Corrupt

 
 

Tom, or Tam to his friends, was in every definition of the word, an average thirty-three year old British man. Married with two children, a steady, if somewhat soul-crushingly repetitive nine till five job and proud owner of a Dapol Flying Scotsman model railway

Tam had never been a greedy man, or a particularly ambitious one at that. Content with being content, the man still had a relatively full head of hair and his waistline had only been creeping out rather than spilling out like a hole in a dam. His humour consisted of recycled dirty jokes from days long gone at school and repeating lines from Top Gear. Tam was a simple man.

So when he inherited more money than he thought was in the Bank of Scotland, Tam's world changed drastically. For a start it was more money than ever possible to count (Five followed by nine zeros) and Tam was a man accustomed to tax rebates and stressing over VAT receipts, a medium of the middle class. Tam might not have earned the money but he might have deserved it. The only thing he was guilty of was looking away when passing the homeless begging.

Money changes people, a man-made concept that corrupts the soul; it's a game changer for anyone. Tam, with hindsight, should have been smart enough to realize this and should have prepared him and his family better. He didn't however and it didn't take long for the rotten and vile syndrome of greed to take control of him.  

Tam wasn't just rich overnight, he was stupidly rich overnight. Rather than spend hours constructing the scenic (and realistic) surroundings for his model train to pass through, he bought a train. Instead of reciting Jeremy Clarkson’s lines, he was having a pint with him. He no longer wore the Primark discount value t-shirts tucked into his Springsteen-esque blue jeans (which were always higher up his waist than should be physically possible). He now wore hand stitched Armani tailored suits and was so heavily doused in cologne, it was impossible to tell if he had a natural scent.

Once, while lodged in the limbo of traffic, Tam slipped a relic of his youth into the cars CD player (a relic within a relic, driven by a relic), the CD, a Pearl Jam record, brought nostalgia filled memories flooding back to Tam and soon he was singing along like a teenager in his parents garage. Seeing the young drivers around him brought a surge of embarrassment on for Tam and he quickly ejected the disc and shuffled on the radio, trying to look well mannered. This brought a great deal of shame on Tam for many years, he never understood the desire and need to conform to standards of strangers, especially when trapped in a tin can on the road. Nowadays, Pearl Jam play private concerts for Tam and the thought of nostalgic memories is just a forgotten memory in itself.

Tam is no longer the suburban British man he once was. Surrounded by hangers on and leeches and spoiled to the core, Thomas no longer dreams and he was never particularly much of a dreamer in the first place. He needs not and wants not, he just gets. He can scarcely remember his three, or was it two, children and his now ex-wife's face has been blurred from his mind by the string of loose woman that consume his life

Tam, or Thomas as he likes to be called now, was in every definition of the word, an average thirty-three year old corrupted man.