Worst. Person. Ever. (2 page)

“You ball-curdling witch. What is your problem?”

“My problem is
you
, Raymond darling. I don’t like having you in the same city as me.”

“Can’t say I like it much, either.”

“Yes, but the thing is that you, darling, are a failure. When people bump into you, they justifiably equate me with you, and you have to imagine how that makes me feel.” She put the coke box back into her drawer. “I really can’t have that, at least not until a few more years have gone by and all memory of you and your rapidly accelerating downward failure spiral has faded away like a pensioner’s capacity for long division.”

“I see.” I leaned back in my chair. “I seem to remember a much younger version of you making bedroom eyes at me from the floor of the 1992 Daytime BAFTA Awards when (if I may pat myself on the back here) I accepted my trophy for Best Hand-held Camera Work in a cooking or DIY home-improvement show.”

“You have to stop living in the past, Raymond.” She made her
oh-why-not
face. “How would you like a camera gig in the sun-kissed Pacific, ogling young beauties all day, just you and your shoulder cam?”

I kept silent, awaiting the catch.

“There’s no catch, darling.”

“What’s the catch?”

Fiona sighed. “Paranoia has never looked good on you, Raymond. Here I am offering to rescue you from your prison cell of a life and you make me sound cruel and vindictive.”

“What’s the catch?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it a catch, per se …”

“What’s the catch?”

“Darling, you would have to work for Americans.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Sorry, darling, but take it or leave it. A friend, Sarah,
handles the people for a U.S. network and she owes me a favour.”

“Who’s this Sarah, then?”

“She’s—well, I’m hoping one day she’ll become my … 
special
friend.”

Doubtless some filthy labia-chewing swamp raccoon. “For God’s sake, you’re not still tinkering with lesbianism, are you?”

“If trying to grow as a person is a crime, I stand accused.” Fi clasped her hands together on her desk like a schoolgirl. “Sarah, like me, is only trying to expand her world, and I like to think of myself as a nurturing, mentoring woman.”

I snickered.

“Take it or leave it, Raymond. At the count of three I rescind the offer. One, two—”

“I’ll take it.”

“Go talk to Billy.”

Her face became all business. It was as if I were no longer in the room as she stared down at her iPad and began browsing through toddlersroastingonaspit.com. She said, “Go on. Billy will arrange your flights and your visa for Kiribati. Lovely place. Whores growing on trees, from what I hear. Coke bushes around every corner.”

After a moment she looked up me. “Really, Ray—be a love and fuck off. And as you leave, Billy will offer you a complimentary bottle of water and some sanitizing hand wipes. Cold and flu season.”

“It’s a wonder Billy hasn’t been strangled with a shoelace by one of those man-sluts he arse-rapes nightly out on Hampstead Heath.”

From behind me I heard, “Those days are over, Raymond. I have found love and am a reformed man.”
Billy appeared, as polished and moisturized as a daffodil salesman at Harrods, but incongruously dressed like a Canadian lumberjack out for a day of chopping down a forest of larches.

“Oh. Hello, Billy.”

“Hello, Raymond.”

I had no mirth in my heart for Billy, and I remain convinced Billy was part of the chorus saying “Dump the bastard” back during the divorce.

“Going to Kiribati, I hear. Lovely place.”

“Let’s just do the paperwork.”

“Manners, please.”

“Or else what?”

“Be rude to me one more time and I’ll go online and start a wicked,
wicked
rumour about you.”

“Like what?”

“Like …” Billy paused a second. “I know: I’ll go into an online chat room posing as you.”

My interest was piqued: “What kind of chat room?”

“A shit-eating chat room. I’m sure there must be hundreds of them. And once there, I start the rumour that you, Raymond Gunt, are a … a
log hog
.”

“You
wouldn’t
.”

“
Wouldn’t
I? Or maybe I’d invent some other scarier category … I know: you’re into
funnel cakes
.”

Fi cackled with glee and then her phone rang, a zithering that made my spinal hairs rise. “Both of you—out,” she ordered. “That’s my Bollywood line. Without the rise of the Indian middle classes and their zest for quality English-language entertainment, I’d still be rolling in the muck like you. Now fuck off, Ray. Really. And enjoy the South Pacific or wherever this Kiribati shithole is.”

Not putting a trapdoor opening into a cobra pit past her, I fucked off. Billy followed me into the hall. He said, “FYI, you get to have an assistant with you on this gig.”

“An assistant?”

“Yes. All they need is a valid passport and the ability to tolerate you day and night.”

I didn’t absorb what Billy said next. My brain stopped at the word “assistant”—the joy! On a fly speck of coral dust in the middle of the ocean with no labour laws, no police and most likely no witnesses to whatever punishments I might dole out to my assistant—or rather, my
slave
. A lifelong dream of human ownership was coming true.

“…  and so I’ll email you shortly. Goodbye, Raymond.”

“Right. Yes. Goodbye, Billy.”

Down on the street I looked at my BlackBerry: it was a Wednesday, fuck it, always my bad luck day. I then sort of spaced out looking at the phone’s screen.
Wednesday … Wednesday … Wednesday
 … what the fuck is a “Wednes”? I mean, for Christ’s sake,
think
about it.

So wait a second … this guy, Woden, gets a whole fucking
day
named after him? Do
we
have no say in this matter? Let’s rename Wednesday something better, like, say, James Bond. And we can call Thursday Hitler and Saturday Tits and … You get the idea.

