eric loses his head

On March twenty-seventh next, Eric Purlbright of 17 Orefyce Street, Hoxton, London lost his head.
His day started as his days usually started: he rose at seven, abluted and ingested a sturdy English breakfast cooked by his wife May, who offered her cheek for a peck as she did every morning at seven fifty-five, when Eric sidled out the door into the rain.

Twenty minutes brisk walking brought him to the Victorian mausoleum of Carbits Ltd. where Eric had worked as a clerk for nigh on twenty years. Eric was always the first to arrive and it was his job to open up, but today the front doors were swung wide and in the large junkyard interior of the office he found Mr. Walden, the boss, huddled over his desk, clutching a large, smoky Churchill and retching violently.
`Good morning,` said Eric, carefully propping his umbrella against the old, cold radiator and shaking himself out of his soggy raincoat.
Eric had great plans for the day: he was going to clean up the office; he was going to mount an audacious expedition to the four far-flung corners of the room, a land lost beneath time`s heavy detritus. This land`s topography was one of precarious peaks, spurs and shoulders of compressed and weathered crates of unsold merchandise, superseded machines, and redundant parts, outdated files, bemused furniture embedded at difficult angles, boxes of unsampled samples, and, at the feet of the peaks, exotically coloured lakes of fuming sludge. There were valleys and canyons filling with a scree of spent cans, enough empties to bankrupt the bottle bank, rudely stripped lingerie of fast food packaging, bone relics of extinct things (victims, like their purchasers of the sociopathic colonel and his busy poultry pliers), high speed splats of ground coffee, and enough abandoned PET for an RSPCA appeal. On the versants Eric would find pumice balls of stationery shaken down from the eruptions at Walden`s desk, pencils, paper clips, biros, J-cloths, sponges, soaps, brooms -- all defeated and failed articles of order, and ... Uh-oh! What`s this? A sagging membrane eye, peering timorously from beneath a baked bean can; a ring of sick-pink rubber, a swordless sheath, some hastily and furtively read francophonic correspondence, cast off to fend for itself in this bleak hell -- and how much sperm wriggled tenaciously into the mildewed fibres of inert cardboard before realising its mistake, before discovering like the Japanese that industry is the surest form of contraception?
All of this, and whatever other entombed wonders, formed a massive accretion of irrelevance, literally shoved and flung to one side over unnumbered years by the bullish and impatient staff of Carbits in their mad rush to find and turn out the next product.
Carbits was in -- at full tilt -- the fast lane of the most competitive of markets: bits for cars. They did knobs and toggles and switches and pointers and little orange lights and discy things which would drop from behind the dash without impairing the function of anything in the car, and they did piping for seat covers and edging for car carpets. Carbits even once did a batch of rather flash dashes ... But these turned out to be an audio-typist`s mistake on what was supposed to be a final demand. Mr. Walden was not a little unculpable in this episode: he was that impressed with the huge sum in the total box he completely failed to notice that it was his debt, not his due.
Ok, this was not the sexiest of businesses, not compared to the Atlases who make the chassis, the body builders, and those ninja of engineering who do the engine. But, let`s face it, where would your car be without its bits? And anyway, for those delicate aesthetes, those with the blossom-sensitive souls who cannot sleep at night if their day has not included even a smidgeon of poetry, Carbits was not totally without the magic of creativity, was in no way a prison for the imagination, for Carbits had its other lines. Toys were one thing: oddities, ephemera: Christmas cracker novelties, hideous little monsters with wavy arms and scary tentacles -- anything too cheap to be handled by Taiwan or Hong Kong or China. But their main other thing -- and here they excelled -- was toys for cars.
`No, not toy cars,` Eric would correct people when they invariably misunderstood, `toys for cars. You know, furry dice, nodding dogs, sunstrips, novelty gearstick coversĘ...`
`You mean those novelty gearstick covers?`
`Yes, those novelty gearstick covers,` assured Eric.
Now, what with all the palaver over the imminent collapse of the Earth`s atmosphere and the progressively stricter controls on car ownership, business had not been all it had been and the usual blizzard of invoices and orders that normally caused deep drifting around Eric`s desk had blown itself out. A thaw had exposed long-invisible woody slopes and now there was only the occasional white flurry which disappeared as soon as it touched down in this more temperate working climate. Time again on his hands and not being one to exercise his thumbs when Mr. Walden was paying him good money, Eric had audaciously resolved to excavate the teetering mountains of rubbish.
 

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