Year of the Brute: BRUTE Series, #1

By Matthew H. Jones

What happens when violence solves everything?

The first book in the unfolding BRUTE series, Year of the Brute pits a disillusioned office worker against forces he never could've imagined.
Cheated by his boss and persecuted by his flatmates, life takes an unexpected turn when a savage act of violence conspires to solve all his problems. But as he plunges deeper into the nightmare he'll learn that happiness has come at an impossible price.
Blackly comic, taut and suspenseful, Year of the Brute has been described as 'outrageous, warped and hilarious.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew H. Jones
• Release date: Feb 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386759614

Book preview

‘Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy,

all of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality.’

- William Holden, Network

CHAPTER 1

I stood on the train, weeping because I had to go to work. People asked whether I was okay and I replied no, I wasn’t okay, I had to go to work. They told me there was nothing they could do for me and continued reading their newspapers and electric books.

I fumbled in my bag for painkillers, hoping there’d be enough left to kill me. I kept rummaging but it appeared I’d left the bottle at home. I stared at the ceiling and spied a handrail from which I could hang myself but didn’t have a length of rope to hand. Shoelaces were out of the question, it was pouring outside and I needed my shoes tightly tied to keep out the terrible rain. Might a bag strap take my weight?

Unsurprisingly today’s commute had been unutterably awful. Having squeezed myself into an already heaving train carriage someone had breezily wedged themselves in behind me and said room for a small one? as if this terrible ordeal was somehow a laughing matter. I was pressed against a backpack seemingly filled with nails and jagged metal and my face swung back and forth, pertinently focused on nothing.

I saw an advertisement for a vitamin supplement that promised to make life marginally less miserable because it contained a multitude of unpronounceable and possibly made-up chemical compounds. Beside that a company advertised a new flavour of dust that when taken in conjunction with a heart-punishing exercise regime caused your muscles to become lean and toned like a gladiator. The third advert pitied me and advised I found a wife using a computer but I dismissed their assertion that most romantic relationships were cultivated online these days as a fanciful myth from the future.

People around me sucked coffee from highly technical flasks and my brain felt sluggish and dim because I’d had no caffeine this morning. There was a machine at work that produced coffee if you knew the correct buttons to press but I didn’t. Often I’d watch people twisting the handles and activating the bean grinder but felt too foolish asking how it worked because only an idiot would’ve forgone coffee for five years simply to avoid the embarrassment of asking for help. People said I should be grateful to be in work in the current climate but they didn’t work where I worked and if they did they’d not be so simpering in their praise of my employers.

My wages enabled me to afford shopping but the shopping made me fat and unhappy. I’d eaten two rolls this morning, both stuffed with fried pork and mayonnaise and still I wasn’t full. I hated my mother and father for making me like this but thankfully they were both dead, killed by age and disease while I frittered away my inheritance on salmon and scratchcards.

Martin Dobson was smoking outside the office and I didn’t want to say good morning but had to because I’d done it once, years ago, and if I didn’t say it today he’d think there was something wrong. Yes Martin, I'd say, there is something wrong. I work here in this terrible place with terrible people like you. Being a rough man he’d probably wallop me and I was afraid of pain so I said good morning and had it over with.

I sat at my desk, turned on my computer and settled in for a day of silence and despair. I didn’t care what I was doing because it was meaningless and if I died tomorrow I'd be replaced immediately.

There was a time, distant now, when I’d yearn for the thrill of half past five. I’d have things to do and people to see but now I was alone and had nothing of value in my life. Every day I took a mental snapshot of it all: the smouldering black doom, the dank, unwavering loneliness, the profound, clinging despair, and embedded it in my mind as a reminder of how bad things could get.

I worked in a large, open plan office situated in a dilapidated business park I was convinced would be my final resting place. The décor was slate grey and the hours passed at a uniquely funereal pace. My colleagues, from left to right: Mark, Judy, Biff, Glynn, and Martin Dobson. They didn’t utter a word to me unless strictly necessary and I happily returned the courtesy. Frankly I was in no position to spurn human contact of any kind but these creatures were dogs to me, gormless slugs entombed in their own sad apathy.

