It is a demanding time in the Island Shop. Customers who can afford to buy bottles of wine that cost more than he earns in a week still manage to be obnoxious, grumpy and dismissive. Plus, Thor is bored out of his mind.
As jobs go, working in a shop isn’t as entertaining as his former employment – killing cattle at St Merryn Meat’s slaughterhouse. But even that – the animals’ terror, the piss and shit and horror, the thrill of delivering the bolt to the brain – all that initial excitement dulled with repetition. And he lost that job because he slept in one too many times.
That had been the death knell for his relationship with his sort-of girlfriend of the time, Kirsty. It was a half-hearted arrangement on both sides. They spent a lot of time sitting in the same room ignoring each other, him on his computer, her on her PlayStation. They didn’t share a bed.
After the split, he had nowhere to stay and there was no way he 210was going back to the Midlands. He saw the position of shop assistant on Tresco advertised in the Bodmin Job Centre (crap wages, but accommodation included), so he came over here.
He’s not been with anyone since Kirsty, not properly. There was that one girl, over here on holiday, but that had only been the one night and he hadn’t pushed it. A kiss and a bit of a fumble. And then there was that flirty guest – the woman with the mad Mallen streak of white hair, who looked well dirty. He’d been sure she was up for it, but nothing happened.
His online games help pass the time, although he can’t get off on them in the same way now. It’s too easy. But today is his day off and he has plans. New horizons. He is heading up to the North End, where he will hunker down low, hidden by the gorse and bracken and boulders. Then he’ll wait and see who takes his fancy.
Thor’s bedroom is sparse. All his special things – the World War II memorabilia his dad collected, the treasure trove of women’s underwear he stole from washing lines over on St Mary’s when he first arrived, the special toys he’s ordered online – they are stashed neatly away in the locked suitcase under his bed.
He dresses in the camouflage combat kit he ordered from the Preppers army surplus place on the industrial estate in Newquay. He puts his balaclava in his sports bag. He’s taking the meat cleaver that he bought in the kitchen supply shop in Truro. And then he might … He has to adjust himself at the fantasy.
If he’s lucky she will scream like the gulls above.
If there’s no one up at the North End who catches his eye, he might saunter down to the Old Ship, sneak in through the back door, creep upstairs and hide until she finishes, and then 211he’ll take a blade to that jumped-up barmaid, Alison. She thinks she’s it, flirting with him, leading him on, then pushing him off at New Year. He thought she’d be gagging for it. The old bitch should be grateful at her age. But when she serves him now, it’s like she doesn’t really see him.
He’ll make her see him tonight.
He lifts the huge watermelon he brought home with him from the shop yesterday, hefting it into the postage-stamp-size back yard, where he carefully balances it on top of the five old supply boxes he’d stacked earlier.
He takes the meat cleaver he keeps hidden in the bag beneath his bed, sizes up the trajectory, pulls back, then swings. The slice is satisfying. The top of the watermelon hurtles away, exposing juicy red flesh.
He guesses a skull would be harder, the brain greyer.
You have to make your own entertainment here.