horseblisters

by the seat of my pants

Met a lovely looking girl last week in the pub. Got chatting, and we both pretended she was interesting. Things improved considerably when the conversation turned to me; she was genuinely impressed with the fact that I work with the military. Describing myself as an ‘Aviation Impact Analyst’ caused some obvious difficulty, so I slowly explained that it was my job to work out why planes were so bad at bouncing.

To her credit, she got the funny and even did a little giggle. I asked her to marry me and she laughed again. Then she saw I was serious and left. 

A couple of days later, my employers sent me off to a militaria shop in Norwich. I hate these places. The shops, I mean. Well, East Anglia too I suppose, but these shops are always awful because they’re staffed by war enthusiasts. People too stupid or too injured or too old to be part of the actual war machine, they are reduced to sitting on the sidelines playing their games of terrorist Top Trumps. These are the napalm nerds. The tragedy train-spotters. Genocide geeks. Atrocity anoraks. And they think themselves patriots. Fools.

I opened the shop door and entered. The old guy behind the counter looked up and stared at me, clearly confused to see a customer this side of the shop window. 

I glanced around the room, taking in the predictable display of uniforms, medals, bullet magazines, posters and imitation weapons. 

“Hi. I’m here for the seat you’re holding for us,” I told him. After a moment, he understood.

“Ah, yes! Yes!” He fawned and stood up. “You’re RAF?” he queried, studying my civilian attire.

He thrust his hand over the counter, expecting it to be shaken. I don’t like shaking hands, and greatly enjoy the discomfort this refusal causes. So I chose to simply stare at his hand as though he was offering me a carrier bag full of shrieking vagrants. He slowly withdrew his hand, studying it in case I was right.

“No.” I said.  ”I work for a private company. We do work for the Forces.”

He visibly pulled himself together and then turned, beckoning me to follow him beyond the counter and into the storeroom. I did so.

Inside the storeroom, he switched on a light. I saw a room haphazardly packed with boxes and hangers full of the same stuff on display in the shop. Except, of course for a large bazooka gun propped up against an even larger ejection seat in the centre of the floor.

He moved the gun aside and I studied the seat. It was old, and it was battered. I spun it around and thought it most likely from a Buccaneer plane: mid ’60s or so. There were records kept of all flight accidents, but unrecovered hardware was common. The RAF would be really happy to see this returned, even after all these years.

“Lovely.” I said. “Could you help me get it in the van?” 

He propped open the rear door and we carried it out the back entrance.

“Is it one of ours?” he asked as we walked the seat along the road and loaded it into my van.

“It’s definitely RAF. 1960s I’d say.”

“Oh, not from the War then?”

“WWII? No. Ejection seats weren’t really used in the war.”

“Aw. I’d pictured a dashing pilot shooting some Kraut bastard out of the sky in a dogfight, before ditching and coming home to glory.”

Oh, excellent. This man was stuck in the 1940s. And was clearly also a penis. There is nothing on this planet more tragic than a 70 year old penis.

“Hey, that bazooka in the back room. Is that for sale?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah. £500, I think,” he replied, clearly doubling the actual price.

“Great. I’ll make some space in the van. Can you grab it and we’ll add it to the invoice for the seat?” I said.

“Yeah, sure!” He turned and with a skip in his step walked back down the street. I made a quick call to the police about a man roaming the streets of Norwich with a missile launcher, got in the van and drove away, 

The ejection seat had been taken to the militaria shop a couple of days ago. They know we like this stuff, so they contacted us. We had also managed to obtain the details of the seller; some old lady, about an hour’s drive South. She hadn’t returned my calls, so I was heading there speculatively. Anything she could add to the story of the ejection seat’s history would be valuable. If not, no biggie. 

The sat-nav embarrassed itself badly as we neared the location, but I eventually found the farm (entirely surrounded by forest) where she lived by taking a gamble on chimney smoke visible from some distance away. I parked the van outside the gate to her farmhouse, and walked up to the door and knocked. It was only then that I wondered to myself why, if it was hot enough for the car to need air conditioning,  would a house have a smoking chimney? 

