After a half-dozen failed interviews, it began to seem to Flam as if the prospective employers were all engaged in a conspiracy. The interviewers inevitably began the sessions by commenting on Flam’s unusual name, thereby instantly putting him hopelessly on the defensive. Utterly lacking in confidence, he slumped, or squirmed in his chair, stammered, barely spoke above a whisper, and refused to look his inquisitors in the eye. Without exception, his few on-campus interviews proved unadulterated failures.
Lacking a network of personal contacts to draw upon, or the pluck and hustle to go cold-calling the local mortuaries, Flam soon exhausted all obvious prospects of employment within his chosen profession. Increasingly desperate as his last school days slid away, he widened his scope, applying for any job that remained on the bulletin board, no matter how unqualified he might be for it. Now failure seemed to spread like a cancer, for he was unable to land even the most menial of jobs.
Flam began to feel outright panic. The insurance money that had paid for his college education was all spent—in fact, he had not had enough left to buy a proper suit for his interviews, and the rumpled shirt and hand-me-down polyester tie in which he appeared for interviews had done nothing to help his prospects. The shining path of mortuary manifest destiny, on which he had been treading, was now turning out to be the slippery back of some treacherous cosmic serpent, threatening to send him tumbling back to the coal-black despair of earlier days . . . starting with the loss of his precious apartment.
Despite his domicile’s miniscule size and shabby condition, he hated to give it up. After all those years without a room of his own, the apartment was a sanctum sanctorum, albeit a cluttered one filled completely with books, whose precariously balanced stacks ran the periphery of available wall space. Flam cherished the seclusion his apartment provided. It was a private, utterly safe world where no one could abuse or insult him. In fact, he hadn’t had a single visitor since moving in—beyond his mother’s initial requisite inspection. That visit had resulted in a nightmarish day spent together cleaning and scrubbing, with his teary-eyed parent alternating between fervid prayer and entreaties to her son not to leave her, and to commute to school instead. Now it appeared Mary’s prayers had finally been answered, and Flam was damned to move back home.
It’s not that he wasn’t profoundly grateful to have reconciled with his mother. He knew—he felt—how that rekindled connection had rescued him from despair and allowed him, at the most root level, to deal with and move on from the miserable memories of childhood. Perhaps that was the very reason he dreaded now having to move back in with her again.
Nevertheless, the first of May, with a new rent payment due, was only days away. Utterly dejected, yet resigned to his fate, Flam began busying himself to vacate his apartment. He first notified his mother he was moving back in with her, and although she was suitably mournful about his failure to find a funeral services job, her unbridled delight at Flam’s pending return under her wing was all too evident.
“Don’t worry, dear,” Mary consoled him, “perhaps I can find you work at the parish. God willing, we may be able to spend our whole days together. Won’t that be grand?” Flam swallowed a planetoid-sized lump that had sprung up in his throat, and although he would not have thought it possible, grew more disheartened.
He glumly inaugurated the moving process with a purging of his unwanted possessions. He packed up two boxfuls of assorted books that were no longer of interest to him, figuring he could give them to his old friend Page Turner, before heading upstairs to his mother’s to drop off the first load of possessions.
Turner almost fell off his stool when Flam walked into the shop. Although it had been several years since the two had spoken, not counting a brief exchange of condolences at Steve Grub’s funeral, the older man seized upon Flam like a long-lost son. The bookmonger locked him in a huge, rib-crunching bear hug, and then pinched his cheeks, as if greeting some precocious toddler. A spare chair was dug out from under its load of bookstore flotsam to allow the prodigal to sit and bring Turner up to date on the latest chapters in the Flam Grub story.
Turner had heard second-hand of Flam’s career choice, and it was quite clear he had some misgivings. “I guess it’s like lawyers,” Turner groused, “the crooked ones give the whole profession a bad name . . . bloody vultures, preying on the distraught.”
“It is a business, I can’t deny that, but I really think we perform a valuable service. Or ‘they’ perform a valuable service, I should say . . . it seems the profession doesn’t want me in it.” And Flam went on to describe his futile attempts at securing employment, his forthcoming loss of the apartment, and his return to the flat upstairs.
“I guess you’ll be seeing a little more of me. I don’t suppose you know of any jobs that might be available in the neighbourhood . . . you know, just to make ends meet and maybe help me save up for first and last months’ rent so I can get my own apartment again?”
Turner’s face, at least as much as was visible beyond the forest of whiskers, lit up with delight. “Talk about coincidence . . . why, you can come and work for me. I was just going to draft up a classified ad when you so serendipitously walked through the door.”
“But I’ve never known you to have a helper . . . you’ve always run the store yourself.”
“Precisely the point. Of late, I’ve been focussing more on the trade in rare and antiquarian books, but that requires regularly closing the shop in order to keep appointments and go on book-buying expeditions. I’ve had many complaints from my regular customers. It would be extremely helpful to have someone behind the counter I could trust. And the summer season is upon us, after all, when I normally like to keep the store open well into the evenings.”
“So, business is good?” Flam asked.
Turner’s whiskers sagged downwards into a frown. “Frankly, the second-hand book trade is no longer what it used to be. It’s too premature to pronounce the printed word as facing extinction, but as the poet said, ‘The times they are a’changing.’ A lot of the other shops in the area have already closed. Which is why I wouldn’t be able to pay you a fortune, I’m afraid, but I can give you a plethora of hours.” Turner turned to Flam with an impish grin. “Mind you, it’s extremely boring much of the time—all there is to do is sit around amongst all these thousands of books . . . and read.” He winked when he delivered that last piece, and it cemented the deal.
“Okay, well I do need a job . . . at least until I can land something in the funeral business . . . and this certainly is ideal. Thanks, Page, I appreciate it.”
Turner leaned over to punch open the cash register, lifted the money tray, and from underneath fished out a wad of bills. “Clearly, you’re fond of your tiny domicile, so why not retain it? Here’s an advance against your wages so you can remit your rent.” Flam hesitated, and Turner thrust the money closer, not budging.
Finally, Flam reddened, and reached out to accept the loan. For the first time in days, he felt resurrected and hopeful again. However, just as he was wondering whether his mother was home so he could break the news, a potential problem surfaced, temporarily deflating his good spirits. Although Flam would be able now to manage the rent on his apartment, how was he supposed to rationalize commuting all that distance daily, when his mother could offer free accommodation right above the workplace?
It was Turner who devised a solution. “Surely that vocational academy of yours must offer a veritable cornucopia of night courses, even during the summer,” he counselled. “Why not simply sign up for one or two, and then explain to your mother that you’re still taking classes for extra credit. It won’t technically be a prevarication.”
There were, as it turned out, hundreds of courses offered through Prentice College’s School of Continuing Education, so many so that Flam had difficulty figuring out what to choose. There were even some additional Funeral Services courses available he could take, like Advanced Restoration Techniques, which he had previously bypassed in favour of a progressive course on grief counselling.
Flam ultimately dismissed this