TT -27 Len in Love

Winter has finally set in. The trees are black and bare. It is dark when the villagers get up in the morning and dark when they come home from work. And it is cold. The whispering North Sea breeze that wafts gently up the estuary in the summer has become a continual icy drone. Up in his loft, Len Magma lays blinking in the darkness. It was a lock-in the night before at The Railway and his clammy rumpled bed, so gratefully received when he’d stumbled back at nearly 2 O’clock that morning, is now a vast and inhospitable plain of loneliness and self-loathing.

Len didn’t used to drink this much. He’s always ‘liked a drop or two’ as Douglas puts it, but he would make a gradual descent into a boozy blur each evening and still be up for work the next morning with a reasonable degree of spring in his step. It is Len’s job to go around the village with a sack and a stick and pick up bits of rubbish. This might seem a lowly profession to some but for Len it is something of a vocation. Urban Bushman, Human Fox, One Man Recycling System, see it how you will, Len finds beauty and meaning in that which others carelessly discard. He is particularly fond of rubber and plastics, particularly if they have a vaguely clinical look about them - his most treasured item is the prosthetic leg he found a skip behind the old folks home.

In fact, up until now, Len’s life has been like a scruffy old item of clothing, the kind of thing that anyone might lounge around in when no-one is looking, only in Len's solipsistic world, no-one is ever looking. Now it has all gone wrong because Len is in love. Mrs Carduggan has knocked on the door to Len’s heart and Len has had to answer it in a gravy-stained vest. “How’s the barn?” “Busy again I see.” And if that weren’t enough provocation, there she is, wherever he looks, disporting herself before him in a dizzying array of saucy rubber hand-wear: pink, yellow, dimpled, lined, reinforced, until, by some strange process of transference, he has fallen in love with her. Now she is unhappy with him, but try as he might, Len can’t understand why. He pulls the turmeric stained quilt more tightly around him. Clearly Alison Carduggan is a sex tease.

He must make her a gift, he decides, to win back her affections. Len uses this thought to pull himself, hand over hand, out of his love-sick inertia. Very soon he is able to lever himself from the dank hollow of the collapsed mattress and pull on some wear-sodden clothes. They smell like a dish-cloth that has been left in sprout water but continuous usage has imprinted into the fibres the memory of every possible position of his knees, arse and elbows, making them sumptuously comfortable. He must be especially vigilant for new materials today, he thinks as he descends the stairs, and by the time he arrives at the front door he is whistling in joyful anticipation of a morning well spent.