As I knocked on the door, I also realised I could also smell some lovely cooking. While trying to recall exactly what it was, the door was whisked open by a woman who was either very attractive for her advanced age, or disappointingly unattractive for someone so young, it was strangely hard to tell which. Her mouth said nothing, but her face said “You are already boring me. Make this good or I shall burn you,” which is quite impressive when you see it up close.

“Sorry to bother you. I’m following up on the ejection seat you sold to the militaria shop in Norwich recently.” I said. Her eyebrows raised slightly, but other than that, she didn’t respond. 

I played the cash card. ”We would very much like to know some more details about how you found it. I am authorised to compensate you for your time. May I come in?”

She still didn’t respond. Time for the guilt card. ”Our boys in the Forces risk their lives defending the country. Anything you could tell us about the recovery of this seat could help save more lives.” 

She still didn’t respond. I was running out of cards. Without warning, she slumped to the ground, a fire poker protruding from the back of her head.

I jumped back, totally unprepared. After a brief pause, I crept gingerly forward. I looked quickly at her inert body and then past her, into the house to see where the fatal poker had come from. A voice croaked from the darkness within.

“No fucking way! Did I get her? I really got the bitch?” the voice said between pants. The owner sounded in a bad way, but was obviously overjoyed at the outcome at the door.

I crouched down against the outside wall, and tried to let my eyes get used to the darkness. The voice continued. “Who’s there?” A pause, then “For God’s sake, please help me.”

I said nothing. Didn’t move a muscle.

“She’s had me here for years. Please. Help.” Then a whimper “It hurts. It really hurts.”

I couldn’t see much inside, apart from the flickering of the fire in the hearth. I crept slowly forward, and my eyes began to make out the shape of a man lying beside the fire. 

No. 

Not beside. 

In. 

In the fire. His legs, at least.

He was lying on the floor, with his lower legs and feet pushed deep into the fire. They were burning. He was rigid with pain. The rest of his body was covered in tattered old clothes.

I crawled over to him. He wept with relief at my presence. I started to pull at him to move him away from the fire, but couldn’t. “No, ” he whispered. I ignored him. He seemed heavy. 

No. 

He was stuck. 

I looked at his waist. There was a huge spike through his stomach pinning him to the floor. I gaped at him, my eyes a canvas to my horror.

“Fire. Put it.. out” he panted. Then he seemed to faint.

“Uh. Right.” I mumbled and looked around for water. There was a bucket beside the fire. There was clearly some water inside, so I started pouring it over the fire.

The flames roared higher and significantly hotter as the oil from the bucket caught alight. I instinctively pulled the bucket away from the flames, spilling some of the contents over the floor and even on the guy.

“Shit! Shit! Sorry!” I shouted to his unconscious form as I heard his feet burn even more loudly. 

The spilled oil hadn’t ignited, but it wouldn’t take much. I had to get the guy out before the place burned down around us both.

I looked at the spike, and grimacing, leaned over to see if I could pull it out. I tentatively touched it. It was a rusty iron spike, protruding about an inch through his shirt and stomach.

With an eye on the fire, I wrapped my fingers around the shaft and tried to pull, but I didn’t have enough grip or leverage. I tried gently pushing down on his stomach to liberate more of the spike. His stomach resisted. His wound had scabbed over and was now stuck strongly to the spike. I pressed harder until shit! the scabs lost their grip on the spike and his whole stomach dropped a couple of inches further down in response to my pressure. Fresh blood seeped around the spike, softly reflecting the fire dancing behind us.

With the extra grip on the spike I felt I had a better chance of pulling it out, and worked it to and fro, wincing with each wiggle because I was acutely aware I was further damaging his insides each time it moved.

