Ladies Who Lunch

“‘I’m sure you know the film I mean;” Lady Burbage gestured imperiously with her fork- ” The 1950’s classic science fiction film, with Richard Carlson and Julie Adams; I told the man at the video store.” Lady Burbage was a confirmed Luddite whose idea of Home Entertainment had never passed beyond DVD, though her vocabulary and outlooknremained mired in the days of VHS. “You know the one – the fish Man film – The Creature from The Blue Lagoon.”

“I think the lagoon in question was brown, and had attracted a great many flies.” Max spoke up from the chair he was almost invisibly sitting on, only his grey ears visible over the edge of the table, and conversation faltered for a moment. Everyone knew that Max’s knowledge of films was unparalleled, a fact rendered even more surprising when it was realised that Max was a small Tabby cat. It was true that Max had sat on Mrs Riverlet’s lap during a great many films but he had, (for the most part) only pretended to be asleep.

“Well said, dear boy,” said Mr Riverbend the curate, who was still visiting from the village, having discovered that Lady Burbage’s hospitality was far more sumptuous and to his liking than the paltry comforts of the vicarage. “Dreadful film. Dreadful!”

“at least on a standard with “Spotlight” I should think.” replied Max who was evidently in no mood to bandy words with someone who, in his opinion, was rather less entitled to the pleasures of Lady Burbage’s table than he, who after all, had simply followed Mrs Riverlet in through the front door before ingratiating himself to his hostess by means of his impressive charm and redoubtable purr.

“Maxwell,” Pronounced Lady Burbage; “I do not allow rancour or ill-feeling at meals. “Mr Riverbend is a guest at my table, and is not to be subjected to disrespect, no matter your personal feelings as to his work or chosen vocation.”

“My dear Lady Burbage!” Twittered Mr Riverbend, ” I assure you, I took no offence! The film in question is a trenchant indictment of Catholicism, not the refined form of Protestant worship that I, myself hold as my spiritual foundation – and indeed in my limited time in the Church I have not seen the slightest hint of the disease that rots the core of the holy Roman church. Indeed,  I have heard it said that the Holy Roman Church is much too concerned with holeys. A weakness that we in the C of E are not plagued by.” He finished primly, the faintest tint of  blush colouring his sallow cheeks. 

But Max was having none of it. He stood and, all four feet close together, stretched until he quivered. He then walked in a circle on the spot, his tail erect and curled into a hook on top, thereby displaying his rear gun position to any who might be interested, although none were. This performance concluded he fixed Mr Riverbend with a level stare and pronounced 

“Is that so? Well perhaps  you might communicate to Reverend Blenkinsop that the Sacristy garden is not quite so private as he, I fear, seems to imagine?”

Mr Riverbend sat back in his chair and crossed his legs, suddenly. He accomplished both movements simultaneously but with a certain lack of grace. Spode rattled and Mrs Wheatsheaf from the village, who sat next to him, jumped.

“Sir!” Mr Riverbend ejaculated with some heat. “I’ll thank you not to bandy unfounded insinuendos about respected clergymen, especially at table!”

“I quite agree Mr Riverbend! Max, you are behaving in a quite insufferable manner! As if accusing him of being Catholic wasn’t bad enough, now you imply some kind of probably illegal sexual failing on the part of our beloved village vicar! An honourable man who, I am sure is quite above reproach!”

“I assure you, Lady Burbage,” Max replied warmly, “I am not repeating scurrilous gossip at some second or third hand remove but simply and honestly reporting the evidence of my own eyes gathered some two weeks ago during a Thursday morning choir practice.”

“Your own eyes?” snorted Mr Riverbend.

“Exactly sir. While I had originally attended the activities of the choir because I find some of their harmonising not unlike the songs of my own people, after some time I was called away by some business that would not wait and which I decided to attend to in the Sacristy garden, rather than, as is my wont, in the dark area behind the organ.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Mr Riverbend.

“Pray continue, Maxwell” Lady Burbage’s voice was a mixture of interest and menace.

“Delighted, mam. In any event, I walked through the choir during their attempt on a half – baked  Jesus Pie,”  

“Pardon Me?”

“Pardon, mam,  an attempt at a small bon mot- I meant of course ‘Pie Jesu'”

“Not to your normal standard, cat.”

“I have to agree mam- in any event during my passage through the choir I could not help but notice that several members of the choir were wearing high heel ankle boots, and, when I looked up, these same choristers were wearing only female undergarments under their vestments. Frilly ones.”

“Quite normal attire for any choir in the land Madam. It is unfair to draw any ufair inferences based on this allegation!”

“I’m quite sure we’re capable of making our own minds up on this subject, but thank you for your opinion Mr Riverbend.” Lady Burbage’s tone carried more meaning than her choice of words.

“Sir – I can trace my lineage back to the seven matriarchs – I occupy several important positions in the feline culture in this territory- my word is above r’approach and I will not have my escutcheon called into question by a common clergyman’s assistant! Do I make myself clear?”

“My dearest sir! I meant no disrespect! Indeed in my emotional state I stumbled over my own words. I merely meant that in my two years at Saint Cuthbert’s parish I have seen no evidence whatever of such anomalous activities or deportments as you describe!”

“And how, pray tell, do you arrange your fact- finding examinations up the chorister’s cassocks?”

