Even Sean was surprised by the amount. I mean, he'd thrown up before, who hasn't? but at the dinner table and in front of your 93-year-old grandmother is quite an achievement. Throwing up all over your 93 year old grandmother, seated 6 places to your left, goes beyond the traditional boundaries of achievement and into the realms of legend, a bit like shitting yourself at school.
The stinging burn of the embarrassed cheek. The crushing weight of public opinion that only an incontinent 13 year old or a PR officer called Wendy can fully appreciate. Fortunately Sean was neither, so he wasn't really bothered.
Sean was a 26-year-old Graphic Designer. As far back as he knew his family was English which meant his shortish dark curls were accompanied by the pale skin and ruddy cheek bones that make you look like you've permanently just stepped inside from a force 12 gale. Sean was a Graphic Designer in the least glamorous sense of the word...s. While at Camberwell College of Art he'd been creative, buzzing with ideas, he'd even handed one in once or twice, but these days he spent his waking hours putting together recruitment adverts for a website called JobUfind.net. He might have considered it `selling out', but then selling out traditionally involves being paid more than you get in McDonald's. He was just out. His mate (of both the best and flat variety) Phil often joked that Sean was more jaded than a very large piece of jade, but then he stopped saying it because even he thought it was a stupid thing to say.
Most of Sean's working life involved being patronised to varying degrees by Susanna, his 33-year-old boss. Being 33 in itself is nothing remarkable, but when your vitriol for life directly correlates with the number of years beyond 17 that you've been alive, it takes on a whole new significance. Susanna was from Catford in Essex, she spray-tanned religiously and had certain opinions about certain things and that was just her and you could either take it or leave it and she wasn't about to change for nothing-or-no-one and that's just me that's how I am and it's your problem if you don't like it and.... Yes. Sean thought that about her as well.
Susanna seemed to have a constant string of boyfriends called Lance who worked in lifestyle re-location. Sean found it remarkable quite how many Essex-based estate agents there were called Lance. The Lance's tended to be in their late thirties and have that barrel-chested appearance that at first glance could appear to be some sort of bulk but inevitably reveals itself as blubber. "I like big men, real men" she'd say to anyone who would listen, "none of these scrawny little boys". Sean took personal offence to this, being on the skinny side of wiry himself, "no you don't, you ridiculous moron", he muttered, "you like fat knob-ends from Braintree called Lance". But she wouldn't hear, by this point her vacuous mind would have wandered off to some more pressing preoccupation, like what shade of tights would go best with her new furry boots. Susanna's devotion to absurd celebrity-based fashion trends was as fastidious as her contempt for Sean and people like him; men who were younger than her and had an education beyond 2 D's and an F at G.C.S.E. These results were in fact currently mounted in a frame and hung on a mahogany veneer-panelled wall behind the desk of Hank Hutchinson in Big Hank's Autos, the best darn cars in Catford. Harold `Hank' Hutchinson was Susanna's dad; used-car salesman and American enthusiast. Alongside his daughter's results sat a gold-framed picture of George W. Bush in a white Stetson, the two forming a shrine to modern intellectual achievement. To give Big Hank due credit, his daughter may have made the furthest foray into the British schooling system of any Hutchinson before, but George was only really on that wall because he had a nice hat. To suggest any political thinking had gone into George being there would have been giving too much credit to either man, both of whom preferred to think about golf.
Despite Susanna's dislike of young men with any brains, it would be unfair to say that she spent all her time patronising Sean; at least two hours a day she was on the phone to her friend Sheevon. Sean suspected her name was actually Siobhan but `She-Von' was what Susanna cackled in to the phone between silence and bursts of that horrific laugh. He would have compared her to a Harpy but that comparison, he thought, was unfair on the Harpy, which probably possessed some redeeming features, like nice feathers.
