Worst. Person. Ever(3)
I snickered.
“Take it or leave it, Raymond. At the count of three I rescind the offer. One, two—”
“I’ll take it.”
“Go talk to Billy.”
Her face became all business. It was as if I were no longer in the room as she stared down at her iPad and began browsing through toddlersroastingonaspit.com. She said, “Go on. Billy will arrange your flights and your visa for Kiribati. Lovely place. Whores growing on trees, from what I hear. Coke bushes around every corner.”
After a moment she looked up me. “Really, Ray—be a love and fuck off. And as you leave, Billy will offer you a complimentary bottle of water and some sanitizing hand wipes. Cold and flu season.”
“It’s a wonder Billy hasn’t been strangled with a shoelace by one of those man-sluts he arse-rapes nightly out on Hampstead Heath.”
From behind me I heard, “Those days are over, Raymond. I have found love and am a reformed man.” Billy appeared, as polished and moisturized as a daffodil salesman at Harrods, but incongruously dressed like a Canadian lumberjack out for a day of chopping down a forest of larches.
“Oh. Hello, Billy.”
“Hello, Raymond.”
I had no mirth in my heart for Billy, and I remain convinced Billy was part of the chorus saying “Dump the bastard” back during the divorce.
“Going to Kiribati, I hear. Lovely place.”
“Let’s just do the paperwork.”
“Manners, please.”
“Or else what?”
“Be rude to me one more time and I’ll go online and start a wicked, wicked rumour about you.”
“Like what?”
“Like …” Billy paused a second. “I know: I’ll go into an online chat room posing as you.”
My interest was piqued: “What kind of chat room?”
“A shit-eating chat room. I’m sure there must be hundreds of them. And once there, I start the rumour that you, Raymond Gunt, are a … a log hog.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I? Or maybe I’d invent some other scarier category … I know: you’re into funnel cakes.”
Fi cackled with glee and then her phone rang, a zithering that made my spinal hairs rise. “Both of you—out,” she ordered. “That’s my Bollywood line. Without the rise of the Indian middle classes and their zest for quality English-language entertainment, I’d still be rolling in the muck like you. Now fuck off, Ray. Really. And enjoy the South Pacific or wherever this Kiribati shithole is.”
Not putting a trapdoor opening into a cobra pit past her, I fucked off. Billy followed me into the hall. He said, “FYI, you get to have an assistant with you on this gig.”
“An assistant?”
“Yes. All they need is a valid passport and the ability to tolerate you day and night.”
I didn’t absorb what Billy said next. My brain stopped at the word “assistant”—the joy! On a fly speck of coral dust in the middle of the ocean with no labour laws, no police and most likely no witnesses to whatever punishments I might dole out to my assistant—or rather, my slave. A lifelong dream of human ownership was coming true.
“… and so I’ll email you shortly. Goodbye, Raymond.”
“Right. Yes. Goodbye, Billy.”
Down on the street I looked at my BlackBerry: it was a Wednesday, fuck it, always my bad luck day. I then sort of spaced out looking at the phone’s screen. Wednesday … Wednesday … Wednesday … what the fuck is a “Wednes”? I mean, for Christ’s sake, think about it.
Wednesday comes from the Middle English Wednes dei, which is from Old English Wõdnesdæg, meaning the day of the English Woden (Wodan), a god revered in Anglo-Saxon England until about the eighth century. Wõden, or Woden in Modern English, is the head god in English heathenism.
So wait a second … this guy, Woden, gets a whole fucking day named after him? Do we have no say in this matter? Let’s rename Wednesday something better, like, say, James Bond. And we can call Thursday Hitler and Saturday Tits and … You get the idea.
I looked up and saw that I was once again inside that wretched, unwieldy dump people call the real world. I rode home on a series of buses, and what is a bus but failure crystallized into the form of two storeys of metal, painted red, hurled out into the world to hoover up losers from the streets of London.
Kiribati?
Could be kind of nice. Pretty, even. Who knew … maybe my luck had turned.
The Republic of Kiribati is an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean. It is comprised of thirty-two atolls and one raised coral island, and is spread over 1.4 million square miles. It straddles the equator and borders the International Date Line on the east. Its former colonial name was the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. The capital and largest city is South Tarawa.