Mr Riverbend sat back, abashed. Mrs Wheatsheaf tittered. Mr Riverbend darted a poisonous look at her.

“Really Madam” he snapped, “If you must pick sides I rather think that you should at least ally yourself with the superior species!”

Mrs Wheatsheaf ‘s smile was quite impenetrable when she spoke. “I rather think I have, sir.”  

Mrs Riverlet looked up, and smiled. 

“Mr Riverbend,” Lady Burbage’s question was intended to restore the company to a state of polite equilibrium: “given you close association with the Parish of Saint Cuthbert, are you able to state whether this year’s church finances will permit  the church fete cake stall to stock the same jam donuts and chocolate eclairs as last year?” One thing was undoubted, Lady Burbage had a very sweet tooth and the intervening months had dimmed memory of the unpleasant aftermath of last year’s church fete. But the question performed it’s intended function, providing Mr Riverbend with a much needed respite to collect his flustered wits. 

“I-I’m really not sure Lady Burbage, my relatively low position in the structure of Saint Cuthbert’s has not seen me granted access to the minutiae of the organisation of the church fete.”

“Minutiae? Minutiae?” Lady Burbage examined Mr Riverbend’s blush closely through her pince-nez. 

“The Cake stall is the very backbone of the Church Fete!” it was impossible to ignore the reverenceand menace in her voice.

“My dear lady!” Mr Riverbend tried hard not to squeak, “I simply mis-spoke! There are a very broad variety of issues in the organisation of a church fete and these issues are addressed by aa small army of dedicated volunteers and this year my responsibilities do not encompass the organisation of the Cake Stall. Instead, this year, for the first time ever, Saint Cuthbert’s Parish fete is to boast an inflatable   Krazy Kastle!(c), the organisation of which is my sole responsibility;” he flexed his shoulders. His deep crimson blush showed no signs of abating. “You know, it’s for the children. To jump up and down on.”

“Quite.” Lady Burbage evidently  considered that castles, crazy or not, ranked far less weightily on the scales of importance in fetes than cake stalls. Especially, it must be said, cake stalls that purveyed the chocolate eclairs of Miss Deborah Clatchitt, from the Cake Creation Emporium all the way over in in Ramsbottom  Her mouth had been watering at the memory for the last eleven- and- a- half- months.

“While I am sure you anticipate giving the choir, in their vestments free tickets to your Crazy construction and then keeping a close eye on their activities; I myself am far too busy, and physically frail to make the long trip by rail to Ramsbottom and stay overnight in a town that is, without doubt either too wet or too cold, in some hostelry where the beds would be either to hard or too soft  and the vittles overpriced and not to the standard of the produce of the erstwhile Mrs. Noakes.”

“Indeed madam that would be unlikely!” interjected Mr Riverbend who had a particular weakness for the sausage Lady Burbage’s cook called “bloaters.”

“thank you sir” said Lady Burbage who considered any praise of the cook to be general praise that reflected on the quality of her house  and inferentially herself.  And Lady Burbage  too. was far from being above appreciating a good sausage. While she glowed in the praise of her cook, Riverbend took joy in the acceptance of his dedicated kow-towing.

“High praise indeed since Mr Riverbend is indeed well known as a connoisseur of sausage.” Interjected Max, sweetly.

Mr Riverbend bristled; “What do you mean by that sir? Is it another one of your limp attempts at humour?”

“Heaven forbid my good sir! merely that the contents of the garbage bins at the rear of your humble abode and intelligence gained from  the village butcher, who happens to be a close personal friend of mine, point clearly at the peculiarities of your diet.”

“Ah.”

“not to mention that a peek under the toilet cubicle walls in the vestry on Wednesday afternoons will teach any student of anthropology all they need to know about sausage appreciation.”

Mr Riverbend achieved the colour of a London bus. Lady Burbage wondered as to the strength of his heart in relation to what was clearly stratospheric blood pressure.

“sir!” Cat!” Mr Riverbend spluttered scarcely capable of intelligible speech;”You avow violating the sanctity of the vestry and the privacy of the toilet without a hint of remorse and the segue in wild allegations I avow I am too innocent and callow to understand the ramifications of-Explain yourself sir, lest I propell your furry body into the fountain with a swift kick of my right foot- I was in the first elevens at F-footer in my year at Oxford sir!”

Riverbend sat back, the worst of his rage seemingly dissipated by his outburst. He panted and if his deep flush showed no signs of abating it at least did not worsen

“So sir,” Max was unabashed; “Aside from being caught ilflagrante eldickto you have broadened the scope of yourshameful activities to tooping to threatening a innocent housecat with physical violence might I remind you that the guiding principle of the rules laid down by the Marquis of Queensbury is to only pick on people of your own size?”

“Innocent cat?I hardly think so sir unless innocence encompasses sneaking, spying and the deployment of uncorroborated allegations in a manner designed to maximise harm and embarrassment.”He  breathed noisily through his nose and swallowed.

“A shameful performance.”

