masterchef ho! (four blues)

G. Wallace (2005 – )

Bald head! Tan skin! Fat hands! Stuffed fork! What a mouth!
How’d a greengrocer ever bag this number?
The wife loves a bit of sole (fish), prick tells us in every shot
Done to Le Gavroche standards
Torode relegated to guest (not chef) – not with Roux’s eyebrows on the stainless steel
Swallowed the poor bitch whole on the wedding night
Stained white thermals under his giant suit
Watched TV, then dozed off to the sight of himself
Then woke up for coffee and presenting commitments
Fuck cooking – LIFE doesn’t get tougher (or better) than this
You excruciating cunt!

J. Torode (2005 – )

They call him tortoiseshit,
all the lads,
always did and’re right to do so
Over a couple of cold lagers and fat fistfuls of chilli nuts
In the Streatham pubs where he haunts the fruit machines
With sad eyes and heavy face
Clothed in long sleeves to hide the eczema
Haunted by the faces of other, more successful chefs
Not just middling but starred and treasured
He cried that time, reminiscing about family life in Australia
in the weird episode where the chefs cooked for his father and his aunt but not his dead mother
You’re not a fat man, John, but your torso looks fucking huge
Keep up the good work
You don’t become second best by jerking off.

M. Roux, Jr. (2008 – 2013)

Roux! Roux! You! (terminally nice person!)
Just keep on nodding
You might be French in tongue and name
But you’re ours now
English.
Roux! Roux! You! (cultural appropriation!)
We’ve colonized the movements of your bulging eyes
They’re two assets of the corporation now
(were, before Potato-gate)
Like your beard and your two gentle hands and your obvious pleasure
Roux! Roux! You! (marketable talent!)
We’ve commodified your measured gestures
Your exemplary cutlery work
Your stock phrases –
“Unctuous!” “Perfectly cooked!” “The classics!” “Just not right!”
&c. –
And slowly over whole series you’re stripped of greatness by default
Until your enthusiasm for British pears and artisan breadwork
Are caricatures of your silent laughter.
Roux! Roux! Fuck you!
It’s the English way.

M. Wareing (2014 – )

You were cruel Wareing
Before, I mean
Some face making women cry
Some voice convincing itself of its own import
Twats like me don’t forget.

always crashing in the same car

What a glorious life! he said, moments before the car hit. Both were travelling slowly and neither hurt beyond mild whiplash and, in his case, a two-inch laceration upon his forehead which must have happened when his head hit the steering wheel. He climbed quickly from the driver’s seat and rushed to the other vehicle. A woman was behind the wheel, apparently well, muttering apologies and bizarre declarations and obviously deeply in shock. He asked her how she was and helped her out of the car, then wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and sat her on a bench at the roadside and waited for an ambulance to come. He knelt in front of her and helped her to control her breathing by gesturing with his arm in a vertical motion, quickly at first and gradually reducing the speed and urging her to do similar with her breathing. After several minutes when she had begun to breathe in a more regular manner he asked if she smoked, and although she said she didn’t she also said that at a time like this of trauma and similar it might be prudent to start. He lit two cigarettes and they each smoked one, their cars smoking also just lightly from beneath their bonnets. Two recovery vehicles arrived at the scene perhaps five minutes later, to lift their damaged cars off of the road and on to a garage premises of their choosing. As luck would have it, they both lived within a couples of streets of each other within the same generic suburban neighbourhood on the city’s deprived northern edge – although they did not recognise and likely had never encountered each other before this event – and utilised the same local garage premises for MOTs and other such minor repair or mechanically oriented works. Small world, laughed the recovery operatives, and they both had to agree. Once the cars had been removed he noted to her the absurdity of a world in which the response time for the safe rescue and removal of two modest vehicles was so much faster than that of two living human beings. She smirked and agreed with his analysis: the world was a crazy place. He held her hand tentatively and she gripped his back. A traumatic event of this nature inspires this kind of boldness, a desire to make life happen all the more quickly without the pointless pleasantries and expectations to which our interactions usually adhere. He thought but didn’t say this.

Given the non-threatening nature of their injuries their conveyance to A&E occurred within the same ambulance, and throughout the short journey their conversation became increasingly relaxed and then, gradually, quite intimate, and by the time the paramedics had booked the two of them into the reception area they both felt as though they had known the other for a great number of years, and felt familiar with not only their respective presents but also their pasts and how their futures might now occur. Whilst they were sure some parsimonious detractors might denounce the pacing of their active relationship to itself be the product of shock or even the desperate need for comfort or closeness of a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, they felt differently, and were certain that their meeting – even through violent accident as had been the case – was “meant to be”, so to speak, and although neither used the term fate – for who were they to bandy such terms about? – they certainly described something very much akin to what would commonly be understood by it, that their paths had to cross in whatever way the universe deemed suitable to orchestrate. They were taken off to separate treatment areas to be administered to, his own taking slightly longer than hers as his laceration required three reparative stitches, but they reconvened by prior arrangement within the hospital’s meagre catering facility. He purchased two machine lattes – her favourite – and they drank them together and talked without interval, and she carefully wiped some dry blood from his face with a dampened tissue. When he thought of the crashing cars and her cloud-white face behind the wheel he felt stronger, as though a burden had been relieved.

When those lattes and two further lattes like them and some biscotti she had found in her handbag were consumed, and with both their cars gone, he suggested they share a taxi to their respective houses in order to cut costs, and although she agreed to the suggestion both in principle and from a fiscally astute perspective she proposed instead the both of them going back to her house. He thought about this for some minutes before its implications solidified in his mind, and he not only consented to the proposed course of action but explained also how he desired her with a force that would in other circumstances of some similarity be completely inexplicable, a desire so great that a physical union at the earliest possible opportunity was the only outcome he could consider being in any way fulfilling at this pivotal juncture in his and her – he hoped – shared lives. She placed her open palm on one side of his face and appeared deeply moved, and explained that she was seldom so reckless in her emotional attachments but felt somehow as though the impact of the vehicles had released something long buried within her which she absolutely refused to ignore but would instead nurture and grow with everything she had. They walked arm in arm to the waiting taxi and shared the back seat like post-theatre lovers. “Been through the wars eh?” the driver asked them, no doubt observing his stitches and her very slight bruising and deducing the worst. “Quite the opposite,” she said, gripping his hand as she did so. The rest of the journey occurred in only silence and quiet radio.

At her place they fucked as need demanded, and the brow-furrowing intensity of the climax was such that his stitches popped open as he otherwise popped off, which they both found to be humorous. She tended the wound gently and when the bleeding had begun to subside applied some new Steri-Strips from her own bathroom cabinet. They fucked again several more times throughout the hours that followed in great waves of euphoric carnality the likes of which neither had ever before experienced, as though time were simultaneously both quickening and slowing with every thrust and clench of their bodies. By dawn they were engaged and desperately elated with it, and regardless of how crazy or impulsive or spontaneous it was they had never been more certain that a decision was the right one, and not a voice on the earth would be able to convince them otherwise. As the morning passed they telephoned significant or pertinent family members, all of whom responded with surprise and often doubt if not disgust but were soon however reluctantly persuaded by the intensity of the declarations and by tell of the profoundly life-changing traumatic experience they heard, any that weren’t all but ejected from the couple’s sense of familial consciousness and unity, their ties of blood now severed in the name of love.

The months passed in overwhelming happiness and the couple grew ever closer until their identities merged and they become one indistinguishable whole which, rather than being oppressive or in some way creepy was remarkable and liberating and precious, as though prior to their meeting their whole lives had been unfulfilled and forged of absence only, lacks completely remedied by their physical and emotional union. As they went about their daily tasks of work or miscellany they missed each other to tears but relished the hysterical passion of their evening reunions as though their separation had been of years and not mere hours. They were inseparable in ways that incited commentary from friends and loved ones, indeed inseparable in ways that began – they said, these friends and loved ones – as cute but were soon considered unhealthy, even harmful, the friends drifting from their circle like distant memories or dreams until their unit tightened and collapsed further still like a mighty black hole from which no love could hope to escape.

A fortnight prior to their wedding he had finished work over an hour late and his sadistic miser of a manager had expected him to complete a particularly involved task and had made it quite clear that to not do so was simply not an option, and was then driving home through the largely empty city streets immersed in wild webs of fantasy relating to his fiancé, her face, her painted fingernails, her vocalisations, her wonderful vagina. What a glorious life! he said, moments before the car hit. They had both been travelling slowly, thank goodness, and he climbed quickly from the driver’s seat and rushed to the other vehicle. A woman was behind the wheel, apparently well, muttering apologies and bizarre declarations and obviously deeply in shock. He asked her how she was and helped her out of the car, then wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and sat her on a bench at the roadside and waited for an ambulance to come. She was profoundly attractive and he felt very calm and perceived the rush of the future as he reached into his pocket for cigarettes and thumbed his phone off as he did so.

beyond the pines

We ran down the sloping dunes through the coarse ruffled grasses, our sandals off and trousers rolled up our legs, to cross on foot the wide saline channel that in myriad unheeded parental warnings would take (a euphemism to straddle the spectrum!) the children come the high tides that occurred very rapidly on that corner of the coast, lost forever behind its impenetrable fluid barrier, the water up to our thighs and rising as we slowly neared the sea still many metres from where the beach began back among the pines. When we reached the gently breaking waves at the water’s edge as soft as bathtime I ceased but she went yonder, straight into the icy sea. I suggested she too ceased but “no”, she told me, already in the front crawl position and accelerating away from the shoreline, and she “must see Norway!” Weird I thought but reasonable too in its way, these both the reasons I had ever fallen for her. I watched until the speck she became on the horizon fell out of sight then returned to the café in the car park for a 99.

unmoved movers removals co.

