on the roof

I was woken from a fitful sleep by cold water.

Upon opening my eyes, I quickly ascertained that it was, in fact, rain, and that I was, it would seem, outside. A cursory photoreceptive investigation into my surrounds further suggested that I was on a roof, although which roof I was on and why I was on it were at that time mysteries unsolvable by observation alone. I was neither clothed nor naked, but in the middle state provided by a two-piece cotton pyjama suit, and I promptly thanked the stars for small mercies. It was a flat roof, thankfully, but much to my chagrin was of the sort commonly associated with factories or other such industrial premises and littered liberally with sharp gravel, that had apparently taken it’s toll on me during my nights slumber. Feeling my back with one hand, under the now sodden material of the pyjamas, I felt myriad pockmarks and grazes about my person, and as I stood up I couldn’t help but to allow myself a high pitched yelp as the gravel embedded itself in the soles of my bare feet.

The wind whipped and whistled around me as I stood, forcing the coldness of my pyjamas onto my skin. My muscles ached and my neck was in a miserable state of stiffness. I yelped again as I tried to turn my head, and again and again. For the life of God almighty I couldn’t move the wretched thing, it had locked fast into place and imposed the most crippling agony upon me if I tried to make even the slightest rotational motion. My luck had run out with the pyjamas, it seemed, and appeared to be waning further with every second that passed. With my back locked in a rigid vertical pose, the only stance that reduced the need for movement in the neck and thereby eased the debilitating pressures upon it, I rotated my whole body around an arc of some 270°, feeling both absurd and uncomfortable in nigh on equal measure. Such pain in the neck should never be underestimated, and I vowed there and then to take regular meetings with a chiropractic executive at the earliest available future opportunity. Thus with my head held in perfect straightness I tried to pick my way around the gravel as best I could – which was far from easy when incapable of looking downward – and, like a man beset by the final paralysis of rigor mortis, attempted to better assess the inexplicability of my unfurling situation by grasping where I was, what I was doing there and how I might rectify the inappropriateness of my exposure.

A slow and lumbering walk to what appeared to be the edge of the roof initiated more mysteries than it solved. By now holding my head still, with hands on each side of my face, to prevent the wind from blowing it and inadvertently triggering the acute sensitivity of the neck, I glanced awkwardly, and not without a rather porcine expulsion of grunts, in the southerly direction, due downwards, for even the vaguest suggestion as to my whereabouts. My first observation confirmed my suspicions that this was indeed the roof of a factory of some sort. The crudity of the brickwork, the dulled glass of the windows, the sooty chimney structure; it fulfilled the necessary factorial stereotypes to make such an assumption acceptable – if not entirely correct, then certainly in the higher end of the probable, and when considering the current state of personal discomfort to which I was a party (to wit: pyjamas, roof, inclement weather, sustained neck injury), I proceeded without further ado with the secondary observations required to address the issues at hand.

I had still not managed to angle my neck sufficiently to see all the way to the ground below, but nevertheless I began to shout out for assistance. To the best of my reckoning, yesterday had been Tuesday which would make today Wednesday, which ipso facto would likely have all manner of menial workers and blue collar ruffians within receptive distance of the impressive range of my voice, and happy to help a gentleman of fine nightwear from the pickle in which he had somehow found himself by the mystery of the spheres, especially in exchange for a fiscal reward concurrent with inflation and representative of the severity of the work conducted to be assessed and calculated at an opportunity satisfactory to either party and to be conducted on neutral ground.

“Hello there!” I hollered. “Hello and I say, down there! Forgive my countenance, I have been struck to stiffness by neck ache of the grossest calibre. By some madness it is I slept a slumber atop this flat roof of your humble factory, and for the love of man could not tell you why! I say, might I trouble you for your generous time and assistance from this devil of a predicament, see for I can’t rotate the old think tank due to the aforesaid! Call me a sausage, I fear I might be stuck up here! And only in the pyjamas I stand up in! I say? Hello down there? I say?”

Despite my eloquence, replies remained minimal, or rather, more correctly, absent. I listened as best I could, angling my ear – and thus my whole body – toward roofs edge, squinting my eyes into the wind, but heard nothing but the rasping on the rain on my pyjama shirt. I swallowed out of concern, and felt immediately struck by the most awful horror. I longed to do something fast, anything, to rush from one side of the roof to the other, to shout and scream and jump around, but my neck made anything of the sort impossible. A blessing, in that respect; sometimes it is only monstrous pain that enables a man to stand still and proud with dignity firmly intact, contemplative, calm. I took some deep breaths and attempted a philosophical reflection. I had only woken a few minutes ago, after all, and without my wristwatch I had no idea what the time was. It was of medium lightness in the sky, I could establish that much despite the looming menace of the rain clouds overhead, but that could put it anywhere between seven or nine o’clock in the ante meridiem period, I reckoned with confidence. Which would in turn suggest that patience, once again, might prove to be my greatest virtue, for the factory wouldn’t begin clocking in until half past eight or perhaps nearer nine, and therefore if I merely bade my time then I would surely be noticed by the approaching workers who would immediately come to my aid and feel refreshed and invigorated by the humour of the situation and talk about it for years to come in voices loud enough to be heard over the production line, one of those bizarre little stories of human interest that have no precedent and are eventually engulfed in the darkness of the unsolved.

Of course! My pleas went unheard, not ignored! What a fool I was! With a smile, which sent a jolt of pain from my neck to every inch of my body, I vowed to sit tight and to occupy myself with my thoughts for next hour, two at most, and would again call for assistance when I heard the first of the workers slurred and broken English make its approach from the road. Dare I say I even felt a glimmer of amusement in my reverie, despite shivering as I was in this rotten weather, and the many aches too plentiful to list. A roof! I couldn’t make it up! None of the gentlemen would believe this one, no matter how I told it! I felt slightly queasy, some combination of tiredness and the cold, but pushed it from my mind, saying aloud to myself in a cheery voice: “what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger!”, a cliché I tended not to agree with in the slightest but that seemed appropriate, despite its hackneyed and misleading sentimentalising. I thought about Herrington, turned to jelly by a post-traumatic stress disorder, and felt oddly guilty. It was certainly character building, I admitted that much, one of the many fragments of life’s rich tapestry, all combining to make me the man I will one day be, the little stories that form a history.

I wanted to sit down, but feared I might never be able to stand again, what with the ache of my neck, and I certainly didn’t want to go unnoticed, or miss the arrival of the factory workers – they shouldn’t be long now – so decided to head towards a raised skylight that jutted from the roof like a greenhouse. Whilst it offered no passage into the dryness of the factory below, I theorized that its structure may well provide minimal protection from the rain, which had settled into a constant and repetitive blanket of wetness that was abusing the ground like a violent superior. I ambled over with slightly spasmodic movements, and leaned back against the glass as best as I could. It pressed the pyjamas back into my skin, and I winced at the coldness, but it felt pleasant to take the weight even slightly off of my feet, and indeed did offer some shelter the relentlessness of the rain, effectively reducing its onslaught by a good thirty per cent, which you might think is a trifle for a man already soaked to the skin and atop a factory in his pyjamas, but even the wettest man can feel the often crushing sadness of a constant precipitation, perhaps the wettest man most of all. Something about the monotony of the drops can shred away the dignity and, indeed, the sanity of a man greater than myself, and I greedily relished the thirty per cent reduction in rain contact with all the gusto of a man not afraid of the loss of the comforts to which he is accustomed.

As the time slowly passed my mind too began to wander to a topic I had hitherto ignored somewhat in my excitement and instinctual desire to remove myself from the roof that held me captive, victim of the elements. Namely: how the devil I came to be on that selfsame roof in the first place. Try as I might, however, I just couldn’t seem to piece together the events preceding this present unfortunate circumstance. The previous night was a blur at best, and beyond a glass or two of – particularly fine – brandy and some hearty laughter, there was little either unusual or untoward that had so far formulated into lasting memories. Whilst I was unable to recall with certainty the personal use of my own bed, I could make certain educated assumptions about its likelihood, for the simple reason that I was wearing my own pyjamas, pyjamas which I kept in a silk pyjama case beneath the topmost pillow of my luxurious bed and nowhere else. Perhaps not evidence that would pass as fact or truth in a court of law, but amply sufficient for the purposes of a reconstruction of my previous night, and how it contributed to my current, rather compromising location.

I squinted in concentration, desperate to recall even the smallest detail. There had been people with me. Johnson-Devizes and Willis-Harker, that was it! And little Rawlings, the blighter! Yes! They had been with me, all three of them. We had eaten a meal of exceptional goodness, and conversed into the late hours as only the educated will, exploring amongst ourselves in the sanctity of my drawing room all manner of philosophical concepts and treatises, both Western and the other. We had laughed, we had bickered, we had ribbed, but only ever in reverence of the deepest respect we felt for the next man. Come the striking of the first hour of morn, my three closest, most male friends bade me simultaneous farewell and took leave as one in a shared taxi, propelling them to their respective bedrooms as my weary legs had propelled me up the staircase to my own. I did remember! I slipped between the sheets with only just enough time in which to pull on my pyjamas, and then I had drifted easily into the blissful complacency of a delicate unconsciousness. Then I had woken, at which point you joined me in this most bizarre of adventures.

I rubbed my hands together briskly, and impulsively raised the wrist where my watch would usually be to a level at which I could examine it. Dash it all, it was getting even colder. No closer to discovering the reason behind my altitude, I decided that perchance a stout constitutional around the perimeter of the roof might both circulate the heat of my blood somewhat, whilst passing the dragging time in a more interesting way than that in which I was then engaged. After a democratic assessment of the pros and cons of the suggested constitutional, a vote of one was passed, counted, recounted and announced, and promptly acted upon in the most effective fashion available, namely the commencement of motion.

The rain had slowed but continued to fall as a thin sheet of sadness in the morning air. The pain in my neck seemed also to be easing, but I couldn’t be sure whether I was simply getting used to it, and any rash movements would cause significant and lasting harm in the long-term, so I continued to move in a posture of absurdity, my neck rigid and straight atop my shoulders.

Perhaps sleepwalking was the answer? I had heard tell of grown men wandering from their beds and almost functioning in their lives without ever leaving the realms of the dream. In my youth an acquaintance had drifted into some poor lad’s room in the thick of the night and started removing, of all things, his underwear. The nude sleeper then attempted passage into the startled boy’s bed, who – woken in accordance with the rustling of his blankets – had had to use words of force and sincerity to rectify the intrusion, much to the hilarity of the dormitory. Unsure, come morning, as to whether he had dreamt the whole affair the lad thought no more of it, until later that day he had uncovered the sleepwalker’s boxer shorts at the head of his bed. We questioned the latter, who – embarrassed and shamed as he was – tried to explain his history of sleepwalking, which we found even more hilarious as he tripped over his own words and bumbled out apologies. It was an occurrence beyond humour, I said to myself, but there was something in it. The human unconscious is of powerful design, and as we submit it to the silence of sleep only fools or madmen would attempt to guess at what might happen, or what could happen. I was happy with this, and decided to write more about it when I finally got off of the roof.

Whilst seeming like the most fantastical explanation, sleepwalking was also currently the only explanation I had, and though I had no history of the act and no reason to assume that it would be to this location that I would sleepwalk, it was a possibility at least, and sometimes even a poor or ridiculous explanation is better than no explanation at all. It can help us to make logic in a situation devoid of the same, and without logic the god’s themselves wouldn’t know where to begin.

I edged to the drop and again tried calling out for assistance, to no avail. I reassured myself with a contemplation of the perceived contortions to the passage of time, and how – despite my growing boredom and feelings of uneasiness – I had probably only been waiting, in truth, for a period of around ten minutes, and that the workers would still be arriving, as expected, come the appropriate time for a Wednesday of honest hard slog.

But then it caught my eye, glistening under the force of the raindrops. I squinted against the weather and shielded my eyes with a hand. From this distance I couldn’t quite be sure if my initial perceptions were correct, but as I became more focused in scope I saw quickly that they very much were. A fire escape! Of course! Health and safety demands no less than these mighty steel structures wending their utilitarian metal features towards the skies! Groaning with joy I began the painful walk across the loose shingle of the flat roof and towards my salvation. O sacred metal bonds, pantheon of legislation and forethought, scaling buildings large and small with the perpetual determination of a celebrity escapologist! I would fall at your feet in worship, were it not for this wretched neck!

As I reached the far side of the roof, and in so doing the entrance to the fire escape, I breathed a sigh of relief and laughed aloud, making a mockery of my prior fears. I had made it through whatever test the divinity had deigned to throw at me, had stared adversity in the face and felt the force of its moist flanks within my very hands, and now, here, with decorum and grace, I would make my descent from the wilderness and back to the daily motions of my life, a little stronger, a little wiser, and always with the conduct of the gentleman that I was. It was a feeling so glorious that I felt it in my loins.

*

Alas and to bastard! Imagine, if you would, my very despair. The fire escape, that heavenly structure, that feat of engineering, it was incomplete! INCOMPLETE! With straight neck I made a steady path of descent down its surface, still only able to direct my gaze forwards, never from side-to-side and never down. Despite my pain I could now found time for a smile and had almost even started to enjoy the rain, in some strange way, as often one will when the promise of a hot cocoa, a fine robe and a good fire awaits them at journey’s end. I heard a sound akin to watery motion, as of a lake in the breeze, or a slow moving river crossing flat earth, but in my reverie I dismissed it as imagination, or as the driving rain in transit and against the side of the building.

