Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [4]
Hell is other people, he thought on this particular morning as he crunched the truck down through the gears and brought it to a shuddering halt on the seafront. Even if by some miracle he did one day meet Sally Thomsett or the Hai Karate girl and she did, by some far greater miracle, turn out to fancy him, he honestly doubted whether he would be able to cope. Part of him desperately wanted to be loved and accepted, but the more dominant part balked at the prospect of what that would really involve. People - real people - were different to fantasies. They were too unpredictable, they wanted to enter into relationships that needed to be worked at, partnerships in which compromises had to be reached, sacrifices made.
„What‟s this? Offering a silent prayer to Neptune?‟ said a voice from the back of the truck, and Jack realised he had been daydreaming again. It had been happening with increasing regularity this past week or so, an inability to concentrate on what was happening around him, a tendency for his thoughts to drift inward. By now he was finding it difficult to keep track of conversations without his mind slipping away. It was almost impossible to settle down to read or watch TV for any length of time. Perhaps it was all to do with the fact that he‟d been sleeping badly of late. His dreams had been full of dark, unsettling images that caused him to wake several times a night, sweating and gasping for breath.
The frustrating thing was, he could not recall the specifics of any of these nightmares. If something beyond his usual anxieties was bothering him, he had no idea what it was.
„Sorry, just... erm... just collecting my thoughts,‟ he mumbled in reply and, twisting round, attempted a grin that he couldn‟t help but feel sat awkwardly on his face.
The group in the back, his eight-strong workforce, four lining each interior wall of the truck, stared back at him sullenly. Jack felt sweat trickle down his forehead, moisten his armpits. At forty-four he was a good quarter-century older than every one of these boys. They made him feel dull, fat, ugly and unaccountably nervous. They made him feel like a teacher in dubious control of a class of students who felt nothing for him but contempt, or perhaps, even worse, pity
„Right,‟ he said with hollow bonhomie, „let‟s get to it then,‟
and he rubbed absently at the rash that had sprung up on his arms in the past week, and which in the muggy, sweaty heat was itching more than ever.
They climbed out of the truck, carrying the paraphernalia they would need to clear the beach of rubbish left by both holidaymakers and the outgoing tide. Jack had been doing this job for a long time and had seen enough stuff washed up on the beach to put him off swimming for life. As well as the usual rubbish - bits of old fishermen‟s netting, plastic bottles, rusty tins - there had been dead animals (dogs and cats mainly, and once half a horse, trailing bluish-white guts bleached of blood), syringes, surgical dressings, raw sewage and chemical drums rusted and punctured. He had never found a person, or bits of a person, but he knew one or two workers who had. Mike Salters and Craig Branch had once found the body of an old woman floating in on the tide, her face black and eyeless, shrimps and baby crabs spilling from her mouth as the waves dragged her up on to the beach. And there was talk that Tony Carver had once found a man‟s decomposed head in a Sainsbury‟s bag, the victim of a gangland