When it seemed to be loosening, I stood, and pulled it strongly upwards. It came out much more easily than expected, but my excessive force caused me to step backwards, losing my balance. I slipped on the spilled oil and compensated by reeling forwards onto the guy. The spike was still in my hand when it came down on his body and stabbed him deep in the arm. 

“Shit! Shit! Sorry!” I repeated, while I again wiggled the metal spike from his body.

When I noticed he was starting to come to, I guiltily realised I still hadn’t pulled his feet out of the fire. I pulled at his body, now free to move, and dragged him away from the fire and out towards the front door.

He put a hand on my arm. “It’s OK,” he croaked. “I think I can walk now.” 

I stopped dragging his heavy mass, and stared at him. I looked him over. His feet and legs were blackened from soot, but otherwise appeared undamaged.

He pulled himself over and onto his knees. Then, with the aid of a wall, slowly stood upright. He put a hand to his stomach and winced slightly. He examined his feet. He ran his fingers over the wound on his arm and looked briefly puzzled. Then he turned back to me.

“Thank you.” 

He then walked to the dead woman in the doorway, lifted her up and carried her to the fireplace. He threw her unceremonially into the fire and her clothes and hair immediately ignited and her flesh slowly began to blacken and catch alight. He picked up the bucket and poured the rest of the oil around the fireplace and all over the floor and furniture of the small house. I watched from the doorway as he grabbed some of her burning material and ignited the oil. The house started to burn. He ushered me out of the way, closed the door, then indicated we should both sit on the ground some distance away, and watch the house consume itself.

I had no idea what had just happened. I didn’t even know how to begin to ask the  questions.

He saw my reaction and volunteered his story. While speaking, he never took his eyes off the house.

He had joined the RAF in 1955 and become a pilot. He’d met a sweetheart at the same time, who was worried about him flying all these dangerous new planes. She was very superstitious, and after much cajoling, had managed to convince him that they should go and ask a witch to cast a protection spell for the sake of their true love. 

The witch had agreed but in payment required a visit from him once each year to chop firewood for her. He’d agreed without ever intending to actually do so.

However, during the first year of the spell he’d survived two plane crashes entirely unscathed. After that, he was never going to jinx himself by crossing the witch, so he’d gone to chop firewood for the day, then returned to his life.

The spell really appeared to have worked. Furthermore, he found himself able to recover from any wound he suffered. However, they found out the hard way that the protection spell didn’t extend to the sweetheart he had made his wife. She died in childbirth in 1963.

In his anger at the injustice, he refused to visit the witch again. Two years passed without further incident. Then he had another crash. He ejected safely, but became stuck to his ejection seat and both had become entangled in a forest, un-rescued for more than a week. The witch had then come along and captured him. To punish him for breaking his word, she decided to use his ever-healing body as replacement for her firewood. And then 45 years later, I had come along.

Of course, the police didn’t believe a word of this, and I was jailed for killing the old woman, and burning down her house. At the trial, the militaria guy was a character witness and said that I was a total fucker.

Diluted Spirits

Damsels in distress. Knights in shining armour. In my more romantic moments, this is all I want from the world. Oh, and maybe water skiing. I sometimes go at the weekend.

Instead, the world insists on serving up drive-time radio. Motorway service stations. Happy Meals.

My 40th was celebrated with friends and family. In contrast, I just spent the evening of my 50th alone in a homogeneous Burger King on some anonymous stretch of the M1 near Leeds or Sheffield or somewhere else simply too northern to matter. 

I’m driving from London to the Orkney Islands. They’re the ones directly above the Scottish mainland. I think. Wherever they are, that’s where I’m headed. I’m visiting the distillery of my favourite whiskey, Highland Park. Then I’m going to kill myself.

It’s not like there’s anyone left to miss me. My wife and kids were among the thirty thousand that died last year when Wimbledon was launched into the sea by terrorists. I fell apart badly, took to the bottle and successfully alienated all my friends. Apart from a special few. The tediously sincere ones. These, I had quietly taken away one morning when I told the police they ran a mobile library prostitution ring.

