Little Giants

Well, this one's a 3 hour read at least, my longest yet. At 35000 words, it's long enough to win the booker prize, if they valued stories about gigantic, awkward musclemen and small, strong women craving each other's genitalia.

Enjoy!

BC

X

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CHAPTER ONE

This was a new low, even for me. Literally, a new low. I mean I'm used to ducking my head under doorways -- I'd been doing that since I was a teen -- but that morning I'd crammed myself into a half-height cleaner's cupboard just to avoid a client. I'm not proud of myself. I was hiding from this guy called Marq (with a fucking q, what a qunt). He was still limbering up outside his flat ready for a run I guess. I'm the caretaker in this luxury apartment block, and when he'd texted me to say his shower was fucked, he said he'd be gone by 9 and I should let myself in to fix it. It was five past. Tosser. Why wouldn't he just fuck off? The thing is, he always bullied me for my stammer, even though he was half my size and an actual moron.

"How," you might ask, " Does a little prick like that get to bully you, Dave? I mean look at you, six foot eight and built like fucking Arnie." And I'd say you are most kind, clever reader, and well spotted. I am twice Marq's size and twice his weight and, even though I'm no genius, probably twice his IQ too. He bullied me on account of his great big shameless balls. That's all any of these people have, even the women. Fuck, especially the women. Huge cojones. You can have all my skills: plumber, electrician, carpenter, gardner, cook, bouncer, fucking pilates teacher, but what you really need to make it in the City is big fat shameless bollocks. Once you've got them, nothing holds you back and you will make piles of money and money gets you power. But without said testicles? Well. Then you're the big, bald caretaker of the big-balled, and the butt of their jokes. They even call me Little Giant. LG.

"Jesus, LG." Marq looked me straight in the eye where I cowered behind the cupboard door. "Are you hiding?"

I stepped out, my cheeks blazing. I didn't say anything. I rarely do. I just... loomed.

Marq tilted his ear to me as if to make out the squeak of a mouse. I know that's what he meant, because he squeaked like a mouse as he did so. Then he shook his head and pranced past me.

A few minutes later, I was replacing the thermostatic valve on his power shower and feeling sorry for myself. Not just because I'd been caught hiding and felt pathetic, but because Clara Balzac, the American owner of the apartment building, gangster businesswoman and my boss, had made one of her fleeting visits to her penthouse the night before.

I got a text at 10.30: "Need deluxe service, LG." So, up I went to her elegant flat. Then down I went on her elegant cunt. She was obsessed with my tongue. Jesus, and my cock. I told myself, other blokes, they'd boast about giving an awesome woman like Clara Balzac multiple orgasms. It'd be the highlight of their year. Especially if she -- fuck, anyone -- emptied them the way she emptied me. And, yes it was intimate contact with another soul, of sorts, but afterwards I just felt... empty. Our relationship was professional. She even put it in my contract. I was paid twice the going caretaker rate as long as she was "thoroughly satisfied". You might think, mate, either enjoy it, or don't deal with the devil, but when the guy before me refused this contract, she had me chuck his stuff out on the street. She wanted me to torch it too -- she said she needed "vengeance" -- but I managed to avoid that. So the night before I did as I was contractually obliged. I licked my boss to a hissing orgasm and afterwards gave her the quick filling she always needed in a fuck lasting seconds before she clawed my ass and howled, "Oh G-GAAAAD!". Then -- still cumming, or cumming again I don't know -- she sucked me dry, patted my arse, and immediately started snoring. I was left standing in the dark with a wet dick and an aching jaw. It was hardly love.

I sighed and wrenched another cut-price Chinese shower valve into place. When did everything get so enshittified? London was in the ravages of a crapocalypse. I swear, everything was turning shitter and shitter while it got pricier and pricier and all the once beautiful Londoners seemed to have turned into these hollow-eyed fast-food, ADHD zombies. Proof: Most of the properties in the block were sold as "luxury serviced apartments". You know what that means? No kitchens. I kid you not. Look it up. This was a generation of people too busy, lazy, or dumb to prepare food for themselves. Surely that's the end of life as we know it, right? I mean when an organism can't even fucking feed itself... And love. How could love exist anymore, when all people cared about were likes. Or swiping right. Take my so-called intimate relationship with Clara, with my boss. Transactional. A skill purchased. A need taken care of. Where was the love in that? In fact, where was the humanity?