The delusions commenced following his divorce and the disassembly of his family with the registering of his own removal company, “Unmoved Movers Removals Co.” He declared himself divine to all who’d listen, and employed precisely twelve staff who wore uniforms with “disciple” embroidered upon the breast of the issued polo shirts. Though he couldn’t turn water into wine, say, or resurrect the dead, he was proficient with a screwdriver and could collapse a flat pack wardrobe for transportation within minutes, a miracle – he thought – in its own right. The day came as he knew it must when his betrayal at the hands of one of his own disciples was assured. The disciple declared one morning at the staff briefing in the meagre portakabin that doubled as both company office and private accommodation quarters for the displaced employer (he slept on a foldout bed that acted as a couch during the daylight hours) that he was leaving with immediate effect, would not be working a notice period of any description, and indeed was forming his own removal company in direct competition to UMRCo., as the firm was on occasion abbreviated within the trade or amongst regular clients, called “Moving on Up!”. He made his declaration coolly and left the portakabin and although devastated the employer only shook his head with some sadness and bolstered his staff, told them this was always coming, that things had to be this way and now were. The messianic narrative had been long written, and such a betrayal was integral to it. The staff each offered him their best wishes individually and he dismissed them to their duties within the firm, not heavy of heart as such but something close, because although it was written and although it was perfect it meant that his earthly life in this earthly body was drawing to an imminent close, the wheels in motion. He lifted the telephone receiver and considered for a number of seconds the possibility of calling his ex-wife, to tell her the news of his new messianic path, but he thought better of it; she would know soon enough.

At the subsequent staff briefing the following morning he explained to the remaining eleven staff how given the immense cultural shifts and differences established by the passage of over two thousand years since the life and then of course death of the Christchild, certain deviations from the original messianic narrative were inevitable even if the outcome and profound and lasting significance of the narrative remained undiminished. In light of this, he said, he needed their assistance, he said, needed for their roles in the narrative to become all the more essential. Although not one of the eleven particularly believed in the delusional nature of their employer’s messianic narrative his enthusiasm and remarkable capacity for self-belief was infectious, and they soon found themselves willingly consenting to assist him in his efforts to realise the fundamentals of that narrative in any way they possibly could. He led the group of them out of the portakabin and into the vehicle yard, where he had laid a large 8 x 6 foot solid sheet of thick MDF down flat on the damaged asphalt. Although he had not had time to assemble a cross per se, he considered the specific geometry of the structure to be a trifle, in the scheme of things, and felt that if the treatment and positioning of his physical body adhered to both the ancient practises and essential cross shape synonymous with Christ’s crucifixion then that would be amply sufficient, both as symbol and prophetic fulfilment, particularly given the weight of compelling historical evidence that made numerous disparate references to the large variety of basic structural shapes used in deployment of the process. He had placed a metal toolbox containing a couple of good quality claw hammers and a range of heavy-duty nails alongside the MDF, on which he then laid and positioned himself appropriately for the inevitable. His requests for the eleven to begin nailing him to the board met with some reluctance, but he managed to persuade them under the promise of the certain salvation that his death and only his death could prompt. They beat the nails in through his wrists and through the bottom of his legs down by the ankles, each of the eleven taking turns at bringing the hammer down to enable the most democratic chances of salvation across the board of UMRCo. employees. Given the centrality of the event in the messianic narrative he had perhaps imagined a relatively painless process but the pain was incredible and almost unbearable and he screamed as the hammer hit and he saw the concentrated faces of his staff at their work with the due gravity and consideration he had come to expect from them, but he accepted it gratefully and passed out for a few minutes, the blood soaking the board beneath his body. When he had regained consciousness the eleven had amassed around him and looked very worried at what they had done. He attempted to reassure them that they had done only what had to be done, but he was aware of the delirious babbling of his own voice occurring and the eleven looked more worried still. After several false starts he urged them to raise the board to a vertical position as was written in the messianic narrative, but without handles or finger holes no one was able to muster the sufficient strength or force to do so, and the board remained horizontal and he with it. Three or four of the men requested permission to get about their duties and to tend to waiting customers, which he naturally granted, and the rest gradually ambled off, some in tears, and left him to his business, which after all felt particularly private. When all had departed he lay quite still upon the board and looked at the bright blue sky. The phone was ringing in the portakabin. Have you forsaken me? he asked. He tried to shuffle himself slightly but the pain was too great, the nails tearing at his tissue and tendons. Father, he said, into your hands I commit my spirit. Nothing happened, nothing at all.

community guy

There was once a good man, proud man. He loved his family and loved his friends, was a real “community guy” – that’s what they called him, but tenderly – and was at the centre of any and all local issues and initiatives. He lived for it. The kids flocked to him, he had the kind of gentleness that kids can spot a mile off, and they followed him around the streets and into his garden and called him Pops. They all did. He was “Pops” to the kids and “community guy” to their parents, but each and every loved him dearly. He walked the kids to the shop on the corner every Sunday morning and paid for sweets for all with his own cash money, and the children skipped about him and chattered with excitement as he distributed the confectionary among their waiting hands. His wife had died young, long before they had children of their own, but he never remarried, preferring instead to devote himself to the community in which they had chosen to spend their life together and the ever-changing roster of families who gave it life. And besides, he had his memories, nothing could ever take those away. While Pops didn’t think of himself as a good man, not in those terms specifically, he knew nonetheless that he was one, and it made him very happy to see the children’s happiness, and to provide them with a place of some relative safety in his enclosed garden that the once-quiet surrounding streets and their now heavy traffic couldn’t begin to offer.

One Sunday Pops was taken unwell, as is commonly the case for men of his vintage, and unable to muster the necessary energy to rise from his bed for the sake of the children. They knocked at his front door, surprised and affronted by his absence, and when he didn’t answer they hammered at his bedroom window also, and he heard the handle of his door rattled, his back door, heard the knocking intensify violently, then stop, the voices of the children audible but indiscernible. He felt blessed by the insistence of their concern for his welfare and the high regard in which the community held him, and was only sorry that he was unable to open the door to explain that he was feeling slightly under the weather but had no doubt that he would be right as rain come tomorrow or the next day. After a few minutes he heard the footsteps of the children on the shingle in his driveway as they made their way away. He would give them all a little something extra next week, he thought to himself; they must be quite worried, for he was a vital figure and they each loved him quite specially. He screamed helplessly and cowered – suddenly old, afraid – when a brick smashed through the glass of his bedroom window and the glass splintered like ice on a pond and remained jagged in the frame’s edge. The brick itself landed at the foot of his bed, and he moved his legs beneath the blankets to jostle it to the floor where it fell among the fragments of glass that it crunched beneath its weight. He could not understand how this had happened, only that it must have been a kind of terrible mistake that he was sure there must be a good explanation for, which he would be certain to find out just as soon as he had rested up and was feeling a bit better. Fortunately it was a warm spell and the breeze through the smashed window was pleasant and soothing and he drifted off to sleep, which was the best thing for him to do, he thought, so didn’t try to resist.

Outside as he dozed he could hear some cars, some tools or other equipment, but mostly nothing. When he awoke he was very confused and found the father’s of several of the children encircling his bed. He tried to lift himself up on his pillows but was too weak to do so, and the father’s didn’t help him, explicitly refused him help, and their faces were very stern before him. They’ve told us everything, said one of the father’s. Everything. How could you? How could you do that to children? How could you? How? How could you? How could you? How? How? Pops was very afraid. What have you done to our children? the father continued. What have you done to them? What? What? You monster. You pervert. What have you done and how could you? Pops tried again to raise himself but unbalanced fell from the bed, hit his head on the bedside table. Please, he implored, I love your children, I would never. I love them as my own. You shameless monster how could you? the father persisted. One of the mute others kicked Pops in the ribs, those chalky old ribs, that gave easily beneath his scuffed work boot; the breadth of his rage made it impossible not to. Pops fell to his stomach and moaned and the father’s went to work on him, as these people tend to and do with a nonce.

animal police 2

There were less than ten people there for the funeral including clergy and organist. Aside from the obvious Dryskin hadn’t had friends, barely even acquaintances. He was a profoundly forgettable man, the vicar had said as much in his eulogy. They’d all laughed, appreciative of something to cut through the gloom of the setting if not sadness – there was no real sadness, just boredom, some resentment maybe – though he hadn’t meant it as a joke, only an adherence to the one agreed fact as recounted by the odd couple of people he had conversed with in his research, all of whom had very little to say. Gone, the vicar had said, and – as in life – very much forgotten. Which is the way he might have wanted it. We just can’t remember. Let us say goodbye to, uh – he thumbed through his notes, back and forth a couple of times, eventually shifted his vestments up some and took a small black diary out of a trouser pocket, then flicked through that – yes, to William Dryskin. “Billy”.

***

Johnny Mondays and Jack Oddbins stood smoking at the graveside, feet away from the other mourners. The cold was intense, the sky a churning mess of thick black cloud. Oddbins’ good eye was teared up but it was the drink, the wind too. Once the rest had started back to their cars, a fleet of identikit silver saloons, Oddbins crouched to the sodden earth and scooped a handful into his palm.

“Goodbye Billy,” he said, and threw the mud onto the coffin lid. It hit like fast-falling shit after a good night out and spread out forensically over the wood. The council gravediggers were waiting in the digger, rubbing their gloved hands together and rolling their eyes; a tinny portable radio they had on in the cab was playing American Girl. Oddbins took a last drag on his smoke and tossed the butt down into the grave. “Goodbye,” he said again, and scooped another handful of dirt up, which he offered to Mondays. Mondays looked at the dirt and squinted against the wind, flicked his own smoke into a deep tea-coloured puddle, the paper unfurling from the scrap of tobacco like a fitting kid spread on a couch.

“Nah,” he said, and started to walk off. Oddbins face spewed disgust. He threw the mud into the grave a second time, less ceremonially, and grabbed Mondays by the shoulder.

“What the fuck Mondays? That’s Dryskin in there. Dryskin is dead. Does that not mean anything to you you cold hearted piece of dick?”

“Dryskin’s alive,” he said. “He’s in the car.”

“You what?” His face turned to real hurt as the realisation sank in, that or disgust. Or idiocy. Fucking last-to-know-Oddbins.

“Come the fuck on,” said Mondays, walking towards the car park.

***

He opened the boot of the shit Merc and Dryskin was inside it, an empty bottle of scotch laying next to him and sandwich crumbs all over the front of his jumper, chunks of corned beef and Branston pickle dotted among the white sliced. Mondays slapped him on the legs with the back of his hand.

“Dryskin,” he said. “Get up. It’s done.”

Dryskin opened his eyes and blinked the grey into focus, saw Oddbins, hoisted himself out of the boot with both hands gripping the car, picked some of the larger crumbs from his jumper and put them in his mouth, brushed the rest onto the floor, streaks of pickle left in their wake like raw skidmarks.

“Oddbins,” he said. “Great to see you. What’s it been, three days?”

“Why the fuck are you alive? I’ve just been to your fuckin funeral. I’ve just thrown fuckin mud on your fuckin coffin. You’re dead, Dryskin, you hear me? There was a funeral. Dead! Why didn’t either of you pricks tell me?”

