Bulk Order: A Short Story

The orders dropped like water from a leaking pipe. Drip, drip, drip, drip. They were tedious in their consistency. It was this monotony that had attracted him to the job. Anything more intellectual and he would have handed in his resignation.

Steadily, every day, the emails arrived. A pair of tweezers here, a shaver there. Trimmers, blades, cutters. When a man in England wanted to remove unwanted hair from his body—usually because his partner had told him how disgusting he was before dumping him—he went online to search for grooming products. When he did, their company came up on the top of Google’s search results.

David Clarke’s job was to monitor the orders, make sure they were delivered. The work wasn’t difficult; a blind monkey could do it. This suited him just fine. His eyesight had never been the same since… well, anyway, it wasn’t the same. He came to the office in the morning, tallied the receipts, phoned the suppliers, and made sure the products were dispatched on time.

Now and then they received a bulk order—twelve pairs of tweezers instead of just the one—and he’d get on the phone with the person who’d placed the order, often the employee of a salon. He would inform this person that the lifetime guarantee on the products was only for individuals, not professionals. Those places went through the bloody things so quickly, like you wouldn’t believe. He’d learnt to call them first, before the request for a refund came in.

It was a woman who had brought him to the job. He’d only ever been on one date after his divorce, if you could call seven beers and a bad fuck a date, and the woman (Natalie? Nora? Miriam?) had jumped out of bed shortly after, as if her face was on fire. “Well, that’s never going to happen again,” she’d said. When he asked why, she pointed to the hair on his back, shuddering as she did so.

That evening he’d googled. No one prepared you for how much hair started appearing in strange places after you turned forty. He wondered if his wife had found his body hair repulsive as well and why she’d never mentioned it. He ordered every hair and grooming product on the website. Then he noticed the “Work for Us” button in the footer. One thing led to another, and he had a job. He was offered minimum wage and a free supply of products. This was before he’d known about the lifetime guarantee.

The banality of the job, he liked; the people not so much. He’d had better jobs once, but the higher the quality of the jobs, the more thought they required. Thinking made him crazy now, so he did as little of it as he could.

One day, the drip became a flood.

There was a payment for four hundred pairs of tweezers. He let out a slow whistle as he leaned back in his chair. “Fuck me, that’s a hairy bloke.” He chuckled at his own joke. Surely a mistake had been made. He called the number on the delivery slip.

The woman on the phone sounded high pitched, easily excitable. He tried to explain there had been a mistake in her order, but she cut him off before he could finish a sentence.

She worked for a nonprofit, it turned out. By the time she explained why she wanted all the tweezers, something about blindness in the developing world, he’d already stopped listening. The order was not a mistake. She understood there would be no lifetime guarantee. He had done his job. The only reason he was still on the phone was because the damn woman hadn’t stopped talking and as much as it was pissing him off, he could do worse than to have a customer who regularly placed such big orders. Perhaps he could persuade Tom to put him on commission, he thought before catching himself. Bringing in large orders and high-profile clients had been his life once. It could never be again.

He made himself a cup of tea while the woman rambled on. Then, just as he’d taken his first sip, she went for a full-on attack. “We have a conference happening in London next week,” she said. “Would you like to come, seeing as you’re right next door?” He’d taken two seconds too long to gulp down the tea, burning his throat in the process. She’d taken his hesitation as a yes. One thing led to another, and soon he was in Tom’s office, reluctantly telling him about the conference.

“Just go,” Tom said. “They’ve ordered four hundred of the bloody things. Do you know how much more we could make if they made this a regular order? Go. Tell their other bleeding heart friends about it. You can take the rest of the day off.”

He went, technically, but really he just signed his name at the reception, collected all the reams of papers they gave him, and took the rest of the day off, just as Tom had suggested. He brought the pamphlets home and threw them on the sofa. They sat on the corner of the faded red three-seater, now a dusty brown, for days, weeks perhaps. He reminded himself every morning to toss them in the recycling when he returned from work. But then, too tired from having survived another day, he just shoved them aside, microwaved a ready-to-eat meal or ordered a takeaway from the curry house down the road, and fell asleep in front of the television. He’d forget about them until the next morning.

He led, he thought, a boring life. But he liked the comfortable predictability of it, even if it was exhausting. After his divorce, he’d just sort of settled into it, without realizing when it happened. One day bled into the next, and then the next, and so on. He’d given up on dating, even though he diligently continued removing the unwanted hair from his chest and buttocks.

