Drunken Baker E-Book

Barney Farmer

• Herausgeber: Wrecking Ball Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 127

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Characters born into the celebrated Viz comic strip, 'Drunken Bakers', are here for the first time immortalised in a book. A day in the life: the decline of the independent bakery, and the steeper decline of the independent bakers within it (cake and bargain booze included). A harsh reality displayed without apology, elbowing its way into our comfort zone bringing laughter and the smell of stale beer.

Leseprobe

Drunken Baker

Barney Farmer

Drunken Baker

Barney Farmer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-903110-46-1

First published in this edition 2018 by Wrecking Ball Press.

Copyright Barney Farmer

Illustrations by Barney Farmer and Dave Iddon

Book design by humandesign.co.uk

All rights reserved.

For fuck’s sake.

Must be getting time to think about making a move.

In a minute or two. Finish this first, then have a look.

Christ I’m tired. Should have got some sleep. Or more sleep.

Must have got a bit of sleep, because I don’t remember

getting on the floor, but nowhere near enough.

Should have turned out the light and closed the curtains. Gone up.

When the wine went was when I should have gone up.

Tired enough then. Could have slept 20 hours and never dreamed.

No need of a night-cap. Well away. Out on my feet. Shuddering.

That thing when it feels like there’s water racing though your legs.

Do you get that? I never used to.

But you open the next one and you’re into it.

And this is a nice drop, to be fair. A good rum, this is.

Warming not hot, rich and sweet, not sickly.

I’ll take the rest into work. No I won’t. So I can put it down,

turn my back, and that cunt can neck it?

He can fuck off.

Creep out, close the door, softly softly sneck clicks in latch.

Habit really. I was married wasn’t I? Long time ago now.

Eight-odd year or so tiptoeing, a little ’un sleeping

in the front box room right over the door for most of that,

and since then I never think about it, I just leave quiet.

Nice cold air on that breeze, blow some wool out me head.

Mmm, I can feel my face…

Months going faster every day aren’t they?

Already stopping darker later, getting darker sooner, later on.

No odds to me. Used to starting in the dark, me, any road,

bar them mornings in summer, just now gone, when you

clock orange and purple fingers reaching up over the rooftops.

Still the middle of the night for you,

but my morning since I was young,

younger than you are now.

Your mornings are my afternoons.

Your afternoon is my night.

Your evening is my night, still.

And this is the way I’ve always walked.

This way, through these streets, all them years, all on my own,

all alone in the dark and the quiet.

Only my footsteps or the odd piss-head rolling home break the silence.

Or a clink in the bag. If I take a bag. Sometimes there’s stuff in.

Everyone asleep bar me, is how it feels. Bar us, I mean.

Bar us bakers.

Be same story all over the world. Even the postmen are still in their beds, not earning their daily bread.

We’ll be making that fucking bread mate, from here to Timbuktu.

And the cakes, such as we do these days.

No pies. No savouries. Had to stop. Must be months now, since.

All getting wasted, every crumb.

We can’t compete with them shitty chains. We can’t make a go.

We’ve them ten-bob pasty bastards one end of town to the other.

Used to be just the one, the famous one, and just that for ages,

in the precinct, but last ten year or so the fuckers pop up like mushrooms, cheaper and cheaper, shitter and shitter an’ all, but cheaper.

Two steak slice for a quid? A fucking quid? That’s us fucked there.

And steak? Get to fuck is steak, I don’t know how they get away with it. Where’s fucking Trading Standards?

It’s bleeding shit, bought by the tonne, blasted off of fucking skeletons with a jet-wash, but people see that word ‘steak’ and think ‘oooooo I deserve a treat, I’ve earned a treat sat on me arse’.

Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but you ain’t fucking getting one.

They seen you coming. You’ve been fucking had pal.

So we stopped. We had to stop. There’s only so much you can throw

in the bin. Or eat yourself. And I can’t eat any of it much,

can’t keep it down the same.

What is it if you see a run over black cat? Lucky or unlucky?

Can’t cross my path so lucky I suppose. Or is it lucky if they do?

Somebody’ll be unhappy whatever. Nice someone pulled it out of road,

stop it getting chewed up more for the owner.

Miles more cats I see now, on the way. Spying from under cars,

peering down from wall ends, snotty bastards.

Less birds. That’s them. Bastards. Trees bustling with birds some mornings once. Some still are to be fair. Some cats are alright.

