Feeding Frenzy
By
Mark Morris
“Satan’s Beast,” sneered Oliver. “You’d think the people they employed here would be at least semi-literate.”
“Don’t be a snob, Olly,” said Jacinta. “At least it shows the owner reads something. Too many people don’t these days.”
Adam overheard the exchange as he crossed the gap between the fire door at the top of the concrete stairs and the staff break room.
All but his first two steps were hesitant, because he had quickly realised they were talking about him.
Well, not him specifically, but the paperback he’d left on the long table strewn with thumbed newspapers, unwanted promotional freebies and discarded coffee mugs.
When he entered, Oliver was pinching Satan’s Beast between his thumb and forefinger, holding it at arm’s length as though it was a dead mouse he was transferring from trap to bin.
“Better to read nothing,” Oliver began before Adam, who had decided to brazen it out, stepped forward with a confidence he didn’t feel and said, “I think that’s mine.”
“Aren’t you sure you want to admit it?” Oliver said, who looked peevish at having had his flow interrupted, and nothing else.
“Of course I am. I mean I do,” said Adam.
At least Jacinta had the decency to look contrite. “We didn’t mean anything by it. We were only mucking about.”
“You’ve nothing to apologise for,” Adam said, wishing he’d emphasised the first word before being glad he hadn’t.
It wouldn’t do to be making enemies on all their first days.
He took the book, whose cover depicted a horned demon making a messy meal of a man with glossy entrails spilling from the bite in his stomach, and trying not to make it sound like an excuse, said, “I read this stuff because it’s as far enough away from reality as I want to be. ”
Oliver’s thin, bespectacled face looked disdainfully unconvinced. “Pornography for sadists, I’d call it.”
“If you think I’m a sadist you’d best not get on the wrong side of me,” said Adam, and curled his lips in as much of a smile as he could muster. “Really, though - Oliver is it? - if you ever read any of this guy’s books you’d laugh. They’re too daft to be taken seriously.”
“Why read them at all then?” said Jacinta. When Oliver began to look triumphant she added, “I’m not taking sides, I’m just interested.”
“For entertainment,” said Adam.
“You find entertainment in things like what’s on that cover?”
“Well, it’s hardly real life, is it? And you must admit, most human beings have a taste for the macabre.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Jacinta.
“Not just for myself. I mean, granted, most of us are disturbed by the horrible things that can happen to people, but you can’t deny that we’re fascinated by them too.
And evil, we’re all fascinated by evil, by what it is and how it works.
It’s to do with being aware of our own mortality, I suppose, and by trying to understand what makes one another tick. ”
“Hang on,” said Oliver, “so on the one hand you’re saying these books are brainless entertainment and on the other you’re saying they provide an insight into the dark side of the human psyche?”
Adam pressed the top of his head as if to keep his thoughts in place. “No, I didn’t say that. Or I didn’t mean to. God, I only came up for a coffee.”
Jacinta laughed. “Leave him alone, Olly. Your first day and you’re already giving everyone the third degree.” To Adam she said, “He’s been my book buddy all day and not only has he wheedled my life story out of me, he’s plotted my future so I don’t make the mistakes he thinks are inevitable.”
Oliver rolled his eyes and said, “It’s for your own good, dear.” A perfunctory glance at his watch prompted him to drawl, “Well, I can’t stand here talking to you peasants all day. I’ve Thackeray and Wilkie Collins awaiting my attention.”
After they had listened to him clattering down the stairs towards the chaos that would be a high street store open to the public by this time next week, Jacinta poured them both a coffee from the percolator whose dark brown smell filled the room.
As they sipped, she told Adam she had worked in a cinema and a vegetarian café and had been part of a co-operative that found accommodation for the homeless before getting the job at Hanson’s.
He thought it made what he’d done sound dull, especially since his business had dragged his marriage down with it, but her pale blue eyes, startling in conjunction with her raven-black hair and thick eyebrows and especially her long lashes, widened.
“That’s a hell of a skill. How did you get into that?”
“I played violin in an orchestra. But I never thought the sound of it was quite right, so I decided to have a go at making my own. It turned out okay, and so eventually I started making and selling instruments for a living.”