Left alone, I eventually pulled myself together, sobered up, and decided to end it all by jumping into the North Sea.

It is getting dark as I leave the motorway service station and locate my car. I stick my coffee on the roof while I fumble with my keys, when I hear the desperate yell of a woman, quickly muted. I turn and realise it is coming from a Limousine parked a little way away. The Limousine starts up, turns on its lights and starts to pull away. A passenger door opens, is quickly shut again, but not before something is tossed out onto the floor. 

Once the Limousine has left the car park, I walk over to pick up the dropped item. It is a small black leather handbag. I open it and see that inside is some make-up, a phone, an electric puppet expander and a single business card:

                                                    Bella’s.

                   Premier Gentleman’s Club of West Chesterlyshire.

                                           and a phone number.

I look at the clock. It is already half ten. I look down at the map. Shit. Only a third of the way to Scotland, and it’s getting late to drive much further tonight. 

I decide to try to return the bag to its owner. Maybe even check out Bella’s. Maybe even hope I won’t get treated much like a gentleman. I pick up my phone, get directions, and follow the satnav to the club.

Twenty-five minutes later, I am sitting in a dark night club, sipping a dram of Glenfiddich and idly picturing myself wandering through the Scottish landscape of it’s birth. It’s not the best whiskey in the world, but it’s damn fine.

After a while, the lights dim slightly and a spot illuminates the stage at the rear of the room. A pianist starts tinkling to one side, and then a small black dress with matching hair, enclosing some deliciously shaped milk-white skin steps slowly onto then stage and begins to sing a heartbreakingly delicate song.

“Great, isn’t she?” interrupts a voice behind me. Resenting having to miss the glorious sight on stage, I turn slowly around, in the manner that someone might turn around if they were resenting having to miss something by having to turn around. The owner of the voice shows me a bottle of Highland Park whiskey, and then places it gently on the bar beside me along with two shot glasses. My resentment at missing something by having to turn around evaporates. “She’s beautiful,” I say and pull out a chair. The man smiles and seats himself.

“Road-kill Barry,” says the man as I drain my original glass. He doesn’t miss the gesture and deftly pours us each a large measure of Highland Park. My eyes sparkle as he pours. “My name.” he adds.

“Uh, Joseph,” I say belatedly. “Mine,” I nod at the bottle. “You’re a connoisseur?” 

“This? No.” he says, looking me straight in the eye as we each raise our glass. “You are.” He drinks.

My brain stalls momentarily, but I drink automatically in an attempt to hide it.

He narrows his eyes, without looking away, and then pushes his chair a little further back, examining me all the while.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

His unbroken gaze demands a response.

“I uh, found a bag.”

He says nothing.

“It had a card in it. For here.” I continue.

For a moment, he says nothing, then “That bag is mine.” He calls to the barman. “Stump-licker George! Bag.” He turns back to me. “I dropped it for you. So you’d come here.”

The barman hands Road-kill Barry a bag. I slowly hand Road-kill Barry the one I found. They are identical.

I look up from the bags back into Road-kill Barry’s eyes.

“So why are you here?” he asks again.

“Because you wanted me here.” I answer meekly.

“But why did you come? Weren’t you on the way somewhere else?” He chinks his glass once against the bottle of Highland Park.

I look at the bottle. I look at him again. “You know where I was going?” I ask, deeply surprised.

“I do. And I think it is a waste.” He says this very earnestly.

“How do you know all this?” I ask.

“I needed to know more about the man who cost me millions.” 

I look at him, totally confused.

“I spent ten years building up a specialist customer base, which you destroyed overnight. I was a pimp. Very successful.”

I still have no idea what he is talking about. Road-kill Barry realises this, and leans in close.

“Do you know how much a man will pay to fuck a mobile library?”

The penny drops. “I don’t,” I eventually manage to whisper. “I really, really don’t.”  I start to feel funny.

“Want to know how Stump-licker George got his name?” he asks. I think he’s drugged me. 

