Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (20 page)

: When?

: proud tower thrusting into your clear blue skies.

: When?

And that’s as much as I got.

Um. What are we to make of that? This man in his mid-forties, with his suit and shiny shoes, his slicked-back hair and briefcase, talking of battering rams and thrusting towers to a warrior princess in a virtual pub in a game called Ragnarok. This man in his mid-forties who chooses to call himself Sauron Flesh Harrower when he’s not at work in (no doubt) middle-to-senior management somewhere, engaging in borderline-violent sex talk with a total stranger on a computer screen on the 20.20 train from Paddington to Oxford? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

But also: when is he going to take her? I need to know! Martin, I never thought I’d say this, but tonight’s delay: it’s not long enough. I need more time. I need more time to find out how and when Sauron Flesh Harrower and Elvira Clunge are going to do the dirty with each other!

The only person more frustrated than me when we finally rolled into Oxford some nine minutes behind schedule was Sauron Flesh Harrower himself. With a sigh he snapped the laptop shut, slid it back into his bag, straightened his tie, slicked back his hair and gazed at his reflection in the window… preparing himself physically and mentally to face the real world again, the family, the wife who no doubt does not call him ‘my lord’, who perhaps isn’t as pure as the virgin snow upon the misty peaks of the Jagged Mountains of Montezuma and whose lips, I’d wager, are not softer and plumper than even the legendary pillows upon the beds of the courtesans of the Emperor Carnus the Rampant.

We trudged off the train together. And if he was going to keep quiet about his doings in the Tavern of the Slaughtered Magi (as I’m sure he was) then I couldn’t wait to get home and tell Beth all about it.

What did Beth say when I told her? She thought it was hilarious. She thought it was a scream. She fired up our own laptop and tried to join Ragnarok – she wanted to log on and find Sauron Flesh Harrower and Elvira Clunge and see the action for herself.

And so that’s exactly what we did. We found the game all right, we downloaded the drivers… and then it asked us for our credit card details. Do you know how much Ragnarok costs to play? Fifty quid a month! That’s what they’re paying, for their dirty talk in virtual taverns – 50 smackers a month. Six hundred quid a year!

Obviously we didn’t sign up. But we did go to bed still laughing, Beth jumping into the covers and whispering, ‘You have a mighty weapon, my lord…’

And, just to add to the jollity, Sylvie didn’t wake once, either.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
19.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, November 1. Amount of my day wasted: 14 minutes. Fellow sufferers: None (odd time of night).

Trick or treat, Martin! Surprises or sweeties? I hope the spooks didn’t spook you. I hope the ghoulies stayed away and nobody gave you the willies. And most of all, I hope the feral kids who seem to hunt in vicious, legitimised little packs like ASBO-flouting legions of the undead on that one particular night of the year did not do too much damage to you or your property.

I hope your house remained unegged. I hope your car has kept its full complement of wing mirrors and windshield wipers. I hope, in short, that the traditional Halloween teenage zombie apocalypse did not upset your evening too much.

Round our way, of course, we like to train ’em young. We prepare our children for their adolescent delinquency by getting them dressed up and trick or treating as soon as they can walk. Or even, in fact, earlier.

Last night, Martin, my baby daughter went trick or treating. We all did: Beth and Sylvie and I, our little nuclear family. We all dressed up, we got a little bag for sweeties, we carved ourselves a pumpkin, and we hit the haunted streets of old Oxford town. I wanted to go as Sauron Flesh Harrower and Elvira Clunge, but the weather just wasn’t with us. Wrong time of year for bikinis and loincloths.

Beth still cut a dash as a rather saucy-looking Cruella de Vil (I don’t know about you, but the slashed red dress and high heel does it for me, Martin), I was a rather rakish Dracula, and Sylvie was the cutest little toffee apple you ever saw (the costume was actually a Sainsbury’s baby Christmas pudding outfit, cunningly adapted).

We hooked up with a bunch of other parents and babies and we went out in search of loot. And proper fun it was too: just about everyone had dressed up… everyone except Mr Blair, of course, who said something arch about Halloween being an ancient English pagan tradition that had been co-opted, corrupted and commercialised by the Americans. Didn’t stop him grabbing a handful of fun-sized Milky Ways when they were handed out, mind.

Anyway: like I say, it was fun. Sylvie had a whale of a time – it basically combined the four most exciting things in a young life: staying up late, dressing up, hanging out with Mum and Dad, and getting lots of nice things to eat. Or look at, in her case, as she’s still too little for chocolate.

Someone had brought a hip flask with them, and by the time we’d covered three or four of the closest streets to our house, we were all pretty well up for the pub… which is exactly where we ended up. Adults, dressed like unwanted extras from the ‘Thriller’ video, sitting around a couple of big tables; children, dressed almost unbearably cutely and massively overexcited, running, crawling and bum-shuffling in and out of our legs and around the pub.

The only slight downer came when Mr Blair tried to engage me in a conversation about the media (look, he started it!). I tried to be nice to him, Martin, honest I did – he is Beth’s friend, after all, and all the other mums seem to like him too (though not so much the dads, which is interesting) – but, really, I couldn’t resist sharing a few tales from the front line with him.

I confess: I was deliberately trying to shock him. You can’t blame me for that, can you? I’d had a drink and all, and he was claiming some kind of spurious authority (I mean, what does he actually know? He may be the man when it comes to babies, he may be able to attend bonding weekends, but when it comes to the workings of Her Majesty’s press, he’s as ignorant as a baby himself.) So all I did was tell some of the more outrageous stories I’ve heard. The odd thing is, they’re all true.

I told him the one about the Sunday broadsheet that decided to run an investigation into the Lesbian Avengers pressure group – and sent two male reporters to infiltrate the organisation (their reasoning being, astonishingly, that these particular chaps made for more realistic lesbians than any of the women in the office).

