CLICK TO PLAY White Van Men MP3
Read by Suzanne Goldberg
WARNING: VIOLENCE AND SWEARING
WANTED: MAN WITH VAN.
PICK ME UP—TAKE ME TO QUIET PLACE THEN WITHOUT SAYING A WORD, GIVE ME THE FUCK OF MY YOUNG LIFE IN THE BACK.
I AM NOT A WORKING GIRL. IT’S JUST WHAT GETS ME OFF.
‘Oi, let me the fuck out!’ this one says. ‘You bitch. You fucking cunt. I’m going to strangle you, girl. You hear me? You’re fucking dead.’
I brake hard and hear him slide along the floor until he slams into the partition that separates us.
I thought that the 6,000-year-old kiss was so romantic when I first saw it.
‘You cunt, you fucking bitch-cunt,’ he says.
I brake harder. The tyres screech. He slides, hits the partition with such a thump I think I hear his collarbone pop. He starts to get the idea.
This 6,000-year-old kiss. It’s two skeletons they found in Iran. One skeleton lies there with his head caved in, and the other has a hand held ever so softly to his face, and God, kissing him ever so tenderly. And as the dirt was thrown in on them, buried alive, they were frozen for 6,000 years in this one beautiful Christ Almighty moment.
‘You crazy fucking bitch!’ he says.
‘Let me the fuck out,’ he says.
I go, ‘Come up with something I haven’t heard before and I’ll let you out.’
‘People know where I am.’
‘That’s a lie. Lying makes baby Jesus cry.’
When I researched more, I find out that the 6,000-year-old kiss is two men skeletons, and they’re not 6,000 years old at all, and the caved-in skull was done by an archaeologist who dug them up wrong. And the kiss suggests they were family, the way the Asian men hold hands. It’s just the way they buy each other pints over in Asia.
‘I’ll give you money,’ he says.
‘Sure you will. All thirty quid of it, yeah?’
I’ve heard it all. Once, a poor fella called me a “cock-teaser.” Me after giving him 5,000 volts with a stun gun, duct-taping him up in the back then driving on in his van, him in the back, and he starts getting really angry because I didn’t….
But yeah, I’m not to gag them.
I say, ‘I can keep braking all the live-long day. You’ll work for what you’re wanted for just fine with broken legs and a fractured skull.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he says, proper scared now. ‘What does that mean?’
Next come pleases and grovels and waterworks.
‘Please,’ he says.
What did I tell you? It’s a science.
‘It’d be mad if you could write a Facebook status now, wouldn’t it?’ Duct-taped up in the back of my own van. Heading to unknown location. Possibly West London. Kidnapper is a crazy brunette bitch-cunt. Help. I’m really fearing the worst here.’
‘Please,’ he says.
‘THIS IS NOT A JOKE, CALL THE POLICE! It’d be better than the usual tripe on there wouldn’t it? All baby photos and who’s eating the most delicious fucking noodle soup or some such shit. I say, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody posts a photo of it on Facebook, did it fall at all?’
‘I like that,’ he says. ‘It’s very clever. You are very clever.’
‘Why, thank you. Maybe you’re not such a bad fella after all.’
‘I am. I am a nice fella.’
‘Are you respectful to women?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Do you see them as merely objects of your sexual desire?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Mind if I take a look in your glove compartment?’
‘Don’t!’
I laugh. I don’t do this because I’m a man-hating feminist, repulsed by the selection of dirty pornography he undoubtedly has in there. I’m not the victim of any sexual abuse nor was I locked in a dark room for days on end by an evil stepmother. I don’t and never have worked in the sex industry and I have never tortured animals. I’m not a psychopath as far as I know but when I researched psychopaths, I found they’re just people without a proper conscience to decipher between right and wrong. So, I don’t know, maybe I am a psychopath.
‘I do it for the money,’ I tell him. ‘It’s all about the money.’
Speaking of which, here they are, standing in their little spot like they’re two kids waiting for a school bus, white shirts, knee high shorts and Dickie bows, even holding lunch boxes though they’re not filled with sandwiches — pair of weirdoes. They look like they’re fourteen with their curly hair and porcelain smooth faces but when you look closer their eyes give them away. That checklist I just went through, these two wouldn’t be able to put as many not’s in it, believe me. Pair of absolute over-mothered, screw-loose …
I nod to them as I slow roll to a stop, engine still running. They open the side door of the van, get in, shut it and I drive on, starting my stopwatch.
‘What’s going on?’ he says.
The weirdoes laugh.
‘Get off me,’ he shouts. ‘What, what are you doing?’
I’m not allowed to jam on the brakes to stop the shouting from here on in. The noise is their responsibility now and I’m not telling the freaks otherwise. I just concentrate on not making any sudden turns or hitting any speed bumps. I take it nice and casual — not fast but not too slow either, brushing the speed limit just right like Baby Bear’s porridge.
‘No! No! No! Please, boys, stop, stop …’
I turn up the radio. As usual, phone-in chat shows about football as though they all know something about it. ‘What music have you got?’
