Dom's Rambles

Between 1982 and 1984 I worked in the stores of a factory in Lincoln and in early 1983 our supervisor got sacked when he mislaid a consignment of goods and was caught fiddling the paperwork to try and disguise the fact. His replacement was an officious ex-RAF warrant officer and I absolutely detested the man. Shortly after being taken on, our new supervisor put in a request for an assistant and a guy called Barry ‘Toucher’ Taylor was duly shipped in from another of the company’s local factories.
Toucher Taylor was in his mid 40s, sported an Alvin Stardust quiff and had the job title ‘key operator’. What this meant, as he would explain at length to anyone who would listen, was that he was a pay grade above the rest of the lads in the stores and had the authority to approve requisitions from the various departments of the factory should a supervisor not be available to do so.
He was one of those people whose mere proximity made you feel queasy. It was never anything you could pin down and it wasn’t like the guy was mean or spiteful or anything like that, but there was just something about him that made your skin crawl. Whenever he talked to you, particularly when he was explaining some work related issue, he was so in your face that you could feel the heat of his breath and he had an alarming habit of subtly brushing his hand across your behind at the same time - which was how he’d come by the nickname.
One day in the autumn of 1983 Toucher came into work and announced that his just turned 16 year old daughter was expecting a baby. She had apparently been impregnated by some lad she’d met on the family’s annual holiday to Skegness but didn’t want anything more to do with him. Toucher could scarcely conceal his delight and for the next nine months would talk about nothing else. When the baby was born he became absolutely insufferable, even bringing the child into work on a couple of occasions. Okay, you might think this was nothing more than the perfectly innocent over enthusiasm of a doting grandparent, but there was something about it which I – and most of my colleagues - found distinctly unsettling.
In September of 1984 I quit the job and went to live in a series of squats and flophouse where I thought that by getting mindlessly stoned and talking nonsense all day long I was somehow helping to bring about ‘a more caring society’.
I never saw Toucher again and had all but forgotten about him until one morning in the summer of 2005, when I was working at a local scrap yard and a familiar face walked into the office.
Pete (as we’ll call him) used to work in the stores with me and had got the sack a couple of months before I left. The last time I’d seen him had been in 1990 when he’d come staggering into Lazers one night after having been thrown out of some towny nightclub for fighting.
At first he didn’t recognise me - my hair was a little more sedate than it had been - but he soon remembered and we chatted about the old days for a while (I seem to remember, I paid him well over the odds for the copper pipe he was weighing in too). As he left he turned around and asked me,
“By the way, did you hear who the father of Touchers grandson turned out to be?”
“No.” I said. “Who was it?”
“Let’s put it this way,” said Pete. “Toucher wasn’t just the grandfather!”
It seemed so obvious that I almost slapped myself on the forehead.
The sick fucking bastard.