When the men were exposed as not only journalists, but inept drag queens (which could admittedly look like someone was taking the mickey), there was nearly a lynching – the two guys ended up being chased down the Holloway Road in London, holding their high heels and hitching up their skirts, pursued by a mob of 50 or so righteously furious women, before finally seeking sanctuary in a pub showing an Arsenal–Spurs game. Their pursuers burst in after them, punches were thrown, someone got glassed, and the police were called before a full-on lesbians v football hooligans riot broke out.

I told him the one about the reporter on another paper who was told to dress up as a schoolgirl and buy some crack in King’s Cross – just because someone there thought that the idea that crack was being sold to schoolgirls in King’s Cross would make for a good headline. She duly got dolled up and hung around for a while, fending off propositions from all manner of unsavoury characters, getting increasingly terrified, before finally someone offered her some drugs. Grateful, she handed over £50 and hot-tailed it back to the office, thankfully still in one piece.

But when they got a lab to test it, it turned out not to be crack at all. She’d been sold flakes of crystallised ginger. So what did the paper do? They ran the story anyway. The point was, she thought she was buying crack, right? And the comment editor took home the ginger and cooked it on her salmon for tea.

And after that, seeing as I’d had yet another drink and I was in full flow and on the subject of crack anyway, I told him the story about the features journalist who was told to babysit the crackhead heiress who was ready to spill the beans on her rock star boyfriend. She duly put her up in a hotel room overnight, stayed in an adjoining room, and in the morning went to rouse her. Except she wouldn’t answer the door. There was no sound at all. Panicked, she got the hotel manager to break in, and found the girl shivering and blue-lipped and in the first stages of severe withdrawal. Between fainting fits she managed to tell the journo that the only way she’d be able to make the interview and photoshoot was if she got hold of some more drugs, and fast.

So of course she calls the news desk and asks them what she should do. The answer?

‘Buy her some fucking crack!’

The desk gave her the address of a crack den in Hackney and she drove there, with the addict semi-comatose in the back of her Micra, knocked on the door, bought some rocks, asked for a receipt for her expenses, was told to get lost by the dealer.

Halfway to the shoot, with the car filled with crack fumes, she got another call from the news desk. The editor had changed his mind, the story was dropped and the shoot was off.

‘What do I do about the junkie in the back of my car?’ she asked. The only reply was a virtual shrug on the other end of the phone, and she ended up pulling over somewhere in Shoreditch, wrestling the confused girl out of the car, stuffing £20 into her hand (all she had left) and speeding off before she could work out what was happening.

I must confess I got a bit carried away by that stage, Martin. As Mr Blair’s expression turned from amazed to shocked to downright disgusted, Beth had to tell me to shut up. People were getting uncomfortable. Most of the rest of the pub had gone quiet. She stood there in the middle of the room, in her blood red dress, black stockings, killer heels and hair piled up and falling down over her eyes, telling me in a low voice that perhaps not everyone is so amused by these stories as I am… and she looked pretty goddamned amazing.

That’s my wife, I thought. And I left Mr Blair with a big old wink to let him know so, too.

So, yes, Martin. Halloween was a success, all told! The important thing was that we all had a good time together, as a family, like the old days.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
19.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, November 1.

Dear Dan

Many thanks again for your continuing correspondence. Your train was delayed on the morning of the 20 October due to overnight vandalism. Such mindless defacing of Premier Westward carriages is unfortunately an ongoing problem for us, and one to which I confess there would not appear to be a solution. Why anyone would choose to write such things on a train is quite beyond me; and I must say that even their seeming inability to spell the profanities they’re writing makes the whole business even more disheartening.

On the evening of the 27th your service was held up at Reading when a passenger was temporarily locked in the ‘quiet zone’ toilets and on the evening of November 1 you were late leaving Paddington when a pregnant lady refused to leave her seat in first class, despite only possessing a standard-class ticket. (She was eventually allowed to stay and let off with a warning, given that she was the only passenger in the first-class carriage and the conductor could not find a free seat in any of the standard cars.)

I must confess, however, that I have no record of any delay on the 25 October. Could you please check your records again?

Finally – some good news! As you may know, we at Premier Westward pride ourselves on the punctuality and reliability of the service we provide, and as such periodically carry out ‘spot checks’ on the performance of trains used by season-ticket holders. After performing one such spot check on your season ticket (you must believe me when I say that yours was chosen at random and is in no way related to our correspondence) I am happy to confirm that you are entitled to some compensation from us for your delays.

Premier Westward Railways are delighted to offer you a pair of Standard-Class Off-Peak Super-Advance Tickets from your home station (Oxford) to Torquay, to be redeemed at any time between now and December 31. The usual restrictions apply, of course, and you will need to specify exactly which services you intend to take. Once specified the tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable.

Congratulations, Dan! I hope you feel this shows just how seriously we do take passenger satisfaction, and on a personal note, perhaps it means you can take Beth and Sylvie on that holiday at long last! I hear Torquay is best visited during the winter months, before the ‘holiday hordes’ descend!

Many thanks

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, November 8. Amount of my day wasted: five minutes. Fellow sufferers: Sauron Flesh Harrower.

Dear Martin

We did it! A week – a whole week – without delays! Oh frabjous day, callooh, callay! Pop the party poppers, unstream the party streamers, mix up the Premier Westward punch and let’s do the locomotion! I hope you’re proud, Martin. A week without delay: I hope you’re properly proud of yourself.

On the other hand, a week without delay has meant a week without one of our little chats. And I do enjoy our little chats (sorry, I know that sounded sarcastic, but it really wasn’t meant to: I do genuinely enjoy them).