How Sean came to throw up on his Grandmother, was not entirely unrelated to his Gorgon of a colleague (He was never that hot on Greek Mythology). Had it not been for that particularly stressful Friday morning she'd given him, he might never have taken that swig of Absinth in the stationary cupboard at 11:42. It would be unfair to blame the Absinth entirely; the three Jack Daniels' with pint chasers at lunchtime had their say in the proceedings as well. Not to mention the Gin and Tonic that witnessed the whole thing but said nothing.
Sean had been called a `prolific drinker' before though never by anyone still sober enough to say the words rather than just think them. As it happened, today he'd managed to curtail his afternoon drinking for long enough to make it until hometime, hometime being 0.3 seconds past 5. To many people shutting down a computer and gathering your things before leaving takes maybe 2 or 3 minutes. Sean's record stands to this day at 0.296 seconds. Yes. He timed himself regularly. Had Sean known at this point that it would be the last time he would ever leave the office he might have organised some sort of celebratory drink, however, the fact that he was already technically `blotto', and that the only person in the office he remotely liked was a cantankerous cat called Jonesy, ruled out the possibility of any such occurrence. As he bounded down the staircase to leave the office (4 steps at a time instead of the usual 3), it occurred to Sean that his old friend, balance, was clearly about to desert him at a time when he needed it most. "The traitorous bastard", he thought aloud as the heel of his left foot slid off the edge of the third from bottom step. His left leg, closely followed by his right, flew out to one side, at the same time his head and shoulders accelerated towards the floor. Everything slowed down, and for a blissful second Sean felt himself lying perfectly horizontal in the air, about two feet above the concrete steps. Blanketed in the warm glow of liquor, Sean wished he could just stay like this forever...but of course he couldn't, and didn't. Sean crashed to the ground, but as luck would have it the fall was broken by his head, which was the first thing to collide with the stone steps beneath. Strangely quiet but for a whimper Sean allowed himself to roll down the remaining two steps and flop to a stop, lying flat on his back his arms and legs spread. Sean's position was similar to Leonardo's famous Vitruvian man, except the Vitruvian man was a case study in the proportions of the human form. And Sean was a case study of a cretin.
It occurred to Sean that he was at a low. Not a new low, because lying on the floor is familiar low to anyone who has dabbled in the dark arts of Alcohol, or the Devil's Urine, as Phil liked to call it. Sean's low was partly caused by the rapid onset of concussion and partly by recalling the night before, the real reason that he was more drunk than a Glaswegian tramp, called Big Alec, who was thought among the tramp community to have a drinking problem.
Last night Sean's gorgeous-if-a-little-highly-strung girlfriend Laura had dumped him. Sean was no gargoyle himself, not quite model material, but handsome in a boyish, ruffled, just got out of bed sort of way. Which is hardly surprising as, whenever time allowed he was just getting out of bed. He said to Laura one Thursday morning a few weeks back, "you know Law, sometimes I feel like my whole life is spent getting up for work". Tired herself and annoyed by his depressing worldview she muttered, "yeah, well that's life, so get used to it" with that she got out of bed and left for work without another word. Laura had an amazing ability to get up and leave the house in the time it took Sean to muster a decent yawn. She thought he was a lazy git and often said so, and he thought she was `deeply unchilled', but mostly they got on well and laughed together. That laugh. She could rip his heart right out and leave it bloody and beating on the floor, just by smiling at him in the right way (when she scrunched her nose so it has those little wrinkles in it). Sean was hopelessly in love with her. Naturally, as any human male would do, Sean told himself he didn't really care about the split, that now he'd be able to go down the pub without `her indoors hassling him all the time'. The reality was that she encouraged him to go out with his mates more, when in fact he was happy to spend most of his time with her on the sofa getting stoned and asking her to do that wrinkly thing with her nose.
