Dead Dogs (11 page)

Then there’s the young fella who just came out of the
hairdresser
’s. He can’t be any more than ten or so and his arm makes
a hard bony triangle over his head because he’s trying to get at something itchy down the back of his tracksuit top. His head is shaven down to almost stubble and his skin shows through pale and domed over his skull. He is small and thin and now his head looks too big for his body. With his angry little face and bundle of sticks body he looks like a cross between a skinhead and an Auschwitz victim. A conflation of opposites. His whole being is a contradiction in terms. With a complete lack of self-
consciousness
he stands in front of the plate glass window and looks at his reflection. His hand comes out of the back of his top and rubs delicately over the bristles of his head. He doesn’t see anyone in here and no one in here sees him. Except me.

The office works like this. A bank tells someone they need insurance to get a mortgage. This aforementioned someone comes to the insurance office and fills out a proposal form for Life and Serious Illness cover or Mortgage Protection or both, ensuring it’s signed and dated on the Xs.

See also Declaration A.

See also Declaration B.

See also Direct Debit Mandate.

Now, strictly speaking, just to get a quote from an insurance company not everything has to be filled in. You can leave out
certain
details. Not details like whether you’re on the verge of
croaking
from motor neuron disease or details like the fact that the tumour pulsing in your brain has just been diagnosed as
inoperable
. Not stuff like that. But to just get a quote you can leave out other details.

Usually underneath the personal details there’s a little empty field marked
Occupation
. This is there so that if someone like a scaffolder wants insurance the insurance company can screw them over because they work at a height. If the poor fuck falls three storeys off his scaffolding there’s a fair chance he’ll either be dead as dead can be or not really in any condition to continue working. In the industry this is called
risk
. Outside the industry this is still called
risk
. The insurance cover is there so that if he can’t meet the mortgage repayments through injury or falling from a height and impaling himself on rebar the bank still gets paid.

Financial Institutions 1: Everyone Else 0.

Myself and the business undergrads who work in the office collect up the proposals that are filled in. We photocopy them for the files. Then we either post them or fax them to the insurance company. This is what we do. All day every day. Some days you can actually feel your brain turning to sludge. I’m starting to find it difficult to make abstract connections anymore. My eyes are sore from the photocopier’s glare. Then I do something just to prove I can still change the routine, to prove I can still invent things. I do something that gets me fired.

Once more with feeling. This isn’t done out of badness and this isn’t anything like the stuff that Seán does.

There’s a stack of proposals left on the edge of a table to be photocopied and sent off. I know this because there’s a pink
post-it
stuck to the top one with the words PHOTOCOPY & SEND OFF written on it. Every day there’s another post-it curling up
from the top of another pile of proposals and every day it says the same thing. You’d think we wouldn’t need instructions by now. The proposals are always a pleasing peach colour and the parts you fill in are all white squares for the BLOCK CAPITALS. Most people ignore the block capitals thing and simply scrawl the information across the boxes. Each proposal is a smudged mess of blue or black ink. The pink post-it though is always clearly printed in BLOCK CAPITALS.

Most days as I’m working through the stack I check some of the proposals. Mainly I do this because otherwise I’ll go insane. I just run my eye over the names, the addresses, the dates of birth. Sometimes if a date of birth or something important is missing we get flak from head office. There’s a middle-aged, nervous
person
who works here, named Sarah. If head office gets Sarah on a bad day she starts to cry and has to have a fag and a cup of tea before she can face work again. I could say I check the proposals in order to postpone Sarah’s imminent nervous breakdown but I’d be lying. I couldn’t give a flying fuck about either Sarah or head office. Nobody knows this though and when I spot
something
wrong I get a pat on the head and am cooed over. I am a novelty act. I am a performing seal.