Yet as I edged my toes over the crest of the sixth step down, extending them like sensory receivers of some kind, like the feelers of a blind man, I noticed a distinct lack of further steps. Queer, I thought, and tried to turn my whole body around forty-five degrees. I could see that I was as yet less than half way down the fire escape, and therefore the side of the building, but the fire escape seemed to simply stop. I again moved my toes down, further this time, even bending my other leg at the knee (in a motion of profound discomfort to myself) to reach as far as was possible into the space below me, in case a single step had somehow been misplaced, or dislodged in an act of nature or of heinous vandalism. But no, the farther I leaned, the more space there was, until with a scream from my lips and a sense of horror running in an unbroken line from heart to anus, I felt the unmistakable coolness of water about my toes, and from what I could make out in this spontaneous initial assessment, rather a lot of it.

“Pending disaster,” I squealed desperately. I lowered my toes once more, faster this time, and reached the same conclusions again, for the second time. Wrenching my neck southward with a shout I looked, looked dammit, looked below me to where – as the power of universal logic would suggest to any man of remotely sane faculties – the remainder of the fire escape should be.

And there it certainly wasn’t. Believe me when I say I nearly died on my feet – right where I stood and let the god’s take me up – when I saw the truth of this unbelievable nightmare. The world had gone. Not only the fire escape, which had rusted and broken off at the banisters, but the world on which I stood, from which my life had grown. It was gone, flooded, washed away like some Biblical metaphor. The water had risen to just below the now bottom of the fire escape, the last step of which I was now astride, paralysed by disbelief and pelted with terror.

The water surged and rose and waved as if it were breathing and I looked up at the thick grey sky, certain that the rain had once again started to increase its falling quantity. It will only continue to rise, I thought, mentally referencing the standing water, and looked hopelessly towards the horizon. The town around me had all but vanished, only the odd tips of church spires or the occasional roof still peeking sporadically from the watery depths, the cruel liquid swallowing buildings and vehicles without thought or remorse. There wasn’t a person in sight, no cowering mothers clasping to their roofs and longing for a rescue mission, no brave husbands tying their family to their waists with an old bed sheet and paddling carefully to a floating piece of furniture. There was nothing, no one. I realised that it wouldn’t be long for me either, that only the slight incline on which the industrial estate was built had preserved me for this long.

I made haste up the stairs, and realised to my rather muffled joy that the pain in my neck had finally subsided. It must have been the speed of my earlier motion somehow forcing it back into a comfortable alignment. Loathe as I may be to admit it, as I reached the roof again I must confess to panicking, almost awfully. I ran one way, then another, then a third after that, all the while grinding my teeth uncontrollably and emitting little screams from between my teeth, that were again chattering in the cold. I began to shout out words quite randomly.

“Canister!”

“Funereal approach!”

“Scabbards!”

“Interrogate!”

“For the love of the one good God, please help me!”

I fell to my knees in an act of bizarre and hysterical prayer and bellowed from the pain of the sharp stones that littered the roof digging through the fine cotton of my nightwear and into the soft skin of the knees below. Slumping to my side in the very pits of despair, I am man enough to admit that I wept, wept with the force of a naughty child, wept until I could weep no more, wept until an acrid bile was vomited from the sanctity of my innards. I was doomed, and even my trademark optimism was powerless against this particular reality. My plight now definite, like the unfolding plot of a scripted stage play, and I knew then that I would die on this roof. I was a broken man, my death the epitome of the pointlessness I had spent a lifetime running away from, dowsing in brandy, throwing my wealth towards, shoving beneath the fibres of one expensive rug after another. Finally it had caught up with me. One wet roof, one lonely man. It was exquisite, in a strange way, and I closed my eyes and willed death upon me, taking little comfort in the poetics of my downfall. Let the rain engulf me, I thought, let it swallow me in its eternity, let the decision be taken, wipe me from the face of this monstrous world!

*

As I sank into the blackness of irreversible oblivion I was soon jolted back into the coolness of truth by what sounded like a voice. A human voice.

“Good God, it’s Peterson!” the voice said.

“Great Scott,” said another familiar, if somewhat high-pitched voice. “Peterson, you devil!”

“It is,” said a third voice. “It is, it’s Peterson!”

“Peterson!” chimed all three of the voices simultaneously, as I felt several sets of hands fall upon my shoulders and pull me somewhat gracelessly to my feet.

I opened my eyes, and almost couldn’t believe them when I did. I didn’t know whether to laugh or die.

“Johnson-Devizes!” I said, joyously recognising the spreading bulk of his flanks beneath his sodden pyjamas. The sight of his paunch had never once made me so happy and nauseous in equal measure. “Willis-Harker!” I exclaimed, the meticulous parting of his thick black hair starting to droop under the persistence of the rain, thick globules of pomade hanging awkwardly around the hairline. “And Little Rawlings!” I said finally, genuinely uplifted by the presence of this unusual little man, his white-bottomed pyjamas stained liberally with the most unflattering yellowish tinge centred around the genital opening. “You three!”

“Peterson,” said Johnson-Devizes again, “just what the heck’s going on here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said firmly. “Isn’t this all some trick, some prank, organised at your hands?”

“Pah!” ejaculated Willis-Harker, wiping his forehead with a wet handkerchief. “A prank! A prank, he says!”

“Come on Peterson, for goodness sake. A prank? We’re as wet as you are man, soaked through! Would we pull such a prank on ourselves?”

“I suppose not,” I said, curiously. “Then what the devil is going on here? Look around you. It’s flooded, the world has flooded!”

“Most unavoidably,” said Little Rawlings, his voice the high-pitched one I had recognised previously.

“Indeed,” said Willis-Harker. “The question remains, gentleman, of why? Why and how?”

“And more specifically, I should think,” I interjected, “why are we here?”

“Very much the case,” Johnson-Devizes concurred pensively. “Last night, I for one sought slumber in my own bed and my own bed alone, and it was within that bed where I slept the sleep of the good this very night past.”

“Likewise,” said Willis-Harker.

“Most agreed,” said Little Rawlings.

“Concurrence is extended voraciously in my favour,” said I. “Tipsy, perchance, I might have dabbled in the fineries of the aqua vitae, but drunk I wasn’t, and in bed I most definitely had been. That much is remembered clearer than the lights of the brightest days.”

“Tipsy!” exclaimed Willis-Harker with a snort. “My friend you were more beast than man!”

“Devastated!” laughed Little Rawlings.

“Primal!” chortled Johnson-Devizes.

“How dare you, three of you!” I said defensively, feeling my cheeks aflame with the indignity of their claims.

“It fails to matter either way,” snapped Willis-Harker. “Drunk as manticore or sober as church mouse, it means little. The fact remains that, irrespective of the intricacies of our faculties in regard to the aqua vitae we all of us can honestly and with certainty plead a guiltless guilty to the fact that we did appropriately commit acts of sleep in one – or rather four different – places, to wit, our own beds, places most intimately familiar to us, and yet have seemingly awakened in an unfamiliar location without the benefit of shelter. Namely, and primarily, outside.”

“Here-here,” rallied Little Rawlings.

“Damn your accusations, Willis-Harker!” I growled.

“Accusation nothing, Peterson. The veracity of your abject drunkenness is of no consequence to our current disagreeable position, and so merits no further discussion at this or any future point.”

“Come on Peterson,” said Little Rawlings in an amenable tone. “Let’s not dwell on your penchant for a drop or three.”

“Damn your eyes if I wasn’t drunk, you funny little person!” I’m sure I was perspiring, but thank the lord for mercy’s large and small if it wasn’t too wet both in the air and on the pyjamas for anyone to notice.

“Let us all give due consideration to shutting up hurriedly,” said Johnson-Devizes, rather sternly, I thought, considering it was my habituals on the smorgasbord of discussion. Regardless, we did as he suggested and he continued to speak. “That is agreeable,” he said. “Now, as our mutual associate Mr Willis-Harker has rightly exemplified, we did all, as men, seek the comforts of our own beds in the night prior to this morning. Might we vote for agreement?”

“Agreed,” we other three chimed in unity.

“Democracy in action,” smiled Johnson-Devizes warmly. “Now, based on proven consensus pertaining to the workings of time, space and the associated universals, we educated men can most confidently make certain assumptions regarding our presumptive whereabouts in the morning immediately following the act of slumber in one’s own chambers. Namely,” he said, looking at me as he spoke, “that one will wake up precisely where one fell asleep, save for the odd movements performed during said act.”

“That certainly is of sense,” said Little Rawlings sycophantically.

“An undeniably accurate summary of the truths leading to a construction of the present,” congratulated Willis-Harker.

“Or, to summarise yet further,” continued Johnson-Devizes, “one can only assume that one will rise in the self-same place where one has previously fallen. At least pending some external intervention within the rise-fall continuum.”
Little Rawlings went as far as to applaud as he spoke. “I would find it perhaps as definite as the impossible to agree with you any more than I currently do, Johnson-Devizes, which is in the figure of one hundred per cent, to the best of my mathematical calculation.”

“Far be it from to me to agree with Little Rawlings at this or any other interval,” said Willis-Harker, “but on this I must. I took leave of my consciousness within my chamber and yet awoke atop this building of apparently industrial intent. And it is from this fact that I take discomfort and, more significantly, no little amount of confusion.”

“Confusion indeed,” I said. “Or still worse, as if the broadly metaphorical carpet of comprehension has been markedly wrenched from beneath the soles of our feet. Do I dramatise my emotions when I say that my above-average understanding of the very workings of the known universe has been rendered meaningless in such a way as to leave the essence of not only my intelligence but also and inextricably the essence of my humanity in some way wavering on the fragility, emptiness and callous impersonality of the ever-turning heavenly bodies?”

“Dramatise you do, Peterson my friend,” said Willis-Harker with more than a hint of sympathy to his voice, “but for once you are vigorous and justified in so doing. For this is, indeed, a most puzzling and inexplicable occurrence within the established paradigms of scientific spirit. In short, I am at something of a loss as to understand our own position and likewise the tentative position of the experientially flooded world of which we are a sentient organic component.”

“Oh my earth!” exclaimed Little Rawlings excitedly. “There is no answer, only pain!
There is no reason, only the frailty of the submerged aged rocks! There is no respite, only the eternal wetness of relentless precipitation! There is no avoidance of the unfurling scenario, only acceptance of our perilous stance! God save us! God save us all.”

Willis-Harker struck a brisk slap to Little Rawlings’ cheek, then another, and Little Rawlings fell prostrate to his knees, deep in meditative sadness, knees apparently unscathed by the imposing pressures of the stones.

“Show some decorum man,” snapped Willis-Harker harshly, rubbing the offending palm in his other hand. Little Rawlings mumbled inaudibly from the floor. He had tendencies to speak in tongues, and we remained staunch and unfazed by his terminal oddity.

“What are our choices?” I asked out of the silence.

“Choices?” asked Johnson-Devizes.

“Peterson?” asked Willis-Harker.

“Or rather,” I continued uncomfortably, “what shall we, as it were, all considered and theretofore consented to, do?”

“Do?” said Johnson-Devizes. “Do? My dear fellow, anything we go so far as to ‘do’ as of now is a pointless act of self-invalidation.”

Both he and Willis-Harker laughed briskly.

“How so your cynicism?” I asked cautiously.

“Dearest Peterson,” he continued, his voice slightly strained by the smile on his face, “to engage in any attempt at action at the present time, considering as we have the intrinsic destruction of any semblance of sense hitherto garnered from generations of learning by the illogicality and impossibility of our current spatial coordinates, would be folly.”

“A waste of time,” Willis-Harker interjected. “Although quite how one can specifically waste time when the very notion of time itself has been severed from meaning within the passage of a night, is a conundrum the likes of which invert reality, sense, logic, language, mind and man.”

“Quite particularly,” said Johnson-Devizes, almost flirtatiously. “You see Peterson, nothing is the same. This has become the one basic fact to which we can extend any consensus or any trust without fear of inaccuracy. Nothing is the same. The structures of meaning that had previously underpinned both our mental and physical interaction with the world have since been rendered meaning-less, our very bodies have defied those structures in their appearance on this... this roof. All we had understood about our impact on the world and about the world’s impact on us has been disproven. We have lived our lives within and as a part of a flawed paradigm, but a paradigm so flawed it has effectively put an end to life, at least life as a meaningful abstract discussable with merit. And thus to you I ask: why act at all? Any performed action in which we might engage could only be in concordance with the outdated rules that still bind the processes of our brains, and what could possibly be more pointless than playing a game of life, death or anything in between with the wrong rules? It would render the action ridiculous, and I for one will not be a party to ridiculousness. We would be men of insanity, men imprisoned within the mental shackles of an unchanged world whilst the world as it pertains to be real or of existence has in fact changed around us, and changed intolerably, men displaced without structure, displaced to what past glories might refer linguistically as ‘roof’, and roof very much within what we might similarly verbalise to be ‘rain’. Would, in the name of all things past, I deign to act in the midst of such madness? No, no, no. Action is something I refuse to take, and refuse wholeheartedly. I refuse to be a madman!”

“I...” I said.

“Precisely my point,” he replied.

“So in effect, Peterson, the question is not, as you so quaintly placed it in the sphere of dialogue, ‘what shall we do?’, but rather and more properly, ‘what shall we be?’” Willis-Harker beamed with perplexity as he spoke.

“Hence put to you,” I said, “gentlemen, sometime associates and furtive lovers, what shall we be?”

“Now that,” said Johnson-Devizes, “is a question!”

