Drowning is Fine by Darren Allen

Author:Darren Allen [Allen, Darren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Expressive Egg
Published: 2021-06-10T11:04:39+00:00

Knocked Conscious

‘Wednesday today, soon be end of week, and that’ll be February finished.’ Derek is in the habit of dispensing of time in this way, ‘winter almost over, then it will be summer, another year gone, soon be dead,’ he says, immobile in his chair like a sack of potatoes.

Sunday afternoon, boiled cabbage, Songs of Praise, damp outside, and dark—the uniform grey non-thing of the South London sky—chipped paint on the bathroom plumbing, steam, sour bodily odours, slightly faecal, overcoated with disinfectant, but never quite completely. Such is The Meadows in Derek’s little room, overlooking the cold car-park and the service alley to the Chinese, and a plume of smoke rising from a burning box of Meccano.

‘That drama therapist just been in with her bloody cards. Therapists, teachers, doctors, priests, I’ve had enough of ‘em,’ he says wearily, ‘They grow up in a professional house, go to a professional school, then to a professional university, then they get a nice professional job, and they don’t know a bloody thing about life, not a thing—cowards they are, mostly.’

Derek leans forward and whispers, ‘you got any tobacco son?’

‘Sorry, no.’

He shrugs and settles back. ‘In the mine the vicar, they brought him down once, he wanted to see it all, he stepped off cage like, got to the mothergate, “aye,” he said “thas enough.” They said “you haven’t seen the men working.” He said “don’t want to”. He was frightened. They’re all frightened, priests, and then they go around telling us how t’ live! And it’s not like you can just forget about ‘em, you need a priest, I mean a professional, for everything, or at least every bit of bloody paper. Didn’t use to be like that.’

I can hardly imagine a world without professionals. It seems so… unprofessional.

‘Anyroad, can’t see it lasting much longer.’

‘What d’ya mean?’

‘I mean, I think, it seems to me that everything is just… crumbling. There’s new stuff all the time, but it’s—it’s paper-thin, underneath everything is crumbling.’

Like a loaf in the rain.

‘‘There’ll be another war before long,’ he says, ‘and it’ll all come crashing down!’

‘You think so?’

‘I do. All rich countries trying to keep the poor ones out—there en’t wall high enough.’

‘You’ve been in trouble though, had hard times, seen death.’

‘Death? Oh yeah. We was on face one night and we were building the pack for the roof. Group working on one side, we were on t’other. And I could just see—I thought, “that bastard’s sitting down” Their lights were pointing down. I said “eee!”—about thirteen foot from us. Went round, they were flattened. Gone. Four men; gone. Happened all the time. Wives’d never let us go to work on an argument. Worked well though, that did.’

We sit in silence, listening to the pipes. I feel the tension of freedom. Magda will be along soon, poking her long nose into my tea break. She has the hyper-observant mania of the lower manager, constantly on the lookout for a calorie of wasted workforce energy.

Yes, my tide of defiance washed away, revealing the black, flinty fact of penury.

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