the bibliophile kid (2)

In response to my failing marriage, our mutual intellectual deconstruction of my personal – which is to say romantic – life which so inevitably followed the shared infidelities of two so neurotic souls, I befriended a bizarre troupe of sixteen year olds, ten strong (who I would only later learn to be the VHS Crew) a symbolic grasp for freedom, for the liberation that oozed through their constant swearing and that their poverty and joblessness afforded. Our meeting had been unplanned but was life-changing within moments. In the light of sadness I tended to walk quickly between streets, hurrying to places I had no interest in being, and none more urgent than the underpass that crossed four lanes of medium flow traffic a few minutes walk from my house. Landscaped trees dotted the concrete at the two entranceways but it was still a place resolutely uncluttered by the niceties of urban redevelopment, the trees themselves half-stunted, dwarfed by the enormity of a derelict and grey former office complex sprawled stark over a vast floor plan, its angles like the ancient architecture of a distant past, as inconceivable as history itself, its windows bent and boarded, the whole place reeking with the incompleteness of unfinished plans, of stalled momentum and brutalist assertions. Rusted long-defunct aerials still pointed skyward, transmitting pleas for deliverance and redemption, their signals unidentifiable through the murk of occurrence, unheard and futile, residents left voiceless by change. The road tore through memory like the underpass tore through the earth, and the youths approached me in the dim ceiling lights that flickered with every vehicular passing, only five of their number, each clad tightly in heavily stonewashed bright blue denim, fashion relics, monuments to the decades that preceded their birth, an historical re-enactment that – instead of the slayings and bloodsheds of which any Briton can be proud – created a palpable sense of the youthful ennui and disenfranchisement of the 1980s, their white socks glistening at the gap between trainer and jean cuff, their inaction somehow more authentic than any documented source. Their faces betrayed no such awareness. Guttural groans echoed from their parted lips and around the tiled walls of the underpass, graffiti dowsed, streaks of spilt ketchup like theatrical blood in violent knife-spatters right up to the ceiling and which left the place with the slight tang of vinegar among the embedded piss. Declarations of illicit desire were transcribed with a thick tipped marker pen. “For my urgent relief please call”. They all forget to write the number, countless handjobs left hanging in the ether of possibility, of drunken consideration, experimental abandon, never performed. Or “Human landscaping: I WILL DEFLOWER BY APPOINTMENT”, humorous sloganeering of unusual intellect, betraying no doubt a dangerous psychopathy. The rest of it just tags sprayed carelessly – the paint dripped dry beneath the body of the text in thin lines, marking territory like giant bald cats, paint cans and illiteracy the new scent glands. Any artistry in the underpass was borne of life not of spray paint; tags became photographs, family portraits, old super 8 films unearthed in the dust of locked attic rooms, lives observable through their poorly executed lines and patchy colours. It was their only shot at permanence, made all the more futile by the high pressure water jets that would monthly return the walls to cheap virgin white, a museum robbed of exhibits or burnt to the ground. A Sisyphean attempt to come to terms with mortality, it could at least keep them busy until the inevitable, this endless spraying, their pigmented particulates carried off by the terrible wind in faint coloured gusts before a mark is even made. The eyes in this circle of youths around me spoke of windows dripping with condensation and yellowed net curtains stuck to the damp, the limp colour of pain in the faded brickwork of factory exteriors. They peered at me hesitantly, one of the males half-gesturing towards my trouser pocket with a loosely clenched fist. I impulsively drew a handful of change, held it extended in the flat of my palm like a holy truth, the five moving in shuffles around me, as if they were nervous of the money or in reverence of it like a strange sovereign idol, the coins themselves of soul, spirit, life, shackled to banks and treasuries and forever desecrated and blasphemed in pockets and purses and desired and manipulated across generations by all who learn of their weird power.

