Lloyd 1.3
Daydreaming at work
1.3
“Where the fuck have you been?”
She said as he entered the front door of the shop. She was sat in the back office with her feat warming on top of her desk next to a small halogen heater. Her dirty blonde hair looked broken and greasy and her tubby little body hung out in all the wrong places.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re the only one that’s bothered to come in today, and you’re late at that”
Her name was Sharon and he hated her.
“Well the weather is pretty treacherous…and I’m not late” he said as he scanned the clock. “Have the others called in?”
“Yes they have” she said with an exclamation mark, as if the weather were somehow his fault.
Lloyd was a debt collector. Arguably the hardest most unrewarding job ever invented.
Lloyd and Sharon worked with three other people who looked after in-store-sales, ‘signing up customers’ and helping with telephone debt collection whenever they had a minute. Only three or four employees were ever needed on a daily basis.
“They can’t get in because of the snow, but it sounds more to me like they can’t be fucked getting out their beds!”
Her harsh Geordie accent grated on him. He imagined shoving a baking apple in her mouth and sealing it with duct tape before tying her to a chair in the stockroom and leaving her for the afternoon.
“I’ve been speaking with Jack. He’s going to be visiting the store next week and he’s fuckin appalled at how bad the debt is right now, so you betta get cracking pal”
He didn’t like her tone of voice, or the P word. “Pal.” Sam Burtenshaw used to call him Pal. He nipped himself through his trouser leg.
“It’s going to be hard for me to get anywhere today in that van”
He made his way to the kettle in her office.
As he filled up his cup, he pretended he had a rocket launcher on his shoulder and shot a warhead through the wall straight into her arse.
He’d done the job for almost ten years even though he’d gone to University, briefly, to study Anthropology. He dreamed about a parallel universe, where he’d gotten his degree and been an ‘above-average’. People would have taken more of an interest in what Lloyd cornerstone had to say in that world, even if it was all bollocks.
He’d got addicted to self-help books and surmised after years of deliberation that everything in life came down to good decision-making. He knew it was impossible for anyone to make a ‘perfect’ choice anymore because there was too much ‘stuff’ out there; from dozens of Starter choices in restaurants to Hundreds of brands of dish washer pills in supermarkets to thousands of Holiday resorts in Spain to Billions of potential female suitors On earth…
And wrong choices could cause irreversible anxiety.
Now in his thirties, he tried to be grateful. He knew that it was all too easy to pine after what never was rather than make the best of what he already had, so he limited the hardest choices he ever had to make to what books he was going to read next. That was safe, forward moving and gave him inherent control over something; even though that something was so vague it had no real means of application.
The easiest course of action was to keep on reading until some great idea became resoundingly clear; making action seem like a no brainer. One day he’d take a sabbatical and learn another language, one day he’d tell his boss what he really thought of her, and so on and so forth.
*
Lloyd met his beloved Jess on his 20th birthday in the middle of his second year at University. He would travel to and from class in his beat up Nissan Micra, but only on certain days of the week so that he could look after his mother. She’d been diagnosed with Cancer during his third semester and soon started undergoing chemotherapy. It became more and more imperative as her health deteriorated that he should find a partner to take her place as eternal comforter. Luckily, Jess was attracted to his accommodating nature and when she found out his predicament she knew he would be someone that could never let her down.
She had been seeing some other kid for a year before Lloyd came on the scene — been really in love with him — but it all fell apart because he was a “boy” and a “player”. At the time she didn’t let on much more than that, just that she was sick of dating “children” and that she needed someone to depend on.
After Lloyd quit Uni and married Jess — as strenuously as they tried — it soon became apparent that a baby wasn’t going to come easy and after their first year of cohabitation Lloyd finally bit the bullet and went to see a specialist. After various embarrassing tests, it transpired that he had a terribly low sperm count and although it was certainly possible for them to conceive, the chances of pregnancy were very low.
