Berthold: The Scottish Play

Mrs Penny phoned me next morning at nine o’clock. She said she had gathered together the singed and sodden forms from her office floor and wanted to express her gratitude. She didn’t refer to our moment of body contact, and I didn’t bring it up, but she did mention the coffee (Luigi had done us proud, with a double latte for me, and an extra-frothy cappuccino for her topped with chocolate, cinnamon and ground nutmeg), suggesting we might repeat the experience another day.

‘Absolutely,’ I said with faux enthusiasm, for I was beginning to regret my moment of weakness in the council courtyard. I’d detected a whiff of neediness in the way she had clung to me. There’s no bigger turn-on for a man than sexual desire in a woman. But if you surrender to the beast and sleep with them, you’re trapped. They suffocate you with their niceness, and next thing you know you’re sitting in the back row of the multiplex every Saturday, eating popcorn and watching George Clooney. No thank you. Add to this that she was a hostile agent of ‘Them’, on whose whim I could be ousted from my home if I put a foot wrong, and you can see why I was holding back.

Besides, I was now bracing myself for another bureaucratic hassle. In the words of the Immortal Bard, ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’ I had just received a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions, another outrider of ‘Them’, which winked at me evilly from its brown-envelope window.

We are conducting a radical overhaul of the system, which will put the needs of you the jobseeker first, it sneered, inviting me for a preliminary interview at Job Centre Plus to review my continuing entitlement to benefit.

I bumped into Legless Len in the ground-floor lobby, and learned that he had received one too. He was bristling with positivity.

‘I reckon they’ve found me a job, Bert. They reassessed my capabilities!’

‘That’s brilliant, Len.’

‘Let’s hope you’re in luck too, Bert.’

‘As the Immortal Bard would say, the miserable have no other medicine but only hope.’

‘That’s truly profound. I’ll add it to my collection of positive sayings.’ He wheeled away, humming cheerfully.

When I arrived at the Job Centre for my appointment, I found to my dismay that gorgeous Justin had gone, and the new representative of ‘Them’ was George McReady, a lean foxy gingery man with a goatee beard and a Dundee accent.

‘What happened to Justin?’ I asked.

‘He wasn’t meeting his tarrgets, Mr Sideboatum,’ he burred. ‘And you’re one of them. I see you were last employed four months ago, and that was only for two weeks.’

‘Two weeks is bloody good, in my line of b-business.’

‘Well, in my line of business it’s pathetic. How many jobs have you actually applied forr?’

‘Since then?’ I racked my brain. It all seemed to blur into one long haze of failure. ‘About ten. And f-four auditions.’ Possibly I was exaggerating a bit.

He perused a dog-eared document covered in Justin’s scribbles and ticks, and tutted.

‘According to your agreement, your tarrget is six applications per week. Of which two in six should lead to an interview.’

‘Six per week? That’s absurd. Six p-p-per month would be p-pushing it.’

‘Is this, or is it not, your signature, Mr Sideboatum?’ He pushed the paper towards me.

My chest tightened. My head started to spin. His name and the vague hint of menace in his Dundee accent brought up a strange bubble in my memory of a long-ago performance of the Scottish play at Newcastle in which I’d played the porter. To great critical acclaim, I might add.

‘Faith, sirr, it is.’ I could hear the tense hush in the theatre, the audience breathless in their seats.

‘When you signed, you committed yourself to six applications perr week. You’re bound by the agrreement, and you’ve not perrforrmed.’ He leaned across the desk with a leer, and I could feel the bones of my resolution snapping between his foxy jaws. ‘Do you have any excuse to offer?’

‘Faith sir, I was carousing till the second cock: and drink, sir, is a great p-provoker of nose-painting, sleep and urine.’ There was a murmur of laughter in the audience.

McReady looked at me coldly. His eyes were very light grey, with hard points of black at the centre. ‘Are you takin’ the piss, Mr Sideboatum? If so, I dinna advise it.’

‘Lechery, sirr, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but takes away the p-perrforrmance.’ More laughter.

‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about. But here’s a couple of jobs to get you started. Come back same time next week. Let’s see how you’ve got on. If not, it will give me great perrsonal pleasure to sanction your JSA, and send you for retraining.’

He clicked the print button, and handed me two sheets containing details of the Mickey Mouse job and the funeral parlour job.

‘Sanction?’ This wasn’t in the script.

‘In your case it means cut it off.’ He flicked his fingers across his throat. ‘Next!’

An aged hunched man, unshaved, uncombed, and reeking of alcohol, shuffled over and slumped in the chair I had vacated, while I shuffled over to the side-room where the computers and printers were chained to desks under the steely eye of a chignoned matron with a cruel mouth and ultra-clean hands who could have been a central-casting Scottish Lady.

I started to draft an application for the funeral parlour – it was indeed Wrest ’n’ Piece – but an image floated into my mind of Jimmy the Dog at my mother’s funeral, floundering in the mud with an unknown corpse, declaring, ‘We’re helping to prepare the unemployed for useful jobs.’ Not me, Jimmy, not me. I put the sheet aside and reached for the Mickey Mouse application. ‘Drama students or similar sought for retail promotion opportunity.’

The aged alcoholic who had followed me into the interview was now slumped in front of the computer next to mine, stinking heavily and snoring lightly. His screen read: Retraining opportunities in retail.