And why was the thought of that job, stimulating her slobbering cunt until it burst all over me, making me so hard while I did this job? Shit, I was turning into them. Next year I'd be as soulless as Clara Balzac, making my fortune building kitchenless apartments to launder money for drug cartels while paying women to suck me off.

That's when Ma called and changed my life.

"M-ma," I said, and put the phone on speaker, propping it on the toilet seat. I took a breath to try and calm my stammer. Stressful situations, or people, always made it worse.

"Now, she'll be with you tonight and when she gets there tell her that she left a notebook at her mother's--"

"Wait. W-what? Who?" My mother always kicks off a phone conversation like it wasn't a week ago that we last spoke-- lIke she'd just walked in from another room.

"Iona, dear. Remember the girl you used to play with? You said she could stay with you until she finds her feet in the big smoke." Nine-thirty am and she was slurring her words already. What time had she started drinking? Had she even stopped last night? I got a vivid flash of being a kid, of her slow-blinking face, snarling at me when I asked if she'd made my lunch for my first day at school. "Since when did idiots get into school? Fuck you, David. Fuck you."

"Umm. I D-don't think I said that Ma. Are you--"

"Yes, I'm quite certain we discussed it at length."

"N-nope." I'd never offer to share my flat, let alone with a girl. Let alone that girl.

"Well, you must have mentioned it, or why else would I have offered? Idiot boy. You're too kind, David. You let folk walk all over you. So she's on her way. Look after her, she's a gentle soul."

I groaned. Then shut up, and let my ma whitter on while I lost myself, as I do, in my worry for her, and then, mercifully in my work.

Work was my life, and it still is, and I'm proud of that. I've turned everything into work. Only by working at something do you get better at it, so now years, months, days, even hours are stuffed with task loops. I got into the habit during my first job as a gardener, working with the seasons. So now everything had its cycle, from the biannual gutter clean, to the monthly window buff, the weekly floor polish, even the Friday night bouncer duties at the local bar. Then there was baking every morning, furniture making every afternoon, gym every evening. Then the rounds I did twice a day checking on the block, as well as the security cameras Clara made me fit in her penthouse -- piped into a channel on my TV -- and then Clara's irregular needs of course. I even wanked to a schedule (Every other day in the winter, every day in the summer). It's all about consistency, and making little improvements each time, and before I knew it I was an expert at loads of shit. Even cunnilingus apparently. And Especially masturbation, I was a fucking ninja at that. There wasn't much time for people in my routine, true, but that's how I had so much time and, based on my experiences with the people in my life, that wasn't such a bad thing either.

So the last thing I needed was someone -- worse, some sad ass girl -- coming right into my home, scuppering all my perfect routines, and sadding it all up.

The rest of that day I took my frustration out on my flat, banging and scrubbing and shunting stuff around. I had a spare room but was using it as a workshop-cum-gym. In the end, it was quicker to move my shit into that room and change the bedsheets in my original bedroom for my guest.

My guest. I hated those words. And, Iona. Fuck. I hadn't seen her in, what, fifteen years? She moved to a fancier street when we were still children. She was a little panda of a thing when she left, what would she be like at twenty-five? A big panda? She knew me as a beanpole who'd only just started his freakish growth spurt so she'd certainly be freaked out to see me now.

Ma might remember Iona and I as friends but in reality we had nothing in common. Iona liked books and board games. I liked making treehouses. We hung out together because none of the other kids played with us-- we were too shy and too into our own stuff. We felt safe together. I mean, our home lives didn't feel so safe. Iona's parents were both lawyers who left for work before dawn and returned after midnight and kept forgetting who's turn it was to book childcare. We first met her when she was six and turned up at our doorstep one dinnertime asking for a sandwich. But our house wasn't much safer. My ma was a bitter drunk who blamed me for my Pa bolting.

Most days Ma told me to "Fuck off to your posh friend's house." So Iona and I, as opposite as we were, became the best of a shitty world for each other. She'd read me Jane Eyre -- over and over -- while I worked on my treehouses, or she'd try and teach me chess and scrabble while we hid out in the trees. In the summer we'd sleep in them. Christ, of all the people to live with. We just reinforced each other's lonesomeness. We validated each other's sadness like alcoholic strangers becoming besties in a bar.

