Overview

Mike McConnell is a flabby assortment of flesh and electrical impulses attached to a Linux orientated laptop dispatching to the Wikipedia super computers at irregular intervals. He spends the rest of his time trying to isolate the chemical reaction that occurs in golfer Tiger Woods' brain when he is addressed by a member of the public with the words "Easy Tiger."

Achievments

He has…

…DJed in a Soho Club

…Dined at The Ivy

…hosted a hit graveyard radio show

…been to Bucharest, Nice, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong, Monacco, Charlamagne, L.A, Isle of Wight, Wales, Belgium, Rome, Mallorca, Madeira, Barcelona, Macau, Luxemborg and once got stuck in Crawley for nearly 25 years.

…seen every episode of Lost and reckons the last 10 minutes were very rubbish.

…been addressed by Craig Charles as "Big Fella"

…painted paintings called ||De Fibonacci Stijl - Photo || 1037913 - Photo || 999999 and so on... - Photo ||

…written a story about Rats that isn't really about Rats ( Summer at the Rat House) as well as stories about agreeable corporate murder ( DBD Inc) Contagious Nightmares, the circular nature of existence ( Mesh) and A Brief History of Metaphysics.

…set a school record for throwing the Hammer

…listened attentively to Nelson Mandela speaking in Trafalgar Square

…booed Tony Blair

…been fired, several times

…seen Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Mumm-Ra, Pulp, Richard Hawley, Jarvis Cocker, Elliot Smith, The White Stripes, The Strokes, Symposium, Mystery Jets, Madness, Ian Brown, Kula Shaker, Space, Toots and the Maytals, Green Day, PJ Harvey, Vic Chesnutt, Iggy Pop, Daphne and Celeste, R.E.M, Mel B, Dave Stewart, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Supergrass, Smog, Rock of Travolta, Beck and some more that momentarily escape him.

…been unintimidated by Will Mellor

…aligned himself with lolspeak and decried the heathen leet speakers

…advised the sound technicians during an Elliott Smith gig

…read every XKCD strip, and once even commented on Randall's blag

…a first edition of Will Self's Grey Area

…kissed the Blarney Stone

…completed Burnout Paradise 3 times on the PS3

…been a layout artist and columnist for an online magazine

…owned a Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Gameboy, Game Gear, NES, SNES, Mega Drive, N64, PS1, PS2, PS3 and various PCs and Laptops.

…parlayed with Vic Chesnutt

…a taste for Bagels

…worked in a cinema

…checked for Dave Gormans at work

…asked Sir Robin Knox-Johnston lots of questions, mainly pertaining to the level of desperation required to eat Flying Fish raw

TwInput

I have begun work on a simple twitter client in Python, code to follow soon...

A Brief History of Metaphysics

It was when humans discovered and defined the laws of metaphysics that the true scope of human self destruction became wholly apparent.

In 2098 Dr Hilde Mycroberg, philosopher of physics at Oxford university published her defining paper “Perception of Physical Reality: Intuitive Physics and the Concept of Concepts.” In her paper she described the thought processes of a number of her forebears. She described how Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, having constructed the periodic table, was able to predict the remaining elements and their atomic masses correctly. She explained how John Couch Adams had theoretically determined the position of Pluto and astronomers, some years later, had been surprised when they found it exactly where he said it would be. In all the cases Dr Mycroberg showed in her thesis, the key to discovery was almost always to know what it was you were looking for. The rest of her paper went on to suggest that the key to understanding, defining and manipulating metaphysics was to deduce what metaphysical law would apply to.

The paper caused outrage in the science world and it fiercely divided practitioners. Some felt that this was at last a great new frontier for science, another great development for the human race just as antiseptics and communications had been in the last millennium. Others felt that it was ‘pop’ science of the very worst kind. That in essence it was contradictory to attempt to define things it said were intangible and they would usually drag up the age old question of why universities allowed bastardized pseudo sciences like philosophical physics anyway.

So the argument went back and forth for a number of years and a lot of people got cross and nothing really happened. Then in 2103 a graduate research team in California set forth four basic principles for the definition of metaphysics.

1. If physics defines the physical world, logically metaphysics don’t.
2. If metaphysics don’t exist in a physical world they don’t have a physical presence.
3. Therefore there must be a metaphysical existence in tandem with the physical.
4. If physical laws are constant and all encompassing, metaphysical laws aren’t.

The publication of this paper riled the scientists even more than the previous one. Those who had supported the original work by Dr Mycroberg claimed it as vindication of all they had surmised. Their opponents took to vehemently defaming it by chanting “logical fallacy, logical fallacy” whenever the subject came up.

The general public became aware of metaphysics in 2112 when a scientist called Kirk Solowka claimed that he and his team had found a way to transfer consciousness from the physical world to the metaphysical. The mass media demanded proof. Something they could broadcast directly into people’s brains. Some scientists said it would be the kind of shtick P.T. Barnum would have happily put about; other scientists said they were finally being vindicated. The man on the street shrugged his shoulders and posed rhetorical questions about whether as a taxpayer he was paying for all this.