“You know now,” said Mondays, looking around the cemetery. They probably weren’t safe there. Probably.

“It’s a shit story,” said Dryskin, lighting a smoke and pulling a fresh bottle of scotch from the boot of the car.

“I like shit,” said Oddbins. “So shit on me.” They embraced a little, Mondays grimacing as they did.

“Lovebirds,” he said. “We need to be gone.”

“Right,” said Dryskin.

“Let’s get back,” said Oddbins slamming the boot shut. “Shoot up.”

“Hey,” said Dryskin. “Let’s Animal Police.”

Mondays sighed and took a hit of scotch and they climbed in the car and got gone.

***

Some days earlier the Animal Police had formed a broken semi circle, Mondays, Oddbins and Dryskin, right around the bar. Oddbins felt the elbows of his denim stick to the unwiped surface, months of spilt beer and worse all left to congeal, so thick you could carve your fingernails through it. The barman’s heavy face smirked towards them from a cloud of smoke, fluming out of a prison-thin roll-up clenched filterless and flat between his tarry lips, his poached venison fingers clutching at the splintered wooden edges of the bar.

“Rumours,” said Oddbins, draining the business end of a single house scotch. It was eleven fifteen, morning, although the scotch made it taste later. Much later.

“Rumours indeed,” followed Mondays, throwing a peanut into his waiting mouth. The sound of his chewing felt hard against the struggling jukebox, all of Phil Collins’ pathos lost in poor treble, in inadequate speakers.

“What the fuck’s this about?” asked the barman, measuring himself out a couple of fingers of sauce. “I mean.” He swallowed the drink and coughed until his face turned the colour of his hands, bloody and purple. The cigarette had burnt out, unsustained by the low-end combustibility of its own paltry amount of tobacco product; his meat face was wet with tears of effort as he relit, sucking hard at the soaked mouthpart. “It’s fucking morning. This morning.”

“It is fuckin morning,” agreed Mondays. “And this fuckin morning, we heard a fuckin rumour.”

“Fuck your rumour.” The barman leaned back, folded his arms over his chest, almost pleased with himself. Mondays looked at Dryskin. He swept the scotch off the bar and slammed the barman’s face down into the spilt drink and the upset ashtray.

“Meaty bastard,” said Dryskin. “Manners take a holiday, slab of shit?” He pulled him back up and shoved him backwards into the optics. Bags of pork scratchings and Big Ds nuts fell to the floor like cheap snow.

“Who the fuckin hell are you?” he said, clutching his hands to his busted chops. “The three cunts?” Mondays threw a card onto the bar. It said Animal Police and listed their names: J. Mondays, B. Dryskin, J. Oddbins.

“Who we are isn’t much of your fuckin concern,” said Mondays. “Just tell us what we need to know and we’ll be out of your face.”

“Animal Police? You don’t look like fuckin RSPCA from where I’m fuckin slumped.”

“Shut your opening,” barked Oddbins. “And clean this fuckin bar up.”

“RSPCA,” spat Dryskin.

“Listen, bastard,” Mondays went on. “We don’t have the time to be dealing with a prick like you. You’re storage at best, bulk, an empty fuckin room. No one’s gonna trust a dumb shit like you with anything concrete. But we fuckin know you know people, people we wanna know too.”

“Storage? Do you know who the fuck...”

“Wipe the shit words out of your dirty arse mouth and listen: Murakami. Name mean anything to you? Mura-fuckin-kami?”

“Murakami, Murakami.” He smirked over his teeth, great yellow canyons. “No, I can’t say it does. My mind’s a blank.”

“That much I can see. Try harder.”

He made a show of thinking that felt gratuitous, even in that dive.

“I meant no. It means nothing to me. Definitely.”

“I think you’re a fuckin liar. Now keep thinking your tiny mind around.”

“Murakami,” said the barman, rolling the syllables around his thick tongue, savouring his opportunity. “Murakami. No. Sorry lads. Must be one of those... empty days.” He straightened himself up and measured out four house vodkas, passed one to each of the Animal Police. The four men swallowed the drinks. Mondays passed his glass back for another.

“Is that a fact?” he asked. “Murakami? Nothing? Nada?”

“Afraid so.” He passed the drink back. Mondays swallowed it alone.

“Think harder,” said Mondays. “Murakami. Try it. Cat. Called Murakami. Cat. Missing. Murakami. Feline. Stolen. Think.” Mondays slapped him, just lightly, across the face, an impulse. The barman pulled slowly backwards.

“I’d like to help you fuckers, but time’s getting on and I do have a pub to run so...”

“You couldn’t run a fuckin flex,” said Mondays loudly. The barman walked round the bar and up to Oddbins. He was tall and stood inches over him, Oddbins’ blind eye kind of uncomfortable in the dusty light.

“Don’t you fuckin dirty talk my business acumen you cunt,” said the barman, pushing Oddbins a first time, then harder a second, jerking his thumb towards the door as he did. “Now off you fuck.”

Dryskin flipped the pool table over, its few balls cracking hard against the uncarpeted floor, flecked with decades of excretion, the very fixtures coated in countless thousands of farts. Mondays swung a pool cue into the side of the barman’s face. He dropped to one knee and clutched at the damaged bone, but stood up immediately, tears streaming silently from his eyes. He didn’t seem to notice the tears. Mondays hit him again, three times, until he eventually went to both knees and Oddbins moved in to punch him.

“Alright for fuck’s sake,” shouted the barman, holding up a hand in self-defence. “Alright I’ll fuckin well talk. But what can you do for me?”

“You talking money?” asked Dryskin. The barman nodded.

“Dangerous people,” he said conspiratorially, pawing at the side of his head. “Fifteen.”

“You’ll have ten if the knowledge’s good,” said Mondays, pulling out his wallet. Empty. He felt his pockets. Appointment slip. Eleven thirty. He looked at the clock.

“Fuck. Check your pockets,” he instructed the other two. They came up with about a pound in small coins. “We’ll have to go to a cash machine,” he said.

They left the barman on his knees, and could hear him laughing over the car engine and the Norwich traffic.

***

They were back half an hour later. The barman had patched himself up some, bar snacks still on the floor. Oddbins shook his head gravely.

“Look out,” said the barman, throwing back a shot “The fuckin trinity. Father,” he said, pointing at Mondays, “son,” pointing at Oddbins, “and Holy Twat.” He looked at Dryskin, laughed himself into a suicide cough. Dryskin reached for the in tact pool cue as a throat was cleared somewhere around the edges of the room that were left in permanent darkness by the filth on the windows, and the thick cloud of dust in the feeble sunlight exposed like unwanted genitals.

“Mr Mondays,” said a voice. They couldn’t put a finger on the accent but it sounded fucking ridiculous, high-pitched and youthful. “I believe you require some information that my associate and I may be able to assist you with.”

“I believe I do,” said Mondays, nodding to Dryskin to lower the pool cue. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Allow me to introduce myself.” A kid walked out of the darkness. Not a bloke who looked like a kid, an actual kid, in a beige pinstripe suit and these tiny brown loafers. “Name’s Donnie.”

“Ho fuckin ho,” said Dryskin, yanking the pool cue back up. The barman flinched backwards.

“That’s Donnie-the-five-year-old-pimp you mug,” he said, hand up in self-defence. “Do you know who he is?”

“No,” said Dryskin. “I do the fuck not, and care even fuckin less.”

“Gentlemen,” said Donnie. “Let’s take it fuckin easy can we.”

“This is his town you poor cunt,” said the barman.

“Shut your fuckin mouth I said Jefford,” snarled Donnie. He was five years old. Mondays was surprised, he supposed, but had seen weirder shit than this.

“Murakami,” said Mondays, throwing a crumpled tenner onto the floor. “You going to talk, kid?” Donnie picked up the money and pushed it back into Mondays’ damp hand, pulled over a chair and stood on it and patted Mondays on the cheek. He tensed, Mondays, and they heard the sound of firearms – two? three? – cocking at the room’s edge. Bodyguards.

“I don’t need your money Mr Mondays,” said Donnie.

“Then what the fuck do you want?” said Oddbins. “Tell us what we need to know and we can fuck right off, everyone’s a winner, it’ll be alright on the night, stars in their eyes, family fucking fortunes. You get me?”

“It’s not that simple friend,” said Donnie. “These are dangerous men we're dealing with. Powerful men.”

“Ha, more powerful than you? A fucking kid?” Dryskin’s mirth was futile, ugly. A shot guffed out the pitch, hit Dryskin in the chest. He was down instantly. The shooter strode forward and shot two more rounds in.

“Don’t ever underestimate me Mondays,” said Donnie, lighting a smoke, straightening his sunglasses. “You two,” clicking his fingers at the barman and the other heavy, “get this one outside in the alley. Put a fucking box over him.” They did as he said, the barman’s moist arse creeping from the top of his brandless denim like a buoy on the water.

Oddbins had frozen, his mouth wide open.

“Mondays,” he said. “They’ve just…”

“I know,” said Mondays. He lit a smoke and took a bottle of brandy from behind the bar, took a deep hit. “To Billy,” he said, and took another, passed the bottle to Oddbins. He threw it against the wall.

“To Billy? Mondays, they just fuckin killed him.”

Mondays reached over the bar took another bottle, another hit, passed it to Oddbins again. He smashed it.

“Are you fuckin deaf and a cunt?” said Oddbins. “They. Killed. Him.”

“Shut. It. Up.” Mondays said. “Now. I’m handling this.”

“You’d do well to listen to your man Mondays, friend,” said Donnie. “He’s the only friend you got left.”

Oddbins sat down and sparked up, cried some, though he’d have never admitted to it. The barman came back in, whistling some theme tune. He passed a few cold beers round, stuck a straw in Donnie’s. They all of them drank pretty hard.

“Murakami,” said Mondays. “Can we talk now?”

“You know, I’m kind of sorry about your friend,” said Donnie. “I needed to know I can trust you.”

“No chitchat kid cunt,” said Mondays. “Murakami. Give me what I need.”

“There’s a guy. Goes by Parkinflap. Pimp.”

“I don’t give a shit about pimp feuds,” said Mondays.

“This isn’t a pimp feud. He does dogs.”

“Some guys have some weird fuckin tastes.”

“No, as in canines. Like, actual dogs.”

Mondays dropped his smoke and sank the last of his beer, just foam really.

“What does he want with Murakami?”

Donnie sucked at his straw for five, six seconds, slurped around the bottom of the bottle.

