The return
We are all trapped. There might not be a padlock confining us to our cash-strapped, stuck in a groove, one-size-fits-all existence, but we are trapped, nonetheless. Fleeting dreams of an escape is the panacea that makes life more tolerable, grasping at our freedom just over the horizon.
For some people, it just seems like it’s destined to remain there.
Winter 2003
Rarely did Martin put a foot wrong, and if you were so inclined to slice him in two, lengthways of course, it would read hero of the hour straight down the middle; somewhere between his chin and his belly.
A little cheesy perhaps, but most of his dreams started this way. Saving the world from a slightly skittish megalomaniac was another common feature, and his alter ego, with the intuition of a dolphin and the keen nose of a bloodhound, could sniff out trouble from miles away; kind of like a pig on a truffle hunt, but without the mess.
Inevitably, things would get a little complicated, and in the face of an almost assured demise, he would somehow manage to slip the handcuffs and dodge an on-rushing bullet with his name etched on it, Martin Murdoch.
Tonight, as on most evenings, he’d whisked away the despot’s glamourous lab assistant to the nearest beach, but on this occasion he was rudely interrupted by a message from HQ, repeatedly flashing on his digital shark-proof wristwatch. No matter how hard he focused, it was indecipherable. The fuzzy message smouldered, refusing to form.
Click.
A million miles from the nearest beach, the numeric digits of a cheap plastic bedside clock oscillated; a luminous green beacon whispering through a sleepy fog. Martin could barely read it. Was it the glow that woke him up?
His leaden eyelids closed again, drifting back to his favourite dream. Palm trees wafting gently in the cooling sea breeze…no, it happened again; he resisted. Reclining his bronzed torso onto the sugar white sandy beach, he fervently tried his best to ignore the itchy woollen blanket in his cold and damp Manchester flat.
Halle Berry ditches the lab coat, carrying the cocktails back from the bar, a sashay in slow motion; the burnt orange bikini hugging the contours…hold that thought …click, click, click. There it was again. What the hell was that? Cicadas? That’s it, cicadas! Damn those noisy insects, now back to the beach.
Click, click, click, whirr.
Opening his eyes a little wider, the darkness gave nothing away except for the faded Halle Berry poster, wearily hanging from the three remaining drawing pins above his head.
Not cicadas, not insects of any kind, and certainly not Halle Berry. There was something, or rather someone else in the room with him; he could sense it now and the hairs on his arms tingled. Scanning a part of the room with the one eye not pressed into the pillow, nothing seemed out of place. It was virtually pitch-black, but the familiar damask outlines of the wardrobe and chest of drawers were uninterrupted. The ebbing of the digital clock was all that seeped through the void. It was three-thirty a.m.
“I made it back sir,” oozed a placid voice from the darkness.
Martin catapulted himself out of the bed and across the floor, colliding painfully with a wooden chair.
“Who, who’s there? W-what do you want?” his voice quivered, clutching the chair seat to his chest with one hand, and the speared remnants of the broken chair leg with the other.
“It’s Soames, sir. Jack Soames. I need to come in. You need to bring me in.”
He hadn’t noticed it before, but in the far corner of the room, a huddled mass now shifted, stretching out its elongated hand. Click, click, click, as the trigger was squeezed. Loosening the grip on his own makeshift weapons, Martin’s eyes adjusted to the darkness whilst the rest of his senses played catch up.
Jack Soames. The name haunted him more than any ghost possibly could; but he just shouldn’t be here, not now, not ever. Very slowly, the half-forgotten events of another life came back into focus.
Many years before…
It would be accurate to say that Martin’s ambitions far outstripped his abilities. He’d never excelled at school. In fact, whatever the opposite of ‘excelled’ was, that was him. School reports were seldom complimentary, with the rare highlight being ‘satisfactory,’ a single word expressed by his English teacher, attempting to describe his creative writing. With the encouragement of Genevieve, his enthusiastic but deluded mother, he focused all his efforts into developing this rare talent, but sadly it had been at the expense of all his other studies, and he duly failed in each.
