Me and Mr Blakus
Dog Days with the Old Man
The following is a short story from my upcoming collection, Pantomime. This four-volume anthology — A contemporary mythic cycle, a Decamaron for our fractured world, a Canterbury Tales for our disjointed times — will be released, in paperback only, on 1st November. In two weeks, however, I will release an eight-tale ePub sampler. Details below.
I watch an old film with Mrs Blakus. People don’t use bad words when they are in black and white. Mrs Blakus says that men were much more handsome in the past. She says they were bigger too. They don’t look bigger in the film, but I think maybe everything was bigger, such as the houses and doors and furniture. This would make the men seem ordinary-sized.
Mr Blakus asks me to help him in the garden. He is building a box for Mrs Blakus to grow some herbs in. He says Mrs Blakus doesn’t use herbs, and it is stupid growing them when he could put carrots in it, but he says that if women didn’t get their way they became impossible, so it is best to give them what they want.
There is a man at the DIY shop who laughs at us when we buy the wood from him. I don’t know why. Mr Blakus’ face becomes very red. I ask Mr Blakus why the man is laughing at us. Mr Blakus says he is an ignorant young fool. There are lots of ignorant young fools in our town. Mr Blakus says that the ones with broccoli-shaped haircuts are the worst. They have broccoli for brains he says.
We watch the football. Mr Blakus gets very angry when he watches the football. His team is called West Ham. They usually lose, but even when they win he is angry. During the game, Mrs Blakus talks to him in a soft voice about the players. She says ‘The manager doesn’t seem like a nice man’ or ‘The goalkeeper has had a haircut’. Mr Blakus speaks out of the side of his mouth when he answers her.
I go to bed, because I am tired. I hear Mr and Mrs Blakus arguing through the wall. I think they are arguing about whether churches sell ice creams. Or it could be they are arguing about whether Churchill was a nice man. Or perhaps are were arguing about whether chairs can feel pain. The house can feel pain. I try to explain this to Mr Blakus, but he doesn’t understand me.
It is the morning. The ginger cat is in the garden. Mr Blakus runs outside shooing it. He says he would like to kill that poxy cat. Mrs Blakus says he would never do such a thing. Mr Blakus says, ‘I bloody well would.’ I am afraid of the ginger cat.
Mr Blakus is watching the golf while he is eating his toast and kippers. He has money on Ryan Wangenheim. Mrs Blakus doesn’t talk about the golfers because she says you can’t find a personality in them. Mr Blakus has little bits of buttery crumb on his lip. Mrs Blakus says that he eats like he is feeding a furnace.
Mr Blakus smells like a kind of bitter oil. Also tobacco, Imperial Leather soap, butter and the back of a cupboard. His sweat is nutty and slightly rancid.
The news comes on. Mr Blakus says he is losing respect for the Prime Minister. He says he thought he was going to make a difference. Mrs Blakus says ‘You always say that.’ Mr Blakus says, ‘At least that other crook didn’t get in. He’d be much worse.’ Mrs Blakus agrees.
There are plumbers next door. Mr Blakus goes into the garden to ask them, ‘When are you going to be finished?’ One of them, who is an ignorant young man with broccoli for brains, says, ‘We’ve already finished.’ Mr Blakus says, ‘It doesn’t look like you have,’ and the builder says, ‘Well we have,’ and walks away. Mr Blakus’ face goes very red.
It is the afternoon. Sam visits. He is Mr and Mrs Blakus’ son. He brings his two boys, Harvey and Morgan. All three of them sit on the sofa looking at their phones. Mr Blakus asks Sam what he thinks of mobility scooters. When Sam starts speaking Mr Blakus interrupts and says what he thinks of mobility scooters.
Mr Blakus doesn’t like mobility scooters at. He says he would rather kill himself than use one. He says that half of the people who use them can walk anyway, that they are just lazy. Mr Blakus doesn’t like lazy people. He doesn’t like scroungers. He doesn’t like fat people. He doesn’t like religious people.
Mrs Blakus asks Harvey and Morgan how school is going, and they shrug. Then Mr Blakus asks them if they have girlfriends, and they shrug. Mr Blakus says ‘Don’t embarrass them’. Harvey never smiles. Nobody knows why he is so sad. I tell him he needs to run up and down the street and then wee on a lamppost, but he doesn’t pay any attention to me.
Harvey and Morgan both wear polyester jackets. It makes them smell like a greenhouse, and the runoff from a bog. They cover this with Lynx deoderant which they spray on for about fifteen minutes every morning, is my guess.
When the boys leave, Mrs Blakus gives each of them fifty pounds. She does it so that nobody will see her, but I see her. She sees that I’ve seen her and says ‘shhh’ to me. I say her secret is safe with me and she pats me on the head.
