1. A SORT OF ROTTEN DAY

Anything that could go wrong does go wrong for Ivan Bramble

Ivan Bramble yawned, turned over in his bed, and sighed.

It had been one hell of a day and he was only too pleased that it was over. It had started with a dire warning when the post (early, for once) had brought him the electricity bill and it was wrong. Very wrong. Ten times, maybe even a hundred times, more than it should have been. Someone had made a mistake and that same someone probably wouldn’t believe him when he told them.

So he decided to tell them and the woman he spoke to on the phone was clearly doing something far more interesting than talking to him, like unpeeling her eyelashes or poking her teeth with a matchstick. That’s what it sounded like, anyway, and when she said, in that bored voice of hers, that they didn’t make mistakes in their ultra-modern and highly technologically advanced office and he must have left something switched on and stop complaining, he knew that the day ahead of him was going to upset him.

“If I was a woman sitting in an office with nice central heating warming her private parts rather than an old man shivering in his unheated flat then I might believe you,” he said, trying not to sound irritable but unable to keep a morsel of his feelings out of his words. “But as you probably know my heating went on a wobbly fit six months ago and it hasn’t worked since. So how can my electricity bill be so astronomically high?”

“You must have left a light on,” she told him, and she hung up.

She hung up! Not him, but the cow sitting in her office with a warm breeze blowing up her skirt and a meringue floating on top of her coffee! She’d hung up on him! And anyway all the lights under the sun wouldn’t burn as much electricity as the bill said he’d used!

Then the rent collector, a sour-faced b***h if ever there was one, had called, knocking his door with unnecessary violence, and he’d said, quite politely, that he wasn’t paying on account of having no heating and his tenancy agreement explicitly said the place had underfloor heating, and that scumbag of a rent collector had said, quite rudely, that if he didn’t pay he could get out and stay out and someone else who would pay could take his place.

“Piss off,” he’d said, and shut the door in the woman’s face. Rudely. Before she could march off scowling, the equivalent of the electricity woman hanging up on him. Before, in fact, the day could get any worse.

And it did get worse. At lunch time.

At the fish and chip shop when the pretty young blonde refused to serve him.

“You were nasty to me last time you came for fish and chips,” she said, “so you can take your trade somewhere else. We don’t need your sort in here!”

“But I’ve never been here before,” he protested. Because he hadn’t. He’d remember if he had, wouldn’t he? You just don’t forget something as mind-wrenchingly monotonous as queuing in a chip ship and waiting for the fish to fry, do you?

“Go away or I’ll call the police,” she said. And he didn’t go away and she did call the police because it just so happened there was a uniformed police woman just behind him in the queue, a brunette of a police woman with a permanent scowl etched onto her face as if maybe someone had dragged a mangled fistful of rusty barbed wire across it.

“You heard what the woman said,” snapped the police woman, “Get out before I arrest you, and be careful what you say because this conversation is being recorded.”

The fish and chips smelled delicious.

“But I’ve never been here before,” he almost wept, and crawled out of the shop before the long arm of the law could grab him by the shoulders and frog-march him to a cell.

Maybe a warm cell...

When he got back home, hungry and dreaming of fish and chips until the amount saliva in his mouth might have been classified by a geographer as an ocean, his landlady was waiting on the doorstep.

“So you won’t pay your rent?” she asked, “and at the same time were offensive to my representative who has spent every moment since then weeping at your rudeness in my office?”

“My heating hasn’t worked for six months!” he snarled, “and yet I’m paying for it! I might die of hypothermia with an empty bank account because of all the money I’m spending on something I don’t get!”

Then she thrust a sheet a paper into to his hand.

“This is a notice to quit,” she growled, “you’ve got to the end of the month!”

“Sod you!” he said, and burst into quiet tears.

Then a day that shouldn’t have got any worse did.

There was a knock at the door and a policewoman stood there. Not the same one as he’d been offended by in the fish and chip shop and had meant he went without lunch even though his stomach was rumbling loud enough to waken the dead of five counties, but a grim-faced senior one. With crows feet on her crows feet and a dab of red rouge on each cheek.

“I need to interview you down at the station,” she said, “so you’d best come along with me.”

“Now what have I done?” he asked, quite wearily.

“We’ll discuss it down at the station,” she said.

And they did. Two of them now, against him, and the second one was probably fresh from college and absolutely knew deep inside her soul that every man on the planet was guilty. Good for a night out. Good for a one-off in bed, but otherwise as guilty as hell is fiery.

“Can you remember the case of Rosalind Barker?”

He couldn’t remember the case of Rosalind Barker.

“Never heard of her,” he answered truthfully.

“It was all over the papers,” the young man-hater said, her eyes glinting and her breasts, both of them, pointing at him through a crisp blue blouse.

“Well, I never read about any woman called Rosalind, what did you call her, Barker,” he said firmly.

Too firmly, it seemed, because it put both of their backs up.

The rouged and more senior office said in a voice that could easily have convinced thr Pope that God didn’t exist, “a credible witness has come forward. What were you doing in nineteen seventy-six, on the tenth of March?”

“Nineteen seventy-six?” he replied, “March? I haven’t the remotest idea! Forty odd years ago...”

“You were seen,” said the younger officer. “A witness has come forward. Says you were arguing with the deceased in the middle of the market in the year in question, saying that if you had your way she’d be dead and buried, and good riddance to her! Those were your very words, she swears. She described you, and from that description it was most obviously you.”

“Did she say I was in short pants?” asked Ivan wearily, “because that’s what I would have been wearing in nineteen seventy-six.”

“It doesn’t matter what you were wearing. You threatened the deceased.” That was the senior officer, scowling.

“When I was six?” he asked, “how was I going to harm her? And what was I doing in the market on my own…? My mum wouldn’t let me go further than the end of the street on my own...”

Then, in a great mass of warnings and threats and more warnings they told him to go home and forget about it.

“But don’t go far. We may want to speak to you again,” growled the rouged one.

And he went home. It was tea time and he was starving.

So it didn’t help that his ex-wife called and demanded that he took her in because if he didn’t she’d be homeless and it was going to be a cold night, and if she were to die of it he’d be the one to get the blame.

“And you can switch the heating on,” she said over a cup of tea, “you always were a tight-fisted mean old fart!”

He’d growled at her, said she could sleep on the sofa because nobody was having his bed, and he stomped into his bedroom. It didn’t take long for him to get into bed. Not with the cold already eating into his hungry bones.

Then he yawned, turned over in his bed, and sighed.

It had been a really rotten day. Tomorrow had just better be better or life wouldn’t be worth living.

© Peter Rogerson 10.12.18