Saturday 11 January 2020

THE DISAPPOINTING MENTOR part 2

On his way to Malcolm, Stefan walked through the town centre. Passing somnambulistic pedestrians window-shopping and a number of beggars, one of whom, Stefan thought, muttered something to him.
‘Uh?’ Curious, he turned to look before he could check himself. What did most beggars want? Money, of course, he sighed inwardly.
‘I said: a wise man listens.’ The beggar said clearly, quietly and winked.
Stefan turned a blind eye and hastened on his way, accidentally kicking the hind legs of a guide dog in the process. The well-trained Labrador’s placid temperament was undisturbed apart from the reproachful look it gave Stefan over its shoulder, before being pulled towards its blind owner who was wanting to cross the road. The pair was at a pedestrian crossing and the lights were just changing to red. Half a dozen cars in each direction began slowing down as Stefan hurried round the blind person and their dog, nearly twisting his ankle as he slipped off the kerb.
‘Shit!’ he exclaimed.
‘Er? What… What’s wrong?’ The blind person asked no one in particular, their unseeing eyes futilely flitting behind a thick pair of dark glasses.
‘It’s nothing,’ Stefan said, coughing. ‘I slipped, that was all. Everything’s ok.’ He noticed the guide dog was giving him a funny look again and felt his already hot face redden.
‘Oh, dear,’ said the sightless one, ‘are you alright?’
Stefan was crossing the road, despite being startled by the sound of a car’s horn tooting. He was already halfway across, swivelling his head to check no cars had jumped the lights, when he shouted back. ‘Hurry up, the lights are about to change!’
‘What?’ A weak voice said and the dog barked, startling Stefan as much as the car’s horn. On the other side of the road he took a deep breath and upped his pace. Malcolm’s house was only ten minutes away. He thrust his hands into his coat pockets and trudged quickly, his gaze fixed firmly ahead. A suited man walking in the opposite direction was whistling jollily but Stefan froze him with a malevolent stare. Two minutes further on, a trio of aggressive-looking youths jostling each other and shouting veered so close to him, Stefan could smell their alcoholic breath. He avoided their eyes with an affected nonchalance he was hoping conveyed an air of such intense preoccupation that he had not even noticed the edgy group. They passed each other in a couple of uncomfortable, for Stefan, seconds. Spitting, swearing, the threesome shouted insults at Stefan who bowed his head and became fixated with the pavement, speeding up unconsciously.
His heart was pounding for a while after passing the hostile group. He sucked in a couple of deep breaths and forced himself to calm down. In no time, he reached the familiar corner of Malcolm’s road and turned into it with not inconsiderable relief.

