Crispy

 The shrieking recommenced almost as soon as Jill closed the door behind her again and Marvin shivered, glad that he wasn’t having to face potential customers.  He picked up the invoice that he’d pushed back before Jill came in and a puzzled expression came over his face.  He wasn’t especially handsome, and even his wife sometimes referred to him as having a face fit for radio, and his expression of puzzlement twisted up his puffy lips and flexed pock-marked skin in a way that sometimes put diners off their food for a couple of days.  He read the invoice again, and then turned it over and inspected the fine print on the back in case this was some kind of obscure joke.  Finding everything he expected there, even down to the phone number looking mostly correct he turned it back over and read it again, just in case it had changed while he wasn’t looking.  Then he set it down on the desk in front of him, stared at it as though it might change while he watched, and finally, reluctantly, picked up the phone.

“Kev!” yelled a voice on the other end.  Describing Marvin’s boss as excitable missed the opportunity to compare him with a hyperactive toddler who’d been gorging on forbidden E-numbers all morning and sugar all afternoon.  Marvin pulled the phone away from his face slightly to avoid feeling like he was being deafened.

“Kev, it’s Marvin here,” he said.  Most people would have checked to see who was calling when they answered the phone but Marvin knew his boss would simply have grabbed the phone without looking and answered it.  There was no-one in the world that Kev wouldn’t talk to, but there were a lot of telemarketing firms that had him on their no-call list.

“Marvin!” Kev sounded elated.  “I was just going to think about you!  You’re awesome, you know that right?  I love the job you do!  What do you for me again?”  There was the sound of a car horn blaring and Marvin guessed that Kev was probably driving.  He waited, and sure enough he heard Kev shouting, probably out of his window.

“Yeah, and I’d do that to your mother too, you—“ and another cacophony of horns drowned him out.  When approximate silence resumed Marvin risked talking.

“Kev, we’ve got an invoice here from the council,” he said.

“Lovely people,” said Kev.  “You’re one of my corpse-robbers, right?”

“Right,” said Marvin.  Arguing with Kev was pointless as he rarely listened to anything anyone told him unless it was related to money.  “The council are billing us for littering.”

“What?”  There was a screech that might have been Kev braking hard, or someone close by to him braking hard.  Marvin wouldn’t have liked to have to guess.

“Yeah, apparently we’re in breach of new guidelines on the disposal of long-chain hydrocarbons with persistent features.”  That was, word for word, what the invoice said.

“What the bloody hell does that mean?  Can’t these guys speak English?  And look where you’re putting that thing, mate, or I’ll find somewhere to put it that’ll have you walking funny for a week!”

“I think they’re talking about plastic surgery,” said Marvin, who was certain that this was the case but still had trouble believing it.

“You what?  That wasn’t a bleeding pig, mate!”

“I think,” said Marvin, wondering what was going on where Kev was, “that the council are saying that if we bury people who’ve had plastic surgery without removing the plastic bits first, they’re going to bill us for littering.”

“Then remove the plastic bits, bro!”

Marvin stared off into the distance while listening to the wail of a police siren approach and then fade away again while Kev trash-talked someone who sounded like they might be a pensioner.  When he felt that Kev might be listening he spoke up.

“First, people are going to get upset if they think only bits of their relatives are getting buried,” he said and Kev cut him off.

“Tell them it’s a legal requirement,” he said.  “Put it in the fine print and point them at the council when they moan.  Their rules, they can sort it out.”

“The other problem,” said Marvin doggedly, feeling like he was ordering the tide to turn back.  He’d been rather hoping Kev would be upset by all this and would go and shout at the councillors.  “The other problem is that rummaging through a body to remove the plastic bits will take ages.  It’ll end up costing us a fortune in wages, and maybe overtime for the first couple of weeks.”

“Sorting machine!” said Kev.  “Same to you, love, only with spikes on!”

“What?”

“Sorting machine,” said Kev.  “Like what they use in the post office.  Push the body in one end, get a filleted body out the other and a nice bag of plastic giblets.  Easy.  Talk to Alfred, he’ll fix you up with one.  Right mate, gotta go, I’m still trying to get these organs delivered and the traffic’s atrocious up here!”

Marvin set the phone down on the desk and gently rested his head in his hands while he tried to find a way that Kev’s idea didn’t make sense.  Outside he heard a slam and hoped that Jill had managed to get rid of the troublesome customer.

“Sorting machine,” he whispered to himself.