Michael is based on an old man named Alistair that I used to work with during my tenure at National Car Parks.
Alistair used to work the night shift at the same building as me and I would take over at 6AM. He was a strange, fragile, broken man who didn’t have a genuinely malicious bone in his body.
He was L-shaped with a stoop that left him bunched up. He wore coke bottle glasses over his greying, bushy eyebrows that had to be inches thick and barely any help to his myopia. More than once I came into work and found him on his hands and knees in front of a parked car as he attempted to transcribe their license plates for the company’s night log; his face would always be about 10 cm away from them.
He had worked with NCP for over 28 years after he had been released from hospital after ‘recovering’ from shellshock.
I would arrive in the morning and he would sit down take his pills (a curious blue shaped one followed by a pink and yellow one) and then go out and feed the pigeons in the park that was adjacent to our work. This was something he did religiously and clearly gave him a great amount of pleasure.
He used to ramble a little before going out so I got to know a little about him over the months.
He was convinced that NCP had setup cameras in his house and were monitoring his every move to make sure he behaved. Frequently he would mention friends that he had who would tell him things. One of these friends was responsible for the only time I ever saw him angry at me, which was impressive as he had more than a few reasons to be annoyed at me with the amount of times I would show up late..
Alistair was a poet in his spare time but as his eye sight had gone he was struggling to read his own, immaculate hand writing. During one of our conversations he brought this up and I offered to type them up and blow up the font so that it was legible to him.
He was delighted by the idea and gave me two poems. They were both very different; the first was about an uprising in Chile with people being shot and dying for freedom as the narrator watched on television. The second followed anthropomorphised seagulls as they flew around Brighton going through their daily routines. While the first was dark, the second was light and silly.
They shared the fact that they were both plainly written but touching in their simplicity that and each had his signature followed by a ™ and © that reminded me of what I used to put next to my drawings when I was 8 years-old.
I typed them up and returned the prints with the originals and he cheerfully took the piss out of my spelling and tendency to miss out words when I speed type.
After his initial delight the next couple of days he was fine with me but something changed in Alistair after that. He became more guarded around me and abstained from indulging in chatter when I arrived to start.
After a week he confronted me, the poetry had appeared in a national newspaper. Alistair was having trouble walking the streets for fear of the people staring at him. They all knew he had written the piece and he was terrified of the repercussions, he kept lamenting the publication of the Chile poem:
“They think it is real!” He kept repeating.
I prodded him to tell me what paper it was but Alistair wouldn’t tell me more details; only that it was one of his friends that had told him. He kept insinuating that there were only two copies and that only I could have sold them to the newspaper.
I kept trying to get him to present more tangible proof that any of this had actually happened but all my arguments served to do was for Alistair to clam up and keep repeating that it was his friend who told him. It was my word against theirs.
I gave up on talking and he walked out in a bustle of stumbling angst.
I felt kind of mean because the whole thing was pretty amusing, which made his heartfelt apology he gave me a few days later even worse. Whatever apparition in his mind that had started this mess had now faded and he felt the need to explain his delusions even though I knew full well how crazy he was.
I moved car parks and saw Alistair less frequently but when I did, he was his usual chipper self.
I stopped working for NCP a few months later. Several years on, I found out that the company had coerced him into retiring so that they didn’t have to lay him off and pay him severance. NCP was his life so I can’t imagine he went on living for much longer than that and with him went his poetry and pigeon feed.
So, I wrote Michael as a tribute to Alistair as a way to remember the funny, sad, weird and tragic little man that he was. Even if those weird little moments in that booth were fleeting, they stayed with me and I hope they stay with you.
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