Two in the Front, Two in the Back
New fiction from TIM WEST. In this surreal comedy, an elephant dreams of writing a sitcom about a brothel, but is trapped in a soul-destroying job in advertising. One day, however, he extracts a terrible revenge.
Frank opened the bathroom door. The elephant turned its head toward him and glared. It trumpeted its irritation. Frank closed the door and the elephant turned back to its paper, scowling at the sports section. Every morning, the same thing.
Downstairs, Frank opened the cupboard, removed his box of Frosty Flakes, upended it over his blue bowl. The skimmed milk stood to one side in readiness; his favourite spoon lay upon the counter. Nothing emerged from the box. The elephant, once again, had finished his cereal and put the empty box back in the cupboard. Frank hated that.
He stood jangling his keys noisily by the front door about twenty minutes later. The sound grated on his nerves and had no effect on the elephant's, but every morning that it was more than five minutes late, which was every morning, Frank jangled his keys nonetheless. The elephant was always at least five minutes late because it liked to read the paper thoroughly over its breakfast and succeeding bowel movement, and spent a good quarter of an hour towelling down after its shower. An elephant has a great many hard to reach places. However, despite always being at least five minutes late leaving the house, neither Frank nor the elephant was ever late getting to work. This often led the elephant, during its more contemplative moods, to reflect on the concept of 'leaving late'. Frank never reflected; by nature always in a hurry, he was not a reflector but a jangler.
The elephant sauntered downstairs at ten to eight, hat on head and holding a slice of toast and marmite, which it munched delicately as it passed Frank at the door and headed out to the car.
Twenty-seven minutes later, pulling up dangerously on a busy corner, the elephant dropped Frank at work. He was an under-writer at one of the city's largest insurance providers. The elephant didn't really understand what an under-writer was or what Frank did, and its mind tended to wander at dinner parties or in bars when he tried to explain. It involved lots of numbers and, the elephant suspected, risk analysis. Grim prospect. The elephant was more of a beast for language. It had dreams of someday writing a sitcom - about a man who runs a brothel in Morningside, but suffers the daily interference of his elderly mother and the continued efforts of the dimwit from the Home Office to have his girls deported. In the meantime it whored its own talents at the lacklustre ad agency, Lloyd-Platt and Associates. It waved Frank goodbye and continued to the office.
Cynthia the temp was bending over a pile of papers as the elephant entered. Her round buttocks strained the black polyester of her supermarket trousers. Their white label poked out from the top, at the base of her spine. Wash at 40û. The elephant thumped its right foot five times on the floor and reared its trunk to the ceiling, showing its white ivory to fine effect. She seemed to wiggle her hips slightly in response - or did it just imagine that? Christ, it thought, King of the Animals and no tail in - what? - over eight months? It hung its hat on a peg by the door and walked round to its desk, keeping one eye on Cynthia's expansive arse.
Mr Hitchcock came in, whistling the Marseillaise as he always did on a Tuesday morning. These people and their routines, the elephant thought. God help us. If I end up like that... But it had plenty of routines, all sorts of things. And Cynthia's at least five years too young for me, it realised with a sudden sense of nausea. It saw itself as Cynthia saw it: grey, slightly wrinkled, a spent force stuck in a seedy office where it would most likely die, slumped over its desk with a sugared bun stuck in its throat.
'Good morning, good morning!' Mr Hitchcock said, unconsciously picking a paperclip off the elephant's desk, twisting it in his hand and slowly unfolding it. 'And how is my number one most valued member of staff this fine day?' He didn't wait for a reply. 'Hey, do you know how you can tell an elephant's been in the fridge?' he asked, smiling, running his tongue over his teeth, left to right along the top and then back left again across the bottom.
'Yeah, I've heard it,' the elephant said.
'Footprints in the butter!' Mr Hitchcock exclaimed, letting out a high, baying laugh and slapping the elephant matily on the back. 'Footprints in the butter... so, talking of, I need your copy for the Goldberg Butter people today. How's it looking?'
'Mmm,' the elephant grunted, nodding at a few sheets of paper on its desk. Cynthia wobbled through its peripheral vision and out of the room.
'Great. Really great,' Mr Hitchcock said, picking up one of the sheets. A little yellow man with a cool, post-modern expression of detachment and world weariness stood in the upper left quadrant and beside and below it the elephant had scrawled several pithy slogans, none of which it was particularly pleased with.
'Yes - yes. These are just great. But how about, Goldberg butter is better - better butter. That bettery taste? Something like that. Hmm.' Mr Hitchcock tossed the paper back on the desk and stared vacantly out of the window for a few moments, perhaps imagining himself adrift in a sea of butter. He absent-mindedly tugged his left ear lobe three times, then strode out through the door without another word.
Scott, another 'creative' without the ability or inclination to progress beyond the grim undeath of Lloyd-Platt, threw a paper ball at the elephant from his desk across the room. 'Say, do you fancy coming to a barbecue this Saturday?' he asked. 'Some friends of ours - that's me and Mary's - are coming down for the weekend and bringing these brilliant sausages they make up there.' He waved a hand expansively at the rest of the world.
'Thanks, but I'm a vegetarian,' the elephant said.
'Ah, really? Religious thing is it?' Scott asked.
