A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART TWELVE

Perhaps if Mr Snatch had read Old Marley’s message instead of merely throwing it away, he might not have been quite so surprised by the events that subsequently occurred to him. As it was, he lay upon his couch in his office, unfairly able to dream the dreams of a man with no conscience. He was, after all, a single-minded man of business whose nights usually remained untroubled by the kinds of doubts and worries which can trouble other mortals, and so he remained blissfully unaware of the pieces being moved around and put into place that were about to ensnare and engulf him.

In the middle of the night, Mr Snatch’s office telephone rang and woke him up. Whilst still half asleep, and yet already raging at whoever it had been who hadn’t screened the call and prevented it from getting through to him, he listened to the first couple of words of the recorded message before hanging up and swearing furiously before beating at the cushion which was serving as his pillow and attempting to get back to sleep.

Moments later, when the telephone rang again, his mood had not improved, and this time he ranted back down the line at the uncaring machine as if it might make some kind of a difference. It would not, of course, and he knew very well that it would not, but he ranted and raged nevertheless with the misguided notion that it would make him feel better, which, of course, it did not.

Nor was his mood improved when it dawned upon him that, curse them as he might, he was one of the many businesspeople responsible for millions of those such telephone calls actually happening, and disturbing the days and nights of many of his fellow human beings as they tried to do something else, and the fact that he himself had been disturbed by one might just be one small example of the universe finally getting its own back, albeit in a tiny and rather harmless way.

The universe might then slink off, holding it’s hands in the air and claiming to be totally innocent in this matter and that it must have just been some kind of unfortunate coincidence, whilst secretly smiling wryly to itself and having a discreet punch at the air once it had got around the corner and thought that nobody else was looking.

Not that Mr Snatch was really thinking about that, because he was getting slightly more perturbed at what his telephone was doing, because oddly, and rather annoyingly, he could still hear the message quite clearly even though the tiny screen informed him most emphatically that there was no signal and the call had been very definitely disconnected.

He punched any and all of the various controls and menus and buttons which glowed in the semi-darkness and taunted him with promises of solutions which failed to occur as the voice droned on and on, and as Mr Snatch got rattier and rattier, he also became more and more awake, and less and less likely to be able to return to his blissful slumbers.

Eventually he snapped and flung the telephone across the room in a fit of temper where it struck one of his favourite photographs and he heard the smashing of the glass and the soft thud as it fell onto the thick carpet beneath it.

It was the photograph of him shaking hands with the Prime Minister on the day he had been presented with his “Humanitarian of the Year” award, and the irony of that never ceased to amuse Mr Snatch, in as much as anything ever really amused him at all.

It might have done him more good if he had actually spent some time listening to the actual message which was being relayed to him, because he might then have understood what was going on when it all started to happen, but, like many of his kind, he thought that he knew better than anyone, and believed that breaking telephones and photograph frames was the far more sensible course of action than listening to a few words of wisdom which might just have helped him to get through his coming ordeal more successfully.

Finally, he heard the music which started to play as the message finished and some far distant machinery clicked over to place him on hold, and an empty electronic version of some Handel bleated out into the darkness.

Mr Snatch’s mind was racing. He seemed to recall that Mister Snipe had brought something to his attention a few weeks earlier. It seemed that if he didn’t use a particular employment company to supply his temporary and service staff, he had believed that terrible things might befall SnatchCon and he thought that he had better mention it.

Poor old Snipe hadn’t realised, of course, that this was yet another dodge to put more business in the direction of one of Snatch’s own subsidiaries, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility that someone else might just be trying to play him at his own game, and decided that he’d better arrange to have it looked into the next morning.

That next morning was already becoming a very busy one.

Awake now, he decided that he’d be better off if he got up and had a drink to help him rest. He’d be able to clear the worst of the damage from his fallen photograph, too, and see whether it was salvageable before the cleaners came in first thing.

He pulled back the top of his sleeping bag and put out his feet, but the floor was no longer there, and instead, he fell awkwardly forward out of what he thought of as his bed for the night (a luxury not afforded to many of his fellow countrymen and women), and as he held out his hands to absorb the impact, instead of colliding with the soft, warm lush carpeting of his office floor, they fell into the thick, filthy and exceedingly cold snow of a Victorian street in London.