Malcolm Orange Disappears by Jan Carson

Author:Jan Carson [Jan Carson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909718548
Publisher: Liberties Press
Published: 2014-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

– Chapter Nine –

Drinking and Smoking

The People’s Committee for Remembering Songs was struggling to harmonize under pressure.

Whilst the ladies on the sofa, incapable of coping with real-time disaster, sought comfort in birdy little chit-chats about the latest soap opera intrigue, the men pounded the carpet, balled fists constraining their rage. They were stoic by numbers. Between them they’d soldiered through seventeen individual wars on four separate continents, lost a devastating total of nine life partners and thirteen children, conquered six different types of cancer and survived fifteen or more presidential elections, not to mention Civil Rights, Watergate, the Great Depression, McCarthyism and the onslaught of MTV. They were not about to be intimidated by a teenage girl.

Bill was the first to take charge of the situation. He proposed marching straight to the Director’s office to lodge an official complaint about the girl.

‘We’ll say,’ he announced to the room, ‘that she hit Irene with an umbrella in the face. They’ll have to take an actual assault seriously. We’ll agree our stories before we go and if everyone says the same thing, well, they’ll be legally responsible to act on it. They’ll have to get rid of the little devil.’

‘Hopefully they’ll throw her in jail,’ added Clary O’Hare and launched into a meandering anecdote about a Japanese prisoner of war camp and a goat, an army pal from Tennessee and the incredible benefits of knowing Morse code in such a situation.

‘Never mind jail,’ hissed Roger Heinz, incapable of containing the rage any longer, ‘the bitch deserves to be hung, drawn and quartered if you ask me.’

‘No one’s asking you. No one’s ever asking you, Roger,’ snapped Bill. He was not the sort of man given to alligator impulses. However, Sorry’s departure had knocked the civility right out of him.

The two men glared at each other from either side of the Oriental rug. Averagely built and erring on the cautious side of short, Roger Heinz had a face like a brick shit wall. It was six years since he’d last been reprimanded. The unlucky idiot unfortunate enough to question Heinz’s right to the only empty booth at the IHOP on 82nd had eaten his pancakes pureed for the next fortnight. Short order cooks and oil change guys from east coast to west could recount similar outbreaks of inappropriate violence. The military had planted an uncommon rage in Roger Heinz. Whilst other men favored the penis, Roger Heinz did his best thinking in his fists, finding they automatically curled and rose like a perfect pair of divining rods at the first inkling twitch of anger. Approaching eighty, his arms were not what they’d once been. Rising into an argument he felt them sag at the elbow like cheese strings left too long in the sun. The rage was not diminished, however, and more and more Roger Heinz found himself attacking with words and occasionally small weapons – salad forks or flick knives – which could be pocketed, or at a pinch secreted in his armpit.

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