“Suggest you ask him,” he said eventually. “Now fuck off the pair of you.”

***

Donnie had said this Parkinflap worked the Riverside all the way between Cow Tower and Frankie & Benny’s. Mondays parked the Merc in the Zak’s car park and gave a couple of quid to the middle aged waitress scowling in the doorway, flattered her a little, alluded to futures in the way that makes some people weak at the knees. He was a people person, in that he couldn’t stand them.

“We’ll be back in a few,” he said.

“Minutes?”

“This car gets clamped,” he said, “and so do you.”

He and Oddbins went on foot along the river, past a couple of bridges and a whole bunch of scum.

“Fuck Mondays. They killed Dryskin. Just like that.”

“He was a decent man.” Mondays lit two smokes and gave one to Oddbins. “Died on the job. It’s the risk we take, you know, day in, day the other.”

“Decent man? He was our friend, Mondays. He was my fucking friend.”

Just outside of some AngloThai restaurant – everything with frites and ketchup and lettuce leaves – on a moored-up boat that they kept open despite, or because of, widespread reports of huge investment coming through corporate orgies, heavy-duty bukkake and ritualised humiliation within the vessel’s lower decks (the city’s urban regeneration targets couldn’t allow any other Riverside business to fold, not after the Costa situation and the Brewers Fayre. The council were happy to turn a blind eye to perversion if it kept the enterprise figures at the less shit end of fuck up), they found him, peddling his wares. He was a pint-sized prick in goliath trainers, highlighted hair caked to his scalp with poundshop gel, ground meth teeth like a shattered plate behind his stretched rodent lips, stinking of smoked fags and corrosive aftershave.

“Look at these two,” Parkinflap said, clapping his hands together a whole bunch of times. “You look like a couple of fun gents. Like a bit a fun. You guys wanna have some fun, huh? Have some? Fun? Good fucking fun? Gents? You gents want it? I got it all for you mates. ’satian! Cocker! Collie! Dachshund! Bloody Yorkshire! All the fuckin terriers. I got your Great Dane. Like it rough? I got your Doberman, your pit bull. Like it tight? I got your Jack Russell. Goes like the fuckin clappers, almost always shits itself. Brilliant. You fuckin name it you cunts, we fuckin got it all, all beautiful, all dog. Fucking NAME IT!”

“Murakami,” said Mondays, blowing smoke in Parkinflap’s face, which dropped to flat record-quick when he heard the name. He shoved Mondays backwards just gently.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he said, turning around to recommence his spiel on the few passing suits from the recruitment agencies up the street who were loitering a short distance away, their pockets bulging with wallets stuffed with cash, half-cut on strong lager and primed for dog cunt. “We’ve got it all ladies and gentle-fuckin-men,” he said. Mondays looked at Oddbins, who nodded and flung the pimp onto the pavement, a cautious circle around them almost instantly. Oddbins knelt on his back and held the back of his head down, his face pressed into pure floor. Mondays stamped on his arm and heard the bone snap clean and Oddbins pushed his mouth down harder into the pavement to keep the scream down.

“Who the fuck you working for?” said Mondays. “Pimp needs a pimp, so fuckin talk.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Parkinflap dribbled, half-blind with pain. “I’m self-employed.”

“Aren’t we all, in this climate?” said Mondays. He knelt down and broke two-three of Parkinflap’s fingers, one at a time.

“Oh shit!” said Parkinflap. Oddbins was digging his knee down hard into his spine. “Okay okay I’ll fuckin gabble.”

They pulled him to his feet and dragged him over to the station car park. His arm was limp at his side and he was trying to tie it up somehow with his shirt sleeve but it hurt too much for that.

“It’s a kid,” he said. “A fucking kid.”

Oddbins and Mondays looked at each other, at their watches. Past teatime. Kid’ll be home now, back by teatime or grounded for a week. They’d wait. “Motherfucker,” said Oddbins.

“Donnie, he’s called,” said Parkinflap. “You must know him. Everyone fuckin knows Donnie, and nothing happens in this city without his say so.”

“One thing does,” said Mondays, punching Parkinflap in the face.

“Sweet dreams Donnie,” said Oddbins.

***

“Look, I know all of that shit,” said Oddbins. “I was fuckin there. Question I have is, is how are you fucking here? I watched them kill you.”

“Oh that,” said Dryskin, kind of dismissively. “It was simple really. Mondays had a feeling. Ain’t that right Mondays?”

“I suppose,” said Mondays, focused on the road. Less than a mile to Mile Cross. Donnie. His grip tightened on the wheel. I’d clocked the two apes in the bar pretty early doors,” he said “saw the glint of their shooters from the lights of the Terminator Pinball. Guess I knew what was coming but wanted what that little bastard knew nonetheless. Needed him to trust me.”

“So?” said Oddbins.

“So,” said Dryskin, “when you got out of the car to go to the cash machine? Put a vest on.” He held up the bulletproof vest pierced three times, put his index finger through the holes.

“But your body.”

“Those lazy twats just dumped me in the alley out the back,” he said. “I gave it five or ten minutes and just walked away.”

“And the funeral?”

“All staged,” said Mondays past a burning smoke.

“Fuck,” said Oddbins. He opened a beer and swallowed it in a couple glugs. “And the body?”

Mondays looked at Dryskin in the mirror. “Let’s just say I didn’t want Parkinflap tipping little Donnie off.”

He pulled the car over in a two-hour parking bay a couple of corners away from the bar, cut the engine and checked his pockets for blades, smokes, for his shit, all of which he had and always did.

***

“Handful of large scotches,” said Mondays striding into the bar, alone and smoking hard. Donnie was hunched over one of the tables playing Operation, entirely engrossed in trying to extract the bread basket. “Fuckin right child,” said Mondays again.

“Mondays wait,” snapped Donnie, one hand up to stop him. “I need to fuckin…” Twat lost it, the buzzer went off, the nose lit up. “GODFUCKINDAMMIT!” Donnie screamed it out, threw the board and the ailments over his shoulder and the table over too. “You fuckin satisfied Mondays you sad sack of shit? That what your fuckin here for, to fuck up a fuckin boardgame? Fuck!”

“It’s you,” said Mondays. “You’re behind all of it. Parkinflap, the whore dogs, Murakami, Christ knows how many other AWOL pets. What the fuck do you think you doing?” Donnie smirked indifference.

“How is Parkinflap?” he said. “Not seen him around.”

“He’s been busy,” said Mondays. “But less busy than your going to be.”

The apes flanked Donnie and the barman came out of the toilet with a piss stain across the front of blue jeans. Mondays took it in. They raised their shooters up. Oddbins and Dryskin came silent through the saloon door at the side and slit the pair of their throats and they slumped without a shot popped to the floor, swimming in their own spillage.

“Fat fucks,” said Dryskin, taking the guns out of their dead hands. He shot the barman through the throat. “Holy Twat,” he said.

Donnie had taken off his sunglasses and his lip was trembling. He really was only a kid.

“I just wanted to play with them,” he said, blinking a couple of tears out. “They were so soft.” “Where are they now?” said Mondays. Donnie’s lip was shaking too hard to get anything out. “WHERE THE FUCK ARE THEY?” said Mondays. Donnie pointed to the back room of the bar, the accommodation. Oddbins went through and was back a minute later. He nodded at Mondays.

“You’ve been bad Donnie,” said Mondays, grabbing hold of him by the scruff of the neck. He sat down on vacant chair and dragged the kid across his lap. “Call this little shit’s mother,” he said to Dryskin. “She can take care of this herself.” He kicked off his trainer and kicked off spanking Donnie with it, about thirty strokes in all, kid sobbing into Mondays jeans the whole way through. Poor shit wouldn’t sit down for a week.

Some half hour later his mother stormed in, usual type, screwjack bottle blonde, fag on, savoury tang of Gregg’s under her nails.

“He’s all yours,” said Mondays, the Animal Police all laden with cat transporters they were carrying to the car.

They pulled the door shut behind them, Donnie’s mother slapping him and cursing her luck and wishing God knows what amongst the dark and the death as they started loading the cats into the car, Donnie begging and pleading and praying for change, a lifetime’s grudge built in a second.

***

“So to clarify then,” said Oddbins, shoving the last of the cat transporters into the rear footwell, “why did Dryskin have to die?”

“Fuck, will you let it go?” said Dryskin. “We had to give Donnie a chance to trip himself up. Give a kid enough rope, you know? Mondays had heard talk of some kid pimp targeting pets for some time and just needed to wait until he had the opportunity to nail him. My death,” said Dryskin proudly, “was just that opportunity. The more a guy thinks he’s invincible the more flawed he becomes.”

“But this could have all gone pretty wrong,” said Oddbins. “What if they’d shot me? Or you, Mondays. We didn’t have bloody vests on.”

“Actually I did,” said Mondays, sticking the keys into the ignition. “Seemed a sensible precaution, given what I knew.”

“Fuckin terrific. What if they had shot me? I’d be…”

“Look, who gives a shit?” said Dryskin. “They didn’t. You’re not.”

“I’ll drink to that” said Mondays, rifling through a carrier bag he’d filled with bottles from behind the bar, passing one to each of the others. “Let’s fuckin go.”

They did, slowly. The Norwich traffic was a bitch.

the ritual

I followed the youths through the cemetery gates and then around the pathways towards the very centre of the oldest part of the cemetery. They walked very quickly and I struggled to keep up though did, slightly breathless and conscious of the time. I was expected at work in half an hour and had little or no idea as to how long this type of thing was likely to take. When we reached what felt like – geometrically – the very heart of the cemetery some minutes later, the youngest of the youths stripped from the waist up and lay upon the flat surface of an old and likely once ornate tomb, although any engraving or artistic detail had been weathered over the intervening centuries to leave a smooth surface pocked only with lichen. His torso was peppered with keloid scars and more recent wounds still fresh in places across a huge spectrum of sizes and shapes suggestive of myriad utilised implements. His associates cleansed his torso with several alcohol free wipes and invited me to sit, which I did.

Would this take long, I asked, as I had to be at work very shortly. They silenced my concerns, also said no, that the process was an efficient one. I asked precisely what the process was and the three youths looked at one another as though they had selected the wrong man for this process and quieted me again, proceeding nonetheless with the ritual. The oldest youth drew a large knife from his bag and, whispering some incantation above its gleaming metal, began to carve methodically into the fatty stomach of the prostrated youth; he registered no sensation outwardly as the knife sank easily into the tissue but looked me in eye directly throughout. Several further incisions were made until the oldest youth was able to extract a small slice of flesh from his youngest associate; he held the meat on the flat edge of the knife blade and lowered it to me.

