The Short List

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If Sedwick Crafton had been asked what the worst thing was that could happen to him he would probably have had to decide between water and Christianity. Not that he was an unkempt individual. Indeed his use of water between seven and eight in the morning threatened the harmony between him and Juanita because that was the period she was daily locked out of her own bathroom. No, it was water as in swimming pools, as in bathing in the sea at the tedious, anally retentive resorts around the English coast that would be posted on his short list. He hated water. He never wanted to get near it again ever since he nearly drowned and particularly since he got cramps in his legs from the incessant cold and found himself unable to brush off the sand that stuck to his feet like superglue and had to get home in socks full of grit.

 

As for Christianity, the less said the better. Then again, the more said the better. That way he could keep on reminding himself of his childhood, of the Christian brothers who got their rocks off by beating him with his trousers round his ankles and of the need to avoid priests and their own perverted form of self abuse for all time.

 

But neither of these horrors was on his mind at that very moment. There was a possibility that the third worst thing that could happen to him was about to happen. He’d left his car in the wrong place. By ‘wrong place’ he didn’t mean an illegal place or one that was legal when he left but which had become illegal through the flux of time. He meant one which a bunch of thugs had decided to purloin for their own drunken pleasures and which, unfortunately for him, included the use of his car as a park bench. Sedwick Crafton had, in short, parked his car in a pub car park in the centre of Barnsley on a Saturday evening.

 

His mind was now settling on quite a different shortlist. It contained those things which he could do in order to get home. At the top, appearing momentarily then vanishing without trace, was to turn swiftly on his heels, get a bus to the safety of his bed and collect the remains of his car in the morning. But there were two reasons why he didn’t feel like doing that. One was that he was really mad. The car was a very second hand Ford Granada, a bargain at £499 and a joy to ride around in. He never thought he would be able to acquire such luxury so soon after his bankruptcy. How dare these arseholes use it to lounge around on. The second reason was that he’d downed a bottle of merlot, one of many since becoming a bankrupt, and any notion of comparing discretion with valour was not going to surface for many hours. So he chose the worst option.

 

‘Get the fuck off my car you morons.’

 

The lads, who had been laughing, pouring cans of beer down their throats and swearing at others who’d had the temerity to wander into the car park, ceased all action as they turned and collectively bore their eight eyes into Sedwick. Slowly they slid off the bonnet and roof and stood in a vague line in front of him.

 

‘You piece of shit,’ said one of them.

‘Takes an arsehole to recognise it,’ said Sedwick and was sufficiently sober to realise immediately that the remark was not one that should have been made in the circumstances.

‘We’re going to rearrange your kidneys, you shit,’ said another as they advanced toward him.

 

The car park was bordered by high walls and the entrance was a narrow passage between the pub and the adjacent building. There were no choices but to run forward and be cornered or to turn and run back into the street. Bankruptcy was one thing but death through the rearrangement of one’s kidneys quite another. In spite of everything he didn’t want to die just yet. He was still too interested in seeing how much worse life could get. It was curiosity that was getting him through each day.  As he turned towards the relative security of the street he heard a call from above.

 

‘Now stop that.’

 

He looked up to see a man leaning out of a window set high up in the boundary wall. He was wearing a cassock and holding a bucket which he abruptly tipped up. Water cascaded down and hit the yobs full on the head. It was a masterly shot.

 

‘I’ve been watching you. Please pipe down. I’m trying to work. And leave that man alone.’

 

The yobs stopped and looked up. As Sefton wondered briefly whether the cassock coated man would have recognised any of the obscenities now being fired in all directions, he took advantage of the moment to disappear down the street towards the security of the bus station. Seated on the number seventy four amongst the louts and their molls heading for the Hadean fire of Barnsley’s nightclubs, Sefton realised that he would need to modify his short list of most horrible things. The building next to the pub, he now recalled, was similar to the one he had spent his tortuous and humiliated young life in. One of those places in which silence and prayer and getting up before sunrise, and being beaten by masters who knew that revenge was impossible, are the point of existence. And now one of its residents had saved his kidneys and possibly his life. And he’d done it with water. Route 74 through Barnsley had little similarity to the road to Damascus but for Sedwick there was, at that moment, not much difference. Curiosity about how much worse life could get had been worth it because he’d just discovered that, eventually, it didn’t.