*

The rain toppled and the waters rose and the four men of whom I was one watched in a silence contorted by situation. Johnson-Devizes smiled broadly under the grind of breaking metal as the fire escape was pulled from its moorings at roof’s edge. Despite its passage downward into the certainties of death, I couldn’t help but feel dismayed at its loss, like the accidental drowning of a familiar acquaintance and the awkward funeral that follows. I rubbed my hands together in a brisk gesture and Little Rawlings stood up.

“I demand appropriate action,” he said.

“I see,” countered Johnson-Devizes. Willis-Harker walked ferociously towards us from the far side of the roof, where he had taken station. His face scowled in the dull. “And what, pray heavenly, is the specific of this action to which you allude in minimal verbosity?”

“Heck, Johnson-Devizes, you know I don’t know.”

“Perfectly adequate ignorance.”

“We’ve already established the end,” snapped Willis-Harker, “if you’d damn well listen.”

“End?” said Little Rawlings. “What end?”

“The present end,” said Johnson-Devizes reassuringly, slapping a palm onto Little Rawlings shoulder. “To wit, the end in which we are. There is nothing to do and nothing to be done and still the world will change around us. And so nothing is what I will do and nothing is how I’ll enjoy it.”

“But isn’t that...”

“Waiting, indeed, and in effect, most affirmatively.”

“But we can’t just...”

“Wait, on the alternate, we most positively can though.”

I yearned for the comforting shroud of alcohol, for the decisiveness of good tailoring, for the intimate sculpting of well-upholstered home furnishings, and sharply cried, to the surprise of all.

“Peterson?” sneered Willis-Harker, a satisfied expression melting across his rather angular features. “What on this or any other earth might you claim to be allowing yourself?” I laughed, so almost hysterically, and dash it if I knew for why. Willis-Harker’s body tensed in reply, as if ready to pounce. “He’s gone mad,” he said, “mad as mad. Driven out of his operational thought processes. Messily divorced from his faculties. He’s...”

“That’s enough, Willis-Harker,” said Johnson-Devizes. “The poor blighter’s at the edge of something difficult, I’ll concur. But mad? My dear erstwhile conversational recipient, in a world inverted by the chaos of bodily transference there is no mad. Or more prudently, there is no sane, and thus it is your sentence pertaining to the mad which is the maddest, or rather least sensible, of all!”

“Genitals to your patterns of logic, man,” growled Willis-Harker. “Mad? Real? Logical? It’s of minimal import!”

“Entirely sympathetic to your gripes, old bean. Which is why I plan to wait for the cold fingers of death to stimulate me away from the terra firma and into the oblivion of the beyond. Assuming, of course, that death is to be expected, and if not then I shall wait all the more. After all, something will happen.”

“Please deliberate yourself into existence!” I cried, vomiting as soon as the words had passed my lips. Johnson-Devizes jumped as I said this.

“The speaking of Peterson!” he said.

“Why wait?” I continued. “We are dead already, to all but ourselves. Why sacrifice our integrity yet further to the fickle passage of expectation?”

“Interesting,” said Johnson-Devizes. “Interesting in the mid-spectrum. Correct me if you are not suggesting by waiting for the inevitable I am intrinsically presupposing this notion of the inevitable as the, as it were, inevitable outcome of sufficient waiting time?”

“Precision analysis,” I nodded.

“Very much a case of accuracy on your part, Peterson, and an inexcusable oversight on my own, for which I beg the forgiveness of your functioning brains.” A mumbled agreement of valid forgiveness barely heard over the fierce movement of the water. “Most certainly yes,” he went on, “to hand my limp passive body over to the inconsistencies of this altered world like a pound of unwrapped butter, to let it run some course around me, would be to give a credence of the monumental to its paradigm, a credence I do not purport to be satisfactory. Yes! Of course, and curses! We must impose our own active humanity upon it, and forthwith to do so!”

“And how to do the aforementioned, do divulge?” asked a sarcastic Willis-Harker.

“Suicide!” proclaimed an animated Little Rawlings, arms extended to his either side like a pyjama-clad Christ of the industrial roofways.

*

Within a passage of minutes Little Rawlings – in a manner more enthusiastic than any in which I had ever visually observed his countenance – had retrieved four shards of glass of varying sizes, and issued one to each of us three, keeping the largest for himself. Willis-Harker, holding the glass at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger alone, guffawed and looked at it with such disjointed disgust that I felt a wave of nauseous sadness through the depth of my body.

“What the good God is this?” he spoke like a derisive laugh. “Some solid, some inorganic product of fusion, some... glass!”

“Most affirmatively, dearest acquaintance whose association with my personal has extended into the realm of years,” said Johnson-Devizes, examining his own shard with an almost affectionate yet oddly scientific exploratory stare. “Glass it is.”

Willis-Harker laughed again. “And what, please express, is the suggested democratically proposed usage of this solid?”

“I think the man Rawlings has a plan to imminent self-induced destruction,” I said. “Put bluntly, an act of the suicide.”

“Surprise unconcealed, he’s serious!” Willis-Harker shuddered, as if the glass he held already dripped with his own blood, transparent engine of his own destruction. “The suicide!”

“It’s the only choice we have left,” Little Rawlings said, pleadingly. “The only thing upon which we can make a difference.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Willis-Harker. “I refuse to believe that it will be an act of violence as performed with an edge of broken glass that will draw the final curtains around the glory that was my presence within the expanses of the firmament!”

“Whilst it remains far from me to offer sympathetic agreement with the mental workings of our own Little Rawlings,” said Johnson-Devizes, running a fingertip across the length of the glass in assessment of its effectiveness as sharp-edged tool of controlled harm, “in this instance I would tend to offer at least partial support to his decisiveness.”

“It’s the only thing left that retains a context of meaning,” said Little Rawlings in a voice of patronizing quality, placing a hand on Willis-Harker’s shoulder. The latter withdrew roughly.

“Touch not, devil!” he snapped. “This is preposterous, preposterous!”

“He’s in hysteria,” I said, “embroiled by the unfolding madness of life. His faculties weathered, his capacity gone.”

“I fear yes,” agreed Johnson-Devizes. “Little Rawlings, your proposal, most honourably, and entirely hurriedly in the spoken word of mutual comprehension.”

“Certainly to express. I propose a sitting for the four men in a formation of the circular structure.”

“Blessed geometry, you live on in us in sacred memoriam! Logic! Structure! Sense! Dear mathematics, forevermore at peace and held tenuous within hearts and minds, your boundaries engulfed in the movements of history!” Johnson-Devizes smiled at the sincerity of his own rhetoric. “Do continue, Little Rawlings,” he continued, “and forgive me my interruption. Momentarily I was overcome, as soon we all will be by the grandiosity of death, the finality of an ending!”

“Most acceptable,” said Little Rawlings, “most acceptable indeed. Following the formation of this circle, I suggest a mutual and simultaneous drawing of the glass hitherto issued, raised henceforth to the throats of the individuals involved, thus with a minimal application of pressure invoking an incision into the depths of the neck’s soft tissues and through the jugular vein. The singular result, of course, being fatality.”

“Bravo, sir, for your evident respect for the rituals of closure,” congratulated Johnson-Devizes. “Peterson, do you find yourself in consensual union with Little Rawlings and myself with regards to the necessity of an act of suicidal intensity, in concordance with the gravity of the hopelessness of our current situation?”

“I must confess to a full agreement,” I said loudly. “I consider the meaninglessness of an act of suicide to be rendered itself meaningless by the full meaninglessness of our plight. A lesser of two meaninglessnesses, as it could be.”

“Difficultly put,” nodded Little Rawlings.

“Certainly put,” nodded Johnson-Devizes.

“You’ve all gone potty!” blurted Willis-Harker. “Absolutely. Suicide? It’s madness.”

“On the contrary,” said Johnson-Devizes, “it’s the one sane move left to the tactician of life.”

“I hereby extend my full refusal in the participation of this psychotic glasswork,” said Willis-Harker defiantly, smashing his shard on the surface, despite the cries of Little Rawlings.

“Social improprieties abound,” responded Johnson-Devizes. “Then for the sanctity of good taste and in a respect of completion, at least, I assume you will join us in the seated circular formation?”

“I will,” said Willis-Harker, head bowed venerably.

“For that I thank you.”

We sat down as four awkward points dotted around a circular circumference, Willis-Harker of empty hand on my left direction and Johnson-Devizes on my right. The remaining three of us held our glass as one would any sharp object, at odds from our body. I knew that to use it in self-execution was in the utmost defiance of nature, but saw all around me a nature in defiance of man, the only escape being this final escape, a sneaking unnoticed from the back door of life.

“Tell me, Willis-Harker,” said Johnson-Devizes in a voice that seemed inappropriately pitched in the rain. “What the blazes will you find to do with yourself, following our departure from the physical realm?”

“A fine question indeed, and one to which accurate response is still notably impossible. I must imagine that it will be a time for enriched contemplation of the highest order. From there one might only speculate as to what could follow, or to when it will follow.”

“Very much.”

Little Rawlings coughed and both myself and Johnson-Devizes looked toward him. He had raised his glass and held it clutched between both hands at a height level with his neck.

“I think perhaps now is profound,” he said.

“Now begins now,” said Johnson-Devizes, lifting his own glass likewise.

“To here now, now and the eternal now,” I said, glass identically raised.

“My gentleman,” said Johnson-Devizes, “I presume it would not be excessive of me in the current climate of illogic to propose a four count. For in consideration, the simple count of three seems so suggestive of a dead past of purpose as to be the ultimate irony.”

“Four count it is,” agreed Little Rawlings. “I refuse to die in irony.”

“Partners in vocal exchange,” said Willis-Harker. “In absence of sentimentalizing, I safely feel that it is still of prudence to express myself at this, the time of your demise. I disapprove, wholeheartedly, of your methods, your motives and your actions. To that end, I must congratulate you from the bottom of my selfishness, for in this disapproval lies the determined hope of something better, a hope somehow still alive in this appalling doom. Amen.”

“Amen,” said Johnson-Devizes, wiping a tear briskly away with his pyjama sleeve. “Your selfishness was always your Achilles heel, dear Willis-Harker, the finest aspect of an otherwise drab personality.”

“Johnson-Devizes, thank you.”

“I’ve never known a woman,” I said, my hands trembling around the glass.

“Good cosmos, Peterson, this is hardly the time!” said Johnson-Devizes.

“There isn’t much to know, Peterson,” said Willis-Harker in self-satisfaction.

“I thought you should know,” I said apologetically.

“Honestly, Peterson, we already knew. Little Rawlings, are you of satisfactory preparation?”

“Impeccably,” said Little Rawlings. “Let us act, and quickly.”

“Then it is for I to speak and say: on four. On four.”

“One.” I focused on the glass, its razor sharp edge catching the rain as it fell from the sky.

“Two.” I focused on Willis-Harker, the friend I never liked, so greasy in the rain.

“Three.” I focused on Johnson-Devizes and Little Rawlings, never faltering.

“Four.” The sound of the flesh tearing open was deafening and terrible and I looked at my own glass, which hadn’t moved, still levelled in front of me. Johnson-Devizes and Little Rawlings had fallen onto their backs and were bleeding heavily. Willis-Harker was staring at me with an emotion of intense negativity.

“Peterson!” he shouted. “You haven’t done it!”

“Peterson?” spluttered Johnson-Devizes, trying to lever himself onto his elbow so he could see his disbelief with his own eyes. Observing his struggle Willis-Harker moved to his aid, holding the dying man under his armpits so he could see me the better.

“This is unbelievable, Peterson! You’ve shied away from the final action! You are beyond inhuman, Peterson, beyond inhuman!” There was blood in his mouth as he spoke, and Willis-Harker laid him back down into the growing puddle of blood and rainwater.

“He’s right Peterson,” said Willis-Harker. “You’ve let the future down.”

I stood up, placing my glass carefully onto the roof, and it looked like Little Rawlings was already dead. He seemed enraptured on the pebbles. Johnson-Devizes gurgled the noises of death from his wound.

“Come on Peterson,” he said. “Take the plunge. I feel strong in my pain! Alive in my death!” I looked at him with a certain sadness, at the fading colour of his plump cheeks. Good old Johnson-Devizes. I could delight in the essence of a brandy.

I ran from the three and to the edge of the roof, leaving their blood and their deaths behind me. It was a personal affair, death, and anything pertaining to its actuality seemed most definitely enjoyed in a state of comparative isolation. The sky seemed to be clearing, but perhaps my eyes were finally adjusted to this perpetual darkness.

For all that sings holy in this wild world I’ll jump!, I thought, impassioned.

But I was already in the water, and tired, so tired.

cut to:

Kissing sounds
that are contemplative
and the sound of a leather couch
creaking under the weight of two bodies.

scene: municipal swimming baths, diving board

"Holy shit he's going to jump! Please stop him somebody! He has everything to live for!"

coke can paradise

With blazing wings to set the scene - storm through the dressing rooms and the cosmetics facility, beyond the furniture stores and the industrial catering solutions unit and beholding there, stage right it is, this life itself!

The museums of logs are fallen worthily and mighty through the lakes of your eyes, with pardon me and reconstruct the supersphere, glottal stammers and sky reflections, repeated relentless a thousand simple mirrors and highly charged obsessively polished glass stacks, the repetition representing a perfection above and beyond the really thought or ever seen. Bobbing monotonous but enchanting and encased in the history of the world, preserved through the ages and centuries, the wooden hollow husk of man.

