part 3 of chapter 1

‘Hey come on, lower your standards a little, I did.’ Obviously the chat-up lines weren’t working, but by now Barry was having far too much fun drunkenly insulting everyone. He tried yet another line on yet another young lady. ‘Hey girl, you wanna play a game called hide the sausage?’ The woman’s boyfriend, who just so happened to be close by, gave Barry a decidedly dirty look. Not caring in the least though if he was offending anyone, or if he was about to get beaten up, Barry plodded on, asking the same girl another line. ‘Hey, fancy a packet of Liquorice Allsorts and some sex?’ Before her boyfriend could discharge a beating from his fists, the girl slapped Barry across the face. ‘I don’t think you understood me. I was asking if I could place my penis inside your vagina,’ said Barry informatively. The girl’s boyfriend had a lot more than just a slap in store for this cheeky monkey, and gleefully set about punching Barry, who unresisting, simply lay on his back laughing as the old red sauce began to flow. The doormen quickly moved in, pulling the man off the now blood-stained mess that had once been Barry Broomfield. As he was being picked up like a rag doll and thrown out of Euphoria nightclub, Barry had a line for one of the bouncers. ‘Have you ever kissed a rabbit between the ears?’ ‘What the hell are you on about?’ Barry pulled the pockets of his trousers inside out. ‘Would you like to?’ ‘You filthy bastard, you’re barred—for life.’ Lying on the pavement Barry shouted back: ‘I don’t care less! Your nightclub’s crap anyway.’
8 The boyfriend of the girl Barry had offended was also thrown out. Having one last line reserved especially for his attacker, Barry said: ‘The word of the day is legs. Let’s go back to my house and spread the word.’ You might think Barry is an ardent bisexual as he was trying lines on men as well as women, but he isn’t: he was instead just acting like a drunken fool. Thankfully his attacker had had enough of fighting and simply decided to ignore the insults being hurled his way. ‘Oh well, looks like I’ll be spending another night with Penelope…’ Penelope was Barry’s blow-up doll, the only woman other than his Mum who cared for him. Picking himself up, he proceeded to stagger through the empty streets heading in the general direction of home. His only companion on this lonely walk was a suffocating feeling of how everything was grim, rotten to its very core. And for him Euphoria Nightclub was just a microcosm of the larger world. He felt poisoned by the stench of it, by the stench of humanity. Barry was drunk, but not too drunk to notice the beautifully clear night. Looking up at the night sky and the stars that glinted above, he could have sworn those little balls of light were winking just for him. Trying to find his way home, feeling completely dejected and miserable, Barry wanted to turn his back on everyone.
Alone always alone. The next morning he awoke with a crippling headache, whether it was from the alcohol; or the blows to the head he’d sustained, he couldn’t be sure.
9 ‘Morning,’ said Maggie brightly, drawing open her son’s bedroom curtains. Barry’s eyes squinted from the sudden rush of daylight. ‘Finbar Cedric Broomfield, look at your face, it’s a mess—what happened?’ ‘I fell over,’ he replied. Looking in a mirror he saw his face was indeed a mess, but what did he care, what did anyone care? Well aware that injuries like Barry’s were not acquired from simply falling over, Maggie said: ‘You should know better at your age,’ before leaving, unimpressed by her son’s immaturity. ‘Where’s my little Bob?’ said Barry to the white bundle of fur residing in the corner of his room. ‘Oww!’ Barry roughly threw his pet rabbit back into its cage. ‘You little rascal,’ he said while tenderly rubbing the teeth marks that had been left on his chest. Bob had a tiresome habit of biting; however, it was strange as it only ever seemed to bite Barry while remaining a docile joy for everybody else. ‘Bob is this it, is this all there is to life?’ Bob didn’t reply. ‘Maybe your right Bob, I should be grateful for what I’ve got.’ Barry then gave a moment of contemplation towards what he had but couldn’t think of very much. ‘Well at least I have you and Mum.’ The weekend, over way too fast as always meant Barry was once again at work, and needing to replace a couple of clients he’d lost to diphtheria he was busy canvassing.
10 He parked up his car, walked up to the front door of his next potential customer and said: ‘Hello there, I was wondering if you’d be interested in having a window cleaner?’ The person who answered the door ignored the question. ‘Is that your car?’ Barry turned around to look at his rusty Volkswagen Golf. ‘Yeah, why?’ The man at the door guffawed: ‘You can’t be a very successful window cleaner now can you?’ Barry was accustomed to being insulted, which was lucky as this would no doubt be the first of much indignation experienced this day. Hating canvassing more than any other part of being a worthless window cleaner, as nothing was quite so effective at making him feel worthless, Barry already longed for home. Unfortunately, not having any other effective means of getting new customers, he doggedly continued with his quest for business. A few houses down the road a miserable old man with a raisin-skinned face answered the door. ‘Hello there, I was wondering if you’d be interested in having a window cleaner?’ ‘NO! I DON’T WANT A BLOODY WINDOW CLEANER,’ shouted the miserable man. ‘They should bring a law in to stop people like you coming round.’ The door was slammed into the doorknocker’s plump face. Experiencing a rare moment of insight Barry thought, I’m just an excrement
smear on a toilet bowl to these people…just an excrement smear… It started off as a bad night and it didn’t improve because Barry had a problem, a problem that had plagued him ever since his first days as a window cleaner: many
11 homeowners want someone to clean their windows of course, just imagine what the neighbours might think if they saw them dirty, but then there were so many other, farmore-skilled window cleaners where Barry lived, that he may as well have been trying to sell shoes to a man with no legs. Having spent three hours of his life performing the monotonous task of trudging up and down the streets, knocking on doors, he didn’t bother to look through his trusty notepad to see how many new customers he’d acquired since he knew the answer already—none—