BLOOD PUDDING

by
Neil Cocker

Valentine whirled himself round in the swivel chair, the pot plants and pillars and windows helicoptering around him.

Something vibrated close to his groin.

He lifted his feet up and the chair slowly cranked to a halt. The vibration continued in his pocket, and he slid his hand into his chinos, down past a jumble of coins and keys, groping for his Nokia. As he took out the phone the room was wobbling.

�Hallo?�

�This is the emergency services. You just called us a moment ago?�

�No Ah didnae.�

�We received a 999 call from this number.�

�Wasnae me.�

�Did you have your phone in your pocket?�

�Ehm� uh-huh.�

�Was the keypad locked?�

Valentine said nothing.

The voice continued. �This happens quite a lot. Please be more careful in future.�

�Sorry��

But they�d already hung up.

He locked the keypad and buttoned the phone away in his jacket. Shit. Bad start to the day. He sighed and looked over the counter. They had been open for more than fifteen minutes, and still no customers. This was seen as one of the advantages of working in the Edinburgh Ladies Branch: unlike the main bank area downstairs, which was constantly busy, in Ladies Branch you would only get ten or fifteen customers in any given day. But rather than just pay a cheque in and leave, the old biddies would hang around for half an hour talking to you about their son Campbell�s new conservatory, or daughter Morag�s wonderful wedding presents. Valentine was starting to get an RSI in his face from smiling so much. He had worked in Ladies Branch for most of the year, and now dreaded its ominous silence, the horrible despair when the lift pinged, delivering one of the undead.

The lock rattled on the staff door. Valentine smiled. Ramage walked in, shirt-tail flapping behind him.

�RAMAGE!� shouted Valentine. �YOU ARE THIRTY SEVEN MINUTES LATE!�

Ramage wiped his sleeve across his face. His cheeks had a spanked-red look about them, eyes downcast, hair that always looked wet. Ramage was the plaything of the bank staff: endlessly gullible, timid and unsure, but with a temper that occasionally exploded in a fireworks display of kicked doors and punched walls. Ramage was only the second male to work in Ladies Branch since its inception in 1937. Valentine was the first.

�Ma bus was late,� said Ramage.

�That�s no excuse.�

�Did Ah miss anythin?�

�My left testicle phoned the emergency services.�

Ramage�s eyes glazed over, and his face moulded into the familiar expression of confusion. �Yer what?�

�Never mind. Listen, ye�re gonnae have to hold the fort for half an hour. Ah�m goin over to the blood van.�

�Right� is it today everybody�s givin blood?�

�It certainly is. And I hope, young man, that you will also be donating.�

Ramage shifted where he stood. �Ah�ve never given blood before.�

�Aye ye have. This place bleeds ye dry every day.�

Valentine took the back stairs and crossed the car park to the blood bus. He sat in the glass box with the nurse and she pricked his thumb and gave him the form which clarified if he�d injected drugs or had sex with a man recently. Then she led him over to the bed and they fixed the strap around his bicep and pumped it tight. He lay still and closed his eyes. The needle slipped into his arm and burrowed around under his skin for a couple of seconds until he felt the nurse secure it in place. The pillow was soft and smelled of washing powder, and he breathed out through his nose, feeling his body melt into the mattress.

He liked giving blood. It gave him the opportunity to (a) be self-righteous for a few hours and (b) make his wife feel guilty when he got home from work (she had a thing about needles). He glanced down at his arm. His blood was draining away into the wee bag, his life leaking into plastic to be packaged and sent away for filing. It was a weird concept, that part of you could just get up and leave like that, go away and be absorbed by somebody else.

Afterwards, he sat with his chocolate biscuit and cup of tea, looking at the brown elastoplast in the crook of his arm. What would happen to his blood? Would it go to a car crash victim? A heart op patient? Whoever got it would never know that they had his blood, with its traces of last night�s curry. They would never be able to thank him. But then there was always the possibility that his blood would be forgotten about and sit at the back of the fridge like an out of date yoghurt. He wondered if you could make black pudding out of human blood as well.

It was raining when he stepped back out into the car park. He looked up at the Ladies Branch window and saw Ramage looking down. Valentine waved and Ramage waved back. It was worrying; Ramage seemed to consider him a friend. Valentine couldn�t be seen to treat him with anything other than contempt: in order to maintain the delicate social equilibrium in the bank it was important to slander Ramage at every opportunity. The women in the place generally regarded Ramage with a mixture of pity and revulsion; the men slagged him off behind his back and gloried in the legendary practical jokes they had played on him.

Valentine started to climb the stairs. It was only twenty past ten. He wasn�t sure how he�d get through the day. A couple of weeks back somebody pointed out to him that he had been at the bank for twelve years, and the revelation had depressed him for days afterwards. Twelve years. He kept saying it over and over to his wife, until she tutted and told him to stop moaning. What was it she�d said to him? That was it: when did you ever do anything interesting?

He�d thought about leaving the bank every day since he�d started at the age of sixteen. No, not thought about it, fantasised about it. Because leaving the bank was not realistic: there were his savings and the mortgage and the pension to think about. The truth was that the closest he ever came to leaving the bank was when he gave blood, smuggling himself out one pint at a time.

