Chad is at the bar

“Hey Chad.”

“Flo.”

“What’ll you have?”

“That’s kind of you. G&T please.”

“Hey barman! A G&T for the lovely lady here. Have one yourself and get me another mojito will you.”

The barman nods ever so slightly to indicate he’s registered Chad’s order, but carries on drying the glass in his hand. When he’s good and ready, the barman makes the drinks.

Flo stirs hers vigorously, the ice cubes clink, Chad glugs his. A gorilla walks into the bar, sits down next to Flo, beats its chest. The barman comes running over.

“No gorillas allowed,” he says, pointing at a sign that has a red line crossed over a gorilla mugshot. The gorilla beats its chest, makes the kind of sound a disgruntled gorilla makes.

“Hey, give the gorilla a break,” says Chad.

“I don’t make the rules,” says the barman, “I just ensure they’re followed. You don’t like the rules, you need to speak to management.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never broken a rule,” says Chad.

The barman stares impassively at Chad, neither confirming nor denying whether he has ever broken a rule.

“Seems unfair to me,” says Flo, “a gorilla has rights, you know.” The gorilla nods its shaggy head, as if in agreement, bares its teeth a little. They’re yellow and sharp as shards.

“How about you bend the rules a little?” says Chad.

“Fine,” says the barman, shaking his head and looking cross, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere but this dingy shithole of a bar serving drinks to bibulous wastrels. He never wanted to be a barman. It just kind of happened. Everything in his life has just kind of happened.

“That’s the spirit,” says Chad. Turning to the gorilla, he says, “What’ll you have buddy?”

The gorilla points at a beer tap, then beats its chest bongo style. The barman pours the gorilla a pint of beer and plonks it down on the bar. “That’ll be seven pounds eighty,” he says.

The gorilla stares blankly. It either can’t pay or won’t pay. “No money, no beer,” says the barman, placing a protective hand over the pint glass.

“Stick it on my tab,” says Chad. Turning to the gorilla, he says: “It’s on me buddy.”

The gorilla swipes the beer and starts guzzling. The barman goes back to drying glasses. Chad puts the jukebox on, a funky ballad that’s all about one man’s desperate attempt to come to terms with his sexuality. Chad asks Flo for a dance and Flo accepts the invitation. Chad and Flo wiggle their bodies suggestively at each other. When the song is over, Chad suggests to Flo that they go back to his place. Flo says she would like nothing better. They are about to leave, when the gorilla starts beating its chest violently. “Hey buddy, what’s the problem?” says Chad. The gorilla points at the beer tap. “Stick another one in here, will you?” says Chad, offering the gorilla’s empty pint glass to the barman. The barman tuts, makes it clear that it’s against his better judgement, but all the same he does as requested. “Stick it on my tab,” says Chad.

“About this tab of yours,” says the barman.

“What about it?” says Chad.

“I’m gonna need you to settle it,” says the barman. “Settle it?” says Chad.

“Settle it,” confirms the barman.

“That could be a problem to be honest,” says Chad.

The barman picks up a sawn-off shotgun from behind the counter, cocks it and points it at Chad’s head. “Either you settle your bill or things are gonna get nasty.”

Flo lets out a little scream and Chad blanches. “Now go easy will you,” he says, holding up his palms.

Without a thought for its personal safety, the gorilla leaps over the bar and lunges at the barman. The gun goes off. The gorilla pummels the barman with its big hairy fists. Eventually, it runs out of rage and stops pummelling. The barman is a pulpy mess on the floor. The gorilla is bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound in its shoulder; its breathing is laboured.

Chad and Flo can’t leave things like this, so they do the responsible thing. First, they arrange for a vet to come and collect the gorilla and tend to its gunshot wound. Then they phone for an ambulance. The paramedics whisk the barman away on a stretcher. One of them assures Chad they will do everything they can for his friend. Chad doesn’t bother explaining that the barman is not his friend.

Flo and Chad go to Chad’s, a tiny house sandwiched in between two other tiny houses. Chad pours some whiskies and puts some music on. Here, he says, offering Flo her glass. She downs it and then she starts doing a striptease to the music. Chad sips his drink watching her carefully. Flo strips down to her pantyhose and bra and then she says: “Your turn.”