And out but in of once grand and now dry lake beds, shopping trolley decays and aluminium drinks cans, past proud striking and brightening logos now weathered, faded, beaten by the sun, powdered pastel memories set through a broken TV, poking as epic monoliths from the fetid soils of a fallen angel.

So where can we be in all of this, you and I? - our eternally wrong shoes send us stumping through our minds and rambling through the silver-crested ice cream cone mountains of the dreams we might only read, drink and talk about, our ends and never our beginnings, to fuck until with spasms and twitches we swearing and weary grip each others thighs until the nails of our fingers leave indents of being, insistence and memorial in the glorious flesh, and then to make ourselves sick with coffee to keep our eyes open and think hard about breakfast and dance into bed.

for sale

Grandfather. Working voice, useful storage space. Ideal for newlyweds. £5 ono.

funeral

Under frail skies it happened as all always happens, the funeral. It had been reasonably stipulated by paperwork to be in occurrence beachward, the sea-drenched sand piled preposterous before the taunting applause of the waves of the sea.

The son – Bramwell Sheens – acted as chief mourner, his unsocked feet so white like newborn fish flesh they were almost transparent, veins running through them like complex cartography inadequately plotted. Ever such a contrast with the black suit that swung in the pressure above his ankles. His toes dug into the sand with imprint and he led the procession marching steadily across the endless coastline. A bowl of incense swung from his clasped hands. No one could smell its finery over the seaweed. There were heavy tears in his eyes. He had loved his mother, his own Mrs Sheens.

The town’s youth carried the coffin, it only took the two boys. Poor woman weighed less than the box that bound her when the time came. The eternal whisper: when the time came.

All of their feet were bare. The paperwork had insisted. The invites too:

Sheens Funeral.
Bare foot code in application, without exception.

The townswomen were impressive against the sand, each black dress striking a chord more minor like a terminal harpsichord. They howled as sirens behind thick veils, beneath which their vision darkened into impossibility. Creeping coffinside along the beach they clutched to each other for directional guidance, their blackened bodies like lightning-struck trees, blind to the horrors of the real world yet immersed in the horrors of their own.

Formalwear so ridiculous wading through knee-deep channels of saltwater, splashing dully into groins with the disturbance of footsteps. It took an hour to traverse the strange beach, from the opening at the harbour mouth to the expanse of the North Sea beyond. The mourners were restless in their upset, bored in the wind.

Vicar on the horizon, long hair spiralling in the cruelty of meteorology but for odd lank strands stuck flat to his large face, his tears as adhesive against the pallid flesh. Fittingly he wore black, smocked neck to bare toes and front-buttoned. Neck-collar stifling. He stood firmly a vessel of God and clutched a leather bound bible before him, weeping for a woman. They came forth at an excruciating pace, flecks of darkness slowly heaving across the beach.

The grave was already dug into the wet shifting sand. Six feet of sand piled to the right of the vicar. The sight was apprehensive, macabre on the approach.

A handful of older males, acquaintances mainly, had dropped to their knees and were picking fresh samphire in their grief. For the wake, sobbed one. For the wake, sobbed another. They stuffed the rich green food into their trouser pockets, still dripping with brine, and walked on delirious.

Bramwell Sheens placed the burning incense at the side of the grave and embraced the vicar as if God Himself. The remaining others encircled the grave like a pack of hungry animals, and the teenaged pallbearers placed the box in the centre of the ritualistic geometry. Wailing, further heightened in pitch and intensity, intermixed with the mighty sea in a sound unbearable. The women began to swoon, falling one then another and one after another, only to stand with sand stuck to their dresses and suits in the shape of their falls, the visual pressures of contacting flesh. A man, somebody’s brother, slumped to all fours with a sharp cry, clawing at sand in the throes of an agony without precedent.

Only the vicar, now, could hope to express a context for this despair. His voice an instrument of grief. “Eternal rest give to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them”. The rain fell with his words, the grave already soiled with a watery bottom. Perchance such irony is lost on the dead. Bramwell Sheens, devastated beyond the physical, nodded to the youths, who like soldiers of business lowered the coffin. It splashed at the lowest point, its wooden sides half submerged beneath the encroaching sea, the sand a poor base for eternal slumber.

Rain increasing in ferocity the vicar spoke faster.

“Ashes to ashes.”

The wet sand clung to symbolic throwing fingers, only odd lumps thudding onto the top of the coffin. The tide approached, cautiously at first. The mourners felt it on their feet with surprise, only just before the siren which announced the commencement of a period of tidal danger.

The vicar looked to Bramwell Sheens for confirmation, who nodded again, more urgently. The pallbearers began pushing the sand over the coffin, but the tide was engaged in its own burial, the grave filling with water, the sand washed in and about and away.

Quickly the mourning party left without eulogy or further conversation. Even tears had stopped, the situation now somehow too determined for such extravagance. His wet vestments so cruel a hindrance for beachwear, taut around the knees in this driving rain, the vicar fell to his lost footing, on his back flat in the rising channel. As Bramwell Sheens helped him silently to his feet he saw, like the vicar, a small crab alone, turned vulnerable on its back in the murky shallows. Its legs moved in flickers and one of its pincers opened in tiny gradations, but still he assumed it were dead. His mother had assured him in adolescence that an animal on its back always brought death. He knew not if crab was animal. His mother was dead.

Heads down the mourners marched mute, steps apart from one another. It was as if the funeral had violated them in the most personal ways. Somehow profoundly it was the end of even distant friendships. The coast guards whistle roared like a bizarre hymnal tribute.

He held hands with the vicar as they walked back to their cars.

Their shoes.

Their lives.

ask the idiot child 2

incidental list of potential criteria used in hastily reasoned value judgement of cemetery quality

1. Thick healthy foliage, trees and flora of varying and multiple types.

2. Combination of very old and very new graves (i.e. cemetery must feel at once historical and contemporary). I find something thrilling about seeing a dug grave, pending burial; in piles of sand, soil and Astroturf united by death. It's a reminder of the process, not just the finality of the ancient weathered grave.

3. Exhaustive catalogue of unusual and inspirational names as documented on headstones.

4. Possible selection of chapels/buildings (both disused and operative).

5. Memorial benches for casual (and mournful) seating.

6. Paths hidden amidst long grasses, low branches and perpetual shade.

7. Old man with dessert gooseberries.

8. Mausoleums.

dessert gooseberries

About two weeks ago I was having my lunch in Norwich cemetery, as I have done every day for the past couple of months. It’s a great cemetery, large but not crudely so, quiet, and there are sometimes foxes running amongst the graves. I like to sit there amongst the dead and the blackberries, eating my lunch and reading. I find it a pleasing place to be, and it takes my mind off of the living in the kind of way you need to during a day at work. It makes me think of the film “Night of the Living Dead” and the graveyard in the first scene, although with the exception of the graves themselves the two graveyards share no real similarities. It achieves most of the handful of criteria I would probably list, off the top of my head, as provisional prerequisites for a good cemetery, although it does – to the best of my investigation – lack any mausoleums, which detracts somewhat from its quality.

It’s really the presence of mausoleums, those catacombs that circle the centre, that make Brompton Cemetery, in London, such an excellent place to eat lunch.

There used to be a London Necropolis Company, which was responsible for London’s City of the Dead, the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. It was once the largest cemetery in the world, built to accommodate the increasingly vast amount of dead Londoners who were spewing out of the inner city cemeteries. The best thing is that it even had its own exclusive cemetery railway station: The London Necropolis Railway Station. It was near Waterloo, and sent bodies and their associated mourners to Brookwood on special funeral trains. The face of the building is still there, 121 Waterloo Bridge Road. I thought this was fact of the most fantastic and seemingly fictional order, trains run solely for the dead from a regular looking Underground station in the heart of the capital. There’s something so wonderfully clandestine about it all. Once I saw a train being run exclusively for Millwall fans, chaperoned by dozens of police and all shouting. It isn’t the same somehow.

Makes me think of those fake houses built in terraced streets in the old cities with an underground rail network, made up to look like the rest of the street with windows, and doors, and curtains, and a good paintjob, when behind that two dimensional façade is nothing but a huge air vent letting the smoke and steam out from the transportation shafts below. There’s one in Paddington, I think. Looks just like the rest of the street, but if you look at it right you can see the windows are blacked out, and then when you see it from behind it is like a film set, and where the rest of the street has rooms and gardens this house has iron struts and a hole down into the tracks.

Whatever the case, a couple of weeks ago I was sitting in Norwich cemetery and eating my lunch. A car pulled up in front of me. Sometimes they do. A silver car. People come to visit dead relatives, with flowers and memories. It’s always odd walking past the children’s section, the headstones all being tiny and flanked with stuffed animals and colourful windmills and cute picket fences. I looked up and saw that it was an old man who looked in pretty good shape, and he stepped out of the driver’s door and walked round to the boot, which he opened. He was looking at me as he moved. He got out some Wellington boots, which he stood into slowly and awkwardly, betraying his age. I wondered if I should help him, but it seemed inappropriate. I guessed that visiting a grave must be a pretty personal affair and I didn’t think he’d want me to interfere with it.

Eyes flicking up from the book I saw him peering, as if weighing me up. In his boot he had blankets and a plastic bag, which I could see contained a watering can from the long nozzle that protruded from the opening. I felt nervous, for some reason, more so when he approached me. He had two green objects in his hand, about the size of testes. I swallowed, perhaps in panicked, and looked at him in silence, putting the book mark into my book in case something happened.

He held out his hands steadily and offered me the green things.

“Here you go,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. They looked like gooseberries, but really big gooseberries, without hair.

“Bet you don’t know what they are,” he said, an almost childish smile on his face.

“Well they look like gooseberries,” I said, “but big.”

He nodded, quietly impressed by my horticultural acumen.

“Dessert gooseberries,” he said in that kind of conspiratorial half-whisper you sometimes playfully use with people you don’t know in order to break the ice.

My turn to nod. I had never had a dessert gooseberry and wasn’t sure if I was supposed to eat them like this. Usually gooseberries are sour little bastards that require stewing and sugar. I held them in front of me as if they were fragile.

“Eat them,” he said. Too proud to ask if there was a particular technique I took a bite out of the bigger one. It tasted incredible. I can already barely remember it, but I know it was incredible. The man wandered back to his car, and I hungrily finished it and ate the other one. We spoke a little more, meandering questions about gooseberries, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was the green of the gooseberries, the fragrance of the flesh, the fact that he had them in the boot of his car and gave one to me in the cemetery. It felt like something very special had happened, but it was only two gooseberries.

We went our separate ways without goodbyes. He looked like the kind of man who grew his own gooseberries. I feel a bit nervous in the cemetery now, in case he comes back. It’s an awkward nervousness because I’d like to see him and eat some more of his fruit, but I desperately dislike seeing the same people twice.

He hasn’t been back, and I am left with the braeburn, the bananas, the memory of another week’s fruit.

a soldier's life

the andy letters: 22nd May, 1997

Dear Andy,

I can only say, principally, that I am awfully glad that I can't see into the future.

Heaven only knows the kind of pain it would throw towards me, so long before before I was scheduled to encounter it in the linear structure of the human narrative timeframe.

When you are a child it seems the simplest thing in the world to take things as they come. Yet one finds as one gets older that, in fact, one can't take things in one's stride at all.

It's another of the many things we are unable to do but don't find out about until we grow up.

This week has been a cold one, unseasonably. I think there might be a problem with the central heating system, as the baseline room temperature never seems to climb into the reassuring realms of warmth, irrespective of how high I adjust the temperature dials of the wall-mounted thermostat.

Perhaps the energy suppliers have taken umbrage with me? There has been a heated exchange of correspondence since I maintained - at the start of the new year - that there had been an unannounced increase in my energy rates across the board (an increase not proportional to the fiscal climate) and thereby refused to pay any bills, either new or outstanding, until a formal apology, explanation and monetary reimbursement had been issued in my favour.

I have filed copies of every document both sent and received (including enclosures).

Whilst the crises of finance have been averted - with, I hasten to add, significant perseverence on my own part, not to mention the abundance of extra costs to me personally (paper, photocopying, postage costs, etc.) - I can still not be anywhere near confident that a device of some nature has not been installed within my heating system by one of the energy providers employees, perhaps during a routine 'meter reading', which insists upon my being charged for the service without receiving any of the associated benefits (namely a thoroughly heated house in concordance with the minimum expectations of a civilised human being at the end of the 20th century).

I am forever bound by the thickness of my coat.

Suffice it to say I have engaged in a systematic dismantling of the entire heating network within the house and hope that if anything is amiss I shall uncover it before too much longer.

Otherwise it has been a quiet week. Dad is off of his food again. Your dad is not a man of meals.

Monday and Tuesday were taken up largely with nosebleeds.

Wednesday I felt terrible. Mostly sick in the stomach, but with a loss of personal balance. I fell in front of my afternoon television programme, and I was sitting down at the time. It would have been amusing had it happened to anyone else! I assume the old blood pressure is once again up the creek.

I didn't make it to the shops on Saturday, as the town is too busy. The cupboards are mildly stocked.

On Sunday I thought about going for a walk to blow out some cobwebs, but decided against it eventually.

Still, another week to look forward to now.

I best dash to catch the post. I can barely seal the envelope because my fingers are so cold.

Please remind me of the children's names in your next letter.