Another of the males looked closely into my hand, his head cocked on its thick meaty neck like straining gammon. “We don’t want none two pence,” his accent a strange bastard of Norfolk vowels and inflections and urbanised street impropriety. “We ain’t want none two pennies from yo child hands.” I was surprised to be called child as I was at least ten years older than he was, but it somehow felt correct.

“Not gold for our wants mister,” another male said. He wore a sweatshirt in oblongs of primary colours, with three press-stud buttons running from the neck to the shoulder; they hung open over a black t-shirt, the peripheries of its design edging past the deep yellow fabric. Fragments of wispy moustache peppered his lip like the remnants of an earlier meal. They had circled around me, told me later it had been unconscious movement. He tore a scrap of paper from an A4 sheet he had unfolded from the back pocket of his stonewash jeans and put it into his mouth, chewed it like decent gum. “We not none too interested in you fakkin pences, pounds or otherwise leggy tappy tappying, y’got me,” he said, past the sodden paper.

“I don’t think I know what you want,” I said. My voice sounded a long way off, as though it had come from somewhere else. In a strange way it felt good to have somebody to talk to.

The first leaned into me, the paperboard bill of his baseball cap jabbing into the side of my head. Embroidered on its front there was a truck and the words Necton Diner, a long derelict building rotting along the exponentially bleak fenlands of the A47 towards Kings Lynn. It had to be an old cap, its white crest blotted yellow with the sweating scalps of years if not decades. “We be wanting the whiteness,” he whispered.

“The white juice,” said the second youth, lisping slightly because of the claggy paper in his mouth. He licked his lips while he said the words. They were all licking their lips. The only girl among them was oddly attractive in her scraped-back hair. She was silent and pale and I guessed sixteen. Her jeans were so tight I could see the declivity where denim and genitalia eventually connected. I felt morose in light of it and wondered who at that moment my wife was with.

“Mister got the white fluids? Gottem for us eh mister?”

“Do you mean?” I said pointlessly. The girl looked at me then half turned away. The loose change in my pocket suddenly felt heavy and superfluous. The other four were all nodding, nodding and licking their lips.

“White mate,” they said, as though unanimously stricken with a debilitating speech impediment.

“It ain’t goin hurt you like child,” garbled a voice from behind me. I knew there was hopelessness in my eyes, could feel it in their dead weight. I couldn’t see the mouth the words had come from. The reluctant hum of moderate weekday traffic sank through the concrete above our heads and was dull like the underpass itself, wheels purring in echoes that bounced from the tiling and the posters for unheard reggae acts hung with duct tape.

“Nah mistah an we is in appreciate.”

“Yeah mistah.”

“Yeah.”

“You is a urban hero of them east anglan skies my mate.”

“Bona fide!”

“Pistachio!” they chimed harmoniously, like some two-bit MC outfit who prowled Norfolk communities in search of social commentary, deconstructing definitions for their own skewed and private communications, where edible nuts formed salted green-tinged declarations of celebration. They spoke a language not of the streets but of the wastelands; their libraries were burnt out cars, their churches empty industrial buildings. They made love on lush green beds of broken beer bottles, felt the romance of dog shit left amongst knee high scrubs whose small white flowers were the architecture of these kids’ own metropolis.

“Okay,” I said. I felt my phone vibrating in my coat pocket and squeezed the screen between my thumb and forefinger until I felt the plastic crack. It was probably my wife, still out of breath and of musky genital and locked in someone’s bathroom where she would piss after coming, urgently reporting a digested account of her encounter to be elaborated upon later. She found this kind of hurried impulsive honesty important. I was always the first to know when they had finished. I think this was supposed to make me feel significant and like I shared in the excitement of her perverse therapy. The silent partner. She was right in some ways; I got fucked too. There were often footsteps in the background when we spoke like this, or running showers, or TV sports turned low, details that built an awful and vivid picture of the encounters she described. I was sure she would leave a voicemail. “It’s white fluid you want?” Half delirious and out of my depth in even basic conversations, I had been long silenced by my wife’s absent sexuality, slave to the crumbling futility of our marriage. Words felt wrong together, and even grammatically incorrect sentences were deafening expressions of heartbreak in all of its legitimized finality, vessels of the revelations of adultery that conspired against me in purposelessness, rendered true by narrative.