The
Occupation
part of the proposal form always draws my attention. Maybe I’m just nosey but a lot of people who fill in these forms are local so I probably know them. Mostly, there’s the usual mix of farmers, general operatives and the oddly repellent sounding
house duties
. Every so often though you get a novelist or artist and I’m thinking, who are these people? Where do they
live? Why haven’t I heard of them? Provincial towns don’t tend to produce bohemian types. The atmosphere of spent ambition, of time’s slow coalescence, means that aspirations beyond farmer or general operative are stillborn. Strangled at birth. People give up. No one is ever a poet.

See also Sculptor.

See also Actor.

See also Playwright.

I decide to give people an occupation.

I go through the stack of proposals, pen in hand, waiting until I see a blank
Occupation
section. I look around and as usual no one is looking at me. Sarah is putting down the phone and is starting to cry. She is having a bad day. Everyone else is either transfixed by their computer screens or is starting to gravitate towards the wreck that is Sarah’s sobbing body.

I come to a proposal with a blank
Occupation
section. Now I’m reading the name and address and date of birth and now I’m writing. The proposal belongs to one Mr Alexander O’Sullivan who lives in Kiltealy. He is forty-eight years of age and now he works as a drug dealer. I don’t intend to make him a drug dealer. At first I’m going to make him a musician but then I’m thinking, why should I? Maybe it’s jealousy but I’m not going to give this place another artist in hiding. I want to bring everyone down to zero. I’m looking out the window at the smiling, blank, defeated faces, the vacant lot of human existence. And I decide to make people what I see. Again, not out of badness, I decide to make people the rotten core at the heart of everything. I think it’d be
funny. I think that I’m somehow proving my intellectual
superiority
. So I make them drug dealers. So I make them pimps. So I make them human detritus.

See also Rent Boys.

See also People Traffickers.

See also Thieves.

Each time I come across a doctor, a surgeon, an artist I strike a line through their occupation and put in something else. Then I photocopy them and then I send them off. Behind me Sarah is sobbing and someone’s going, ‘It’s okay, it’s alright. It’s not your fault.’

How I get sacked from the insurance place is like this. Every day I go through the stack of proposals and every day I give
people
new occupations. Every day I look out on the Market Square and watch the random melodrama of human life and every day I drag more and more people into the gutter.

During the summer, purple and gold bunting goes up and people with purple and gold jerseys come in and go out. Women walk by with the inevitable
Wexford Creamery
printed across their tits. Summer brings this year after year. A fat farmer
wearing
a jersey so small it looks like it’s sprayed on has just handed in a proposal and, quick as a flash, I tippex out Dairy Farmer from the occupation field and put in Pornographer. I can’t help myself.

Again, this is not done out of badness.

Sarah spends half the summer crying and smoking and
drinking
tea. Her tears must taste like tobacco and tannin. Her teeth are turning yellow.

Outside people move in clumps or alone. Everyone moves in sunshine. Everyone is smiling. In here the computers spew out radiation and everyone is smiling except me and the business undergrads. We are photocopying and sending off. There are
targets
to be met.

Trouble starts because of Dr Thorpe.

The procedure goes like this.

When a person applies for Life and Serious Illness cover or Mortgage Protection the proposal is sent off to head office for assessment and processing. Depending on the answers that the client gives to the questions on the nice peach and white forms it goes to underwriting. Depending on the answers that the client gives to the questions on the nice peach and white forms a
medical
report is requested. This is to ensure that the client isn’t going to die of throat cancer or renal failure any time soon.

See also Leukaemia.

See also Muscular Dystrophy.

See also Heart Disease.

One of the items that determine this is what the client’s
occupation
is listed as.

I don’t know who Elaine Doyle is. I don’t care who Elaine Doyle is. But it is because of Elaine Doyle that I get sacked.

Elaine Doyle is a lab technician. For all her working life she has been a lab technician and now according to the records of a certain life assurance company she is a high-class prostitute. This is quite a career move for a woman in her thirties.