The missus got a cat. Never took to me. They took it with ‘em.

You know how sometimes cats what get moved travel miles

get back to their old home?

This never.

Couldn’t tell you how many foxes I seen.

Thousands. Fucking heads jammed in a bin-bag half the time.

None today, not yet, but get the fried chicken stretch there’ll be one, I bet, and a shitload of rats.

Always been a few of them, always, the canal’s just there,

always has been, but they’re thriving now.

Used to see a few deer.

Glimpses, here and there. Flitting across the corner of your eye.

Disappearing. They hear you from miles off.

A stag, once, just the once, and that was bang middle of that road, down there, bold as brass, staring right at us, right into my eyes as I come round the corner, like the fucker had been waiting for me forever.

Big bastard an’ all, horns and the lot. Took one step toward us and I slung the bottle, hard as I could, and it smashed on a car, sprayed sherry at his feet.

Had a sniff of it, gawped a minute, then strolled off, no worries, between the houses, towards the gasometer.

Course, the town’s grown since then.

Half again, doubled, more,

shot out every side.

All them orange houses,

the pokey little shitholes

where big fields used to start.

Fucking thousands. Sling up another hundred every time you turn around. None of the people in ’em work here.

There’s nothing to do is there?

But they built a new junction, and that made this town into somewhere you can live on the edge of and get out.

Most never get nearer town centre than the retail park they built

by the bypass, with the fuck-off massive ADLD and them outlets.

Can’t blame ’em, there’s fuck all left. Bled us all, that park.

All the little shops, one by one.

The Precinct is empty past Boozeland, bar SUPACIGS and charity shops, and them like jumble sales, full of stretched shit, an’ all.

I got a like new Abercrombie overcoat there once for a fiver way

back when, but last I looked it was twatted paperbacks and rags.

Stained things.

Any road, whatever, if deer do still wander in from off the tops,

out of the woods, they don’t come this far no more.

Be away walking the rows and rows of houses where fields they

used to fuck in are, if at all, over there, or over that way.

Stag stares across ADLD car park,

waiting for somebody else, not me.

Their frozen fuckin’ dough thawer

and pie warmer-upper, maybe.

Up and over the canal bridge, where that poor woman

run off with our gin that time after he...

And drowned, we found out, we never knew for ages,

we’d only met her that day, he had, not me.

I wanted nothing to do with the daft cow.

And down the hill, light of the bakery shining up from way off down there,

all the way down the bottom of the hill, corner of Bird Street,

straight as a die, right down the end, a tiny beacon, as was.

Something to make for when you was perishing in winter. But not much now. Cunt never keeps hold of a key more than two minute, so either I get in first or it’s downhill to a dark shape.

Dark now, light back then,

always light, with the gaffer,

but hardly ever after.

Gleamed through the gloom every day,

and noisy from hundred yard away.

Bashing tins, the gaffer banging on, swearing, but never the really bad stuff, never, bloody, bugger, arsehole, sod off, that stuff, no fucking or nothing,

half the time arguing with Alice and her arguing back even louder,

both of ’em laughing.

Then him booming ‘Where the bloody hell have YOU been?’

when you duck in, early, bang on time, late, only once or twice,

when the little ’un was poorly or I’d had a skinful, something like.

His way of saying hello and get your arse in motion, always the same.

And I mean always. Never took one day’s holiday off that man,

that I know of, unless he might have been off when I was off,

and I don’t reckon he was.

Sundays and Christmas and Easter and all them, that’s all he took.

Never been in the bakery without him in it until the first day in after his last day in the shop, and the day before that was first day I ever seen him ill!

Never got ill. But he was bloody ill. Pale and moaning about his eye,

talking like he was pissed, puking, sweat pissing out of him,

hair like he’d climbed out of the bath…

So aye, arse in motion before you got your coat off.

Jumper off in winter, shirt off in summer, trousers too, some summers, that bad drought, you had to, you couldn’t be in there towards noon with that heat, them old coke ovens, with nothing on, and straight to work.

Never should have ripped them out, I told him.

Dry heat.

Four of us in the back then, me, the gaffer, that cunt, but I was here before him, a fucking year before him, there was an old fella who retired, and the other lad started just after me.

