I shrugged my shoulders.

“There’s thousands of jobs like that,” said the count. “They have titles but they don’t really have meaning. If they didn’t exist, the world wouldn’t be any different, except that the people who did those jobs would now be out of work. All these jobs just exist to keep people employed. They’re not real jobs. Your job isn’t a real job.”

I looked up at Count Otto. “Thanks a lot,” I said.

“My pleasure,” said the count.

“No,” said I. “I was being sarcastic. Do you think that I don’t know that? Do you think that everyone on Earth doesn’t know that? People are given jobs so that they can earn money, which they then spend. That is the point of giving people jobs, so they can earn money that they can then spend … on things … on things that have to be manufactured. Thereby giving work to people in manufacturing industries. I could go on and on about this. But we both know how it works. Everyone really knows how it works, although they won’t own up to it.”

“So your job is a stupid job, but it has to be done. Therefore accept it and make the best of it and stop complaining.”

“No,” said I. “No.”

“Well, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Do you want a bet?”

“I’m a count,” said the count. “Counts never bet. We just win by default.”

“Well, I am going to do something about this,” I said. “All right, I do know what I’m like. Well, I think I do. I do dream my way through life and never really pay much attention to reality. But OK, I’m stuck in this one, but I mean to get out. And I mean to change things. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I will. This has been a special day for me. I didn’t know that it was going to be special. But it is. It has determined me upon a mission. Yes, it has. By golly, yes.”

“And what exactly is this mission?” asked the count.

“To change things,” I said. “To change everything.”

“Oh dear,” said Count Otto. “And you having drunk but a pint and a half. Chaps are usually at least seven pints in before they start talking nonsense like this. Back in the old country, talk like this would go on into the night. And they’d always end up with someone saying, ‘I’m going to change everything. I’ve had enough of all this.’”

“And did anyone?” I asked. “Change things?”

“No,” said the count. “Of course not. They’d end up sitting in the courtyard outside the alehouse waiting for the sun to come up and we’d all be hiding inside in the shadows. And up would come the sun and whoosh-woof-zap and flash: another vampire gone.”

“Eh?” I said. “What?”

“Only joking,” said the count. “Or am I?”

I chewed upon my upper lip. “I’ll change things,” I said. “You wait and see.”

“I’ll wait,” said the count. “But indoors in the shadows, if you don’t mind.”

I let the count buy me further drinks and I enjoyed the band. Quilten Balthazar was great. And what can you say about Zagger To Mega Therion? That master bladesman had paid his dues. But I was thinking. Thinking and plotting and planning.

All right. I know how this works. You don’t have to tell me. People only struggle against oppression when they actually are oppressed. If they’re not actually oppressed themselves, then they only pay lip service to the struggle against other people’s oppression. They like to think of themselves as caring individuals. But they don’t actually really do anything. They might contribute a little money to some worthy cause or other, but they don’t actually do.

Funny thing is, now I’m looking back at all this and telling this tale, what I didn’t know was that my struggle against oppression was actually going to further the cause of My Struggle, Mein Kampf, as it were. I suppose that, somewhere down the line, I had actually lost myself. I’d been fascinated by death and the whole idea of death and what might be beyond it. And I had tried to reanimate Mr Penrose, my all-time, then and now, favourite writer, but where had my youthful ideas and interests gone? Into nothing and nowhere. I’d lost my true self. But this business at the telephone exchange had actually woken me up from my slumber. Life had hit me right in the face. And life and death being brothers and all that, it all fell together.

But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know that this was synchronicity. That I was in the right place at the right time and that my struggle against oppression was going to bucket me into the position that it did. In fact, that it would prove that my life had a specific purpose. And that the purpose it had was linked to what I was as a child, which had led – the child being the father of the man, and all that kind of guff – into what I would become as an adult.

Phew! Are you getting any of this?

Perhaps I have become drunk. I was certainly drunk when I left the Shrunken Head and stumbled home with only the prospect of the good hiding I meant to give Sandra as a distant light to steer my stumblings towards.

But I had really, truly, actually, if drunkenly, found a purpose in life for myself. And I would begin on my quest the very next day.

And I would triumph.

And not just for myself.

But for the good of all.

I’d change things for ever.

I would.

I really would.

12

I suppose I must have dozed off.

Although not on the job.

I never once dozed off on the job.

It would have been more than my job was worth to ever doze off on the job. An unmanned bulb is an accident waiting to happen, as Mr Holland used to say. And he knew what he was talking about. That man knew his business when it came to bulbs.

But perhaps I had dozed off at some time or other. Because the next time I was truly, fully aware, I was drinking again with Count Otto, and he was asking me how things were going at the telephone exchange.

“How are things going at the telephone exchange?” he asked.

“So, so,” I said. “I had fourteen flash-ups today. I have my reaction time down to point-three of a second. Point-two-two is my fastest ever, but that was in the first summer when there was a double flash. That’s quite a rarity, two flash-ups in less than an hour. I kind of sensed it that time: I knew the second one was coming. A good bulbsman has a sixth sense. You develop it. Only last week I—”

“Excuse me,” said Count Otto. “I need to go and count some tiles in the men’s room.” And then he departed and was gone.

“He’s a weirdo,” I said to Sandra, because she had come out with me for a drink. For some specific reason that quite escaped me at the time. “He’s always going off to the bog when I’m having a chat.”

“Perhaps it’s because you’re so boring nowadays,” said Sandra.

“Yeah, right,” I replied.

“I am,” said Sandra. “Your job is all you ever talk about. That exciting double flash in the summer of ’seventy-one. How you’ve installed your own bulb tester and how through yoga you can hold your bladder for a twelve-hour stretch without even a dribble coming out of your winkie.”

“Don’t be crude,” I said to Sandra.

“You’ve lost your edge,” said my spouse. “You’re no fun any more.”

“I’m no fun? How dare you! If you took a little more interest in my work …”

“Ha,” went Sandra. “Ha ha ha. Switching a fugging bulb off all day long! How interesting can that be?”

“See what I mean?” I said to her. “That’s all you know about the job. I don’t switch it off all day long. Only at the specific moment when it flashes. Not before and not afterwards. Well, obviously afterwards, but you can hardly tell, my timing is so precise.”

“Just listen to yourself.” Sandra was drinking a Cuba Library, which was the popular drink of the day. It was a cocktail – something to do with cigars and library books. Or it might have been gazelles and bicycle pumps, for all I cared. Sandra supped at it and went right on talking at me. “When you came home after that first day at the exchange you were dripping with piss and ranting like a loon. Then you went off for a drink and came back pissed and ranting like a drunken loon, saying how you were going to strike a blow for the workers and change everything. Do you remember that?”