Tap tap tap

“STOP TAPPING YOUR FOOT ON THE GODDAM FLOOR!”

I knew she was getting riled but it was difficult to just stop. I mean, it has always been difficult. People get riled. Teachers used to abuse me, keep me late, call in my parents. My Dad would whack me. I’d struggle for a while to contain it but, what the hey – it’s a part of me and just runs its own stupid maniacal, tap, tap, tapping course.

Now I have a job and if the floor supervisor isn’t watching co-workers whack me over the head when they pass, but I still tap. I have to. I’ve been threatened with the sack a few times but my sales record keeps me on.

'Well, kept me on,' I thought. 'If I ever get back to work again. Out of this, um, very difficult situation.'

“I can’t help it, I have ADHD, or something,” I said.

“I’LL ADHD YOUR FACE ACROSS THE ROOM IF YOU DON’T STOP.”

“I’ll try. I’ll try.”

I tapped a couple more times. She leaned on her hands across the desk, her eyes a malign wildness that might have been attractive in other circumstances.

I managed to grab hold of my demon and stop.

I call it a demon. It’s inside me but always wants to get out and tapping is its way of trying to get out. Sometimes I can tie it down and stop it from trying to escape for a while. Or throw it off a cliff and it takes a while to climb back up. Or run it over with a steamroller and it takes a while to re-form. I try to be creative to find new ways to crush the demon but it always comes right back. My most successful effort was leaving it in the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet but it didn’t seem to be bothered by cold or bad weather or remote distances and it came back over the horizon to Good End, Connecticut and found me within a very short space of time.

Good End. Great name for a town. The town joke is: ‘You’ll come to a bad end in good end.” It must have been funny when it was said for the first time, but after the thousandth time you realise the good folks of the town have little brain power and no imagination to know just how dull and uninspiring the joke is.

My demon is not something you can easily describe. It has a physical form but not one that is clearly defined. Sort of human, sort of smoke haze, sort of menacing presence. It’s there and then it’s not. It starts to laugh then it fades like a bad old black and white horror movie that ought to be scary but isn’t really.

Anyway I managed to shut the demon down so that woman wouldn't get too angry with me. The woman who was very real and really very upset. With me, but also with the world, it seemed. She was a lava flow of anger pouring out of a volcano of really very upsetness. It wasn't my fault. She was working on the assumption that if some people who she thought cared about me tried very hard to assemble a pile of Bitcoin and put it in a Bolivian server farm then all her problems would be solved.

Maybe those people cared about me, maybe they didn’t. My grandfather had always complained about me so I didn’t imagine that threats against my person would cause him to free up some of his vast pile of cyber-currency, but that was her problem. Though she had stated quite strongly that it would be my problem if the wealth wasn’t quickly transferred to her account.

In that case, she said, she would convert my body into dog food. She seemed to believe that the exchange of valuable bits in her favour would enable her to fulfill the fallacy she had imagined - abduction, threat, payment, release, flight to Bolivia - and which she hoped, beyond all reason, would lead to Happiness. It was unlikely to conclude with a happy ending though - for anyone involved, including tap-tap-tappy me.

Clearly my thinking was more logical than hers, but that was not an argument I was prepared to enter into at that, or indeed any, stage.

She left the warehouse office for a cigarette among the burlap sacks of stock feed. I have seen the movies where that was my chance to rub the cords around my wrists against the rough chair edge and break free - but they were cable ties and the chair leg was smooth. My foot had started tapping again but that was OK because she was outside for a minute or two. I could relax and let the demon go his merry way for a little while. Dance baby, dance.

“WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THE FUCKING TAPPING!!”

She had kicked the office door open and stormed back in. The tension of her situation was working on any remaining sense she might have had of being in control of the situation. My grandfather’s unfeeling reticence in separating himself from a small percentage of his wealth was a trying indication of his lack of feeling for his own flesh and blood, and that seemed to be exacerbating the violence of her mood.

“If you play some music I have a better chance of stopping the tapping,” I suggested. It’s true, any music sooths the demon. The louder the better.

“YOU WANT SOME FUCKING VIVALDI?”

She grabbed an iron bar and smashed it onto the desk. It seemed to me that that was a lot noisier than my foot tapping, but didn’t think it worth pursuing that line of reasoning. I went to speak again but…

“SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.”

She smashed the desk with the bar to emphasise each word. A really quite impressive level of anger was being displayed and I realised that my demon had stopped tapping and, along with me, was watching her with interest to see what her next actions would be.

“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR FUCKING POPS.”

I struggled not to laugh. I didn’t think that would help.

Imagine my grandfather’s response if I called him Pops. The haughty derision would drip from his expression like wax from a badly-made candle.

“He doesn’t really like me.”

She stopped and stared at me. “Why not?”

“I annoy him.”

“Oh god.” She looked at my feet. “The tapping.”

I smiled awkwardly. Well, obviously, the tapping. The ill-informed insist on referring to it as stimming but I am not autistic. I have ADHD. I have studied the literature, not just the internet, and that is my well-informed diagnosis. It’s a fidgety demon, not environment management for the reality-challenged.

My excellent friend Sheriff Govinda then arrived with guns and support people.

The poor woman broke down and sat on the floor and cried. She didn’t have a gun so things didn’t get unpleasant.

"Belinda, what were you thinking?" the sheriff said. It seemed he knew her. She held her face in her hands and shook her head. Then she looked out...and saw it under the table. The small, old electronic device.

I used to play with it there in my father’s farm feed warehouse when I was a boy. It was connected to his office at home. He had learnt to use it from Grandfather who had used one like it during the war. I was never sure which war, but they used to just say ‘the war’.

Morse code. Tap tap tap. Taap taap taap. Tap tap tap. Make the demon happy. Tap tap tappy tap.

I am looking forward to going back to work. Finally I will have something interesting to talk about to my fellow workers, though I am unsure if they will want to listen if my foot is tapping at the same time.