Car Park Job
Some joker has walked through seven floors of the car park and left flyers on every windscreen. The flyers, about the size of a wallet, are photocopied on the cheap. The writing is cut off at the top and bottom, but there is no mistaking the message: there’s a phone number and a picture of a woman, hands scraping her blonde hair from her face, lips parted in phony ecstasy and breasts fairly bursting out of her triangle bikini. I have to take those bloody flyers off every windscreen before the car owners come back, or I’ll have mothers screaming at me about mental scars. Makes me feel like a dirty old man just touching those photocopied breasts.
The car park is full, that means three hundred and fifty flyers. I’m about halfway there and I take a break – my fingers are tired from puckering the corner of the paper so that I can grab it and slip it out from under the wiper blade. RSI. I think about all the trees that had to die to make this pornography, and then I think about how that girl, whose face I’ve seen having the same sham orgasm a hundred times, is someone’s daughter, some girl who grew up right – or maybe not – and then ended up doing this. Puckering her lips like some bloody gawping fish so that men can get off.
And then I think about my own daughter. Sarah hasn’t spoken to me for six weeks. She’s some big corporate deal and wears suits that cost more than I make in a month. Her shoes are peacock-coloured weapons, but she walks in them as if they are slippers. The last time we saw each other she sat across the table from me and pushed the mashed potato and sausages around on her plate like they were nuclear waste. She’d brought wine and drank more than she ate. When I told her she was too thin she said, ‘Thanks.’ When I grew up, being too thin meant that you couldn’t afford to eat, now it means you have more money than God.
I take another break and look over the barricade to where the cars are banked up on the street below. It’s a nice way to see the city, everyone on their way to something important.
I always think of Sarah when I lean out the window like this. She’s in one of those big office blocks, somewhere out there. I go back to picking flyers off windscreens.
The boss showed us video footage of the flyer guy this morning, we’re supposed to look out for him and tell him to piss off if we see him. He’s skinny as a reed, dirty blonde hair, dressed in an old flannel shirt and those tracksuit pants with the stripes down the leg. It’d be my pleasure to tell the weasel to bugger off but I know he’s not coming back, not today anyway.
Molly would have told him to bugger off, too. Never met a broad who loved a fight more than my Molly. I drove her mad with my attitude. She called me ‘lackadaisical’, she loved to use words like that – she would spend hours on the crosswords. I know she would have liked a husband who got fired up from time to time, but I was never gonna be that fella. Sarah never forgave me for Molly dying. You’d think it was me driving the car that hit her, the way little Sarah turned on me. Poor blighter, I was about as much use to her as a shovel without a handle.
I’ve stuffed all the flyers into the plastic bag now so I take my place in the booth. All this thinking about Sarah and Molly has made me melancholy and I want to pick up the phone and talk to my wife but I can’t of course. No phones in heaven.
I call Sarah instead.
‘Sarah Wilson speaking,’ she says.
‘Sarah, love, it’s Dad.’
‘Oh?’
‘Just wonderin’ how you are. Haven’t heard from you in a while.’
‘Is that a car? Are you at work?’
‘Yeah, it’s okay. Abdul will get this one, I’ve got my sign up. Just wanted to say hello.’
‘I’m busy, Dad.’
‘Okay, love. How about coming over for a fish meal next week?’
‘I’m pretty busy, you know.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘Well, bye then.’
‘Wait!’
‘Yes?’
‘Really, Dad? How’s work? That’s all you’ve got to say to me?’
‘No, of course not, love. You know I’m not much of a talker.’
‘And I’m busy, so…if you’ve got something to say?’
‘No, no. You get back to it.’
I hear the line go dead. I say into the beeping phone, ‘Your mother wouldn’t like what you’ve become, Sarah. No time for family. Rude to your father. She’d be ashamed of you, and she’d tell you too.’
I try to imagine the impact of those words, if she’d heard them. I can’t. I don’t know her well enough.
‘Thanks, Abdul,’ I call over to the other booth. Abdul smiles and give me his ‘no worries’ wave as I take my sign down and open up the booth.
A woman drives up and hands me a flyer.
‘This was on my car,’ she said. ‘It’s disgusting, I might as well park on the street.’
‘Sorry, ma’am. I tried to take them all down, must have missed one.’
I hold up the plastic bag to show her all the flyers I’ve collected and a tear in the plastic splits clean down the middle with the weight of it and the flyers, hundreds of them, get caught in the little fan in my booth and blow straight into the woman’s car.
She screeches like she’s been slapped in the face as the paper breasts and puffed-up lips settle on her face, lap and cleavage.
Before I can get out of my booth and around to her car, Abdul is already there.
‘So sorry, ma’am, let me help you,’ he says.
I watch Abdul as he picks up the pictures, one by one, from around the woman in the car. He holds the paper carefully, as though each piece is precious, even though of course it’s not.