The Irritant

              The Irritant

 Every morning, at six thirty AM, I get up and put the coffee on. I yawn and rub my eyes while I wait for it to percolate, rubbing tiredness, thoughts, and wine from my face, though they stubbornly remain. It’s been this way for a while now. I’ve become used to it. Every morning the thought is the same; I appear to have made myself friendless.

 Every morning I go down the lift to the ground floor and walk through the brown brick rows of houses until I reach the Uxbridge Road. I don’t take the tube because I’m trying to save money. I want to go on holiday later this year, a real one, where I don’t have to scrimp at shops and restaurants, where I can feel well off, if only for a couple of weeks.

 Every morning at a quarter to eight, I catch the 607 bus from Shepherds Bush to Ealing Broadway, shuffling onboard with the restless lines of blank faces. Together we cram ourselves in, escaping the traffic going in the other way, towards the city and the grander corners of our metropolis, escaping the grocers and mobile phone shops and the little bits of plastic and paper detritus littering, fluttering, glittering like tramp’s gold.

 The bus rumbles on through the gritty weather, the sad light, the hooded, coated, turgid streets of Londoners, heads down, walking as if a weight was against them, which I suppose there is. A weight of oppression that ordinary men and women, like me, negotiate every day. Some have it better than others.

 Once upon a time I thought that Ealing Broadway was a kind of holy land. It seemed richer than the corner of The Bush where I lived, not far from the market, not far from Loftus Road. I remember when my mum dragged me up there when The Queen opened the shopping precinct back in the eighties, it all seemed so optimistic and vibrant, even if The Queen herself appeared such an insubstantial person with a rather silly looking, fixed grin. Better, perhaps, not to go there, you know how people can be.

 I’ve done myself no favours. I don’t seem to have an edit button. Am combative. Contrary. I don’t know why that is the case. I once read a very conjectured description of the human condition by a scientist who explained that, from a physics perspective, the effects of a 45 degree axis on the Earth’s rotation, meant that as the maelstrom of our existence spins away from the equator, the bulk of popular belief, which is so mediocre, becomes more extreme as it flies outwards, and it is at those far flung edges, where geniuses and criminals, or even just the very ‘odd’, those impossible for the masses to understand, are formed. And that, to succeed in this mediocre world, the more mediocre you must become. I’m paraphrasing, but you get the picture.

 Ealing Broadway is definitely in the centre. It’s a leafy suburb in part, and vast prison of mediocrity in another, but it’s where I work, and make a mediocre wage.

 I work at houseyou.com, a medium sized estate agency just off the Broadway, founded and run by Ken and Karen Gammon. No, don’t laugh (oh well, maybe a snigger or a snort), I’m not making it up. They really are called that. It’s a neat coincidence that they both represent only too well what those nicknames have become. He, red faced and furious, she, though softer in a half-demented way, initially warm to strangers, but then slowly beginning to take offence at things, even though she dishes out plenty herself. Sexual politics and emotional blackmail are her preferred weapons. They moved there in 1982 after seeing the Fred Housego documentary and thought it looked like paradise for estate agents on the make. There’s a photograph on the wall of them from the mid eighties looking slim and dressed in broad shouldered power suits and sporting big, blonde hairdos, they’d just won ‘estate agents of the year’, or something or other, and they’re gurning like pop stars. The rest of the team – it’s quite a big one, big enough for some people to hardly ever see or know each other, unless at one of those big annual gatherings – are anodyne to me. Though this is a conventional job, they wear their conventionality with a mediocre pride I will never understand.

 The truth is I don’t fit in, the same as I’ve never really fitted in anywhere. And the gossip, the back biting, the asides, have become worse lately. It’s as if I’ve disappeared from view and no-one can even be bothered to pretend to be friendly or wait until I’m out of earshot before making snarky comments.