“And one you appear unmotivated to contradict” Max was unabashed and if he was blushing, no sign of it showed through the tabby fur on his cheeks. “So am I to take it that it was not you I found in a toilet cubicle gulping away at a German internees prize bratwurst with every evidence of bursting into the ‘sprung rhythm of religious ecstasy?”(C) Alex Rieneck 2018

The calendar said it was supposed to be Wednesday and the periscope didn’t work anymore. It wouldn’t turn and it made a nasty scraping noise when he tried to force it. Whatever had happened topside had driven it downwards so that the optic was at crotch level and he had to squat low to look into it. He found himself thinking that his bodily posture was somehow indecent and worse than that, symbolic, so he found himself blushing as he pressed his eye into the worn rubber-cup.
“So what does it feel like?” David was his twin brother but he’d been born ten minutes earlier, so he out-ranked Toby but by only the narrowest of margins; Toby knew that he really wanted to look into the eye-piece himself, but didn’t want to push his luck, so Toby ignored him .
“What do you think’s happened to it?”
It was a stupid question. Anyone with a clue about conditions topside would have a pretty good idea of the answer but he tried to keep his voice neutral as he replied.
“Probably a big wind pushed the garage wall over on top of it. I guess the weight of the bricks forced it downwards. Hope it didn’t bend the tube: That’d be just about impossible to fix.”

“You think its worth fixing?”
“Dunno, probably-it’s the only way we can see the surface.”
“Doesn’t help much – just see black sleet, not much of an aid to morale.”
“Yeah, true, but its not up to us – any decision involving the surface is Dad’s call anyway, you know that.”
“Der. I can’t see him taking much of a risk for the ’scope, though – he’ll play it safe.”

As it happened, Toby’s guess turned out to be wrong. For reasons that were never made clear, the General opted to have the damage to the scope examined by a surface recce, which would also place a set of battery-cams topside connected to the habitat by microwave link. Toby and David were the Recce team, their protective equipment would be checked by lieutenant-general Marjorie before they left. It was only when the General said that, that Toby realised how much trust was being placed on his shoulders. He could barely taste the lunch of Meatloaf “that he had time for” before they had to get ready. The Meatloaf wasn’t really meat of course but made of “Surv paste” that had been flavoured. Neither of them recognised the flavour, never having tasted real meat in their lives, but the flavour was very familiar to them and they both found it comforting.

The protective suits were airtight and very heavy, the body, including the flexible joints were shielded with lead. The thick glass faceplates were leaded. They had more recent suits, but both of them were in larger sizes and exclusively reserved by the top brass and had developed faults in the video pickups that replaced the faceplates. They offered arguably better protection but Toby found the immediacy of the glass view preferable to the often streaky and black and white vision offered by the VideoView (C) suits. In his whole life Toby had only seen the inside of the front airlock door twice. Once on a tour given by George the Master-at-arms on repelling theoretical attempted incursions into the Habitat, and once on a illegal mission of his own where he’d taken David’s dare and actually touched the inside of the door himself. David had laughed from the corridor outside thinner door of the lock, but he hadn’t repeated Toby’s act of bravery – a fact that Toby still held near his heart. From the General’s office there was a short corridor to a locked door; behind the locked door was the lift, but the lift didn’t matter, the lift hadn’t worked in either of their lifetimes. It was into the lift by forcing the concertina mesh back, then poking the hatch in the roof up with the stick that was always there. Toby gave David a boost up and David went first.

The main core of the habitat was an empty cylinder about twenty metres across and sixty metres high. The rooftop of the cylinder was a metre and a half thick steel, in the past it had apparently opened. To get to the top of the cylinder David and Toby climbed the main ladder, which was steel and bolted to the wall. The ladder was rusted, melted slightly out of shape and vibrated as they climbed into the distorted mesh gantry. The higher they got, Toby’s ass puckered at the knowledge of the dank black void underneath him. A half- melted rickety gangway, another heavy steel door, another corridor, matching the one underneath, but this one was only five metres under the surface. Occasional puddles from the leaking cold stream pipes. The acrid smell of hydraulic fluid and the softer smell of congealing lubricant. Another heavy steel door. The ready room. The suits were waiting, hanging like corpses from their charging rigs Lieutenant-General Marjorie was waiting, sitting in one of the original office chairs, resting her feet on what had once been the duty officer’s desk.
“You’re here! O.K. The suits both check out as fully optimal, David, though, I’d pee before I got outside, O.K? The relief system seems pretty manky, possibly dodgy, not sure f it’ll expel properly. Davey, the suit on the left is slightly larger, so that’ll be yours. You boys strip off and we’ll get you changed in time for the changeover; I’ve been up since 0:400 and I need something to eat.”

She knocked the steel wastebasket with her feet as she put them on the floor and stood up. The steel base of the bin screeched on the concrete floor. By the time Toby had looked back at David, his brother had stripped to his pale grey shorts and was engaged in rubbing the goose-pimples from his crinkling body to get the blood flowing.