Road-kill Barry notices my condition and smiles. “I hear you like water skiing?”.

I have an overwhelming urge to fall unconsciously to the floor. I go for it.

* * * 

It is cold. On waking, I find myself outdoors in the early morning sunshine. I am seated on a chair in the middle of the road. In front of me is a Jeep and Road-kill Barry.

Road-kill Barry sees that I have woken. He smiles, and indicates the rope attached to the tow bar. He then points to my feet. They are strapped into a waterski board. 

He beckons me to stand up. I do so, helplessly. He silently takes away the chair, offers me the waterski rope handle, then climbs into the driver’s seat.

A window in the back of the Jeep opens. Stump-licker George gives me a hungry smile.

sting in the tail

Dr. Heuskeyn’s advances in spinal chord repair promised to forever change the lives of thousands of accident victims. But far more importantly to one so fiercely ambitious, it was going to propel him to the very top of the medical profession. 

So when Dr Jacobs and I simultaneously published papers on radical new directions in spinal injury research, the threat to Heuskeyn’s position should have been intolerable. Despite having marvellous results to back up our research, we fully expected him to orchestrate a campaign in the journals and the general media to pillory us.

After all, we had made it easy for him. Jacobs’ work required the physical injection of live ants into the back of the neck, allowing them to inhabit a tiny enclosure linking the pituitary gland to the top of the spinal column. Their waste products naturally engineering an internal reconstruction of damaged nerve tissue.

My own results required the painful excavation of five vertebrae, and the permanent insertion of a live wasp into each along with a sustaining nutrient feed. Granted, this sounds grim, but within days some patients were so mobile they had regained the ability to walk unaided.

Finally, after a couple of months, when the combined number of our successful patients reached double figures, Dr Heuskeyn advertised in the journals that he fully ceded victory to us, and would throw a celebration in honour of us, our patients, and their families.

I guess it was just that we wanted success so badly that we failed to look too deeply into his motivations for organising the event.

It was the most horrifying picnic in history.

spitting feathers

I spent the gap year of my Law degree in a small village called Pond in the south of England. It started badly when I learned of the sheer number of ponds that can be found in the village. 

None. Not one. 

Nor is there a river, a stream, a canal, a brook or a spring. There isn’t even a bog. 

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Given the almost total absence of water, the fact that the village turned out to be entirely overrun with ducks struck me as being little short of cosmically sarcastic. 

Ducks could be found waddling up and down the roads, across people’s driveways, over the cricket pitch, everywhere. Presumably, hunting for entirely absent ponds. But if I was initially amused at the plight of the ducks’ situation, this soon turned to contempt. It irritated me the way they spent so much energy blindly searching for something that they were never going to find. I suspect it was when I recognised how closely this parallelled my own life that I really began to resent the place. 

I learned from the locals that Pond had been ‘dry and ducky’ (oh, please) for more than a century, and everyone seemed to find the whole thing charming. 

I did not. 

I lived there for ten months without ever getting used to the ducks. If they weren’t wandering around getting underfoot, they’d just be standing there studying you. With beady little black eyes. As though trying to working out if you might be the kind of person who hides ponds.

A friend of my father’s got me the legal trainee job, working as a dogsbody in the one solicitors office in Pond. It was run by two ageing partners, Mr Godfrey and Mr Dapper. Originally from London, they had long since gone native; now as much a part of the village furniture as the feathers and the stink of duck crap.

The village itself was a little too large for everyone to know everyone, but most people use the services of a solicitor at some point in their life, so the staff of the solicitors were pretty well known. As well as Mr Godfrey and Mr Dapper, there were the two legal secretaries, Jas and Allie, and then there was me.

My contributions were initially restricted to filing and shadowing the two secretaries. The work was utterly dull, and many times I considered quitting. I reluctantly stuck with it, thinking it wouldn’t look good on the CV, and would also no doubt upset my father’s friend. Eventually, the work improved as I helped out more directly with the partners, and in time, I was allowed to accompany them on customer visits. On rare occasions I even went with them to court in the city. I loved the city. Not a duck for miles.