The next day, Mrs Blakus drives Mr Blakus down to the town. On the way they argue about crisps, because Mrs Blakus wants to buy the expensive kind and Mr Blakus says he doesn’t bloody well care what kinds of crisps he has, and Mrs Blakus says he does bloody well care because he bloody well sulks if she gets the wrong bloody ones.
Mrs Blakus leaves Mr Blakus in the pub and then we go for a walk down to the harbour. She meets Mrs Garfal who is very unhappy. Mrs Garfal is always unhappy and she always expects everyone else to be unhappy. She also smells like a heavily-perfumed kipper. When Mrs Garfal sees Mrs Blakus, she bends her head down and looks pained and says ‘How are you?’ This annoys Mrs Blakus, but Mrs Garfal seems to enjoy annoying people.
Mrs Garfal says she misses Leeds, where everyone knew each other, but nobody knows each other anymore, everyone is a stranger. Mrs Blakus nods and said ‘Yes, yes, oh yes, it’s awful, everyone is a stranger.’ She’s not really listening, she just agrees with everything Mrs Garfal says so that she’ll stop talking, but that never happens.
In the afternoon, Mr Blakus comes back drunk. He has difficulty getting through the door. He lies on the sofa and watches the football, then he starts crying because he loves his dead mother. He says she was the best woman who ever lived. Then he falls asleep. Mr Blakus smells of smoked pipes and spilt beer.
He wakes up because the plumbers next door are playing loud dum-dum-dum music. Mr Blakus goes round to tell them to turn it off. When he comes back, his face is red and the dum-dum-dum music is louder. He goes round again and when he comes back his face is purple and he is shaking. The music is off but now the plumbers are drilling through the wall. One of them is screaming.
Mrs Blakus is afraid, and so Mr Blakus phones the plumbing company and says his wife is afraid of the plumber. He says the plumber is probably mentally unstable. A little while later the drilling stops. Mr Blakus says they aren’t allowed to work on Saturdays anyway. He says he will report them to the council. Mrs Blakus tells him not do that. She says the plumber might now throw a brick through the bedroom window.
We go shopping — we sneak out the front door very quietly so that the plumber doesn’t see us — and in the Tesco car park I see a bitch I want to mount. Mrs Blakus has to pull me off of her. This leaves me quite agitated and I want to bite something, but I don’t.
Mrs Blakus then bumps into Mrs Soolie. Mrs Soolie says that her neighbour has killed himself. I feel so sad that I start to cry. Then Mrs Soolie says to Mrs Blakus, ‘Look, he’s crying,’ and Mrs Blakus says, ‘It’s probably the bad air.’ Then Mrs Soolie says, ‘Here, have this,’ and gives Mrs Blakus a little chocolate vacuum cleaner that she bought in Belgium.
At home a bee stings my testicle. I make a fuss and Mr Blakus tells me to shut up. I keep hollering and whining. And he says shut up again, this time he is angry. I am whimpering now because it hurts very much and Mr Blakus says ‘What’s got into him?’ and then Mrs Blakus takes a look and sees the dead bee. She realises what has happened, she finds the sting and pulls it out. Mr Blakus thinks this is very funny.
Mr Blakus takes me round the corner shop, which smells of lentil dust, jelly babies and cheap disinfectant. He runs into Mr Quinn. I find it very hard to understand Mr Quinn because he has a thick Irish accent and speaks in a quick, high-pitched voice like he’s just had his wallet stolen.
Mr Quinn used to live next door to us, but he moved out when Mrs Murray got sick. Mrs Murray was Mr Quinn’s common-law wife. Her family hated Mr Quinn and thought he was after her money. ‘I wasn’t after her fucking money,’ says Mr Quinn. He moved out and came back every day to nurse her while she was dying. Then he nursed Mrs Murray’s sister, who got sick and died a week later.
Jack is with Mr Quinn. Jack is a Westie. He has allergic dermatitis and needs to be bathed in medicated shampoos every day, but that means he is always very clean, which embarrasses him. It embarrasses me too. We don’t look at each other.
Mr Quinn tells a story. He says that when he was young, living in rural Ireland, someone had given him a black Labrador and ‘the fucking thing kept mauling farm animals’. He says that it killed ‘six fucking calves and ten fucking sheep’ on a local farm, ‘so I had to shoot it. I had no fucking choice. Worst thing I ever did. It was worse than shooting my fucking wife.’
Mr Quinn asks Mr Blakus about his old house. Mr Blakus says it’s been turned into an H.M.O. Mr Quinn asks what that is, and Mr Blakus tells him it’s a House of Multiple Occupation. He says that soon the jmumba jmumba will move in, or the chum chow.
