RuKsaK

I’m getting into this speed writing gig - this week at least. My wife and workload is fairly happy about it too. Anyway, spent 90 mins this morning blasting off the two stories below – there’s this effort and an epilogue to Stink and the Suicides. If you’ve got the time, read them both and tell me where I’m shite and where I’m not. Cheers, and I’ll not be posting for about another week, so you’ve time to read it – I hope.
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Our gang of four stood in front of the square brick building. It was a crisp March morning, not a cloud in the sky – besides its stark blue, the green grass and the red bricks, there were hardly any other colours to be seen. It made life seem really simple – the way certain paintings and books were supposed to make us feel, but didn’t for us because we didn’t give a shit. We knew why we were there – more or less.
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‘This is the shower unit and these are your scrapers.’
She held up four pieces of metal on wooden sticks. They shone in our eyes a little.

‘Come with me and I’ll show you what to do.’
We followed her into the men’s unit first. It was musty from lack of use, no one had taken a shower or pissed in here for five months and the place was giving off a smell to signal that to us – the kind of smell that spiders like, the kind which grows when humans have not been around for a while – a prehistoric detergent.

‘Watch this you four.’
She ran the scraper up the left side of the first shower cubicle. A faint grease, like vaseline, grew and curled up the scraper. We inched forward and peered down on the product. At the blade end there were a few spiralled millimetres of this gunk. Our stances showed a little dread.

‘That’s human fat and you’ve got to clean it off. Eight cubicles in the men’s, eight more in the women’s – that’s four each. Should take you about four hours.’
‘Hang on – you want us to scrape human fat off those walls?’
‘That’s right – get it off, flick it in your bucket – then this afternoon wash them down. If you don’t want to do it, that’s more work for the rest of them, but we don’t go back in the van until it’s done. Your choice – clean it or sit it out and wait until evening.’
‘I’ll do it then, but how did it all get there?’
‘When campers have a shower, the sweat bounces off them and congeals on the wall – several hundred of them over a summer season builds up. We do this every year – with new faces mind. Not many returners in this work.’
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I visualised the process on some slow-mo, expensive documentary. A huge, close-up blob of water, splashing into a broken bowl of more drops on some blubbery skin. I imagined this square centimetre of flesh wobbling a little, let off a grain of perspiration and then the camera follow it to the wall where it blasted onto the formica and glued itself in a slow, languid drip. Then the screen faded black, it said ‘six months later’ and an accumulation of crowded fat appeared on the wall, then a massive metal object roared across it and the clean blue wall was revealed. The camera pulled back and a hand was holding the tool, the fat was on the end of it, and the person cleaning it was smiling with all the joy of summer – fucking TV.
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Four hours later, halfway through the women’s unit, we sat down for a break. We didn’t open our sandwich boxes – our morning had not tempted hunger in the slightest. I looked down at my hands and sleeves. There was human fat between my fingers, like my hands were webbed with the stuff. Splats and globules were distributed in smaller amounts as you went up my arm. The lard of men and women. I thought about how many people’s melted flesh I had on me – like an orgy of old, captured sweat all over me – it could be as many as five hundred bits of bodies stuck to me. It was all I could do to not throw up my guts.

‘Ruk – you look a bit green – you alright?’
‘Sorry man, but this is truly fucking disgusting – it really is.’
‘Aye – well it’s a job, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but fucking why?’
‘It’s money to get us pissed out of our fucking boxes at the weekend.’
‘Do we have to get pissed? I mean I’ve got all this greasy, human sweat on me and it’s only to get pissed? Why is getting pissed up so important?’
‘We have to get pissed because were doing this and we have to do this to get pissed. We’re trapped in the fat of the fucking land Ruk – all of us.’

We laughed out with our eyes in the sky and I felt much better. Things have not changed too much since then.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

The Fat of the Land