Echoes. Laura Dockrill

       The Boy Who Cried Monster.

      BORED

      Off an oily main road, where not even the pigeons could be bothered to visit, was an ugly mechanical building. The building was so violently ugly that visitors were advised to bring sunglasses to shield their eyes from the hideous view. Most of the building had been deserted, odd bits of furniture lay everywhere, haunting empty office spaces, broken technical equipment, all under a blanket of dust and old skin cells as though it were the residue of a ship under the sea. Forgotten.

      But at the very top of the building was an office full of professional scapegoats. Inside, the cold walls were colourless, covered with empty corkboards and organized post-it notes. Everything was stiff and dated and static, so painfully unforgiving it forced you to wander through it as though you were colour-blind. It was as though somebody had ordered everything to be painted grey.

      And the eight people who worked in this office were dry and flaky–not in a tasty almond croissant way, but in a sore skin sort of way. And these people were pessimistic. They believed that the world was crumbling in; they believed everything was a conspiracy against them, gruelling, grumbling, and continuing, even though every day consisted of boredom and dullness and paranoia. And this wiry stiff party (bad choice of word) wouldn’t communicate–they wouldn’t know how to, they never played the radio or treated themselves, they just sat and stared and tapped away like robots. All except for one.

      Albert started off at Limps as a work experience, forced by his parents to do something, anything, other than write his silly stories. And three years later he was still there, filing, plonking out letters, photocopying, but always, in his head, writing stories. His father said he should read more than write, he said before you even pick up a pen you have to know the history behind what you are writing about. He said, ‘You can’t have a tree without roots.’ But Albert believed that history was created every day and roots were growing all the time, it was just a matter of where you planted the seeds.

      Albert liked writing about what he already knew. He liked to write about what he saw and what he felt. He liked to write at about six o’clock when the sky was so pink and perfect he could almost see Marc Bolan rising out of it. He liked to write about the cute girl he saw on the train that day who had odd shoes on and had