What a Load of Rubbish by Martin Etheridge Page B

prosecuted. The police would occasionally send a squad car to the area just to maintain a “police presence” but it never hung around for very long. Come on, we all know these places exist. It was to this place that Malcolm was, in his depressed state, drawn. Here he felt safe. Here nobody knew him. Here he was nobody – just another of life’s failures who nobody wanted.
    And it was here he started drinking andnot just a couple of celebratory pints of beer on pay day either. Malcolm never did receive any severance pay from the council, because he had quit his flat the postman could not obtain a signature for the recorded delivery and so had return the package unopened to the sender. Eventually it came into the possession of Mister Willy Eckerslike who took it upstairs to his office, put it in a bottom drawer and locked it. He was not about to be accused of withholding a man’s pay, not him. Not the future Mayor of Suburbiaville.
    Having received no pay Malcolm had no money and so could not afford buy alcohol, so when he finished the bottle of Cinzano from the drinks cabinet in his flat, which he had originally bought for when Gisele visited on Christmas day, he started to drink the kind of drink that wasn’t supposed to be drank – metal polish, shoe conditioner, methylated spirits. Anything he could find that had been dumped on that wasteland. It did not taste very nice and you had to dilute it with rain water because if you drank it straight down and unmixed, it made your vision go all zig-zaggy and in the end you could not see a thing.
    For just over a fortnight this was Malcolm’s daily routine: he’d awake after flaking out after an evening of binging on whatever solvent he could find. Youname it: shoe conditioner, adhesive, metal polish – anything with a kick in it, and he’d just stare blankly into space until a black, unconscious state overcame him. Then, hours later, daylight would filter into his head, and off he would go on a tour of skips and dustbins to stock up for the next evening. Malcolm was on the road to ruin and he knew it. How many other famous artists have taken this path and were unable to return?
    But it had the effect of making you forget, it dulled the awful memory of his dismissal. And forgetting is exactly what Malcolm wanted to do. He wanted to forget that he could have once had a career in medicine. Wanted to forget his smart and dapper appearance, wanted to forget his skill and dexterity with the pooperscooper. The elderly ladies he had helped in their hour of need and his special relationship with mothers and their children. And it hurt him badly to think about Gisele and the close relationship he thought they were forming – she would not want to know him now.
    Even the local pooches that, out of respect for Malcolm’s hard work, did their business in the gutter, would now leave their “calling cards” heaped in unsightly steaming mounds on the pavement. And there they remained, waiting to engulf the shoe of any unawarepedestrian or to ruin the businessman’s shiny new footwear. For the “All-in-One-Der” did not begin its daily round until eleven o’clock and residents of Suburbiaville Newtown, especially the rich and famous folk of Willowy Lane, were up and at work long before that doing what rich people do best – making money.
    During the next couple of weeks “doggy doos” became such a problem that many a well-shod city gent had taken to wearing trainers to work and carrying their more expensive footwear to work. One of questions raised in Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons and aired on BBC TV was: “What is to be done about the doggy-doos in Suburbiaville?”
    Sometimes Malcolm would go to the town centre and sit by the fountain, near the duck pond, and have breakfast with the ducks. But when the ducks began to realise that Malcolm was really only interested in the