Fucksake, Ma. I didn't need this. I had a nice, neat, content life. Everything was just how I liked it, from how I kept the apartment block, to the rhythm of my right fist. I didn't need someone like Iona shoving her own sad life into mine, again. And she certainly would. She was nothing if not opinionated.

I fumed and fumed again.

Then, a whole hour before she was supposed to arrive, there was this soft knock on my door, followed a few seconds later by the door bell. I was sweaty and gross from my day's cleaning and was making pies -- for some fucking reason -- so covered in flour and stuff. I threw open the door.

Not Iona. Some winsome little goth tinkerbell with eyes like an alien. She stepped back, blinking, like I'd slapped her in the face.

"Sorry!" We said in unison. Then immediately laughed too loud.

She wrung her hands together. "I think I've got the wrong flat. I'm looking for David? He's the caretaker here?"

Ah. One of the resident's classy friends, looking for something to be fixed. Figured. She was pretty glamorous for a punk. like some Vivienne Westwood model. Yes, way too clean and perfect-skinned and slim to be someone I'd know.

I must've been staring.

"I startled you." She shrugged. "I'm sorry. I have that effect on..." she rolled her hand, like, etcetera, etcetera and the gesture was familiar-- very familiar. Then suddenly there she was.

"Iona?"

CHAPTER TWO

Iona's jaw dropped. "Shit. Davy?" She sent wide eyes up and down me. "What the fuck happened to you?"

"I know," I followed her eyes over my swollen, veiny limbs. "Sorry. And you! You're... you're b-beautiful."

Her cheeks looked suddenly slapped. "Oh you too!" she blurted. "I mean... beautiful." The word danced around us like a bully.

"Sorry!" I said again, for fucksake. I grabbed her suitcase. "P-please, come in. I'm making pies."

"Umm. OK," she said.

We both laughed at that, even though it wasn't funny.

Hilarity done, she stepped into my flat like it was a bear's cave, leaning in first as if to check it was safe.

I saw the wide, low-ceiling basement flat through her eyes. The floor was polished concrete but I'd painted all the walls and ceiling black, seeing as the space was dark anyway, thanks to squinty windows running just under the ceilings. They were too high for a view out, and too small for any light. And I had fuck-all furniture but for a a beaten-up old punchbag, a huge TV opposite a massive sofa. I'd made the kitchen myself too, out of bits I'd salvaged when the local Pie and Eels shop was converted into a Pret. It was a pro kitchen, but honestly looked fucking dystopian now. The place smelled of bleach and baking, at least. My favourite smells. Perhaps I should've bought some flowers or something. The boiler room next door rumbled.

"You live here?" Iona said, and swung one platformed boot into the flat.

"Bit rude," I said, and scoffed like she was joking.

She flicked a frown at me. "It's a fucking carpark."

I hovered, unsure if I should bring her luggage in after all. "Ah. It was supposed to be, b-but they couldn't get p-permission so..."

She pressed her lips, stoically, like the six-year-old on our doorstep asking for food. Doing what she needed to do. "Show me the room," she clipped.

My bedroom was cosier, I'd lined it in oak panels and the bed, my bed, was huge, of course. I'd made it myself because I couldn't buy one big enough. It had a fake-fur bedspread and was covered in loads of pillows. The room had its own bathroom too. And a view. The flat's only picture window, a window seat looking across the road to a hoarder's rundown old house.

Iona sighed, and nodded.

Phew, I thought. Obviously I'd have been delighted if she'd decided not to live with me, but I didn't want that to be because she thought I was a creep with a creepy flat.

Then the fragrant waif said. "Ah, would you mind?" and got me to move all the furniture around until the room was twice the size and "Zoned". Of course, she'd just finished her architecture degree and was in the city looking for work.

"Thank you," she said finally, showing me the door. "It's perfect. And very kind of you. I promise I'll find a job in the next few days and be out of your hair."

Well, a few days came and went, and she still hadn't even left the flat. She barely moved from her room. Honestly it was kind of like she wasn't there, but for the girlish haunting of her perfume and the sound of her "doom jazz" as she sat on her laptop all day, "Working". Rather than looking for actual work, she seemed to spend all her time on the window seat making designs for the old hoarder's knackered old house. I'd bring her meals on a tray and leave them outside her door. I quite liked that she ate in her room too, then one morning she appeared beside me at the breakfast bar with her food. From then on we ate together, albeit in silence but for the pleasantries. "Sleep well?" "Good." "Nice croissants, you made them?" "Hmm." One time she remarked that my stammer was better than it used to be, and I realised that with her, I didn't stammer at all. And she was always fully dressed and made up, even first thing, even if I was still in my shorts and vest. Days slid by and I felt like the shoots of new loops were curling out of my life.