Eat, he urged. I must have recoiled some as he repeated the word, eat, and jabbed the knife towards me in a way that would be considered unsafe in any different circumstance. It’s part of the process, he said. Rather than being reassured I felt as though I were continually making an appalling mistake and would continue to do so without fail as the event demanded. I reached out to take the flesh in my hand but was admonished harshly by the youth of middling age, who punched my stomach though helped me upright when I doubled hard over. Use your mouth, hissed the elder of the three youths. Your lips, tongue. It won’t work if you touch it. I noticed that the youngest of the three had sat up and was rubbing handfuls of earth from the cemetery floor into the wound on his torso. He stuck a large adhesive dressing over the entire area from which blood and mud gathered and dressed himself hastily. The imminent consumption of his flesh for purposes of ritual provoked a singularly unusual feeling, but I focused my thoughts on my poor sick child and lapped the tissue from the knife and into my mouth. It was warm and iron-rich and metallic on my tongue. Now chew, said the oldest youth. Chew and swallow. I did as he said and struggled not to retch as the tough skin eventually passed down my throat. The youth of middling age whose role within the process aside from violent retribution was unclear throughout squeezed my cheeks and forced my mouth open and the other two closely inspected the cavity, I presume to ensure I was not stashing the meat in some corner of my mouth to then spit out in their absence or use for some diabolic reason at a later point of my own choosing, which was one outcome I had resolutely failed to consider. Satisfied that the meat was gone they helped me to my feet and the youngest youth brushed my knees of the soil and leaf detritus one routinely encounters within urban cemetery settings.

I paid them each ten pounds, plus a further five between the three of them as a kind of gratuity, and we went our separate ways. When I returned home that evening my child was still incredibly sick, worse if anything than she had been that morning. We agreed to make a further doctor’s appointment for her the following day, and I said nothing about the ritual.

to the beach!

They listened to the Archers omnibus as they drove the twenty odd miles to the beach, their child asleep in the backseat. It was terribly cold and would be worse at the coast but the decision had been made. It was but another day among all the days that pointed like great signposts to death. They were glad of the excuse for silence.

the attraction of her temporary vulnerability

She was a delicate person who appreciated the better things, cheeses, cooked meats, dips and antipasti, occasional good glasses of reasonable wine, and she had recently suffered a bad breakup from a long term partner that was still raw and brought sadness upon her when she discussed her weekend, her evenings, her future plans. He desired her all the more when he overheard her discussing the breakup with colleagues, and soon saw each little gesture that occurred between them as declarations of lust and invitations to intimacy. He trailed her around the corridors and attempted conversation, cornered her in the kitchenette and listened with a discomfiting attentiveness that made her eyes dart nervously, toward the tea-stained sink, toward the paper towel dispenser, toward potential escape routes. He stood very close by her at the filing cabinets and waited for her to bend to the lower drawers, and observed her doing so hungrily. If they slightly touched by way of error or accident he almost screamed with delight and gnawed down on his arm so as not to and felt himself stirring in the very front of his chinos. She bore some noted resemblance in both facial and vocal construct to an older or even old lady despite being several years his junior, and she sort of lisped her way through short sentences with particular care, turning each word over her tongue and through her little lips like worked candy until it they withered in parts, and something about the shape of the constituent parts of her face were in his mind synonymous with the elderly, the face itself strangely segmented like an insect’s body, and he found this combination of elderly mannerism and handsome and fuckable figure to be a profoundly attractive one, some fetishists amalgam of a weird duality.

During one lunch hour he passed her near the lake and they spoke, and he listened attentively, and in the sunshine, euphoric, he leaned in to kiss her mouth and did so, which with some reluctance she permitted, for the comfort of even mostly unwanted contact was great, and she knew she should move on in whatever ways were proffered and that it was fundamental to her recovery; her mouth tasted of old tea and crisps and was a feverish combination. Their teeth clashed like brawling beasts, as he urged himself onwards like a falling rock and she half-heartedly submitted and couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes. Her neck was incredibly thin and bore such beauty and she wore black suede desert boots as they did in the dreams he had. Emboldened by all he vocalised his desire to fuck her and provided an eloquent and numerically structured defence of his position and she laughed despite herself at the absurdity of it and was flattered a little and imagined her now ex-boyfriend and how out of character all of this was – or was thought to be – for her, for the old her, and how disgusted he would be, the prig, and he led her into the trees around the lake just feet away from the pathway but isolated anyway, and she consented and even felt a slight excitement at the possibility and at the seeing of a new body both along and inside of hers. He pulled her black jeans down and her underwear with them in a practised movement and they peeled away from her like skin and he left them in a ruffle at her ankles and ran his hands up her legs and between them and over her buttocks and between them and felt nauseous with anticipation. She leant forward slightly and rested the hands of her extended arms against a tree trunk as though in self-defence and he parted her legs and slipped it in and fucked her very hard in measured strokes that he counted in his head. They could hear the conversation of a fisherman at one of the jetties around the lake’s circumference, as noise rather than distinct words, and his heels sank into the sandy earth. When he came, which he did quickly, he pulled himself out and she was still doubled over and though she hadn’t come her thighs felt unsteady regardless and he knelt down and with one or two hard flicks ran his tongue around the site of her anus as appetizing as chocolate cake; she recoiled when she felt it and turned and fixed her clothes and felt very grim, the sun lost behind clouds, the chill of early spring unpleasant on her thighs, the smell of dogshit from the many local walkers who made use of the extensive grounds festering at the back of her throat like a deployed bioweapon, the brutalist concrete structures of the university so sheer and grey and suddenly stark that she felt entirely devoured and consciously so.

They walked back to the office separately, and although she didn’t cry she wanted to, and although he did he didn’t. He heard her throwing up well into the afternoon, and waited dutifully outside the ladies toilet to be there for her, to listen attentively while she got things off her chest whatever they may be or however they might relate to his performance or whatever which she had of course encouraged, to help; after a few minutes his manager asked him what he was doing and he returned apologetically to his work, although turned round regularly to try to catch sight of the opening door. The vomiting stopped but he didn’t hear the girl emerge, only large groups of female colleagues entering the toilet to see if she was okay, though they couldn’t possibly care as he did, or listen as attentively as he would to the problems or challenges she might face, of that he was certain. He could feel her secretions entangling his pubic hair, could smell the meaty tang of coitus through the fabric of his trousers. She really was very beautiful.

not an epidemic

The cull of the cats was an inevitable development once the deaths became plenty if not epidemic, as the hypothesis pertaining to their responsibility spread virulently through the township. The cats spoke not a word but accepted their fate, further fuelling the widespread acceptance of their guilt. The hypothesis explained not why the deaths were occurring, or precisely how the cats were causing them, only that they did, they must, and that the township had a responsibility to stop them for the sake of its own continuance. Council funds were allocated to the cull, with organised teams of huntsmen rewarded in pennies per kilo of cat product returned to the civic buildings. The captured cats writhed and groaned in increasingly hoarse tones in large hemp sacks that were piled on the steps outside of the civic buildings, several hundred cats in total, and much of the township had gathered to witness the cull, considered by all to be humanities great triumph. The mayoral party greeted their people as heroes, and the applause drowned out even the frightened sound of the cats for its duration; they spoke of civic responsibility and of difficult decisions and of the fundamental worth of the human spirit or soul and how the only just response to threat imagined or real was murder. The gathered agreed in the way one does with partly distorted loudspeakers. The mayor’s assistant, an attractive barely beyond the college years, approached the piled cats and carefully poured a combustible liquid of unknown origin from a jerrycan upon them. Ignited, the blaze was staggering and a carnival mood reigned, the sounds terrible from within the sacks that tore like fireballs around the car park with the force of cats desperation. A youngster was holding a single cat by the scruff of its neck, somehow missed by the encroaching huntsmen. Encircled by four of his school friends they held the cat down and took it in turns to stamp on it, its small bones snapping easily beneath their shoes, singing as they did the songs of yore.

live lit

He finished reading the pages of prose - eight of them, single spaced, no paragraphs - and thrust his hips and, subsequently, his genitals towards the small crowd. Live Lit had become quite a thing in the city, and he had been grooming a handful of promoters for the last few months for a slot at one of the bigger monthlies, assuring them via essay of his immense worth and acknowledging his contextual placement within the canon (whilst simultaneously proclaiming the – in fact – superfluity and obsolescence of it resultant of his own ground breaking work), and plying them with emailed collations of his own grandiose profoundly unfunny tweets, really just his usual prose efforts broken often awkwardly into 140 character segments, until they at last relented, gave him the opening slot one Tuesday night. The silence was harsh, even hostile.

“Clap then you dumb fucks, he sneered.

“Fuck off and fuck off hard,” said one already drunk punter, who’d come for the local boy they were calling “the next Patrick O’Brian”.

“Clap? What the fuck for?” said one of the promoters, half-hiding behind his own notes.

“You ignorant bastards,” he said, holding his rolled-up manuscript aloft like an incredibly valuable prize. “You just listened to genius. Fucking genius. So fucking clap.”

“Look, if I could anticlap I fucking would,” said some joker. It raised a laugh at least, more of a response than his whole text had managed.

“You pretentious arse,” said one of the two present women. They were both scheduled to read later, and both were incredibly popular. No doubt their extensive fan base didn’t bother showing up for the opening acts, fucking bleeding hearts.

He threw the manuscript across the room. The pages separated - he found it very hard to read from stapled pages - and fell barely a foot in front of him. He wouldn't gather them, he thought, and did immediately.

“This is a fucking joke,” he said. “All of it. Live Lit? LIVE SHIT. You twats wouldn't know literature if it fucked your wives.”

“Listen to yourself,” said an especially angry performance poet. He turned up at all these events - even the exclusively prose-focused ones - and did his ‘thing’, a loathsome outpouring of pointing and shouting and saying zilch. “Never heard of grammar?” A roar of assent carped round the room.

“You have no fucking idea,” he said. “NONE. I’ve ‘heard of’ your ‘grammar’. What the fuck is this, eighteen-fucking-something-something? Grammar. Grammar’s the instrument of the middle classes, a shackle on the freedom of expression and creativity. I shit on your grammar!” People were getting up, to piss or go to the bar. It was worse than the heckling, which was a dialogue at least. “Paragraphs are for shit,” he said, yearning for the focus back on him, “for people too fucking lazy and thick to try. You've got to expect to work for your pleasure, for the reward of fucking ART! You want to get laid, you work at it. You want to eat nice food, you work at it. You want to watch Tar-cocking-kovsky, you fucking work for it! Work, you arseholes! You’re all CUNTS!”