One evening, his brother Ray came over to watch rugby. David removed the papers from the sofa and carried them out to the bins. There were three bins, one for metal, one for paper and cardboard, and another for plastic. He had lined them up, their edges in perfect alignment with one another. He dropped the papers into the green bin and one the size of a postcard separated from the rest and fell onto his foot. He picked it up and glanced at it briefly. The picture was that of a child. Blind, it said. Preventable. Curable. The girl was the age Sophie had been.

Something shifted in him. It was a flutter of a feeling, something like he’d felt only once before. It was the moment, the one second before your world broke open. He had felt it in the moment he’d set eyes on the limp body of his then six-year-old daughter. His chest had exploded after understanding set in, splayed into a million pieces that could never be recovered, never again put together. But there was that one second before the realization of what had happened, that one second in which there was hope, that one second in which anything could happen.

He felt it now. A flutter. Just a tiny glimpse of hope. He picked up the papers and took them back inside, where he placed them neatly in the middle of a kitchen drawer.

The next day, he plucked them back out. Trachoma, it said. An infection of the eye that could eventually lead to blindness. An infection that sometimes led to trichiasis, in which eyelashes grew inwards towards the eye. Trichiasis, a condition so painful, sufferers pulled out their eyelashes to get comfort.

The four hundred pairs of tweezers. He understood suddenly.

He decided to try it for himself.

He positioned himself in front of the bathroom mirror, pulled down the skin under his eye with one finger, brought the pair of tweezers to the bottom, and pulled.

“MOTHERFUCKER!” he yelled as the first one came out.

This was what they did to relieve the pain? Even the mothers? The children?

He tried again, slowly this time. He pulled out all the bottom ones, then a few of the top ones. He went to the other eye then, to even it out.

On the train into the city the next morning, David sat next to a woman in a suit who exuded an air of authority with her black suit and sharp high heels. Her hair was pulled back tightly into a ponytail, though a few stray wisps escaped and fell onto her forehead as if in defiance of her control. She repeatedly kept pushing them back in aggravation as she checked her phone. In front of him was a college student whose hair was long and flowing and next to the student was an Asian woman. He noticed her eyebrows first. They were thick, like little worms trailing all the way down her face.

He’d never looked at women’s faces before, not like this. He was more a leg guy. Michelle was all legs. It was what he most loved about her body. But he found himself looking at their hair now. Or their eyelashes, how long they were. They wore makeup, these women, he noted with some surprise. Thick mascara that made their eyelashes look longer than they were. He’d never noticed that before. Every now and again, when a woman didn’t sneer, she smiled at him.

On his lunch break, he walked along the South Bank. Past the girl playing the guitar, past the food trucks selling Indian, Mexican, Chinese, past the young mother pulling her toddler by his elbow, hissing at him to stop acting like this right this very minute. When he handed the homeless man on the corner a pound, David asked him if he’d ever heard of trachoma. The man shook his head and looked away hastily. The woman who handed him a flier about climate change, he asked her, too. Why did people not know about this? There were children being blinded! It was preventable! It amazed him that no one seemed to know, to care.

He had never liked London. Everyone was always in such a rush, caught up in their own private worlds, always running away from something. Michelle had been reluctant to leave. After Sophie was born, however, they had finally moved. We have become country bumpkins, Michelle said when they sold their flat in Shoreditch and moved into a three-bedroom bungalow in Sevenoaks. She didn’t seem to mind after a few weeks. Liked it, even. He knew they were in the right place when she threw off her shoes and ran through the grass that first evening while the baby slept, tossing her hair over her shoulders and inviting him to her. “We have a garden!” she cried. “A proper garden!” It was summer then. Her freckles twinkled like stars under the rays of the sun. Winter would be different.

He wanted to scream at the passersby. He walked up to them, accosted them with information, pamphlets that he’d printed out earlier in the day at work, pamphlets they threw into the bin without as much as a second glance. He didn’t blame them; he did much the same. Most of them ignored him or stared at him. Sometimes, they muttered under their breath. Like he had once done. Most of them looked right through him as if he didn’t exist. He’d done that, too.

He came home that night, fraught with nerves over the insensitivity in the world. He bought frozen pizza from the shop down the road and shoved it in the oven for the fourth day in a row. The Sikh man at the corner shop had pushed the donation box in front of him, as he had done a million times before. But this time, David threw in a few pennies.

He had always held the belief that you needed to look out for yourself, protect yourself and your family. People were out to get you, he’d said to Michelle, who thought him excessive and paranoid.

But he had been wrong. Life itself was out to get you.

