For a week things were calmer.
The full bladder thing forces Martin John to walk even more circuits on the job. The only way to ascertain it’s truly full is to walk and live that pressure from above.
The original reason for the circuits now has a double purpose.
Each circuit would arouse him more and more.
Until he’d “Bucket It.”
Now with the full bladder and the increased circuits he is sexually higher than he has ever been.
Thanks to mam.
Thanks to not going upstairs.
Thanks to not being able to use the lavatory.
Thanks to avoiding Baldy Conscience.
They caught him.
She caught him.
Sarah caught him.
Called his name.
Followed by:
For fuck’s sake.
He turned, trousers down.
He could have pulled them up. He had the choice. Could have pulled them up. Could have pretended he was looking for something in that bucket.
But no. He turned, trousers descended, defiant.
Enjoyed it.
SUSPENDED FROM JOB PENDING INVESTIGATION.
Check my card was all he said, when she screamed at the sight of him.
It was in the report. Typed out as her testimony.
Sarah said she did not wish to say out loud what she had seen Martin John doing up in the rafters of the building where they both worked. She said for private religious reasons (all security guards resort to religion when trouble brews) it would pain her to use the language required.
First she said private.
Second she said religious.
Third she combined the two.
Doubled her conviction.
Martin John maintained he was caught short and innocently piddling into a bucket that happened to be lurking under the roof beam up there. He claimed a bent kidney. The Manager fella said he’d never mentioned any bent kidney. Martin John agreed and said Ya, right you are, he had no bad kidney. He was just “caught short.” The Manager fella looked puzzled by the admission.
Sarah said this is some high tale and he should tell the truth of what he was doing. Martin John said the woman had a vendetta against him and she needed to drop it. Check my card, Check my card, he added.
Nobody ever understands Martin John’s instruction to check his card. They usually ignore it. If they asked to check his card, Martin John would present an expired Travel Card. All parties will examine it blankly and this is the most likely reason nobody asks him to expand on the demand to Check My Card.
The card that he is actually referring to is the card he believes registers his circuits of the building. The card he is confused about. Is it deliberate, this confusion? He knows there are cameras. He knows they are spying on him. He knows Baldy Conscience has likely made contact with the people behind the cameras. He likes to make this easier for them, by tapping his Travel Card on the light switch of every floor.
He is not truly sure if those behind the cameras are his employers, yet he does believe in the rumoured machine in the office that they are never allowed to enter. This rumoured machine, which logs all of their movements. The machine that primarily Martin John has rumoured. The threat of the rumoured machine that records what the manager cannot see. Martin John has become so confused about what is where and who is watching him that from the moment he lifts his head off the pillow, he understands he is being watched. This is why he knows that the many times he does the thing to the women’s legs and feet or has his trousers undone and it out he will be seen. He has told himself he is doing these things to register to them that HE KNOWS THEY ARE WATCHING HIM. I’ll give them something to look at, these bread-stealing fuckers. This is partly how he resolves what he’s doing. I am letting them know I know they are watching. I know that Baldy Conscience has been sent.
This doesn’t explain to him or any of us why he has a history of doing these things. A history that began before Baldy Conscience and a history that commenced before he had any notion of “the trackers” and “their tracking.”
This falls into Harm Was Done over Check My Card.
When Martin John admits harm was done, when that refrain circles his mental turntable, it can cause him pause.
The pause quickly fills with self-appeasement. I had an opportunity. I coulda taken full advantage of the Estonian when she was up there. She was up there waiting on me. She wanted me in a way none of the others did. She offered herself to me and I didn’t touch. Well not entirely. I touched a bit. Same as any man would. I took her to the hospital, I bought her a magazine, I took her home. I nodded.
Sort of. But not exactly. There had been some time before he called the ambulance. He had cleaned her up after he had delivered on her. He had cleaned himself up. He remembers clearly the upward strokes with the bunched-up toilet paper. Wipe. Swipe. Wipe. Swipe. Afterwards he worried. Was there a smell? Did the ambulance men suspect something? He thought maybe they might. But he’d checked her pulse and had been quick about it. How quick had he been? He noticed a stain on the roof while wanking over her and made note to check the loft for leaks. He had made himself come by repeating the words jammy jank, jammy jank, jammy jank. He worried now. He had rolled her over facedown to be relieved of her eyes, lifted her dress, yanked down her tights and faded knickers to give him bare bum to toss over. He knew this because he kept one hand pushing resistance against her skin, propping himself over her and his arm had protested his own weight, which only intensified his primary pull. Was she still facedown when the ambulance men arrived? He was worried now. But she had come back, she had returned to the house into the room. She didn’t want to leave. He had forced her out. Had she not wished to leave because she liked it? He would never know. Did she know what he’d done? She must have known. She must have liked it. That was it. That was that.
Mam does not like the talk about Beirut. She has made this very, very clear. Abundantly transparent. She has told him not to mention the place again. You have never been there, she has been heard to say. Very loud. Very frustrated. Very angry.
You’ve never been anywhere, except Noanie’s!
She is wrong.
Martin John has been to Beirut.
He just can’t prove it. The way they can’t prove anything about him either. They just know what they know and he knows what he knows and what he knows is he believes he has been to Beirut.
The Manager fella sat between the two of them stated he was not present and therefore reliant on witness statements and repeatedly queried the two of them in rotation as to the activity that Sarah saw and that Martin John insisted she could not have seen.
Sarah requested to speak alone to the manager.
She expressed to him what she had seen.
Martin John was suspended from work for two weeks. It suited him as he was behind on collating his Eurovision files.
Sarah was triumphant.
Martin John was more triumphant.
There’s misery in triumph, thought Dallas, having endured the dual carriageway of bickering in each direction.
— I have a confession to make, Martin John eventually said to the Manager fella.