Insult

Squeaky Dot wrote a letter to Michael in the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen.

"I expect you are sitting out in the dark and desolate place wondering if I am sleeping with someone else, well I have to tell you I am"

Julie China said "I don't fancy you anymore, but would you like one last bonk before the mirror". There was a football match playing on the TV in the Amsterdam hotel room.

The Icon took a bite when Michael was sleeping, "You are hopeless" she said

Sarah Stevens said, whilst walking in the park in Farnham, came up with

"You are too old, too ugly, too fat for me". All of which was most manifestly true.

Rachel Surrey dumped Michael by mobile phone whilst waiting in the check out queue in Tesco, what better way for a busy career woman to best utilise some dead time.

These events amuse, they make a tale, are part of the stuff of relationships, are what women do. A man can justify some fear and loathing by these tales, explain not being married or of having sired children. But they are hardly insults, these are women.

Tim King invited Michael to his very smart hotel for a curry lunch on Sunday. Michael was not so keen but it is only polite as a neighbour. Arriving for lunch Tim extended greetings, showed him to a table on the lower level of the restaurant. Then he called a waiter who listed the numerous bits and pieces of the colonial tradition. Then Tim said he was leaving to join his high table and left the man he had invited to eat on his own. Of course Michael walked out, but too late, the insult had been wonderfully delivered. Only a man can effectively insult another man, and in so doing define there relations in every other sphere until they die.

I have seen Tim plenty of times since then, we are always polite, formal, if we have to speak we do. I sometimes think such gratuitous insults ignore the rule of unnecessary enemies: "Do not make unnecessary enemies, there will come plenty enough on there own". I surmise that if you are that rich and powerful there is every confidence in the power to always vanquish.

Lisa turning her face three quarters to the light, the blond mane dropping to so prettily frame face, a perfected gesture, speaking posh with a dash of Essex.

"Michael sitting here amongst this beauty you are such a bitter, twisted, obsessive, cantankerous old sod"

Supermarket

A man drifted back to the country of his birth when the difficulties of living in Darkness and the siren sounds of woman had pulled him home. In a scheme to get acquainted and to re learn the mores and means of what was once his own country he took a job in a super market, a small one, Marks and Spencers in Wimbledon. He was surprised to get the job, he presumed they had not really checked the references he gave, or they were so desperate for labour that they could not afford to. He mused that there had been a suggestion from some fool in human resources that older men may be more reliable than the school children and students, former bank clerks, disgruntled nurses, abandoned mothers that were their usual fodder.

The man got on well during the training course and back in the shop. He had an easy smile, a charm made smooth by many years of associating with diplomats and the sensibilities of people of other cultures. He spoke with ease and humour, skills necessary to those who have always to lie. The job was dull but the customers were affable, pleased to find a cheeful fellow amongst the scolds who more usually worked the tills. He helped the older ladies amongst the customers with their gambling on horse races , took bets for them when they were reluctant to go to the bookies themselves, gave tips and made sure the winnings were decently distributed whatever horse won the race. The supervisor, a peroxided proletarian called Tina, found her natural suspicions of this interloper confirmed by the long queues at the mans till point and a reluctance of the customers to move the line to an empty till when invited. Invited is wrong, in paid work the phrase "would you do this or that for me" has become the mantra of the oppressive boss. He felt, so he told me later, the first resurgence of his hatred when he heard this incessantly repeated request.

The supervisor acting on her instinct that this man was not of them started to harass him with the practicised nagging natural to both her profession and her sex. In the morning before the shop opened he had the job of filling the vegetable racks. The trays of old potatoes, the carrots, the chemically preserved salads all had to be put in their places on the shelves according to a store plan carefully devised by merchandising who were represented by freshly made up graduates in black skirts or blue shirts, who arrived early, harassed by the traffic, from their suburban places. The supervisor complained the man filled the shelves too slowly, that it was too close to opening time before the shelves were stacked. He ignored her lies. She increased the pressure by writing out disciplinary reports which he refused to sign. Though he smiled still, she knew he did not fit and would in the end be a cause of some unspecified disruption.

One morning she asked him to move to stacking frozen chickens. I think he saw already the inevitable and after four months there was ready to hasten the outcome. He stacked chickens so slowly, made the others laugh and delay with too many funny remarks that the fellow chicken stackers, two b and t women were pleased to complain to Tina that weight was not being pulled. Tina came to remonstrate.

The man, calmly, but with some deliberation, stepped forward, into what in the culture of women is known as personal space. Softly, but loud enough to be clear to all around, using a very careful diction he said

"Tina if you speak to me like that I will kill you. That would be very bad for you and very bad for me. Don't do it"

The frozen chickens were left across the floor. Tina ashen stepped back, reclaimed her space. The man left by the lift collecting his jacket and stalking though the halls of Centre Court just as the security officers readied to open the doors to the early morning shoppers. He returned mid morning to sign off with personnel represented then by an an over weight professionally amiable man called Bob.

"This woman says you threatened to kill her, and whilst I understand your sentiments, you cannot say that kind of thing in an English workplace"

The man said "You cannot say that type of thing anywhere".

I heard this story in a bar, where I hear all my stories and I never expected to see him again. I have though, in Darkness, to where he returned happier once his attemt to come home had failed and he could comfortably die in Darkness. I see him somtimes, always charming, always witty, always smiling, soft spoken, the careful diction and changing accent covering the stammers his life has created. He survives as he did before on the desperate schemes of migrants every where. He never keeps the company of women, or when they come by his converation quick and quiet he moves away, as if he feels they will notice the change of temperature. But maybe that is a preference: to walk away is the civilised response to insult.

