Tit-for-tat

Basquiat yanked the rabbit from the hat. He checked for ticks and put it back. In the corner sat Jat, laundering Basquiat’s cravat. Basquiat chucked the hat at poor Jat; the rabbit arced out and came down with a splat.

“Clean that,” growled Basquiat. Old Jat did just that, asking that Basquiat lift his black boots off the mat.

“Less chitchat than that, muskrat,” came Basquiat’s brickbat.

Well, that was that. “This autocrat brat is due a hard twat,” thought the doormat Jat. But a twat of what format? Sabotage the thermostat? A cricket bat up the habitat? Chuck him off the ziggurat and leave him for the rats? No, not that brand of combat. Jat fancied a bit of tit-for-tat, so he shat in Basquiat’s cravat, ironed it flat, and left it for the aristocrat to find under his placemat.

Bank

Jane walked into the bank and calmly joined the queue.  At one window, a middle-aged cashier was dealing coolly with a middle-aged customer.  Friendly chit-chat, but at no detriment to the efficiency of the transaction, a transaction which they had surely conducted, respectively, thousands and hundreds of times previously.  Jane was buoyed.

At the other window, a builder laboured under the mistaken impression that his hefty red and purple wad was somehow impressive to the pretty young cashier, a woman who, after all, sat by a drawer full of cash in a room full of cash next door to a room full of jewels and gold for forty hours a week, and who was, frankly, already sick of the sight of money just seven weeks into the graduate scheme.  Jane was dismayed.

Ahead of her in the queue were a greasy, frustrated man pointedly flicking a cheque; an Orthodox Jewish man clutching some sort of leather document wallet; an old lady’s zimmer, as placeholder for an old lady, who sat nearby on a boxy sofa thing; a cheerful-faced twentysomething and her toddler, in matching Strokes t-shirts; and another builder.  Jane contemplated trying a different branch.

But no. Remember what Tommy said.  Patience.  She took a breath and another run through her mental checklist.  “Good things come.  Good things come…”

Fag shed

Remember back in the day when all the lads were getting the ‘Fronds of Japheth’ hairstyle?  Ah, yes, a little bit before your time, I suppose.  You know what I’m talking about, though?  The one with the spicate crown, fluffy at the edge.  That’s right, yeah, just like Perry Mondragon when he lifted the cup.  Haha, reminds me of a funny story, actually.  I was staying in Harrogate, doing some contract stuff for ICI.  Hold up, here comes Clive.  I’ll tell you it later.  Wotcher, Clive.

Heir

“What’s the point of owning a moat if you’re forbidden from throwing the locals into it and watching them flail for their lives before ultimately succumbing to the same watery grave which imprisons their fathers, grandfathers, uncles and second cousins?”

Deary me, not a day used to go by without Dad coming out with that lot.  He’d go on for hours: moat this, locals that, morbidity, corpsehood and servitude the other.  He was a damaged man, my dad, not that such a term existed back in his day.  Back then he was known as ‘passionate’, ‘dedicated’, ‘hardworking’.  In his promotional literature he boasted of ‘having worked closely with’ the full gamut of regional worthies.  Deary me, he was emir of the entire oblast; I’ve no idea whose favour he was attempting to curry with this absurd rhetoric.

But on he’d go, “chuck ’em in the fuckin’ moat”, “send ’em to their deserved, wet fate”, it never ended.  Even today, decrepit and spent and obsolesced by democracy, he lies sprawled on his cushions, moat-muttering.  When the rotten old bastard finally kicks the bucket the estate is mine, and the identity of the first object over the battlement – splash! – will be obvious to the intelligent reader.

Leash

One moves forward.  It isn’t easy.  Inch by inch one inches, inching inchily to the next inch, the next inch, the next.  After an injury like this, the inch becomes one’s sole unit of measurement.  The lavatory is 180 inches from the bed.  The front door is 400 inches from the lavatory.  The fridge is 450 inches from the lavatory.  The lavatory is 310 inches from the settee.

Accompanying this reduction in scope is, obviously, the firm assignment of the lavatory as the focal point of one’s domestic existence.  Further, as one is necessarily housebound, the lavatory thus becomes the focal point of one’s entire existence.  You see, the machine’s crossbeam punctured, amongst other things, one’s bowel – a horror which one might expect to be superseded by the fresh and sudden uselessness of one’s legs – but yes, the lavatory is one’s constantly necessary, and necessarily constant, companion.

In fact, the loss of mobility one can deal with, and, frankly, one’s training prepared one for such an eventuality.  It’s the servitude to the lavatory to which one vehemently, ragingly, fruitlessly objects.

