Free White Man Falling by Mike Stocks

you poked around needlessly, that will come to be seen as the worst day of your life if you’re not very careful, retired Sub-Inspector…”
    DDR sits down at last, breathing heavily, mopping his brow. One of his flunkeys is nodding, in solemn admiration of the performance, while the other flunkey pours his boss a glass of chilled
Miranda fizzy drink.
    Not a clue what he’s talking about
, Swami thinks, very frightened now, and as miserable as it is possible to be.
If DDR takes it into his head to destroy me, there is no
defence…
    “Very sorry,” Swami mumbles.
    “What?”
    “Very.” Swami repeats. “Blame all,” he says, indicating himself. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve –
this kind of fellow, he will only understand
submission.
    DDR taps on the desk.
    “What did you find out?” he asks suspiciously.
    “Nothing.”
    “What do you think happened?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Who do you suspect killed him?”
    “No,” Swami starts, and “one,” he finishes.
    “Why shouldn’t I get your pension stopped?!” DDR abruptly screeches, voice catching with rage, jumping up once again and bouncing around the room. “Don’t you
realize who I am? Don’t you know what-and-all committees I sit on? Why shouldn’t I get you evicted from your accommodation? Don’t you know there is a shortage of accommodation for
serving police officers? What will you do, you and your herd of women, on the street?!”
    Swami is suffering too much humiliation and anxiety in his life. He has been enduring the onslaughts for two years, and this is the moment that he can no longer endure it. He folds –
not this, not this, not this as well as everything
– and every meagre shred of pride and dignity and hope comes oozing out of him in an instant; he slumps forwards, his head banging
on the edge of the desk and staying there. In abrupt, heaving gasps he starts to sob.
    “Ayyo-yo!” DDR blurts, surprised – he’s gone too far, he detests the sight of a weeping man. “Hey, stop it! Hey, stop it, I say!”
    “Hey get up you,” the flunkeys are joining in, “no blubbing on the desktop, get up!” and they are pulling him up roughly, but it makes no difference, his body might be
under their control but his weeping is something else, he is getting it from somewhere deeper and more desolate than they have known or imagined.
    “Sir, urinating,” one of the flunkeys says apologetically to DDR, as he struggles to master Swami’s floppy arms.
    DDR stares aghast at the lake of urine expanding over the marble slabs from its source at the end of Swami’s left trouser leg. At that moment the boy comes into the room with his handcart,
so that Bobby can have one of his many daily fondles. The boy stands in the doorway hesitantly, staring at the sobbing Swami, the cart sticking into the room. Bobby – lolling and obese and
also, it should be said, incontinent – lies there like an undersized bloated water-buffalo.
    “Get out!” DDR snaps at the boy, but at the same time he moves over to give Bobby a tickle behind the ears, so that the boy, not knowing what to do, stands on one leg and looks
frightened. “For God’s sake will you stop crying!” DDR pleads with Swami, still tickling the dog in a mechanical frenzy, “What are you doing sobbing on my desk and pissing
on my floor, don’t you understand the way things work, weren’t you in the police for twenty years?” He stares down at Swami, who is still weeping inconsolably. “It’s
really just basic elementary business practice,” DDR explains to one of his flunkeys in an aside, “to apply a little pressure. Oh, forget it, take him home,” he orders in disgust,
but then as soon as the flunkeys are trying to haul Swami up again he contradicts himself, “No no, leave him there, get out now.”
    So the flunkeys leave, and the gardener’s boy is sent away too, leaving behind them a weeping Swami, a bemused boss, and a handcart of pedigree paraplegic