NEWSLETTER

Dave stared at me from across his huge desk. He asked me why had I committed the ultimate act of betrayal as he saw it? I told him the truth. How it had been Christmas and I wanted to be able to buy my godchildren (hello, Poppy and Hank) Christmas presents. How I wanted to take them to see that film about the penguins everybody was raving about. I asked him if he had a nice Christmas lying on the beach in Hawaii? As a family man he must be able to understand what I was saying.

“That’s not the point,” he snapped impatiently.

“You exploited your position in the shop to buy shoes to sell again on eBay.”

“I only bought what I was entitled to,” I countered. “Once I bought the shoes, surely it was up to me what I did with them.”

“Why do you even bother working for us?”

I told him I worked in the shop for the same reason that anybody works in a shop like this: to pay my rent and to be able to eat.

He stopped me there. “Other people work in our shops because they believe in what we stand for.”

“What? How can they possibly believe in what you stand for when the T-shirts with the shop’s name are fifty pounds and they only get paid forty pounds a day? I’m sorry,” I continued, “but I don’t feel guilty about what I’ve done.”

“I don’t care what you feel,” Dave snapped.

I said sorry again but I still didn’t feel guilty about what I had done.

Dave said if he heard any more complaints about me I would be instantly dismissed. Up till then I had been certain that I was going to get the sack. In fact I had been so excited at the prospect of never working there again I couldn’t sleep the night before. Instead I lay awake dreaming of the novels that I was going to write. But suddenly I could see the cell door shutting in slow motion before my eyes. Dave was going to grant me a reprieve but it felt like he was throwing away the key to my cell. That’s it, I thought desperately. That’s it: I was going to die here. I looked up at him with tears in my eyes and began to speak.

“I can’t face another day working in that shop. My facial muscles ache whenever I’m forced to discuss the finer points about the work of Stash and Futura 2000. I can’t bear listening to people tell me that those plastic “figurines” made by Silas deserve their own retrospective at the Tate Modern. Or when some T-shirt maker tells me, as if he was an artist explaining his latest work to his gallerist, that the reason he has borrowed the Cramps typeface to write his company’s staid name is not because he hasn’t got a single idea of his own but because he wants to diffuse the spirit of the Cramps with a contemporary aesthetic, I want to grab the sides of his mouth and puke down his throat until he drowns. And when the Street Energy Global Advisor from Nike namedrops that Sharleen Spiteri from Texas sang “Happy Birthday” at his fiance’s birthday before he dropped down on bended knee, what could I have possibly said? How romantic? I’ve always admired the work of Texas from afar? It makes me want to put a gun in my mouth and blow my bloody brains out. And when people confide in me that “Bathing Ape has lost it”, when what they really mean is “ever since the black kids started wearing it”, how do you think that makes me feel? To quote Spiritualized quoting Spacemen 3: “Lord can you hear me?” I’m begging you, please have mercy on me. I might have done things that are bad but I’m not a bad guy. All I want is a bit of meaning in my life. If doesn’t even have to be all the time, just sometimes, occasionally, part time. Once every leap year or even once in my lifetime would be nice. I’m not asking to be Bob Dylan. I just want to be someone sometimes. Please. I’ve beaten cancer once but I’m not sure if I can do it again. Please, please, please you have to help me live again. Just put me out of my sick grovelling pathetic misery and fire me… Please”

I didn’t think that Dave could believe what he was hearing. That morning when he had told his PA that he wanted to fire me there on the spot, she had told him he’d better be careful; that nowadays, if you don’t follow correct procedures, I could turn around and sue him.

“Sue me?” he had asked, bewildered. “What is the world coming to when someone who has been stealing from me can sue me?”

I slowly put my hands up to show him I wasn’t armed.

Dave stood up and looked me up and down before speaking.

“You’re fired.”

After seven years in a trendy clothes shop, it felt like I had been promoted.

MATTHIAS CONNOR
The author would like to thank Brian Degraw and Oliver Payne for inspiring this piece.


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