Lloyd often brought up the idea of adoption but it repelled Jess; she didn’t see the point of looking after a child for its whole life if it wasn’t hers; neither did she see the point of fertility treatment when it wasn’t God’s way.
At Jess’s insistence the facade of having to have sex dispassionately at the right time under the right conditions became the be all and end all whenever they were together. Eventually, they started arguing about the smallest things and soon they only spoke about the housekeeping and other people’s lives just to keep things ticking over. Neither of them could admit that the relationship had failed.
The day Lloyd came home with Yep, things got a bit better, because she agreed with everything he said.
“Do you want to go to the park?”
“YEP!!!!!”
“Do you like bones?”
“YEP!!!!!”
“How many letters in the alphabet?”
“YEP”!!!!”
The couple was able to refocus their attention on the pup and started to work again, together as a unit. Jess loved having something to coo over and she did everything she could to keep Yep fed, watered and lively… then Yep got bigger the novelty of having a pup completely wore off.
*
“So you’re going to just have to hit the phones all day” said Sharon, dragging Lloyd feet-first out of his daydream-hole.
“And you’ll have to go through the others’ call list as well” otherwise the stores’ debt is going to get out of control again”.
Lloyd cleared his throat and tried to make proper eye contact, which was tricky. One of her eyes often did it’s own thing.
“All of them?” he replied “I don’t know if it’s possible to make three hundred phone-calls in a day Sharon?” He was trying to make a joke, but he didn’t want to rub her up the wrong way.
“Sean!…Lloyd!”
She barked the words despite his proximity……
“Lets not have this conversation now; we’ve been here before haven’t we? Just try and do as much as you can, I want to be getting out of here at a decent time tonight. I’ve got my son coming round for dinner and I don’t want to have to cancel it because you never got your fuckin finger out.”
Her son was called Sean.
Customer Samples:
Roger Carmichael used to come in and be on the verge of tears when his VCR wasn’t working because if his VCR wasn’t working then it meant that he couldn’t watch tapes of his cats playing on the beach.
Lloyd had visited Rogers flat one day: Cat toys; cat beds; cat flaps; cat nip; cat poo; cat photos. The only other discernible things in the room were the used tissues caking the floor.
Steve Bury was always getting robbed. He had thousands of pounds worth of goods. Even after being burgled he still had to come in and pay for everything (as well as his precious laptop; the one item he’d managed to save.) One day when his laptop broke down, Steve came in looking nervous, asked a lot of questions with regards to the hard-drive and never came back.
(Apart from perhaps being a pedo, Steve was obsessed with the beetles and used to go on about how the real Paul McCartney died in 1966 in car accidents and was replaced with the winner of a Paul McCartney lookalike contest. Lloyd thought that if that had been the case then the second Paul was doing a great job and peter should probably let it go.)
Deborah Smith was a friend of Sharon’s as well as a customer, who would come in, drink tea, and help Sharon shirk her responsibilities for four hours while sexually harassing Lloyd. No teeth, bad face. Lloyd would grin and bear it but sometimes when he was stressed out he wanted to take her outside and push her in front of a speeding motorbike. She’d pinched his bum once when he was trying to lift a washing machine and dropped the thing on his foot before peeing himself a bit.
He tried his best not to think of them all as scum.
The first few calls he made that morning resulted in people hanging up on him or telling him the person he was after no longer lived on the premises; or they had died (which was always a lie and never eloquently put). The abuse made him wish he hadn’t turned up. And then there were people who told him he had ‘no right’ to be calling them and ‘who the fuck did he think he was’ when they were ‘only overdue a week or two’ and that they’d be ‘having words’ with him the next time they came in the shop.
He felt his face go prickly red. It was a real injustice, that anyone could have a go at him for trying to do his job!
You don’t see people hurling rocks at fire engines for disturbing the peace, do you?
He knew that face-to-face, there was a better chance of resolving their debt problems amicably. That was where his skill-set lay…and by God that was hard enough on a bad day.
