Читать книгу Flam Grub - Dan Dowhal - Страница 13

Chapter 9

The optimism and bright certainty that had led Flam to Prentice College slowly began to dim as he wrote the last of his exams and faced graduation. Only a handful of funeral home positions found their way onto the college’s Placement Office job board, and competition for those proved fierce, especially for the outclassed Flam.

Despite his peerless book smarts, the introverted Flam was a veritable dunce when it came to dealings in the real world, from which he had spent so much of his life hiding. He certainly possessed no practical experience or skills when it came to landing a job. He naïvely assumed his top grades would be enough to clinch a choice of offers, and did not realize getting hired hinged on making a strong impression during the interview process.

After a half-dozen failed interviews, it began to seem to Flam as if the prospective employers were all engaged in a conspiracy. The interviewers inevitably began the sessions by commenting on Flam’s unusual name, thereby instantly putting him hopelessly on the defensive. Utterly lacking in confidence, he slumped, or squirmed in his chair, stammered, barely spoke above a whisper, and refused to look his inquisitors in the eye. Without exception, his few on-campus interviews proved unadulterated failures.

Lacking a network of personal contacts to draw upon, or the pluck and hustle to go cold-calling the local mortuaries, Flam soon exhausted all obvious prospects of employment within his chosen profession. Increasingly desperate as his last school days slid away, he widened his scope, applying for any job that remained on the bulletin board, no matter how unqualified he might be for it. Now failure seemed to spread like a cancer, for he was unable to land even the most menial of jobs.

Flam began to feel outright panic. The insurance money that had paid for his college education was all spent—in fact, he had not had enough left to buy a proper suit for his interviews, and the rumpled shirt and hand-me-down polyester tie in which he appeared for interviews had done nothing to help his prospects. The shining path of mortuary manifest destiny, on which he had been treading, was now turning out to be the slippery back of some treacherous cosmic serpent, threatening to send him tumbling back to the coal-black despair of earlier days . . . starting with the loss of his precious apartment.

Despite his domicile’s miniscule size and shabby condition, he hated to give it up. After all those years without a room of his own, the apartment was a sanctum sanctorum, albeit a cluttered one filled completely with books, whose precariously balanced stacks ran the periphery of available wall space. Flam cherished the seclusion his apartment provided. It was a private, utterly safe world where no one could abuse or insult him. In fact, he hadn’t had a single visitor since moving in—beyond his mother’s initial requisite inspection. That visit had resulted in a nightmarish day spent together cleaning and scrubbing, with his teary-eyed parent alternating between fervid prayer and entreaties to her son not to leave her, and to commute to school instead. Now it appeared Mary’s prayers had finally been answered, and Flam was damned to move back home.

It’s not that he wasn’t profoundly grateful to have reconciled with his mother. He knew—he felt—how that rekindled connection had rescued him from despair and allowed him, at the most root level, to deal with and move on from the miserable memories of childhood. Perhaps that was the very reason he dreaded now having to move back in with her again.

Nevertheless, the first of May, with a new rent payment due, was only days away. Utterly dejected, yet resigned to his fate, Flam began busying himself to vacate his apartment. He first notified his mother he was moving back in with her, and although she was suitably mournful about his failure to find a funeral services job, her unbridled delight at Flam’s pending return under her wing was all too evident.

“Don’t worry, dear,” Mary consoled him, “perhaps I can find you work at the parish. God willing, we may be able to spend our whole days together. Won’t that be grand?” Flam swallowed a planetoid-sized lump that had sprung up in his throat, and although he would not have thought it possible, grew more disheartened.

He glumly inaugurated the moving process with a purging of his unwanted possessions. He packed up two boxfuls of assorted books that were no longer of interest to him, figuring he could give them to his old friend Page Turner, before heading upstairs to his mother’s to drop off the first load of possessions.

Turner almost fell off his stool when Flam walked into the shop. Although it had been several years since the two had spoken, not counting a brief exchange of condolences at Steve Grub’s funeral, the older man seized upon Flam like a long-lost son. The bookmonger locked him in a huge, rib-crunching bear hug, and then pinched his cheeks, as if greeting some precocious toddler. A spare chair was dug out from under its load of bookstore flotsam to allow the prodigal to sit and bring Turner up to date on the latest chapters in the Flam Grub story.

Turner had heard second-hand of Flam’s career choice, and it was quite clear he had some misgivings. “I guess it’s like lawyers,” Turner groused, “the crooked ones give the whole profession a bad name . . . bloody vultures, preying on the distraught.”

“It is a business, I can’t deny that, but I really think we perform a valuable service. Or ‘they’ perform a valuable service, I should say . . . it seems the profession doesn’t want me in it.” And Flam went on to describe his futile attempts at securing employment, his forthcoming loss of the apartment, and his return to the flat upstairs.

“I guess you’ll be seeing a little more of me. I don’t suppose you know of any jobs that might be available in the neighbourhood . . . you know, just to make ends meet and maybe help me save up for first and last months’ rent so I can get my own apartment again?”

Turner’s face, at least as much as was visible beyond the forest of whiskers, lit up with delight. “Talk about coincidence . . . why, you can come and work for me. I was just going to draft up a classified ad when you so serendipitously walked through the door.”

“But I’ve never known you to have a helper . . . you’ve always run the store yourself.”

“Precisely the point. Of late, I’ve been focussing more on the trade in rare and antiquarian books, but that requires regularly closing the shop in order to keep appointments and go on book-buying expeditions. I’ve had many complaints from my regular customers. It would be extremely helpful to have someone behind the counter I could trust. And the summer season is upon us, after all, when I normally like to keep the store open well into the evenings.”