I can’t remember doing this to her. Then again I can never
remember individual names. All these proposals, all these lives, are one homogenous slick of sewage. Outside walking in the sunshine are factory workers, butchers, shop assistants and in the silicone depths of our database they are human waste. They are holes in the day. They are shadows in the sunlight. I’m
standing
at the desk watching them through the big front window. I’ve a black pen in my right hand and I’m about to have a quick rifle through today’s proposals. There’s a hugely fat couple laughing with each other in the middle of the road and I’m wondering what they work at. The woman has
Wexford Creamery
stretched across her chest.

It is at this moment that the shit hits the fan.

The broker, the person who owns this bustling establishment, steps out onto the office floor. Then he’s turning to me and he’s going, ‘Would you mind having a word with me in private, please?’ It’s the
in private
bit that gets me. I’ve never, ever, seen him pass up the opportunity to humiliate someone in public.

I follow him into his office and I close the door behind me. I’m wondering what he wants and now I’m thinking how this can’t be good. There’s a letter lying on his desk and upside down I’m reading it and upside-down I can see the signature. It says Dr S. Thorpe. I’m reading this and for some reason I’m trying to stop myself laughing. And now I’m wondering what the main part of the letter says.

I’m standing here with the broker looking at me with this prim expression pursing his mouth so that it looks almost sutured shut. He’s looking at me and his left hand is pulsing on
the desk beside the letter. It is spotted and crawled over with thick veins. It is a grotesque spider, hairless and scrawny and straining with tension. I’m standing here and behind the broker venetian blinds segment the day and I’m trying to stop myself laughing.

The three paragraphs of Dr S. Thorpe’s letter probably go something along the lines of: Mrs Doyle has been a patient of mine for blah blah I have never known her to be employed as anything other than blah blah Mrs Doyle and, indeed, I, as her doctor am shocked blah blah grossly embarrassing blah blah HIV Test blah blah Internal Examination blah blah Legal Action blah blah. Blah.

I can’t read this. Upside-down it is Cyrillic but looking at the broker and the urgent blind spider of his left hand I know this is what it says. Looking at the broker and his puckered sphincter of a mouth I know this is the end of my life in the fast-paced world of insurance brokerage. I can’t say I’m exactly despondent over this and now I can feel the start of a smile leak out from the edges of my lips. It is a guilty stain.

Now the broker’s face is going blood clot purple and
something
’s making a fault line in the middle of his forehead. He’s looking like he’s about to explode and he’s looking like he’s about to kill me and then his face is going pale again. The pink and knuckled spider on the desk is uncurling itself and I’m starting to grin.

Then he’s picking up the letter and then he’s putting it back down and then he’s saying stuff. He’s saying, ‘I’m not even going
to ask you if you did this. That shit-eating expression of yours says everything.’

And now I’m realising that he hates me. Right here right now he hates me more than anything. And now I’m wondering how long it will take before he hits me. I’m suddenly worried. Offices are full of potential lethal weapons; scissors, paperweights, letter openers. That kind of thing. It’s only the weirdly constipated expression on his face that keeps me grinning.

He’s going, ‘Yeah I fucking knew it was you. As soon as I opened this fucking letter, I knew it had to be a little fucking smart arse like you.’

I’m just standing there. I get the feeling that this rant is going better than he thought. He’s leaning forward in his chair now and his head is a spitting white-hot ball bearing and he’s saying, ‘The others wouldn’t fuck up a great chance like this. Fucking summer workers, you’re all the same. Jesus Christ, I do a favour for your Da and you wouldn’t even make a fucking go of it.’ Now I’m
wondering
, a fucking go of what? Of stapling?

See also Photocopying.

See also Making Coffee.

See also Counting Petty Cash.

He’s sitting in his chair and if this were a cartoon little jets of steam would be whistling out of his ears. He’s sitting in his chair and if this were a TV programme I’d try to explain why I did this to Elaine Doyle amongst others. He’s sitting in his chair with his back to the day and on his desk there’s the letter, two pens, a
calendar
, a Waterford Crystal paperweight and his computer. He’s
sitting at his desk and he’s going, ‘Do you have anything to say for yourself?’