Then a week or two later I woke to find a coffee beside me and the smell of toast and the sound of eggs frying in the kitchen. Iona smiled at me when I sat beside her for breakfast, and her cheeks flared pink. I think that's because her pixie-cut was all bed-headed, her face clean of makeup, and she was still dressed just in the long, skull print t-shirt she slept in. Is it wrong that I noticed how fresh her skin was without makeup? And her bare toes? Yeah that was probably creepy, but I mean it was the first time I'd seen her out of boots. She still had podgy fat kids feet and that warmed my heart for some reason. Perhaps I was staring at them, because her flush deepened and she wrung her feet together. "Sorry I'm not decent," she said. "I wanted to get into the kitchen before you."

"I'm pleased you're relaxed," I said. "It's your flat too." I think that's the first time we acknowledged this was going to be a permanent arrangement. Then we laughed nervously, and ate in silence.

In this way, slowly, Iona's life slipped in sync with mine. She made breakfast, I made dinner and neither of us cared for lunch once we were busy. Sometimes she'd come and work in my room, sitting on the old leather daybed -- my night bed -- while I made my furniture or I worked out. Iona was as shy as me, but unselfconscious in two things. Firstly when she was lost in her work -- never her CV like she should, but that fantasy building -- she sat without care, her knees drawn up and legs apart, laptop on the seat between her feet, I mean even if she was wearing a skirt. She caught me regarding her plump knicker gusset one time and just said, "What?" but didn't move. Then other times, when I was hefting my weights usually, she'd stare at my chest and arms, chewing the inside of her lip. I caught her doing it, shamelessly watching me. "OK?" I said.

"Mm-hmm," she said. And didn't stop looking.

I could never work it out, was this because she liked me looking at her, and liked the sight of me, or because she simply didn't care? Whatever. I was just glad she felt safe enough not to worry I suppose.

She must have applied for some jobs because I drove her to a few interviews, and waited to take her home after. I told myself I hoped she'd bound back to the car all excited because she'd finally got a job, but shamefully I didn't want her to be hired, and get paid, so she was forced to stay with me for free a bit longer. It took a while to realise this. It only became clear when, just before we went out to another architect's office, I was doing up the chunky zip on the back of her best dress -- full length, skin tight, black vinyl -- and buckling her into a viciously spiked dog collar. "This makes me feel fierce," she said to me in the mirror. "Strong, y'know?"

"I bet."

She chewed her lip. "D'you think it puts people off?"

"Not at all," I said. "Just be yourself."

Then she got rejected again and we spent the journey home moaning about, even bonding over, the curse of shyness.

So Iona stopped looking for work after this, only leaving the flat to talk to her new friend Aggie -- the woman who owned the shitty house across the road.

"Shameless," I said. "Doesn't she know how much you want her house?"

"My first client," Iona said through a mouthful of honey-nut loops, grabbed by the fistful right from the box. How this woman wasn't a full-sized panda I don't know. She ate like a builder.

"She's paying you?"

"Pro bono." Crunch crunch.

"That's just lawyers, isn't it? And in the states? And in the movies?"

"Huck you."

So she measured the place up and made computer renders and models of how she'd improve it, presenting them to the owner in formal client presentations even though the woman was so poor she made a tea bag last a week. When I asked Iona, again, why she did this, she just shrugged. "Remember our treehouses?"

After a couple of months, we moved about the flat -- about our whole life -- in a kind of dance, totally in step, and slotting into shared tasks like an old married couple. She came with me on my rounds and checked the penthouse CCTV channel with me, or often without me, she was so fascinated by Clara's huge, empty apartment she was like its ghost. Then she was my helper when fixing things too so she could see inside the other flash apartments. And when I hid from the residents, so did she, neither of us meeting the other's eye. She came with me on Friday nights to hang out at the bar while I did my bouncer job, glugging my free cocktails because I don't drink. I'd carry her home on my back while she babbled boozy plans for the future where she was an architect and I her builder. She even joined the pilates class I ran in a local gym -- teaching a class is a surprisingly lonesome experience by the way -- and we'd stretch and squat in the mirror, trying not to catch each other's eyes so we didn't get the giggles.