Proper Job (in progress) - a comedy by Ian Hocking

'Proper Job' is a witty and fast-paced comedy set in the Cornish ice-cream industry. It features a young man, Fabe Carrick, as he attempts to juggle friendship, family and love in his last summer before entering Oxford University. It’s a book for any of the 270,000 visitors who travel to Cornwall each summer, and the 500,000 Cornish who serve them ice-creams, rent them surf boards and get stuck behind them in narrow lanes.

The manuscript was described by a leading UK literary agent as 'fresh, lean, original and inventive'.

If you wish to see a synopsis of 'Proper Job', or request chapters, email me at ian_hocking@uk2.net with 'query' in the subject line.

Here is an excerpt from 'Proper Job', in which our hero begins his first day at work:

Parked next to the slag heap, I set out my scoops and wiped surfaces with the aplomb of a gardener laying out his prize cucumbers. I tested the taps at the passenger end of the service counter. Cold water running nicely. Straight onto my shoes. I looked at the puddle with my smile hanging. I decided to wipe it up and not treat it as an omen of the coming day. I whistled in the random way that starts with a high note, a slighter lower one, one or two bum stragglers, and finishes with a sensible decision to stop.

I opened one of the freezer’s loose lids and put my head into the fog: several large tubs of vanilla, mint, raspberry, chocolate and pixie flavour ice-cream. From the shelf above the freezer, I selected a box of cones. I also took down the float. Then I discovered the special meaning of ‘float’ in the context of ice-cream selling: ‘to have insufficient monies, and to have them in denominations that are punishingly heavy to move’. Penelope had told me that the year-round drivers receive a float of fifty pounds whereas the seasonal drivers receive twenty, but with plenty of copper and the odd boiled sweet. Soon, however, I had distributed the coins in neat denominations in the money tray.

I was all set. I looked at my watch: 11:03 AM.

I slid open the glass serving hatch and beheld my first queue: an orderly line of grandparents, mothers and fathers, and children. They were searching themselves and each other for money.

“And good morning!” I said, feeling papal.

A rotund gentleman put an elbow on my serving hatch. He had so much hair erupting from his bare arms, his chest, and – alarmingly – his cheekbones, that it would have been possible for him to make a comfortable year-round living donating toupees to men in need. If so, his first customer would have been himself, for his bald, mahogany-brown head collected almost all the ambient light and reflected it into my eyes.

“Good morning back at you, young man,” he said. “I’d like an ice-cream please.”

My smile was beginning to ache already. “Which flavour?”

The man rolled his head as though I had asked him to think randomly of a number. “Mmmmmm-peaches.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have peach flavour.” I nodded to the jolly stickers on the serving window. “We only have the flavours you see there.”

The man did not follow my nod. His head rolled again. “Rrrrrrrrrr-rum and raisin.”

I licked my lips. “We have vanilla, strawberry, mint, and pixie flavour.”

“Pixie flavour?” He turned to the lady behind him in the queue and chortled, “They put pixies in the ice-cream.”

“Don’t worry, they’re free range,” I said brightly.

“What?” He looked horrified. “That’s terrible.”

I looked down into his eyes for a long time, but if there was penny rattling around his head somewhere, it wasn’t about to drop. “Sir, we don’t actually have pixies in Cornwall.”

“I thought they were little squirrel-type things. With trousers.”

“No, sir. Pixies only exist in folklore.”

“Folklore?”

With my best ‘lesson over’ voice, I said, “Sir, I’m conscious of the queue behind you.”

Whether the image of mashed squirrel-pixies had disturbed him or he had been disturbed by something beforehand, like his mahogany-headed life, the man’s expression would not have been more aghast had I held up a pair of tiny, torn trousers and cackled witchily.

“Sir, shall I get you a vanilla ice-cream?”

“Um, OK,” he said.