Over the first couple of months, Jas and I were intimate a couple of times, but she made it clear she wasn’t interested in getting serious. I liked her enough to spend a small fortune on a cute locket for her birthday. She liked it enough to wear all the time. But, meh.

It was at the end of my tenth month in the village that everything fell apart.

One of the wealthy elderly villagers had just died, and we had been instructed to deliver his will. Very peculiarly, he had requested that it be conveyed outside, on a pretty hill overlooking the nearby quarry in which he’d made his money. So his family and friends, and our small legal team, spent an afternoon in the sun going over the details of the inheritance. Most especially welcome, Pimms was served to all in accordance with the wishes of the deceased. With no other work that day, I took full advantage of several free drinks. 

After the formalities were concluded, I caught the eye of Jas as she was gently strolling along the edge of the quarry. She smiled at me in that way she would after a couple of drinks. I smiled back and then looked on in disbelief as she disappeared over the edge of the quarry. There was a loud rumbling noise as of rocks and stones on the move, and a cloud of dust leapt into the air.

I darted to the edge and looked over. Through the dust, I saw a final few rocks tumbling to the bottom of the quarry, but of Jas there was no sign. Huge sections of rock had cascaded down with her.

I started to climb over the ledge but was held by back Mr Godfrey, his eyes desperately scanning the bowl of the quarry for his employee and friend. I dumbly heard everyone calling her name, but no one was favoured with a reply.

The police and fire brigade soon arrived, and eventually some mountain rescue people too. They carefully made their way down into the quarry, shifting smaller rocks and using infra-red monitors, but Jas wasn’t to be found.

We solicitors staff were in shock, and after a few hours with no developments, we were encouraged to head home. Once in the house, I made myself some kind of a meal, but it remained uneaten and went cold on the kitchen table as I climbed into bed.

Eight days later, Jas woke me in the middle of the night. She put a dirty finger to my lips and made shhh shapes with her lips. In white panic, I leapt out of bed, staring at her. When I noticed that she was missing an arm. I jumped out of the window. 

I lay on the lawn staring up at my bedroom, trying to work out if I had imagined the whole thing, when my front door opened and Jas hobbled through. I started whimpering. She held out her one arm to me, her face imploring me to not fear her. I stared at her as she approached, her horrible limping a broken parody of walking. 

She was a complete mess. Her clothes were shredded and she was dusty from head to toe. As she reached me, I heard a low rattling sound. She was trying to talk. I slowly stood, and cautiously leaned-in to try and understand her words. She stank. I ignored it.

“Quarry-snirrrrk-Go-snrrrrkkkk-Now-uhhhhhh”. I looked over my shoulder to check we were alone. At this time of the night, we were pretty safe. I looked back. A duck was standing, staring at me where Jas has been just seconds ago.

I pulled my hands down over my face and sighed heavily. The duck turned and walked out of the garden. At the edge of the garden, it turned its head to me, waiting. 

“Let me get some God damn shoes first,” I muttered. As I entered the house, I muttered, “You feathery bastard.”

With shoes and a coat, I followed the duck down the road. It was clearly making a bee-line to the quarry. Other ducks joined us on the way. We all walked in silence, single file. Ten minutes later, we arrived at the quarry. The ducks milled around, obviously agitated. I looked at the lead duck. He (she?) ignored me. I looked into the quarry. I replayed the accident in my mind, wondering for the hundredth time if there was something I could have done to stop her falling. Then I saw something glinting halfway down the walls of the quarry. I squinted and wandered over to the very edge. Behind me, half a dozen ducks launched themselves at my back, and knocked me over the edge. I fell, scrabbling at the rocks for something to hold onto. It was useless, I slid uncontrollably. 

I hit a flat rock and suddenly stopped. I groaned. I was about halfway down the slope. I looked up at the mouth of the quarry and saw a dozen duck faces staring down at me. “BASTARDS,” I wheezed. 