Marjorie apologised. “Its is a bit much, the place’ll heat pretty quickly, though.” She twisted the dial of the thermostat while David hopped his legs into his suit, dragging the unwieldily bulk of the suit up his legs even as his feet slid into the attached thick-soled boots, which were already dusty from their brief contact with the floor. Toby watched as David’s narrow chest vanished into his “city-camo” armour and walked overt help Marjorie manoeuvre the attached helmet over David’s head. The business-like snap of the helmet locking into place was a good reliable sort of sound and put them all in a better mood. The look in David’s eyes changed from trepidation to a kind of worried determination that gave Toby confidence as his shivering naked back sank into the welcomingly warm interior of his own suit. “Right, lets light this candle!” Toby wasn’t surprised as David’s voice, rendered atonal and metallic by the external speaker on his brother’s suit; spoke the most inspiring line from their favourite 2D; For a moment he was proud of his elder brother; the quote was an almost perfect fit for the moment.
Marjorie didn’t have to admonish the boys to be careful, her feelings were implicit in the way she patted their helmets on their way past her to the door. The sound, and the emotion it contained seemed to ring in Toby’s ears past the fifteen centimetre-thick steel door and all the way up the next ladder. They were now technically on the surface, although there was no hint of it. The walls on each side of the corridor they were in, the General had taught them, were four meter thick, lead-shielded reinforced concrete. The roof was three metres thick. It was thinnest shielding from the outside that the Habitat offered. They took weapons from the racks beside the ladder-hatch. David took a Stirling MK and two extra clips, which he slid horizontally into the pockets on his chest. Toby took a Bullpup F90. He had no idea how long he’d be carrying whatever he picked around so he wanted it to be as light as possible, and of all the weapons available it was the one he scored best with, so he switched barrels to mid length, heavy calibre – somewhere between self protection and overwatch, since they both saw his role as Keeping the point covered; and in this case David was going the point, and he most definitely did not want to anything fuck up. The final corridor was so narrow that Toby’s shoulders almost brushed the sides as he walked. The ceiling was so low that the top of his helmet would scrape the concrete if he bounced on the balls of his feet as he walked. David’s head lights cast him into stark silhouette as he walked in front, stooped slightly to protect the top of his helmet. The corridor was thirty metres long – quite enough for Toby to develop a nasty crick in his neck, to match the lower back pain he’d developed from walking crouched to avoid the lower roof. As it terminated, the corridor opened out slightly till it became a small room nearly two metres across. Toby found David squatting on the floor resting his back against the wall. Directly opposite the main door – forty centimetres of carbon steel, painted pale institutional green that overpowered his eyes and forced his attention,

“There’s a note from Mum-“

David pointed and Toby saw the small page stuck to the door by some inexplicable glue. Across the top was printed the words “While you’re out”. Someone had ignored the possible messages beneath the words and the tick-boxes next to “phoned” and “PM’d” were unticked and underneath that someone had written in a highly recognisable form of block-capitals mutated into running-writing, “CHECK- EVERYTHING AGAIN”. The word “again” was underlined with such vehemence that the pen had torn through the cheap paper. Toby set about checking everything. He recognised Lt: General Margorie’s hand writing and knew that it was quite likely watching on the closed circuit in preference to being present in person an emotionally charged time. She was like that.

David took the hint from Toby, they both checked the clips on their weapons, took turns topping off their air packs so they both had the regulation two hours normal exertion load. Both suit radios still worked, there was a slight crackle in the “receive” on Toby’s but it didn’t seem important and could not be fixed without access to the electronics lab which was down about ten levels and probably twenty minutes walk. David contacted Marjorie, again as per regulations, and she agreed that it could probably wait. So they didn’t wait, they went.

The spyholne in the door was no help, the door was very thick and since the view hole on the inside was a circle two centimetres in diameter, and the outside port was presumably the same size and the door was forty centimetres thick, the view was never going to be great, especially as it seemed to be night outside. At 01:45 David looked quickly at Toby, rested his Stirling on its stock muzzle up and leaning against the wall and took hold of the big wheel in the centre of the door. It was hard work but with their combined strength they got it turning, and by the second full revolution the door was visibly opening with a tooth grating screech of rusted metal. The Gale outside blew the cloud of rust from the hinges into the room and Toby quickly found that it was coating his faceplate in a thin but visible layer. The door stopped opening when it was open to ninety degrees , they stood back and examined the outside. It was history of a sort; as far as they knew they were now as far out of the habitat as anyone had ever been. It was almost jet-black outside. The atmosphere which was completely unbreathable, highly radioactive and had a temperature of minus sixty C was moving horizontally past the doorway at, the gauges informed them, between forty-five and fifty kilometres per hour, with occasional gusts up to seventy. The outside seemed to flash as passing methane ice-crystals caught the light from the doorway and reflected it back into their faces.