‘You took your time.’ Malcolm reproached him in his front doorway.
‘I got here as soon as I could,’ Stefan said. But he muttered under his breath: ‘All things come to those who wait, Malcolm.’
‘Have you seen what somebody’s done?’ Malcolm spilled out of his house flapping his arms at his defaced property. ‘Who would do such a thing?’
Stefan shook his head. Then, acting instinctively, he looked behind him at the houses directly opposite. As he did so, two sets of curtains dropped back into place behind their respective windows.
‘Why? Why?’ Malcolm pleaded. ‘Why me?’
‘Yes,’ Stefan hesitated, looking away from the curtain twitchers over the road, ‘it doesn’t look like anyone else has been targeted.’
‘But why? Why? Do you think it’s personal, Stefan? Has somebody got a grudge against me? But what does this mean?’ Malcolm whined pointing at the graffiti.
Stefan shook his head. ‘Don’t know, mate. Who can say? It was probably just a completely random act.’
‘By whom, Stefan?’
‘God knows! Some drunk…’
‘Oh, my God! What are the neighbours going to think?’
‘Who cares? It’s none of their business.’
‘They’ll think I’m embroiled in some weird personal vendetta, I’ll be shunned and ostracised. For God’s sake, let’s go inside, Stefan.’
Panicking, Malcolm bundled Stefan through the front door, which he closed behind them.
‘What are we going to do?’
‘We?’ Stefan was flabbergasted; he’d never seen Malcolm this distraught.
‘You’ve got to help me, please,’ Malcolm ran to his front windows and peered through them with an anxious expression, as if he’d received a huge bill he was unable to pay. ‘I can’t clean this mess off all by myself. It looks like spray-paint, doesn’t it? I don’t know how to get it off, do you?’
Stefan shrugged. ‘Ring B&Q or somewhere and see what they recommend.’ He thought Malcolm was pathetic.
‘Good idea.’ Malcolm reached for his mobile phone and typed into the search bar for B&Q’s number.
After fifteen or twenty minutes of anxious bleating, whining, explaining and questioning over the phone, Malcolm finally hung up.
‘Right, that’s it!’
‘Uh?’ Stefan looked up over the paperback he’d snatched from the coffee table and had been sat engrossed in while Malcolm had wittered.
‘That was B&Q I was talking to. They recommended something called Clearoff Graffiti Remover. Let’s go and get some before they shut.’
‘What time is it now?’ Stefan’s reluctance was obvious.
‘Nearly half-past-eleven…’
‘Jesus, Malc’ and what time do they shut? Seven, eight o’clock tonight? We’ve got ages…’
‘Not if we’re going to get it all scrubbed off while there’s sufficient daylight, allowing for the time it takes getting to B&Q and back.’
Stefan could not see why the entire process had to involve him. Nor any of it, come to that. Seeing Malcolm reduce himself to this neurotic, panicking heap was embarrassing; Stefan found him a contemptible spectacle and could not wait to distance himself from it. But vestiges of decorum and tinier still amounts of guilt forced him to hesitate in Malcolm’s plaintive presence.
‘Well, Malcolm, you know…’ Stefan rose to his feet slowly, struggling to find the right words that would neatly excuse him. ‘Not really sure if I can… Er, don’t know what, er, exactly I can…’
‘Come on, Stefan, man!’ Malcolm found it somewhere within him to abruptly sound assertive. Before immediately reverting to plaintive bleating mode: ‘You know I can’t stand these ghastly DIY warehouses with their endless wide aisles and shelves stacked from the floor to high above your head with all manner of strange products, and speeding forklift trucks screeching around behind you and leaving skid marks on the grey lino flooring. I hate the smell of these places… And the service, I bet I’ll get stuck in a queue a mile long, which is a nightmare when you’re on your own. Besides I might get the wrong product and…’
‘Alright, alright, I’ll tag along if it’ll make things more bearable. If you really need the moral support that is…’ If Stefan had hoped with this, Malcolm would be stung into jumping in with assurances that he’d be alright on his own, ‘if you put it like that’, etc, he was disappointed.
‘Thank you, Stefan.’ Malcolm clasped his hands together and raised them to his chest in an effeminate, camp gesture. ‘So it’s settled then, we’ll go together. Now what did I say that stuff was called? Clearitoff something Graffiti Removal Fluid?’
‘Something like that,’ Stefan sighed. ‘Didn’t you write it down?’
‘Ooh, no, I don’t think so, oh, God!’
‘Relax, we’ll just ask in the store.’
‘Oh, do you think so? Oh, alright, if you say so… Are you ready?’
‘Yep,’ Stefan slammed the paperback back down on the coffee table. It was called ‘Astral Sex’ by a Dr Lesley Portal-Finder. Its creased spine and grubby pages revealed how well-thumbed it was: one of Malcolm’s extensive collections of ‘Esoteric Self-Help and Enlightenment Books’, Stefan didn’t wonder, published by the Chakra Developments Press or some such outfit aimed at naïve New Agers. ‘Let’s go!’

