CHAPTER 1

“My dick has shrunk so much, it’s almost non-existent.”
Arthur liked to wind people up, especially the turd he sat next to in the midst of the civic flowerbeds.
Jeff belched: “Twat.” He tossed the empty cola can into the shrubbery. “Fat bastard.”
A pretty young female office worker drew a wide arc around their bench and settled for a share of the low stone wall that encircled the foam-filled fountain. She glanced in the direction of the bench as her teeth devastated a prawn cocktail sandwich. ‘Bums.’ She mumbled in disgust through a mouthful of brown bread, pink mayonnaise and dead shellfish.
Jeff settled back against the cold metal of the bench and patted his bulging stomach. Arthur’s agitated eyes followed the girl’s bare white legs as they emerged from the dainty open-backed sandals, and travelled over the bend of the knee, until they disappeared under her small thin skirt at just below crotch level.
“The sun brings them out,” he said wistfully, “it’s a fucking crime – ought to be banned.”
“What the fuck are you on about, you couldn’t get it up if she begged you, your shagging days are long gone.”
“You know fuck all,” spat Arthur. “I’m off, see you ‘round.”
“No doubt.”

On the other side of the town centre, in a grimy café in a street that while not quite run-down, was decelerating rapidly, Smelly Sally pissed herself – again.
“Fuck!” She exclaimed.
Gino, the café owner, a third generation Italian immigrant, with a propensity towards attractive young women, narrowed his eyes. How he wished that he could get rid of these bums from the café for good. He didn’t like the way they looked, he didn’t like the way they smelled, and he didn’t like the small amount of money they spent. But what could he do? He’d sat down one day after closing time with a calculator, a pen and a kit-kat wrapper and worked out how much they contributed to his turnover. It wasn’t much, but it still amounted to nearly a third. How could he afford to lose more customers without going out of business? And, most of the time they only sidled in very early in the day or during mid-morning and mid-afternoon when the café was so very quiet.
Smelly Sally was another matter however; she had to go. Even the other bums complained about her belching and the way she couldn’t control her bladder. Gino saw the piss dripping underneath the seat she occupied and screwed his face up in an involuntary gesture of loathing. He sighed, dropped the dishcloth onto the stainless steel counter under the espresso machine, wiped his hands in his apron, took a deep breath and threw her out.
“But my coffee,” she complained, “I haven’t finished.
Gino exhumed a one pound coin from the depths of his trouser pocket and threw it at her as she fussed with her baggy black coat.
“Fuck off, and I never want you to come to my café again. Never again.” He slammed the door in her blubbery face and leant against it so that she couldn’t force her way back in. Sally gave up after a few minutes and smiled to herself. Fucker, she thought. Stupid fucker, coffee only costs sixty-five pence and I’d drunk half of it anyway.

On the north end of the town centre, Bernard was negotiating the lower end of Albert Road, named after his great-grandfather, as his dear departed mother told him when he was a boy. Albert the Great she called him, Albert the great, citizen of Elchurch, Albert the businessman, Albert the industrialist, Albert the philanthropist.
Bernard lived in a small, dilapidated, terraced house in the middle of Smallhill Road. A house donated by the same Albert to his mother’s mother on the occasion of her marriage to a young clerk from the Tin Works destined to die in the trenches of the First World War, leaving his young wife pregnant, and dependent on the benevolence of her celebrated father. Bernard’s mother was born in 105 Smallhill Road during the first months of the Great War and got married late, to a small round postman, after the death of her own mother in 1949. A year later Bernard entered the world, into what was, at first, a complete loving family. His father died in 1955, leaving Bernard and his mother alone for the next thirty-six years when Bernard’s mother sunk into a terminal decline after a stroke. Now, almost a decade later, Bernard was truly alone, his only family stacked up behind him, already little more than scratches on gravestones.
Bernard didn’t participate very much in school, tolerating the long days and insensitive children only so that he could return home to the warmth and love of his mother. He acquired the nickname Bum, possibly because of the initials of his full name – Bernard Morgan. He left school at sixteen with just enough qualifications to gain him a place as a trainee stores assistant at an electrical wholesaler half a mile from his home in Smallhill Road. He stayed at the wholesaler’s for ten years and never progressed further than stores assistant, finally becoming unemployed in 1977 after the merger of his firm with another caused the closure of the local branch. He hadn’t worked since, living first on unemployment benefits and later, on disability benefits because of chronic depression and his doctor’s eagerness to get him out of the surgery.
Even the unemployed and unemployable have to deal with the stresses of modern life and Bernard, after years of battling with the monsters inside his head had found his own special methods of coping. Now and again however, new and unexpected obstacles challenged the hard-won stability he’d achieved. The anger and frustration started in his abdomen and exploded like a Roman candle through every nerve of his chubby body. The pavement ahead of him was blocked with a small mountain of sand, the depositors of the sand sitting in a white builder’s pick-up, parked right up against the mound, eating sandwiches and drinking from vacuum flasks. This meant he’d have to cross the road to avoid the obstruction thereby deviating from his path, the path that he followed every single time he returned from the trip he took to the shops every day before lunch.
Bernard stopped and rocked on his feet, staring at the immense barrier, unable to move on, unable to go back. As he rocked he went into a trance, a numb, blank state in which the rhythm of the rocking gave him the order and predictability he craved. His breath gradually caught the rhythm, five rocks to each breath in, and five rocks to each breath out. Gradually the rocking slowed to match the breaths until they became synchronised, one long slow breath in to each backward movement of the rocking action and one slow breath out to each forward movement. Finally, the meditation took effect and the rage subsided; he strode purposefully across the road and around the workers, cutting back to the correct side of the road before the crucial right-turn into Smallhill Road.