They started clapping, not as applause but as unpredictable, arrhythmic, spontaneous, piercing slaps that cracked through the tunnel like gunfire, a further extension of their building frenzy. The girl’s eyes narrowed and she looked half away from me. It was sultry in low wattage.

“You gettin the gazebo!” whooped the kid with the taut porcine neck, more boy than man with his eyes electric.

I unbuttoned my fly. It was a difficult time. They talked about white fluid with the fervour of the idolatrous, desperate for life. I thought their ambiguous anti-literate allusions and their gang intimidations referred to the forcible public release of my semen; that they were street-queers out for nameless intercourse kept clean through anonymity, or that in their self-made new Norfolk neo-Borboritic religious sacraments – scratched on brick walls and discarded cardboard sandwich cartons – they had canonized a new Eucharist for the porn-addled young, where seminal emissions formed the figurative consumable blood of a contemporary electronic messiah with real life oozing through its enzymes, to be collected and worshipped with all the underhanded devotion of any Christian artefact, to get one step closer to the salvation and eternity promised in its coagulated globules, tenderly wobbling spilt on the skin of the holy, in the beginning was the seed. So ravaged with the vulnerability of my phone’s vibrating message alert – the cold mechanistic articulation of her voicemails left me mundane with remarkable efficiency – I relinquished all sense and propriety and social acceptability and I screwed taboos and social mores, desperate to feel myself and my organs connected once more to a world that needed and even wanted them, slightly less alone for as long as it would take to come. The recoiling youths hit me in the face at once and my hands instinctively moved to the sting, my fly open and shamed with the wind running through the fabric jamb.

“You terribly fucken faggot queer bastard!” said one.

“Of all me fucked plops!” said another.

“Fuck I puked inside of my head!” said a third, large faced youth.

The folded arms of their female associate spoke pages of perfectly-crafted, targeted criticisms, entirely devastating in their simple honesty. “Brothers a apricot,” she said, her voice a higher pitch than I imagined it would be, like a sound escaped from complex machinery. Her inconsistent syntax sat uncomfortably with her pencilled features, her city sneer, her eyes that swam in memories of domestic abuse; beneath her unbranded sweatshirt would be bruises and scars, brush stroke markers laid down in vivid colours against the white of her skin in awful rituals in the darkness of home; the smell of other people’s beer would always make her sick although she would like to drink beer herself; her ribs would be promontories between which my fingers would rest; I would mean everything I did. She looked at me properly for the first time. My dropped fly had been my fall from acceptability; from the cracked tiles of the underpass the world had risen above me. I glimpsed recognition on her face and her thick lip gloss caught the light and glistened wet, half-angled in a smirk, huge gold hoops in her ears like archaic scientific instruments that quivered with urgency at the pitiful, accidental indecency of my incomprehension. I saw a barely perceptible tic of her trapezius, flickering like a computer monitor, and in that reflex felt a bond with these weird youths, whose anachronous clothing and Norvic patois and fundamental communality was somehow as ancient as the crumbling city walls, flecks of time unfettered by progress. I gasped an apology and zipped up and heard the click of crisp leather business shoes striding down the stairs to the underpass in the determined 4/4 rhythm of executive dreariness, the artillery precision of a life spent moving between office complexes, conference calls and regurgitated data, packaged in plasticized document wallets and expressive graphical representations, hyper-cleaned carpets and stainless underpants each less than six months old, unused kitchen surfaces moist with Dettol and unused wives drenched in the boozy tears of coffee mornings and shitty paperbacks. We all turned to look at him as he strode into the light, sliding thick fingers across the screen of a device clasped with the affection formerly reserved for infants or mammals in the crook of his left palm, fingering it with such considered strokes it almost felt obscene to watch. We caught his eye a few steps before he was on top of us and his stroking hand fell limp, his mouth dropped open, his greying hair and perfectly shaved face concealing unmentionable suburban horrors beneath the cold rubbery skin of commercial relations. He spoke not a word but yanked the leather shoulder bag from his – shoulder – and threw it towards us, and in tears ran in fits and awkward sprint-steps in the direction he had come from, his sobs just audible above the scuffing of soles upon concrete. The bag slumped untouched between us all like a monolithic idol.

