No stranger to the P45 - Dan W.Griffin (the mitten read aloud .TXT) 📗

the right-hand fork and go and find some lunch. A few minutes later and I arrived at a Tesco Express.
I was pleasantly surprised by this discovery: moments earlier having contemplated pilfering my lunch from a tractor towing a trailer filled with turnips. I thought of this as a good place to purchase a Pepperami and a pasty. I also considered buying a Scotch egg and a bag of Monster Munch too.
Although I hadn’t yet figured out what I was doing in a war-torn Balkan-like country in the first place, despite the two convoys of military vehicles and the tractor towing its trailer full of turnips, all these things taking place seemed relatively normal. The appearance of the Orange Tango Man armed with an AK47 assault rifle soon put a stop to that.
Since this was a dream there was not so much little explanation for the arrival of the gun-toting Orange Tango Man as absolutely no explanation whatsoever. There was even less to determine why his expression was that of a man clearly disgruntled with something. For a moment he simply stood in the doorway surveying the scene. I was at the other end of the store behind a promotional display of Cornflakes. Although not of particular interest, I could probably buy a box and get another free.
The Orange Tango Man wore an almost maniacal grin. His lips curled thinly upwards while his eyes were wild and as wide as plates. His demeanour immediately filled me with a sense of dread and I crouched down to the floor a second before he opened fire around the shop. In an instant, loaves of bread, packets of biscuits and jars of pesto were exploding all over the place as the Orange Tango Man let rip. Discounted breakfast cereal rained down upon my head and shoulders as round after round of aggravatingly-hot lead smashed into Tesco stock. There was no order to the chaos; he simply fired in all directions, emptying the magazine into pomegranates, pasta shells and the odd tin of leek and potato soup.
In one corner of the shop, near to the ceiling a mirror reflected a curious fish-eye image of the scene. I could see that Orange Tango Man was hysterical; both laughing and yelling at the same time as he squeezed the trigger. I thought I heard him shout, ‘Tango this, Motherfuckers!’ But I may have been wrong about that.
Anyway... As he continued to shoot into the shop his arc of fire rested momentarily upon a fridge. Bullets tore into cartons of milk, bottles of water and the odd tin of 7-Up. For a second I hoped he’d leave me a bottle of strawberry Yop, but no sooner had this thought occurred to me a bullet then ricocheted off a tin of Irn-Bru and fell at my feet. I picked it up between finger and thumb and with a one-eyed squint gave it a cursory examination: it actually wasn’t a bullet at all but a wasp in a tiny suit of armour.
Given the circumstances, I was in no position to consider this as something significantly more odd than anything else, but no sooner had I identified this bullet as an armoured wasp the image in the mirror caught my eye once more as a second figure came into view. It was a tall, rugged-looking figure with stubble and a small cigar clenched between his teeth. He too carried a gun. Clint Eastwood then shot the Orange Tango Man in the head.
?
My pillow was sodden with drool when I awoke a fraction of a second later and exclaimed aloud, ‘Eh?’ It’s perhaps the most odd and vivid dream that I have ever had, although not as enjoyable as a recent one in which I went shopping for a Ford Capri with Cheryl Cole. Go figure.
Anyhoo… The reason for recalling this dream is that last night I watched a movie based on the Balkan-era conflict. The recollection of the dream was triggered by this, and this in turn took my mind back to a job I had in a shop. The shop was the Frome branch of Blockbuster, the video sales and rental place. The job lasted about three months.
All things considered, Blockbuster Video was actually one of the more banal of my employments. Aside from being accused by the manager of stealing a forged twenty-pound note, the existence of which I was unaware, from a locked safe that I didn’t have access to anyway, nothing remotely interesting happened. During my somewhat brief employment I watched a lot of movies and six Sony Playstations were stolen by a gang of pikeys, albeit not on my shift. But when, some years later, in the nightclub in Bath known as Cadillacs the aforementioned manager arrived at my bar all eyes and teeth, his smiles and greetings present only because there was a queue and he wanted preferential service, I had him thrown out and barred. I really was quite pleased with myself about that.


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Publication Date: 12-20-2011

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