D. Mitchell - The King of Terrors

Beth sat alone in the canteen at break times, she in one corner of the room, Bernie in another, and small groups of weirdos in between. Billy avoided talking to her for a full month, as he avoided talking to any pretty young woman. Their very presence tied his tongue up in knots. But there was something about this woman that had sunk its soft hooks into him. He became increasingly besotted with her. The calm, unruffled way she carried herself only added to her allure. Then one evening he marshalled every ounce of courage, which even on a good day wasn’t much, preparing himself for the inaugural meeting by paying particular attention to wearing a clean shirt, combing through his thinning hair a dozen times, and brushing his teeth for a full two minutes without stopping.

At break time he took his flask of coffee and plastic sandwich box and sat down at her table, opposite her. He felt all the weirdos’ eyes burning at his back, heard the phrase ‘get in there my son’ and ignored them.

‘Hi,’ he said, hardly daring to look in her eyes. She glanced up from her half-eaten sandwich, smiled politely, nodded in greeting and bent down to eating again. She had copies of the Times and Guardian spread out on the table in front of her. ‘Reading in stereo?’ he quipped.

‘I like to keep up with events,’ she said.

‘I’m a Sun man myself,’ he admitted.

‘I prefer words to pictures,’ she returned.

Ouch! He jerked back a little as if punched, then saw that she wasn’t serious, or if she was she made it look like it was harmless. He laughed, too loudly. ‘Yeah, right, pictures!’ he said. The pause hung around for a little too long to make it comfortable. ‘I’ve got egg,’ he said, snapping the lid off the box and a strong farty smell confirmed it. He cursed himself for talking a load of crap. It wasn’t what he’d rehearsed. She’d think him some kind of retard or something, he thought. One of the weirdos. ‘Can I buy you a drink from the machine?’ he asked. ‘It tastes like shit but it’s warm and wet.’

She pointed to a cup of tea. ‘Already fixed, thank you.’ Her accent was hard to pin down. Not Mancunian though. Not from around here.

‘I bring my own,’ he continued, unscrewing the lid of the flask. He almost screwed his eyes up in pain at his abject failure to kick-start a proper conversation. The ice remained resiliently unbroken. All the best lines he’d been mulling over for weeks had been wiped clean from his head, as if her presence was like a very strong magnet put too close to a computer hard drive.

‘It’s Beth isn’t it? Beth Heaney?’

She packed away her sandwich, folded both newspapers and rose from the table. ‘My break is over,’ she apologised, and left him to feel the silent heat of the mocking weirdos.

That wouldn’t stop him, he decided. He wasn’t going to be snubbed by a young tart like her. He had plans. He bragged off regardless, both at work and outside, how he and Beth were seeing each other. An item. Which nobody believed really. But this first meeting continued to trouble him like a niggling little splinter in the finger; hard to remove, hard to ignore.

Billy Crudd put on his hateful lime-green coat and marched down the length of the supermarket. Shelf packers were busy, and silently, opening up boxes and slashing plastic covering and filling up gaps. The aisles were littered with discarded plastic, cardboard, paper, cages of stock wheeled in from the warehouse lined up and ready to empty onto the shelves.

Morons, he thought, avoiding contact with most of the people there. He took a detour, however, down Beth’s aisle, paused by the cage she was emptying and admired her curvaceous rump as she bent to her haunches to fill a lower shelf.

‘Hi, Beth,’ he said. She returned the greeting with a nod. ‘How are you doin’?’

‘I’m doing just fine,’ she said. Which was about all she ever said.

He remembered how it felt when she declined his invitation to a date six months ago; there was a film showing he thought she’d like. She said thank you but no, and it cut him like a blade because she didn’t know how much it had taken him to pluck up the courage to ask her.

‘Another night, maybe?’ he said hopefully.

‘Another night,’ she echoed. But he knew there would never be another night.

Billy Crudd went to his aisle, checked what the lazy fuckers on the day shift hadn’t done and went out to the warehouse to collect a cage of stock. One of the weirdos was standing there, looking out onto the open warehouse yard. In the distance, beyond the high walls of the yard, above the satellite dish-infested roofline, there was a faint orange glow in the sky.

‘What’s that?’ asked Billy. ‘Someone’s house on fire?’

‘Who gives a shit?’ said the weirdo and dragged his cage to the shop floor.

But Billy thought something was wrong. He knew trouble when he saw it.

He took his Stanley knife and slashed down the strip of tape to open the cardboard box’s guts. Dog food. He hated being put on the pet aisle. It’s almost as bad as the arse-wipe aisle, he thought acidly. What you stacked said a lot about who you were here in this twilight zone. Billy Crudd was down with the dogs.

But as always to alleviate the numbing monotony of it all he thought of Beth, only a few aisles down the store from him. All that blonde hair. She reminded him of the hot one from Abba, Agnetha. His dad had admitted to having a crush on her in the ‘Seventies.

What Beth didn’t know was how much Billy knew about her. Oh yes, he knew some things alright. It had all started out of curiosity, following that very first snub at the canteen table. He found he couldn’t concentrate on much else; even his Big Plan seemed to be elbowed from his thoughts by her. She occupied his every waking moment, made all the worse by her having declined his advances, which instead of pouring cold water on his fiery ardour appeared to fan the flames of his obsession all the more.

So early one morning, when they’d all finished their shift, he followed her home. She lived quite some distance away and she took him through a maze of back streets he’d not been down before. Even he, hardened to Manchester’s meanest districts and housing estates, felt more than a little trepidation in walking the run down area. This, he knew, was where all the bad stuff happened — drugs, prostitutes, you name it there was a lot of it going on here. The police came in pairs, if they ever came at all. And then he’d heard it was only to fish for narks.

She crossed a large forecourt that led up to a block of oppressive-looking flats, a throwback to the ‘Sixties when they threw them up like Lego with scant attention to quality or longevity. He followed her to where she took the stairs, avoiding the lifts, he noticed. The stairwell stank of piss, the walls so full of graffiti they could sell it to the Tate Modern as abstract. But he dared not follow her further, not on that first night, and he crept back off as quietly and as furtively as he could. He didn’t want to hang around the place too long. He was likely to get mugged, or knifed, or raped, or all three at once.

But it didn’t stop there. He couldn’t let it. He blamed her for the invisible hold she had on him. He went back during the day to snoop around, maybe to get a glimpse of her. Then he went through her trash and recycling bin. He didn’t really think anything of it. He just needed to know more about her. What she ate, what she read, what she wore. Who she was.

There didn’t appear to be any boyfriends. He never saw anyone else with her. Except for one time; he caught sight of another young woman of a similar age enter her flat. Briefly he considered the unthinkable, that she was a lesbian. That would answer a lot, he thought bleakly, and was consumed by a heavy, cutting sense of betrayal. But he could not, would not, accept that to be the case. He never saw the woman again, which confirmed his feelings and lifted a heavy burden from him.