Shit under the Sole: The Torments of Ken Meaner

Ken was farting and dreaming when the brick crashed through the bedroom window. Shocked out of his ideal early-afternoon posture - spreadeagled across his mattress, his mouth splayed against the crumpled pillow - he suffered a phantom sensation of falling very rapidly and landing very abruptly. To compensate for its failure of corporo-spatial awareness, Ken’s brain then threw Ken's body off the side of the bed.

‘EerrrgghnmrnmnrrgmfckkAVEN’TDONEANYTH...!’  This Ken sort-of screamed, in semi-conscious remonstrance, before his unready bedwarm bones hit the cold floorboards. Nose-first.

Wrapped around the half-brick with a pink post office rubber band was a typed letter, tri-folded and headed with a logo Ken had come to recognise and dread.

‘I haven’t done anything.’  Ken’s tone this time round: whimpering, twattish.

He unfolded the letter and, at the same time trying to stem the flow of blood from his nostrils, mouthed to himself the letter’s contents.

Dear Mr Meaner,

Following from our last correspondence dated 14 Jan 2009 concerning your outstanding professional study loan, we write to advise you that, due to your continued non-payment of the sum owing, the bank has obtained legal sanction to impose its Voluntary/Involuntary Organ Donation penalty, as provided for under the loan's terms and conditions (Section 13 ix - Extraordinary Default Compensation Policy).

The EDCP gives the bank the option to extract with or without consent any non-vital organ (or organs) from the body of the default customer, the resale value of which, as determined by the bank's legal department in conjunction with the Department of Health, should be equal or to within £10.00 of the unpaid amount. As the balance outstanding from your loan is currently £1,451.01, the bank will exercise its legal right to extract your right kidney.

You will be hearing from our VIOD surgeon's office within the next 14 days. Please be advised that if you fail to present yourself for the donation of your left kidney within the timeframe given, in accordance with the terms and conditions of your loan, you will be hunted like a rabbit, strung up and flayed alive.
Please also be advised that a £25.00 administrative charge will be applied for this operation.

A copy of all relevant legal documentation will be attached to another brick and thrown through your window in the next three to five working days. 

Please ensure that you drink plenty of water and avoid smoking and drinking alcohol before your operation.
Yours sincerely,

The Bank

Walking through the park, palpating what may or may not have been a broken nose (it was) and listening to old soul songs at a dangerously tinny pitch through his charity shop earphones, Ken tried and failed to address the day’s anxieties. The impressions flashing across Ken’s ‘mind’s eye’ gave the following:

‘We get to doing… oh god… precisely the shit… won’t somebody have mercy…we said we were most keen to avoid … sometimes I don’t know… and it’ll all end with a howling and a hating…how I stand…and we’ll do it all again but with a dimmer dimness in the eyes and a harder hardness in the heart and…somebody have mercy… what does that matter anyway…and tell me… when I’ve got holes in my shoes and…what’s wrong ... no money for a haircut…what’s wrong…and a bastard broken nose… with me…and the bank’s going to take my kidney… oooooh, wo-wu, woooh-woh…baaastaaard…’

Headhunter

Dear M,

I am writing to you because you are brilliant at your job and my bank is jealous of your bank because you work for your bank and not my bank. My big boss wants you to work at my bank instead.

It's a really good bank. We've got loads of money and gold and diamonds in the safe and a big, tall skyscraper in the middle of the City (our bank's tower is much bigger than your bank's tower).

If you joined my bank you would get a suitcase full of £50 notes as a reward for joining us and a yacht in Monaco. You would share it with one other person to start with, but you would come to own outright after just a year of working in your job in our massive tower.

We have lots of parties when we can't be bothered working any more and lots of mega-celebrities come to entertain us while we drink champagne from gold cups. Last week Bill Clinton came and played his saxophone for us and next week Damian Hirst is coming to give us a workshop on how to make diamond-studded baby skulls.

If you are still not sure if you should join us and do all your brilliant work at my bank instead of your bank, let me just say one more thing: everyone's really cool, you can smoke in the office, we have Illy coffee in our really expensive coffee machines, you will get a really nice badge with your name on it which is made out of solid gold, a massive office with bulletproof glass walls, and a chauffeur-driven limousine as long as two stretchy buses.

See please let me know what you think of my big boss's offer as soon as you can. We only like the best people to work at our brilliant bank and we think you're one of the best, so have a really good think about it.

Kind regards

DS