Funny, odd, clever, brimming with interesting characters and excellent dialogue, made me laugh out loud… I can’t stop thinking about it.
Terry Gilliam
An extract from my epic black comedy, Fired, about a gently anarchic oddbod, Joe Geb, and his uptight brother Neil, who get drawn into a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. Here we meet Neil as he attempts to ask out his flatmate, Lilly, over breakfast.
Although he had worked out continually, Neil Geb was still, now in his late twenties, small and delicate. Instead of building him up, as exercise is supposed to do, it had whittled him away, exposing the ropes and pulleys of his system, operated by resentful anxiety. He drank protein shakes and creatine, he benched his bodyweight, he worked on his posture and his stance, he thrust his chest out, he projected confidence at all times, he was impeccably dressed, he was, for Christ’s sake, an officer of the law! But he could not bolt on impact. He was always to others, or he always felt like, ‘Neil Down,’ the nickname he had been given at school, and which he still heard, whispered in dreams.
He was dressed now for work, in his police uniform, shoes cleaned, hair brushed and parted, a pair of massive headphones clamped to his ears, rippling his agile little fingers up and down the keyboard, glancing for inspiration at his framed Prince’s Trust Gold Award letter signed by Prince Philip and his (as yet) unsigned photo of Jesus Christ on a donkey. He was listening to a track he’d spent two months composing for his flatmate Lilly, but which, the night before, he’d discovered she hated. He’d been too afraid to give it to her, to present it as an authentic expression of his soul’s desire, so instead he’d put it on casually in the background while Lilly was making tea.
‘What’s this?’ she had said.
‘Oh I dunno, some band. A friend at work recommended it.’
‘It sounds like the backing track of an airplane safety video.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ Neil was horrified. He had been inspired by the backing track of an airplane safety video he’d watched on his stone-rubbing trip last year to Ephesus (arguably, with the obvious exception of Pompeii, the best preserved Roman city in the world). He’d added, with the help of his Moog soft-synth, some quirky flair—because Lilly loved things that were out of the ordinary—but she’d just sniffed at it; ‘I’m not interested in that world,’ she’d said. He’d even had the lyrics, giclée printed on warm-white 310 gsm paper and professionally mounted. He sadly scanned the ungiven gift. There wasn’t much point recording the vocals now was there? But nevermind, nevermind. There was still hope. Prepare for battle. He put on his instrumental synthetic-organ version of ‘Bat Out of Hell,’ then stood up, hands on hips, legs splayed majestically, chest out, and began his power-breathing routine. This was the confidence-boosting exercise he always performed before difficult conversations with his boss and any time he was called out on an ASBO.
Downstairs, in a shabby, shared kitchen—bowls in the sink, cupboards papered with magazine cutouts (black Schwarzenegger, Marx in drag, ‘I overthink therefore I am’), fridge fluttering with post-it notes, dining table unwiped from last night’s Vietnamese takeaway—there sat Lilly Pumphrey herself, mournfully regarding a bacon sandwich.
Lilly was twenty-two, with long, fair, chestnut hair. Her hazel eyes, wry and intelligent, passively enquired behind thick glasses. She wore comfortable, tasteful, homemade dresses, of warm, dark floral design. She feared turning into one of those big-hipped, pink-cheeked young women who dress like geriatrics and wear woollen hats and make 16mm films about women’s rights in Tibet, and seem all soft and girly but are actually hard and calculating and grim.
She was soft-voiced, soft-featured and soft-hearted. People found her softness beautiful but if they told her she was beautiful, as they very occasionally did, she simultaneously felt great and wished they wouldn’t because she hated the way that beautiful people acted like beautiful people, and anyway she wasn’t beautiful, and anyway does it even matter, and anyway what does it even mean? That’s the thing isn’t it? When people told her she was beautiful she wanted to ask ‘what else do you find beautiful?’ because if they said Angelina Jolie, or a Maserati, oh right you’re mad then, or if they didn’t know, then alright, but perhaps you don’t actually know what you’re saying, but if they said a red squirrel or a Romanesco cauliflower or one of the Wives of the Meadow Mari, well then that meant something.
Standing next to her, as she pondered the repulsive beauty of the bacon sandwich, was a tall, smooth, chubby, sleepily-cheerful fluffily-bearded immaculately-clean and immaculately-scruffy young man, Hunter Braff. He was speaking into his smartphone just as he spoke into Lilly, or into anyone else who had stepped into what they believed would be a conversation but which, actually, was a trading of impressions.