‘£27. 99?’ Malcolm gasped at the till in B&Q. ‘For this tiny bottle?’
‘That’s right, sir.’ The bespectacled face, saturated with oozing acne, nodded at him behind the till. It was nearly time for their break and there were already six people behind this geezer—if only he’d hurry up, pay and fuck off!
‘It’s only half a litre,’ he looked round at Stefan who was avoiding eye contact with him. ‘Only half a litre, I said. Do you think it’ll be enough? Stefan? STEFAN?’
‘Er, well what does it say on the label?’
‘Enough to remove 9 linear metres of aerosol paint from all surfaces, including brick, glass, metal, masonry and plastic.’
‘Should be,’ Stefan nodded.
‘I should hope so at this price,’ whinged Malcolm. Stefan did not feel alone as he felt like smashing the bottle on the top of Malcolm’s cranium. People behind them in the queue shuffled and coughed. They heard loudly whispered comments like: ‘Come on, ’urry up,’ and ‘Get on with it, will ya?’ Malcolm’s sweaty, stressed face reddened. ‘Oh, very well.’
Outside the store, Malcolm nearly dropped the expensive bottle and screamed like a young girl in horror.
‘You’d better carry it, Stefan. I’m too stressed, I’m shaking. We can’t afford to lose it.’
There was that ‘we’ again, Stefan bristled but he took the bottle from Malcolm and slid it into his jacket’s inside pocket.
‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ Malcolm asked several times as they walked back to his home, half-an-hour away.
Stefan was determined not to get pressganged into helping remove the graffiti when they eventually returned.
‘Look, Malcolm, I’m sorry, mate but I just remembered there’s some shopping I need to do for my aunt. I’m going to have to go…’
‘No! Oh, really? Are you sure you can’t stay for a little while?’
Stefan shook his head, looked as sorry as he could.
‘Oh, go on. Not even for half-an-hour? Twenty minutes? You don’t have to do anything, just make us both a cup of tea and keep me company while I get started. Go on…’
‘I really can’t, I, er, promised my aunt I’d see her at two…’ That was his mistake: specifying a time.
Malcolm seized on it. ‘Oh, well, it’s not even one o’clock yet, I don’t think,’ (it was five minutes past) ‘you’ll have plenty of time to see me get started and time to spare.’
Stefan groaned. ‘Well, I said I’d meet her…’
‘Oh, do be a love and put the kettle on will you? While I just read these instructions and fetch a bucket and a scrubbing brush.’ Malcolm went over his checklist, ‘What do I need? Rubber gloves: check! Plastic bucket: check!’
Meanwhile, fuming, Stefan went inside. After angrily switching on the kettle and snatching a cup, he grabbed a teabag, which he stuffed down the back of his trousers and pressed against his anus before farting on it. Tipping it in the cup, he finished making the drink for Malcolm and took it outside.
‘Here you are,’ he proffered the cup to Malcolm, who reached out for it with a hand in a pink rubber glove. Then, glancing across the road at the house opposite he noticed a trio of women outside looking in his direction. ‘Oh, shit! No!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s Mrs Crushing, the neighbourhood gossip and a couple of her pals from the Women’s Institute by the look of it.’
Stefan shot a look at the senior, concerned-looking women who appeared to be coming over.
‘God, that’s all I need!’ Malcolm muttered under his breath and took a large gulp of his tea as the women crossed the road.
‘Coo-ee, Malcolm! Only me,’ Mrs Crushing called, unnecessarily waving as well, flanked by her reedy cohorts.
Malcolm groaned and shot Stefan a conspiratorial look, but said, ‘You made a nice cup of tea, Stefan. Where’s yours?’
Stefan shrugged, ‘I really don’t want one. In fact, I really ought to be going…’
‘What? And leave me with these three witches?’ Malcolm said in a stage whisper. The women were nearly upon them.
‘Well, there’s not a lot I can do,’ Stefan said.
‘Oh, my goodness, Malcolm,’ Mrs Crushing said, alighting on the pavement outside Malcolm’s house, ‘what on earth’s happened to your lovely, little house? “Pride comes before a fall”, but what’s it mean?’ She shook her head contemplating the sprayed words, her two companions shook theirs in sympathetic unison and Malcolm shrugged.
‘Some random hooligan struck last night,’ he said, groaning inwardly as the three old crones made noises expressing their incredulity at such a thing and then more noises aimed at conveying their collective sympathy for him. He knew that Mrs Crushing would stand there prattling and watching him all the time as he washed the paint off. He shot a glance at Stefan who had smiled nonchalantly at the women and was now preparing to take his leave.
‘Okay, Malcolm, like I said I’ve got to get going. Good luck with this. I’ll give you a call sometime tomorrow; see how you’ve got on. Ta-ta!’
‘Mmm,’ Malcolm’s face was beetroot red, he looked livid.
Stefan turned abruptly and, as if struck with an afterthought, approached Malcolm and leaned close so he could say something quietly in his ear: ‘Don’t they say bad things come in threes’?’

DOES ANYONE WANT TO READ MORE? PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU WANT ME TO CONTINUE WRITING THIS STORY, JULIAN.