I looked up and saw that I was once again inside that wretched, unwieldy dump people call the real world. I rode home on a series of buses, and what is a bus but failure crystallized into the form of two storeys of metal, painted red, hurled out into the world to hoover up losers from the streets of London.

Kiribati?

Could be kind of nice. Pretty, even. Who knew … maybe my luck had turned.

When I arrived in East Acton, I looked about: nice enough day—but then on Henchman Street some verminous panhandling dole-rat squatting on the sidewalk stuck out a soiled Caffè Nero coffee cup and begged for a few pence, instantly blotting out my good mood. I kicked him on the shin. I mean, for fuck’s sake, here he is, the same age as me, but I’m out in the world, work, work, work, making the world a better place for everybody, and this guy? All he does is sit around all day, expecting the world to throw him cash.

“What was that for, mate?”

“Get a fucking job, you lazy shit.”

“Job? You want me to get a job, do you?”

He stood up then. He was sunburned, somewhat larger than me, dressed in oily rags arranged in a manner that would have been considered Duran Duran stylish in 1982, but, thirty years later, flecked with feces, discount fag cinders and the spattered remains of meals-in-a-can, constituted a rather terrifying mite-breeding facility. “Say that to my face, mate,” he growled. He was wearing a
name tag:
NEAL
—like anyone gave a shit what this street-fuck’s name was. His left eye was a milky cataract white.

Seeing as I’d kicked a hornet’s nest, I decided the best course of action was to flee.

“Come on mate, don’t be a coward!”

Just fucking speedwalk out of here, Ray, don’t let him smell your fear. Why, look up there—its Wolfstan Street, where you can turn right and never see this unoccupied dickwad ever again.

Whump!

Tackled from behind … 
fuck.
Two hundred pounds of man stink crunching my face onto a sidewalk papered with lung oysters and chip wrappers gone transparent from oil.

You’d think I’d find a shred of mercy or concern or even interest from the citizens of glamorous West London, but no, they were all so fucking busy with their drug-taking, their lotto-ticket-buying and dole-robbing—assuming they were even fucking English—that seeing a visibly sane man like me being attacked by an obviously violent nutter like Neal elicited not a whiff of protest.

A colon–scented mouth and the one working eye asserted itself in front of my face. “We like ourselves, don’t we?”

I shut my eyes.

He twisted my right arm behind my back, “We like ourselves, don’t we? So, what’s your name, then?”

I twisted around; there was no escape to be had. My eyes opened.
Fucker.

He smiled at me. “And our name would be …?”

The smell of street grit reminded me of childhood.
I’m not telling this low-life fuck my name.
“I’m not telling a low-life fuck like you my name—
Neal.
”

“Right then.” Neal did something I still don’t quite understand to this day, but it resulted in a jolt of pain in the shoulder that was a gourmet blend of stubbed-toe-meets-hot-boiling-chip-fat.

“Raymond!” I moaned.

“Whazzat?”

“Raymond! My fucking name is
Raymond!
”

“That so?” Neal rubbed his dreadful, dreadful hair in my face. “My name is Neal, and my hair is called Neal, too. I can give my hair a name because I’m nuts and live on the street and I haven’t washed it since Princess Di died. It’s my way of letting my love for her live on and on.”

“You sick, contaminated fuck, what is wrong with you? Get off before I get fucking super
AIDS
from your fucking beard.”

“Can’t do that, mate. I have a lifestyle, and part of me being me is me keeping my style alive.”

He is off his fucking rocker.
“Are you off your fucking rocker? No one dresses like Duran Duran anymore. The eighties revival came and went. People barely dressed like that back in the fucking
day
and all of those wankers can’t change their own fucking diapers anymore. If you have to dress like some haircut band, at least make it Echo and the fucking Bunnymen instead of Duran fucking Duran.”

Another profound jolt of pain racked my shoulder. I shrieked.

Grannies with vinyl tartan grocery carts passed by as if Neal and I were tweens sharing a chaste kiss.

“Right,” barked Neal. “Echo & the Bunnymen thought they were so cool, but it was just Ian McCulloch acting all fucked up with asymmetrical hairdos so that birds would
form a line outside the bus and chain-bang him one by one.”

“Well, that’s why anyone becomes a musician, Neal. Why the fuck else would you do it?”

The pressure on my shoulder was eased.

“You have a point.”

“Neal, I would like you to stop crushing my skull into the pavement. You may like life on the street, but I, myself, am not used to smelling evaporating lapdog piss close-up.”

Neal began to croon: “
I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!
”

Oh Jesus, the daft fucker was singing eighties pop tunes in the key of hepatitis C.

“I said:
I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!
”

Neal shook my neck; a fleck of pigeon shit went up my right nostril. “Raymond,” he said, “you have one last chance before this escalates to the theoretical next stage. I repeat:
I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!
”

I whimpered my required line: “
That much is true.
”

“And? And what comes next, Raymond!?”

Jesus fucking Christ. “
But even then I knew I’d find a much better place, either fucking with or without you.
”

“Louder!”

“But even then I knew I’d find a much better place, either with or without you.”

“Raymond! You are a man redeemed. Next line!”

“
But now I think it’s time I live my life on my own, I guess it’s just what I must do.
”

“Louder! All together now … One, two three …”

In stereo:
“But now I think it’s time I live my life on my own, I guess it’s just what I must do!”

“Very good, mate.” Neal let me go to sprawl beside him.

We lay there on the street, drunk with song. I looked over my left shoulder to see a pair of pigeons bobbing towards us. I was feeling oddly philosophical. “Neal,” I said, “what the fuck is it with pigeons, anyway?”