‘Why? God knows!’ he said, his plausible, nasal voice cutting through the walls to a radius of 20 metres, ‘I’ve NO idea. I’m like “I don’t need to hear this.” I think Jaxon forgets that I’m not, like, a work person...? What?... Has he? No! Oh my God, oh my God. What is wrong with that boy? Is he actually mental? I thought Teagan was smarter than that, ef-ef-es. And he was going to come in with us… With LifeLine. What!? You haven’t heard? Yeah! Our new app! Basically it’s like, you put this little monitor under your skin, and… uh…? oh, I don’t know, ask Prig, he’s the boffin… anyway, it tells you literally everything about what’s going on in your body. It’s going to free the world from doctors. I know! Yeah, what? Oh sorry, yeah, me too! Hahaha! Okay, okay. Ciao, ciao, little cow!’
While he was speaking Lilly whispered to the bacon sandwich a tiny, quiet, ‘sorry,’ the sense of which was still lingering in her awareness when Hunter hung up and turned to her, as if continuing the conversation he’d just finished;
‘I was coming out of the shower last night and I got a message from Ollie.’
‘Oh?’ Lilly looked up, surprised that she was involved here.
‘It just said “are you okay?”’
‘Why?’
‘No idea! I. Have. Got. No idea. I wrote back. I was like, yeah, I’m fine! Hahahaha!’
Lilly smiled weakly. Hunter bustled out of the room, still unable to believe the madness of it all. As he passed Neil’s bedroom, the door—brass nameplate officially declaring its bearer, ‘P.C. Neil Geb, B.A.Hons.’—opened and Neil, a head shorter than Hunter, emerged. Yes, Hunter had passed, unaware of Neil, who enjoyed a fragment of relief that there was no need for a morning acknowledgement or, worse, morning small talk. Neil feared small talk, particularly with people who were on the threshold of being someone you know, but not quite, like shopkeepers he’d accidentally had a conversation with and now had to avoid (thank God for supermarkets and internet shopping). He also feared saying hello, which was tremendously difficult, but not as hard as goodbye. He once climbed out of a hotel window to avoid having to say goodbye twice to a doorman.
Conversation, generally, was problematic. He wanted to get deep, but for some reason he was afraid of the shallows at the first step. It was so hard to predict where chit-chat would go and so he had developed various strategies to control it. He would direct the flow of information towards cars, tools, insulation, the new ring-road on the A654, the foolishness of fighting a European campaign on two fronts and similar such safe spaces with an ‘innocent’ question, such as ‘had lunch yet?’ or ‘is W.H. Smiths open on bank holidays?’ or ‘I wonder if Mongolians are good at swimming?’ which he would then guide towards a nice, comfortable conversation about protein, stationery or how Genghis Khan contributed to the modern world.
Neil’s relief was momentary. Chiyo had silently and swiftly exited from the bathroom and was now standing, oddly tilted, wet hair hanging to her side, staring.
‘Oh! Ah! Morning!’ he said, unnaturally loudly.
Chiyo—inscrutable age, inscrutable face, inscrutable feelings, pale, slim, breastless and horribly beautiful—said nothing.
‘Morrr-ning,’ said Neil, conscious that he’d repeated himself and already given away his awkwardness which he began every other day promising to himself not to do. He tried not to look at Chiyo, into her eyes, because there was a little ghost in them that seemed to reach into him and squeeze his prostate and make his voice rise an octave. It was difficult though, looking away, because there was something compelling about her long, slim body, always dressed in black, and her long, slim face, also always dressed in black, just as there is something compelling about a bottomless chasm or a murdered body. Sometimes he resisted the compulsion physically, by wincing, or raising his palms and stepping backwards. But actually, now, she wasn’t looking at him at all, but over and past him. He turned, following her blank gaze to the corner of the stairwell ceiling.
‘What, erm… what are you doing?’
‘Looking the space.’
She continued looking. He turned back to her.
‘Looking the space,’ he repeated quietly.
Chiyo’s head shook, almost imperceptibly, then her glance fell on Neil. ‘No,’ she said, fixing him with a look that felt like the opposite of a torch or candle. Just as they lighten up the night, so her eyes darkened up the day.
‘Ri…’ Neil swallowed reflexively, mid-utterance, as he tended to do when his anxiety-meter hit red, ‘…ight,’ then tenderly stepped past her and down the stairs. As he rounded the bottom stair he spotted Lilly in the kitchen and his face—hard, focused and resisting—switched into alert, mobile and eager. A surge of fearful awareness prickled his back and a light scent of his own stress sweat reached his nostrils. No matter. The time had come, his fate would be sealed. By the time he’d finished his tea and toast and washed and wiped up and put the plates away he would know if Lilly would go on a date with him.