“Just shut yourself up chap,” the poet said, his practised tone conciliatory and desperately patronising. “No one minds struggling to listen if there’s something to hear, yeah?”

“Think about it friend,” the promoter said. Opinion validated he was no longer hiding behind his notes. Arial. What a cunt.

Led by the poet they applauded when he left.

riverrun

They sat together at the river’s edge. It was very quiet apart from the sound of the rushing water, and the sun was bright in slivers through the dense foliage. Side-by-side their shoulders touched like old friends, and he leaned his weight onto her, a minute gesture that would precede something greater; their shoes were off and their socks balled inside them, and they dangled their milk white feet into the icy clear water that filled the gill, and ran their toes through gravel that made plumes of mud like mushroom clouds beneath the pristine surface, washed quickly away by the certainty of the running river. He fingered a half of scotch egg, idly picked a few chunks of the soft yolk out like a scab under the one thumbnail he kept long out of what had then become habit then cleaned his thumbnail on the grass, dislodged the remnants with a thin length of stick gripped like surgical equipment between the fingers of his other hand; he took the white and ate half of it and threw the rest into the river and she found the act repulsive and told him as much. The picnic was hardly touched, the food all topped with a thin crust of time like hardening rock. He lowered his feet onto the stones and carefully picked his way to the centre of the river that came only part of the way up his calves as the summer had been dry, crouched and picked up the half-eaten egg white which he carried back to the bank and rinsed off in the water; he stood before her and cast her in shadow and slowly consumed the food in a manner she found to be pointlessly confrontational. She refused to look at his face but could hear the sounds of the chewing which was somehow worse than seeing it, and looked only at his midriff that rested at eye level, at the stray open button of his shirt and the curled dark hairs on his stomach beneath that were so depressing against the awful pallor of his skin.

The end of their relationship was given form in every interaction they made, every thought of the future – even the future only seconds away – screamed it’s over like an incredible relief.

He sat back down next to her and they started to stuff the untouched food into the bags they had carried them in. Her finger sank into hummus as she groped for the lid and she felt her eyes filling with tears as it did so; she felt very happy to be moving on. She rinsed that finger and the others in the river and held her sandals in one hand and the wasted food in the other and crossed the river cautiously, ensuring her footing was secure before every step. The stones could be very slippery with fine hair-like algae. Her skirt was tied up around her waist and some stray pubic hair poked from the edges of her underwear; he didn’t notice and she didn’t care. She climbed onto the bank on the other side and slipped her feet back into her sandals and untied the knot in her skirt and let it fall back over her legs, and the cool drying water on her soles and between her toes felt delicious in the sunshine. He took a last look at the tender grass as soft as bedding and felt at the contents of his pockets and crossed the river also, soon slipping on a large and perfectly flat stone and falling heavily into the water; he fell again when trying to stand, and her arms were folded on the bank looking down at him, and though she didn’t laugh she was smiling, and he shouted dumbly and splashed his way to the bank where she only then help him up. They walked the footpath in silence, his feet slurping at the heels of his trainers.

He drove her the twelve or so miles to the train station through empty lanes and byways and the journey was brisk and there was almost half an hour before her train – one of only a handful of daily services that ran through the station – was scheduled to depart. He parked the car some small distance from the station in a layby beneath some huge oaks. The air was incredibly still and he could feel sweat pooling at the base of his back beneath his already soaked garments. He reached into the back seat and opened up a bottle of white wine drenched in thick condensation, took a long drink and passed it to her. She sipped only tentatively but took his hand. They kissed firmly and she led him climbing over the handbrake into the back seat, where she straddled him awkwardly but they managed to do it regardless, their limbs bruised by luggage and the structure of the vehicle. Both breathless and desperately hot their cheeks were flushed like flagrant alcoholics, their thighs soaked with the sweat of the other. It had been the best thing to do, the final conversation, so much the end that it became the beginning. She walked back to the station and he sat for a moment before driving away. It was a good day.

the shared park

The doggers and the cruising homos share the park I visit most Saturday mornings with my daughter. We like to feed the ducks and climb the many stairs around and use the play equipment and run in circles around the ornamental labyrinth; they like to fuck with a small appreciative audience in the small wooded crevice that hugs the riverbank in the park’s northern corner, or follow each other around the lightly gravelled footpaths checking their mobiles and making imperceptible gestures and motions in an unspoken semaphoric language of lust with the result of fellatio or, I suppose, even sodomy, bitten down on wrists or wedges of tree bark or rolled up knock-off Harrington jackets to silence the grunts. They are all a technologically astute bunch, utilizing the internet for their own carnal ends, and spent sheaths like shed snakeskins hang from the trees like decorative adornments, like the archaeology of some ancient perverse sect.

It has been blessed with myriad sex-oriented monikers relating to the preferred activities of its most committed visitors: Queen’s Park (inevitably, though this has fallen out of favour somewhat, given the presence of an actual Queen’s Park elsewhere in the city) Shaggle Rock, Fuckpond, etc. On any number of pertinent dogging sites the park had been issued an overall rating of “good” for the practise of dogging, with one friendly couple particularly commended for their inclusiveness and for putting on a good show; one female commenter who had experience around much of Norfolk and some of Suffolk had noted positively how the man “comes loads” – weirdly I would have thought overall mass of ejaculate to be an odd desirous prerequisite for enjoyable outdoor encounters, but I suppose it makes some sense: no bed sheets to worry about and similar – and how he “fucked so well”, comparable only to one other particular couple who commonly worked one of the layby’s between Norwich and Great Yarmouth in terms of technique, methods used and all-round sexual experience. Although I found no such rating system in place for the park as the location for casual homosexual exchanges which it had in recent years become, following the advent of any number of smart-phone applications aimed at just such a thriving subculture, the abundance of furtive, repressed, tough-looking blokes would suggest a similar level of popularity, the combination of a controlled, natural, urban environment, proximity to the city centre and without the expense of a Premier Inn room being one too good resist.

My daughter and I would frequent the park in the early morning, commonly before 8am, by which time we would have already been awake for some hours; I find this a good time to visit the park, it being generally empty (aside from a handful of bird enthusiasts and sexual opportunists), a state to which my generic anxiety disorder is well suited. I prefer and actively attempt to avoid other children and their parents in the enclosed playground area at all costs, irrespective of the negative impact this might prove to have on my daughter’s socialization and development, a point of some contention within my family. My paranoia is such that I feel a great distrust of the children who attempt to engage my daughter in play or in the kind of stilted conversations at which two year olds (and their parents) excel and I immediately put a stop to their efforts; on occasion I will say the words “oh no” quite loudly when a familiar looking kid comes over to us, and despite deep ignorance they do usually get the message and persist instead with their personal leaping or varied other solo play methods on or around the equipment.

In fact the only instance on which I did engage in conversation with a fellow parent was one borne of the park’s copious sexual activity. Despite it being long before what would constitute a reasonable Saturday breakfast time for most, all-too-often the park represents a choice destination for fathers too unimaginative to think of anything else to do with their young, the same few faces cropping up week in, week out, as they too must – and would be right to – think about me: him again, can’t he think of anything better to do, that poor child, &c.; in fact my rucksack routinely contains a tea towel I bring from home for the specific purpose of wiping gathered rainwater or dew from the play equipment to minimize the potential discomfort to my daughter’s person and garments. Although for some this may represent a sort of mollycoddling, for me it is a decision structured by practicality and sensitivity, two traits on which I pride myself as both parent and, more generally, extant personage. Whilst we swung our respective children on their respective swings ensconced somewhat uncomfortably within the very minimal spatial privacy such action affords in a small enclosed children’s playground, we could hear the unmistakable sounds of sexual pleasure occurring only feet away within the wooded area that flanks the riverway, and I noted how we swung our children slightly more forcefully as an instinctive response to it. There is something quite surprising if not entirely unsettling about the knowledge that strangers perform sex acts either publically or otherwise in the daylight hours, and that same knowledge somehow conspires to tarnish life, all life, with complex levels of decadence and sleaze and leaves me feeling sticky or at least similar to that sensation, in all of my key or sensitive or fleshy body locales.

“I like the daytime doggers the best,” the other father said from nothing by way of a greeting. We had been in the playground together for ten or fifteen minutes but had not as yet even looked at one another; this didn’t change as he spoke and we both focused very intensely on our children. “They’re a proud, open bunch. It’s a community. Meaningful friendships extending long beyond the point of orgasm.”

I wanted to ask him to be quiet but instead asked “Do you partake?” as though I were offering around cannabis at a house party, and listened to the creaking of the rusted metal chain that held my daughter’s swing up, that yelped like discordant brass with every arc.

“That I do,” he said. “But only when the kid’s at home.” I observed as he strained to peer over the hedge towards the wooded enclave, as though helpless but to answer some overbearing call of nature, pointless really given the thickness of the foliage, his child now hanging in the stationery swing. “Do you mind?” he asked. I ignored the question because I didn’t, or wanted not to, understand it. “Watching him for a minute?” He pointed to the hanging child. “As you’re here anway, I mean.” His kid was staring at me, flecks of foam around the edges of his cunt red lips. I pushed the swing a couple of times, alternating between my daughter and the other kid.

“I suppose it’s okay,” I said, “As long as you’re not. You know.” He clapped me on the shoulder with one hand then rubbed both his hands together in the warming gesture.

“Minutes,” he said. “Ten tops.” He kissed his child on the head and walked hurriedly out of the gate and towards the wooded area. I could hear sticks snapping underfoot as he disappeared amongst the trees.

today's episode

In today’s episode, Donnie asks Mary if she would like to take their relationship to the next, physical level, a question she refuses to answer.

DONNIE
So Mare, we been seeing each other two weeks now. Two weeks. So what I was wondering is, is would you like to, you know, take our relationship to the "next" level? Physically speaking?

MARY
Donnie, you’re okay, really you are, but you know I refuse to answer that question.

DONNIE
(looking away)
I know Mare, I know.

