Ruin Nation Read Online Free PDF

traffic smashes; attacks by religious extremists and the maniac on the train with the broken vodka bottle as sharp as the memory of the wife who’s just left him.
    Your main challenge is keeping your pointless job and fighting your own bad complexion. Or you can go out after curfew and see how far you get before the patrols mace you or a leopard chews off your face.
    Mortality should make us feel alive. But it doesn’t. So I guess we don’t have fun anymore. We have it made for us.
    And I just want an adventure.
     
    * * *
     
    Sparks shower against the surface of the workshop door. What isn’t scorched is scratched and gouged by the various belts and buckles and ‘interesting’ clothing of the staff. There’s a window – a small square of wire-reinforced glass – and it’s sandwiched between the exterior frost and interior filth. And I’m there, pounding my fist on it, trying to get in. There’s some kind of debris caught beneath the bottom edge of the door, acting like a wedge, and I can’t get the damn thing open.
    Inside, there’s dirty magnolia walls supporting even dirtier metal racking. Cobwebs everywhere – they coat the dull grey shelves and the detritus upon them. Each shelf’s labelled and each label bears absolutely no relation to, well, anything whatsoever. Nothing reveals any obvious purpose, but nothing’s ever thrown away. Because it might be important. But no one knows what’s important anymore, because dozens of workers have come and gone over the years and the remainder have given up trying to work it out. It’s like trying to decode The Secrets of the Ancients.
    There’s an area referred to as ‘The Kitchen’, but you can’t prepare food in it. The work surfaces wear a crocodile pattern of cup marks and the detergent that should be used to clean it just oozes from its coloured bottles like Martian semen. The corrugated metal roof drips condensation. Over live electric sockets.
    The workshop floor’s a greyish rectangle, textured like leprosy. Carcinogenic dust rests in conical piles itching for a lung to rustle up some tumours in. Catalysed fibreglass resin clots in unseen buckets, spewing out hot, choking fumes. Un-catalysed resin spills out from an overturned barrel, imploring something incendiary to set light to it and burn the building down. Which just might happen.
    Sparks shoot skyward like rockets then futter into nothingness. By reversing their course I trace their source and I watch in horrified wonderment.
    Now an angle grinder is a dangerous power tool. It can cut through metal, so it’s more than capable of severing an unwary finger. And it’s pretty unnerving to see it grasped in the podgy digits of the company idiot: Ambler. The grinder screams, as barrel-shaped Ambler swipes and stabs at some dark heap of something or other, muttering something racist to himself. He has dark, curly hair, a wide, liver-lipped mouth, broad, almond-shaped canine teeth and a lolling tongue. He has a dog’s mouth, when I think about it. He has an old dog’s smell. He has dog-level intelligence, hence the racism.
    He’s laughing to himself. I’m doing my amateur psychology thing and theorising that the inside of his brain must be like some cave painting: all full of stick figures and bright primary colours. Then confusion creeps over his face. I wonder if he’s thinking about something beyond his capabilities, like toothpaste tubes, a happy mouse, or not shouting at a black person. Anyway, he’s distracted and the grinder leaps from his hand and scuds across the bench, trailing flaming nuggets. 
    Now, Ambler is a mystery to me. I can’t work out what he does and I can’t work out how he does it. I don't know why he's allowed to do it here. I find it hard to believe he can breathe unassisted. Sometimes I see him sitting on the floor and I wonder when he’s going to fall off it. I watch. And he does. He loses balance, he flails around and somehow ends up on something higher up. He