‘AAAArrrrrgGGH!’
Surprise, surprise, Neil Diamond.
I turn on Capital. There are worse things to listen to than Beyoncé.
I heard this story once and it was told to me as true so, if it’s a lie I’m telling you here, it’s a lie I was told. A heart, belonging to a man that killed himself was transplanted into another man. Now, the wife of the man who committed suicide tracked down the recipient of the heart.
‘AAAArrrrrgGGH!’
But anyway, they hit it off — he’s grateful for the heart and there’s a living piece of the man she loved inside this new man so, they fall in love and get married! And I know what you’re thinking, Oh my God, what a beautiful and romantic story if a little tragic. But, a few years into the marriage, the new husband kills himself in the exact same way as the first husband who killed himself. I mean, to a tee. I mean, it’s unbelievable.
‘No! No! No! Jesus Christ, stop, stop, stoooooooop!’
You’re thinking, Jesus, she must’ve been some bitch to drive two men to it. Or you’re thinking, Jesus, what a vindictive prick that second husband must’ve been to go out the same way as the first guy and thus, scar the life out of her. Or you’re thinking, maybe that heart made people kill themselves that way. All of it’s open to interpretation.
‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!’
Look … I don’t know what the little fucking weirdoes do in the back. Not exactly anyway. I don’t even know what they are — medically. I don’t think there is a term for them yet. They don’t want them gagged so they like all the shouting so I mean, I could speculate. I could draw conclusions based on what I see when they’re finished but…it’s different every time. Sometimes there’s not much to see and sometimes well, sometimes it’s sometimes.
‘AAAaaa aaa aaaaarrrgh. Just kill me. Just fucking kill me!’
After that tsunami hit Japan in 2011, the spiders that usually stayed on the ground moved up into the trees because of the flooding and spun their webs up there instead, completely covering the canopies of whole forests. I mean, imagine candyfloss — that was what one tree looked like. Now imagine a whole sticky sugary forest of spider web. That’s what it looked like. And the greatest fear after the tsunami was malaria because of all the stagnant water and the population explosion of mosquitoes but the spiders, with their webs up in the trees, caught, killed and ate them all and an outbreak never arrived. I’m not saying men in white vans are mosquitoes, I’m just saying, sometimes we need spiders.
‘AAAArrrrrgGGH!’
I’m early so I circle very slowly making sure nobody is dogging in the parked cars or bird-watching in the bushes.
19 minutes 56 seconds
19 minutes 58 seconds
I slow roll to a stop, engine still running. The little weirdoes open the side door of the van, get out, close it shut and I drive on.
I know, we can use stories however we want, can’t we? Put whatever slant on them we need to further our own agenda. Someone told me, and I think it’s very good, he said, history is not the past. I like that. History is what we want it to be. Yeah, I do, I really like that.
I get to my farm in the late afternoon. It’s an hour outside London. I drive down to the quarry, reverse up to the ledge, and park. I get out, do a bit of a stretch and open the slide door, take the money, make sure it’s all there, and Christ, they’ve done a number on this fella. I close the door again, take off the handbrake and push the white van over the ledge into a decade of decomposing men in their white vans, partly entwined down there with tyres and axles, rusty wipers, smashed windscreens and intemperate dispositions, all with faces of horror on them, some hanging out their vans with their guts spilling and cursed hearts burst open, staring with sickly thick grins, immersed in fear, aswirl in their final moment of terror and pain, their eyes still calling me every name under the sun.
I should cover it up.
I know — it’s ridiculous leaving it all uncovered like this.
I’m asking to be caught and if the weirdoes found out, I’d be down there with the men in white vans. It’s just — I like looking at them.
I’ll sell the farm soon when it’s rezoned as residential. I’ll cover it all up good then. And they will be under people someday, normal good people raising families in their starter homes, hopeful and trying to do well, loving each other and wanting nothing but the best, working long hours for school trips and uniforms and they’ll never know their foundations are made of angry men in white vans, just below the surface, raging and screaming threats of murder and revenge, drenched forever in their own fear and hatred.
I don’t know.
But I do wonder, not in terms of it being art, but I do wonder, in 6,000 years, when they dig it up and exhibit its story to the world, what are they going to say happened here? What will they call it?
© David McGrath, 2013
David McGrath won StorySlam & the Peirene Short Story Competition. He has been longlisted for things and shortlisted. He represented Spread the Word at Towersey this year and he has a story in Weird Lies.
Suzanne Goldberg’s theatre credits include: Macbeth (National Tour), Miniaturists (Arcola Theatre), A Big Day for the Goldbergs (New End Theatre), Who Will Carry The Word (Courtyard Theatre) Moll Flanders (Southwark Playhouse), Soho Streets (Soho Theatre), The Cherry Orchard (Greenwich Playhouse), and Theatre Souk (Theatre Delicatessen). Suzanne regularly narrates for RNIB Talking Books.
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