‘You’re the last white man left,’ says Mr Quinn. Mr Blakus says that soon there will be none of us left. ‘None of us with balls,’ says Mr Quinn, and then looks at me, and then looks at Mr Blakus, and then whispers ‘Sorry’. I don’t know why he says ‘sorry’ because I still have my balls?
We have new neighbours. Mr Blakus says they are so black that at night they’re just a pair of floating eyes. Mrs Blakus is unhappy too, because they talk very loudly. She says it wouldn’t be so bad because they are out all day, but the woman on the other side uses her blender a lot. Mrs Blakus doesn’t know why you would use a blender at six in the morning.
Mrs Blakus has coffee with a work friend of hers, Mrs Pompa, who has a very wide head, very red lips and smells of old apples and milk of magnesia. They are both agency school cleaners, but at different schools. They always talk about the same thing, ‘kids today’.
Mrs Blakus says, ‘Absolutely shocking, kids today. Leaving turds in the bowl. The girls are worse than the boys in my experience. I don’t know why, but I never find turds in the bowl in the boys’ toilets, only in the girls’.’
‘That’s nothing,’ says Mrs Pompa, ‘The other day I stood on a turd, on the floor it was!’ ‘Was that in the boys’ toilet or the girls’ toilet?’ asks Mrs Blakus. ‘Neither,’ says Mrs Pompa. ‘Neither?’ says Mrs Blakus. ‘It was in the staffroom,’ says Mrs Pompa.
This story makes me run around the cafe hollering, until a man with a red, bald head like a knuckle says ‘Can’t you shut that fucking thing up?’ and Mrs Blakus drags me out.
We go home and Mrs Blakus spends an hour and a half preparing her hair and make up to go down to Boots and get a photograph for her passport. Mr Blakus says ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering, we never go abroad.’ And Mrs Blakus says that Mrs Soolie has one.
Later on, Mrs Blakus goes out and comes home in a fluster. She’s had a terrible falling out with Mrs Garfal. Mrs Blakus said to Mrs Garfal that Mrs Garfal is addicted to complaining, that she just wants to bring everyone down and she’s actually disappointed when people are cheerful. Mr Blakus enjoys hearing this story very much. His eyes are full of angry joy, like he wants to bite her.
Mr Blakus has very blue eyes, a little like those of a theologian or mass murderer, but funnier. He has very few wrinkles around his eyes, which make them look unused, but he can look at Mrs Blakus in a way that makes her laugh and say, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool John.’
Mrs Blakus has little shrewd dark eyes, which are very well used to looking people up and down. Sometimes though, when Mrs Blakus looks at me, or at a baby, or at a photograph from long ago, they melt into a kind of hot, wet sauce.
Mr Blakus sometimes spends three hours on the computer. His face gets redder and redder. When he has finished he walks around the house distracted and wary, like he knows there’s a dangerous animal in the attic. Sometimes Mrs Blakus says to him ‘Why are you grumpy?’ and Mr Blakus says ‘Because someone on the internet is wrong.’
Mr Blakus then gets a phone call from Sam. Sam says that Harvey got fired from his job at Morrisons. A customer dropped a tub of yoghurt on him and laughed, so Harvey punched the customer in the nose.
Harvey said he hated it at Morrisons. He hated retail. He said that the general public were entitled cunts. He said he would never in his life forget the sight of two old ladies fighting over the last bag of sprouts on Christmas Eve.
A young man comes out of the house next door with a bike and a Deliveroo pack on his back. He is a skinny black man. He is wearing scuffed Decathlon trainers, a plain white Primark T-shirt, George at Asda tracksuit bottoms and a puffy black ribbed coat. He looks like everyone else, a shiny maggot in a water tank jacket, except his face is so black it’s blue.
Mr Blakus says that the jmumba jmumba don’t care about this country. Why should they? He says immigration is all well and good if you live in Sevenoaks and can watch your house price double every five years, but what about us down here? In the shit? We have to fucking live with them.
It is a freezing cold day. Mr Blakus is digging in the garden. Suddenly a JCB rolls into view at the bottom of the garden. Mr Blakus’ eyes go very wide, and then his head goes the colour of an apple, a shiny red one, and then he vanishes through the back gate. I can hear shouting.
He comes back and says that they’ve got planning permission. They’re going to put up more houses. ‘More houses!’ he shouts. All the veins are pumping away at his temples, they are wriggling around like blue worms. ‘Where’s the infrastructure? Where’s the infrastructure!’ He often complains about the infrastructure.
He walks back and forth for a while, up and down the garden. Then he looks back at the JCB, then he stops and looks up at the grey clouds, pit-pats of rain fall on his face, then it’s as if all his insides slump. He looks like all the air has left him.
