capitalism.txt

Caspar

He had wet spots of loathsome cold in all his crevices; his towel had stubbornly refused to dry in the unheated flat. The card for the meter had gone missing; he had searched fruitlessly for an hour before giving up and calling the electricity company. The lady on the phone had been sympathetic but unhelpful. They could send another one by post (two days) or someone could drive out to replace it that day (£100). He'd bitten his lip, thinking of the expense, and then humbly told her that the post was fine, and he could survive without electricty for a couple of days.

This would probably have been true had he still been employed, with access to a heated office where he could spend most of the day, charge his phone or use the microwave and the kettle. Or plug the antique stereo in, and finish the mix tape. Here, possibilities were limited. He sat huddled in a  corner of a Starbucks a mile and a half from his home, with his phone and his laptop plugged in, trying to drink his acidic and oversweetened coffee as slowly as possible. A burning tyre aroma, he thought. Notes of whiskey vomit overlie a foul caustic aftertaste, and a beforetaste, and a duringtaste as well.

His brother Weston lived just around the corner with his girlfriend. All he had to do was pick up the phone, do a little explaining, and be let into their warm, spacious and happy home; they had a spare room and everything. That was family. And all he had to do in return was feel the crushing sense of strangling awkwardness that always choked both of them in. Neither of his brothers had ever really learned to interact with him as a human, only as an object: something  to be pitied, guided, or ridiculed.

And, he knew, Weston kept an instinctual guard on himself and his expansive laddish behaviors whenever Lakeisha was around; she was bound to be around, six months pregnant and all. No patronizing brotherly advice, which he might have found unwelcome if he could begin to understand any of it. And no jokes either about his dress habits or casual cracks at how white he was acting these days. Weston would ask helplessly "How's work going?" and Caspar would lie "Fine, fine,", and then they would completely run out of things to talk about.

He shuddered to think what Weston would make of an indie mix tape for a girl he met in the supermarket. There he was, earning (he estimated) four times Caspar's own former salary as a site manager, oozing confident authority in the way that had propelled him in the child world and the adult. Caspar wondered if Weston still did coke at the weekends. He had the money for sure. But there was a baby on the way, and with the confident authority also came that sense of responsibility. Sunday school had done something different to, or for, all three of them. God, not Weston. Not today.

That left the uncompromising Cordell, who had moved to New Cross, six miles and half a world away. Cordell hopefully would be engrossed with something and in the mood to essentially ignore him. There was always the chance, not negligible, that he would be feeling argumentative, which meant he would be worse than Weston. "Why are you..." he would begin, and then Caspar would make a stumbling answer, and then Cordell would ask again, "No, no, no bruv, why ARE you...?" and watch Caspar twist himself into knots under this torture. Cordell was quicker with words, proud of the man he was and eager to demonstrate it on his little brother, for whom he had a great deal of contempt. Caspar wasn't sure which brother he felt less like seeing.

There was a third alternative. Not his parents, they weren't even an option. "Why are you here" and "why didn't you stay with your brother" were questions which made him sick to even think of answering. Another night in the flat, then. What, exactly, was the importance of the mix tape after all? A van drew up next to the window outside just as he was thinking this, and he saw his outline reflected in its windows. The fatness, the baldness, the ape lips, everything he was working so hard to forget about came back to him. A stupid mix tape would be worse than useless. The whole thing stank of forlorn effort; such a smell was fatal to such an enterprise.

Suddenly he wanted to pull the thing out of the cassette player, tear its guts out and smash it into fragments under foot. As it was he second-guessed himself within a minute. It would pass, he told himself. He should, rationally, feel loath to waste an evening's work, and to meet Stacy empty handed. The tape would not get stamped on. It would take ten minutes to wipe out the preceding buffer song and play I Am The Resurrection to the end. Anywhere would be good. Anywhere with a power outlet. Anywhere.

He decided to pretend now. He pretended hard, pretended that a new, grim determination was falling upon and transfixing him. He did that once in a while, whenever circumstances cornered him and the submissive pessimism that seemed purely rational at last starkly and undeniably failed him. He was reckless in such moments, capable of charging an oncoming tube train or punching a policeman. But this time he took the machine from the damp floor next to his feet, set it on the table, tore his charger from the wall and drove the stereo's plug in. He didn't have any earphones. He didn't care.

He wound back...wound back. Was anyone looking? He turned the volume up. Oh that was getting some looks, from a pair of businessmen at a nearby table. This was sweeter than Stacy. Do you mind, do you mind, he was waiting for them to say. He couldn't even concentrate on the music. But the song was drawing to a close, a swirling riff over Ian Brown's fading voice.

Oh no. Oh he'd forgotten. This song ended with a three-four minute jam session, some sort of off-the-cuff funk fusion. He'd never cared for it in the past, but right now he blessed its existence. More volume! More obnoxious volume! He could start swaying his head and tapping his feet! He was going to be aggressively idiotic because he'd had enough of the shitty world, where key cards ran out because noone trusted you to pay your power bill and where people you'd done nothing to took your job away. The businessmen were reacting to him now.

They were smiling. They grinned, they nodded along appreciatively. One was drumming on the table. Cunts! thought Caspar, in horror. They had turned his attack on them, they had stolen his victory, and they did it via the shittiest and unfairest trick in the universe. They believed, calmly, unwaveringly, certain as the air they breathed, that they deserved to be alive. And he hated them for it.

Now the song was truly over, and he miserably jabbed the stop button before it went to the next track. He packed up, drained his coffee, all the while trying not to look at them. And when he finally slunk past them, they seemed not to care; they were chatting again. "Kopi Luwak, they call it. Indonesian for weasel coffee. This tree weasel eats the beans and shits them out. Hundred quid a pound, they say." "Bollocks!" "Wanna bet? check Wikipedia..."