David stood up; “According to my schematic,” he waved his paddlet, “the periscope should be like eight metres that way,” he pointed at the corner. “So I reckon if I walk five metres straight out, turn ninety degrees right and walk five metres straight, – I’ll be right on top of it.”
“I’m coming out as far as the five metre mark.”
“Alright. Bring a piton ring and a hammer. The five metre mark can be our second anchor point.”
“Good stuff.” Toby fished a aluminium piton out of the small satchel at his hip. There was a hammer in the steel toolbox to the right of the corridor entrance. The wind was like a force of gravity, almost stronger than the invisible force that held them onto the planet, the wind was another force, fierce and elemental which wanted to push them off it, sideways. Toby knew well that without his suit he would have been dead before he could have taken his second step, so he took his third one and fought the urge to look back instead concentrating on David, two steps ahead of him. Davids tether-line ran out and stopped solid at waist level, a straight line between David and the anchor-point at the habitat’s door. David turned, stepped within range and uncoupled the tether from his waist, clipped it onto the belt on Toby’s middle. Since Toby was closer to the habitat anchor point if only by a half metre, he felt the slack in the rope whipping in the wind, dragging at his balance. David squatted, scrabbled a piton out of his waist pouch, pressed the point into a crack in the concrete ground and thumped it home hard.
David clipped his second tether line, which was made of bright pink woven plastic onto the ring in the carabiner. He stood, bracing himself against a sudden gust in the onslaught of the gale and gave a quick thumbs-up; Toby could not see his face through the shit the wind was throwing past between them and the dark behind his brothers visor. At that moment, a larger than usual shard of the black sleet hit his visor with a resounding splat and whipped away into the murk. Toby felt sick, even a crack in his visor would probably kill him quite quickly. His suit sensors put the outside temperature at minus sixty and the atmospheric pressure low enough to cause the faceplate to explosively outgas in the event of damage, and the completely poisonous atmosphere, or what there was of it, would do the rest – after he stopped trying to hold his breath.

David braced himself and pulled hard on the tether. The Piton was good. It held “Should be alright; if you think I’m getting off true tell me.” David’s voice was so clear in his ears it was as if they were sharing the same helmet. They shook hands, hugging while wearing the suits, was not worth it. David turned and set off, after two steps he turned his suit lights on brilliantly illuminating the ground before him and highlighting him in a halo of whipping sleet. By the time he had gone ten steps;
“You’re getting harder to see, for such low atmospheric pressure there’s a lot of shit flying around.”
“ Shit happens- sometimes I can barely see my- what the fuck is that?”
“What the fuck is what?”
“Such witty repartee.” David seemed to be breathing heavily.
“ It looks like a whirlwind. The sleet is going into it, and in the lights from my suit, its all silver.”
Toby heard wonder in David’s voice, but no fear; nevertheless he crouched and connected his second tether to the same Piton, set off after his brother
“Incredible!”
“What is?”
“Well, you know how whirlwinds move in relation to the surface they’re attached to?”
“I suppose so, why?” But Toby could already guess the answer.
“They have to move, its a physical requirement- either a circle, or an infinity symbol or a meandering snake -type course; the moment is a mathematical requirement of the forces that form them.”
How like David to seize this strangest of opportunities for a lecture.
“So what’s incredible?”
“ I‘ll tell you most emphatically, what whirlwinds do not fucking do;
They do not travel along, then reverse direction. They do not fucking stop spinning on way and the start spinning in the other fucking direction.
And they most fucking emphatically do not stop spinning altogether and stand there like a fucking tree trunk ,fucking looking at me !”
“Whaddaya fucking mean, looking at you? Shoot it Davey!”
“Shoot it? Its not even really there!”

But he heard the sound of David firing, on full automatic over the voice link, until the communicator gave a Nasty electronic screech and shut up for good. After that all he heard was his own ragged breathing as he pulled himself hand-over-hand along his tether line into the full fury of the wind.

(c) Alex Rieneck, 2018

“Lunchtime Bloodstorm”

Most of the time, or the slow days, the “Glenorie” is really silent and that Wednesday was no exception, the building was so quiet that when I turned the pages of James Michener”s “Hawaii”, I had the strange feeling that the noise was echoing back at me from the walls of my office. 

I’d be lying if I said that I was enjoying the book or that it was really holding my attention, because it wasn’t on either count. Mostly I continued reading because the voice in my head made my office, and the building beyond it seem less silent. I heard the street door open down two flights of stairs and my ears pricked up. The street door opens onto Darlinghurst Road and is a fire door as well as the main entrance to the building, so as a design feature it has two steel bar lock things that terrified burning-to-death-residents push against to escape a fire, banged against the wall. Of course the doors don’t do that when they are pushed from the inside and the doors open outwards to allow those burning residents to escape. When that happens the fire alarm goes off, but seeing that in that case the alarm would probably already be going off, I don’t think we have to worry about that; since it wasn’t. 

Instead, far away, the doors opened inwards and hit wall with a bang that echoed up the stairs and I faintly heard a truck reversing on the road outside. And footsteps. Brisk footsteps from flat leather soles and heels. A man. Lighter rapid steps interspersed with the man’s feet. Odd; it didn’t sound like the noise was being made by two feet, in fact the impacts sounded as rapid as radio static. The lift was broken that day. I had been greeted on my arrival by a sign, written in ballpoint on a crumpled Express Post envelope, it read simply, “Broke.”  James, the building’s re-bearded landlord was as stingy with words as he was in paying the upkeep on the ruin. Far away the footsteps started to stamp their way up the fake granite steps.

