Ted by Jason Jackson

Ted MP3

Read by Jim Cogan

Ted used to dress up like a nun. Usually, it was for Children in Need, but sometimes it was fundraisers, that time there was the tsunami. He’d carry a bucket, wear a pair of false breasts outside his habit – if that’s what you call the thing a nun wears – and he’d charge you fifty pence a squeeze. They made a noise like a duck if you squeezed hard enough. Some people used to laugh.

He had a photograph on his desk of his wife, his kid. It was the kind of picture you could imagine he’d cut from a magazine and put in a frame, just to pretend there was a family. You hear about these people, rocking in their darkened rooms alone at night and pretending to everyone at work they’re happily married. But Sam in accounts said he’d bumped into the three of them at some garden centre, said the wife was surprisingly tall, the kid well-behaved. Ted didn’t talk about them much, but if you asked him, he’d give you the normal response, yeah, fine, off to the coast in the caravan for the weekend, or whatever.

 

At the time, I was engaged, had my eye on promotion. I used to take Sal to Indian restaurants, loud bars that were open past midnight, clubs with names like QuBall, BaseRider. We lived in an apartment with a balcony, and I’d come home from work, sip large gins and we’d talk about the people we worked with thinly disguised irony.

Each day, I’d look at Ted and I’d feel my chest tighten. I knew that he watched Coronation Street. I knew that he preferred formula one to football. I knew that he wore the same five shirts to work each week, red on Monday, green on Tuesday, whatever the sequence was. He wore Disney ties and matching Disney socks.

I mean, Jesus wept.

I didn’t do anything bad. Not really. Jay was behind most of it. He thought of the porn mags. We used to leave them in Ted’s drawer, his in-tray, under his desk. We’d watch him. He never said a word to anyone about it. He’d see the mag, sigh, and he’d pick it up, roll it up, carry it across the office to the paper recycling bin.  

So Jay pushed it further. He took the photograph from Ted’s desk, scanned it, and he made a mock-up newspaper story, with the photograph as the centrepiece alongside a reproduction of Ted’s security pass, all about how this beautiful family had disappeared, how police had searched for them everywhere, how they suspected foul play, and how the father, the husband, ‘Disney-loving nun-impersonator’ Ted was their chief suspect.

It made me laugh.

Jay stuck the article up in the canteen and by the time Ted got there on second lunch, half of the building had seen it. Apparently he took it from the wall, read the whole thing while he ate his pie and chips, and then he rolled it up and put it in the recycling bin.

We stopped after that. Jay was eyeing the same promotion as I was, and rumours had started that either one or both of us was behind the newspaper thing, so we decided to leave it alone. I told Sal, and she said good, it was about time I grew up a little bit.

The night I caught them I was drunk. I’d been out with a few people from football - it was the end of the season. The worst thing was that they were in the bed I slept in. The bed we slept in. They weren’t at Jay’s, and they weren’t at a hotel. I knew exactly what that meant.  

It meant they wanted to get caught.

I came back early - I’d wanted to see her, had even taken some ribbing from the boys about how I was under the thumb - and as soon as I walked in I could hear them.

I walked into the bedroom, and then I walked straight back out again. I walked out of the door, got into my car, and I drove away.

It was a Wednesday night, and I took the next two days off. I went to the coast, booked into a cheap hotel. I lay in bed, watched Sky Sports, drank gin straight from the bottle and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. The only thing I ate was pepperoni pizza, which I got delivered to the hotel reception at five pm each day.

On Monday, I drove straight to work in the clothes I’d left in on the Wednesday.

Jay didn’t even look at me when I walked in. He’d taken the photograph I had of Sal from my desk and put it on his. I knew what he wanted from me, and I didn’t say a word.

Ted was there, along with everyone else, and things passed like any other Monday. People worked. People made coffee. People worked some more. There was some problem with a big contract that Jay and some of the others had been working on, so there was quite a bit of coming and going around eleven. Soon it was just me and Ted.

I’d like to say that he said something to me, some kind of consoling words. I knew what Jay was like, and I knew that everyone must have known. But Ted didn’t say anything. He didn’t stand up, walk over and squeeze my shoulder, he didn’t lean across to me and say, “we all think Jay’s out of order,” and he didn’t even offer to make me a coffee when he got up to make his.

He sat there in his red Monday-shirt, and he worked.

I worked too, and at the end of the day, I went home. Sal’s stuff was gone. There was no note.

The next day, I went to work, came home. Did the same the next day. And the next. I didn’t get the promotion, and nor did Jay, but he got another job, better pay, for another firm, so he was gone within the month.

Last week, it was Children in Need. Ted came to work dressed as a nun, breasts high and handsome, carrying his bucket, smiling, but the boss called him into the office, and when he came out again, the breasts were dangling in his hand.  He went straight to the toilets and when he came out he’d taken off the nun costume.

He still took the bucket around the canteen that lunchtime, and a few of the offices in the afternoon, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. I asked him, finally, near the end of the day when there were only the two of us left in the office.

“Said it was inappropriate.”

I shook my head.

“Never mind,” he said, and he smiled, shrugged, and turned back to his computer.

I looked at the nun costume and the deflated breasts lying under his desk, and I looked at his broad back, his hunched shoulders. I looked at the photograph on his desk, his wife, his kid.

I picked up my briefcase, and I walked to the door. For the first time since I’d worked there, I said, “ ‘Night, Ted.”

He turned to me. “Yeah, ‘night,” he said, and he made it seem as if it were the easiest thing in the world.  

(c) Jason Jackson, 2016

Jason Jackson writes short fiction and poetry. You can find links to some of his recent published writing at www.jjfiction.wordpress.com

 

 

 

Jim Cogan is a scriptwriter, documentary maker and occasional voiceover artist based in Oxford. After far too much acting at university, he studied Creative Writing at Birkbeck and jointly won the Liars’ League Most Valuable Player writers’ award 2015.