Best regards,

Ma

the animal police

Johnny Mondays was fast becoming the least popular private dick in all Norwich, and he wasn’t even a private dick. He was one third of an outfit self-dubbed ‘The Animal Police’: bored freelance journalists, ex-heroin addicts and crime fighters unextraordinaire. Petty stuff, mainly: lost dogs, tired cats, loud birds. It wasn’t that their rather paltry detective skills were limited exclusively to the animal kingdom, but Mondays and his associates did have an almost preternatural ability to solve these dull cases with a half successful rate of accuracy.

They’d hit East Anglia when times had drawn hard in the capital. The smack had been getting out of hand for a while. Billy Dryskin had taken a series of hard line beatings from his dealer in the street, and Jack Oddbins got fucked dissolving his fix in lemon juice and wound up blind in one eye, that now lingered dead-looking and lazy after the rest of him looked away. They all three decided to get out while they could, get some help, get clean, get the business back on it’s feet. Norwich seemed like the place to do it.

How wrong they’d been.

They’d only been in the city walls for a month and already the cases were flooding in, five maybe six a day. It shouldn’t have been like this, Mondays thought, reaching for the scotch from the desk drawer that he shared with Dryskin and Oddbins. Animal Policing was as much about trust building as it was solving the cases. No one was going to come and start puking their guts out to a perfect stranger, especially one with a blinded fungal eye and needle tracks spread up his arm. It should have been a long process, but the phone only stopped ringing when they unplugged it. What the fuck was going on in this town?

He heard the door going, his already acute sense of hearing heightened by withdrawal. His mother had thought he must have some dog in him, some wolf maybe, due to his powerful brain and his acute sense of hearing, but Mondays knew that was bullshit. It was Oddbins; he could hear his stupid voice. Yeah, and Dryskin. Back from the clinic, pacified with methadone and ready to sleep. Not this morning. Mondays knocked back a hunk of scotch and slipped the bottle back into the drawer, 10:24 am.

“Mondays,” said Dryskin. “You missed your fuckin appointment.”

“And who gives a shit?” asked Mondays.

“Longo. She was not happy. She’s gonna stop the script if you miss another one,” said Oddbins, one eye engulfed in a dull yellow sheen.

“We’ll see about that.” Mondays plugged the phone in and it started ringing immediately. He took the receiver and hung up, then dialled a number from memory. Good memory. He looked at the other two and nodded, and mouthed ‘ringing’ with hand over the mouthpiece. They heard a muffled answer, unclear past Mondays scruffy hair. “Maria Longo,” he said quickly. “Johnny Mondays.” A few seconds happened and they could hear more noises on the end of the phone. “Maria?” he said. “Mondays. What? I know. I’ve got nothing to say. I missed it. Of course. Is that a threat? I wouldn’t, Longo. I just wouldn’t. Fuck with me. Yeah, fuck.” He smiled at his buddies. “It’ll be ready next week? Right.” And he hung up.

“Sorted?” asked Dryskin.

“Yeah,” said Mondays. The phone started to ring again. Mondays snatched the receiver. “Animal Police,” he said. “Uh-huh. Sure. Address?” He wrote some words down on the back of an envelope. “Okay.” He hung up and pulled the phone out of the wall socket. “Fuckin phone won’t stop.”

Dryskin and Oddbins sat down on the two chairs in front of the desk and they all lit smokes.

“What the fuck’s going on, Mondays?” asked Oddbins. “That’s the third time this morning I’ve found the car burnt.”

“And the sixteenth time this week,” said Mondays, his fingers sliding into a steeple. “Interesting,” he spoke slowly, methodically, contemplatively.

“What’s going on?” said Dryskin this time. “This was on the doorstep when we came up here.” He passed a plastic supermarket bag over the desk towards Mondays, who took it between thumb and forefinger, weighing it up. “Be careful man,” said Dryskin gravely. He leaned in a little and whispered. “It ain’t human.”

Mondays opened the bag and looked in. “Shit,” he said. “Day old, solid mostly.” He lowered his nose slightly, to the opening, and inhaled deeply. “Dog, medium size.” He sniffed again, two short sharp pumps. “Spaniel?” Another sniff. “There’s some cat in there.” He shook his head disapprovingly, tied the bag up by its handles and threw it out of the open window. “A bag of shit,” he said rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “A burnt out car. A bag of shit and a burnt out car. Very, very interesting.”

“What do you think, Mondays?” Oddbins was sweating heavily in his customary way.

“I don’t know boys,” he said, looking at his watch. “I don’t know.”

*

Maria Longo left the hospital around half past four, as always. She’d only worked at the clinic about a month, transferred from London. Change in pace, she’d said, spend time with the family. An Italian, definitely, and probably a lesbian, most people thought, heavy-built and moustachioed, ripe with sweat and easily worked up, stretched into plain crew neck t-shirts of the primary colours. Despite the Italian roots her family were Norwich-dwellers, she said, but she didn’t like to talk about her family. It was personal details, and Longo wasn’t into being personal.

Back at the three bed redbrick house she lives in it was 4:45 pm and Longo glanced surreptitiously over her meaty shoulder joint. No one. She pulled out the keys and hulks through the front door, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror in the hallway. In the confines of the house she seemed nervous, and jumping a little she puts her bag down and is straight in the kitchen, drying her face down with a tea towel. The place smells of animal but there’s nothing in sight.

“Maria!” boomed a male voice, the accent thick heavy Italian like the noise of meatballs. “Maria, come-a the fuck-a in here-a!”

Longo crossed herself and rushed in the direction of the voice. It looked like there were tears in her eyes. She opened the door off of the hallway and into the living room and went through it. Seated in the middle of the bay window on a threadbare armchair there was a fat octogenarian dressed head to toe in black vestment-like garments. His fingers are weighed down with countless gold rings and he wears prescription sunglasses on his vast football shaped head, his body a rack of solid fat. Not the flexible, doughy fat of the English but the solid, compacted fat of the Mediterranean, unmoving and dangerous.

“Well?” he snarled gruffly, his skin the colour of cigar clenched between his black teeth. Longo dropped to her knees in the doorway.

They’re here!” she said, herself heavily accented. “I’ve-a seen them!”

“All of them?”

“All but-a the one they call the Mondays.”

“Mondays,” he repeated, his eyes narrowing behind the glasses. “Perhaps the Mondays should get a little visit? Show him the way things a-go in the Norwich. That we don’t need no fucking Animal Policemen. That-a we-a do-a things our own-a way in-a the East-a the Anglia.”

“Yes Ambassador!” said Longo, hands clenched together in ecstatic agreement. The Ambassador smiled.

“Now get-a the fuck outta here woman, you fucking stink.”

“Yes Ambassador, yes!” said Longo, edging backwards out of the room.

*

The Animal Police pulled up at the address. The car was in a bad state, windows smashed and upholstery still damp from the fire extinguisher, but somehow it still moved. It was 4pm and the sun was still hot in the sky.

“What the fuck’s this place supposed to be?” asked Dryskin. “Looks like a factory.”

Mondays nodded, peered over the metal frame of his sunglasses. “It does, doesn’t it?” He rifled about in his jeans pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. He checked the address. It was right. “I don’t see no Mrs Fucking Michaels.” He opened the car door and stepped out onto the dry gravel floor. “Sonofabitch.”

“What’s it supposed to be, Mondays?” said Oddbins past a pencil thin cigarette, also getting out of the car, along with Dryskin from the back.

“Stolen pooch, she said.”

“Why here?”

“Said this was her place. Residential address, she said.”

“Residential?” said Dryskin. “This is a fuckin abandoned factory. There’s nothing here.”

“Hoax,” agreed Oddbins. “Another one. Let’s get the fuck outta here Mondays. It’s a fuckin prank.”

“Just shut up,” said Mondays, sitting himself slightly on the bonnet of the car. He looked around the scene. Something wasn’t right about this set up. “Let’s take a look around,” he said. “Nobody fucks with the Animal Police.”

“What’s the point?”

“The point is, dickhead, that people don’t just make pranks calls and drag poor bastards out here without reason. Trying to fuck us up? Then they’re probably here right now, watching. They’ll wanna see it. See us fucked up. In fact,” he said, lighting a smoke with a match, “I’d fuckin bet on it.”

“He’s right,” said Dryskin. “Let’s take a look around. See what we can find. If there’s anyone here I wanna have some serious fuckin words. That fuckin phone isn’t for bullshit.”

“Boys,” said Mondays, raising a hand for silence. “Let’s Animal Police.”

They wandered forth towards what looked like an entrance, which gave in quickly to the forceful sole of Mondays boot. “Michaels?” he growled. “Michaels?” Met with stolid silence his voice echoed around the space. They moved in further, an awkward half-light making it through the dirty windows, until they reached the foot of a metal staircase. Dust was spread thickly throughout the building, and the floor looked hollow where the machinery must once have been. Now it was littered with empty drinks cans and cigarette butts and tissue paper. Always tissue paper, thought Mondays. He raised a foot to the bottom step but stopped when something caught his eyes, just underneath the lowest part of stairs.

“Wait,” he said, pointing to what he saw. It was pink and fresh and raw looking. Like some kind of meat. But what was it, and what was it doing here.

“What is it?” said Oddbins.

“And what’s it doing here?” said Dryskin.

Mondays knelt down next to the pink matter and reached out a hand to pick it up, which he did slowly, raising it to his lips. He darted his tongue out in lizard-like flecks, gently dabbing at its surface. Swallowing a few times to get an idea of what he was dealing with and his face suddenly turned with recognition and he spat, spat until nothing was left to spit out, and threw the matter back onto the floor.

“Fuck,” he said, rubbing his tongue onto his sleeve and reeling backwards. “Fuck!”

“Jesus Mondays, what is it?”

“It’s a cock,” he said angrily, “it’s a fuckin dogs cock!”

“Christ,” said Dryskin authentically.

“You better believe that,” snarled Mondays, putting his fingers down his throat.

“What kind of monster?” said Oddbins.

“You don’t wanna know,” said Dryskin.

“On the fuckin contrary,” said Mondays, shaking his head with something way beyond scorn. “I wanna know very much.” He stamped his foot down on the disembodied dick. “There’s some sick bastards at work here,” he said. “And this ain’t no coincidence. This was left here for us. Some kind of threat. A warning, maybe. Someone’s got something they don’t want us to know, that’s for fuckin sure. Something big. The car, the phone calls, the dogshit, and now the cock. Well I don’t give a pound of shit. No one cuts off a dog’s cock on my watch. Not in my town. Or my name ain’t fuckin Johnny Mondays.”

His fists were clenched as he spoke, and they jumped when they heard the roar of tearing metal coming from outside.

“What the shit was that?” said Oddbins.

“Sounds like the fuckin car,” said Mondays.

“Move!” said Dryskin.

They ran back the way they came and outside. Sure enough, the car was ablaze, torched out, ripped in two like a sandwich by the heat of the blast.

“What did I say?” said Mondays. “They’re here.” Bang on cue the ambience was pierced by squealing car tyres and a huge black Merc drove off at speed, kicking up a cloud of dust as it hit the B-road and flew out of sight.

Mondays walked around the car. Spray painted onto the side were large poorly executed letters. It read: ANAL POLIC FUK OF. Illiterates, he thought. “Look at this,” he said, pointing at the text.

“Anal polic? What the fucks that supposed to mean?” asked Oddbins.

“I’d hazard a guess it means Animal Police,” said Mondays.

“Mondays!” blurted Dryskin, pointing. “Look.”

Monday followed the path of the finger and saw it, there on the floor. Another bag. He opened it. “As I suspected,” he said, and tossed the bag to Dryskin.

“Dogshit,” said the latter, tossing it Oddbins.

“Dogshit,” he agreed.

They looked at the car, didn’t even bother trying to put the flames out. Mondays was about to speak when he saw something else, about thirty feet from where he was standing. He walked over to it and picked it up. A white handkerchief. He smelt it. Garlic. Garlic and olive oil.

“Italians!” he shouted.

“What?” said the others.

“Fuckin Italians,” he said, passing Dryskin the handkerchief. “Smell that.”

Dryskin did as he said. “Garlic.”

Mondays nodded. “Garlic,” he said. “It’s the Italians.”

“Fuck me,” said Oddbins. “What would the Italians want with us?”

“That’s what were going to find the fuck out,” said Mondays aggressively. “No fucker burns my car beyond repair and gets away with it. Not with spelling like that.”

“Let’s Animal Police,” said Dryskin. They all shook hands and set off towards Norwich, slowly and on foot, sweating, the smell of petrol oppressive in the heat.

*

The Merc swung fast into the garage and farted to a halt. Longo jumped out of the drivers seat, her eyes hidden behind a pair of reflective sunglasses. She peered out of the garage door, checking that no one had followed her. The road was clear so she looked at her watch. 4:45pm. The Ambassador would be waiting. Longo felt in her pockets for her handkerchief but couldn’t find it, instead wiping her forehead with a dishcloth left blackened and oily on the workbench in the garage. The heat was unbearable.

She removed the black leather gloves and placed them into a yellow plastic medical waste bag that she had taken from the hospital, along with an empty petrol can and a dead German Shepherd dog, dickless and thick with drying blood, flies already covering it. She tied the bag closed and put it inside an old tumble dryer in the garage.

Longo pulled the garage door down behind her as she left and skulked around to the front door, feeling observed. She was starting to think that she wasn’t really cut out for this type of thing, but she had no choice now. Besides, the Feminist Mafiosi needed every penny they could get, and the Ambassador paid handsomely for satisfactory efforts. And the Animal Police were nothing, no one. Junkies and pigs, trifling interferences. She hadn’t enjoyed killing the dog, but needs must. She was working for powerful men, for whom powerful symbolic gestures were a prerequisite. There’s little more powerful than a dog’s dick, she thought hungrily. If it hadn’t been her it would have been someone else, she thought. Killing the dog. Old age or a traffic accident. Or it would have gone to the Ambassador’s business partners for reformation. Its time was already up, before she made the incision. There was always death. As good this way as any other.

