Monkey's Birthday and Other Stories by Simon Crump

Author:Simon Crump
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Montgomery Road. Substation No. 1965

Pretty much the same set-up as Chadwick Road except the equipment’s made by South Wales Switchgear. Clipped laurel bushes inside the fence. The land it’s on takes a tiny corner out of four different sets of grounds, and four different mansion owners have done their very best to conceal it behind leylandii, climbing roses and trellis.

I crouch down by the fence, unzip my bag and take out a metal plate. A wave of envy smacks into me. If I had all this I wouldn’t hide it away. I’d be straight down to B & Q, get myself a set of the biggest garden floodlights money could buy and shine them straight at it. Then I’d wait until dusk, stretch out on my luxury rattan patio set, sip two-hundred-year-old lager from an I Heart Electricity mug and soak up the view, serenaded by the perfect hum of transformers, and dreaming of all that juice blasting out under the streets.

Back in the Snacketeria I get a stainless-steel pot of tea for one and sit at the same table. Darren still Fucks Pigs.

I pour my tea and roll a fag. I can’t ever drink tea these days without thinking about work and in particular about Russ. The factory fool. Manufacturing industry’s answer to the village idiot.

He’d been there as long as anybody could remember, always the first to turn up in the mornings and the last to go at night. Russ had the mental age of an eight-year-old and, come to think of it, a pretty silly eight-year-old at that. He must have been in his late fifties and he still lived with his mother. Each and every morning she’d pack him off to work with identical butties, a Mars and his little tartan flask. A label sewn inside his coat said who he was and where he lived in case he got lost, and the only thing any of us really knew for certain about Russ was that he liked Elvis. He spent his days sweeping up, running errands and helping out in the dispatch bay, all the shitty jobs they’d give a scheme lad nowadays.

When management decided to enter us in some daft Chamber of Commerce competition for best-kept factory, Russ was given the job of sorting out the tatty flower beds carved out of the knackered turf in front of the admin block.

He picked up all the litter, dug the beds over and planted them out with bulbs. Contractors were hired in to lay fresh turf.

Russ spent a carefree afternoon leaning on his spade, watching as they laid a level bed of sand, then rolled out the turves and tamped them down flat.

Eight o’clock the following morning we clocked in and found Russ sitting in his garden. It looked like a beach. He’d rolled all the turf back up again, stacked it in a neat pile by the entrance, then dug out all the bulbs to see if they were growing. They slabbed it after that.

The best thing about Russ was his teeth.

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