I took the scoop, reached into the freezer, and dragged it across the top of the open vanilla tub. The vanilla was flint solid. I swear I saw sparks. I struck it in the centre and the scoop hummed like a tuning fork. I scrapped with the frantic motion of a dog digging up a bone: my rewards were the ice-cream equivalent of angel hair and a sharp pain in my wrist.

“Can I interest you in another flavour?”

The man shrugged. “Vanilla?”

“Vanilla.” I leaned on my scoop the way a council worker will lean on his broom. “The thing is,” I whispered, “the vanilla is rock hard.”

“Rock hard? Why is it rock hard?”

“It’s been in the freezer.”

He blinked. “Of course it’s been in the freezer. It’s ice-cream.”

“I can see I’m not explaining myself.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

The ten-litre tub, which weighed as much as a small car battery, bounced as I dropped it onto the counter. I took the scoop and scored the surface. The ice-cream curled into a spiral as thin as carrot shavings in a pricey restaurant. “Rock. Hard.”

“It just needs a bit of welly.”

I will briefly summarize the straws of the prior days that had been loaded onto my back: I had fallen through the box-wall of Jeff’s office, had my ears boxed for me by the mechanic, and had the ice-cream bicycle give me full-body massage. Into this broth of woe let us add the spice of tea deprivation.

And, now, this mahogany-headed pixie-lover wanted me to give the ice-cream a bit of welly.

I licked my lips.

“Welly, you say?”

I grabbed the sides of the tub and pulled them out of shape. I lifted the tub and dropped it on the counter. “You want welly?” I asked the customer. Far from being ashamed of his comment, he nodded seriously and looked at the vanilla to see if it had softened yet. So I dropped it on the floor of the van and kicked it towards the gear stick. It struck the stick and spun onto its side. “How’s that?”

I strode to the tub, lifted it to eye height, and dashed it against the floor of the van. The shock echoed about the interior. “And that?” Before he could reply, I reached for the nearby child scoop and bludgeoned the ice-cream. It was still harder than a block of fired clay. “That?” I wiped the spittle on my sleeve. “Am I getting there?”

For my last trick, I put the tub in the middle of the van and lined my toes against its edge. This done, I took three deliberate steps backward and to the left. My calves met the driver’s seat. I cupped my right hand in my left fist and visualized kicking the tub through the side of the van, into the arms of the mahogany-headed customer, thence (customer and all) through the H of the drop goal frame on the far side of the rugby field.

With a scream unequalled in the history of welly, I punted the tub.

Had I connected properly, the crowd would have cheered, broken into the van, and borne me away into the annals of local history. This, however, did not happen. Instead, I slipped on the patch of wetness deposited by my experiment with the tap, so that the only part of me that connected with the tub was my ankle. The tub spun away from me like an air hockey puck. During its journey, it returned to knock me playfully as I hopped around the van holding my chipped ankle.

It came to rest, at length, in the passenger footwell, lifeless as a Catherine Wheel with its gunpowder spent.

I hobbled over to the customer. “That,” I panted, “enough welly for you?” I plonked the tub on the counter.

“Probably. Try it now.”

“I told you,” I groaned, “it’s rock hard.” I put the scoop in the ice-cream. It entered beautifully.

“See? Like I told you: welly.”

“It’s probably just the time it’s been out,” I muttered.

“One vanilla, please!”

As a broken man, I muttered, “Yes, sir.”

My watch read 11:09 AM.

I gave him his ice-cream. He gave me a twenty-pound note. I gave him my entire float.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I called to my queue, “I’m afraid I can only accept exact change. If you have exact change, please come to the front of the queue.”

The queue emitted a bird colony of groans. Little girls and boys expelled pent-up breath. Mothers laughed at this farcical turn. Fathers frowned and bit their lips. One father, a forty-year-old wearing shorts, flip-flops and a rugby shirt, fixed me with a stare so well-honed he probably had a secret codename for it. The Dominator, or some such.

“Oh,” he said. “What a clever ice-cream man.”