 The Gammons, when they are there, look at their framed photograph with anguish, searching for those youthful, confident, charismatic signs, that will-to-power that once swept all before them, in the puffy eyed, double chins, and cakes of make-up that have long substituted for them. Or you might sneak a peek at them through the ajar door, as Ken places his arm around Karen as she whimpers – he’s been caught banging one of the new girls again, or it’s that recurring health scare – and tries to make so many wrong things buried beneath the façade right again.

 Of course, when they march out into the open plan office the rest of us share, it’s with that brimming confidence of the actor, the fire re-lit, the fading will, rising.

 I know for a fact that they wanted to get rid of me, the face doesn’t fit, etc, but my sales had been solid, and after the crash of ’08 everyone was preoccupied with ‘the money’, so I stayed. I always planned to something interesting with my life, but the money, the routine just kept drawing me back. Now I feel like a ghost or something, invisible. I just collect the keys to flats and houses, and the occasional commercial property, and meet people at them who seem to just look straight through me as well.

 Those two are at it again in the coffee room. They’d make good politicians, the way they are always toadying up to the Gammons, the way they seem both simultaneously attracted to each other and vying for the best houses in an utterly ruthless way (commissions make a lot of difference to your salary), and they have that general air of the politician, something like a school prefect who never really stopped being a prefect, but just found another environment in which to carry on being one. I know they are talking about me.

 ‘So, do you remember when Thrush started saying that he didn’t understand what the fuss was about face veils? That he’d grown up near Shepherd’s Bush market and had always seen women wearing them and that they didn’t bother him at all, they just made the women seem mysterious.’

 ‘I reckon old Boris is right, letterboxes, bank robbers, bloody sharia. I tell you I was in Morrison’s the other day and one of the bloody rude cows didn’t say thank you at the checkout. I’m tempted to take my money elsewhere, spend it where I’m appreciated. I nearly ripped her hijab off.’

They go on like this and I don’t think they even care that I can hear them. I get tired of challenging them, but it’s the only way I know. Do you know who Edmund Burke was? He once wrote, and I quote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” And it’s true. If you look at history, you find that at every step on the way to a disaster there are moments – Hitler’s workmates throwing him off the scaffolding rather than ignoring his bilious rantings – in which the words or actions of good men and women could have averted an unfolding horror. It always seemed like a decent code to me. No one, however, will love you for it.

 Instead, like those two, they’ll call you nicknames like ‘thrush’. Yes, that’s what they called me. When I asked why they had chosen that name, they said, in huge guffaws: “It’s because you’re an irritating cunt!” Quite funny, I suppose. Quite funny. But vulgar jokes aside, they were right, someone like me must be an irritant to them. I don’t care about sports and they find it alien, cannot make lazy assumptions about people who happen to be different, because of something they have read in The Sun, and cannot help but saying so when they try to include me in the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, jolly, conspiratorial language that passes for an intellectual inner life for the perennially analytically deficient. And yes, before you ask, I am aware that my characterisation is, when all is said and done, just another assumption.

 For I am chained here to these desks and telephones and the badly written and photographed house portfolios as much as they are, ergo, we are all in it together. But now, as I say, they don’t see me.

 Sometimes, when I move a coffee cup or one of their folders, or even put a sheet of paper in the photocopier, they’ll at it, not at me, as if it somehow got there all by itself, and no matter how I try to exude my own sense of power, anger, irritation, it has no effect at all. I can snoop on conversations, sit on the desk in front of their computer screen, sit in their laps for Christ’s sake, as I have become as anodyne to them as they have to me.

 Every day, it is the same. I return home on the 607, walk back to the tower block and take the stairs if the lift is a long way up, and then sit watching the news on the BBC, where there is always something bad happening somewhere, something bad enough to make me wince and feel pity for those who it is happening to.

 Then I eat my ready meal and drink and then try to sleep. But since last June the monsters come. Anguished, soot stained, raspy breathed, clawing figures in flashing lights. A kind of atrocious spectacle that I am part of but don’t understand. What does it mean?