“You fucken people is all the same,” said one of them, a terrible honesty to his voice that made life feel grave and pointless. “Perverts and animals.”

“Don’t yo see kid that white juice a life we want to feel drunk up right in the side of us?”

“Please,” I said. “Please do tell me what you want.” I had an ugly tendency towards pleading; my wife had asked me to try to control it when we first got together and I pretended I had, but it kept on happening. I revoked agency.

“Shat your snakes cunt you don’t listenin! We ain’t about for your cock or your bollick or even your wordsearches!”

“Contrarywise and sunder, we come here for milk, sir, of bovine udder, and you goin get us some.”

Milk. Just milk. There was something improbably sensible about this group of calcium crazed hoodlums running gently, thirstily amok through the city centre, congregating outside grocery shops and express sized supermarkets for the civilized consumption of pint-sized increments of lactate. Hardly the antisocial regimes constructed by the alienation of the twenty-first century’s faceless and unchecked capitalist infrastructure. They existed outside of life.

“Milk,” I said in disbelief. Like Catholics they each crossed themselves as I uttered the word, the crosses encompassing the mammary with the reverence of touch and the eternal significance of monotheistic religious symbolism.

“Fuck mistah shhhh your flaps up!”

I didn’t want to question the ritual and I imagined milk drenched sexual rites, milk intersecting through vaginas and anuses and lubricating the same in warm abundant showers of erotic lactation. I imagined the girl’s two breasts in my hands and felt immediately sorry.

“Okay,” I said. They had a look of milk in their eyes. “Follow me. We’ll go the red brick shop down the way.”

We left the underpass together and towards the shop, a hopeless Norfolk department store of 1950s gents polo shirts and giant cotton trousers that pleated around the waistband, empty metal shelves left rippled at the back with rust specks and hung at all the wrong heights, linoleum tiling that failed to reach the peripheries of the floor that was grey and damp-looking at the edges, waiting for the inevitable. They youths kept a distance of a few feet behind me which made me feel like a perverse authority, and they made heavy disorientating tribal beats with an interplay of their mouths and tongues, screeching unintelligible mantra over the top at an almost destructive pitch. They sounded like pack animals speaking the language of the early days.

In the shop they pushed past me and through the entrance barriers – a pointless emblematic signage envisaging an abundance of customers where in truth there were handfuls – and knew exactly where to go, drawn like insects in some transverse orientation to the dairy fridges that hummed in flickering light bulbs, a mating call to the yearning and the lactose idolatrous. They paused for a moment before the fridge and gazed through its glass, the cartons lined symmetrically across the shelves, perfect white and near-pornographic in ascending size order. The whiteness of the milk. With an unspoken declaration of movement they pulled the door open and each grabbed a four pint full-fat jug and unscrewed the blue plastic caps – the five of which dropped rattling to the floor, light discarded obstacles that seemed to speak volumes about our youth and our cities – and carefully peeled off the thin plastic stopper that popped from the rim with a fine splash of milk droplets and they drank heavily and determined into the blissful electric silence, their pleasured gulps masked by the drone of the open refrigerator. A shop worker’s crooked face looked on disgusted, eyes sodden and narrowed and his thick red cheeks fluttering with breaths of disapproval, cold and gruesome and hard under strip lights, a frozen turkey that would never thaw; he was gesturing with tics to some colleagues a few aisles away, and I could almost see the anger entering the body of a middle-aged woman dressed head to toe in standardised uniform-issue red synthetic fibres with a face like a battered puppy long-past affection, her sculpted hair quivering about her like a picture frame in an earthquake.