There are only two tenants on my floor, Kevalas Private Investigations, which was, and is, me and Doctor Julius Woo who occupied the office two doors closer to the stairs. Julius is a very closed-mouth Chinaman originally from Wuhan, and I had gathered that over the years we’d been hardly communicating. That he was the kind of doctor who specialised in “women’s problems”- specifically helping women not get pregnant, or occasionally, the reverse since the addition of various herbs and roots to the diet would make a desired pregnancy far more likely, apparently. I was quite sure that he, on occasion would, with the intercession of other herbs and roots, intervene in a prior existing pregnancy and put a stop to it, but since this was frowned upon by the law and quite seriously illegal, we both kept our mouths shut about it. But there was no way I could have kept from overhearing the disagreement that had spilled from his office into the corridor nearly two years earlier. The young lady had been almost hysterical, the older man, who I took to be the father had done his best to calm her and be, well, fatherly. Woo had been doing his inscrutable best to shut her up. About ten minutes after they’d left, a highly worried young man turned up looking for the girl.  A few minutes after *he’d* left, Woo popped in on a social call, and looked almost comically relieved when I told him my door had been shut and I’d been napping and I had heard nothing. I told him it was very dedicated of him to work on a weekend. He said the same was true of me. Very inscrutable is Woo.

I figured the footsteps outside were for Woo; I didn’t have to check my calendar to know I had no appointments. I keep my own calendar since I have no secretary or office help, for obvious reasons. Suddenly the building around me seemed much bigger, and much emptier. I took my feet off the reception desk so that could check that the nickel plated sub-nose .357 revolver Miss Hadley had kept hidden was still in it’s drawer. It was two months since the dashing Mr Chase had swept Jane off her feet and away to a new life in Palm Springs, but my fingers touched the pearl handle exactly where it had always been. I rolled the chair under the desk and sat upright with my legs in the kneehole. I moved the revolver out of the drawer and into a new pride of place – resting on my balls. It was surprisingly heavy. The footsteps got closer they paused outside Julius’ office. Whoever he was; the climb up the stairs seemed to have tired him. He was panting. The footsteps started again, heading my way. The panting grew louder and I slipped my hand under the desk to cradle the butt of the revolver, it was reassuringly heavy and solid.

Two things happened simultaneously. A big man appeared, in silhouette, in the door of my office, he faced me; he was wearing a belted trench coat in some light material, probably gabardine. The lights of the hall highlighted the resin frames of his spectacles and the brim of his Fedora, his face was a mystery but he was still panting when he tried to speak. To a large extent, the two activities were mutually exclusive, but with a strangled gulp, speaking managed to gain partial control for a few words.

The second thing that happened was so strange and so unexpected that I yelped my greeting and banged my kneecap hard into the underside of the desk. It hurt, so I suavely converted my yelp of shock into a squawk of pain while trying to smile a smile of welcome at the big black gun my guest was pointing at me. It had a muzzle as big as north opening of the Sydney Harbour tunnel.

The man said; “ Collette, stop that.”

And whoever it was who had been slobbering and playfully gnawing at my shin under the desk, stopped. I rolled the chair back a matter of inches from the desk and looked down; I was curious and, as a matter of fact, I was finding staring at that big black gun to be rather stressful. Two black paws appeared on the front edge of my chair between my legs followed by the “pushed in army boot” face of a French bulldog. The face was equipped with a large, wet, shockingly pink tongue and a happy smile. I made my mind up about Collette as quickly as I had about the big black gun. One I liked, one I didn’t. Collette, stretched up and strained to bury her face in my crotch. While I had mixed feelings about the personal services on offer by Collette, mostly because it had been far too long since anyone had wanted to bury their face in my crotch. But  I but was in no doubt about how I felt about the gun.

“Mr Kevalas?” I knew that he knew who I was and that his asking was just a formality, but in civilised societies it is an almost universal rule that he person with the bigger weapon is naturally deferred to, in fact, that’s what civilisation *is*. 

So when he spoke again the next few steps of our acquaintanceship fell into a natural order that, while not precisely comfortable, was at least founded in basic and immutable structures.

“Mr Kevalas, this is a savage twelve gauge single-barrel shotgun. It has been sawn off so that the barrel is seven inches long. It is loaded with birdshot, I’ve forgotten how many pellets that is exactly but I don’t suppose that it actually matters that much and at this range I wouldn’t even guarantee that it would actually kill you outright, but I am completely sure that it would fuck you up right properly. 

Basically, you’d look funny the rest of your life and probably be blind as well – which might make looking in mirrors easier, I have to admit.”

“Why would you want to break poor Collette’s heart just when she’s made a new friend? “

Collette had given up on my plums as being too high in the tree as to be attainable and gone back to diffidently nuzzling the exposed skin of my left shin. As I spoke she stopped that pastime and found herself another hobby. About two seconds later I knew what it was. There was a faint squelching noise from under the desk and right away there was the most abominable stink.

“Oh God, Collette, have you disgraced yourself and made a mess?” He stooped to look under the desk from the front, and in the light I could see he was glowing cherry-red everywhere that was not covered by closely trimmed black beard. I was far less impressed by the alarming way that the muzzle of his hand cannon was waving around yet still pointing mostly at me. I had a very good idea of what it was capable of; I’ve seen the aftermath of a few shotgun deaths over the years, starting with the suicide of my father. I could see that the fucking thing was cocked and I had no desire whatsoever for it to go off, unless perhaps if it missed me and got the dog that had just shit on my foot. I found myself tilting to the right, partly to see into the kneehole of the desk and probably mostly to present less of a target to the fucking shotgun. Courses of activity along those lines have always had a natural appeal to me.

“Oh God! Collette! You’ve been a naughty dog! You’ve embarrassed me in front of Nice Mr Kevalas! What am I going to do with you? I can’t take you anywhere!” There was the clicking noise of one of those ratchet leads and I found myself wondering why a hired goon would have brought a fucking dog along on a stand-over job anyway.

