Introducing the first chapter of Tender is the Gelignite

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Definitely not the best idea to stare at the rain when you’re crossing the road.

First, no matter how calm and relaxed and dreamy you feel, your mug will form a snivelling sneer. Second, it’s likely that a pretty-car will knock your block off. Unintentionally for once.

A black shiny pretty-car screeches to a halt right up by my hip and I blink and jump back onto the pavement. It careers off again straight away, with a tuneful ‘fucking stupid, miserable, crazy, fat, dick-flapped cu-…’ stringing out of the driver’s window. I wrinkle my conk. The watchtower looms over the dim and dingy rows of red warehouses, prickly coils of barbed wire lacing over obtuse bleacher roofs.

In the UK there’s what I call UMAY, laws where you literally may pick whatever Uniform you like. Any clothes any style any arrangement. Which is great. Freedom and choice and all that. I like knowing who and what I am. Just so long as you stick to it afterwards mind, that’s very important.

Me

Feet: Laced-up bovver boots.

Bod: Black jumpsuit. Jersey.

Coat: Woollen, blood-coloured.

Choker: Scarf, like a blanket. Black, white, yellow.

I crunch my way through the downpour, the chopped fragments of glass, grit and sodden cardboard, squishing, mingling and munching in the thick soles of my bovvers, a firm barrier between my digits and the grindy, grimy slop. Careful: scantily scattered used condoms are a slippery risk, always best to avoid splurting skins.

Completely out of control Conscript.

This creeping crisis always begins when I first start walking to my Employment. At the beginning, I step into the hustling muscling city Centre-For-Work. Buildings are tall, sleek and clean. Dull sky is reflected beautifully, pavements are fresh and clear, streets are pedestrianised for bods, odds, sods, Conscripts, capitalisers, Employers and bods. Not many Poor Ones but they constantly hang about unseen. Clacking from the soles of hard-heeled shoes clash with snaps and spits coming from the Autogrammers, their portable ze-cams and ze-phones capturing the commute. Autogrammers aren’t just some nuisance bods that you need to dodge with their flashes and their cracks; they fill the city Centre-For-Work, providing photographic evidentials of everything and every bod all the ploughing time. That’s why you’d better stick to your all-important Uniform, especially during the day. Otherwise you’ll be Unrecognised and, well, that’s always a mess waiting to mong.

Walking through the city Centre-For-Work is void and impersonal; bods autogramming, staring at hologrammed ads or news stories on the roof tops or plodding along in a misshapen and miserable manner on their way to some office box or other. But there’s some comfort in seeing other like-feeling shittos living out the communal curse, no matter how vapid and sophisticatedly superficial the surroundings.

But crossing the ornate nineteenth century old old cold bridge into Strangeways, like I do and did every sodding day, you want to see as few bods as possible. You can never trust anybod driving them BMW, Jaguar or Mercedes Benz around a god-forsaken No Bod’s Land shit-hole dump like where I work. But you see them there a lot. What has a nice pretty-car got to do with a place so crap? A place so measly, oozing with muck, sweating like a foul ponging cheese or cold sore on the way out? Them BMW, Jaguar and Mercedes Benz form a clean, cool contrast to such a mildewed patch: the rotting decaying roads and alleys; prozzes clopping about in puffer coats, flashing over-worn underwear and grotesque kitten heels as they perch on corners or fumble after these luxury-wagons, these fill-your-bovvers cock-on-wheels succulently-leather-arsed motor machines. Drug dealers dally at an angle to the prison, the tell-tale trainers lobbed over the disused ze-phone wire, hanging in a still brooding manner over the grids of warehouses.

I hate to see those cars. I hate being mistaken for a prozz. They crawl up alongside you. Even though you can’t see the toads inside you can feel the goggly woggly globes scanning your bod like you’re a slab of meat hanging in a blood house. Except they want to fuck you instead of eat you. Same thing really though, no? Tell me I’m wrong. I fantasise everyday about smashing them up. In my head, I take one of the slippery slimy waste bricks that has been lying chucked about round here since who knows when and pummel it into the pretty-car. The windscreen doesn’t stand a chance against my bricky blows, with Odious Toadious inside bricking his denim dick-casket as glass shards are cast in all the directions. He screams and shouts ‘you crazy betch’ and I shriek with delight at his panic, taking my big booted bovver foot to the hood and kick kick kick.

TAKE THAT YOU FILTHY FAT FUCK

No pretty-cars lurking today. I crunch on unwatched.

I pass the same bod every day. I think he must actually live in Strangeways or something because he’s always hurrying down the hill, every fucking day. He’s Asian, with a kind pleasant mug. We glance at each other every morning. I get the feeling he’s a nice bloke. You can tell who the nice ones are around here. The ones who keep their heads down and plough on; not the serial strutters, the swaggering shits who are proud to be a big-shot in a piss-pot like this.

Welcome to the hub of the UK’s fashion industry, the old Hell by wholesale.

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Tender is the Gelignite is now available to buy from Amazon. Get your copy here >

Copyright © Elizabeth Harper 2017