What was his name…

Big sod. Didn’t stop long. Four or five year? Joined up, him,

1970-something, eight or nine. Went to Ireland and come back

a different sort of lad, then the Falklands, and come back

all over the fucking show.

We seen him once.

What was his name?

Built like a brick shithouse.

Quiet as a church mouse,

before he went away.

Topped his self last year,

or the year before that,

wife had gone I’d heard.

My wife went.

Both of them went.

Four of us, baking for the shop and the orders, pubs and clubs, hotel or two.

Hard graft, boiling, red-faced, swinging sacks, sifting, kneading, slicing dough, filling tins, hot, loud, clanging, piss-wrapped sweat head-to-toe,

swilling tea by the gallon.

Alice kept the brews coming, the gaffer’s wife Alice, she ran the front, the serving, and if not her one of her lasses,

all lasses, well, I say lasses, most of ‘em knocking on.

Old hands, worked with Alice a long while one or two. Carole was one,

her son was one of them autistics and fucking run her ragged.

Florence, with her rosy cheeks and wall-eyes, she was a young ‘un.

There were others, they come and went.

My mother, for a bit, before me, although she done her bit in the back too as she had very cold hands and was good with the dainty cakes an’ all.

She’d have kept the tea flowing out back too though, for some other grafting blokes, her or one of the other lasses, while they was getting set for opening.

Kettle hardly stopped singing in there, then, when the flour was flying and drying you out and the big coke ovens was coming up.

Fine flour floats,

on swirling hot air,

white eyes and hair,

nose full of bread proving,

baking or cooling,

every breath was bread.

So you had a thirst. You had a biting –

There he is, the cunt. The fucking cunt.

Not the same rush now. No rush at all really.

Arse in slow motion is plenty. No shouting or banging,

no pissing sweat, nor Alice and the lasses out front.

A kettle ain’t sung in this place since we started having a drink,

a proper drink, without hiding it, and earlier than we had before.

Ha ha, Alice ain’t been in this shop 20 year! More. Is it? Must be.

Fuck knows. Long before the gaffer went I know that.

I know she went went, pegged it, last year.

No, the year before.

I went the church. He didn’t.

Come out with his usual about how she was a hard-faced cow,

who’d slagged him to the gaffer, for fuck all,

so fuck her, and she’d never liked him,

or give him a chance,

nor the gaffer.

He was wrong.

Alice give him a fucking chance like she give everyone a chance.

You only got one chance to throw it back in her face, though,

and then you were done.

Not the same rush, no, not now.

Nobody going be standing at the door come eight with errands to run,

tut-tutting and pointing at their watch through the window.

Not be a line along the pavement, along the street, past the bookies, down to the hairdressers week up to Christmas, some years,

nattering headscarves and smoking fags.

Same faces same days week after week,

regular orders, the most part.

Be 99 out of hundred of ’em women, only one or two blokes,

older ones too, widowers and them.

Never seen many men under 60 until gone noon, then them in for the pies.

Every morning be a queue out front, the early birds, the older girls,

who got the habit of shopping early doors, from all them years of rationing.

Same faces, same times, same orders, this, that, treats, basics,

but always two large white, three large white, four large white.

Every day the large white flew.

We done a bit of brown. That advert with the lad on the bike going up the hill done a fair bit for that, but even then. We done it but nobody apart from dieters and nut-munchers wanted it.

Nobody apart from them wants it now, ask me. Fucking idiots force

it down. Good white’s as good for you, they can fuck off, it is.

Spun up in tissue,

away down the street,

still hot in your hands,

water, mould, wheat.

Everyone got their bread here.

Everyone bar lazy gets who wouldn’t walk past Crooks in King Street. They was second best bakers in town but their bread was nothing

next to ours, palsied shite, and dearer an’ all.

Their pies were alright though. Can’t knock them. But pies aren’t bread, and everyone always needs bread, and theirs was shit.

Lazy bastards was welcome to it.

They only opened in the 19-fucking-60s.

Our large white was old by then, already.

Tried and true, it’d been coming hand to hand, father to son,

this is the way we make bread, for fucking years.

Fucking generations.

The gaffer’s dad was a baker before him, see, in this shop, and his dad’s dad a baker before that, same shop, all that’s changed is the ovens, electric now, not coke. Should never have fucking got rid...

Bread of that family fed this town for 70 years. More. I had that large white mashed in milk before there was a fucking tooth in my head, my mother said.