          *

 The next day at six thirty AM, I rub the wine from my eyes while drinking coffee and drag myself through it all again. It’s November and the occasional bang sounds as the neigbourhood kids throw leftover fireworks at each other from the night before. The smell of gunpowder seems to lay like a low mist in the dark grey blue of growing winter light. It is more damp than cold, and the reliable rain which drizzled over the thousands of bonfires last night is still lingering as I reach the bus stop where the same invisible crowds swarm around the opening door.

 Ealing Broadway at the office and there’s a trainee trying to fill out a new Marks and Spencer suit, with big, thick, black hair piled up on top of his smooth, pale brown skin. I guess they’ll have indoctrinated him before too long, into the Ken and Karen Gammon ethos of good old British values, unfounded confidence, common sense (or the lack thereof), casual racism, and the importance of climbing a slippery pole by whatever means expedient.

 Karen’s showing him around like a mother hen. Ken will corner him with his awful jokes and ‘I built all this up from nothing’ speeches later on, in a perverse, Platonic initiation. Poor lad keeps peeping at her ample bosom as if he’s never seen anything quite so appealing other than on his phone. Probably had a nice, sheltered, middle class life.

 She’s showing him that photograph of our team taken last spring, pointing out who’s who so he’ll put faces to the names he’ll hear, and introducing him to those two morons.

 ‘And this is X, and this Y, this is Z, you two, now go easy on him, he’s only a baby!’ The three then laugh and leave poor newbie Z blushing and not really knowing where to look.

 ‘That’s Harold, and that’s Martha, and that’s these two here as you can see, you’ll meet Ken later…’

X pulls out his phone and hisses, ‘Here, do want to see something from Facebook last night?’

 ‘What is it? Nothing disgusting I hope!’

 ‘Well, it depends how you see it, I mean, in the news earlier they said there was a police investigation into it, so I suppose it’s serious, but I think they’re just having a laugh.’ X plays the clip on his phone and first you hear the laughing voices of south London sink estate residents, the fizz of popping beer cans, as they indulge in what’s commonly called ‘banter’, but really is nothing more than the mindless rambling of the unthinking.

 A pair of hands carry a cardboard effigy of a tower block towards a bonfire in a metal cage, as raucous laughter rises and rises from the watching crowd. The collected idiots’ film away with their phones, excited as jabbering baboons, as the same hands, the ones wearing Nike branded gloves, turns the model around and places it onto two planks of wood, so the crowd can enjoy the attention to detail with which the model has been made, such as the paper cut-out of a woman wearing a face covering, and other badly drawn faces, some children, peering out. As it catches, one of the idiots cries out in a singularly ugly voice: “Argh! Help me! Help me!” and, “Jump out the window!”, while another says: “Yeah, right, don’t worry, it’s only blacks.” And then then the cardboard tower burns up into the atmosphere while they talk about the “bad taste jokes” they continue to make about burning men, women, and children. It is their, special celebration of Guy Fawkes’s ancient failure in 1605 to blow up parliament and King James I along with it.

 ‘That’s disgraceful,’ says Karen, her advanced years and recent health issues allowing her a more circumspect view of our shared world. The trainee looks shocked, but doesn’t say anything at first, until he turns to the photograph on the wall again, and points at my half smiling image in it, the only one Karen omitted to name.

 ‘Who’s that?’ he says. The three, fall silent for a moment, as if caught in a shared guilty act, and before Karen can reply, X says,

 ‘That was Thrush!’

 ‘What’s Thrush, his name?’

 ‘Yeah, a nickname, er…’ Even X seems lost for words.

 ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ Karen says, increasingly uncomfortable at what it is she must confront.

 ‘When is he here?’ Newby Z says, the sudden sensitivity of the women, not X – who is still cocky as a popinjay – passing him by.

 ‘It was a horrible way to die,’ says Y, now looking suddenly downcast, mournful.

 ‘What was?’

 ‘He died in Grenfell tower.’