So a one day seminar was arranged and the graduate team hired a disused space force hangar for the event. They spent three weeks moving and installing their lab equipment. They employed a small team of laborers to arrange the accommodation in the hangar. They had the seats arranged in the round with their machinery on a raised dais at the epicenter. It was July and the heat in the desert was intense, a number of workers collapsed from heat exhaustion and dehydration while erecting scaffolds and plinths. The night before the seminar the two head scientists, Dr Solowka and Dr Humphrey Gaskin sat in silence on the scaffolding drinking beer.

By the middle of the afternoon the hangar was filled. The scientists sat in a separated booth watching people arrive. None of them spoke but furtive glances were bandied back and forth. Each of them feeling a deep sense of fidgeting anxiousness. The show began with a short talk given by the group's sponsor a Mr. Horatio Stoppard, he spat out platitudes and simple jokes while avoiding any mention of the research and soon welcomed the team to the dais. The silence as they filed up was negated only by the deep hum of the 600 air conditioning units pushing the hot air around. The seminar began.

Dr Lena Howard began by discussing the formation of the group, their development in metaphysics and eventually how they settled on a course of investigation. Dr John Waits further explained how the group had originally been frustrated in the application of their theoretical work by using animals. They had eventually drawn the conclusion that animals had no innate metaphysical existence as they lacked the cerebral development to distinguish instinct from concept. He finished by saying that metaphysics couldn’t alter basic instinct traits, traits such as survival, the need for sustenance and sexual drive as these were irreparably entwined with the individuals physical self. Dr Stephen Saunders gave a short but technically impenetrable talk about how they had coupled theoretical research with the creation of apparatus and machinery to test and employ their theories. Finally the last two speakers stepped up, Dr Gaskin and Dr Solowka.

They gave a short presentation that detailed, in layman’s terms, the experiments that they had conducted. The team having theorised that though a metaphysical instance existed parallel to physical existence, if the two were to interact then there must be a copula between the two. It took a lot of careful physical research, but in the end they had found it. Dormant and unused in the cerebrum, they had found the copula's physical terminal. It had taken months of illegally testing on themselves, they explained, but not only had they found a way to move consciousness across into the metaphysical world but also to manipulate metaphysical reality.

There was uproar, people threw paper in the air, and there was shouting. Some said they were tampering with God’s design, others said they were insane, others laughed and shouted “fraud” and a few shouted that it was the greatest thing man had ever done. It took a few minutes for the scientists to get everyone to settle, before announcing that, as promised, they would now offer a demonstration. A volunteer, a thin wiry man was chosen and he and Dr Gaskin were both strapped to the machine. As this went on Dr Solowka explained that Dr Gaskin would have his consciousness moved to the metaphysical world and manipulate the journalist’s metaphysical self. The previously dormant crenulated panels of the machine flared into life. After 10 minutes the pulsing wound down and both men were extricated from the machine.

At this point it is unclear what happened but, it appears that Dr Solowka quietly suggested to the journalist he strip naked and return to his chair, on his way he was to punch every third person in an aisle seat, punch them on the bridge of the nose, which he promptly did. The Crowd exploded again as people started yelling, a fight broke out and the young journalist was dragged off to an ante chamber to be dressed and isolated. The day concluded with a final lecture from Dr Solowka explaining the basic forms of concepts in the metaphysical world. Broad reaching concepts such as decency were nesh nuclei and from them sinewy spurs ran off representing individual notions of decency such as public nudity or unprovoked violence. He concluded by saying that just as in the physical world one man could injure another the same was true in the metaphysical world, but that they could also be healed, given time and attention. What Dr Gaskin had done that afternoon was to damage part of the journalist’s decency concepts and then when a path of behavior was suggested to him, he had been unable to determine that it would be inappropriate.

Over the next few months the media was filled with discussion of metaphysics, from the acute satirical observations of the talk show host’s monologue to the wild soliloquies of fire and brimstone that poured from the mouths of the televangelists. The scientists were arrested for their dangerous unlicensed research and were sent to serve the rest of their lives incarcerated in solitary confinement in military prison cells, their sponsor Mr. Stoppard became a recluse. The machinery, notes and laboratories were impounded by the government and that was the last we heard of metaphysical research in a public forum. Until recently.

We are fighting a losing war against so called “rebel armies.” Those of us with our ears closer to the ground then the cynical news hacks or the comfortable career scientists have heard disturbing reports. Soldiers fighting without morals and behaving with suicidal intent. These soldiers regularly desecrate corpses, rape, torture and murder civilian men, women and children as well as the Mexican soldiers. Reports of soldiers operating suicide missions, a story of one soldier who strapped on a bandolier of grenades, ran silently into a church full of people and pulled the pins. These soldiers are cold, calculating, compassionless and cruel.