“Collette! You’ve made a mess of Mr Kevalas’ carpet! You’re very naughty!” His voice was stern and simultaneously surprisingly gentle, gentler than I felt because I knew it wasn’t carpet under Mrs Chase’s desk; it was far, far, worse than that.

When Ms. Hadley had come to work for me she’d been working a job as a checkout chick at a Franklins in Chatswood, standing up for an entire 6 hour shift adding up the totals of the piles of shit bargain conscious shoppers needed to live, from powdered soup to poo paper. She’d hated the work but worse than that she’d hated how much her feet hurt. She’d requested that her manager buy her one of those soft rubbery mats that bar staff have behind the bar to soothe their feet.

Her manager, a rather sleek young man from Estonia sat on the corner of his desk both to appear more approachable and to forestall a rectal prolapse and suggested that flattened cardboard cartons would do just as well, even better, since they were free! The store would even donate them, without charge!

The young Miss (as she was then) Hadley restrained herself from explaining to her manager exactly what she thought he could do with his flattened cardboard cartons and bought a rubber mat for herself, out of her own paltry wages. She then stood on it for eight weeks until the start of the Christmas shopping frenzy, and abruptly quit. The mat itself was about three quarters of an inch thick and composed of ridges surrounding diamond shaped holes that went right through the mat to the floor underneath. Young Jane would (strictly against regulations) slip her shoes off, and undetected by anyone poke her toes into the holes and clench them against the resistance offered by the rubber. She told me that it was very calming and pleasant, and it was a habit she continued when her “lucky mat” was placed in the kneehole under her antique Art Deco reception desk. And Collette had just done a lovely wet diarrhoea on it that had soaked down the diamonds into the carpet underneath. The carpet which, of course, I had bought, and which, also of course, had not been cheap. So while my unwelcome guests were attempting to collect their wits, specifically to aim the hand cannon back at me and, knowing my luck, to have a piss as well, I was thinking along the lines of dragging the rubber matt upstairs on to the roof to hose it off, and similar dire thoughts about the hand-knotted Turkish mat under it. 

All thoughts of Mr. Michener’s “Hawaii” were long gone to wherever such things go. I straightened up so that I could more easily see down the barrel of the shotgun with my right eye. At the very back of the cylindrical vanishing point I half-suspected I could see the top of the neatly packaged cartridge of birdshot, already up on its haunches to explode down the barrel and rip my face off my skull. And against all logic, my sense of self preservation was finding itself almost equally matched against my natural fastidiousness, which was vehement in its opinion that being shot to death was not nearly as great a failing as being shot to death and leaving behind a soiled rug. The thought expanded and embroidered itself in a kind of yammering hysterical howl. If I was shot with that gun, most of the good bits of my head would be spread over the wall behind me. The original poster for  “The Glass Key” would be ruined – albeit in a particularly apt way, but it was priceless to me. I internally scolded myself for not having it framed and put under glass – and bulletproof glass at that. But when I could have afforded it, it hadn’t occurred to me and right at that moment, the whole subject drove me into a snarling rage.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to clean up after your fucking shitty dog?”

He was stupid for sure, but deep down, behind the gun and under the trench coat I got the impression he was quite a decent guy; the kind of man who would run head first into a brick wall chasing a football if he was told to. In any event the question seemed to take him by surprise, its profound normality seemed to defuse the whole gun/cowering victim scenario that had been unable to stand up to pedestrian reality.

“It’s not my dog!” There was a trace of a bleat in his voice.

“Well who’s fucking dog *is* it? And why did you bring it with you? Was it *supposed* to shit under my desk? Is it a trained shitter?” 

I was still really angry and the first sign of weakness on his part was like petrol on a fire for me. I turned into a real shrew. It was only with difficulty that I realised how hard I was pushing my luck, and I strangled my words off. He stood up straight, squared his shoulders, flicked his arm, and with a scrabble and a yelp, Collette flew past him and back into the corridor. She barked once, outraged at her treatment.

”Not my dog.”

“Whose dog it it then?” I was in a unpleasantly mixed state of mind where my disapproval of his off-hand animal cruelty struck a nerve of potential human cruelty visited on me. These thoughts were offset by the truly abominable stink emanating from under the desk. It had me wondering whether I’d ever get the stink out of my clothes. Whatever it was that Collette had been eating, it had definitely been a mistake.

Out in the hall Collette made a noise like a cross between a growl and a stomach-grumble. I found myself thinking that the hall was polished vinyl and mopped clean – not that our beloved landlord would ever leap at an opportunity to mop anything – or at a chance to pay someone else to, either. The only things he was interested in were computer games – and big noting himself to his string of unbelievably credulous girlfriends.

“Oh, fuck.”

“Look, why are you here anyway?” I wanted to know immediately. The shotgun had gone back to being pointed at my face, and I didn’t want to die ignorant.

“Thing is, I wanna tell you now, but it was s’pozed to be different.”

“Whattaya mean?”

“I was supposed to turn up – I’d say; Simon Kervalas?”

“If you said “Yes.” I’d pull the gun out from under my coat and say; ”Remember Cynthia Sheinberg?” Then I’d shoot you in the face.”