A small part of a grand plan. A catering plan.

Where was that handkerchief?

In the house the voice of the Ambassador. “Maria! Get-a your fat-a fuckin ass in-a here!”

She did as commanded, the Ambassador in that same chair.

“It’s-a done,” she said, on her knees. “Ka-boom!”

“Magnificent,” he beamed, eyes sunken gleefully into his doughy countenance. “And-a
these Animal Police?”

“Stranded,” said Longo with pride.

“You mean-a,” his face turned from the smile. “You mean-a you-a didn’t kill-a them?”

“I… no, but-a they are-a stranded, Ambassador.”

“You stupid woman. They may-a be a-stranded but-a they can walk. You were supposed to-a kill them, Maria. Kill them! Instead-a you just-a burnt their car? What are you the fucking stupid? You-a can’t-a be trusted, Maria, can’t-a be trusted!”

Longo sobbed apologies. “But I too sprayed-a their car a-with the nasty words.”

“Oh-a you a-sprayed their automobile! Shut up!” screamed the Ambassador, head engulfed in a thick cloud of cigar smoke. Longo honked as she tried to stifle her fear. “Do we-a look-a like we are in-a the playground Maria? Do we?” She fell to her front, sobbing in ugly tears, her face pressed into the carpet.

“Maria, Maria,” said the Ambassador, his voice quieter, “this-a may not be the end of-a the world,” he went on. “Stop-a your crying. We scare them, yes? We burn their car and put-a the dogshit in the letterbox. But-a still they don’t-a know it’s us. We are-a calling the shots Maria, yes? Hmmm? We are-a pulling the strings? We will get-a those-a Animal Police exactly where we want them, and then-a bang! Next time there will be no mistakes! We must-a make them afraid to walk-a the street of Norwich, Maria, make-a them fear their own shadows and-a even themselves. Of course!” He clapped his hands together. “It’s-a so simple. Intimidation. To chase-a them outta town and-a outta my-a animal business! Bellissimo!”

He laughed, laughed and laughed, clutching his thick abdomen with one massive hand. Longo crawled towards him, along the floor.

“Yes-a, the masterful Ambassador,” she said.

“And-a there was nothing to a-lead them here?” he asked.

“Nothing, nothing, I-a swear!”

“Very well, a-Maria. Now suck-a my dick, you fat-fat bitch!” he roared, unzipping his fly. “There is still a-much-a to do before-a da opening!”

Mouthful: “Yes! Oh-a yes!”

Groaning orgasm: “We-a make-a the facking rules.”

*

The Animal Police were back within the city wall, walking now in an intense silence. Mondays was shaking and needed something to take the edge off of it. It’d have to wait until they were back in the office. He sneered as they walked past a kebab shop, opening up for the evening shift.

“Fuckin stinks,” he mumbled, peering through the dirty glass with disdain.

“Like a dogs dick,” snorted Dryskin without thinking. He looked apologetically at Mondays, who involuntarily clenched his fist. “Sorry, John,” he said quietly, head slightly bowed.

Unexpectedly Mondays face dropped to slack, struck by a revelation. He clicked his fingers and grabbed Dryskin enthusiastically by the shoulder. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s fuckin it! Kebabs, dog dicks, that’s it!” He let go of the shoulders and paced backwards, gripping his jaw in concentration. Dryskin and Oddbins watched him, and watched the dusky boys by the kebab shop grill, amused as they were by the unusual. “But who?” said Mondays rhetorically. “Who? What’s the link? Who? What?” He paced more, in tight circles, drumming fist into palm and whispering hurriedly to himself.

It hit him like motorcar. Something about the rotating doner and the godawful stench made him think of Longo.

Longo. Italian. Greedy. Meaty. That was it. She was their keyworker, knew them, knew their business, knew their address. And she was Italian. It was all coming together.

Feeling the smile stretch across his face Mondays turned to his colleagues. “Longo,” he announced proudly.

“Longo?” they replied simultaneously.

“Longo!” he said again, shouting this time.

Oddbins noticed the eyes of the kebab shop goons widening with repetition of the word Longo, as though someone had uttered a swear word. Or a secret. The smallest of the three ran to a phone and started punching in numbers, then talking animatedly into the receiver and gesturing towards the window. The middle sized one kept watch of the grill, while the biggest threw his cloth down onto the stainless steel surface and came to the door.

“Junkies fuck off,” he said harshly, in a thick unidentifiable accent.

“That fuckin Longo.” Mondays, oblivious, said it again.

“No fuckin Longo here man,” said the kebab goon. “Now get the fuck off from outta here.”

“Mondays,” said Dryskin, shaking him from his reverie. “I think this gentleman wants us to leave.”

“Huh,” said Mondays, looking to Dryskin and then the Arab, arms folded like tree trunks and blocking the entrance to the shop. “Leave?” he said. “We only just got here. Doner and chips.”

“You’re Mondays?”

“My reputation precedes the fuck outta me,” said Mondays, smile locked onto his face.

“No doner for you. Fuck off.”

“And what about Longo?” said Mondays.

“What you want?”

“Longo.”

“There ain’t no facking Longo neither. Now don’t you ever facking come here again with your facking Longo. There ain’t nothing we need to talk about.”

He spat down onto the street, a thick yellow emission, pointed at each of the three Animal Police in turn, then went inside the shop and locked the door behind him.

“What the fuck’s going on?” asked Oddbins. “What’s this Longo shit? And why the kebabs?”

“I have a feeling it’s simple,” said Mondays. “See…”

A screeching of brakes shredded the sentence. Mondays looked up to see a black Merc, the same black Merc, tearing around a corner just up the road. It was headed straight for them, and didn’t look like it was going to stop.

“Son of a…” he said.

“They ain’t fuckin stopping,” said Oddbins.

“Agreed on that,” said Dryskin.

“Get the fuck out of here,” said Mondays.

“Agreed on that too,” said Dryskin, and they erupted into a run. They hit the riverside walk, knew the car couldn’t get down there. Mondays looked back and saw the car pulling to a halt by the footpath they’d taken down to the river. No one was getting out and he couldn’t see through the tinted windows.

“Stop,” he said to the others. “They’re not getting out.” Oddbins and Dryskin walked back to Mondays reluctantly, stared at the car. It was an absurd standoff. Slowly the car pulled away and was gone. None of the Animal Police tried to follow it. Left in its place at the head of the pathway was the stub end of a thick cigar. Mondays approached it. There was something else next to it, wrapped in the same kind of white handkerchief as before. He lifted it up and unravelled the handkerchief. As he suspected.

It was the severed paw of a German Shepherd.

Fresh.

Mondays beckoned Dryskin and Oddbins over to him. “Let’s get some smack,” he said, and gave the paw to Dryskin. It was 7:52pm.

*

“Ah, Maria, you piggy piggy,” said the Ambassador softly. “We are a-gaining on them, huh? One-a step closer, huh?” He prodded her flanks playfully with his sausage-like fingers as he spoke.

“The car-a, Ambassador, it-a wouldn’t fit a-down the footpath.”

“No no Maria, you are-a misunderstanding me. Everything is a-working as I a-planned.”

“But…”

“No-a buts, Maria. This is a-part of-a the plan. The Mondays will-a come-a to us, it is-a only a matter of time. He has a-had-a his clues, and-a he is-a the big-a-shot-a detective. I have laid-a the map Maria, and-a all he must do is-a follow it into my trap. He will know-a the truth if he-a follows the clues. Right-a where we want them.”

Longo bit one corner of her lip, concerned expressing on her face. “And-a then?”

“And-a then? We kill-a the shit of-a the Animal Police! And-a without-a them to stand in-a my way, the multi-a-million pound takeaway industry of-a Norwich will-a be mine! All mine!”

His laughter ricocheted around the leather upholstery of the Merc as Longo drove it North, towards the warehouse.

*

Mondays tried to open his eyes and puked, twice, three, even four times. What did they do last night? Oh yeah. The smack. Without remorse he stood up. 8:29am. Dryskin was draped over the table, entirely naked, widthways, his body in a crippling crescent shape, his ribs covered with bruises; Oddbins was underneath the same table, completely flat, straight and with his arms by his sides. The phone rang and woke them up with a start. Monday grabbed the receiver, lighting a smoke with his free hand.

“Yeah?” he said, voice sounding like it was being scraped out of him. “Hello? Hello?” There was a laughing at the end of the phone, male and persistent. “Hello you sick fuck? Fuck it,” he shouted, and threw the handset into the wall. It didn’t break.

Dryskin screamed as he pulled himself up, spine grinding back into a vertical stance. “Who was that?” he said, looking for some underwear.

“Laughing boy,” said Mondays pulling hard on the cigarette and pouring a scotch. “Again.”

“Laughing boy?” asked Dryskin.

“From last night,” said Oddbins, who was now laying face down. “The fucker was ringing last night.”

“Right,” said Dryskin, given up on the underwear and slipping on a pair of jeans.

The Animal Police looked at each other, around the office. It was a state.

“Fucking Longo,” muttered Mondays, spitting the scotch back into the glass, drinking it back and then smashing the glass against the wall. “Fucking fucking Longo.”

“Shit yeah, Longo. That was it!” said Dryskin excitedly. Mondays nodded. “What’s the story, John?”

“The Longo Story,” said Oddbins.

“It’s not a story you dickheads, it’s a theory.”

“Tell us then.”

“It’s Longo, all of this. The dogshit, the paw, the car, the handkerchief for Christ’s sake. The fat fucker’s up to something. She followed us here from London, got in as our keyworker, found out our fuckin address, burnt out our car and planted that dog dick in the factory.”

“But… why?”

“Simple,” said Mondays. “Kebabs and takeaway.”

Oddbins and Dryskin gave each other a look, like he’d lost his mind. “Are you alright, Mondays?” asked the latter.

“Course I’m alright, and I’m telling you: kebabs.”

“What do you mean kebabs?”

“Exactly that. They’re using dogs and cats as meat.”

“Shit.”

“Explains all the missing pets,” offered Oddbins.

“Right,” Mondays went on, “and the body parts. And that fuckin stench. I recognise grilled dog meat anywhere and that shit last night, that was dog meat. Even the paw,” he said enthusiastically, picking it off of the floor. “Look at that,” holding up the severed limb for inspection. “Cut with a fuckin catering knife.”

“Jesus,” said Dryskin.

“But this doesn’t make sense. Why Longo?” asked Oddbins.

“Well that’s the difficult bit. Aside from the fact that the big bastard’s probably got a thing for kebabs, I don’t really know. And she doesn’t have the brains to be organising a racket like this, so she must be working for someone. But she’s in on it. This kebab job’s got Longo and the Italians written all over it.”

“Maybe,” pondered Oddbins, wandering to the window. “Maybe.”

“Maybe nothing,” said Mondays. “It’s the only explanation. Why do you think we’re getting such a hard fuckin time? Last thing you want sniffing around a racket like this is Animal Police. We’re enemy number fuckin one. Longo’s just a stooge, but I don’t doubt that those filthy Italians are supplying half the county with cheap animal meat. I mean, how many people’d really know the difference.”

“Not many, it would seem,” said Dryskin.

“Fuckin bingo,” smiled Mondays.

“I don’t get it though,” said Oddbins. “Why the Wops? Isn’t it the Arabs that make kebabs?”

“That doesn’t matter for shit,” said Mondays, “although it is odd, I grant you. Must be money in it. And power. It’s the way of the world – everybody respects the man who gets the meat. Maybe it’s a respect thing, I don’t fuckin know. All I know is that it’s happening, and Longo’s in on it. And if that bitch will burn up our fuckin car, what’s her boss gonna be prepared to do to us?”

Dryskin whistled through his teeth. Oddbins watched a twitch pass over Mondays’ face. “You okay, Mondays?”

Mondays shook his head and poured another drink. His was having a memory, that much was clear to anyone.

“Mondays?”

“I’m fine,” he snapped, but then looked guilty for his aggressive reaction. “I’m fine,” softer this time.

“You don’t look fine.”

“Fuck you!” he shouted, face reddening. Oddbins recoiled and Mondays caught himself, grabbed some lungfuls of air. “I’m… sorry,” he said. “It’s just… the memories.”

“Kebabs?” asked Oddbins.

Mondays nodded. “Kebabs. I had a bad experience once. A bad experience.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

“I don’t know if I can. I’ve never talked about it before.” He slumped down into the chair behind the desk.

“Take your time,” said Oddbins, perching on the windowsill. Mondays knocked back the drink in one.

“It was ’97,” he started. “Summer. It’s hard to believe it looking at me now but I didn’t always used to be… like this. I wasn’t always a scumbag. Used to be somebody, with a job, a wife, a place. And then it happened.”

“Go on,” encouraged Oddbins gently.

“Oh, you know how these things go. It was a hot day, the wife and I were having a drink, feeling a bit toasted. I had whiskey, she had pints of lager and lime in half pint glasses. Then off home, feeling a bit peckish, so what do you think to do?”

“Kebab,” said Dryskin quietly, reverently.