A recent report came to us from one man who had been captured by one of the new platoons. He said he had looked into the eyes of one of the sergeants. He said the eyes were like balloons, taut with surface tension, but beneath the thin veneer they were empty.

Just empty.

Summer at the Rat House

It was a long hot summer that year at the Rat House. There was Gram, an old grey rat who had become a burden to his numerous offspring and had been left to die. Murinae and Muridae, two rat brothers from the city; exiled for their viciousness, attacking females and forcing procreation upon them. Louche in the extreme, even by rat standards, they were considered debased and deplorable. There was Jakke and Kura the foreign rats, they had not so much been exiled as had decided to leave their homes in search of better food and different females but had been rejected by the local rat populace. Finally there was Fotze. Once he had been a James Dean among rats, causing ruckus and violence, leading his own dangerous pack but now he sat at the house bitter, dangerous and fat.

The house itself was in a bad way. A three bedroom detached house once home to a family of tall people. Then one day for reasons yet to be fathomed by anyone, not least the police, the father had slit the throats of his wife and daughters before slowly cutting out lumps of his own flesh till he bled to death. The house stood empty for ten, then fifteen years. The windows had been smashed in, boarded up and then the boards burnt and splintered. The tiles had started to slip from the roof and the mortar in-between the furcating bricks were crumbling. The local rats knew the house, they knew who lived there and they kept well away.

So it happened that one blisteringly hot July day, Fotze sat ruminating in the skirting of the front room. He was bored and idle time made his mind pulsate. The heat always did this to him, made his fur itch, his brain toil and then there was the sweat. He could hear the other rats in the house scuttling to and fro and scratching. Every sound an invasive irritation. He had to make a decision, to endure the indoors or go outside to the water hole and rinse himself. He began moving.

Once outside the sun began to boil his blood. Why, why must that thing be there like that he thought? Then he heard something, a yelping. Yelp for pleasure and a squeak for pain. He moved into the longer grass and there laid his eyes upon Muridae. Muridae with a female, on a female, a female that looked to be in pain. Before he really knew it Fotze had made a decision and was diving for Muridae. His claws sank in with thrilling ease and he set about biting the back of Muridae’s neck. Muridae completely surprised by what was happening bucked backwards and then as the female darted free from under him he lurched forward attempting to catch her. This allowed Fotze to get all his weight on top of him and within another minute had chewed his way through Muridae’s brainstem.

Fotze staggered back catching his breath with the unctuous taste of blood in his mouth; he began spitting and pawing at his mouth. Desperately he wiped at it more and more. He felt repelled by the rapist’s blood he was now working into his fur. Then it hit him, water hole. He ran through the grass and over the decaying prasine masonry slabs, through the broken fence and on to the river behind it. He began rolling in the shallow water, feeling it disintegrate and distil the sweat and blood from his fur. After about 10 minutes, he began back towards the house. He passed the corpse of Muridae, already being scavenged by the insects, and settled back into the skirting of the front room.

It was some hours later that Murinae came running back into the house screeching about the death of his brother. The other rats stood round him, Gram said it was the local rats, finally coming after them and Jakke and Kura agreed. Fotze said nothing save to offer to help Murinae bring his brother’s body into the house, so that it would not succumb to the insects so quickly. As they walked down the length of the garden Fotze deliberately stayed two steps behind, so as to appear unaware of where they were going. When they arrived, they stopped and Fotze rested himself on his back legs.

“You know, it’s odd that the town’s rats would pick now to attack us.” He said. “Well attack us they have.” Murinae snivelled and choked.

Although only a short time had passed the insects and the sun had started to take their toll on the now tumescent corpse. The air was thick with the gagging scent of decay.

“The reason I say it is, well, I saw Jakke down at the waterhole today and he appeared to have been hurt, he was washing blood off himself. But I see him now and he shows no sign of injury.” Fotze said, carefully weighting the words so that Murinae wouldn’t be ignorant to the implication.

“Do you think, did, did Jakke do this to my brother?”

There was a need in Murinae’s eyes. One that Fotze knew he could fill and when he did, it would be explosive.

“I believe that he did.” He told Murinae.

Bang. Murinae was running back up to the house. Fotze doing his best to run with him was unable to jump over the detritus of the garden due to his distended gut. Despite this handicap Fotze was only a few seconds behind as Murinae made it into the kitchen. Squealing and screaming he fell upon Jakke, his hind legs pinning him to the ground as his sharp front claws ripped at Jakke’s head and face. Kura was scratching at Murinae’s back, but Murinae was so incensed that he felt nothing.

After a moment of catching his breath Fotze dived at Kura, and landed an exceptional bite to the rat’s throat. The gush of blood into his mouth surprised Fotze so much that he leapt back, watching as Kura ran in circles trying to stem the flow, only making what little blood he had left pump harder and faster. Fotze, spiting and wiping his mouth, turned his attention back to Murinae who was still atop Jakke and now clawing at his chest. Jakke was flailing wildly try to land blows on Murinae, even using his tail in an attempt to swat the rat. Each blow seemed weak and directionless and then Fotze saw why. Jakke’s eyes had been clawed out.

