Read 1973 - Have a Change of Scene for Free Online Page A

turned to look at the kid who was listening and watching.
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘He’s bleeding.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘What happened to him?’
    He regarded me, his pig eyes now impersonal. I could see I was boring him.
    ‘Why should you care, buster? If that’s all you want to say, take off with the feet,’ and he began to roll his pencil again.
    I went over to the kid.
    ‘I work for Miss Baxter, the welfare worker,’ I said. ‘It’s my job to be helpful. Is there anything I can do for. . .’
    That was as far as I got.
    The kid spat in my face.
     
    * * *
     
    Nothing dramatic happened for the next six days, Jenny rushed in and out, dropping yellow forms on the desk, asking anxiously if I had had trouble and then rushing out again. It baffled me that she could keep going the way she did. It also bothered me that she always wore the same drab dress and she made no effort to make the best of herself.
    I typed out her reports, broke them down, put them on cards and continued to bring the card index up-to-date.
    The word must have got around that I was now the official help, because the old, the lame and the halt began to come to me with their problems. Most of them tried to con me, but I took their names and addresses, wrote down a summary of their problems and told them I would talk to Jenny. Once it got into their muddled heads that they couldn’t con me, they became friendly, and for the next four days, I fell for this, then discovered because of their yakking I wasn’t doing any useful work, so I cut them short.
    Rather to my surprise, I found I was enjoying this strange contact with a world I hadn’t imagined existed. I was startled when I got a letter from Sydney Fremlin, written in purple ink, asking how I was progressing and when was I returning to Paradise City?
    It was only when I read the letter that I realised I had forgotten Paradise City, Sydney and the deluxe shop with its rich, overfed clients. There seemed to me to be no point in telling Sydney what I was doing in Luceville. Had I told him, he would have taken to his bed in despair, so I wrote that I was thinking of him (this I knew would be a sure-fire success) that I was still very nervy, that Luceville provided me with a change of scene and that I would write before long. I thought that this would keep him quiet for a week or so.
    On the sixth day the scene changed.
    I arrived as usual at the office around 09.00. I found the office door open. A glance showed me the lock had been smashed. My careful work for the past six days: my carefully typed cards, my reports were all piled in a heap on the floor and over them had been poured melted tar. There was no question of a salvage operation: no one can deal with tar.
    On the desk, printed with my red felt pen was the legend:
    GO HOME, CHEAPIE.
    I was surprised by my reaction. The average person, I suppose, would have been angry, in despair and perhaps defeated, but I didn’t react that way. I turned cold and a viciousness I had never known flowed through me. I looked at the work I had done, ruined by a stupid, vicious youth and I took up his challenge.
    ‘You do this to me: I’ll do it to you,’ attitude.
    It took me all the morning to clean up the mess. I worked fast, as I didn’t want Jenny to know what had happened. Fortunately, this was her visiting day and she wouldn’t be in until 17.00. I got a can of gasoline and cleaned the tar off the floor. I walked the ruined reports and the cards down to the trash bin.
    Every now and then, old women would come, and I told them I was too busy to talk to them. They gaped at the mess I was cleaning up and went away. One of them, a fat woman, pushing seventy, paused in the doorway and watched while I scrubbed the floor.
    ‘I’ll do that, Mister Larry,’ she said. ‘I’m more used to it than you.’
    Maybe the viciousness in my eyes as I looked at her scared her. She went away.
    By 16.00 I had cleaned it all up. I had ignored the telephone bell. I