Worst. Person. Ever. (15 page)

Right.

The jet. Time to leave.

Just then Neal roared up in a Jeep driven by one of his video-gaming friends, with two more in the rear seat, all of them holding foaming half-full Oktoberfest mugs of beer. “Rejoice, Ray!” Neal shouted. “The trash vortex will soon be gone.”

“Christ, Neal. You’re wasted. Let’s just get to the fucking plane.”

“Not until you have a beer with us, my friend. Everyone on the island is celebrating a new era of hope for mankind.”

“Yes, yes, whatever. We’re the worst thing that ever happened to the planet. But a pint of lager right now
would
be just the ticket.”

A back-seat goon turned a spigot on an aluminum canister and … voila! A cold, frosty, surprisingly delicious mug of lager appeared. I became drunk with the first swig. “All hail the atomic bomb!”

“To the bomb! The bomb! The bomb!”

It was a matey moment that cancelled out the horror of my cleansing. I climbed in beside Neal and we began
driving on the runway, carving donuts and weaving in between other Jeeps filled with soused airmen. The whole island had erupted into an orgy of stress release.

“Makes you feel good, doesn’t it, Ray?”

“Just hand me another fucking beer.”
Finally
, a bit of light-heartedness after seventy-two hours of total shit.

Neal found an eighties radio channel on the Jeep’s satellite set, and the afternoon turned into a blur of hair-band ballads and puddles of vomited saltines. Around sunset, to the waning sound of Haysi Fantayzee’s hit “Shiny Shiny” from the departing Jeep’s sound system, I found myself utterly cunted and lying in a heap on the ground at the foot of the stairs leading up to the jet. Neal was Angry Dancing his way upward. I crawled after him. Once on board, I heaved my old aluminum medical gurney out the door. It bit the concrete with an aching clang. Elspeth closed the port and, finally, Wake Island was history.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so thrilled to hear the landing gear pull up. Neal, Elspeth and I feasted on Advil and microwave luxury meals as we tried to process the biggest twenty-four-hour travel kludge in history.

“I telephoned me mum when I was down there,” said Elspeth. “I told her where I was and she said her brother, Olly, went through Wake Island back in the late 1970s on a transpac boat when he was shipping off to Yokohama.”

“Where’s Olly now?”

“He runs a Dungeons & Dragons shop in Hull. He never really was the same after he’d spent time training dolphins to wear video cameras on their foreheads. I think those little buggers stole his mind.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“Laugh if you will, but Olly served the Queen very well.” Elspeth wiped tomato sauce from her lips. “And now he throws rocks at you if you go too near his council flat door. Fucking dolphins.”

“They think they’re actually going to fix the trash vortex with bombs,” I exclaimed. “These fucking Americans are like
children.
”

Neal, being one of nature’s mimics, said, “Imagine John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe riding in a bomber above a nuclear blast. ‘Ooh, Mr. Kennedy, that H-bomb is so scary.’ ‘Don’t you worry, Marilyn. Just cover up your diseased minge with this lead-lined X-ray-proof garment I stole from Jackie’s hope chest.’ ”

“John Kennedy,” said Elspeth. “Is he the one who had a lot of sex and the retro hairdo?”

“Dear God,” I said. “What year were you born?”

“I’m old enough to be a flight attendant is how old I am. Just like Prince William’s mum-in-law.”

We became reflective then and took a pause from eating. Overtop the dusty whoosh of sleek jet engines I put forth a question. “Neal, let me ask you this: do you think camel toes are, in any way, you know … 
hot
?”

“That’s an excellent question, Ray.”

“Oh God,” said Elspeth. “I’m going to be sick.”

Neal said, “Come along, Elspeth, think of this as an interfaith symposium, with you representing just one of several points of view. But I do want to say that simply because a woman’s got camel toe, it in no way indicates she’s a slag.”

I said, “Thank you, Neal. I, too, believe women are the future—yay, women! Yay, tampons and all that! But it’s the camel toe part about women that’s the topic here.”

Neal reached for brandy. “It’s hard to really get in the mood when there’s a badly packed kebab three and a half feet away from your eyes. It’s all about the packaging.”

