Hugo: A Character Profile

Rummaging through my records I came across this character profile which I sketched for a short story a few years ago. I remember distinctly writing the piece, sitting on the couch on the upstairs room in Finsbury Park’s Park Theatre. Hugo simply didn’t fit the story I was writing but I liked this so much I didn’t discard it altogether. Rather than let it ferment in a folder, the modern day equivalent of the dusty drawer, I want to share it as a parting gift for this eventful 2016. My friend Hugo…

 

…needed some money to replace the carburettor of his car—an old banger if there ever was one but the only inconspicuous method of transport to get him from the village to that fancy country home eighteen miles south where a smutty mother of two made up for her husband’s neglect with more than her fair share of beef next to her children’s room. (Dis-gusting. Not the MILF, she was fine, she wasn’t Victoria Beckham or anything, but she was fit enough, all of his friends would agree, no one could blame Hugo for that—but for crying out loud, choose a different room, it’s not as if the house wasn’t big enough!) Everyone would agree that that had been a true emergency, a major (MAJOR) crisis. And to be fair to Hugo, he took it really well, he didn’t even seem at all bothered until the third or fourth day. The truth is that the MILF was shagging the living soul out of him, banging him like there was no tomorrow, which, come to think of it, was probably the case, at least from her perspective. Hugo had never looked so tired in his life, skinny, pale, eyes bulging and red around the socket. In all likelihood he had been relieved to get a break from her when his car first broke down. Until withdrawal kicked in, and he must have had a boner like he hadn’t had since he was fourteen. But Hugo needed some serious dough to fix his wheels, the kind of dough you can’t access simply by upping your working hours from eight to ten at the warehouse—and that was all you could aspire to, because anything beyond that was illegal and the unions would kick you out and make certain you never got a job again in your life. Not that there was much danger Hugo would even consider spending more than ten hours a day doing anything other than sit on his hands, which is what he normally did anyway—and that wasn’t going to make him much money, was it, let alone the kind of dough he needed for his carburettor. So what he did was he went online and he browsed a few websites of big charity organisations, and he settled for one he claimed was massive abroad though not so big in England, and it made sense because it had a foreign name, Ethos, Veritas, Caritas, something pompous like that, something that comes with a good-person batch, one of those names that absolutely no one dares question because just the fact of questioning good causes like that already is a telltale sign that there is something wrong with you. So, shielded behind the goodwill generated by a simple logo Hugo counterfeited the documentation he needed to claim that he was raising funds for some fittingly honourable cause. In a mere fortnight the beat up Vauxhall was fitted with badass injectors—forget about a carburettor—and Hugo was again nursing large puffy bags beneath his eyes, like he the needed extra space to store jism to make up for lost time with his yummy mummy. Needless to say, the charity never saw a penny of Hugo’s money—and to this day he doesn’t acknowledge the fact that what he did was wrong: what have they got to do with anything, he’ll ask if you confront him about it, it was me who did all the hard work, so why should I give any of it away?