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NEW AUTHORS SHOWCASE
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17-12-08 6M p6 |
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Life of a Salesman by Rupert Miller |
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Synopsis I need to find money for tuck. Although my father is rich, he prefers me to eat Mrs Shufflebotham’s tasty morsels with my free milk. After my three successful business ventures are exposed I am expelled. At Harrow, while avoiding the drugs and bomb hoaxes. I manage to set up a branch of the local booze shop in my room and make a killing. However my love of trading and Miss Forbes mean my final exam results are so bad I have to join the army. Commissioned into the Scots Guards I spend a hectic time in Germany during the Cold War, in Belfast at its worst, in Chelsea Barracks for Diana’s wedding and in Kenya to shoot buffalo. A year in Australia follows my time serving Her Majesty and then I meet Anton on a financial advisors training course in Windsor. A few years later, bored of selling inappropriate financial products to little old ladies. I disappear to help my father breed wild boar and get married. Anton tries his luck in the timeshare industry. The wild boars take a back seat when we discover that my younger brother Julian, a severe haemophiliac, contracts the Aids virus from imported American blood products. This virus quickly develops into the full blown disease. My parents cannot cope and over the next two years I ferry him in and out of hospital before it finally claims him. My mental state and marriage collapse. Quite by chance I bump into Anton. In the last seven years he has built up a substantial timeshare development empire and now wants me to help him look after his interests in Eastern Europe, starting with Poland. I arrive in Poznan, a major Polish city and almost immediately fall in love with the beautiful Katarzyna Przybyszewska. It is plain to see the corruption brought on by the systemic failure and ultimate collapse of Communism. Pimp-controlled prostitutes are omnipresent and the cheap alcohol destroys families daily. The shelf life of selling timeshare in one place is short so in the New Year Katarzyna and I head off to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania where John Holmes, (Anton’s franchisee,) and I have a hair-raising time providing a timeshare laundry service for the mafia and their counterfeit 1988 Saddam Hussein hundred dollar bills. We make a fortune. Katarzyna joins me and we quickly notice that the poverty, corruption, prostitution, smuggling, protection and racketeering is far more blatant and dangerous than in Poland. The near miss we have with the mafia in Kaunas is only matched by my partner, John, who gets “swamp fever” and decides I have too much money. Rather than find ourselves mingling with the ice packs that flow down the Neris, Katarzyna and I flee with our cash on the night train back to Poland, only to be threatened at gunpoint by the Belorussian customs officers. By the skin of our teeth we make it.. At the end of a lazy hot summer we run out of money and by sheer luck I become the import manager for Komax, a computer company set up by Grzegorz Kowalczyk. Soon his company is booming and we look to import other stuff. I manage to secure the exclusive rights to import Hooper’s Hooch alco-pop into Eastern Europe. However the mafia quickly decide this is not good and closes us down. After our marriage, our son’s birth and an abortive attempt to work in the UK. I return to Warsaw as a financial advisor to expatriates. Disaster strikes again and we do not get paid. Rather than sell alcohol I start to drink it and end up back in North Wales having lost everything. Determined to get my family back I give up the fags and booze and start work in direct sales. Six months later Katarzyna and my son join me and we live happily ever after.
Exert from work starting page 167
“You need a Transit Visa.” he said. “No I do not. We checked at the station. Give me back my passport please.” He then pushed passed Kasia, opened the window and called out to some of his colleagues who were standing on the platform. Two of them then ran onto the train arrested me, handcuffed me and marched me off the train over to a large building. I was dragged up three flights of stairs, released from my handcuffs and locked in a room no bigger than a broom cupboard. I thought, shit they are going to kill me. The Belorussian customs officers had a simple rule. If they thought you may have some US dollars on you then you would require an expensive Transit Visa and if they did not, then you wouldn’t. I had five thousand dollars on me plus a Scottish twenty pound note. I was petrified, the train was about to leave and I was stuck in this little room. Futhermore, Kasia was on the train and had not got a bean on her. I took all but a one hundred dollar bill (1988) and the Scottish twenty pound note out of my wallet and buried the money beneath my balls. Shortly afterwards the door to my cell opened and I was taken to a little office, where a very large woman was sitting behind a desk. She had greasy black hair tied up into a bun and piles of dandruff had congregated all over the shoulders of her dirty green uniform. On the desk was my passport so I felt a little calmer and I also saw the train out of the window. They were jacking it up to change the wheels as the track-gauge in Lithuania was different to Belarus and Poland. I suddenly felt a great sense of relief as this was going to take hours. “You have dollars, yes? You must pay for visa.” she growled. I took my wallet out of my pocket and pulled out the Scottish twenty pound note and put it on the table. “Okay?” I asked nervously. One of the guards in the room took one look at this unfamiliar note on the table, pulled his gun out of it’s holster and, pointing it at my head, screamed, “Dollars NOW!” and went bright red in the face. I was convinced he was about to pull the trigger. To exacerbate the situation, I could feel the wad of notes nestling under my balls begin to move. This was not good. I picked up the Scottish note and replaced it with the hundred dollar bill I had kept in my wallet. This did the trick as the guard put his gun back into his holster and they all started to smile. This was an encouraging sign but I still needed to do something urgently about the dollars in my boxer shorts. Why, oh why was I not wearing “Y” fronts! If those guys had started to see dollar bills appear from the bottom of my trousers they would have nicked the lot and I would have been cat food. I had to get out of the room as quickly as possible, so I crossed my legs and said. “Toilet?” Fortunately toilet is an international word which they understood and I was escorted down the corridor. Thank God I had drunk a few beers earlier so I did actually need a piss. Standing in a toilet not doing anything would have certainly aroused their suspicions. As they had all smiled when I put the dollar bill on the desk I thought it unlikely that they would search me, so I rescued my wad of notes, which was now a bit smelly and then split it into four equal mini-wads and put one in each pocket. When I got back to the office the hundred dollar Saddam Hussein bill had vanished and Mrs Snowy-shoulders was holding my passport. She glared at me, handed over my passport and, with a wave of her hand, indicated that I was free to go. I turned round very slowly and walked towards the door. When I got inside the corridor, my pace quickened and by the time I had reached the stairs I was running. I leapt down all three flights, ran out of the building and raced to the train. Kasia was leaning out of the window and the moment she saw me her face broke into a wide smile. I got to the compartment and hugged her half to death. “I thought I was never going to see you again.” she said and burst into tears. “I thought I was never going to see me again either,” I joked and then we both collapsed onto the seats and roared with laughter. How close a shave I had just had I’ll never know, but later we found out that many people had mysteriously disappeared on that train journey…. |