The Blueprint Read Online Free PDF Page A

roughly
translates as a split personality, wherein one of those
personalities is a serial killer. Whether the serial killer version
of Northumberland Street is the daytime one or the one that comes
out at night depends on your viewpoint, I guess. The daylight one I
could imagine being Freddy’s equivalent of a bad acid trip, what
with the looming behemoths of capitalism flanking either side,
screaming at the shambling zombie masses to come in and BUY!
BUY! BUY! or, as he puts it, to ‘come in, and hand over your
soul in exchange for a beef burger where “beef” is a very loose
translation and some shoes from a corporation whose marketing
strategy is a whispered, “We starved our infant labour force to
make these, and we’re passing the savings on to YOU! ”’ I
don’t necessarily agree with this assessment, firstly because
MacDonald’s changing their recipe is one of the few things that
would get me to join a student protest, and secondly because the
people working at the aforementioned clothes stores come across as
too apathetic to be the minions of Satan, which I’d assume to be a
pretty interesting career.
    The nighttime
version is the one that I find far more terrifying. Since
Northumberland Street is one of the few places in town - probably
even the country - where one can purchase a soul-crushing
cheeseburger at four in the morning, in the last couple hours of
twilight it suddenly fills up, becoming the site of a kind of
pissheads’ pride parade full of indecipherable screaming and
shouting, people wearing less clothes the colder it gets - as
though they think the weather has called them a pussy and this is
the best way to square-up to an abstract concept - and mating
rituals dredged up from the shadows of our cave-dwelling past.
Between the rush to get a Big Mac or a taxi and people’s panicked
last attempts to ensure they don’t go another week without sex, it
feels as though the normal rules of society somehow get waived.
That notion gets the better of me, I’ll admit. All the more on a
Friday night, since it’s the one occasion where the city’s native
and student populations come into contact. Even Charlie’s
insistence that he’s seen more fights on Mondays than Fridays and
that this is all paranoia on my part doesn’t make the terror any
less potent.
    He can’t get
enough of that sort of thing, though. Charlie thrives on
unpredictability and booze-fuelled chaos, to the point where I
sometimes think he’s counting down the days until civilisation
collapses in on itself, burying those few scraps of the social
contract he hasn’t yet thrown into the fire. I’d imagine it’s this
aspect of his personality that leaves him unable to resist the
allure of shoplifting every time we go into town together. While
we’re looking around HMV, in my peripheries I notice him using one
hand to bring one DVD up to his eyes for closer inspection, whilst
using the other to surreptitiously slip a different one inside his
coat. I tut, mostly to convince myself that I disapprove, but
secretly I’m wondering whether I should ask him to nab me the Gilmore Girls box set while he’s at it.
    I go back to
browsing through the cavalcade of entertainments that I’ll never
have the spare cash to take over to the till. When I first noticed
Charlie’s kleptomania I couldn’t go into a shop in his company
without my blood pressure ratcheting up several notches, but I’ve
since cottoned-on to the fact that he’s got a cape of Karmic
invulnerability. Not just when it comes to shoplifting, either;
I’ve literally never seen him suffer any sort of consequences for
his laziness, his utter lack of shame or his general lack of
respect for the law; he was born with the luck of the Irish, the
bastard, without getting lumbered with the traditional alcoholism
and unintelligible accent. Well, without the accent, anyway.
Whatever Liz says, I guarantee that he’ll end up graduating with a
2:1 and a decent paying job – you mark