As the customers opened their wallets and purses, grunting with the sudden effort to locate coinage, I massaged my wrist and pulled out tubs of the remaining flavours for thawing. I looked at Penelope’s trailer and I waved my scoop. A moment later, she did the same.

I served the next four or five customers with slow, apathetic ease: ball after ball of vanilla, icy kindling of lollies and pre-packed ice-cream snacks. I had no till and calculated everything in my head. My eyelids were hooded. And no cup of tea on the horizon.

“I’m accepting notes again,” I called to the queue. They muttered phrases like, “Make your mind up,” and “One way or the other, boy,” and “Bitch.”

My next customer was the man who had called me clever. His daughter, seated in the crook of his arm, fussed with her dress and regarded me with the shock of a person who had been randomly slapped.

“I’ve been standing here so long,” said the father, “I now have to face the possibility of a nappy change.”

I giggled.

“Are you giggling?”

“Oh, sorry. You meant your daughter’s nappy.”

“Just get me a bloody ice-cream.”

“Yeah,” added his daughter. “Blurry eye-cream.”

I handed over one adult cone and one child cone. In return, the father gave me a note with a red picture on it.

“Sir, I can’t accept this.”

“Why not? It’s legal currency.”

Someone further down the queue shouted, “I can confirm that, young man. I work in the City.”

“So do I,” said someone else.

“Oh, really? For whom?” said a third.

The father knocked on my counter, as if I needed to open up the door of my common sense. “Did you hear that? That man confirms it.”

With my empty hand, I massaged the back of my neck. “Sir, you want to pay for two ice-creams with a fifty-pound note?”

He snorted. “Good grief. Do you mean to tell me that you’ve never seen a fifty-pound note?”

“Actually, I haven’t.”

“Yokel!” he spat.

“Whether or not I’ve seen one is irrelevant. I don’t have enough change.”

The man adjusted the position of his daughter. “What is this, darkest Africa? You won’t accept money, now, in Cornwall, is that it? You won’t accept money?”

This was my first day on the job, but I was not wet behind the ears when it came to dealing with excited customers. This particular specimen was psyching himself for a confrontation. It was the mental equivalent of jerking himself off and just as unpleasant to watch. I chucked my scoop into its water bowl. “Fine, sir. You can stand next to the van until I’ve served enough customers to give you change.”

“But I have to get back to our wind break. You can’t stop me. I’m a free citizen.”

“Even free citizens have to pay for their ice-creams.”

“I really must,” he said, licking the ice-cream, “protest.”

His daughter licked her own and pouted at the Bad Ice-Cream Man.

“Sir, please step to one side. There are others in the queue.”

“No,” he said. “I shan’t.”

“Sir?”

“No.”

“Sir.”

“No.”

I sighed. “Have them for free.”

“Well done,” he said, speaking with the cocktail of contempt – one measure disgust, two parts relief – that mathematics teachers are wont to visit pupils who cannot solve an improper fraction after their name has been barked.

“Good-bye, sir.”

The girl stuck her vanilla-covered tongue out.

“Madame,” I added.

Before the next customer could step up to the hockey, I walked fore, where no customer could see, and rested my head against the fibreglass canopy. My watch read 11:15 AM. I made a slow circle and inventoried the room: my options for suicide were limited.

A customer cleared his throat. “That last one was a bit rude,” he said. Where this would have sounded companionable from another person, this man made it akin to a recommendation for prefrontal lobotomy. His weather-worn leatheriness and large hands reminded me of Shoemaker the mechanic, and I felt for the adult scoop in case he wanted to box my ears (for me).

“What will you have, sir?” I looked at my watch. It was 11:23 AM. “Ice-cream?”

“She’ll have one of they Why-balls.”

I looked down at the crown of a girl’s head. “Why-ball,” she repeated.

“I’m afraid I sold my last a few minutes ago.”

He frowned. “Well, let’s have it then.”