His father hadn’t stuck around long enough to see the results and whilst some relatives thought he was badly in need of a father figure; Martin was glad that none of Genevieve’s many potential suitors had bothered to make the effort. Kind though she was, his mother was a bit of a push over, and so, whatever Martin wanted he got. Unfortunately, he never wanted to be educated, disciplined, or indeed anything else requiring effort on his part, though he did have a yearning for success and money. Frustratingly, these always seemed to elude him, adding to his firmly held belief that shadowy people with money and influence conspired to block his advancement.
His developing years had marked him out as a bit of a loner. Some people used that term like it was a bad thing, but Martin preferred it that way; his fellow classmates’ yearning for friendship just seemed a little bit too needy for his liking. The lonesome trail had begun at age five when his mother received an invite to bring him along to a chicken pox party, a rite of passage ensuring all the kids in the class could get the annoying virus out of the way in one go. Unfortunately, she omitted to mention that he had measles at the time, and they all ended up with a disease they never asked for. It wasn’t Martin’s fault of course, but he was resented by the other kids, and their parents, from that point on.
It didn’t get any better at senior school either. Despite the good intentions of old Sam, the patriarch of the school crossing fraternity, sporting his luminous hi-vis on duty outside the gates, hanging around outside school any longer than necessary was just asking for trouble from the chasing pack.
“Don’t go jumping into the road, lad, it’s dang…” Sam would routinely say in exhausted tones, as Martin weaved through the oncoming traffic. The day-glow pensioner’s pleas were frequently ignored, and he was reported more than once to the Headteacher, each time adding another black mark to his already bulging disciplinary file.
Martin’s parents were oblivious to his tormentors and were more than a little surprised when he asked if he could take up karate lessons. Initially enthused that he’d finally found a hobby, they actively encouraged his progress in the martial arts, all the way up to the day he was suspended for standing up to his bully-in-chief, Jimmy Podmore, busting his nose in the playground.
The path into adulthood was equally rocky and his venture into bathroom sales was more by accident than design. He’d left school without qualifications at sixteen years of age and was begrudgingly dragged to a jobs fair by his mother the following week. None of the jobs on offer held any interest, which was lucky as they were all expecting higher grades than he’d achieved, but in the corner of the vast hall, away from the hub of activity surrounding the major players, there was Norman Franklin, a single man at a single table, desperately trying to attract the attention of the brightest and the best to a sales career at Radford’s Bathroom Accessory Supplies. He failed, and in Martin he found the ideal match. There hadn’t been an instant offer of work of course; Norman still hoped he would attract someone with actual qualifications, but as the days and weeks went by without interest, the job was Martin’s.
In the ten years since he started, he became quite good at his job, or at least he thought so, though Norman’s praises had become increasingly rare. Martin had taken this as an encouraging sign; after all, if he’d wanted Martin to work any harder, there would be more praise, not less. He used to relish the sales-grabbing challenge of the old days; the patter flowed like honey and most of it stuck, with vaguely untrue claims that product performance easily outstripped a rival’s, or ingeniously inferring that profit margins of his other customers had increased by at least fifty percent.
“We need to have a chat,” Norman uttered to a buoyant Martin, fresh from delivering another bumper crop of sales.
Today was the day, the inevitable conversation about promotion in lieu of succession. He’d waited long enough and it’s not like Norman was getting any younger. Martin sauntered casually into the office, sitting sideways on to his mentor, admiring the corner office that would one day be his, perhaps sooner rather than later. Maybe Norman, or Franklin as he was usually known, had a dickie ticker, or his wife had finally persuaded him to take it easy. He wouldn’t be short of a few quid so possibly he’s planned retirement to a villa in a sunnier part of Europe.
Casting a critical glance around the office, it could certainly do with a change of décor. The picture of Franklin’s dour wife and kids definitely needs replacing with something a bit more motivating, perhaps that picture of Pamela Anderson he carefully extracted from the magazine in the dentist's reception.
“There’s a problem with your sales, Martin.”
Problem? This wasn’t the opening to the conversation he was expecting. “What problem? I smashed the targets you set for the sixth month in a row. Look, if packaging can’t keep up with the orders it’s their problem, not mine.”