Valentine reached the staff door and typed in the combination. Ramage was sitting at the counter counting through wads of notes, tie over his shoulder, floury fingermarks on his black trousers.

�Ah told them ye were comin, Ramage. They said they didnae want your blood.�

�Aye, very funny.�

�Any customers?�

�Just that old bird.�

�Christ, which one? Give me somethin to go on.�

�Och, the one that always goes on aboot cancer.�

�Christ! Which one! Give me something to go on.�

Valentine sat down next to Ramage and put his hand in the cash drawer. He liked to run his hands over the bristling notes, imagining his fingerprints all over the tens and twenties.

Ramage stood up. �Ah think Ah�ll go an give blood.�

Valentine leaned back on the chair. �Remember now, just one pint. Don�t overdo it.�

Valentine watched Ramage leave. The staff door clicked shut behind him, encasing Ladies Branch in silence once again. Valentine sighed. He climbed up on the counter and swung his legs over the top, a miniature breakdance he had perfected over the last few months. The security was ludicrous when you thought about it; downstairs they had bulletproof glass and dye-sprayers and CCTV and all kinds of fancy gadgetry. Up here there was a wooden counter, buffed to a fine shine by his arse, and an unlocked cash drawer with about five grand in it.

He jumped down to the other side and walked across the deep pile carpet to the coffee machine. The dispenser was strictly for the use of customers but Valentine always used it and no-one had complained. He made himself a black coffee with three sugars and flicked through the pile of house-keeping magazines. Fuck, he was bored. And depressed. He wasn�t sure what was worse at the moment: his job, his marriage, or his Irritable Bowel Syndrome. They were all interlinked, a holy trinity of shit. He went to work, got bored senseless, went to the toilet, went home, argued with his wife, had dinner, went to the toilet, then filled out his daily journal of what he had eaten. His wife found the journal hilarious. She referred to it as his �Diarrhoea Diary.�

He looked over at the door to the powder room and pondered going in for a look. Sometimes the old biddies would disappear in there for half an hour at a time. He always imagined a long white room stretching into the distance, trickling waterfalls and shadowy ferns, frolicking grannies comparing hats. Maybe they all went in there to get their elixir. Maybe that was what happened to his blood; his veins were tapped every couple of months and the old dears wired themselves up to a drip and got a fix of his vitality.

He breakdanced back over the counter and slumped into the swivel chair. There was only one thing for it. He took out a bundle of ten pound notes and uncapped his black pen.

He liked to be surreal when defacing banknotes. One time, on the back of a tenner, he had drawn an additional wing onto Glamis Castle, complete with satellite dish and a waving skeletal Queen Mum. Another time he had drawn tiny devils rampaging around Lord Ilay�s shoulders, some of them clambering up into the tumbling curls of his wig. But his all-time favourite was his perfect line drawing of Saddam Hussein�s grinning face on the back of a fiver which was, amazingly, returned to him in a pub in Dundee.

He spread the ten pound notes out on the counter, waiting for inspiration. But nothing came. He looked at the notes and for once saw money rather than blank canvases. It was bizarre that he scrimped through every month, life ruled by these bits of paper that he had unlimited access to every day. He had worked out how easy it would be to rob the place and give himself a few days to get to South America, but he knew he didn�t have the balls to do it.

Valentine opened his wallet. He had a scrunched up, sellotaped fiver in it. It would be easy to transfer all these tenners into his wallet just now, eighty or ninety quid, and then just write it off during the weekly cash balance.

He was about to replace his wallet when he noticed a sliver of foil peeking out from one of the sleeve pockets. It was a Marks & Spencer voucher for twenty pounds. He held it in his hand, puzzled. Then he remembered: it had been a Christmas present from his mum. Jesus, he�d completely forgotten about it. Brilliant. Maybe he�d go down Princes Street at lunchtime, buy some of that white chocolate cheesecake and Czech lager and chicken fajitas.

The lock rattled on the staff door and Ramage reappeared. �Did Ah miss much?�

Valentine swept up the ten pound notes and replaced them back in the drawer. �Nah.�

Ramage returned to his seat and picked at the elastoplast on his arm. �Didnae much like givin blood.�

Valentine smiled to himself. He had an idea. �What ye gonnae spend yer Marks & Spencer voucher on?�

�Eh?� Ramage narrowed his eyes.

�Ye know� the twenty pound voucher ye got for givin blood.�

�What ye on aboot?�

�Did ye no get one?�

Ramage scowled, indecision in his eyes.

�Look,� said Valentine, removing the voucher from his wallet. �Every time ye give blood ye get a voucher. Marks & Spencer sponsor it at the moment.�

Ramage�s cheeks turned a deep red.

�They forgot to give ye it,� said Ramage.

Ramage went to stand up, then changed his mind. �Bastards,� he said.

Valentine shrugged. �C�mon man. Are ye gonnae let them have yer blood for nothin?�

�Bastards,� said Ramage, and launched himself off his seat. He strode across the room and blustered out the door.

Valentine dialled upstairs to telebanking and told them all to look out the window. Through the smoked glass he watched Ramage cross the car park, head tilted towards the ground. The nurse stepped down off the blood bus to meet him. The lift pinged, but Valentine kept on looking out the window, grinning at his own reflection.

� Neil Cocker
Reproduced with permission

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