Gram finally leapt into action, throwing all his weight into attacking Murinae from the side they rolled together off the body of Jakke and into the dirt. They scuffled and jumped, they continued to lunge at each other and roll around clutching at each other, biting and when possible clawing each other. Then as they rolled up to the skirting board below the sill, Murinae suddenly stopped moving. Gram jumped away from him as if fearing some trap, he was cut and bleeding and shaking. Fotze slowly moved towards the motionless rat and seeing the flashy glint and the burgeoning pool of blood, realised that the back of Murinae’s head had been impaled on a glass shard from the shattered window.

Fotze sidled up to Gram, the old rat was wheezing, and now up close, Fotze could see that some of the old rat’s wounds ran deep. He glanced over at Jakke’s body which had been intermittently twitching but was now as lifeless as the stone beneath it. A sharp wheeze and a splutter drew Fotze’s attention back to Gram. It’d be a kindness he thought with a lethiferous leap onto the old rat’s back. He was disappointed when he heard a loud crack and felt a sudden lack of tension in the body below him. He sniffed at the rat, he was dead.

So Fotze stood and looked at the four dead rats around him. This time the blood on him felt good, mixed with the victory sweat and the chill vespertine air. Fotze rested on his hind legs and sat there catching his breath, his tail lolloping from side to side. The house was his now, all his. Slowly he dragged each body out of the kitchen to the outside, so that the insects or the bigger furry creatures could have them. Then he set off to the water hole to wash himself down.

Mesh

The skinhead stares into my eyes. There is a cold moment passing, the clientele stares. The last shouts of the skinhead are still ringing in everyone’s ears. He’s a skinhead, like his father before him. His father had served as a paramilitary in the Falklands and had been at the battle of Goose Green. When the battle was won he had taken great pleasure in taunting the captured Argentinean officers. An act that had eventually led to his dishonourable discharge, a matter which had broken the heart of the skinhead’s grandfather.

His grandfather had served in the Africa core. When Rommel made his African advance, the company had been taken on the Egyptian border. The grandfather held off Rommel’s forces first with a turret mounted machine gun, when the ammunition ran out he held back the forces with singular shots from his service revolver. Once captured, he was stripped of his uniform and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Italy. Within three weeks he had escaped. Making his way along the coast, living off the land and then joining the sparse resistance in the south of France. He spent 1944 travelling north with the help of the network. He spent three nights staying in a barn, against the farmer’s better judgement. In the farmer’s ignorance, he also spent three nights in his daughter.

Several months after the brave young British soldier left, she confessed to her parents about what had happened and that she was now carrying his child. Her father was furious, not only were the English not liberating them, they were littering the country with their progeny. He tried to force her into aborting the foetus. Every meal became a screaming shouting match. A father and daughter each brooding with resentment of the other. The anger building and escalating, an indoor domestic microcosm of the outdoor international war. Then over dinner one evening her father dropped the atomic weapon he’d promised himself he would never use, he told her that if she kept the child he would always regret not making her mother have an abortion. She ran away, never to see her home again.

Using the same resistance network as the soldier she ended up staying with her cousin and aiding the resistance with what few skills she had amassed, she sat out the rest of the war and in 1948 she took the money she had saved and moved to London. Her and the child travelling on a merchant ship and they eventually ended up in small lodgings near Bethnal Green. She found regular work in a small tailors, her son started to attend the local school, and they settled. At night she sat by her window and stared at the stars, mumbling lilting Gallic folks songs to herself. The tears rolling down her cheeks.

Her son finished school and attended college and graduated with qualifications in Maths, English and Business. After some short term appointments he found work in a branch of the Bank of England. Within a year of being employed he had saved enough to be able to purchase his own flat, though still visiting his mother 3 times a week. With assiduous care and detail in his work, he was first respected by his colleagues and then rewarded by the hierarchy. Some people never warmed to him, felt that it was an infiltration of the old boy network they worked so hard to protect from incursions. Though they never made this clear to his face and in fact acted in the way they felt they must, he always felt their exclusion.

After his mother died he was able to sell his flat and her home and move into a better suburb of London. Finally with the combination of success at work and better living quarters he was invited to join the Bank gentleman’s club. He finally felt safe, after years of being on the move he felt settled.

Some years later after his mothers passing, at the annual Christmas function, he plucked up the courage to speak to a young African girl he had long admired from afar. They began courting and married in 1971. After two years they moved to a new housing development on the edge of Corydon, six months after that, I was born.