Jeff found Arthur outside the dole office, which doubled up as a jobcentre.
“No fucking chance. Ha!”
“What the fuck you on about?”
“It’s my birthday next week.”
“Old bastard.”
“Not that old, not as old as you, you prick.”
“Your brain is shrinking, as well as your knob, you’ve gone senile already. Have you signed on yet?”
“Five minutes to go.”
“I’ll see you down in Gino’s caff.”
“Not if I see you first.”
“Cunt.”
Jeff ambled through the town centre towards Gino’s. What a load of arseholes, he thought. All these dumb people rushing about as if their lives were important. He smiled smugly to himself. At least he’d got out of the fucking rat race. He didn’t have to worry about getting places. Just once every two weeks he visited the dole office and that was it, they’d given up on trying to make him find work, he’d made sure of that. He’d never work again; he knew that. Even if he wanted to work, no one was going to take on a bum in his mid-fifties, and that’s the way he liked it. He had the power; he controlled his own life.
As Jeff strolled majestically past the pubs and the hairdressers’ salons towards Gino’s, he noticed Smelly Sally coming towards him about a hundred yards away. She didn’t look up but focused on her feet and clutched a white plastic bag in her hand. She’s got some booze, he thought, silly old cow, she’ll never learn, you’ve got to keep your wits about you in this world. As they drew closer Sally turned sharply to her left and disappeared into a back lane.
Jeff smirked and chuckled. I’ll fucking show her, he thought. He slowed down as he approached the entrance to the lane and peered around the corner. There was no sign of her. He turned into the lane and walked more briskly. Another lane joined the first at right angles to his left and Jeff peered down that one as well. Sure enough, he saw Sally, leaning over a mound of rubbish, black bags and bins overflowing with the shit that came out of the rear end of the shops and pubs on Park Road.
Jeff crept up behind the old woman intending to scare her. Sally didn’t move, but stood as if fixed to the ground.
“Aargh!” he shouted.
Sally started and turned around, the fear in her eyes much more intense than he expected. Her eyes hopped wildly in their sockets, their focus changing in a rapid three dimensional pattern: up, down, in, out, right, left, until she turned her head back to the pile of rubbish she had been regarding so intently when Jeff had surprised her. Jeff took a step forward and curious to see what was so fascinating craned his neck around her dishevelled body.
What he saw shocked him as well. At first it was difficult for him to make sense of the heap of death, then as it came into focus he saw that there amongst the black bags and soggy cardboard was a body. He stepped forward once more to get a closer look and after absorbing the scene he turned towards Smelly Sally. Their eyes met.
“Fuck me!” He said.
Sally’s shocked silence ended, “It wasn’t me, I didn’t do nothing.” She started moving backwards, slowly at first then she turned and scuttled away the way they had come.
Jeff ran after her: “Hang on, you stupid old tart.” He chased after her as fast as he could, bearing in mind his completely unconditioned physique, but she was too fast. By the time he reached the exit to Park Road, gasping for breath she was already fifty yards further down the road in the direction of Gino’s café.
Jeff leant one arm against the wall of the newsagent’s shop and waited while his energy came back from the deepest reserves of his being.