“Agreed,” I said, “Part of the charm of the quim is that it’s on the inside, not the outside.”

“And,” added Neal with authority, “just because there’s something big on the outside doesn’t always mean a bird’s got a clown’s pocket on the inside. Perhaps the contrary. And it’s a slippery slope, too. One day you’re fine with having a camel toe, and the next day you’re out behind the chip shop with your knickers yo-yoing up and down, servicing strangers for the price of a pack of fags. Not helping society much that way, are you?”

Elspeth rebelled. “Will you two
stop
blabbing on about camel toes! I would like to enjoy my chicken piccata in peace.”

So much for the consolation of philosophy.

I looked over at a pile of apparently blank CDs on a seat beside me. “Neal, for fuck’s sake, who the hell uses CDs these days?”

“Oh, them. They’re bootleg Harry Potter movies I promised someone in LA I’d take to his friend in Kiribati.” Neal threw a Sharpie my way. “Do me a favour, Ray, and write ‘Harry Potter’ on them so they don’t end up in the rubbish.”

“Will do, mate.”

Stuart Greene.

What a total fucking dick.

But let me back up a bit.

We finally landed in Kiribati in the fiery coral dawn. Christ, could these people have found a place on earth more remote? Excuse me, but were the Kerguelen Islands all booked up? Was Pitcairn Island shut down for an extended religious holiday? Try Google-Mapping this place; it’s a dogfart.

On a practical level, since cartwheeling over the atomic blast, I’d been down to a borrowed pair of sailor pants. Before we landed, Neal gave me one of Arnaud du Puis’s linen outfits.

“Ooh,” cooed Elspeth after I changed, “you’re dressed just like Ewan McGregor.” She brushed some dust off the lapel.

Neal added, “And your lobster-like sunburn from our afternoon beerfest gives you a previously missing outdoorsy air. We should go drunk-driving around Wake Island a lot more.”

Wake Island
had
left me a bit tender red on the scalp and face. Still, standing on the Bonriki tarmac, I was feeling pretty darn good about myself, and felt even better when I spotted Sarah, with a clipboard, overseeing some staffers while something was being unloaded from an aging prop plane. She smiled and waved at me, and my heart swooned. And then a pickup truck approached and came to a stop. Stuart got out of the passenger seat. He looked at me and said, “Oh, great. It’s you.”

“Hello, Stuart.”

“Jesus, you look like Rock Hudson with late-stage AIDS. What the fuck happened to you since Hawaii?”

“Well—”

“Like I could care. Which one of you is Neal?”

“That’s me.” Neal raised a hand.

“You’ve got some Harry Potter CDs for me.”

“Brilliant! So you’re Stu Greene.” Neal reached into his jacket pocket and removed the CDs I’d labelled. He handed them to Stuart, who looked at them and froze.

“Everything okay?” asked Neal.

“Neal, who labelled these CDs?”

“Um, Raymond here. What’s up?”

“It’s just that
Raymond
spelled ‘Harry’ with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’.” He held it up for Neal to check out.

Neal looked and said, “H-E-R-R-Y. Huh. Don’t see that every day now, do you?”

Now, I like to think of myself as an educated bloke. I wasn’t head boy or Stephen fucking Hawking or anything, but Stuart—what a dick.

“Jesus, Gunt, how the
fuck
could anyone be stupid enough to spell Harry with an ‘e’?”

“It’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be.”

“Not as bad? How did a useless imbecile end up on
my
payroll?”

“That’s deeply unfair, Stuart. I was a bit drunk at the time.”

“Drunk? Gunt, even if my brain had been raped by a gallon of tequila, I’d still have the fucking wits to spell ‘Harry’ properly.”

At that moment, a rusty, windowless van used for hauling medium-sized groups about the airport was approaching. On its sun-rotted leather seats lounged a spent-looking array of executives, plus a handful of stocky types who could only be cameramen—hod carriers in any other period in history—torsos lopsided from decades of tramping across deserts and mountains and battlefields and swamps with a Sony always over the right shoulder, their livelihood also betrayed by their nylon cargo pants, capable of conveying a nineteenth-century hunt’s worth of crap from airport to airport to airport, fully washable and dryable in any hotel room on earth in under three hours.