In attendance

There was Angela, whose legs were one short.
There was Bhav, the Junior Minister for Sport.
There was Craven, the head guard at Gupping House.
There was Daz, a music teacher, diminutive, Scouse.
There was Ethelbald, a grumpy, obsolete king.
There was Farid, a lumpen oaf with a sling.
There was Gert, an insalubrious old lush.
There was Hera, in certain light the spit of Ian Rush.
There was Ingmar, heir to the Bündethrashet billions.
There was Jasper, the bastard, in the red by millions.
There was Kaspar, a Norwegian marksman on a sortie.
There was Little Les, a local favourite with an IQ of forty.
(There was me, of course, for quorum reasons.)
There was Norfolk, the Duke, a man for all treasons.
There was Oyvind the butcher, who went to school with Neil Stuke.
There was Pavel the goat, and his goatminder Luke.
There was Quackins the dwarf, symbolic head of the treasury.
There was Ronson the DJ, compiling a bestiary.
There was Simon of Athens, erroneously invited.
There was Timon of Athens, so rarely recited.
There was Ulrika, who I met on a bench.
There was Vern Fisher, munching a delicious tench.
There was Wendy, from Bourton-on-the-Water.
There was Xerxes, with his ruddy licentious daughter.
There was Yorick, alas.
There was Zoë, pissing in a pint glass.

Lengthy stoppage

“Fuck’s Mick playing at?”

It was a valid question.  Thanks to a well-drilled line of industrious professionals protecting us ahead, plus our fabled Ecuadorian duo up front, it had been a quiet opening twenty-five minutes for Ian, myself and our keeper, Sully.  Indeed, my fellow centre-half and I had had little cause even to speak until now.  But now, now, as Ian barked his valid question, it dawned on the entire stadium, wave-like, that all was not well with the referee.

Mick Jigger, a forty-two-year-old father of four, a P.E. teacher from Barnstaple, a bald man, a football referee.  Here he was before the twenty-two of us – before the twenty-two thousand of us – stood with his legs straight and his torso leaning forward, hands gripping just above the knees, and neck craned unsettlingly upward, as if he were staring into the eyes of someone eighteen inches shorter than himself.

Seemingly frozen in this position, his mouth gaping and his eyes glassy, he somehow appeared undistressed.  Alert, but calm.  Present, but distant.  Suddenly from his mouth there emerged a long, shiny, thick, moist, flexible, green object – inch by inch it continued, until after maybe eight feet it terminated in a cheeky little face and flopped finally to the turf.  Bewildered, I looked over at Ian.

“Dunno, looks like he’s swallowed some kind of limp serpent at some point.”

Fish day

– Ey, were that the “Friday is the lord’s fish day” bloke?  Seriously, that were him outside.

– What you on about, he’s been dead donkey’s years.

– No way, that were defo him.  He had the hat on, the weird stick thing, the lot.  Honestly mate, that were him just walked past and round there.  Serious man.

– Nah mate, me dad did his funeral.  His real name were Boghill or summat.  Francis Boghurst or summat.  His dad were a mad Jesus bloke and him and his sister both ended up nutters or summat.

Drive thru

No, Jacob, you can’t get out of the car.  The reason is that the giraffes are very big and they could kill you.  Yes, I know they’re herbivores.  I didn’t say they would eat you, I said they could kill you.  Yes they could, Jacob.  They could stomp on your head and squish your brains out of your nostrils.  Or they could kick you so hard your spine shatters like china, and you fly thirty feet through the air before landing in a grotesquely motionless heap on a poorly maintained patch of bark chippings.  In front of everybody, Jacob.  Now come on, act your age, not your shoe size.

The Bablake Jazz

Kids were going wacko for the Bablake Jazz.  We’d never heard anything quite like it, and me, Jippy and the rest of the gang would while away countless hours after school and at weekends, riffling through sides by groups like the Jabbers, the Figbags, the Martineau Planks, and the Boosters, down at Rageh’s Records, behind the old telephone exchange.  The shell’s still standing, but it’s a fake tan place now, I think.

Most Friday nights we’d catch some of the hot new acts, and usually a favourite or two, down at Smedley’s Cakes, a ramshackle old family bakery with a converted cellar.  I say ‘converted’, the damn place was as shoddy as the cake shop itself.  But ah, the wine flowed, the smoke wisped, the walls whispered.

Big Jackie Flagons used to take care of the MCing duties.  He had a minor stroke one memorable night, right after introducing the Goosedrifters, right there under the cake shop.  Jippy and a few of the other lads stepped in after that, taking it in turns to talk the groups up to the hungry audience, among which I preferred to remain, front and centre, swigging wine from the bottle, frantically waving my tricorn hat, yelling primally with demented joy, drowning in Bablake.