Neil did not have much success with the opposite sex. His last date had been in London with a woman he had met on the internet, a puffy, hungry, red-lipsticked restaurant manager called Carrie who’d described herself on her profile as ‘a sassy geek who loves philosophy and accessories.’ The meeting was in tube-less Tottenham, so a long train journey was followed by a two-and-a-half-hour bus journey across North London; a total of five hours to get to a bleak, windy corner on Lordship Lane, to meet a woman who, the instant she saw Neil said ‘Oh. You’re much shorter than I thought.’ ‘Yeah, erm,’ he’d laughed nervously stressing his words erratically, ‘I was a normal sized child, as a child, but I never really had a final, you know… spurt… uh… but, uh…’ He’d trailed off, realising, from the lip-pursed disappointed look on her face, that he wasn’t able to explain his size or convince her that it was not actually undesirable. ‘Shall we call it a day?’ he’d said, heart shrinking, and she’d agreed and he’d travelled five hours back home.
In the films you asked a girl out, and then five minutes later you were ecstatically fornicating in a weirdly clean public toilet. In real life it was a long arduous process, requiring all kinds of devices and stratagems, success always far from certain, even at the last moment, even with her knickers in your hands there was a good chance of failure. It was like climbing Everest, requiring months of planning and training and then, all the way up, there were dead frozen bodies and litter from those who had gone before you, and even when you got to the top, right in reach of the pointy-point, it could suddenly just detach itself from the mountain and fly away.
Lilly was perfect. No, not perfect, she was quite strange, and not exactly his type, physically, and she liked completely different things and she probably didn’t like him very much; but perfect. She wasn’t too pretty, that was important—nice face, lovely and cute, but a bit too big to put too many fellow suitors in his way and, much more important, a bit too plain for her to consider Neil too far beneath her. Neil had imagined what it would be like going to the restaurant with her, she would look good, and he’d imagined presenting her, with pride, to his mother, and he’d imagined Lilly knitting him a tie or something, and it all just… worked.
He collected himself and walked purposefully, but not too purposefully, into the kitchen. He offered to Lilly a casual, but not too casual, ‘hello,’ noted that her ‘hello’ was several degrees more casual, and then, slightly hurt by this, set about preparing his breakfast—toast cut into four exactly equal quadrants, each with a different spread (Marmite, peanut butter, jam and marmalade; rotating from ‘main course’ to ‘pudding’). He was trying to ignore the sick, acidy fear in the pit of his neck, but the more he tried the more he felt like he might, at any moment, burp up a teaspoon of bile.
‘If I discovered my comb was made from the bones of a dead relative, I don’t think it would really bother me,’ said Lilly, half to herself.
Oh Christ no, it was a ‘creative’ conversation, one in which you were supposed to say interesting things, but he hadn’t prepared anything. Play it safe. Agree and deflect. Agree and deflect.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘first day on the job. Are you nervous?’
Hunter’s squeezed-frog voice cut through the house like a boring axe dropped from the bathroom two floors above; ‘There’s no hot water! Again!’
‘Yeah, a bit,’ said Lilly. ‘Would it bother you though?’
‘Actually, I was wondering… Would what bother me?’
Hunter appeared in the doorway, frumpy and dramatic. ‘There’s no hot water Neil.’
‘No? Isn’t there?’
‘I think the thermostat’s bummed.’
‘If,’ said Lilly, ‘you found out a dead relative had been used to make your vegetable rack?’
Neil calculated his conversational priorities. Dispatch Hunter with a succinct instruction, then try again to deflect Lilly away from this mad, surreal line of questioning. ‘It’s not the thermostat,’ he said to Hunter, ‘it’s the element. We’ll have to drain the whole boiler.’ He turned to Lilly, ‘Erm, I don’t know. I don’t have a vegetable rack. I don’t trust them.’
The toast popped up, burnt. Neil ground his teeth. ‘Drat.’
Hunter slouched further, hand to temple. ‘How do you do that?’
Lilly sighed, ‘No, I don’t know either. Nothing’s really certain though is it? Not when it comes to death.’
Neil was down to the crust, he didn’t want to go shopping after work for another loaf of bread, because, when twenty harried home-goers were being reminded to take their receipt or use their loyalty card by an automated-till voice, multiplied by twenty, that, like all automated voices, sounded like it was trying to get children to be more enthusiastic about playing a game they didn’t want to play and which was set at a murderous biddy-skull penetrating volume, Neil felt like he wanted to smash the place up with his Monadnock PR-24 side-handle baton. This, along with the small-talk-to-shopkeeper problem, was why he preferred to get his food delivered, and why he now accepted the burnt slice, rattling and tugging the crippled husk from the jaws of the toaster. ‘You have to find the drain cock and then the inhibitor…’ he said rapidly to Hunter, then turned to Lilly with sighing dismay and returned her much harder to hit conversational volley with a pathetically inadequate drop shot which he knew wouldn’t even reach the net, ‘erm. Isn’t it?’
