Читать книгу Execution Plan - Patrick Thompson - Страница 10

I met Dermot six or seven years ago. I was on a training course in Birmingham, learning the fundamentals of object-oriented programming. The course was in a small building on a new business park close to the NEC. It was the peak time for new business parks. They were everywhere, and they were all the same. Each one had the small, flat, white building that did computer training, the grey warehouses for furniture companies, the sprawling blocks occupied by new businesses going out of business, the inconvenient out-of-town sorting office. There was a van selling burgers and egg baps. There were signs with arrows in bright primaries. The road names were misleadingly pleasant and rural.

On the first two days of the course, I went to the restaurant for lunch, along with everyone else. It was the usual business park restaurant, with no evening menu and no atmosphere. Secretaries leaned across tables. Men shouted into mobile phones. Nothing meaningful happened. We had scampi that had been constructed from recycled scales, tails and fins. We had French fries made out of anything but potato.

On the third and last day of the course I said I had some work to catch up on at lunchtime. I’d had enough faux scampi. I’d had enough of mobile phones. I went to the burger van. It had been a VW camper once upon a time. It was white under the grime, which was considerable. It was leaning slightly into the road. The tax disc was months out of date. One side of the van had been cut open and brutalized into a serving hatch.

There was no queue. There was no menu.

‘What do you have?’ I asked.

The proprietor looked down at me from behind the crusted sauce bottles. He had black curly hair and a round nose. He looked like a cartoon Irishman, and as it turned out that summed him up pretty well, apart from his accent. His accent was all over the place, and as I soon discovered, he put heavy emphasis on at least one word in almost every sentence.

‘I have fucking burgers, what do you think I have? Truffles?’

‘What sort of burgers?’

‘Cheap ones.’

‘Do you sell many?’

‘Not round here I don’t. They’re all in there, eating really cheap burgers.’ He nodded towards the restaurant. ‘They’re all in the fucking tuck shop. Have you noticed that? It’s like a campus here. It’s like a university. They’ve all got the same clothes. They’ve got tie clips. Fucking tie clips. Jesus.’

He looked at my tie.

‘Did you tie that? Was the light on when you did it? You have to be a computer man.’

I told him I was.

‘Fucker of a day this is turning out to be. Only one customer and he’s a computer man. I’m sick of this. Do you want a drink?’

‘I want a burger.’

‘I’ll give you a fucking burger. It’s your funeral. Then can we go for a drink? They have a bar in there?’

I nodded.

‘Right we are then. Settled. Here.’

He dropped a burger into a bap and passed it to me.

‘Sauce is there if you want it.’

He closed the hatch. I heard a door close on the far side of the van, and then he walked around it. He was shorter than me but not by much, and far more alive. He was more alive than anyone I’d ever met. He was all energy.

I took a bite of my burger.

‘There’s a bin there,’ he said, pointing. ‘Take my word for it, throw that fucking thing into it.’

‘I thought it was my funeral.’

‘And it’s my fault. Do they have beer in here or is it all wine and shite in bottles?’

‘They have beer.’

‘In tiny fucking bottles or in pints?’

‘Both.’

‘Fair enough. You had enough of that?’

I had. I dropped it into the next bin.

‘First sensible thing you’ve done. For the second one, you can buy the drinks.’

‘I’m buying the drinks?’

‘Of course you are, you cheeky cunt. I bought lunch.’