Ruin Nation Read Online Free PDF Page B

can’t even obey gravity. And I’m told he’s the company safety official.
    So he’s standing at my bench. And my bench is on fire. The flames, the flammable chemicals, the grinder and its razor-sharp cutting disk skittering around his ankles – all of this, or should I say none of this, matters to him. He doesn’t do ‘mattered’ because he doesn’t do abstract thought. He doesn’t wear safety goggles, either. It hasn’t occurred to him that a shard of metal skewering him in the eye might hurt. He just stands, watching the fire spread, watching me banging at the window and (almost) wondering what all the fuss is about.
    There’s a vinyl disc playing – ‘ Twenty White-Power Hammond Greats’, squawking from a tinny speaker buried somewhere in the great morass of spilt paint and charring debris.
    I’m shouldering the door, kicking at the protruding part of the obstruction with my steel toecaps. But it’s the bottom of the door that gives in first. There’s a splintering crack and I’m in. I haven’t time to think and Ambler isn’t going to do it for me, so I dash forward and grab a fire extinguisher. There’s smoke, shouting, swearing, and I’m spraying like Neptune at a porno shoot. Water everywhere. The grinder shorts and I’m lucky not to get electrocuted. And finally, when the fire’s out, I spray Ambler. And I don’t stop until the extinguisher’s empty. And he just mewls over the wreckage of the whatever-it-is he was making.
    Everything’s quiet now, save for the drip, drip, dripping and the soft splash of our work boots. And he turns to me, sooty-faced and sopping, squelching forward like a proud parent cradling some unidentifiable baby in his arms.
    “Spice rack,” he says. Moron.
     
    Now, what would life be without cruelty, irony and good things happening to bad people? I don’t know. Ask God. You pray hard enough, maybe he’ll take enough time off from wanking up tsunamis to answer you. I doubt it, though, so here’s my own little parable: The Story Of The Camel And The Erection.
    Historically, people have taken their names from the things they do, sell, kill, kill for money or kill for money and then sell. With this is mind, it is entirely possible for a man whose ancestors traded hump-backed livestock in the Middle East to be called Bactrian. Or even Dromedary. And it’s not impossible to imagine later generations of folk with these camel-based names forming a humorous internet group. And it's all such fun that they arrange to meet. And then they get drunk and they sleep with each other. Commit that to memory.
     
    Now, Adrian Dromedary is a noxious specimen with a fat face and engorged cherub-cheeks crazed with a Rorschach pattern of burst blood vessels. Buckteeth? He’s got ‘ em. And bulging piggy eyes jutting from the collage of zoological atrocities he calls his head. His overall expression? Like he’s sucking on a rancid citrus fruit. Probably one of Richard Gifford’s.
    More of a bipedal hippo than a man, he lives for the satiating of his baser urges. I’m talking food and ‘specialist’ magazines and taking an unhealthy interest in what the mailman might bring in a discreetly wrapped bundle. So you can imagine his surprise when Posty delivers an elegantly typed communication informing him that his entire life is a lie. His camel classification is wrong. His mother was a Dromedary all right, butMr Dromedary, never existed. He’s the bastard son of the late Lord Annadin Bactrian and half-brother to surfacing turd of politics, Humboldt.
    So Dromedary’s been growing increasingly tired of his life of solitude and self-abuse. And his current profession just isn’t supplying those feelings of God-like omnipotence he’s after. Okay, his little, printed ladyfriends give him some sense of control but not as much as, say, firing off a .45 calibre pistol in a crowded restaurant. Or anywhere really, providing people die and he might feel like a man for once. So, we can say