The Scottish Lady approached, rubbing her hands and muttering, ‘Who’d have thought an old man to have so much booze in him.’

She kicked the back of his chair. He jumped up with a start and stared around him with bloodshot eyes, his glance falling on the paper I had just discarded.

‘Aaargh! The graveyard ghouls!’ He leaned towards me and laid a hand on my arm. ‘Don’t touch it without a bunch of garlic, mate!’

‘You know the firm?’

‘Wrest ’n’ Piece. Worked for them for forty years. Know everything there is to know about laying out a corpse. It was a good firm while old Mr Wrest was in charge.’ He tossed his grizzled locks. ‘Then he died and his daughter took over – with her big-nose boyfriend, James. Decided to expand the business. Privately managed cems and crems, bidding for local authority contracts. Tried to cut their costs. Laid off anybody that knew anything about bodies. Brought in a bunch of young uns off the dole to do it for free.’

‘For free?’

‘Unpaid work experience. Thirty hours a week.’ He gripped my arm. ‘They wanted me to train them up before I left. Sod that, I said. You’ve got to show a bit of respect for the dead. Mind you, I never got as much lip from a corpse as I did from them young uns.’

‘Are you …?’ Through a horror of mud and pain a memory crawled into my mind, ‘… Philip?’

‘Phil Gatsnug. That’s me. Master mortician. Artist of the dead.’

‘My mother –’

‘Yeah, the old lady. Your mum, was it? Awful shame. I did my best, but the young uns messed her up. We had to send her straight to cremation. But you should ask for her ashes. They always give you the ashes.’

‘Thanks, Phil. I got the ashes. But how can I be sure they’re the right ones? Given the cock-ups we’ve had so far.’

‘Sometimes they do mix ’em up.’ He fixed me with a bloodshot gaze. ‘Whoever they belong to, my friend, treat ’em with respect. It’s somebody’s mum or dad. Say a prayer and sprinkle them in a nice place. Not on your porridge, ha ha!’

His words struck a chord in me. I resolved forthwith to honour the ashes of the unknown crematee in the hope that someone would do the same for Mother; I would sprinkle them at the heart of the cherry grove that she had loved. Of course, if anyone asked I would have to pretend it was a dead parrot.

‘So you resigned from your job?’ I asked.

‘Yes, and according to this austerity Nazi,’ he waved his arms in the direction of foxy McReady, ‘it makes me voluntarily unemployed, so I’m not entitled to any money for three months. I’ve been living off tinned beans from the charity food bank for the past fortnight, but it runs out tomorrow. I’ll have to go and scrounge some bread off the pigeons in the park.’

‘But with your skills, surely you’d find another job easily? People are dying all the time. Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die.’

‘Not enough, mate. Besides, all the big money is in weddings: funerals they want to do on the cheap. I won’t compromise, see? I like to do a good job.’

I felt a sudden bond of kinship with this wounded man, this fellow soldier injured in life’s battle against the mean, the slick, the self-serving, the ‘it’ll have to do’ mentality. Despite the odds stacked against him, he had tried to do the right thing by my mother. I was glad that he’d been the last person to handle her mortal remains.

‘Mmm. Thanks for trying, pal. Maybe you should set up on your own.’

‘Good idea, mate.’

With a heavy heart I completed the application form for the Mickey Mouse job, signed it, and gave it to ‘Them’ to process.

When I tiptoed out of the Job Centre, Phil Gatsnug was asleep again, his head resting on the keyboard.

I got back to Madeley Court around five o’clock of a sultry afternoon; I had wasted most of the sweet day in the airless Job Centre. Legless Len was hanging around in the grove enjoying the last of the sunshine that dappled through the cherry leaves.

‘How did it go, pal?’ I asked him.

‘Great.’ He tipped up his Arsenal cap so I could see his shining face. ‘Telephone sales. Well-known legal firm. My job will be informing the public of their right to redress for wrongful mis-selling of financial services. Not bad, eh? I’ll be glad to be off benefit and earning again. Like the man at the Job Centre said, it’ll build my self-esteem and boost my aspirations.’ His face glowed. ‘He said he’s incredibly passionate about aspiration.’

Had I been wrong to sneer at Len’s dreams? There were jobs out there, even for the legless. If double amputation was no impediment to employment, why should a slight stress-stutter hold me back? Maybe Nazi George truly had my best interests at heart and all I really needed was a kick up the backside. My eyes watered with gratitude and resolve. Mickey Mouse, here I come!

‘Well done, Len! Great! When d’you start?’

‘Straight away. Self-employed. Flexible working. Zero-hours contract. How about yourself, Bert?’

‘Yeah, I sent off an application too.’

Inna was in the kitchen, slapping minced pork for kobabski about on a chopping board, mixing in crushed garlic and finely chopped herbs, ready to force through a wide funnel into a skin made from the gut of some unknown animal. Her neat, newly black plait was coiled at the back of her head, and a frown of concentration sat between her stern black brows. In the weeks that she had lived with me, her cuisine had become more sophisticated, though using the same basic ingredients.

I told her the good news concerning the flat, and she laughed and wiped her hands on her apron before giving me a hug. Then we tipped back a glass of vodka to celebrate.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the tenancy transfer was all but complete and I soon wouldn’t be needing her services any more.