I looked to see what I was sitting on, and noticed Jas’ locket beside me. Was this what had been glinting? I desperately looked around for any other signs of Jas, but there were none. I called her name. Nothing.

I lifted the locket up, and noticed it was wet. I looked down at the stones it had been sitting on and brushed aside the dirt. There was a small trickle of water seeping through a small crack. I poked my finger into the crack and a little more water seeped out. I found a stick and started working at the crack. As I levered out a medium sized stone, water sprayed into my face.

Above me, the ducks started to go nuts.

Nightbus

It is dark and I am walking home.

That last drink was always going to cost me my ride home, but unlike most weeks, I just hadn’t been able to refuse it. When I eventually left the pub, I was just in time to watch the bus pull away, and I had sworn loudly into the uncaring night air.

However, ten minutes into the walk home I have found my rhythm, and I’m actually enjoying it.

It is a cold night but the evening’s beer, along with my pace, conspire such that I become too warm for my jacket. I take it off and tie it around my waist.

The stars are sparkling overhead and I briefly pause to appreciate the view. I don’t know many constellations, so I make some up. Directly overhead, that can be Socrates’ Pyjamas. Those over there, that’s the Jam Fountain. Over there, the Postman’s Teat. I chuckle to myself. All is well in the heavens tonight.

I continue my walking, and estimate that I’m about 4 miles from home, when I hear the high-pitched squealing of a car being driven in very much the wrong gear. It is some way ahead of me but gradually the noise gets louder and I soon spot headlights coming my way.

Eventually the car arrives and spotting me, pulls over. While my eyes try to recover from the glare of the headlights, a voice from inside yells “This car is cool!”.

Lit only by the illumination of the dashboard, a smiling man’s face leans out of the driver’s window.

“Hi!” says the man.

After a short pause, I ask “Do you need some help?”.

“My brother lives with pigs.” he replies, apparently very comfortable with this.

His words, maybe coupled with their delivery, pierce me with the cold, dry fear that I feel when encountering mental illness. I don’t quite know how to deal with it, so I don’t immediately say anything. 

“We pay a farmer to let him stay on a pig farm.” he says. ”He eats with the pigs and even sleeps in the sty.” 

I still don’t have a response. Only a desire to leave. ”I have to get on,” I say, and turn to continue my walk.

“It worked.” he says, urgently.

I start walking, but he just continues. “Years ago, when you were young. You tried to broadcast a message to others with your mind. It worked.”

I stop mid stride and turn to stare at him.

“I think he wants the farmer to make him into sausages, but that’s not allowed.” he says.

I refuse to engage him on this, but desperately want to hear more about the the other.

“It worked.” he then repeats, still smiling. “I heard you. In here.”  He taps a finger against his temple. “We all did. You’ve got a gifted mind.”

A sizeable part of my brain wants very much to be rid of this guy, but he’s triggered a memory I haven’t thought about for years. When I was about 13, I did once sit down to meditate and try to send a telepathic message to anyone who could hear it.

Nobody answered, of course.

“No one replied because you’re only a sender.” he says, answering my unspoken thought. “You can’t receive.” He opens the rear passenger door. “Yet. But we can help you.”

I just stare, lost.

“Get in. Let me take you to a man who can show you how to use your mind. Like he showed me.”

An inner battle begins. Is this patent horseshit or fairytale nirvana? 

Fortunately, I know from the start who will win, and I find myself walking towards the car. The final traces of my common sense eject and run for cover.

This is all that those ethereal ribbons of dream so delicately woven into my soul have ever wanted, and they are so grateful they completely suppress the memory of being bound and gagged as I climb into the back seat and get driven to a pig farm in the middle of nowhere.

smalltalk

At the party, a girl in some kind of dress came up to me, and shyly asked if it was Jane or Danny that I was friends with. I told her that I had just come from a stationers.

I waited to see how long she’d take to respond.

