wordsout by
The curse of
the financial advisor
by Paul
Richards
"I've been
shafted!"
Your words to me
that February morning
just before we moved in.
You are folded over your mobile
locked in to the red Merc
stuck in traffic
on the
and seeing as you were one of my worst clients
I'm telling you...
You shafted me
and I will take a view on that".
On a February morning on the
air damp with the sighs of thwarted travellers,
the boarded up ice cream parlours,
crazy prices on satellite TV,
you curse us
hunched over your mobile behind the tinted glass
of the trapped Mercedes
Over Christmas we’d dumped his
Critical Illness Cover
for the Pru.
Stripped him of his commission
left him with nothing
after he’d sweated sweat for
us,
going to pieces
with spiralling flu, panics, debts,
fever, family to keep;
keeping tabs on multiple addresses
money draining from
the Financial Advisor
and that ratcheting hawking cough…
Remember, Stephen,
the night you choked on that digestive
over our dining room table—
your cherubic face
fit to bursting with coughing-choking
as you dived for cover
in the thick folds of the
Critical Illness Cover form
pockmarked with spittle,
and tapped in to your calculator,
the tatty room ringing
with your fat, laughing
The winter-long coughing fit
over,
the air somehow going down straight again
into the swollen chest,
the breakdown suffocated with tranquilizers
you lunge for the mobile and
you put your curse on me
and on Susanne…
and then we move in
trailing your words behind us
I've been
shafted...
We laugh like a couple
of elopers
boxed in now to the last
available space
of our brand new sitting room,
but soon the battle begins
for what we had in the old place.
We can’t get it back.
We unpack and unpack and unpack
cut our hands on the edges of boxes
and begin to taste
box dust in the water
but nothing is ever enough.
Never enough space,
nowhere where the other is not somehow heard;
then one night in the garden
in the hysterical rain,
perching on the aluminium step-ladder
as I tack flapping black bin-liners on to my bed
(the one the men couldn’t get upstairs)
your words drop in to my head
I've been shafted...
and I will take a view on that.
By October
we are packing again,
this time only for me.
Over scrambled eggs on toast we settle the bills
then return to stuffing bin liners.
I won’t ever hear her coming through the front door
again.
Stephen
we shafted you
and us too.
Perhaps we really shouldn’t
have gone with the Pru