“That’s it,” intercepted Mondays. “What more normal thing is there?” His eyes had glazed over, somewhere awkward between tears and anger. “We got our kebabs – lamb doner for the gent, chicken shish for the lady – and thought we’d walk them home. Only lived a few minutes away. That’s when it happened.” He brought his fist down hard on the desk, displacing the bottle of scotch. It broke on the floor.

“It’s okay man.”

Mondays shot him a glance. It wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay.

“These fuckin... two bit muggers. Followed us a way and then jumped us. They knocked us both over but pulled me up, to my feet, asking for my wallet. I was a bit drunk and I didn’t want any trouble, Jesus I just tried to give them the fuckin thing, but they weren’t having it. Start laying their hands on my wife, whose still on the floor. They’re holding her down.” He has tears running the length of his cheeks, but he doesn’t sound like he’s crying. “Fuckin touchin her, the dirty little bastards. And they start unwrapping her kebab, fuckin laughing while they’re doing it, and all I can hear is her crying and crying, but I can’t do nothing because they’re holding me. I can’t do nothing.” He shouts, frustrated, wipes his eyes. “Fuckers force the kebab into her mouth. She’s gasping for breath and they force the kebab in her mouth, dripping garlic sauce and grease and limp fuckin salad. And they laugh while they rape her. She isn’t gasping by then. She isn’t nothing. Just lying there.”

“Mondays I...” managed Oddbins. “I had no idea.”

“By the time they’re through I kneel next to her but I know she’s dead. Choked on a kebab. A fuckin kebab! They murder my wife and they take my wallet and what am I left with? A tepid doner. What could I do?” he said, bleary eyed, stung by the pain of the past. “What the fuck could I do? I lost everything, and for what? Kebabs? It was no fuckin good. I threw myself into the heroin and never once came up for air. I wanted to obliterate every shred of myself that was leftover from that mess. I didn’t want to see it again.”

Dryskin wiped the sweat from his face with a t-shirt, then put it on.

“And now we’re here,” said Mondays, slapping his thighs as though he hadn’t said a word. “Present fuckin day.” He lit a smoke.

“Mondays...”

“Another day in paradise,” he scoffed.

“You don’t have to bullshit us Mondays,” said Oddbins.

“I’m bullshitting no one man. I fuckin hate kebabs, and that’s why. Kebabs killed my wife, they took everything I had. And it was all because of kebabs. That I can almost live with. But using dogs? Fuckin cats? And Italians fuckin doing it? It’s not right boys, I’ll tell you that much.”

“I think you might be right,” said Dryskin, looking at the clock ever-frantically.

“That’s why we’re going to track the bastards down and put a stop to this. Put a fuckin stop to kebabs in the Norwich area. For the animals. For my dead wife. For the future.”

“Right,” said Oddbins.

“Starting with that ape Longo. Make the cunt talk.”

“Right,” said Dryskin.

“First things first we better get to the chemist,” he said. “Get us a medicine breakfast.”

“Nothing like methadone in the mornings to get you going,” said Dryskin.

“It’s what detective work was founded on,” said Mondays, pulling his old brown suit jacket from the back of the chair and opening the door. They’d be at the chemist in five minutes, 9:15 by the yellowed wall clock.

*

By 11 they had Longo tied up to a straight-backed wooden chair. She smiled pathetically as Mondays drove a fist hard into the centre of her face, nose popping under the force of the punch.

“We want answers Longo,” he said. “Answers.”

“I know a-nothing,” she said, apparently unfazed.

“Nothing is it, tough guy? You know nothing? Well I know this much, and that’s you’re fucking dead if you don’t spill the sauce.” He tossed Oddbins a nod who, nodding back, brought his fist down like a gavel on the top of her head. “Now tell us about the fuckin animals.”

“What a-fucking animals?” she said slowly. “I don’t a-know no fucking animals except-a you!”

“Very, very stupid, Longo,” said Mondays, enjoying a cigarette. He tossed another nod, to Dryskin this time, who responded by slapping a firm backhand across Longo’s broad face.

“What-a you want me to say?” she asked, tasting blood on her tongue.

“Tell us about the meat, Longo. About the kebabs. About who the fuck would let a stupid lump like you loose working for them.”

“I don’t know the kebab,” she said. “I know a-nothing about-a no meat or no animals.”

“You’re an Italian liar, Longo, like all Italian liars.”

“You bullshit,” she said.

“Bullshit nothing,” snarled Mondays. “Are you gonna tell us what the fuck we wanna know, or are we gonna fuck you up?”

“I say not a word,” she said in the kind of defiant way that required folded arms, but she couldn’t move because of the rope.

“Wrong answer Longo,” said Mondays.

“You murderous kebab mongering mothershit,” said Dryskin, leaning in close and accentuating the words as he said them. “People like you make me fuckin sick.”

Mondays strolled around the behind the chair and stood in front of Longo. He was holding a knife and loosely gesturing towards Longo. She panicked, visibly, her breathing deepened.

“Oh-a shit,” she said. “Not-a the knife.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this Longo,” said Mondays softly, dragging the blade gently across the flesh of her neck. “We don’t want it to be like this, we just want the answers. There’s some bad shit at work in this town and we’re here to put a stop to it. And you,” he said, flicking the knife against the back of her ear, where it joined onto her cannonball head, “are a big old part of that bad shit.” He started whispering, into her ear. “But we know you’re not pulling the strings Maria. Do yourself a favour a fuckin talk. Tell us. Who’s in charge? Who’s running the racket? Who’s pimping the kebab meat?”

“I...”

“Who?” he shouted.

“I don’t-a know,” she pleaded desperately, almost childish.

“Who,” he said, stabbing her right shoulder with about two inches of blade.

“Boss,” snapped Oddbins, interjecting and pulling Mondays back some.”This is a lot fuckin more than gentle persuasion.”

“Shut it,” said Mondays. “We need the bitch to talk and I’ll get the fuckin job done.”

“Just don’t become one of them,” said Oddbins firmly.

Mondays lunged behind Longo’s chair and grabbed her by the forehead, pinning her head back against his chest as he held the sharp end of the blade right against her throat.

“Do yourself a favour Longo,” he said over her terrified screams.

“No-a! A-please!” she was shouting, trying to free herself from the ropes but it was hopeless. “Please! The-a Ambassador will-a never...”

“What Ambassador?” interrupted Mondays. He threw the knife to one side and ran to face Longo. He slapped her, trying to calm her but she was trembling violently, delirious with fear. He slapped her again. “Maria, what Ambassador? Is he the one, Maria? Is he doing all this? Is that who you’re working for? The kebab giant? The meat cunt? Dog eater? Longo, who’s the fuckin Ambassador?”

“My a-brother!” she said, sobbing in frenzy. “My a-brother! The Ambassador is-a my brother. He-a made-a me do it!”

“Fuckin Italians,” said Dryskin, punching his palm.

“Good fuckin work Longo,” said Monday, tweaking her cheek like a kid. “Now you’re gonna fuckin take us to him, understand. Right now. And don’t make a peep or I’ll slit you throat” – and he made the throat slitting gesture – “from ear to fuckin ear. Got it?”

“Ah shit-a,” she said in woe.

“Shit-a indeed, Longo. Oddbins. Cut the ropes.”

*

The Animal Police pulled up outside of Longo’s house in a borrowed car, Longo stuffed in the back seat between Oddbins and Dryskin, Mondays driving. It was 1pm by that point, and thoughts had turned to revenge. Nobody makes Johnny Mondays taste a dog dick, and certainly not this Ambassador Longo.

“This the place?” Mondays snarled, looking at Longo in the rear view mirror.

She nodded in the affirmative, snorting tears back. “Please a-don’t-a do this!” she begged. “The Ambassador, he will-a kill me.”

“Kill you? He’s your fuckin brother,” said Dryskin.

“Exactly,” she replied wretchedly.

“You both should have thought have that before you fucked with the animal police,” said Oddbins. “Right Mondays?”

“Right,” said Mondays. “You burnt our car and left dog shit through our letterbox. But maybe even worse than that, you sick fucks are selling dog meat for kebabs. Kebabs, for fuck sake! Scourge of the drunk. And we will not tolerate dog meat in Norwich.”

“Fuck-a,” she said.

“Let’s do it,” said Mondays, cracking his knuckles. “Get her out of here.”

Oddbins and Dryskin struggled with the bulk of Longo from the back seat while Mondays lit a cigarette. This was it. The big one. This was so much more personal than dogs, or faeces, or burnt out Ford Escorts. This was about memories. He imagined himself crying as he sucked on the smoke and looked at Longo’s hunched form, snivelling before him like a broken child.

“Open the fuckin door,” he said. “Now!”

Muttering curses under her breath Longo pulled out her keys and lifted them to the lock. She looked back at the Animal Police, stood about a foot behind her and all frowning. Hopelessly she turned the key and the door opened with a clunk. The stench of sweat and cigar smoke hit Mondays like an eighteen-wheeler, and he shoved Longo through the door and beckoned in his colleagues with a hand, signalling for their silence with a finger to his lips.

“Maria?” came a heavy Italian accent from what looked to be the living room. “Maria, get-a the fuck in here!”

Mondays nodded to Dryskin and Oddbins. “That’s the cunt,” he whispered, pointing to the door.

“Maria? Maria?” The voice sounded angrier, louder. Mondays slapped her on the shoulder, to get her to reply.

“Ambassador,” she said eventually, struggling to keep the panic out of her voice. “It’s-a me Ambassador.”

“Of-a course it’s-a fackin you, Maria. Who-a the fuck else-a would it-a be? You-a fackin live here.”

“Yes Ambassador,” she said.

“Now-a come in-a here, you fat-a bitch.”

She looked to Mondays for guidance, who nodded. She went for the door. Mondays quickly grabbed her, counted to three and then threw her through the door, where she slumped in a heap at the Ambassador’s feet. Mondays lunged through after her, and came face-to-face with Ambassador Longo, dog meat baron of the East Anglian kebab racket. He was sat in his decrepit looking chair, beaming like a fat doll and half enshrouded in a thick cloud of cigar smoke. Enormously fat, he was stretched into an off-white vest, evidently well tailored trousers open at the waist. Fuckin Italians, thought Mondays, feeling his teeth clench. The Ambassador sucked a vast breath on the cigar, thick as a baby’s arm. With the exception of his currant-like eyes, everything about him was enormous, oversized.

“Mr a-Mondays,” he said, smiling as he spoke. “We meet at last.”

Without warning Mondays swung an open-handed slap into the side of his fat face. It knocked the cigar out of his mouth but otherwise the Ambassador didn’t move an inch, almost as if he hadn’t noticed. There was a dot of blood in the corner of his lips, which he licked happily, relishing its flavour. “That’s Johnny Mondays to you, you filthy bastard.”

“Johnny Mondays,” he said, trying the words out for size. “Johnny Mondays.” Longo had crawled to the side of the Ambassador’s chair, and was prostrating herself at his feet. She picked up the dropped cigar and passed it back to him, spitting out muttered pointless apologies. The Ambassador took the cigar and with one huge hand held Longo by the head and drove the burning tip of the Stogie into her cheek, holding it until the cigar went out. She screamed and he pushed her backwards into the wall. The screaming stopped and she fell unconscious to the carpet. “Fuckin-a bitch,” he said, throwing the spent cigar to one side.

Mondays was looking on disgusted. “Hey,” he snapped. “Hey! Look the fuck at me!” The Ambassador slowly turned to him. “That’s right you fat sack of shit. I’m here to bring you down.”

“Is-a that a-right, Mr Mondays?”

“You can fuckin bet it is, porkchop,” he said, grinning himself.

“And-a why would-a you want to do-a that?”

“Why? Are you really that fuckin stupid as well as fat?”

“Humour me,” replied the Ambassador, pulling another thirteen inch cigar from the table next to him and striking a match for it.

“Because, git, you’re a canine racketeer.”

“Is-a that a fact?”

“Yeah, it is. Your selling dog meat to all the fuckin takeaway’s round here. Kebab shops. You’re stocking the bastards with this filthy dog meat and it ain’t fuckin right.”

“And-a why is that?”

“What?”

“Why is-a that so wrong?”

“Because the dog’s have gotta come from somewhere and your fuckin nicking them. For food.”

“So? Does it really matter what-a happens to these dogs? They are everywhere, my friend.” He leaned forwards in his chair, happy with the cigar. “Everywhere. We-a take-a them off people’s hands, sure, but they get over it. They-a get another dog. The cycle goes on, Mr Mondays. People are-a fickle creatures. They don’t-a give a shit.”

“Fuck you,” said Mondays, pointing at the Ambassador. “You’re full of shit. People do mind. That’s why I’m here. Animal fuckin Police. People like dogs. I fuckin like dogs. It’s not okay to kill them, not here. You’re not in fuckin Italy now. People don’t want to eat dog meat. Not in their burgers, not in their chow mein, and not in their fuckin kebabs.”

“Oh but-a they do, Mr Mondays. They do eat it.”

“But they don’t know about it,” Mondays was losing it, shouting, slurring his words, Oddbins and Dryskin could hear it from the hall. They exchanged a glance that asked whether they should go in. Not yet. “You’re not telling them what they’re eating. These are our pets.”

“One man’s pet is another man’s bitch-a, Mr Mondays.”

“You’re only interested in the fuckin money,” said Mondays. “That’s all you people are interested in. Not the love of the animals, or the meat. Just the money.”

“We all-a want money,” smiled the Ambassador behind his cigar.

“Fuck money.”