Death by Hammock

Sarah Stevens is a tall, big nosed, big arsed, privately educated Surrey girl, a type that has aroused my primeval side and led on occasion to an association that in the end has always been a mistake. Such liaisons, sometimes sexual, I think, when in retrospective mood, a contributing element in my disappointment, but have on the other hand justified a lot of drinking. I can’t remember if I enjoyed the sex. I cannot remember it so I suppose not much is the answer. Did they? Not much I reckon.

She started of as a dressmaker, got her own business doing wedding dresses, was good at it until all those bride mothers got her broken. She went around the world on the insurance money, learnt to dance, poles and salsa, whatever was the fashion. I met her drifted up in Dar es Salaam sitting in a beach bar covered in a hairy dog. She was ready to ditch a short broke German and not so interested in the fat one who would take his place.

We went to down to Ruaha.

"Do you expect to sleep with me just because you take me to a game park"

I stopped the car.

'After fifteen years in Africa I would hardly want to drive fourteen hours to see another elephant"

But I had no such expectations, Surrey girls, decide themselves when it is time to go to Ascot.
We hung out a bit, I liked her tales, but it did not go far. She gave me one of the better dear john lines in my career: too fat, too old, too ugly. I laughed, it was all true at least, though now I am rather thinner.

Back in London town she did more dancing, Salsa rather than pole, got hooked up with a Columbian who hunted in those Piccadilly places. He told me that he could not understand why these girls some from as far as Manchester came to dance Salsa and lost their handbags so easily. But I could. Sarah got in with him, got pregnant, it was her age to do so, fading thirties. She put the Colombian up in my flat for a while, Surrey Girls, do have a ruthless side beneath that big smiling diplomatic charm. And a good line in brutal endings, perhaps that is where I learnt it. Rachel Warren was even better in put downs, a phone call form the Tesco Check out queue: "Your clothes are in your car"

Juan was not so hot as a petty criminal, credit card stealing, street muggings, female Japanese tourists were a good bet, these mix badly with speeding tickets, driving without insurance and belting the missus. These can attract the attention of Plod.
"This is not Columbia" I told him, but to no avail and soon enough Juan was with Her Majesty more often than on the streets. Whilst doing time our Colombian was offered the acquaintance of a well known Lord also in residence who expressed a considerable interest in acquiring prime pieces of Colombian art. Snow sculptures. So on release Juan financed with the benefits of Sarah's credit card went off to seek out such valuables, whilst his mother, son, and the parrot kept up Sarah's home.
The old school pals conferred and decided that Sarah must be rescued, came up with an officer once of the Black Watch called Frederique Christiaan Von Winkle Hesse-Nassau. He is a rather hapless fellow, he would have been rather out of time in the century before last but these members of the decadent officer class are still about, protected by regimental traditions, the comradeship of the Officer Mess and often the convenience of The Official Secrets Act. He is tall, gangly, inbred with a white office made pate.

Juan and Winkle came to meet, he sat on the couch cradling his regimental bayonet whilst Juan bayed and pounded in the streets. In the end our hero avoided confrontation by calling Plod who, belatedly arriving, discovered Colombian in serious breach of his parole conditions so it was a do not pass go and do not collect two hundred pounds but straight back to Porridge. Eight months later when he re-emerged to have another go it was me sitting in the lounge. No more Juan trouble.

Von Winkle Hesse Nassau having left the army, a rather vague career, but ending in tears on an aero plane from Ulster, set up a furniture importing operation but the realities of commerce were not a world he could know. Officers rallied round and he settled in a job about which he told me rather more than he should have. I suppose with a bottle of whisky it is tempting to make sure that the lower classes know their position in natures order. I am not prepared to talk about that with the likes of you was the preferred genre of answer, complete with a wave of the hand and a sulk. That it was an insult would not occur, a cockroach cannot be insulted. But on such insults have most slaughters been predicated.

Von Winkle swung his adopted son most violently in the hammock. It is his belief, as in Sparta, that the brutalising of males before the age of five is the most vital part of their education and must be done before they get into the hands of the mamby pambies who run schools today. Having done his duty Von Winkle plonked himself in the hammock, whereupon the supporting pole, rotten and finally weakened by his disciplining, snapped and cracked him most smartly on his very white pate whilst the sand below gave a most undignified thump to the imperial posterior. The cut was long and quite deep. I have kept my cuts together with toilet paper but Von Winkle, for fear of ugly scars, signs of hanging out with the cockroach class, went, with my car to the clinic and had seven neat stitches inserted. There was no lasting damage but dignity, the insult, required a most humble apology and some financial compensation. He never got the apology, but got the compensation by the simple expedient of reneging on his hotel bill. They are all cads in the end.

I was rather disappointed in my pole but I suppose there is only so much one can expect of a rotten hammock pole. I told Joan Lawrence who came around amongst quite a few Zombies recently, now that the hotel is quieter, that I had thought death by hammock might have been a good way to do for the Butler.

Her eyes were very blue, translucent.

"Michael, you will have to think again:"

The Washermans hat covered all the expressive bits of his visage, but I think I saw the momentary flare of a nostril. One has to have a sense of humour.