What made today doubly awkward was the fact that it was just Sharon and him. It was never a good thing to be left alone with a reactionist, egotistical psycho and he would constantly be at the mercy of her mood-swings and unreasonable requests because she knew she could get away with treating him like dirt. As he listed her inadequacies in his head between phone-calls, he surmised that she may be psychotic or slightly schizophrenic; such were the timbre of her irrational outbursts.
There’d been a few times she’d been in perfectly calm spirits before grabbing a customer by the scruff of the neck and telling them she was going to send her son round their house with a machete should they refuse to toe the line, as if little voices had just that second commanded her. Rumour had it she’d punched a customer in the nutbag in Bognor and that’s why she got moved to the Brighton store.
“Hi can I speak to Mark Henderson please” said Lloyd, bent over the front desk. Sharon eyed him suspiciously from her little office; she had no idea what crap the other person on the line was about to divulge but she knew exactly what things Lloyd should be saying in response if he didn’t want the shop to lose money.
“Yes, it’s Lloyd Cornerstone here calling from The Gadget Shack, it’s about your payment for your widescreen TV. We haven’t had a payment for two weeks and I just wondered if there was a problem?”
Silence.
“Yes I understand…” he eventually stuttered.
“…I’m sorry to hear that Mr Henderson, so when do you think you’ll be able to pay it?”
It wasn’t the assumptive, illegal phone manner he’d had been taught by Sharon time and time again, so she marched through to the payment desk and snatched the receiver.
“Mark, you need to get this paid now or we’re going to come out and take your stuff, you do understand that don’t you?” “…Your excuses are your own, you signed a hire purchase contract and you know that it has to be paid…” “…That’s not my fucking problem Mark” … “don’t swear at me “ Then she hung up.
“Cunt”
It was relatively early in the day but Lloyd could already feel his tolerance levels peaking.
“2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048 4096”
He was far too tired; his toe hurt, he hated his neighbor, he hated his wife a lot of the time and he hated Sharon. His job was crap, his life was crap.
He went outside for a cigarette and concentrated on the snow falling for five minutes so that he might gather some composure. His hand was shaking. He imagined the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters doing a massive shit on the shop.
It was rotten how when you were having a bad day everything just seemed bleak. It felt like you had never been happy before in your life and never would or could be again. But then the self help books all claimed they had ways of beating the blues.
NLP. Frame-games. Self-affirmation.
If his problems added up to a swimming pool full of water then these poultry little aspirins would do nothing to change its composition.
Play back incident in head like a film reel. Pretend you are sat in the cinema watching clips of your life. Sharon shouting. Pause. Rewind. Turn sound down, add comical music, make her wear a strap on, make screen very small. Play Backwards. Trash cinema.
Sometimes he got distracted from inner diatribes by the odd vagrant juggling a vodka bottle or walking ferrets. It was a rundown area of the city with an abundance of freaks and if he didn’t see them, he’d imagine them in his head. He took the brass albatross out his pocket and stared at it intently. An old charm he carried around for luck. It had always reminded him of what was important but he couldn’t remember what was important anymore.
An icy fist of de ja vu broke his eightieth daydream of the day by slamming his jaw and knocking the cigarette out his mouth; it started bleeding. Another hit the side of his bowed head, pummeling his eardrum so all he could hear was static and all he could feel was a jaggy cold numbness down his face, like he’d just been to the dentist.
Hearing laughing across the road, he raised his head to find his bearings. Not surprisingly some chavvy little shits were giving him the wanker sign. Another snowball hit him on the shin. He repressed the urge to cross the road and kill them all.
Oh yeah, you can my book LLoyd on Amazon for £1.80 GBP or $2.99 USD
An absolute steal. Should be charging more really.
Anyway, Just type ‘Scott Lundrigan’ into the Search Engine… Or ‘Lloyd’.
Cheers.
Bye.