Hunter waved the problem away with a small hand, ‘Oh I don’t have time for this Neil. I’ve got a meeting with investors. Let’s talk about it later shall we?’
He left. Neil, sweating now, collar damp, needled by Hunter’s implication that he was at fault here, continued to work meticulously at his toast, but because it was burnt it broke up under the pressure of his knife. He could detect a slight ‘pre-blackout’ shimmering around the edge of his vision. He hardly knew what he was doing, or saying, or being, but it was now or… not ‘never,’ perhaps later, but that was bad enough.
‘Erm,’ he said, clearing his throat and sucking up the last quivering dregs of his casualness, ‘I was going to say though, did you see my note?’
‘Which one?’ said Lilly, sipping her tea, ‘There are so many.’
‘Oh, right. I er...’
‘Not the one about leaving the TV remote control in the remote control box?’
‘No, I, actually...’
‘Or the one about how much pressure to apply to footfalls when climbing the stairs?’
‘No, no. It was more...’
‘Or was it the one about taking the celery out of the fridge before it shrivels up and goes brown?’
‘No, none of those. I... uh...’
‘I think you need to date your notes Neil. Then we can keep track of them more easily.’
‘That’s a good idea actually. I’ll do that. Erm, but, no, this one, I decided to put on your…’ He opened the fridge and gestured inside with a surprisingly elegant sideways splay of the hand, as if speaking to a crowd of connoisseurs. ‘…apple juice. I thought you’d… because you have apple juice every morning, you’d read it. But I notice you’re not drinking apple juice this morning, sooo…’ He hesitated, pulling back from the abyss, then brought a piece of toast to his lips to conceal the terror, then realised it was the wrong piece (marmalade before peanut butter), put it back on the plate and then closed the fridge, thinking ‘terminate, terminate.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Lilly, sighing, ‘you could just tell me what it says now?’
‘Right.’ He opened the fridge again and removed the note, some kind of wind roaring in his ears. Impossible to abort. This is it, this is the moment. Say it now, before Hunter or Chiyo come back. Say it now! ‘It says… it says, “would you like a dr… (swallow) …iiinnnnnk with me this evening? From Neil.”’
‘Oh…’ The thought had vaguely occurred to Lilly that Neil was sort of asexual, that he didn’t really have romantic feelings; but apparently he did, and apparently they were directed towards her. This was unexpected. Despite her surprise though, and despite not really being in the mood for a life-critical exchange with Neil over breakfast, she immediately understood that the wrong kind of answer here could smash him into tiny little pieces. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said hesitantly, and softly, ‘I don’t know Neil. I’m going to be spending all day with death. I might not be in the mood for… you know, life…’ She wanted to say ‘your life,’ but she held her tongue.
‘Okay!’ he said brightly, volume and confidence enhanced by a kind of relief. Strange that she’d responded to his suggestion so casually, as if he’d offered not his heart but a chip or a biscuit, but that made it better, it made it normal, and at least it was over, ‘Well, if you change your mind, just, I’ll leave an empty note on my door. Just take it off if you want, if, as I say, if you change your mind, that is, or you could write on the note, that you’d like to… um… change your mind.’ He furrowed his brow. For some reason he had pronounced the word ‘mind’ more like ‘marrnd.’
‘Or I could just tell you.’
Neil considered this. Interesting idea.
‘I prefer the note system.’
Reader reviews for Fired (Amazon & Goodreads)…
…really engaging and very readable, in fact completely absorbing. …On the other hand, utterly mental, totally crackpot, and deeply challenging. …I looked at it afterwards and thought “Can’t believe Amazon actually sells this!”, “Do I put this on my bookshelf or under my bed?”. “What now?”
Fired is a magnificent work; provocative yet, finally, gentle… Mr. Allen is not just imaginative and wise in criss-crossing destinies, but quite remarkably compassionate.
This book blew my little mind. It is a colossal, all encompassing, thought provoking, and emotion-stirring epic journey.
Genius… A lovely, yet hilariously terrifying ride. Crazy as all hell and brimming with love, unconditional love. I was lying down for some time after.
A genuine piece of Counterculture at last… Melds together so many disparate parts of our universe, but there is a feeling of wholeness that all true art gives. …Blows the lid off what we think is possible for art in the world at the moment.
The best fiction I have read in years. Weirdly compelling, relentlessly bleak, profound and moving and funny…
Buy a copy of Fired here. Or from Amazon or from pretty much any other online book retailer.
Or read another extract (a short story embedded within the main story) here.