I was educated at a school whose name was synonymous with good breeding and better money. Even thought it was the late seventies when I arrived there was still a bastion of outdated views, shouted jibes and banana jokes. Attending college in the mid eighties was such a liberation. I met people who thought like me and felt like me and who despised the colonial home guard who wanted to protect their country with jealous eyes and filthy words. I moved into a flat in Southwark about 18 months ago, my girlfriend lives in a converted loft space in Bankside and we are forever spending afternoons sitting beside the Thames watching the grey flow of people and water and discussing everything under the smog obscured sun.

The shouts still ring in everybody’s ears. Then in one sweeping motion the skinhead smashes his glass and drives it into my throat, a primitives primitive blade flashing white, flecked red beneath the dull yellow lights. I try to breath, my lungs are filling with blood. I‘m lying on the floor watching dull and darkening shapes charging and fighting. Everything is overexposing, light is burning through the film.

All I have now is light, the ethereal gossamer connecting disparate things.

DBD Inc

Whilst at a recent funeral I was in conversation with a third cousin (twice removed) and the subject, quite naturally, turned to death.

“What a shame” I said “that you can’t organise these things a bit better, give a bit more fluidity to the finality. Rather than this ‘all of a sudden, drop everything, somebody’s dead’ scenario we have now.”

He looked at me and grinned with the left third of his mouth,

“Well it just so happens that you can.” He slid his hand inside his jacket and removed a leather bound, beaten and worn filofax. After flicking through the pages he clucked his teeth in satisfaction, the satisfaction of finding something where he’d left it, and passed me a small white card. I looked at it, it was completely blank, I stood puzzled for a moment in the mid June sunshine and my cousin suggested I turn it over. On the back of the card was printed a company name:

DBD Inc

Who are they and what do they do? I pondered momentarily; luckily my cousin is blessed with a mild social telepathy. “They’re a company based in Sussex, they deal in the whole death thing” he said, “they’ve taken care of all my details.” I continued to stare at the card. How do you get in touch with them? There was no phone number, or email or even a real address. In the periphery of my vision I saw a ruffling as my cousin produced another white card from his filofax. This one simply said DBD: 08000 251908. I pocketed both cards and was about to ask my cousin a bit more about the trout farm he’d recently bought shares in, only to discover that he had wandered off and was now talking to my great aunt about the limitless merits of the Autobahns.

Several weeks later I had occasion to be wearing my funeral suit again. The same cousin had been involved in a car wreck abroad and the foreign Government had finally agreed to send back a coffin filled with wood and shredded paper, rather than the sombre bucket of melted body goo that had actually been recovered from the wreck. The service had been held in a big modern day crematorium, which looked like a cross between a school hall and a local community theatre. The priest was a young man who, after the service, told me at length about his proposals to the Vatican to “digitise Christ and bring the church into the 21st century.” As he blathered on about Bible pods and MP3 sermons, my eyes drifted across the assembled family members and I saw the widow standing looking at the floral tributes. Without saying anything I walked away from the priest, now talking about java based sacraments, and towards her. She looked up as I approached and we hugged, I didn’t embrace long as the dressage on her hat was irritating my face. As we pulled apart, I said how sorry I was. She thanked me and then, for what I suspect was the twelfth or fourteenth time explained what had happened.

“It was silly really, he was going for a driving tour, and they have a figure of 8 ring road around two of the big cities. The travel company sell it as a relaxing weekend for executives. Two 8 hour sessions of driving as fast as possible around the course; dodging through the civilian traffic, competing with the other drivers, pretending to be Stirling Moss.” She looked away and blotted a damp eye. “You know” she said “to go like this; it’s what he would have wanted.”

So back at home, sitting on my bed, half in and half out of my funeral suit, I looked at the two cards he had given me for DBD inc. Motoring weekends for tired executives? Dodging through civilian traffic? Were such things legal? I felt a strange feeling brew up inside me, like an angry cup of tea. Why had he died, what had he been doing and who were DBD? So I made a coffee and sat down at my PC, I trawled the internet for hours searching for a travel company that offered a package like the one the widow had mentioned. Nothing. The more I thought about it the less it seemed likely. If you were to let people drive at high speed through civilian traffic, surely you would limit it to the most alert people? Chronic amphetamine users perhaps. Not tired ageing business men with slower reflexes and years of corporate tension stored in their back fat. These thoughts revolved in my head for the next few days.

At work I continued my search for the elusive travel agency that provided these corporate race weekends. I found myself ferverently flitting between bouts of searching more and more obscure search engines and periods of just staring blankly trying to connect up the dots that I had. Sitting at the dining room table on friday morning I placed the two cards side by side and stared at them intently as I ate my muesli. Hoping that somehow some more information would be revealed to me. I decided that the problem was that I didn’t have enough dots to make a recognisable picture. I needed more information, I couldn’t ask my cousin for reasons of theological impractality, I couldn’t find the travel agent to find out details of their packages and I didn’t really want to go and call the widow and ask her to rehash all the details for me. Which left me with only one other avenue of investigation, DBD Inc. I decided to call the number and after listening to all the options, I chose to make an appointment. The chirruping young girl I spoke to slotted me into a cancelled spot later that day. I phoned work, telling them I had gastric fever. I had long since realised that my line manager had no stomach for bodily functions, so simply starting to reel off the symptoms provoked a reaction and he had accepted my lie. I got dressed and watched the mornings TV schedule, feeling more and more like I did have gastric fever.