'No. I just don't like meat.'
'Ah. I just thought, because you're a... Sure I can't tempt you? They're really brilliant sausages.'
'No. Thank you. I think I'm busy Saturday anyway.'
'Ah.'
The elephant bent over its desk, obliterating Scott behind its monitor, and got back to the difficult task of creating a voice for the hip butter man. It pulled a mango from its briefcase and munched it thoughtfully.
At half twelve, sitting on a park bench, watching a flock of pigeons tormenting a statue of the Duke of Buccleuch, Frank was trying to complete his crossword. He was stuck on 8 Across, Austrian Composer, seven letters. He could name about five composers in total and had no idea where any of them were from, nor any inclination to fill this terrible gap in his knowledge. The presence of 8 Across irritated him; he did crosswords to tax his ability to recall synonyms, not to test his music trivia. He put down his cheese piece, unable to finish it.
The elephant ambled through the park, enjoying the early autumn sun. On a low wall beside the bandstand someone had sprayed the words 'Pachy Go Home!' The elephant ignored this graffiti, as it ignored Mr Hitchcock's joke, as it ignored all the slurs it suffered daily. It reached Frank's bench, nodded politely, fetched a brown bag from its briefcase, and sat down. Frank felt the bench sink slightly into the earth under the elephant's weight, but said nothing. Instead he nodded in reply, scratched his knee, tossed the paper aside with a theatrical gesture of defeat.
'Problems?' the elephant asked, munching on its peanut butter and chocolate spread sandwich.
'Bloody things. I'm supposed to be relaxing, enjoying my lunch hour. I work all day at numbers, so I fill my lunchtimes working at words. I'm knackered already, and it's less than halfway through the day. The office'- he sighed and looked up, staring the elephant in the eye, defying it to make light -'was very busy this morning.'
'My boss is a prick,' the elephant said.
'They all are.'
'Want that cheese?'
'No.'
At four thirty, the elephant sat hunched at its desk, gazing at a long list of typefaces. Some were jaunty, some authoritative, some beautiful. None was suitable for a cynical butter icon; none reflected the urban dairy chic the Goldberg people were hoping to peddle. Certainly none would fit the elephant's slogan, because it had no slogan. After a full day's work, the elephant had come up with nothing better than what was written on its original stale ideas sheet, or even than Mr Hitchcock's 'that bettery taste.' It looked up - Scott was gone, out at some meeting across town. Slowly it let out a rumbling, deep-felt sigh. It slumped forward in its chair, closed its eyes, and began bashing its head on its keyboard. A string of 'j's beat a path across the screen.
Half an hour later the elephant was snoring gently, its head on its desk. Cynthia came in to say goodbye; she was off on a third date with a young lawyer named Colin, whom she found tolerably boring. His conversation lacked vim but he was due to earn quite a lot of money in the next couple of years, and Cynthia was pragmatic in her relations. Marry an advocate; keep an elephant on the side. She smiled at its sleeping mass. Grabbed her coat and left.
After another five minutes, Mr Hitchcock shook the elephant awake. 'Tsk, tsk,' he said, smiling a zig-zag smile, poised to capitalise and humiliate. 'My number one em-ploy-ee, sleeping on the job. We don't pay you to sleep. Get up. Up.' He waited as the elephant raised its grey bulk from the chair, shaking its head with sleep and confusion. 'Listen, the Goldberg account is a very important one. And I find you sleeping when you should be at work on it. Perhaps you don't take this job as seriously as you should. You've had a pretty easy time here so far. You've coasted on a couple of early pitches. But lately you just haven't been producing.' He poked a yellowed finger in the elephant's chest. Its trunk flicked; it fought the urge to lunge at him with its tusks.
'Your heart's not been in it. I've had to justify your performance to the people upstairs. I stood by you. They said I should never have hired an elephant. I said you had potential.' Again, poke went the finger.
'And here you are, asleep on company time. Perhaps I was wrong to defend you. Perhaps I should have just let them fire you when they suggested it.' Poke.
In the wild, lions will occasionally bring down baby elephants when no other prey is available. The babies provide the easiest kill and supply enough meat to satisfy the pride's hunger until a less challenging source of food wanders by. For the lion, the killing of a baby elephant is a simple economic equation, a matter of survival. There is no malice in it. In response, wherever they find them, elephants will go out of their way to trample lion cubs to death, with no material benefit to themselves. For the elephant, the killing of a baby lion is a violent act of revenge. Lions kill baby elephants so elephants kill baby lions. Hence, 'elephants never forget.'
Poke.
The elephant reared on its hind legs, let out a rumbling, whiny trumpet, flailed about itself with its forelimbs and trunk and sent office equipment flying crashing against the walls. It fell forward on top of Mr Hitchcock, crushing him beneath its weight. It stamped up and down and beat the old man's body against the linoleum flooring. It crushed his ribcage and lungs. It gouged his flesh with its tusks. It bellowed and it roared and it raged.
'You're late, even by your standards,' Frank complained when the elephant picked him up outside his office at six fifteen.
'I think I need a new job,' the elephant said evenly.
© Tim West
Photograph courtesy of Jo at Morguefile.com. For more information email info@spiralpixel.com.