Cherry Coloured - Alex Turner

12. Tales of High Green

  "In the bleak midwinter," were my fathers final words.

  The same sentence had been mulling over Alex's mind for the past twenty two hours. It had gotten to the point where it felt like it was eating him alive. Chewing his ears off. Probing the backs of his eyes and appearing in his peripheral vision in the crappy Rockwell that it had been formatted in when it was sent to him. His least favourite font. Reading three hundred odd pages of it alone had turned him to mush, and that didn't even include the actual content of those pages.

  "In the bleak fucking—of course it was his last words you unimaginative twat," Alex muttered under his breath. His head sat firm in his hands, elbows pressed into his desk. His closed eyes were victims of bright computer screen lights which had eaten away at his retinas and burned his eyeballs dry.

  The sentence had been the first of the entire text. A text named 'The Bleak Midwinter'. Alex was losing his mind over the pure laziness of it all. Any question one could have raised over the title had already been spoiled and answered before the book had even started.

There was a tap on his shoulder that almost made him jump from his seat.

"Alex, can I see you in my office?" his boss asked. Alex knew instantly he'd been caught slacking off and reluctantly followed the suited man to the small box shaped office at the back of the building. "You don't have to sit, this should be brief."

  Alex moved his hands to his trouser pockets and stood behind the soft-seated chair that sat before his boss's desk. His name was Raymond and he was a proper berk. He sat down in his comfortable desk chair and looked up at Alex in silence for a few moments, just to be extra condescending.

  "Why are we here Alex?" he asked. Raymond had been promoted a year or two earlier and ever since, he'd adopted this idea that he was better than everyone else even outside the workplace.

  "I know, I'm working me way through it, I promise," Alex sighed.

  "In the bleak midwinter," were my fathers final words.

  Raymond looked at him over a pair of rectangular glasses. The lenses so thick his eyes looked gigantic through them. "You're not here to leisurely cruise through some light reading, Alexander, you're here to proofread and have those samples ready by their due date," Raymond said.

  Don't call me Alexander you halfwit, Alex hissed internally. Raymond, the bastard, would call him so, deliberately because he knew it belittled Alex as it was a name he only allowed his parents to call him.

  "You have people waiting for their dreams to come true and you want us to put that on hold because you can't even be arsed to read their work?" Raymond asked.

  Alex shook his head and tried not to clench his jaw. "No, and I'm sorry. I have been reading it, I've just had a very busy week."

  "In the bleak midwinter," were my fathers final words.

  "I'll have it done by tomorrow," Alex said. He'd just placed himself inside a cage with iron bars that were red hot and he knew it.

  "Good," Raymond said. "Better get to it."

  Forcing a smile, Alex turned and left his boss's office and walked all the way back to his own desk. It was only two thirty and his motivation to do any work at all had just been pissed on and thrown out the window. With a sigh, he slumped back into his squeaky desk chair and picked up that god awful manuscript titled 'The Bleak Midwinter.' Alex wanted to smash his head into his laptop until he blacked out. He loved his job and loved reading samples even more, but this one had to have been written by a thirteen year old with rich parents that bribed the company into considering it for publishing. A text had never been so predictable, poorly written, clichèd and downright boring in Alex's entire time there.