“So, business is good?” Flam asked.

Turner’s whiskers sagged downwards into a frown. “Frankly, the second-hand book trade is no longer what it used to be. It’s too premature to pronounce the printed word as facing extinction, but as the poet said, ‘The times they are a’changing.’ A lot of the other shops in the area have already closed. Which is why I wouldn’t be able to pay you a fortune, I’m afraid, but I can give you a plethora of hours.” Turner turned to Flam with an impish grin. “Mind you, it’s extremely boring much of the time—all there is to do is sit around amongst all these thousands of books . . . and read.” He winked when he delivered that last piece, and it cemented the deal.

“Okay, well I do need a job . . . at least until I can land something in the funeral business . . . and this certainly is ideal. Thanks, Page, I appreciate it.”

Turner leaned over to punch open the cash register, lifted the money tray, and from underneath fished out a wad of bills. “Clearly, you’re fond of your tiny domicile, so why not retain it? Here’s an advance against your wages so you can remit your rent.” Flam hesitated, and Turner thrust the money closer, not budging.

Finally, Flam reddened, and reached out to accept the loan. For the first time in days, he felt resurrected and hopeful again. However, just as he was wondering whether his mother was home so he could break the news, a potential problem surfaced, temporarily deflating his good spirits. Although Flam would be able now to manage the rent on his apartment, how was he supposed to rationalize commuting all that distance daily, when his mother could offer free accommodation right above the workplace?

It was Turner who devised a solution. “Surely that vocational academy of yours must offer a veritable cornucopia of night courses, even during the summer,” he counselled. “Why not simply sign up for one or two, and then explain to your mother that you’re still taking classes for extra credit. It won’t technically be a prevarication.”

There were, as it turned out, hundreds of courses offered through Prentice College’s School of Continuing Education, so many so that Flam had difficulty figuring out what to choose. There were even some additional Funeral Services courses available he could take, like Advanced Restoration Techniques, which he had previously bypassed in favour of a progressive course on grief counselling.

Flam ultimately dismissed this option, rationalizing that an extra credit or two would not necessarily guarantee improved job prospects, given how poorly he had already fared despite his stellar grades. There were instead scores of general interest courses available that he found much more appealing. He could learn to do computer graphics, speak another language, study automotive repair, or take introductory offerings in one of the Humanities.

A course in Comparative Religion kept leaping off the page at Flam each time he passed it in the college calendar, and this was the one he finally opted to take. He rationalized it to Turner as a vocational choice, saying that if he ever managed to land a job in his field, the course would be helpful in understanding the different belief systems of the bereaved clients he might be called upon to minister to in a future role.

In fact, the truth lay much deeper. He had never been satisfied with his own Catholic experience, which his mother had practically force-fed him from an early age. Only once, as a boy, had he briefly tasted religious rapture, and that had been on the day of his First Communion.

He vividly remembered standing there in a brand new suit, bought specially for the occasion, and sporting a glossy white silk bow, so exquisitely smooth to the touch, wrapped around his sleeve. His hands had been sheathed in spotless white gloves, and in them, he’d held his very own Bible and rosary. On either side of him had stood a beautiful young girl, angelic in her immaculate white dress of satin and lace.

As Flam had tilted back his head to receive the communion wafer, he had been enveloped by the sun pouring in through the multicoloured mantles of the stained-glass saints, and had felt himself truly filled with the spirit of the Holy Ghost. For a rare moment, he had believed that, to God, Flam’s soul was indeed special—something pure and unique to be prized.

But Flam’s new suit, the last he would own until he acquired the black uniforms of his funerary profession, had for months been the catalyst for some especially vicious sparring at home. Mary had wrung the extra dollars for its purchase from the beer budget of a reluctant Steve. So, not surprisingly, it caused an uproar when Flam appeared a few short hours after the communion service, bleeding, dishevelled, and with his new suit hopelessly torn and soiled after an attack by two of the other boys receiving the sacrament. Flam had been vehemently reprimanded and severely spanked by both his mother and his father in a rare display of parental solidarity.

Amidst the tears, Flam had tried desperately to explain to his parents that he was guiltless, that he had been clinging to the ecstasy of a spotless soul and had tried to avoid the confrontation—had literally turned the other cheek when smote—but this had only served to provoke the other boys further. They had fallen upon him shouting, “God don’t allow grubs into Heaven,” and had taken it upon themselves—dutiful, newly anointed junior lieutenants of Jesus that they were—to enforce His will with their fists.

Later, during his voracious readings, Flam had grown even more disillusioned with Catholicism. He had read, with disgust, albeit also with rapt fascination, about the schisms and wars and hypocrisy and political infighting that had dogged Christian dogma since its inception. He’d also learned with horror of the violence and cruelty that had been his religion’s trademark—the massacres of the Crusades, the brutal torture technology of the Inquisition, the roasting alive on spits of Jews during Church-led medieval pogroms—all in the name of Christ.

And once books had also explained the birds and the bees to Flam (for neither parent had troubled to do so), and then further catalogued all of sexuality’s perversions and diversions, Flam had come to view with quite a different perspective those times in Sunday school when Father Dickinson had so lovingly anointed with salve the bare boy bottoms he had enthusiastically caned only minutes earlier.

Yet, despite the disillusionment and cynicism Flam had come to feel over his own particular brand of religion, he still clung to enough fundamental faith not to throw the baby out with the baptismal bathwater. That moment of divine ecstasy he’d encountered on his Confirmation Sunday, even if it had been the precursor to a particularly painful episode of abuse and humiliation, was not something to be denied. God was lurking out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered, of that Flam was convinced. Perhaps the course in Comparative Religion might help to find Him.