“Hey shoppy” I said, and threw my wallet at his feet. “They’re with me.”

He counted the five milk jugs twice, I saw his lips moving, and crouched down and picked up my wallet and pulled out a ten-pound note. He threw the wallet back onto the floor and shook his head as though we had made him a desperate witness to the most indecent thing imaginable. The woman walked with him to the checkout, both vibrating with a world of injustices, caught in the field of each other’s hatred like magnets, pointing and throwing hands and scorn back through the aisles to where we stood. And the youths they drank and drank, pint after pint, neatly piling the empty plastic jugs at their feet, thick white moustaches left decorating all of their lips like crude disguises. A wholesome drink for strong bones and teeth. They sure loved milk.

They weren’t mugging old ladies or taking drugs or doing unprotected sex with each other. They were drinking milk.

Struck like a car accident with a sudden feeling of clarity I cracked open a four pint jug of my own, so cold and creamy.

the bibliophile kid

The cracks appeared in the gaunt face of my young marriage when my wife asked me what the wildest thing I had done as a teenager had been. I’m nearly 30, it’s irrelevant really, everything is. It was about six months ago. They – the cracks – had been there before, whispered threats composed of incomplete sentences left hanging in guesswork amidst glottal stops and cryptic intonations, possible future occurrences, quantum-scale geneses of unfolding heartbreak, but they became visible then, when the question left her silence, these huge blots blemishing our shared frailty, suddenly so real. Their edges spread frayed like ink with time and now only they remained. I feel partly responsible because the question made me feel trivialised. She knows that I hate to talk about the past because I have a terrible memory unless it’s for a set few triggers of tender nostalgia, and I knew that the question was a thinly-veiled attempt to reflect upon how boring I had become, a truth of which I was acutely, almost debilitatingly aware. I grew into monotony over years as one does an oversized piece of clothing bought second hand. We had met as teenagers, at parties, and we first fucked drunk sitting down on a foldable garden chair in darkness and the sporadic glare of the security light that kept picking up our thrusting with its poorly placed motion sensor in a friend’s parent’s garage. The urgency of youth intensified our lives. I was probably always inclined towards tedium, it’s in the blood, encoded into my genes; it lurks under the surface of my half-cocked nihilistic pronouncements (nihilism’s the perfect cover for the boring), and I think she knew it too, but we were in love, and told ourselves that as long as we had each other then everything else would be fine. It was a weak mantra, and false. I never felt boring as such, in the way the very old feel just eighteen inside, but I am, the kid she once fucked on the chair now lost amongst financial insecurity and endlessly researched projects that amount to little at best. I can’t blame her for losing interest; I’d lost interest in me too.

Shortly after this she had started having affairs but called them encounters, somehow romanticising her daily betrayals; she was very honest about them, and explained them to me at length without invitation, which was supposed to make it easier for both of us and would probably even help us because of the science behind the human brain and the ways in which it processed information. One of her friends had told her that, a mental health nurse who she had slept with two or three times with varying levels of success. I didn’t think a nursing qualification – even with a psychiatric specialism totalling some twenty-four months of training – really put you in the best position to make assumptions about other people’s lives and relationships and reactions to complex personal information relating to fidelity and love and socio-behavioural interactions that would generally be accepted to at best be hard to deal with, but my wife seemed to give his limp theorizing – a nurse! – some kind of credence, despite the obvious bias associated with his intermittent interactions with her curious cunt. She’d always had a thing for public sector email addresses. We talked about the encounters with all the superficial politeness of work friends at obligatory drinks both attended and unwanted by all – me afraid to give any kind of reaction and so straight-backed and gurning, cheeks sunk against the effort of the gritted teeth that held my composure together, nodding her story onwards to its inevitable coital conclusion, as though her extramarital interests were the expected results of two years of wedlock, and she animated like I had never seen her – she was always so stoic with me, as though smiling were a gormless weakness she would not allow herself – her huge eyes moistened with the verbalised recent reminiscence and her whole body incorporated in expressive gestural re-enactments of the key moments of the recounted relationship, a sexual ballet performed for – but not about – me, rendered as I was the most pathetic of all voyeurs: non-consensual, involuntary, powerless.