Next week: Donnie converses with Purfleet at length about the various ways of ending it all.

into the grey afternoon

In the woods with the child his impotent rage subsided some. He breathed deeply among the trees and crouched with the child by huge fungi and fallen logs and pinecones and many other treasures, and he held her close to him and felt her warmth and her life against his skin and felt very stupid and sorry. He wanted to call her at that moment to apologise but he had left his phone in the house when he had walked out so hurriedly. The child ran into thick piles of orange leaves and kicked and threw them like tickertape into the grey afternoon, squealing as she did so with delight. He joined her and they threw the leaves together in great fistfuls and they stuck in their hair and to the fronts of their jumpers and they were so crisp like left toast and perfect, skeletal, and they fell into them and looked up laughing through the falling leaves and the mostly bare branches and to the sky, and the smell of the earth was deep and damp and tremendous.

He had hit his wife but not – and never – meant to; the argument was heated and ferocious and, he knew, worthless, but it happened and kept happening as those things – the worthless ones – do, impulsive in all the worst ways. The child watched television while in the kitchen they went at each other in cruel competition, the benchmark of caused pain raised ever higher with every shouted sentence. Their troubles were small but niggled persistently, money, ambition, attitude, just trifles, really. The timbre of her raised voice turned his stomach but not at the expense of love; it reminded him sadly of his age, of the youth they had shared but now lost. He was punishing and measured with it, traits that had worsened with the years. The argument lasted for only minutes but caused immeasurable damage. His wife cried and he offered no comfort for it felt false and wrong to do so. She had slapped him twice, the argument by then in its death throes, the energy subsiding; he should have let it pass but hit her after the second one, not hard but still. He felt as though he was watching it happen and not participating in its deployment, which of course he was. Such detachment was the cause of many arguments; “you knew what I was like,” he would say; “you weren’t like this”, she would say. They were both incredibly right. Her face was very betrayed clasped between her open hands. He took the child, all smiles, and they left. The air would clear everything.

There were several steep hills in the woods which had once extended for many miles north, the sites of sand and gravel extraction of generations ago. He sat at the top of one such hill and the child sat in his lap, and they slid down over and over again, running each time right back to the top and then sliding down again, the gravel cutting into the seat of his jeans, themselves weathered and left clammy by the disturbed topsoil. They balanced on logs and large root systems and he pretended to fall from them, flailing his arms and yelling, and the child found this incredibly funny. There were dogs barking in other distant areas but they saw not a soul. In spring the place was swamped with frogspawn, the dew pond and even deep puddles forged into the various declivities that lined the tracks all teeming with the stuff, and they would watch then with baited breath in hopes that the spawn would hatch and mature before the rising sun dried the waters to nothing. By the Autumn there was no frogspawn, and the muddy water of the dew pond was very still as they stood at its edge and caught their breath, jolted only to occasional life by the child’s thrown stones which rained in great handfuls one after the other like prophesy.

His wife’s face at the edge of the windowpane as he and the child drove away from the house seemed etched into his memory even as it happened. A symbol of all of his failures, he would see it when he closed his eyes; it reflected the minutiae of their lives back to him as his did to her, clear as mirrors. Everything else, all of it, now gone.

He lifted the child up into his arms, and kissed both of her cheeks, and she laughed, and he threw her up and caught her when she dropped, and she was mute with the excitement of that split second of flight, and he would take her home and would tearfully apologise to his wife, and kiss her softly, the kettle would be boiling, and he’d beg her forgiveness, and they would know that they were meant to be together as without doubt they were, for they, they had created this child, this perfect child, and know that these blips – for what were they but that? – could and would stop, and they would all three sit on the sofa or lay upon the bed and be so happy and strong and all would again be well, and he threw the child up, he was sorry, and he caught her, oh how peaty and damp the smell of the earth!, and he threw her up, he loved her, had never meant to hit her, and he caught her, and he threw her up, her shocked face frozen above his then gone ever so quickly. There was blood on his hands and the child’s body fell lifeless to them, almost weightless, face down; her little skull and her little brain were pierced by the lowest branch as he had thrust her up to it, she was dead in an instant. They said it as a comfort on television programmes: she died instantly, but it was no comfort at all, it was all too instant, everything happened in an instant, leaving no time at all for it to be otherwise, for him to make it otherwise. How quickly the joy of life becomes not. He turned the child’s body over and straightened the frown on her face and kissed it many times and walked back along the paths they had earlier shared to his vehicle and to more.

th' wilde bunch

For two weeks or thereabouts Th’ Wilde Bunch terrorised my terrace and the surrounding few terraces on the northern side of Norwich city. The sons of Buttaller Wilde – a known Norwich cad but also local history buff, self-published author and theorist and unlikely architectural authority – the Bunch were a bicycle gang of three, who pedalled the alleyways in torrents of profanity and smashed vodka bottles like an unfolding bi-wheeled apocalypse. I was recipient of their wrath on at least one occasion, where encircled by their bicycles I was forced to pledge allegiance to their intense breed of insularity, decrying the surrounding postcodes with a level of venom they considered suitable (a generosity – they assured me – only extended to me [they called me “el hombre nada”] due to my own possession and daily usage of a bicycle). They offered to ink me with the Bunch’s visual credentials, furtively showing a small pocket book containing a couple of rusted blades and some Bic Cristal ballpoint pens, but I declined their offer, stating that the integrity of the spoken pledge could not possibly be furthered by permanent physical modifications to my person, that the conversational bonds we had shared in the alleyway out back of my house represented my resolute word as pro administrator that would, if anything, be somehow undermined by the crudeness of their artistic methodology. They reluctantly consented to this despite the audible hatred in the many fuck off’s they muttered under their collective breath as I did just that.

In the early twilight, under the bright streetlights that lined the alley, they honked and drawled like copulating felines, stretched and fought and drank heavily, giving indiscriminate single-speed chase to anyone who happened upon them in those middling hours; they caught few, and those who had been determinedly refused to discuss the myriad degradations they had suffered, but took extensive sick leave in the time period following without exception. There was little doubt among residents that the large rancid stools deposited at precise intervals like perverse waymarkers along the several alleyways that comprised the Bunch’s dominion was their work, but the residents were rendered powerless both by evidential inconsistency and fear of reprisal, for at least – as it was – the stools were beyond the boundaries of their gardens (such small mercies!), a fact that could and would be altered with immediate and devastating effect by the incensed trio as situation demanded. With little sacred the wheelie bins were rooted with no single reason but depravity, the bags torn and jutting like black wispy fingers from beneath the lids, the stench of melon skin and full nappies caustic in the winds of the alleyways, the gold curled remnants of cat food pouches like priceless artefacts amidst the blooming weeds.

Buttaller Wilde had long before erected a shed which adhered to no architectural or spatial or even logical conventions in the garden of his over-alley property, and called it – after Chtcheglov – The Hacienda, a new conception of time, space and behaviours, a fluid structure unfettered by limits of construction or engineering or geology, entirely modifiable. It was, he said, a space of psychological furtherance and deep spirituality, a space “more conducive to dreams than any drug”, although what this meant in actual terms was unclear. The panels that comprised the structure were said to be mounted on a series of tracks and runners and attached to a network of gear and pulleys, and could be reconfigured at will like the pieces of some futile jigsaw puzzle. It was, he said, a one-off, and had been the first element and exemplar of the comprehensive planning and design he had submitted to the city council in his proposed bid to have Norwich recognised as the first experimental city attuned to a new idealistic understanding of the ways in which citizens respond to and interact with their cities, plans which were, of course, dismissed out of hand. Wilde was “out of touch”, they said, and “a fantasist” and “(query?) dangerous”.

Three perhaps five days into Th’ Wilde Bunch’s reign of nuisance the Hacienda burnt outside and Wilde sobbed as he watched it fall, the three boys running between it and the outdoor tap with buckets of water in an attempt to stifle the blaze, swearing as they did so, the mix of vodka and Chewits a potent one on their breaths. The heat of the blaze had burst the bulbs in the streetlight overhead and the glare of the fire was the only glare. The arsonist – for it must have been – was never determined, and police had explained how in fact every street was a suspect, given the recent behavioural anomalies of Th’ Wilde Bunch. Wilde nodded as the officer presented the facts of the bad news as it was and shook his hand tenderly as he left. “I'm sorry Buttaller,” he had said. “The Hacienda was quite a place.” Wilde nodded further, as though he may never stop.

He walked through the garden and out of the gate and into the alleyway, where the three boys stood in sombre reflection alongside their bicycles, the smoke from the Hacienda blaze still farting upwards. He pushed each of them to the floor and their bikes too, and began to stamp on the wheels with great might until the spokes had popped out and the wheels had begun to buckle, and he lifted the frames above his head and smashed them all onto the floor of the alleyway in a mess of severed cables and paint chips and broken reflector lamps. Looking at his boys on the floor, mutely crying and so dreadfully idiotic, encircled by the same stools they raised in arms against the residents of the surrounding terraces, he felt an appalling depression of a kind unknown since his wife’s death, when he realised to his sorrow that his plans were now, and always would be, far far greater than whatever they became.

drink it up

Our conversations seldom progressed beyond the expected pleasantries but far beneath it all I sucked your cunt like a milkshake, and even in my imagination your porcelain face looked very thin and very sad, your crossed legs coiled perfectly around themselves like a fastened shoelace I desperately desired to open up.

the unknown origin of the sweetened products

There were three of them, boys I suppose, all eating chocolate, slurping it half melted past their yellow teeth. They picked the stray brown crumbs from their sweater-fronts like scientists handling valuable resources and ate them down carefully. They were all completely bald and their skin sat badly on their frames like second-hand garments, and was puffy and bruised and yellowing also. The infrastructure of the township had been decimated around them when the bombs dropped as they slept in their beds several months earlier. Many civilians had survived but all had been left with similar disfigurements: bald and with skin of a now ill-fitting nature and with unmistakeable respiratory problems that rattled in their chests like single items in a saucepan. It was uncertain as to the origin of the chocolate; confectionary and sweetened products were amongst the first to go after the bombs had fallen and anarchy reigned. The three of them had simply come across the chocolate in sealed wrappers in the road at their feet as they went about their duties, and after very little consideration of its significance had devoured it as though at gunpoint, in precious quiet, before any other civilians could observe them. In fact similar arrivals of chocolate products had appeared in numerous streets around the decimated city, all of which were devoured with comparable immediacy and in secrecy by the finders of the products. The selfishness of man is paramount. It may transpire in the coming hours that the chocolate products had been dropped by the same forces as the bombs had been in the earlier months, that they were a second more calculating way to continue the decimation of the township by way of poison or transmittable disease, that the eaters would suffer immeasurable pain before their futile deaths; however, for the now bald inhabitants of the township this was an irrelevance compared to the fleeting pleasure of their consumption, of taking their lives into their mouths. Their rotting bodies would be testament, of sorts, to sugar.