He turns to me and says, ‘Thirty years ago today I first slept with her. It was the biggest mistake of my life. She tricked me. She tricked me. That’s what women do, they trick you into becoming a pet. That’s why… uh… uh… aaagghhhhh…’
Mr Blakus slumps down onto the garden swing sofa and weeps. ‘Everything is shit,’ he cries, ‘my kids don’t care about me, my wife doesn’t care about me. I’m living in a foreign land in my own country and all the buskers sound the same.’
I put my head on his lap. He calms down and starts sniffing and wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘Oh, it’s all ballsed up,’ he says, and looks at me with a mixture of sadness, disgust and a sort of moist surrender. I look at him sympathetically.
He wants a fag, but has none, so we go for a walk to buy some baccy. But then, as we step out of the front gate and turn into Guru Nanak Road something strange happens. A sad little Indian man in a dirty grey tracksuit stops in front of Mr Blakus. He has bags under his eyes that are so dark they look punched.
‘Can I have a Sprite sir?’ He has been crying too, his face is wet with tears. ‘A Sprite?’ asks Mr Blakus. ‘Or a Fanta,’ says the man. ‘I don’t have one,’ says Mr Blakus. ‘I’m hungry,’ says the man. ‘But why are you hungry?’ asks Mr Blakus. ‘I paid my rent,’ says the man, which he seems to think is explanation enough.
Mr Blakus asks the man more questions, and we come to understand from his fractured English that he had been lured over to England, with promises of high wages and cucumber sandwiches, but he is now worse off than in the third-world country he came from.
This morning he woke up cold and hungry and so he shambled out into the street, crying, stopping people as they went to work. All day he has been asking people for money or food, and they have all refused, so he lowered his request, lower and lower, until now he was just asking for a can of fizzy drink.
We are at the corner shop now. Mr Blakus fills up a basket with packets of bourbon creams, cans of ‘Big Soup’, potato shapes, loaves of bread, a fruit corner, smoked mackerel, a bottle of Worcester sauce, a six pack of salt’n’shake crisps, a can of Sprite…
‘I think that is enough sir,’ says the Indian.
‘No, no…’ says Mr Blakus. His head is sunk down in his chest. He is trying to hide his face, cramming as much as he can into the basket. Bigga peas, Paxo, rice pudding, sweetcorn in water, cranberry sauce, beef dripping, self-raising flour, all the time the little Indian man is pulling at Mr Blakus’ coat begging him to stop. ‘Stop sir, please stop.’
Mr Blakus gets to the till, heaves the heavy basket onto the counter and I can see he is crying again, the tears are running down his fat cheeks, ‘This…’ he croaks, pulling Maltesers, Lion Bars and Toblerones onto the counter ‘this… and this… and this… and I want to put money on this man’s credit… I’ll buy it, I’ll buy it all… Put it on his tab…’
The large, sad Muslim woman at the counter is very confused, and it takes a long time for her to understand what Mr Blakus is asking for. She says she can’t start a ‘tab’, but she says they have store vouchers.
‘Two hundred pounds of vouchers!’ cries Mr Blakus. His voice sounds very strange now, like it’s all torn up. ‘No, no, three hundred, three…!’ He doesn’t have that kind of money, but I don’t want to stop him. There is a funny mood in the shop, a big feeling. The air around Mr Blakus seems bigger.
The woman sells Mr Blakus the food and the vouchers which he gives to the Indian man who says ‘Oh thank you sir, thank you, thank you…’ ‘Don’t thank me,’ says Mr Blakus, pushing him away, quite aggressively. ‘I’ve gone silly in the head,’ he says and runs out of the shop.
I follow, barking wildly.
This story is from my upcoming collection of interconnected tales of transformation, tragedy, realisation and release, Pantomime, which will come out on the 1st November. On 1st of September I will release an ePub sampler called Eight Tales…
Me and Mr Blakus
A dog tells the story of his angry, bigoted owner.
Everything is Whispering
A woman lends her body to an alien for three strange days.
Hackney Exorcism
A man seeks help to rid himself of the ghost of girlfriends past.
More and More of Nothing at All
Polite zombies take over Cambridge.
Enwombed: The Man Who Refused to be Born
A man lives his life in a high-tech womb.
Merge
A young man begins to suspect he is trapped in a
malevolent alternate reality.
Year of the Rat
A dying alcoholic decides to clean up his street.
Ghosted
A dead man haunts his previous life.
Four of these shorter pieces — which share a kind of family resemblance — I have already shared on this site. The others are longer stories — novellas really — and not suitable for sharing on the screen, so I’m not sure which of these will appear here, if any.
If you are curious, use an e-reader, and would like to read ‘Eight Tales’, buy a £5 ‘nothing’ from my online shop and I’ll send the ePub over next week. Or, if you can help out with publicity in some way, by passing it on, or by writing a review, let me know and I’ll send you a free copy.