She had taken to engaging in her encounters every other day including weekends, which totalled four fucks a week, each of which she narrated to me with the warmly evoked gynaecological precision of an all-girl coffee morning. Sometimes there would be repeat efforts with the same man – the mental health nurse being one such example – but she said that this mostly defeated the object of what she was doing, which required a different male each time. Though I didn’t find it helpful to hear about her intercourse she did seem to genuinely want to help me through it. We had drifted into that kind of relationship.

the all-time great prank

It was the all-time great prank. They took her margarine – this was in a shared accommodation – from the fridge, about half-used or maybe slightly more or less, it doesn’t matter, there were a few fingers of vacant space in the tub, Flora or Bertolli or something, maybe Benecol (she spoke at length about her cholesterol, but in the kind of half-hearted way that suggested an adjustment to her choice of butter-alternative spread was about as far as she was prepared to go to remedy her preoccupation, if it was that, which it might not have been, the years have not been kind to the clarity of the weeks preceding it, the all-time great prank), I think the tub was aesthetically vivid is why I suggest these brands, known for just that. Maybe Vitalite. The mood in the shared accommodation had become very low by this wintry point in the year, the socialisation and communality ever unsustainable beyond even the first couple of weeks, and relationships were badly broken if they had ever been otherwise in the first place. She was of well-off stock and sporty and had a stolid and permanent face that looked like it would weigh a tonne to carry as she did, day in, day out, and whilst I had no or at least little problem with her as a person others certainly did, and as a principle she was appalling; with several friends of similar ideology she had quickly formed a sniggering unit within hours of our arrival in the shared accommodation, and their good humour and premium including fresh ingredients and devil-may-care attitude and cultural illiteracy made them immediately repulsive to a particular pocket of inhabitants of the shared accommodation and whose ranks I occasionally straddled (although then as now I prefer to exist quietly, drifting between the expectations and associations of myriad disparate factions), feelings further complicated by the desire felt despite this repulsion by the majority of the largely male opposing pocket of freethinkers to engage in some and/or any form of sexual experimentation with this sniggering unit, a desire resultant primarily of their apparent permissiveness and self-professed wide experience in the fleshy arts, of their frequent use of sexual swear words (at once both, again, suggestive – in the apparent ease with which they discussed such matters – of their own varied experience pertaining to the acts so explicitly described and also profoundly and, I know, ridiculously enticing when originating from the mouth of a female), of their desire for what they termed “casual and fun experiences whilst resident within the shared accommodation” and of their general physical shape and construction which conformed to many of the more predictable measures of what would customarily be considered attractiveness as contemporarily portrayed (i.e. breasts: full and firm; legs: long and strong; rear ends: round and comfortable with a promising declivity to the vaginal locale; faces: well-maintained; etc.). As the days progressed and it became apparent that carnal investigation of any – even minimal – kind was not on the cards, and that their lewdness was an affectation at best, carefully modelled around primarily mainstream filmic and musical appropriations, the mood worsened and conflict increased exponentially, the unit’s near-constant laughter, increasing insularity and allusions to physical love becoming not only overbearing but also somehow foul, and their frequent jovial critiques pertaining to abhorrent kitchen and bathroom habits of the shared accommodation’s other tenants becoming more vindictive and – in their unavoidable truth – personal. Desire was soon replaced by hatred, in the way these things routinely happen. I for one certainly desire what I hate, and I hate almost everything.