a failure of memory

In bed the following morning I read aloud from Poe and we ate cold buttered toast in our underwear. Like a chimpanzee she groomed the crumbs from my chest hair and like a foal I pressed my nose into the warmth of her neck and slipped my fingers beneath her pants and let them rest there as I read. It must have been early for the sun was weak through the windows but I opened a can of tepid beer left under my bed and drank from it, then passed it over to her and she did likewise. We passed it back and forth and drained it quickly. After several chapters I left the bed and dressed and told her I had to go to work, a truth she acknowledged if disapproved of. She left the bed to return to her boyfriend’s room next door, and the structure of her body was very beautiful as she did so, the way one side of her pants was caught helplessly between her buttocks and her stomach was slightly round, and I tried so hard to commit these things to memory but as soon as the front door closed behind me they were gone, the memory of the memory more memorable than the memory itself.

the organist's digressions

The stage was not one as such but several Ikea boxes pushed together, that he had been saving since a large online furniture purchase the previous year. He had set up two folding chairs on top of the boxes, one of which he used as a stand for the lime green Bontempi organ he had purchased on eBay for peanuts; it had chord buttons to one side that he tended to use exclusively, save for occasional attempts at notational intricacy that inevitably resulted in disaster or in the organ falling over in his exuberance. Since its purchase he had been trying without success to replicate much of John Carpenter’s memorable horror soundtrack work of the 1970s and 1980s but his attempts were poor and the sound laughable, his version of the Halloween theme, in particular, sounding like the theme tune to a daytime entertainment show with absolutely none of the taut oppressive atmosphere of the archetypal slasher of which the Carpenter soundtrack was an integral texture. On receipt of the organ he had stuck a printed greyscale promotional photograph of once-popular, now sexist presenter Michael Buerk to its casing with masking tape; “999” had profoundly influenced him as a younger male, left him with an almost permanent feeling of entrenched anxiety that he considered more blessing than curse, opening his eyes, as it did, to the unimaginable risk in even the commonplace. He watched Michael Buerk as he played and remembered; he cared not for the Buerk of today, whose reactionary aphorisms enflamed all of Guildford with righteousness; his feelings for and gratitude towards the man were of far greater consequence, a fact to which the printed greyscale promotional photograph adoring his Bontempi organ testified.

The days performance was what he termed his “parlour version” of the soft rock hit Total Eclipse of the Heart, a song he had always found almost uncomfortably emotional and rousing. The gathered audience waited for his muted shuffling entrance which he executed without a word like a shadow elongated by the slipping sun. He stepped over the organ’s frayed yellow power cord and took his position on the empty folded chair before it, the chair legs tearing with a jolt into and through the thick corrugated cardboard of the stage surface. Unfazed the commenced the performance, alternating between chords that bore little recognisable relation to the song as known, a lack of relation that was no further bolstered by the lyrics, when they appeared. Performed “in the vein of” Michael Winner they were conversational, shredding the melodramatic pomposity or garment-rending heft of the original to nothing, his pleaded, slightly whiney “turn around, bright eyes” sounding more like a frustrated owner half-heartedly encouraging its aged dog to walk back to the car quickly than the urgent declaration of some fierce and passionate love that Tyler had presented circa 1983. The performance’s impact was further stymied by his insistence at frequently deconstructing the so-called moment and fourth wall by unexpectedly stopping both his conversational vocals and his limited organ work mid-verse and even mid-line in order to explain what he would do differently with a more complete and elaborate selection of musical instruments and skillsets at his disposal. For example: “imagine, if you will, accordions”; or “you’re familiar with the drum kit sir? I envisage its presence here in some plenitude”; or “when I close my eyes I can hear, here, brasses of divine origin”; “recorder bits would pepper this coming section in spiralling solos of perhaps unexpected – given the limits of the instrument – clarity”, the like. Throughout the five or so minute performance he paused nine times to offer these elaborative deconstructions of the musical process, which resulted in his complete fantasies pertaining to what could be achieved with different personnel playing different instruments roughly five times the performance length of the song itself. When finished, he stood from his seat and the boxes further crumpled to flat beneath his weight. The Bontempi continued to hum through its in-built speaker; he crossed the room to unplug the power cord, as the on-off switch was damaged beyond usage and once the instrument was plugged in it remained very much ‘on’, and his foot caught in the piled boxes as he did so and he felt onto his side and pulled the organ down on top of him. The humming persisted; indestructible, the old Bontempi products, he thought proudly.

While he struggled to his feet the gathered audience of three, his immediate family, spouse and two young, left the living room without applause or a word of thanks, and he wrapped the Bontempi in a tartan blanket and began to fold away the cardboard for recycling.

the lad and the dignitaries

The lad piped up, always did when push came to shove, when the buck flapped, or something. “No no,” he said. “No no way way.” The assembled dignitaries fell immediately silent and the silence felt like a presence, heavy and damp and ultimately rancid; water swallowed into desert dry mouths was amplified in it, lowered glasses loud as day, the weight of their worn gold and other finery itself almost given sound, somehow, a dull creaking of straining bonds. The doorman nodded in response to the dignitaries unspoken commands and strode to the lad and slapped him across one cheek and then the other and then the originally slapped cheek once more; the lad’s head jolted with the impact, his cheeks immediately reddened in both shame and from the handprint left, the fingers like four smeared tentacles across his flesh. Even as the slap hit he felt himself jumping surprised at its volume and – over and above the degradation and pain – it felt like the worst part, the noise; it was both loud and as if separate from his existence. Mentally he composed apologies to the wood panelled walls, the buffed tabletop, the crystal tumblers, the assembled dignitaries; he retracted the latter as quickly as he composed it. The doorman offered the lad a tissue which he took and folded into a fine triangular point and used to calmly dab each corner of his mouth, then placed within his jacket pocket for later use. The doorman grimaced and slapped the lad again, and yanked the tissue from his pockets and tore it to shreds that he dropped like snowflakes onto the lad’s head, and then returned to his post by the doorway.

“We have a problem lad,” said one of the dignitaries. It might have been any of them. The lad smoothed his hand upon the top of his hair and a number of stray pieces of tissue fell from it; his eyes watered as the tissue fell past them, as for some reason they did when confronted with whiteness. He stood from the seat he had been directed into on his arrival and walked to the doorman and kicked him incredibly forcibly in the genitals. The doorman vomited and fell and curled into a foetal position and without apparent summons two further doormen entered the room and carried him from it, and one returned to take his place at the room’s only doorway. He gestured towards his own hand as if to suggest that he would slap the lad and enjoy to do so, if he was driven to or requested to by the assembled dignitaries. The lad considered this a mutually respectful position and returned to his seat. “To repeat,” said one of the dignitaries. “We have a problem lad. A significant problem.” The lad took in each of the faces in turn and spoke quietly. “The problem is not mine,” he said. “I do not care about your ‘problem’. I do not care about it at all.” The dignitaries resumed their silence, broken only by the creaking leather of the doorman’s shoe as he slightly redistributed the weight of his formidable body. One of them wrote in black ink upon a small piece of paper what appeared to be four or five words of uniform if otherwise unidentifiable characteristics; he read the words back to himself and when satisfied passed the paper amongst the other dignitaries. They read for many minutes despite the relative brevity of the assembled message. Once the final dignitary had read the message he screwed the piece of paper tightly in his right fist and handed it to the doorman who in turn placed it first into his jacket pocket and then – as though thinking better of it – into the dustbin; the dignitary stood from his seat, removed his suit jacket, which he positioned on a coat hanger, and with some assistance from the doorman climbed onto the tabletop, his shoes polished incredibly competently. The lad watched as the dignitary walked across the table in his direction, removed his braces, opened the waistband of his trousers and pulled them and his underwear down to his ankles and raised the shirt tails up slightly, and then with some discomfort squatted on his haunches and proceeded to defecate, his gaze unflinchingly – aside from a cursory glance to ensure the falling excrement did not catch the back of his shoes or trousers – upon the lad. The smell of the excrement was particularly unpleasant but the lad betrayed no unease. The doorman passed a compact box of tissues to the dignitary who wiped himself in silence once or twice and proceeded to dress himself with the same rigorous formality he had employed in the undressing process. He returned to his seat in silence. “Tell me lad,” said one of the dignitaries. It was the same dignitary who had spoken just moments ago, a spokesman of sorts, the lad assumed then as now. “Is this” – he gestured towards the excrement, that glistened on the table as though alive and not merely waste – “your problem?” The lad examined the excrement with some care. “It is not,” he said.

The doorman opened the door and the lad listened to the heels of his shoes clip-clopping away down the hallway. After two or three minutes the heels clip-clopped back towards the room in which he sat and the doorman re-entered accompanied by several people, the lad’s family, his wife, his little daughters, his aged parents, they were all present. The lad licked his lips slightly as the doorman moved down the line of gathered family members and slapped each of them very hard. The lad’s little daughters were sobbing as he did so and his parents appeared apologetic. Once the doorman had concluded his violence the dignitary asked the lad again: “And this? Is this your problem?” The lad smiled at his wife. “It is not.” The family were led from the room by the doorman. When he returned the lad stood from his seat and calmly picked the mounded excrement from the table with one bare hand and carried it to the doorman and smeared it over his face, and then down the front of his jacket. The doorman accepted his fate passively before once again exiting the room, immediately replaced by another, third doorman and the lad returned to his seat.

Now another of the dignitaries stood and this time walked to the window; he invited the lad to likewise. He pointed to a Ford Escort and the two of them watched as a mother and what the lad assumed to be her three small children entered the car. The dignitary took a very old mobile phone from his inside pocket and dialled a selection of numbers; when he depressed the ‘call’ button the car exploded, engulfed in the profound heat of its own burning metal, the persons destroyed. The lad saw burning flesh upon the pavement and severed child limbs. “This below,” said the dignitary, without any malice or frustration. “Is this your problem?” The lad considered his answer carefully, imagined an endless regression of worsening atrocities resultant of his meticulous honesty. “It is not,” he said quietly. The dignitaries looked amongst themselves at a further piece of paper written with a handful of neat text that was circulated among them. “Very well,” said the gravest-looking dignitary after a considered silence. “You may go.” The lad did.