"If You Can Get It" by Nick Brooke.

A Sample Chapter to whet the appetite

New book complete but now going for draft editing

Chapter '1'

1. Thursday morning.

You know that feeling you get when you come home from work to find your missus in bed with the milkman, the dog's shat on your favourite trainers and your child has spilt warm milk all over your computer? Well, Damien had that feeling today. Except that his missus was always shagging around, he had no dog, and the prospect of bringing another life into this world was something that filled him with untold dread.Night Trip

Today, like most days, Damien came in from his night job tired and irritable. He threw the morning paper onto an already cluttered coffee table and turned on the kettle before beginning his daily search for a relatively clean mug for his tea. As always the search was futile and he spent the next five minutes scrubbing off ancient stains off the rim of a mug with an equally dirty knife.

He slumped down on his easy chair, crushing two half-eaten packets of crisps from the night before, and slurped his tea noisily while glancing through the back pages of the paper. Rugby, cricket, horses, football and others. He didn't care much about any of them, but it was part of the uniform when working in a factory to always be aware of what was going on in sport, particularly the football scene. He read disinterestedly about England's Rugby 'Ridicule', about England's Cricketing 'Catastrophe' and about England's Footballing 'Farce'. Even the Racing section had a particularly scathing article about how the top seven finishers in the Grand National had all been Irish. This was all pretty much normal run of the mill morning routine though, nothing new here, but inside Damien's mind dark thoughts were festering.

People who say they hate their jobs without qualifying it with a valid reason are usually either dumb or attention seeking. You can't just say you hate your job outright; there are many subtle levels of employment dissatisfaction. There's the banker who thinks his job is slightly dull but accepts it because it's well paid. That's one end of the spectrum; the other end is the postal worker who is well and truly fed up with being the plaything for an entire neighbourhood's worth of dogs and decides to shoot all the little fuckers with a wholly illegal sub-machine pellet gun. In America oddly enough the phrase for this is 'going postal' though there their targets tend to be somewhat more human.

Damien believed that he was nicely in the middle of the spectrum. Right around the area reserved for driving instructors who live near Silverstone and have to put up with all the little boy racers from the area. He didn't like his job, and made a habit of moaning about it regularly to anyone who'd listen. The hours were long and exceptionally boring; however it was well paid and relatively easy. Now though, things were about to change. He'd just heard that he was being promoted and his comfortably numb working life was about to be turned on its head.

This promotion wasn't like most other jobs where you get more money, easier hours and possibly even a subordinate to do all your work for you, - he wondered to himself whether those promotions even existed - this one meant hell in the workplace for the foreseeable future. Firstly, Damien was only on a temporary contract. He'd dropped out of Uni having blown his Student Loans on dodgy pills and even dodgier hookers, so for him this job was an opportunity to recover the money he'd lost and potentially get back into Uni. If he took this promotion he could wave goodbye to that hope, it was like the bell had tolled and his fate would have been assigned. Yet even that wasn't the focal point of his frustration. At the factory where he worked, he was currently nothing more than a line-monkey, a machine to the company, and one of the lads. Now he would be separated from all his mates, they would hate him, no matter how popular he'd been beforehand. On the line it was an 'Us and Them' mentality, and very soon he would become one of 'Them'.

Having gauged all the information he thought he'd be needing from the Sports section of the paper, he threw it back onto the pile and flicked on the TV. Daytime television seemed to be getting worse he'd noticed. After gazing at the screen blankly while the reporter on BBC News gazed back, he flicked the channel over to one of the innumerable lifestyle channels. Jerry Springer was on, always good for a laugh. Something about watching fat yanks make tits out of themselves appealed to his basest sense of entertainment. His mobile vibrated in his pocket telling him that someone was ringing him, but he ignored it and flicked the channel over again due to an ad break. So many ads for money. Borrow twenty grand, pay back forty grand, borrow fifty grand, lose your house. What a load of bollocks. Damien needed money, but he wasn't that desperate, not even if he was being threatened by an East End mobster with a penchant for breaking knees would he ever consider one of those loans from a TV ad.

His mobile vibrated again, this time a different pulse, telling him he'd got a text. He pulled it out of his pocket and flipped the lid open. Sure enough, '1 New Message'. He opened it.

'GRATS ON THE PROMO U FUCKIN BROWNNOSE.' From Terry, a lad who worked near him on the line. He dropped the phone on the floor without closing it and looked back at the TV. A new loans ad was on, borrow thirty grand, pay back forty-five, don't get the piss ripped out of you at work. Damien was mildly tempted, but he was tired from his nights work. He wandered through to the next room and slumped down on his bed still in his overalls, falling asleep within seconds.