In was into this difficult environment that the all-time great prank found form. They took her margarine as discussed from the refrigerator and slid a palette knife carefully around the edges of the block of fat, to loosen it from the plastic casing, and then by a process of gentle squeezes and depression of the tub’s two longer sides managed to free the spread in its totality onto a saucer. To see it there I simply couldn’t believe it wasn’t butter as I knew it not to be, and I imagine this to be much as those of a religious persuasion feel on a near daily basis. The most depraved of the shared accommodation’s assembled free thinkers held the tub between both of his hands as though it were sacrosanct or highly breakable and left the kitchen. They waited for some moments for his return, watching the pleasing dimensions of the spread as they did so, and expecting the imminent arrival of the giggling unit and the subsequent certain failure of the all-time great prank. Time was, however, on their side on this occasion, and the most depraved of all of them soon returned with a very grave expression on his face and thrust the tub to one of the rest. He opened the lid and laid across the base of the tub was a perfectly formed stool, still warm to touch through the thin plastic of the margarine tub. The foulness of its stench was immeasurable. The essence of the prank lay in the assumption that, once cooled to fridge temperature and in effect “sealed” beneath the returned block of spread the stool would remain unnoticed until such time as sufficient margarine had been consumed to reveal the telltale streak of faeces in the final stroke of the butter knife. The psychological damage caused would be major, the knowledge that stool had been consumed by proxy for however many weeks it would take to reach the bottom leaving an awful scarring horror that it would be impossible to wash away. For me, the all-time great prank was fundamentally a step too far, but it was beyond me to step in and put a stop to it this late in the game, and furthermore it would be a waste of my stool to do so. No, I allowed them to proceed, to return the margarine to the tub and the tub to the fridge, and life continued apace.

We watched the giggling unit consume their ‘buttered’ toast slices after a night of Prosecco, or scramble their breakfast eggs in it, or stir it into sauces or pasta, or weigh it out in precise measures for baking, and inside we smirked at the silent misfortune that befell them every single time they did. The tragedy was that none of us witnessed the revelation, if there was such a thing. One third of the giggling unit became romantically involved with one of the other members of the shared accommodation, one who had been vitally involved with the implementation process of the all-time great prank, and we were never able to clarify whether he had tipped them off, so to speak, to prevent the girlfriend whose mouth and lips he – presumably – kissed and explored fully with his own oral apparatus from inadvertently consuming the stool of a male associate, or whether he had simply disposed of the margarine in its entirety, thereby avoiding the no doubt difficult admission that he had been party to the application of a secreted stool to the base of their communal spread. Irrespective of truth the giggling unit were seen less and less frequently in the kitchen area of the shared accommodation. When pressed for information relating to the physiological assets of the his new romantic partner and for vivid verbalisations of their performed acts, he had been amenable initially, and attempted to explain the feel and taste of her key areas with the kind of ambiguity and inarticulacy commonly exhibited by the very young when attempting to describe pain to doctors or other medical professionals; however such requests were soon not only ignored but even aggressively rebutted, and he advised us in no uncertain terms to “get lives”, to “fuck off”, and other similar beacons of intelligent and persuasive argument. I was surprised to hear him say these things, as he more than anyone else was intimately familiar with the all-time great prank and how it, in its conception, its creation, and finally its performance, was perhaps the very essence of the “life” he claimed we should endeavour to get. I said as much to his girlfriend and the giggling unit when I explained the whole thing to them. You must appreciate that this was his idea, I said. He is a persuasive entity. The source of the stool itself is deeply irrelevant.

They’d see the funny side in the end.

your father

“Your father was retarded,” she said. “Simple as is. Retarded.” She repeated the word with some relish, the perfect summation, as it was, of her husband’s more notable traits.

“Mum, you can’t say that stuff anymore,” he said. “You just can’t.”

“Defective then. Broken, maybe even incomplete, something… missing. Something important. That thing, its absence. Left him retarded.” She sipped the tomato cup-a-soup, closed her eyes to savour it, necked a fist-sized hunk of farmhouse, almost stale, just the way she liked it. She left the loaves to go hard over a course of days then broke them in splinters to crunch through during conversations, in front of films on TV, a distracting pleasure, harder and sharper of edge than even the best available crisps. All were as croutons to her. “He was a charmless man,” she continued. “Dense and unyielding, stunted emotionally. He was forged of an intense ugliness, of both character and appearance. Joyless, unfunny, simply incapable of pleasures either high or low. There was no connection there,” she pointed to her head as she spoke, “no connection at all. To anything. He just… was. Though what he was is unclear.”