“My turn?” says Chad.

“Yes,” she says, “to strip.” Chad isn’t one for stripping, it’s just not in his nature. He explains that to Flo.

“Spoilsport,” she says.

Chad thinks about it. Can he overcome his self-consciousness he wonders. He decides he can. He puts his drink down and starts to strip. Pretty quickly he realises he was worrying about nothing, that stripping is in fact no big deal, even enjoyable. He gets down to his boxers. He has a visible erection. Flo gawps at it, giggles. Chad embraces her, finds her mouth, pushes his tongue in. Locked in a tangle of limbs, Chad and Flo career around the room banging into furniture, knocking ornaments off their perches, thumping the walls. It’s a frenzied scene in other words.

Afterwards, they lie on the floor smoking cigarettes, chatting about this and that. After however long, Flo says she has to go, that if she doesn’t get a move on, she’ll be late for work. She gets dressed and promptly leaves without even saying goodbye.

Chad continues lying on the floor, staring up at the mould-splotched ceiling. He can feel a hangover coming on. His mind is a seething rhizome of thoughts. Help me, he says out loud. For the love of God, help me! But no one will help Chad because no one can hear him and even if they could, they still wouldn’t. Chad knows that. He feels terribly alone. He has friends, sure, but they don’t get him. He has family, but they hate him. There is no one else. Not unless you include Flo, but Chad doesn’t include Flo because in reality he barely knows her.

Sighing wearily, he sits up. I need to get out of here, he thinks. I need to do something. He grabs a spring roll from the fridge, crams it in his mouth and as he’s chewing, he gets dressed. He resists the urge, the strong urge, to put on the silver tracksuit and opts instead for regulation jeans (flared) and polo shirt (burgundy with a gold monogram). He heads straight out. Sorry, no, first he does a shit, then he heads out. He walks around town without paying attention to where he is going, taking left and right turns indiscriminately. When he comes to his senses, he finds himself in a coffee shop, sitting at a little round table, laminated menu in his hand. He looks around. Apart from an Hasidic Jew sitting at a little square table at the back, there are no other customers. Chad scrutinises the menu, which is in Hebrew. Chad thinks it strange that the menu is in Hebrew, but he is more than used to strange occurrences and therefore quickly accepts it for what it is, besides it just so happens he is fluent in Hebrew.

An attendant materialises. The attendant has a nervous tic. “Yes?” he says. “What’ll it be?”

“I’ll go for the kneidlach soup,” says Chad.

“Kneidlach soup’s off the menu, I’m afraid.”

“Okay, I’ll go for the gefilte fish then. With a side of chrain naturally.”

“Gefilte’s off too.”

“Is that so,” says Chad. His face puckers as he contemplates what else on the menu might take his fancy. “Salt beef sandwich,” he says finally, “on rye, heavy on the mustard.”

“Very well,” says the attendant, who immediately dematerialises. When he rematerialises, he has a plate balanced on his upturned palm. On that plate is a triple-decker salt beef sandwich. The attendant is suddenly seized by a paroxysmic tic. The plate falls to the floor, but somehow the sandwich remains intact, as if it is stuck to the plate, which doesn’t even break into pieces. The attendant apologises, but Chad tells him not to worry, no harm done. He picks the salt beef sandwich up, takes a ginormous bite and masticates in a bovine fashion. As he masticates, a story unfolds in his mind, a story he resolves to write down as soon as he gets home.

But when he gets home, he can’t remember how the story goes, so he makes up a new story, a story he hopes is better than the one he’s forgotten (it isn’t and deep down Chad knows that). The story is about W, an African migrant who comes to the UK in search of a better life. After spending a year in a prison masquerading as a detention centre, his papers are finally stamped and he is free to do whatever he wants in the UK, as long as it’s legal. Or that’s what the immigration official says to him in a deadpan voice as he hands W his papers. W makes his way to London and tries in vain to find work. Eventually, he concludes that UK employers are hopelessly racist and his chances of finding work are remote to non-existent.