I frowned. Two, it seemed, could play at that game. “No, sir. I’ve sold it. I don’t have any left.”

“Don’t have any what? Why-balls?”

“Why-balls.”

He laughed at my incompetence. “What for?”

“What what for?”

“Why’ve you run out of they? My little girl wants a Why-ball.”

He kept his eyes on mine, as if he could get me to break and admit that, yes, I had a stash of them in a secret, refrigerated compartment beneath the driver’s seat.

“Sir, I came out with a finite number of them and they’ve all sold.”

He clicked his tongue. “How many did ‘ee bring?”

“Twenty.”

He snorted. “Well, then.”

“Well then what?”

“Are you being lippy?”

Before he could reach towards me, the serving hatch slammed shut. We stood facing each other through the glass, somewhat surprised, until I turned to ask Penelope, who was pulling the scoop from my hand, what she was playing at. She put the scoop into its water bowl. Then she opened the passenger door and shouted, “Lunch break!” with the joy of a pensioner shouting “Bingo!” To me, she added, “If you don’t have a break now, you’ll be too rushed later, once it gets busy.”

I examined my fingers for sign that they would, given a modicum of physio, be able to form shapes other than that needed to hold a scoop. “Once it gets busy? What do you call that queue?”

Penelope shut the door and the grumbles and hisses muted. Worryingly, the customer whose daughter wanted a Why-ball was looking at the corners of the window. “Lock the door,” I said.

“Don’t worry. Look, I’ve got something that will cheer you up.”

“Is it my notice?”

She took a polystyrene cup from the dashboard and gave it to me. The lid squeaked as I popped it. The steam clouded my glasses but my nose was on the case: tea. Sweet, sweet tea. As I sipped, I gave Penelope that double-eye blink that cats do. “You’ve no idea how good this feels.”

“Is it related to that bulge in your trousers?”

Ice-cream scoop stored in the pocket, thought my brain. Oh, and it’s a child’s scoop. Nice touch. Prisons have special wings for people like you.

“Don’t blush. I can see it’s made of metal. I’m not that naïve.”

More than ever, her eyes were two moons. I felt stricken with sudden autism, as though my sense of how to handle the conversation had left me with nothing but the knowledge that 6th March 2077 would be a Saturday.

“Thanks for the tea,” I said. My intention had been to send a coded signal to leave, but my tone was merry. The result: long seconds where Penelope went through my words like a pathologist picking over the bones of the recently deceased. In desperation – and yet aware that I was making the situation worse – I asked, “How much?”

My name is Christopher and I want to know why the neighbour’s dog is wearing a garden fork.

“Er, fifty pee.”

“There you go.” I gave her a pound coin. “Keep the change.”

Smooooooth. Now put on a Mockney accent and tell her to “Buy somethin’ nice”.

“Fabe, that’s…sweet.”

Creepy is another word, I thought. I made a mental note to get on a container vessel bound for South America.

“I should go,” she said.

I nodded.

“Bye,” I said.

I looked through the serving window, past the stickers and the tourists, at the hill that led to the Royal Cornwall showground. I turned as Penelope closed the door. She walked across the grass with her head slightly bent, as though she was walking against a wind.

I leaned against the freezer for long minutes. Though I had been in the van less than a few hours, it had started to feel homely: the porridge-like ceiling with its decorative air vent, the dusty floor, it stillness and the stuffy smell of wafer cones warmed in the sun.

I smiled.

Then I sniffed.

Fish and?

Hff, hff.

Chips?

In two strides, I reached the driver’s seat. In the centre was a hot bundle of paper. I unfurled it and found a beautiful piece of battered cod barnacled with chips. I plucked one of the chips.

“She loves me.”

I plucked another.

“She loves me not.”

“Never mind about that, my lover,” said the customer, framed by the driver’s window. “I’m still waiting for my Why-ball.”

I tore off some cod and dropped it into my open mouth like an oyster. “In some ways, sir, we all are,” I mused, chewing slowly.

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