Year of the Rat

Death of a Cleaner

‘Dennis Groome drank’ was a pleonasm, for if Dennis Groome didn’t drink, he wouldn’t be able to go on living. He would cease to be Dennis Groome. He hated his bottle of vodka, and he hated himself for drinking it, but he couldn’t stop. He was driven by something inside him he could not perceive, could not understand and could not control, something that had been there for so long it was impossible to imagine living without it. Although drink had undermined his ambitions, had wrecked his marriage and had demolished his health, he could not imagine living anywhere but among the ruins. One step beyond, towards a better life, made him shake with a fear of the unknown that only booze could alleviate.

He had spent his life menaced by an invisible parasite, a worm which, when he was very young, had crawled into his ear, promising to protect him from the bullying demands of an overbearing father. Initially, the hard, black, chitinous shell of the worm had protected Dennis against a world he hated, but, feeding on his heart, it had grown, and grown, and grown, until he could not tell where he ended and the worm began. Because he could never quite locate his adversary, his face wore a constant expression of tense expectation and searching confusion, but he sensed its presence, and he knew others did too, and so, like a sentimental squid, he surrounded himself with an inky, pseudo-innocent mist, a guileless, ingratiating air which attracted people to him, but which was unable to conceal, as they approached Dennis’ innermost, the smell of rotting flesh.

The worm was insatiable. For years, when he was very young, it fed on sugar, but when he was fourteen Dennis discovered lager, and from then on he calmed the coiled beast with booze. Not that he had fallen straight into hopeless alcoholism, not at all. For fifteen years, he had controlled his drinking, and had led what people euphemistically referred to as a ‘normal life’. He had worked in compliance processing—earnt well—married a cute and ambitious girl—Chrissie, who also brought in a healthy salary from event-management—and the two of them put a deposit down on a semi in Caversham, on the nice side of the Thames, where they set about raising a nice little family—with their daughter Olivia, who came into the world when Dennis was twenty-eight. At the weekend, he played football, and every Thursday night he went to archery practice, and won a silver medal in the district semi-finals.