Wallow Man

Craig, at about this time, announced his intention to move out. I don’t know which part of it all that he didn’t like. It might have been the mess. It might have been the noise (the walls were made of cardboard after all). It might have been the relative lack of creature comforts. It might have been a single incident, like the time that Frank pinned raw fish fingers to the kitchen noticeboard.

He might have been hurt by my burgeoning friendship with Darcy, or just nonplussed enough to leave. He certainly never liked his room, although he had landed one on the sunny side.

We didn’t really want Craig to move out. Frank, of course, didn’t seem to give a shit, but I asked Craig to stay on behalf of both of us. Fife Park didn’t tolerate empty rooms for long, and the overseas income of Semester II was fast approaching.

‘We’ll get some random German called Helmut!’ I pleaded.

But Craig went to see the warden, all the same; that corpulent pie-muncher Dorian Tombs. Never before, in all my experience, had such a sour faced man, in charge of a place of so little significance, approached any task with such great pomp. Dorian Tombs was king of the molehill.

The first time that the pie-muncher came around to see us personally was less than a week after the washing powder fiasco. This was no coincidence. The cleaning staff came around every fortnight and made themselves tea in our kitchen. They never said a word to us, or cleaned anything for that matter. However, they made a point of reporting all house discrepancies back to the warden, like some kind of ugly, pensionable, secret police force.

Dorian came around while Craig was in the shower. The blanket, newspaper, and soggy, frothy, washing powder mix still festered outside the door. That week particularly stands out in my memory; I recall leaping over the caustic mess every morning and scrambling for safety. Craig, of course, wore his flip flops into the shower and foresaw no difficulties on that particular morning. He was the only person in the house, at the time.

Tombs cased the joint, no doubt, before knocking at the door of the bathroom. Craig ignored him, for a while. The knocking grew more insistent, so he called out:

‘Fuck off!’

Dorian Tombs did not fuck off. Dorian Tombs kept knocking.

Craig eventually got out of the shower, threw a towel around his waist, and opened the door. He found himself looking into Dorian’s shiny, bald pate. He probably saw the future, or at least part of what it held.

‘Oh,’ said Craig. Then I rather suspect that he asked something along the lines of ‘Can I help you?’

I doubt, quite seriously, that he told him to ‘fuck off’ again.

Dorian had a Polaroid camera hanging around his neck. He was a great collector of ‘evidence.’

‘Only perverts have Polaroid cameras,’ Frank said, later.

I think that there’s a lot of truth in that. Polaroid spent a lot of money in the eighties trying to dissociate themselves from the pervert image. They used to sell on the merit of ‘fun’ and ‘convenience’. They didn’t, of course, distance themselves from the perverts completely. There’s a lot of money in perverts; there’s a lot of them around.

[It was an interesting development that Polaroid had to pull out of their main market when digital cameras took off, but it wasn’t the most interesting development I’ve seen, thanks to Polaroid.]

At any rate, I can say from experience that Dorian Tombs never exuded an air of fun or convenience. It was quite simply not his way. He led Craig into the kitchen, and waved around with his hand.

‘You live like pigs,’ he told him.

‘Yes,’ Craig said. ‘I’m planning to move out. I’ve already been to see you about it.’

That took the wind out of his sails.

‘Why is there food on the ceiling?’ Dorian asked, after a long pause.

That took the wind out of Craig’s sails, and the fat bastard left without saying much else. There were no threats but from then on we were marked men.