Reluctantly, W turns to a life of crime. First, he carries out enough muggings to obtain the cash for a deposit on an apartment and one month’s rent in advance. Then he carries out enough muggings to fund the procurement of a nine-bar. He parcels up the nine-bar in his flat into eighths and then he goes and sells his wares in a part of London known for street dealing. Seeing as he is encroaching on the territory of the incumbent street dealers, he soon runs into trouble. That trouble takes the form of being stabbed in the neck one night, outside a fried chicken place. The knife narrowly misses W’s carotid artery. You’re lucky, says the doctor who treats him. W doesn’t feel lucky, but he gets the doctor’s point.

W is not the type to be dissuaded from a course of action when he sets his mind to it. He uses his cash resources to invest in a computer. He downloads Tor and then he sets up a stall on a dark web marketplace. He sells what’s left of his weed for bitcoin. Within next to no time, he becomes a prolific dealer of all sorts of drugs on the dark web. He makes enough money to set up a legitimate business importing pineapples from his native country and selling them at a decent mark-up. He branches out into the importation of other fruits: bananas, tangerines, guavas and mangos. After a few years, he has built a business that turns over thirty million a year and employs a hundred people, all migrants like W. W delegates the running of his business to his trusted number two. He sets up a charity to provide assistance to migrants and becomes a political activist, a talisman for all those who oppose systemic and institutional racism in the UK. Which is not a lot of people, depressingly few people in fact, although what they lack in numbers, they make up for in their shrewd ability to foment viral social media campaigns. Inevitably, W becomes a so-called thorn in the side of the racist establishment, a thorn they unpluck by invalidating his right to remain in the UK on some arcane point of law. W is summarily deported. He is now a wealthy a man and he lives in some comfort back in his native country. He falls in love with the deputy head of the Accounting Oversight Board. And that’s the prelude to the main story, everything up to this point having been mere preamble, thinks Chad. After Chad has written the main story – a classic romantic tragedy set in a mildly dystopic future – he goes to bed, exhausted, falls asleep.

When he wakes up, he is soaked in sweat. He gets out of bed, showers, towels himself dry, gets dressed, then makes a corned beef sandwich, which he eats on the balcony overlooking the main road. His neighbour is out on her balcony. She’s in a pea-green kimono. Her hair is tied up in a turban, a fag is dangling from her plumped-up lips. “Watcha reading?” says Chad.

“No offence,” says Chad’s neighbour without looking up from her book, “but I’m not in the mood for small talk.”

“None taken,” says Chad, who is in fact feeling a little bit miffed. He finishes his sandwich, lights up a cigarette. After a few puffs he flicks the cigarette over the balcony and then he goes inside. He watches television for a while, some programme about the inhabitants of a slum, but in the end his listlessness becomes too much to bear and he switches the television off. He goes to his desk and writes a poem. It’s one of those poems that snips away at the construct of reality until there’s nothing left of it whatsoever.

Chad phones a friend. The friend doesn’t pick up. Fuck you, thinks Chad. He phones another friend. Same thing happens. He is about to try another friend, but then he realises he doesn’t even want to speak to a friend, not really.

He takes a shit. It’s a satisfying one. He flushes. He stays sat on the toilet, scrolls through his phone without finding anything, not one single thing, of interest. He phones Flo. She doesn’t pick up. Screw that bitch, he thinks, but no sooner has he thought that, Flo phones back. He doesn’t pick up.

He puts on a cloth cap and a farmer’s jacket and heads out. Dusk is sprinkled over everything like a fine powder. He takes a tram to the docks. The containers are piled skyscraper high. He sits on a bench watching the dockworkers doing their ant-like thing. He gets bored. He takes out his phone and uses it to dictate a poem. The poem is jaunty, has salacious themes, ends on a sour note. He stands up and does a star jump, then he runs towards the dock making a cawing sound like a crow. He does this because he can and for no other reason.

He returns to his infinitesimal house. The futility of it all is getting too much, he thinks. I agree, says the author. The end.