He ate dinner in front of the television, turned on the dishwasher, did a load of laundry, folded up the sheets he had washed the day before, and vacuumed all the rooms in the house.

The next day at work, he convinced Tom to give the nonprofit organization the tweezers for half the sales price. Tom balked, but David brought out the pamphlets and explained in grave detail the suffering and the pain, and Tom gave in, mostly he thought, to get him to shut up. He called on the suppliers over the next few days, made them sit through the videos he’d found on YouTube. The delivery time for the tweezers to the nonprofit was cut in half, too. He quickly became the coordinator between the nonprofit and his company and its suppliers.

The more he read, the more he realized that the existing tweezers were all wrong. There was a big difference between something squeezing and pulling out hair and something breaking it off and making it shorter, potentially courser against the eye. He had an idea for creating a new kind of tweezers, ones that were curved in such a way that made breakage almost negligible. He couldn’t take it to Tom yet, so every evening after work, he came home, shoved more pizza into the oven and sat on the sofa in front of the television, making notes. He stuck green post-its on the pages where the ideas were fully formed, yellow ones on the notes that still needed work.

Just before bed, he’d move the pile of papers to the corner of the sofa, where they’d sit until the next evening when he’d pick them up again.

It was the first time in ages that he’d felt something stirring in him. Maybe this was how it felt to die and come back to life. He’d been skeptical when people said they’d seen God.

He believed it now.

The phone call came on Monday morning, on his way to work. His brother had died. Heart attack, they said. Just like that. One moment he’d been watching House of Cards on Netflix, the next he’d been passed out in front of the screen. Nothing unusual about that image, he thought, when they first described it to him. He didn’t say that to them, however.

In the days that followed, he walked around as if enveloped by a thick fog. He didn’t remember much of the funeral, paying for it, organizing it. He was Ray’s only living relative and the inheritor of the contents of his will. Not that there was much to inherit. The flat needed to be sold since Ray owed about as much on it as it was worth, and there were a few other bits and bobs that he’d have to sort out with the bank. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

He developed a comforting sort of routine. In the mornings, he went to work. Then he caught the tube straight to his brother’s flat in Beckenham to sort and pack up his things, throw them into boxes for charity, and clean up. His brother had been a disorganized packrat. It took weeks to sift through his shit. By the time he came back home every evening, he was so knackered he couldn’t see straight. As Ray’s affairs were increasingly getting organized, his own were in disarray. He threw the letters and bills that arrived each day on top of the existing pile on the corner of the faded sofa.

His heart had become small again, the way it had after Sophie died. Next week would have been her birthday. She would be turning ten if not for him. When Michelle left him, she’d looked him straight in the eye and called him a murderer. But he knew she blamed herself just as much. He’d been passed out drunk with the stove on so many times in the past, they’d almost made a joke of it. The last time it happened, there was nothing funny about it. He looked at the burns on his arms, his face. A constant reminder of that moment. That one moment when his six-year-old, half asleep, had come into the kitchen, a kitchen filled with gas from the stove that was left on, a kitchen in which he was passed out on the table. Her small hand had reached up to the light switch and flicked it on. He had woken up screaming in pain as his flesh melted off him. It was the worst pain he had experienced in his life. That seemed like no pain at all now.

He didn’t want a divorce, had never wanted a divorce. He didn’t want to lose her, too. He mourned her as well, when she left, remembered her squeals of delight as they’d made love in the garden that first day, by the shed where no one would see them, at once marking their claim to the land and laying themselves bare. He had lost not one, but two of the only people he’d ever loved. He had not been able to say it. She said she wanted to leave and he dumbly, mutely, nodded. He had wanted to fight for her, but he hadn’t. Couldn’t. He blamed himself for that, too.

There came a day when all that needed to be done at Ray’s flat was done. It was sold; the new owners were ready to take possession. There was no longer any need for him to be there. He went anyway, once, twice, but then the real estate agent called and asked him to stop going and he did.

He came home that evening and noticed, for the first time in a long while, how much his house was unkempt, in need of organizing. There were dishes in the sink that had sat there for days that he now put into the dishwasher. He took out his dirty clothes from the laundry hamper, shoved them into the washing machine and turned it on. He took out the vacuum cleaner, tidied up the house.

He noticed the pile of papers on his sofa. It had become larger, overflowing, green and yellow post-its poking out from somewhere near the bottom. He took them out and dropped them into the green bin. The recycling truck came on Thursday. It would take them away then.

.

Also by Natasha Khullar Relph: