I pay, you pay, we all pay, one way or another, your weight in gold or the candle, but at least we have some resource to cover our backs. The people who must pay but can’t, well, they live down by the delta in ramshackle houses which lean in the wind, where the crops grow thin and seldom prove sufficient. They pay through the nose.
Pay the piper, seal the deal, cover the bet, I’m sure you know the score.
You’ll pay for this! Shall we go Dutch and skate along the frozen canals? Shall we go Irish and go juggling language until we fall asleep?
Contactless is so clinical though, I’ll be in touch. Leave me alone. No, I mean, I’ll ring you. What do you mean? My phone only plays popular riffs, ringing is so passé, I won’t answer if you do ringing. I’ll drop you a line then. I’m not a fish or someone dangling from a ledge, just shake my hand, kiss my cheek, shake a leg. No, that’s something different again.
Have you got any change? Well, you can’t interfere with entropy if that’s what you mean. No, I mean small coins that I can use to pay for the bread. I don’t carry coins, they deform the classic line of my designer trousers and make jingling noises, just when I’m trying to sneak away undetected. I do have a plastic thing for putting in the supermarket trolley, they are silent and last forever. They will be the last remaining evidence of civilisation in a couple of centuries when the thin dogs and mutated Russian vines have dismantled the cities.
As I said earlier, we’ll all pay in the end, when the final bill comes flopping through the letter box like an unexploded firework. Taxes and tariffs hidden in a dark welter of small print. Pay within thirty or forty days, that’s working days mind you, not sitting around drinking beer days or days spent trying to drive to the beach. Days of a reduced working week, or part time, zero hour, contracts. Don’t wait for the warning notice, the bailiffs will be round to scare you with their stubbly chins.
Itemise the bill, count the decimal places, the scrolling ticket will hold all the details of your life. What were you doing buying raspberries on a Wednesday in Yorkshire when you were meant to be chairing a meeting of the P7 in Guatemala?
Aren’t we all entitled to the basics before the meter starts ticking through the bank balance. Fifteen minutes free if you can locate your nephew at the airport before the tick starts clocking. Can’t we fill the hungry bellies before we start filming starlets in space couture, in high orbit.
I dug it up in the garden, everything around here ends up underground. Its probably over a hundred years old. I had been looking for something, anything really, that I could place a value on. I know, I understand that the market decides this and that, but really, what is value. Anyway, when I found this metal spike, made by hand, I thought, this must have been worth something to somebody once.
It is heavy, this iron spike. What if it were made of silver? It’s designed to stick into a wall. I’m not sure if it is best going into wood or masonry, so that it can support or hold or function in some away. I might put it in the old wall near the BBQ to hang things on or I might just look at it.
Someone, a blacksmith I guess, has cut it, heated it, bent it, heated it several times and banged and banged with a big hammer, on a hot day, to produce the spike. Great eh? Is it worth nothing or a lot?
I shall put it in a bank vault for safe keeping. Anyone could take it if I leave it there on the side. I shall organise a secret security box, which will be numbered and anonymous. It will line up with the other boxes in serried ranks, in a small, but not claustrophobic, well-lit room, with the spare gold bars next door.
Shiney steel security bars are for looking through, wishing that the bars of gold and all the stuff in the safe deposit boxes were really mine. Of course, when you finally pluck up the courage to tunnel through the wall, the boxes all turn out to contain salacious photos of politicians.
Or you could just bribe the guard who sits at a desk beyond the huge metal door. She has twenty monitors to watch. Ask her to look the other way and fake the fingerprint scan.
Unfortunately, she has special faceted eyes, like those of a butterfly and can watch all twenty screens even when she’s looking the other way, so you get caught and have to come clean about your values, or lack thereof.
The Guardians of the Cave 