough life, I don’t know.

But that is one little story about why religion, particularly happy-clappy Christians, especially the kind that try to recruit you, boils my piss.

I was still in my dead-end job, working amongst a bunch of cunts who I hated vehemently because I was so angry that I was still there every fucking day. The longer I worked there, the more I started to take the piss. On this one day I’d finished all of the work that I’d be scheduled to do very quickly (because I did a shit job of it) and then put my feet up on my desk to spend the rest of the day reading
The Godfather
. If anyone asked me what I was doing I would fabricate some lie or other like ‘I’m waiting for my scanning to finish’, ‘I’m on my lunch’, ‘This is work. I’m working right now. Go away, you’re distracting me.’

As I sat happily reading away I eventually became aware of someone standing by my desk. My boss.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Reading
The Godfather
,’ I replied.

‘Oh, OK. Well I was wondering, would you mind going into the other office and speaking to ___. He needs some help with something.’

Fuck’s sake.

‘Sure,’ I said, putting down my book. ‘I’ll go now.’

The guy she had asked me to speak to was fucking weird, and that’s putting it lightly. I never went near his desk because he frightened me a lot, and everything that I knew about him was through gossiping with people who sat near him.

There was a lot to this guy, but the thing that freaked me out the most was that he thought that he was Doctor Evil from the
Austin Powers
films. I’d never experienced it close up, but had heard about weird conversations he’d had with my colleagues. I approached with caution.

‘Ah, hello there. Yes, Mr Bigglesworth and I had a couple of questions …’

He picked up a white stuffed toy cat from the shelf in front of him, placed it on his lap and began to stroke.

‘To keep us out of mischief, I was wondering if you could show us how to work that software that you’ve been demonstrating to my colleagues? Just Mr Bigglesworth and I, Madam Fifi doesn’t like technology.’ He picked up a second white stuffed cat from the desk next to him, put it on his lap and continued to stroke both cats.

‘Er, right. Yeah of course. Now?’ I managed to force out of my mouth.

‘Well, yes. Now would suit us fine. The kittens are asleep.’ He placed Madam Fifi back on the desk and pointed to the shelf that he had taken Mr Bigglesworth from. On it there were ten or so small stickers of white kittens. Fucking hell.

I pulled up a chair, tried to concentrate on being professional and began to talk him through what he wanted to know. He was acting vaguely normally until his second in command came over with a query.

‘Hey, Doctor E, could you have a look at this for me?’

He threw his head back and did that Doctor Evil laugh. Some people around laughed, some clearly genuinely thought it was funny and the other 90 per cent sat and kind of giggled uncomfortably and then turned back to their screens. It was so loud and sudden that it scared the shit out of me and I jumped. He turned to me.

‘It’s those bloody machines being …’ he put his little finger up to the corner of his mouth ‘…
evil
again, I’ll bet.’

That was it, it was too much. I got up and excused myself while he spoke to his colleague. Back in my office my boss commented on how quick I’d been and asked if everything was alright.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said, ‘just never, ever send me back there again.’

I put my book away and worked really fucking hard for the rest of the afternoon. Lesson learnt.

Let me tell you how I met my boyfriend.

One of my good friends lived in a different town, miles away from me. She rang me excitedly one day to tell me that there was a band called Anal Beard playing at a club down the road from her, and did I want to go?

Of
course
I wanted to go. I hadn’t seen her in a while and what a reason to go and see someone. Anal Beard. Mmm, such a delicious name for a band.

So I drove down to her house and we drank quite a lot of wine and then headed out to watch Anal Beard. They were really good! Although, I don’t remember that much. I remember the singer announcing, ‘This next song’s called
Sexually Weird
’ and falling in love with him a bit. I was quite horny, I hadn’t had sex in ages. Could I fuck him? Maybe.