"You know what gets me?", Sean slurred to Jonesy who was trying to ignore Sean and concentrate on licking his testicles. "What reaaally twats me off is that she's had the painters in for the last week", he went on, "I mean how unfair is that?" The cat looked up at him blankly, gave a slow, lazy blink then returned to the important business of its gonads. "She could at least have dumped at a time when my spuds weren't the size of Basildon." The sound of the nondescript suburb seemed to ring a bell with Jonesey who looked up at Sean and yawned in the way that cats do; the mouth so wide that it could almost eat its own head, if it kept going a bit. The cat's look seemed to convey knowledge that a lack of sex wasn't the real reason that Sean missed Laura.
"Don't give me that", Sean said to the moggy getting louder, "we can't all lick our own plums. If we could I wouldn't be in this miserable stationary cupboard at half past three talking to a cat." Looking utterly dejected Sean drained the last of the emerald-green liquid in his bottle of absinthe. "I'd probably be in this miserable stationary cupboard licking my own balls", Sean added stumbling out of the cupboard and back towards his desk.
By now the grey carpet tiles, which resembled television static, were busy trying to re-tune themselves before Sean's tipsy eyes. At one point he thought a square next to the water cooler had nearly found an episode of Quincy, but then he dismissed the idea as ridiculous: it was half three and Quincy was never on that late.
An hour and a half of net-surfing boredom passed before Sean found himself lying at the bottom of the stairs, the concrete so cold beneath his buttocks that he swore he could feel a pile developing. Then his mind drifted back to Laura, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone" thought Sean, rather profoundly for a Friday, "you pave paradise and put up a parking lot", he thought, rather less profoundly. Many of Sean's profound thoughts turned out to be song lyrics he had inadvertently pilfered from someone else. In fact if someone wanted to say something noble of Sean in the event of his death, they could do worse than "At least Sean never knew he nicked it". His belief that all these well known phrases had just come to him in a moments of inspiration, reflected Sean's greatest quality; optimism on a cataclysmic scale. Naturally, as was his generation's want, Sean was cynical and in many ways like Phil's piece of jade, but he also underneath it maintained the belief that surely he must triumph in life and end up at the top of the heap in some way. Right now, at the bottom of the stairs, this ideal seemed a little lofty. Sean wrenched his aching body up onto his elbows, then let himself fall back onto the floor with a thock of bone on stone. Two P.A.s from the Italian phone company on the third floor stepped over him and headed downstairs, laughing behind their hands in the way Japanese tourist girls do. He half-heartedly tried to offer some explanation but only managed to say "No, no, it's not how, I..." before trailing off and accepting his supine ridiculousness. Sean eventually raised himself to his feet with all the agility of an arthritic sloth and made his way down the stairs. The walls of the stairs were brick painted with white gloss, as was most of the building, which had in the middle years of the 20th century been a workhouse for loose women then a school. Now it was an office space just behind Clerkenwell Green, home to TelefonItalia helpdesk on the 3rd floor, an independent design firm on the 1st and JobUfind.net. The design company seemed to Sean to specialise in two things: firstly buying brightly coloured plastic chairs moulded in various different shapes (a pre-requisite of any cutting edge company), and secondly doing nothing all day. Whenever Sean popped his head round the door to ask if they had any milk or to borrow one of their stupidly expensive Phaidon art books, there would only be one or two of them in there, and they would be playing table tennis with two empty DVD cases as bats.
As Sean stumbled out into the last of the afternoon sun, it occurred to him that he needed to get Laura back. As he crossed Clerkenwell road to get the bus into town he realised that he would need to change a lot of things about his life, and where he was going. As the cyclist screamed and waved his arms Sean realised that evasive action was probably too late and simply closed his eyes, accepting his fate. Thankfully the cyclist missed Sean completely and managed to save the situation by careering into the back of a parked blue transit van. The two passers-by who stopped help the cyclist were relieved to find that the cyclist was only unconscious for a few minutes, before coming round, livid at the now mangled state of his Specialized racing bike. `Thank god', thought Sean as he hopped onto the 55 going to Oxford Circus, he'd nearly missed the bus. In 15 minutes he was meant to be at a hotel off Marble Arch to meet his grandparents.