“No, Mr Mondays. Fuck you.” He clicked his fingers three times, the Ambassador. Heavy footsteps, and Mondays turned around to find two vast figures, more ape than man, standing right behind him. One punched his face as the other punched his stomach, and then both grabbed an arm in an iron grip and held him fast in place. Blood poured from his busted nose and he coughed from the gutpunch, which had knocked the wind out of him like a heavy fart. They held him up and pointed him to face the Ambassador.

“This is-a worth-a too much to let-a you to fuck it up,” he said. “The dogs, the meat, a-the kebab. You can’t-a stop it. It’s too late-a for that. We run-a the meat in a-this a-fuckin town, and no-a fuckin Animal Policeman is-a going to fuck-a that up.”

“Fuck you,” mumbled Mondays.

“I like-a your spirit, Mondays. Perhaps we could-a work together, if-a you weren’t such a fuckin bastard.”

Mondays tried to struggle, as pointless as it was in the hands of the bodyguards. In the confusion he somehow managed to get an arm loose and crunch an elbow into one of their faces, smashing their sunglasses and blacking their eye, but he got a broken arm for his trouble, snapped painfully with a twist of the bare hands.

“Dear-a Mr Mondays,” continued the Ambassador. “This is-a very amusing for me.” He stood up from his chair, slowly, and fastened his trousers as he did so. They were pulled up over a huge chunk of his stomach. Towering in front of Mondays he was huge, seven feet up and as many around, like a radioactive disaster. He leaned in to Mondays, who was in a bad shape, hanging limp and hurt and busted up. “This isn’t about-a the dogs, is it? This isn’t about-a the dog meat. The dog’s is just a bit-a money for you.” He lifted Mondays chin up with a finger that was as thick as the cigar clenched between the other digits. Mondays tried to open his eyes, to focus on the Ambassador’s grotesque head, which was difficult because of the perspective issues associated with its incomprehensible size. “It’s about-a the kebabs, isn’t it. The kebabs.”

“You son of a bitch,” said Mondays, spitting into his face. “You son of a bitch.”

“That’s a-right, Mr Mondays. The dogs are-a just your excuse-a. It’s a-the k
kebabs you want-a to stop, and it doesn’t matter to you whether it’s-a the lamb, the chicken, or the fuckin dog-a, because it’s a-the kebabs that-a killed-a your wife.”

In the hallway Dryskin and Oddbins looked at each other horrified.

Mondays face dropped. The Ambassador grinned victorious.

“That’s-a right Mr Mondays. I know all about-a that a-little accident. It was a long-a time ago, but I can still-a remember it so clearly. You-a were-a helpless then, as-a you are helpless now.”

“I’m going to fuckin kill you,” said Mondays with more than a shred of sincerity.

“No, Mr Mondays, you’re not.”

“I am.”

“Just admit it, Mondays, admit that you don’t-a care about the animals. What-a you want is a-revenge for-a your wife’s death. It’s a-kebabs you hate, not-a me, and not-a the dog meat.”

“I want revenge alright,” said Mondays. “For my wife, and for the dogs. They need us, you see, you piece of fat shit. They need us to protect them from people like you.”

“Us?” laughed the Ambassador heartily. “And-a where are your-a Animal Police now? Huh? Where are they?”

“We’re right here,” said Oddbins, and both he and Dryskin pulled a knife across the throats of the bodyguards, who fell over, swamped quickly in their own thick blood, spluttering meaningless threats in the throes of their imminent deaths. Mondays looked back at them with an appreciative nod, then turned immediately to the Ambassador, mouth still open in surprise. In a well practised movement Mondays had pulled his own knife from his worn-out Chelsea boots and slashed it once across the Ambassador’s face and once across his throat. The fat Italian lay on the floor, looking up at Mondays with his good eye, breaths becoming shorter, fewer. He opened his mouth as if to speak but Mondays kicked him in the face, so hard he could hear the skull fracturing under his feet. He threw the knife on the floor and pulled Longo to her feet, slapping her awake.

“Longo,” he said. “Hey Longo, wake the fuck up.”

She opened her eyes. “I’m-a sorry Ambassador,” she said in delirium. “I’m-a sorry.” Mondays shoved her onto her brother’s body, a mountain of flesh rising from the carpet.

“He’s dead Longo, and so is your business.” She sobbed, soaked in the Ambassadors plentiful blood. “Now get the fuck out of Norwich before I cut your tits off.” She looked at Mondays, lost and confused. “Go!” he shouted, and she squealed and ran out of the house with nothing but the sweaty t-shirt and jeans she was standing up in.

“You okay Mondays?” asked Dryskin.

“That was pretty fuckin intense,” said Oddbins.

“You think,” said Mondays, smiling. There was a sadness in his eyes, but it could have been the light. He tied a bit of rag into a primitive sling and eased his arm into it. He’d have to get to hospital. “Come on,” he said, and walked out of the room and down the hallway to the kitchen, and then out of the back door. All around the perimeter of the sizeable garden were cages, and each of the cages contained five, ten sometimes as many as fifteen dogs, all different sizes, all different breeds.

“Shit,” said Dryskin. “That’s a lot of meat.”

“No, Dryskin,” said Mondays, resting his good hand on his buddy’s shoulder. “That’s a lot of dogs.”

Oddbins started unlatching the cages and the dogs burst free in a frenzy of barks and excrement. “Poor bastards,” he said, “they’re this fuckin excited to be in Norwich.”

“Open the gate,” said Mondays, and Dryskin did. The dogs surged out onto the street, running to freedom and not looking back.

The Animal Police looked at each other.

“So what now?” asked Oddbins.

Mondays looked back to the gate, the last dog sniffing the concrete and thoughtfully trotting off on its way, wherever that might be. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Maybe we should take the Merc,” suggested Dryskin. “We need a car.”

“Good idea,” said Oddbins.

“Yeah,” said Mondays. “Let’s take the Merc and get fucked.” Dryskin laughed.

“What about the arm?” asked Oddbins.

“We’ll worry about that tomorrow,” said Mondays.

“Tomorrow it is,” said Oddbins. “Tomorrow it is.”

ask the idiot child

the hot air balloon

I looked out of the office window and saw the hot air balloon. “Hey look at that hot air balloon,” I said, which met a unanimous silence. It was gliding steady and majestic across the distant countryside. Later, after I had already forgotten I had seen it, I looked into the equally forgettable sky, filtered and dampened by the tinted windows of the fourth floor, and I saw it again. This time it was veering jerkily, oddly, erratic and stupid across the skyline, only closer to me, the window, the centre of the city.

I wasn’t sure what was happening at first, just watched it getting more and more out of control. I tried to rouse the attention of a colleague, slumped over a computer keyboard and sighing heavily like a man without dignity, but it was pointless. He looked like he was dead, only livening up marginally for another cup of awful instant coffee straight out of a machine. The hot air balloon whooshed back and forth, much like a regular balloon does when you let go of its end tunnel, midway through blowing it up, and I imagined it making that humorous raspberry sound. I suppose it did look pretty humorous, but it was hard to escape the scale of this balloon, the idea of the people on board screaming deathly screams past the raspberry, swung defiantly around the city breadth and waiting for the sweet oblivion of a bloody mangled death when they finally hit the ground, the pride stripped even from those awful last moments that went on forever. It took some of the humour away.

After a few minutes of watching, the balloon reared out of sight in the direction of the Roman Catholic cathedral. I stood up from my desk and walked to the farthest window, trying to follow the balloon, to watch this bizarre journey to its horrific climax, but by the time I’d reached the window I could no longer see anything. Maybe it had already made its plummeting descent into the busy shopping streets of Wednesday? Or maybe it had gone further, carried onwards to the future by gusts and integrity? Either way, it was gone, and I returned to my desk feeling a little let down.

The afternoon passed slowly and without event, my attention interchanging between the computer screen, the lavatory and the window.

By about three o’ clock I had noticed a difference when I stole a quick observational into the street below. It took a while to realise, as it sometimes does when you look at scenes all the time, but eventually I saw it. What had been a beautiful clear – if a little cold – February day was now thickened with a dense white fog that had settled like an old blanket across the mattress of the city. But it wasn’t just a fog. It filled the air, from the top of buildings right the way to their bottoms, so thick you couldn’t see more than a couple of inches in front of you. All I saw from the window up here was whiteness, thick oppressive whiteness, a void of sorts. It was as though the world had ended whilst I had been looking at the screen, and just this one bastion of commercial exchange stood, eternally alone, at the precipice of some great nothingness. The rest of the world gone, into some cosmological vacuum, without a trace. It was apocalyptic, the fog, and I shivered at the thought of an eternity in the office building.

I looked around the office, terrified that I would be the only one who could see this, the cloud really the smog of my encroaching madness, but the others were whispering to each other, pointing smutty fingers with lewd incomprehensible jokes. I didn’t want to imagine the genitals in their business suits, but something about the easily rippled material of business suits makes it hard to think about anything else. Heavy squat lumps, stretched withered lengths, crusted baked flaps, forgotten overgrown openings.

“What is it?” I heard one of them say. He didn’t look up from the spreadsheet as he spoke, despite making direct reference to an external occurrence, a scene unfolding outside of the limited jurisdiction of his ergonomic workstation.

“Must be the fog they’ve all been on about.”

Of course it was fog. But the fog? I’d heard no mention of the fog anywhere, and I subscribe to eight different weather channels. If there was fog at large for which only the definite article would suffice, I would know about it, of that much I was certain. I knew the importance of the weather. But this fog was unlike mere weather, it was unnatural. And so white. It defied prediction. But yet this definite article, this ‘the’; it somehow humanised it, gave it form and motive, physicality and spatial existence. It was appropriate somehow. Unnatural, inhuman, but most definitely alive. And yet this was not the fog of dinner party small talk. It was something else.

Mumbles of dissent and weather quips surged around the office like farts, and I felt myself starting to sweat under my easy-care shirt. I loosened a couple of buttons, already felt like I was trapped somewhere underground and falling apart piece by piece. I went to the window, pressed my face against it trying to see some familiar landmark, any hint of life, but there weren’t even silhouettes or outlines through the intensity of the fog. I was short of breath, convinced I was choking on the air conditioning, panicking wildly. The sweat had dampened my hair and it was plastered to my face, huge wet rings under my arms and on my chest, and I groaned, probably much louder than I was aware because people were looking at me. I needed to calm down.

Lurching desperately from my chair I went to the lavatory again, to freshen up, sort myself out, do anything that would get me through the remaining hour and half before I could go home. I looked at my face in the mirror. My nose was so red. What is always this red? And my cheeks too, I looked like a burns victim, blotchy under the halogen. I wanted to slap my face, and did, then splashed it with the tepid water from the tap. Fuck, I was dying. I must have been dying. I pissed into the pristine porcelain of the sink, and tried out different smiles for size on my reflection.

The lift chimed its presence on the fourth floor when I moved out of the toilet door. Something made me stop when I heard it, and I looked back at the two men stepping from its proximity. They were suit clad and as bald as bald babies, without a hair on their heads, not even eyebrows. I was slightly taken aback by such hairlessness, more so by the fact that they were laughing and joking amongst the pair of them, as businessmen will:

“So I gives her one in the ripply buttocks!”

“Fucking climbing frame!”

“Creosote soups for families everywhere, cunt it!”

“Getta fuckin’ loada that calculator sum!”

“CHILDSPLAY!”

Bald yet joking, it was disorientating for me, and with the sweat creeping back under my second hairline I pressed myself back into the cool white wall and let the bald men pass me in moist-palmed self congratulation, through the door and to where they came from.

“Fuck,” I said, or meant to.

I wiped my cuff across the breadth of my forehead and went into the office, but screamed aloud as soon as I had done so. Suddenly the world had fucked me.

Where once had stood stocky men with short backs and sides, or women layered and enshrouded with the fruits of their gender, or sideburns, or pony tails, there was nothing. Now there was nothing. Just bald pates, cue balls, postmodern fruits, slapheads. Nothing.

They were all bald!

They had all lost their hair!

Every last follicle!

Hollow and hairless!

Lumps of skin they were!

Hairless office workers they had become!

As bald as mistakes!

Their faces had grown from the exposure, bizarre new life forms sprouted from the
features!

My god, it was hideous!

I felt gazes hitting me and threw my eyes desperately to the window. And then it hit me. Of course! The balloon had been a weapon, a kamikaze inflatable! It was loaded with this inexplicable synthetic nightmare. And now they were bald, all of them, bald.

It must be the air conditioning. It was in the air conditioning.

But then…

I had the feeling that I had shit myself, that it was the only logical act left to
me, but there was no warmth, no solidity, no bulk. Nothing. Just another feeling.

If it was in the air conditioning then…

Then…

Panicked I ran back to the toilet, flung my reflection into the polished glass of the mirror. My hair was there but looked so frail, like it was hovering inches above the surface of my scalp. I put my hand up to it and it fell out in thick greasy clumps, just stroked off of my head like the hair from a moulting cat. It fell into the sink and onto the floor at my feet, and I puked as I rubbed it away, erasing it as though already a memory, wiping it away from the future. I felt so bald and tried to smile but I didn’t recognise me.

I thought I must have been dead when amidst the voices chiming with bravado and camaraderie I was lifted from the ground and carried back through the secure doors and into the thick of the open plan nightmare, set down unsteady and reeking of stomach and there in front of my now bald boss, who smiled and looked strangely like a woman and with a hand on each of my shoulders said:

“That’s it, that’s it, we can all do it and welcome. A harmonious life lived well amongst the bald. Adaptation spells remuneration. Colonize the skin.”

I puked again, a vomit of resignation.

It was business.