He cleared the soup cup away, rinsed it beneath the tepid tap water, the sink rimmed with a watermark line of gelatinous orangey scum, the soups of a lifetime having finally left their mark.

“You refer to him in the past tense, mum,” he said, failing to dry his hands on a sodden threadbare tea towel. “He isn’t dead, or gone, or lost to this world and others before it.” He filled the kettle and turned it on. Yet more boiling water. He tired of the sound, the bubbles, the taste and proceeded regardless. Was he too defective? He had heard tell of the genetics of these matters, the defectiveness and ugliness, the uncompromising and inevitable power of heredity. Condemned to his paltry lot, so to speak. The selfish bastards. “He’s upstairs.”

“Upstairs, downstairs, gone, otherwise,” she said. She was crafting a cigarette little thicker than a cocktail stick, a hair’s thread of tobacco drawn tightly through its middle. “Matters not.” She lit it and sucked on it greedily, swamped as it was within her thick wet lips, its empty end saturated and inconsequential between them, paper severed by the sheer weight of flesh. “Fact remains.” She finished it off, the minute strand of combustible plant racing like a fuse to the bomb of her skull. “Retarded.”

He sorted the tea out, milky and weak and very sweet.

“You married him mum,” he said. A boy himself these affairs of the heart were of great interest to him. They defied science as he understood it and succeeded in so doing. “Why would you do that? If he is so… defective?” It felt less true – which he knew it to be – if he whispered the last word.

“His dick,” she said, holding each hand some two feet distant from the other. “Huge.” He squinted in repugnance and wished himself absent. “Now come and kiss your mother.”

He did as asked, obedient boy, those fleshy lips on his like hands round a throat.

“Tell me you love me,” she said.

“I do.”

“Tell me then.”

“‘I love you.’”

“Good boy.”

her predominant odour

Her predominant odour amongst the many was of bacon grease, off-putting at first but soon rich and complex and wonderful, to the very roots of her hair. I would crisp her up and then consume her ravenously, move her stench around my mouth with every gulp. When I walked past a certain type of café I would pause and double take, expecting to see her inviting me into shadows and doorways, but it was only the smell of the cooking food. “Cook me!” she’d command, among the more passionate times in which we found ourselves engaged. “Press me down in the pan! Flip me over and do it again! Mop the juice off with kitchen towel! Plate me up!” Yes! I’d reply, and mean it. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Slathered in butter, condiments, garnishes, even, I’d take it all in, right down to the oily residue beneath the roots of her breasts and on her pink palms and at the backs of her ears and to the last vagina, left tantalizingly prepped like a handful of decent rashers waiting for the grill before my hungry eyes.

masterchef ho! (four blues)

G. Wallace (2005 – )

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

J. Torode (2005 – )

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

M. Roux, Jr. (2008 – 2013)

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

M. Wareing (2014 – )

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

always crashing in the same car

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

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

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

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

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

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

beyond the pines

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

unmoved movers removals co.

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

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

community guy

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

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

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

animal police 2

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right,” said Dryskin.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“RSPCA,” spat Dryskin.

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

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

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

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

“That much I can see. Try harder.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oddbins had frozen, his mouth wide open.

“Mondays,” he said. “They’ve just…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Some guys have some weird fuckin tastes.”

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

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

“What does he want with Murakami?”

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

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

***

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

“We’ll be back in a few,” he said.

“Minutes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sweet dreams Donnie,” said Oddbins.

***

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

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

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

“So?” said Oddbins.

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

“But your body.”

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

“And the funeral?”

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the ritual

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

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

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

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

to the beach!

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

the attraction of her temporary vulnerability

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

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

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

not an epidemic

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