Human Remains

you could read jokes to. He would spend Sundays fixing the car and I would help him, learning where all the pieces went and what they all did. He laughed a lot and together we both laughed at my mother, who was thin, and serious, and bitter.
    After he died, I couldn’t bring myself to read the
Beano
any more. I didn’t really laugh any more, either.
     
     
     It’s grim, feeling like this on a Monday morning. Other people have hangovers, people my age; or they’ve spent the weekend caravanning, or shagging their girlfriends. Or shagging someone else’s girlfriend. I’ve spent my weekend writing an essay, and staying up too late with whisky and porn. As a result I’m finding it impossible to concentrate on the budgets.
    The trouble is that I’m not sure I even want a girlfriend any more. I like my life the way it is, carefully ordered. I like my house the way it is. I’m not pathetically tidy – no visiting psychologist would have concerns for my sanity – but I think I would find it annoying to have to accommodate someone else’s things. Clothes finding their way into my wardrobe. Books on to my bookshelf. Food into my fridge. No, I don’t want that. I don’t have room in my house. And I don’t suppose I have room in my head, either.
    Still, sex would be nice.
    Garth has once again failed to bathe this weekend. He’s on the far side of the office yet I still catch a sniff of him every so often. As hard as I try to concentrate on happier things, I can’t help breathing in his direction, experimentally tasting the air again and again, incredulous that such a scent could possibly come from a normal, gainfully employed adult. He picks food out of his teeth, accompanying this with a sucking noise, and while this nauseates me I find myself glancing across at him, watching him rooting around the back of his molars with a probing finger and wondering what he’s eaten that could possibly become that stuck. He has ink on his fingers, too, like a schoolboy, and, whilst I loathe the man, whilst every second in his presence is a form of torture to my senses, I have this dreadful fascination with him – an unquenchable curiosity about how someone so repellent can subsist in the modern world.
    Martha saunters in late. New shoes, I notice – the third pair this month by my reckoning.
    ‘Morning, Colin – good weekend?’
    She doesn’t really want to know, of course. It took me a while to work out that the question is rhetorical, a ritual for a Monday morning. The first few times she asked, I told her at great length what I’d done over the weekend, carefully editing the details that even I knew were not appropriate to share with a colleague. She looked vacant after a few minutes. She stopped asking, after that, and only recently – I believe when someone else asked me the same thing within earshot and got a brief response – did she recommence with the Monday ritual.
    ‘Fine, thank you. And you?’ It had certainly been eventful, especially Friday evening, but of course I wasn’t about to supply her with the details.
    On occasion I heard her telling one of the others all about her weekend – kite-flying or baking or hiking or going to a fête or watching football or visiting her cousin or landscaping the garden – but her reply to me was invariably the same.
    ‘It was good, thanks.’
    Vaughn sends me an email asking if I want to go to the Red Lion at lunchtime. I’m tempted to ask if he wants to go now; I doubt things are going to suddenly get more exciting here in the next three hours. It’s sad that the thought of half an hour in a dark, mouldy pub next to the gasworks with Vaughn Bradstock is so cheering.
     
     
    When I get to the Red Lion, twenty minutes early, not even noon, Vaughn is already there at our usual corner table, with a pint of John Smith’s waiting for me. Vaughn and I worked together, many years ago. He used to be a contractor in the IT department at the council, and for some reason we developed a friendship that endured even when he moved on to other projects. He gave up contracting in favour of the security of something more permanent, and now he works for a software development company in the town centre. Handy for the Red Lion.
    ‘Colin,’ he says tonelessly in acknowledgment of my arrival.
    ‘Vaughn,’ I reply.
    He wants to talk about his girlfriend again. It’s usually that, or philately.
    I brace myself with a couple of good swallows of the bitter, wondering whether