Despite the gruesome images still vivid in her mind Sally found enough composure to spit a large glob of gelatinous phlegm at the etched glass of Gino’s café’s window as she rushed past on her wobbly legs. The glob held itself together as it oozed down the glass leaving a sticky trail like a dying slug. Gino popped out of the door and watched Sally’s backside moving away from him with regret. How he wished he could plant his size ten in the centre of that blubber and send the old cow flying over the roofs of Park Road to land in a bloody mess half a mile away, impaled on the spikes of the park’s railings, to be consumed by street dogs and big black rats.
He spat with disgust at Sally’s slug-like message and his espresso stained spittle mingled with her vile phlegm to increase its pace down his window. Fuck it, he thought. Everything’s gone fucking wrong today, it’s all fucked up; that fat bitch just about defined his life now, what’s the fucking point?
Gino locked himself inside the empty café, flipped the closed sign over and closed the blinds. Where was she when he needed her? Why did she desert him like this? Didn’t she realise that he was so close, so close that he could feel death’s cold putrid breath under his nose? Bloody women, in the end they were all about as worthwhile as the piss-ridden bums who defiled his town – leaving their filthy spoor in his consciousness like dog shit on the pavement.
What time is it? Ah, just about one o’ clock – good. This will show them, when they turn up to spend their measly pennies on his coffee and doughnuts. They don’t deserve it anyway, no one in this hellhole of a town appreciated his coffee, let them drink urine in the fucking toilets that pretended to be cafés in the town centre. The whole fucking world’s gone fucking mad anyway, there was nothing left for him in it. Let the big businesses, with their same neat sterility have it, the people deserved nothing better. It’ll show her as well, when she comes home from that stupid job she had started in the dole office over two years since. Too quickly after she took her apron off for the last time and spat the words at him with the same hatred that he saw now in Smelly Sally’s eyes. Fuck the cafe, fuck the town, fuck his wife, and fuck them all.
Gino, emptied the contents of the till into his pocket, a little over thirty pounds, his twenty five pound float and the takings of the day, grabbed a fresh bottle of scotch from his place under the counter, and took a long swig. On the way to the back door he put on a large black overcoat, a coat that his grandfather had worn when he arrived from Italy before the war, as warm and comforting now as it was then.
He had nothing left, nothing of any value. Llinos took the last of his self-respect when she disgorged the decomposed vitriol of nearly thirty years of marriage into the lap of his naivety as she poured her last cup of cappuccino – all over him and in front of the last of his regular respectable customers. The twenty-four months he had just lived through were the worst of his life, serving only to hammer him deeper and deeper into a swamp of increasingly filthy bitterness. At last he’d made the decision, he would change things himself, by using violent force if necessary, he’d show them he wasn’t going to be fucked around any longer. He’d show them.
Gino turned at the back door and went back into the café. He heard someone knocking at the front window and voices, concerned, inquisitive voices. For a moment he wavered – perhaps he could pull the business around, perhaps he could re-summon the energy he had when he first took the café over after his father’s early death. He moved towards the window and tried to make out who it was outside. He peeped through the lettering, through the apostrophe of the one word, Gino’s – that had been very expensive, the mark he made on the café to tell the world, or at least the people of Elchurch that he’d arrived a quarter of a century ago.
Outside, Jeff was still breathing heavily; Arthur, shocked to see his friend in such a distressed state at the entrance to the lane, had supported him without comment to Gino’s.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Jeff gasped.
“Fuck knows, perhaps the bastard’s gone for a piss or something.” Arthur knocked hard on the glass. “Come on, open up, fucking eyetie, we don’t have fucking siestas in this country.”
Inside, Gino’s misery metamorphosed into madness. He yanked the front door open and burst outside holding the whisky bottle aloft like a cudgel.
“Bums, fucking low-life, scumshit bums . . .”
“Fuck me!” Arthur recoiled; Jeff put his arms up to cover his head.
Gino trembled with rage and fear but a lifetime of conditioning stopped him from smashing the bottle on Jeff’s skull when he saw the terror that had turned the bum’s features into a grotesque frozen mask. He lowered the whisky bottle and tucked it into the large pocket of the big black coat.
“Leave me alone,” he pleaded. “Go away . . .”
Jeff and Arthur shuffled backwards for a few paces and then turned and hurried away without a word. Gino went back in the café, and locked and bolted the door after him. He slumped into a chair at one of the tables and started to cry. He took another long swig of the scotch, returned it to his pocket and stood up slowly.
There was no going back now; he had to end this before he went completely mad. He had failed, after a lifetime of serving the great public of Elchurch he had failed. It wasn’t his fault – the last few years of decay in that part of the city had finally caught up with him. He couldn’t have done anything to stop it. Perhaps Llinos was right to get out when she did? He should have got out then as well, while he still had some self-respect left. But he’d do it now, he couldn’t make another cup of coffee, it was over.
Coffee, fucking coffee, the best fucking coffee in town, real coffee, how many tons of coffee beans, how many thousands of doughnuts and litres of milk had been transformed in his hands into the best fucking coffee in the whole fucking god-forsaken country? Is that what would be on his headstone? – ‘he made good fucking coffee’.
Gino lashed his foot out at a chair and it went tumbling across the café until it smashed against the counter, dislodging a tray of freshly washed cups and saucers. They fell to the hard tiled floor and shattered into a hundred pieces. Gino laughed hysterically. He kicked another chair, and another, and then overturned a table. He continued in a spree of destructive energy until the whole place was a heap of mangled broken wreckage. Still laughing he went out through the back door and into the lane.
In the lane he paused to take another swig of the whisky and then flung the half-empty bottle away. The bottle smashed against a wall and its fragments drizzled onto the heap of rotten death amongst the bins and rubbish. Gino staggered on.