I’d been successful in my application, submitted five years prior, for the role of Junior Accounts Assistant, a sorry position in which I’d stewed miserably like boiled beef, such was my disinterest in progressing through the ranks. Every day I sank deeper into a mire of perplexed bafflement because despite my years of service I still didn’t fully grasp what was required of me. I wasn’t an idiot per se, I was aware of the processes required to keep dismissal at bay, but the logic and reason behind such tasks remained an impenetrable netherworld. I spent my days moving papers from one side of my desk to the other, ensuring anything urgent remained out of view and anything less so immediately tossed in the bin.

I’d attend meetings and yawn, wondering how long it’d be before I was rumbled. Meetings were frequent and typically mystifying; I’d look from one yammering face to the next shouting I don’t know what you’re talking about in my head while making rudimentary notes for appearances’ sake. Yes, I’ll get that done for you, I said, my sentences vague puffs of wool that meant nothing because I’d already forgotten what we were talking about. I’d end up writing silly words (pass through costs?) that I’d try deciphering afterwards with little success. What did IBAN even mean?

My desk was small and I had a wire rack not for toast but for invoices and expense claims and other things I palmed off on those with more inclination to succeed than I. I sat beside a man with barely a face, just a couple of eyes dotted carelessly above a nose thing beneath which a pair of lips hung like slimy little eels. His name was Mark or Nick or something and he spoke only to say pass the hole punch, a sorry speck of dialogue that served only to illuminate the yawning emptiness of our enforced companionship.

Occasionally we’d be herded into a communal area and made to suck lager bottles on account of someone celebrating a birthday. On such occasions I’d try talking to Mark (Nick? Mark? Who cares) who'd roll his eyes at the others when he thought I wasn’t looking, feigning exhaustion before making his excuses and leaving me to rot like neglected fridge meat.

The basement canteen distributed foul, ashen potatoes and the patrons read rude newspapers as their cheeks bulged with mash. I lunched there occasionally but often there wasn’t a seat for me because Judy or Biff was sitting there, sorry mate.

There was a pub nearby in which my colleagues drank themselves to hell on Friday evenings and to which I’d never been invited. Come Monday they’d trumpet tales of lashed abandon, cawing at photographs of Martin Dobson with fags up his nose and Judy being an Absolute Legend. Such feckless exploits charred my soul and caused me to reflect on the weekend I’d spend spooning wet fish into my mouth and praying for a miracle death.

Chapter 2

I’d transferred from my position in the city to work in an outlying satellite townette and assumed I’d make friends when I arrived but I’d been laughably mistaken. That was several years ago and I’d since morphed into a crabby little hermit with nothing nice to say about anyone. The pay rise I’d been promised hadn’t materialised and I’d overspent on spa days and bread machines, leaving little for housing or sustenance.

Because I wasn’t an asset-rich millionaire I couldn’t afford a flat of my own and had been forced into shared accommodation with a group of students, all younger and all happier than I. They resented cohabiting with a despondent loser and I hated every second I spent there. Their music and screaming kept me awake and when they stopped screaming they started fucking which was worse because it underlined my loneliness and brought to mind my ex-girlfriend. A stern, shrewish woman, she maintained I’d sucked all the joy from her life and she’d never get it back, irrespective of tablet dosage. She often sent me photographs of her new boyfriend and I’d stare at him trying to recall what happiness felt like.

I’d tried to meet women here but they were all bingo callers or pub drunks with no time for me, a man who knew little of darts or cockfighting. Sometimes I sat in parks hoping a bright young thing would forgive my ugly exterior, excuse my odious personality and kiss me on the mouth. This would never, ever happen however, for experience had taught me women liked men who were kind or handsome or considerate and I was none of these things. I wasn’t even tall.

I’d given up going to bars and clubs when I left the city because I had no one to go with and I couldn’t hear myself over the cacophonous beat music. This didn’t matter because there was nowhere worth going in this appalling place unless one appreciated pubs that catered to real men with real interests like snooker and bulldogs. I wasn't a real man; I was a maggot who gave nothing back to the community, rightly left out in the cold where I belonged. I snorted at their bingo shit-pits but ultimately they were enjoying themselves, forging friendships and laying roots while I bobbed