When I arrived at the address the girl had given me, I was at a factory sized building on an industrial estate. I gave the guard my name and he gave me a pass and a map of the car park and showed me the space where I was to park. I parked and for a moment sat in the car, what was I doing here? I didn’t know what this company did or if it was even related to my cousin’s death. For all I knew they may just make nicer coffins or arrange better floral tributes than everyone else. After a few minutes I wiped my hands and face, sprayed on some deodorant and got out of the car. I tried to settle my queasy stomach as I walked across the tarmac to the building. I spoke to the receptionist and recognized the same gaudy upbeat tone of voice as that of the girl I spoke to on the phone that afternoon. While I sat, waiting, I took a moment to flick through the brochures on the table. None of them were for DBD, but they did all seem to have a concurrent theme, undertakers, morticians, law firms and accountants. I was halfway through an article about “Walking Mort” in “The Undertaking” when a man crossed the reception floor towards me.

“Mr Henry?” I asked dumbly.

He smiled, shook my hand and said to follow him. We walked back across reception and into the lift, he pressed a button marked “Introductions.”

“Why aren’t there numbers on the buttons?” I asked. ”Well here at DBD we’re all about efficiency, we pride ourselves on it. Rather than have everyone memorise what floor each department is on. We simply assign a floor to each department. Doing it this way means that even visitors will know where to go.” I smiled a half smile of appreciation, it was a better system. “Like the car park spaces” I realised aloud. “That’s right, by assigning everyone a car park space at the barrier nobody wastes time driving around looking for the space nearest the front door.” The lift pinged and we stepped out into a lushly appointed open plan environment. The space was dotted with small tables surrounded by armchairs and around the edges were a number of offices, Mr Henry led me to his and once inside he closed the door and motioned me into a seat while he sat on the opposite side of the desk.

“First things first” he said, and passed me a plastic wallet over the desk. “I just need you to sign that, the girl in reception should have done it but our normal girl is on maternity leave and the agency only seem to be able to send us people with a restricted mental capacity. They’re just a loose association of well dressed clowns.” “Temps?” I asked. “No, recruitment agencies.”

I glanced at the form; it had a big Health and Safety crest at the top, as if interrupting my thoughts Mr Henry said, “It’s a standard Health and Safety release form. I said in the lift that we are a company that prides itself on efficiency, and sometimes I think the accounts department confuses efficiency with penny pinching. They set up our corporate insurance for the employees only, and given that we’re a customer orientated business it does seem a touch short sighted.” I looked at the form again, then I looked up. “Don’t worry you’re not in any danger” Mr Henry said. A small smile broke across my face. “You’re not going to attack me with a stapler?” “Not unless you want me to” he said. There was a fractional pause before he grinned, which I rightly thought nothing of. I filled in my name at the top of the form and signed and dated it at the bottom. Mr Henry filed it in his cabinet and sat down leaning back on his leather swivel chair.

“So what do you know about what we do at DBD?” he asked. “Er, well little bits really, I wanted to get a bigger view of the picture, of the arrangements, that’s why I made the appointment” I lied. “Here at DBD we don’t see death as any more than an appointment, albeit a terminal one. People across the world die suddenly all the time, even people in drawn out illnesses could die at any time. We aim to minimise the huff and fuss of death, to make it more efficient.” As he talked I fished around for a suitable return gambit, desperately trying to hide my ignorance.

“That’s essentially what I’d heard, what I wasn’t clear on was the specifics, the full package as it were.” He stopped and looked at me, for a horrible moment I thought he was onto me, that he could see the bluffing random path that had brought me into his office, but then a smile cracked over his face. “Why don’t I show you and explain it at the same time, then I think you’ll have a clearer idea of what we do.”

As we walked back to the lifts I took a moment to try and settle myself, I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans and tried to take deeper breaths to settle the knot in my stomach. Once back in the lift I took longer to look at the panel, there was a button for accounts, personnel, finance, goods in and the one where we were heading, factory floor. “The building is actually split into two parts” Mr Henry said “this third of the building is split into separate office floors, as you’ve just seen.” He turned around to face me, “but the other two thirds is open space where we actually get to grips with our customers.” He took a step closer and said “That’s where we’re heading now.” For a moment I thought I was going to break down and cry, there was nothing in his demeanour to imply menace in what he had said, but in a way that only filled me with dread.

I fell backwards as the hitherto unseen doors at the back of the lift opened. As I hit the floor, all I could think about was the underground at Chalk Farm. Mr Henry broke into a grin and helped me up; he assured me I wasn’t the first, or last, person that was going to make that mistake. As I straightened myself I looked up, in front of me was a giant cube, about 200 ft in length. The cube had an exoskeleton of running tracks and at its base where a number of lifts, similar to the ones that window cleaners use on tower blocks and skyscrapers. As I was taking this in I realised that Mr Henry had been talking "and so you see this is our factory floor, a sort of showroom, where the first step of our business takes place.” He looked at me and realised I’d missed half of what he’d said.

“As I was saying, this is our cube, it’s subdivided into smaller cubes of 50ft, 64 of them, however, we only use about half of them and the other half are used for storage and as you can imagine cleaning and sterilising equipment. We also have some remote monitoring cubes for longer term clients. It’s the factory floor end of our business but it can also been seen as a showroom I guess. Would you like to see inside a cube?”

I paused for a moment, what did he mean? I felt like something was dawning in me, the answer was inside that cube. I nodded and we walked over to one of the lifts. As we ascended, I tried to see through the glass but it was darkened. We juddered to a halt on the top row, and Mr Henry stepped past me to a small control panel. He pressed at some of the controls and said “This one’s in use, I think we’re in time. The gentleman in here certainly has gone with a very creative solution. I think you’ll enjoy it.” He tapped a few more buttons and the glass began to clear. The scene revealed to me was astounding, I could barely drink it all in.

Within the 50 ft cube appeared to be a landscape stretching several miles, desert land, and a man, tied to a post. He had been beaten and was in need of a shave, his suit had been ripped and he was gagged and blindfolded. I stared. From beneath us several men walked towards him, dressed in khaki military garb. One stepped forward and removed the blindfold and gag and began shouting at the man, but I couldn’t hear what. The man tied to the post wasn’t responding to him and just seemed to be wearily drinking in the situation. Then all at once he looked right at me, but with no recognition. I stepped back. “Don’t worry, he can’t see us. We use a membrane thin plasma screen to project his surroundings, but as we have no light shining on us, and we’re behind the screen, we can see him but he can’t see us.” I turned back to the cube, four of the khaki men had formed a line in front of the post man, the other khaki man stood to one side. He shouted something and the four men stood to attention, I suddenly realised with the clarity of cold vodka where this was going. At the next command the firing squad shouldered their rifles and at the final command, executed him.

I was now cold and sweaty kneeling on the floor of the lift, as we descended the side of the cube. I was speechless, no longer hiding the sickness in my stomach or the cold fear sweat of my skin. As we bumped to the ground Mr Henry helped me up and we proceeded back to the Introductions floor. We went into his office, a jug of water and ice had appeared on his desk along with two tall glasses. Mr Henry sat me down and poured me a glass; I drank it down, closed my eyes and let the chair absorb my weight.

“It shakes people up when they see it; nobody can really believe until they see for themselves. It’s like the beauty of Machu Pichu or the Sistine chapel. Brochures just don’t do it justice.”

“You kill people. You don’t just take care of the after death inconveniences, you, you take care of the people themselves.” It was all I could do to bring the words out of my mouth. “That man, you beat him and then you killed him, in cold blood. “Not at all” said Mr Henry “That man chose his demise. He wanted to feel that his life had meaning, so devised a method where he felt his death would have significance. He wanted to die helping freedom fighters in South America. Although we couldn’t actually do that of course, why would the Zapatistas have wanted a middle manager from Southwark to aid in their cause? We facilitate a solution to life, whereby the client can put all of their arrangements in order, make time for any special arrangements and then choose the manner of their departure.” He paused to look into my now open eyes. “You see nobody enjoys having their loved ones snatched away from them, nobody wants to endure months of treatment for an illness that will only kill them in the end anyway, what we provide is an efficient and enjoyable euthanasia.” It was too much, my mind snapped. “You could even decide what your last words were to be.” “Exactly” he said “no more stupid last words, people can take time to craft something special, something they can be remembered for.” I sat up feeling some of my strength returning, I poured myself another glass of water. “I don’t know though, I prefer the off the cuff or the ridiculous in last words, wouldn’t it be more representative of life if your last words where ‘I keep thinking it’s Wednesday’ rather than some prosaic verse about the….whatever life or death is about.” My breathing still felt heavy but my stomach had subsided in its clenching and now I could focus.