Stuart whistled for the driver to stop, then bellowed, “You! Bus people! Come over here!”

Neal studied the passengers more closely as they disembarked. “
They’re
looking a bit wasted.”

Stuart agreed. “They’re all of them drunk and pissed off. There’s been an international incident that’s utterly
screwed up our supply shipments. Some dipshits somewhere let off a bomb. Airports are shut down all over.”

“Bombs go off all the time,” Neal protested.

“An
atomic
bomb.”

Neal and I looked at each other. “Well, that’s different, isn’t it?” Neal said. “Where’d they drop it, Stuart?”

“No one’s saying. Rumour is Hawaii. Anyhow, this bunch here has been drinking away the boredom all night while we wait for word about supplies and tech support staff.”

Neal asked about the luxurious TV network yacht.

“It was en route from Hawaii, but now it’s delayed because there’s an exclusion zone for all boats.”

“Probably stuck in the trash vortex,” I said.

Stuart had no time to reply, as twenty of my new co-workers, at the tail end of a long drunken night, staggered towards him from the rusting wagon. And then one more figure came bouncing along. Oh good fucking Christ:
Fiona.

“Raymond? Raymond! Could that really be you? You look like Rock Hudson with late-stage AIDS.”

Stuart smirked.

An executive beside Fiona said, “Who’s that, then?”

She replied, “
That’s
Raymond Gunt. You’ll be working with him. He’s a dreadful human being.”

“People!” shouted Stuart, holding up the offending CDs. “I ask you, would any of you, even at the end of a five-day meth binge,
ever
be stupid enough to spell ‘Harry Potter’ with an ‘e’?”

Someone said, “Why are you asking us?”

“Because your new co-worker here, Patient Zero, actually did.”

“Thank you, Stuart,” I said. “Might I add in my defence that I was cunted out of my brains on booze?”

Someone near the front said, “I still don’t know, mate. Pretty fucking stupid if you ask me.”

“Who died and made
you
Alex fucking Trebek?”

“Watch your language!” shouted Stuart. “There are ladies present.”

“But you swear yourself!”

Ignored.

Everyone melted away to various destinations. Fiona left too, scurrying to a nearby private jet.
Joy to the world!
I did watch her closely, however, and because of this I saw her hand the pilot a bag of money. How do I know it was a bag of money? Because I know Fiona. When we were together, we purchased truck-loads of blow all the time, and she has a
very
specific way of handling money; her body language changes when she’s in contact with cash. She keeps her hands close to her stomach and then passes the wad to its recipient in a direct line from her belly button. Of course, she might only be scoring coke from the pilot, but it was a pretty big bag, so … I made a mental note and left it at that.

Sarah, meanwhile, peeked out from behind Stuart, looking fresh as the dawn, her breasts as insistent as rising dough. “Looks like I’m missing out on some fun here.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Raymond, you poor thing, you’re sunburned! Let me go get some lotion from the medic. I’ll warm it up to just above body temperature so that it feels nice when I put it on you.”

From behind, Neal jabbed me in the ribs with his index finger.

Sarah went off to get some lotion, and Stuart said, “Gunt. Stop brain-raping Sarah. I am
on
to you, buddy.” He looked at his watch and cursed as he got back into his pickup truck, muttering, “
Fucking atomic bombs.
” He peeled away from us.

Me, Neal and Elspeth remained on the tarmac. Fiona’s jet was just taking off.

“Ooh,” said Elspeth, pointing at Sarah, now far down the tarmac in pursuit of lotion. “Play your cards right and you’ll be stonkering her something quick. Watch out for that Stuart fellow, though.”

“So what do we do now?” Neal asked.

“While I await my lotion, why not investigate …” I looked at a sign, “…  Bonriki International Airport.”

Welcome to Bonriki International Airport!
Gateway to the city of Bairiki. Whether you’re
passing through or staying for a while, be happy
and enjoy our fine island hospitality!