Impressively, she tried to reboot the conversation after just a couple of seconds, and was about to speak again when I told her that I’d spent the afternoon cutting up a horse.

She looked simultaneously confused and horrified. That’s my favourite expression. Mix in some panic and a couple of canisters of nitrous, and we’ve got ourselves a real party.

I told her that it was my job, that I was an animal pathologist. I examine and remove dead animals from crime scenes for the police. The horse had been locked in the stationers overnight and had set the alarm off in the early hours after having destroyed most of the store.

She was trying really hard to accommodate this, so I told her that it had bled to death after one of its legs had come off by the ring binders. She put a hand to her mouth and looked aghast.

I pulled a sympathetic face, took her wineglass from her other hand, and drank it down as I walked away.

drawing bored

Clive rang while I was using the back of a knife to extract myself from the grey plastic catastrophe that had been an Airfix kit just four hours earlier. He asked if I wanted to join him while he browsed the local shops for a new drawing board. I didn’t really want to, but I knew he’d be hurt if I declined, and nobody does wounded silence like an artist.

We met half an hour later by the playground, which was attended as ever by laughing, yelling kids and the sound of glass being crushed underfoot. Because of a childhood incident with a burning poodle (exasperatingly never up for discussion), Clive walked with a limp. This often drew hurtful taunts from kids, but those in the playground were far too busy spitting at, or sexting each other to notice us.

We crossed over the road and headed up the hill towards town. Clive wanted to try the antiques place first. This strange establishment was not so much a shop, as an old hall, filled with weird items of all sizes. The only thing the items had in common was that none carried a price sticker. The price was revealed only by taking (or pointing out) items to the strange guy at the desk by the door, who otherwise seemed content to sit and listen to cricket on the radio. Disconcertingly, he seemed to manage this even when there was no cricket being played.

The price he gave appeared to be as random as the stock. My dad bought our dining table from there. It was a big heavy dark wood thing that would be at home in a castle. He paid £118.47 for it. Yes. I know.

Most interestingly, when the guy gave change, it was always with the aid of this little mechanical elephant which lived beside the radio. The guy would make a show of whispering to the animal how much change was needed and then gently pull its tail and voilà, coins would roll down the trunk. Always seemed to be the right amount, too. Kinda neat, I guess.

Clive wandered between the stacked items, hunting for something like a drawing table, while I just mooched. I didn’t recognise much from last time I was here, but that had been a little while ago. A couple of old electrical items caught my eye: an 80s tape recorder and a 70s gravitational approbation grid. Items like these were as tempting as ever, but at long last, I had finally realised that I just didn’t need stuff like that any more.

“Hey,” hissed Clive, who had appeared, eyes wide. “Come look at this.” he urged, and nodded his head beyond a very old grandfather clock. He guided me over to the furniture section and beamed excitedly as he pointed at a white board propped up against the wall. “There. Perfect!” he said. “Help me get it out.”

As I got closer, I could see it wasn’t just a board, it was an architect’s drawing table, with an adjustable board mounted on a fold-away A-frame. It looked heavy, but was actually pretty easy to erect and adjust. Clive was squeaking with pleasure. We collapsed the table and he scooted over to the guy with the radio and started waving his wallet.

I took another wander around and started flipping through some vinyl. On the off-chance. You know. And that was when the doll coughed.

She was sitting on a small, ornate box.  She was dressed in a ball-gown. And she was staring at me.

I looked up to check if anyone else was around, but I was alone. I looked back at the doll. She gracefully reached down between her legs and tapped gently on the front of the box beneath.

I looked around again, then reached for the small handle on the box drawer she had indicated. I pulled, and it slowly slid open. There were matches inside. My eyes flicked back to the doll.

“The guy with the elephant,” she whispered. “He’s a servant of the Witchbrand King. You need to use these matches to burn-“

“Sorted. He’ll deliver it tomorrow.” said Clive, tugging at my elbow. “You done?”. I nodded, dazed. We left, and walked home.

The world ended a couple of days later. There was loads of blood.