Au Suivant

Its Sunday night, the day has been the sunniest of this year. Hampstead heath was heaving. Down from the men’s pond, overlooking one of the open ponds, people stripped off and acted like it was 80 degrees.

A posh girl, only yards away, evacuated her personal life into a mobile phone. She had evidently been abroad; spent the night with a guy who was just about ok. Somehow her clothes got wet, or were un-wearable (I forget).

So she wore his surfer shorts and surfer tee shirt on the bus. And it was full of people going to work, and there she was dressed in inappropriate clothing. She interspersed her story with “Its very private,” and then proceeded to let anyone in earshot know inner workings of her sex-life.

People close by had another glass of wine. Another group were talking about buying English lessons, either as a Christmas or Birthday present. I fell asleep for fifteen minutes or so, and dreamed about nothing in particular.

The heat retracted, and we left; walking through the privileged environs of Highgate and then down through the brutal concrete of Archway.

The lady in the flat below has an accordion, and when I pass her door today Jacques Brel springs to mind. I imagine her playing Amsterdam, because it suits an accordion. But for continuities sake, I will have her play Au Suivant or Next as it’s known in English.

Alex Harvey

Back in the 70s Alex Harvey , and his band The Sensational Alex Harvey Band recorded a version of Next . The Jacques Brel song previously recorded by Scott Walker and others.

In a weird twist of fate Harvey suffered a fatal heart attack in Zeebrugge Belgium ; the country where Brel was born.

On Maunday Thursday, I got a call about my Belgium job; apparently its on again. And there is a possibility of some work happening very soon.

The Belgium job has been on and off since November 2009. I’ve had three interviews over the telephone. Had a Christmas meal with my agent to celebrate the contract. And was given a start date in January. January came and went, and the work was scaled down to a couple of days. Then the days were rolled back, until the job dissapeared all together.

I’m supposed to hear next week when they want me to start.

So to tempt fate myself, I’ll post the Alex Harvey's version of Brel’s song Next. Maybe it will bring me luck, and I’ll stop having those redundancy nightmares. Next, your next.

Next

When I left with a redundancy letter; that was supposed to be the end of me and my former employer. But it’s over a year now, and I’m still processing that event. The nightmares are infrequent, but when they happen I am left unsettled and out of sorts.

Last night my dream amalgamated a couple of my jobs. It mashed in Lord of the Rings, my daughters bedtime book. A couple of naked actresses (Uma Thurman and Elisabeth Moss who plays Peggy Olson in Mad Men) covered in mud; ala the Slits album Cut.

In the dreams version of my life; I’m still at the old firm, working part-time. A blend of yesterday and today as I happen to be looking for part-time positions. It’s coming up to Christmas, and the works party is happening that evening.


Reality was different; I got through Christmas 2008 without a party. Except I found a way of getting horrifically drunk. 10 on a scale of 1 to 10; narrowly behind waking up in a police cell. The pressure cooker of eighteen months of sackings had finally started to whistle. In February 2009 it exploded, and so did my heart.

Two characters appeared in my dream, like implants from a melodrama. There was a Cassius; lean and hungry, slippery and backstabbing. I suppose he must have existed at my previous firm, but not quite in that form. Then there was the benevolent boss. A weak figure who liked me, but was under the spell of Cassius.

A third person, the whisperer, was a real colleague. But I’ve not heard anything from him since I was frogmarched from the building.

The dream segues into nightmare and the whisperer lets me know two people are being canned today. He also makes a point of mentioning one of them is me. The other unfortunate, a woman, is already being hung-drawn-and-quartered by the boss and his sidekick.

But in this scenario there is hope, if only I can influence the benevolent one, persuade him, with a tableau of my past glories.


Reality is something different. There was no old or new school, no continuum. I existed in the day, and whatever happened before counted for naught. The only hope I had was that I would never be next.

The telephone call and a matter-of-fact conversation were not recreated in some Technicolor moment. Instead my new reality took me to a housing development. Quaint Hobbit-hole like housing. But inside they were shoddily built, exposed electrical wiring and poor plasterwork.

In the morning I thought of all the housing left to rot by the Credit Crunch. The Sub Prime loans, long defaulted on. The shockingly awful record of this Government and the Last when it came to house building. But that’s reality, in my altered-state, something different was happening.

There was a muddy excursion, where famous actresses appeared naked, their modesty preserved with mud. And then I was back in the grey generic office.

I plead for my life, the way David Niven does in A Matter of Life and Death. There were examples of my work, laid out before the benevolent boss. My past glories, looking very small under the microscope.

But all I could hear was a hiss of Cassius, speaking in the benevolent boss’s ear. As he turned the pages of a decades work, all I could hear was NEXT, NEXT, NEXT.