“Everybody fantasises about death, about the manner in which they’d like to go. People are scared, they don’t want to spend months of chemo therapy if they get Cancer or endless experimental drug combinations if they get HIV or have their heart replaced with that of a pig. People are scared of getting old, of losing their dignity, of spending the last 5 years of their lives in a home, a holding pen for the Reaper. Soiling yourself and being washed by young, well meaning strangers who cannot imagine the depth of your crushing resentment of them. I have seen people walk out of these offices with a look of blissful satisfaction most people would mistake for a heroin high. I am proud of the work that we do; we help people take a stand against nature, against destiny. We empower people.” As he spoke images rushed through my mind, I had cancer and AIDS, I was dying in a residential home, tubes in my tender places, a young woman looking at me with a painted on smile and pity soaked eyes as she washed the caked faeces off me in an old tin bath. I realised that I was scared. “So tell me, how do you fantasise going?” he asked. I took a moment, finally rising up to a full sitting position. “Suddenly. I’d want it to be a surprise, a ‘here one minute, gone the next’ kind of thing” I said, I wasn’t sure that it was entirely true, but in light of the awful alternative I had imagined, it seemed best. “Presumably moments after you utter something completely daft” Mr Henry said in a way just the right side of condescending. I nodded in agreement.

He produced some more forms from his desk and talked me through them. His words were echoing around my head, but I wasn’t really absorbing them. Inside all I could think of was my own long and protracted death, of my family making regular visits and shaking their heads with sorrow. I thought of my sister, being eventually forced to make the decision to turn the various tubes making me appear alive. There were three main forms, a notice to my solicitor stating that in return for arranging all my post death appointments and expenses DBD were entitled to 20% of my estate, the second was a notification for DBD of what I wanted. I specified a sudden death, with banal last words, I was to be cremated and have my ashes dispersed across Beachy Head and the wake was to be held at my local pub. Then Mr Henry passed me the third form and for a moment I stared incredulously at it, it was an evaluation form. “You want me to give you feedback on my experience?” I said. “We find it’s easier to get it now than it would be later.” I filled it out praising the building and the company and, ticking the “poor" box for Mr Henry and his afternoons work. I passed the forms back and finally felt my strength return to full. That was it; I had literally signed my life away.

Or had I?

“How is this legal? Nothing I’ve signed gives you the right to kill me or absolve you of any legal recourse” I asked almost angrily. “Unfortunately you did, the notary you signed when you first arrived in my office, it’s not just a health and safety form for this building and it’s premises, it also nullifies us of any responsibility for injury or death resulting from any of our products or services” he said. “It’s amazing what people will sign without reading” he added almost matter of factly. I realised that he was right, here was a man working for a company, an efficient company, so efficient that they could have killed me pretty much anytime I had been there. I almost pitied poor Mr Henry. Here was a clever and manipulative man, a man of such intellect and I had wandered like a startled fawn into his path. Docile and curious and it had been an easy matter to pick me off and earn the company it’s share of my death. Does he get commission based bonuses I wondered. I doubted all his clients were this easily manoeuvred, sometimes he had to try a little harder, sometimes he had to flex himself and introduce a little ingenuity, eulogise a little harder about the merits of pre ordained death. I had walked straight to him, stretched my own neck and here I was preparing for the Paddington Frisk.

I stood up with only a slight tremble left in my legs; Mr Henry stood opposite me and walked around to open the door and walk me back to the lift. “When will it happen? “ I asked. “Well it’s hard to say, you’ve chosen a surprise death and if I tell you it won’t be a surprise. We have a design team that work on that sort of thing and I promise they’ll come up with something special and unique for you.” We got into the lift and he pressed the reception button, the smooth ride down was silent. As we stepped out Mr Henry turned to face me. “There’s a bathroom there if you wish to use it before you leave.” He shook my hand and turned back into the lift, his demeanour never once cracking never a flinching sign of sympathy. I wandered over to the bathroom, the water I had drunk was now pressing at my bladder.

I stood over the urinal with my hot sweaty forehead pressed against the cool ceramic tiles of the bathroom, listening to the echoing sound of urine draining away. I zipped up and stood in front of the sink staring at myself, the strip light above the mirror casting parts of my face into darkness. Then I saw it. I looked relieved in a way, there seemed no tension in my shoulders and my eyes seemed to be drinking the images in, I couldn’t help but smile, the grin breaking across my face like the cracks in the glass of an aquarium seconds from bursting. This was it, I was feeling Mr Henry’s heroin high, a thousand thoughts pervaded my mind, I could quit my job, visit friends I hadn’t seen in years, spend my savings on that trip to Sharm El Sheikh I’d always wanted, go scuba diving, tell my neighbour that I’d heard him and his gay lover screaming out each and every night his wife was away, I could, well I could do anything I wanted.

As I walked back through reception I heard the distant sound of the receptionist answering the phone in broken Essex English, the gentle squeak of my trainers and the humming of the ever present air conditioning. It really was like being on a drug high; everything seemed a hundred times more amplified and real. As I walked through the front doors and across the patio I was greeted by golden crispy sunlight poking through my eyes and a slow breeze in my hair. I paused for a moment, I heard a window opening and turned around to look up, it was Mr Henry. He shouted down to me.

“What’s the plural of Mongoose? Is it Mongooses or Mongeese?” I paused. “Is it Mongeese?” I called back.

That’s when the van hit me, killed me and fulfilled Mr Henry’s promise all at once.

References