“That’s amazing. It must be very satisfying to create something beautiful.”
“Time-consuming and unprofitable, more like,” he said, then noticed how uncomfortable she looked at his sudden bitterness and tried to smile. “It didn’t work out, that’s all. It’s a shame, but there you go, that’s life.”
Her silence made him certain she was building up to excusing herself, when she said, “What you said before about the story you were reading being far away from reality...”
“What of it?”
“Well, with me it’d be the opposite. I’d find the blood and guts too real.”
Might she be testing him because she wanted to get to know him better?
It was heartening to imagine so. Choosing his words as carefully as he was able, he said, “Yeah, but it’s so over the top it feels anything but real.
I mean, it’s not as though I’m reading about car crashes and terminal illness.
What happens to the people in these books and others like it is so extreme that you can’t take it seriously.
And the thing is, the characters don’t have real emotions, so you feel cushioned from real life.
And the goodies always win in the end, the evil gets vanquished, and the heroes go off happily because of that - they’re never traumatised by what they’ve been through.
” He laughed. “In a way it’s comfort reading. ”
“Strange way to find comfort,” she said. “I think I’ll stick to my Alice Hoffman and Iris Murdoch.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you? That’s the stuff that’s too real for me.”
For most of the bus journey back to the grim flat he couldn’t bring himself to call home, Adam’s mind seesawed between wishing he’d taken up the invitation to celebrate his and everyone else’s first day with a drink and being glad he hadn’t.
It might have been fun to socialise with a bunch of strangers he hoped would become friends.
Then again, most of his work mates were younger than he was by a decade or more, and he was worried that the age gap, which he (if no one else) had been conscious of at work, might have become even more evident in a social situation.
There was nothing more dismal than feeling alone in a crowd of people who were enjoying themselves.
Even so, his dilemma over whether he had made the right decision made the beans on toast, whose smell couldn’t quite mask the odour of damp in his flat, hard to swallow.
His dissatisfaction continued to distract him through a police drama in which he tried to immerse himself.
When he found his gaze straying more frequently from the screen to the bulging, fleshy patches in the wallpaper above the TV, he gave up and went to bed.
Reaching for his book, he told himself that this was the life, that having no one but himself to worry about could only be a good thing.
The clammy duvet and the muffled but insistent thud of music from the flat below, however, felt like ways in which life was taunting him.
With nothing else to do except face the prospect of continuing to feed his own negative thoughts, he opened his book so vigorously the spine cracked and forced himself to focus on the words.
For a moment he saw nothing but Oliver’s sneer, then the sheer simplicity of the story pulled him in.
The words began to feel like rungs he was using to drag himself up and out of the murky, complex stew of his life.
He lost himself in the prolonged account of a sacrifice carried out by the Brotherhood of Demnos, in which the victim was disembowelled and facially mutilated with a pair of scissors.
Despite the subject matter – or perhaps because of it – by the end of the chapter his eyes were drooping in response to his rapidly fragmenting thoughts.
He was barely aware of putting his book aside before falling asleep.
“There’s nothing wrong with escapism, but when it comes in the form of death and destruction it’s setting a dangerous example.”
“For whom, may I ask?”
“For whoever might be influenced by it. Children primarily.”
“Ah, but my film’s not for children, you see. It has a 15 certificate.”
“That seems to count for nothing in this video age – or dee vee dee, as I believe it is now. Sadly films like yours are all too readily available these days.”
Adam turned the radio off, and not only because it was time to go to work.
The headache he’d woken up with, which seemed to clog his nasal passages with an exaggerated odour of ink and paper, was bad enough for the shrillness of the complainant’s voice to feel like a sharp implement probing a nerve.
Thankfully the pain, which may have been building all day yesterday, stuffing his head with the smell of books like deadly, odourless gas, lasted for less than the length of his bus journey.
By the time the abandoned, graffiti-tattooed cinema came into sight just before his stop, the headache had dwindled to nothing more than a tightness above his eyes – expunged, no doubt, by the Nurofen he’d swallowed with his tea.