“Their problem is not the boxing up of products going out, it’s unboxing of products coming back.”
Martin was confused. Was there some sort of reciprocal arrangement he was unaware of?
“In short Martin, for every four sales you make, at least three come back, along with the request for a refund.”
“If there’s a fault in the product boss, I’m hardly to blame. We just need to change our suppliers, and maybe sell products that do what they’re supposed to.”
“To your credit Martin, that was our first port-of-call, but when we started asking the customers for feedback on what exactly wasn’t performing as expected, it was an eye opener.”
“In what way?”
“On one of the products you sold in abundance, it apparently didn’t provide the smoothest shave a man could get.”
“You know how it is boss. You churn out some marketing spiel and they take it as gospel.”
“It was an automated toothpaste dispenser, you idiot. It didn’t have a razor attachment, and even if it did, toothpaste is hardly the best substitute for shaving foam!” Mrs Franklin and the kids bounced across the desk as he painfully hammered the point home through arthritic clenched fists.
Martin’s dream of decorating the office, with chiselled flock wallpaper and the sporting trophies he bought from a car boot sale, were scuppered. After a week of retraining on forgotten sales essentials, such as honesty and integrity, Martin was forced to stick to the script. It was all very well leaving customers with a good impression, but it left a big dent in his commission and a pressing need to re-evaluate his income opportunities.
Early spring - 2000
A local sleezy casino had been Martin’s first choice, and a few quick wins on the bounce at the roulette wheel, revealed nothing to dim his enthusiasm. His income levels boosted overnight, along with an inflated confidence to match.
As the gaming chips stacked up in front of him, he somehow managed to attract an audience of female onlookers, each vying for his favour, much to the annoyance of the gentlemen they’d been courting earlier.
“Place your bets,” the croupier chimed to a chorus of clattering multi-coloured chips, launched from every direction. A few of the punters waited to see where the boy with all the luck placed his bets, and duly followed suit.
“A kiss for good luck?” whispered a rather mature lady, vibrant in shimmering red satin, but to Martin’s disappointment, she kissed the £500 chip he was holding. The kiss didn’t work though, and he lost the next couple of bets, along with the attention of Mata Hari’s older sister.
Leaving the table to answer a call of nature, he flamboyantly tossed a couple of chips to the croupier. He’d seen it in a Bond movie once and the ladies just loved it; hopefully it might improve his luck.
Sadly, the winning run stumbled, staggered and fell flat on its face. A few small losses might still have seen him with a healthy profit, but at the time, doubling the stake just seemed like the smart thing to do; if he won he’d gain the money back, and then some. If he won.
By midnight he finally realised that gambling may not be the right career choice for him. Down to his last few chips, he was half-tempted to ask the croupier for the return of his overly generous gift, but luckily the embarrassment was averted when the casino agreed to extend his credit.
By three in the morning, lady luck, together with his female entourage, had well and truly abandoned him. Alfredo Ruffini, the casino manager, and two of his larger than average nephews, Alessandro and Derek, were most sympathetic to his plight, even paying for his taxi home. Although, as they pointed out in fairly rudimentary language, the cost would be added to his overall bill. Apparently the interest had been accruing rapidly since midnight and Martin was left in no doubt the hefty nephews would be keen to tamper with his body parts if he even thought about missing a weekly repayment.
“You’re welcome to try your luck on the tables tomorrow Mr Murdoch, but I would strongly suggest you have the money put aside to meet your debts. Alessandro can be a little bit tetchy when new friends don’t live up to his high expectations.”
Alessandro cracked his knuckles in appreciation.
Perhaps the casino wasn’t the best way of raising his income. Not only were his earnings reduced, but he’d somehow acquired a non-negotiable agreement with a local gangster; repay the debt, or else learn to write left-handed. His current prospects had never looked so bleak, which was quite an achievement, but sometimes when you’re soaked by the rain of misfortune, a rainbow appears on the horizon.
He hadn’t meant to defraud the business, the chance just presented itself.