Fuck. I *did* remember Cynthia Sheinberg, 

“Cynthia? Fuck. Why would she want me dead? We split up alright, no dramas.” 

He was watching me closely but the gun had wandered away from my face and was now pointed approximately at the desk blotter.

“You think so? That isn’t exactly how she tells it.”

I stared at him, mutely.

“I mean, I wanted to know too, so I asked her. Mostly I don’t – the money is enough.”

“Money?”

“Ten thousand for a simple job,” a strange movement flickered across his lips, “Like this.”

“So?”

“So What?”

“So why does she want me dead? We talked less and less and one day she gets me on the phone and says we should stop seeing each other and hangs up in my ear, cold as a carpet snake. Nothing about seeing me in hell, or hating me. Amicable.”

He gazed at me fixedly from under the brim of his hat.

“She’d come to meet you here at your office. She met Jane your secretary. They became friends, then they became lovers; in the laundry room on the roof here actually.” His face was hard to read with the hall light behind him; I don’t suppose mine was. I could feel his gaze on me. 

“Jane told her about how you’d been pressuring her for ‘favours’ and that did the trick. For some reason Cynthia put a couple of hundred dollars on a very long shot at the Randwick Spring Carnival – and here I am.”

The gun was pointing back at my face. I knew I’d been juggling Jane Chase’s gun under the desk through our exchange, and I finally overcame my natural and culturally imposed inhibitions and shot him from under the desk. I aimed for his balls because I could actually see where they were, while his loose trousers disguised the precise location of his knees. As it happened the bullet hit him high in the left thigh, and I learnt later, shattered his left femur. He fell forward like a toppled redwood, his head ending up almost on top of my feet, so I shot that, too right through its glowering top. Lo and behold the dum-dumed bullet splatted through his skull sending a mini-explosion of more brains than I would have expected out under the desk to spray my shoes, socks and exposed shins. A tablespoon-full sized dollop landed directly on top of Collette’s shit. 

The dog. Instantly sensing the cessation of parental-surrogate control, broke free, charged under the desk and gobbled the pile up, shit and brains both. She then attempted to lick my face, but I fended her off.

Sworn in front of witnesses;

Senior Constable Pamela Wheen

Det Sgt Daniel Parrot

The Case of the Talkative Turd

Of all the orifices in all the world, she had to crawl out of mine. I was really quite exceptionally unlucky when I think about it, in the normal passage of events I could easily have produced a talking shit and never known about it, since, by and large, in my defecations I am as much as possible, a creature of habit as I can manage. Simply put, I usually use the ensuite toilet in my office, which is situated in a rather scrungy Art Deco block that was once a small hotel in Sydney’s Potts Point. In this age of increasingly liberal social attitudes towards sexual infidelity, the rather poky office is the best that Kevalas Private Investigations can afford, while still holding  any reasonable expectations of continuing to eat. So I, Simon Kevalas P.I., shit at the office as often as possible and let Cedric Rosten my wholly repugnant Landlord, pay for every flush. The thing is, the toilets at the “Howard” are the same vintage as the building – impressive antique china units with at least ten inches of water waiting under the arse to smother the smell of every plop; so I am inclined to think if I had dropped  this bitch of a turd on any normal day, she would have drowned and I would have flushed her away, forever unknowing. 

Sadly however, that was not to be that day. I was in hospital. I had had reason to check the after-lunch whereabouts of a married gentleman who worked in an office on the seventh floor of the Dymock’s building on the upper end of George street. As it happened the gentleman in question was not at his desk, which explained his husband’s frequent failure to reach him on the office phone and confirmed, by inferential logic and a realistic dose of cynicism, that he was in fact at Randwick racecourse putting the mortgage money to what he considered to be a better use. The confirmation of everyone’s suspicions took only a handful of minutes by questioning his workmates and almost before I knew it I was back on the crowded footpath mentally debating the best way of getting back to the office and rewarding myself with some sorely needed sleep. A train meant riding to central and changing trains. It was an unattractive prospect, but since there was no applicable bus and a taxi was quite beyond my means, I decided to walk, and was almost instantly run over by a bicycle courier and his load of pizzas.

Before you ask, yes it hurt. The impact broke my right shin, my left collar-bone and chipped a bone in my left elbow. I bit the tip off my tongue, there-by putting my brand new dental implants to productive use. And to think if I hadn’t spent nearly twenty thousand dollars getting “cut- price” dentistry in Thailand, I would merely have gummed my tongue and saved myself months of misery with my new prosthetic flapper which is thoroughly inferior to the original flapping device. In any event the idiot pizza delivery rider handily solved my dilemma of how I was getting back to the office – the ambulance took me, siren howling straight to Saint Vincent’s hospital Darlinghurst, which is less than a minute’s limp, by crutch from the office. 

In the hospital I soon learnt the golden rule, first everything is crazy rush so that you have longer to wait. To give them their due, I was given Morphine in the ambulance because the girls didn’t like seeing grown men crying but the Morphine also meant I didn’t mind the wait at X-ray as much as I would have if I wasn’t drugged. I even somewhat enjoyed lying on the gurney wearing nothing but a paper nightgown in a corridor outside X-ray. It was interesting. Everyone was a character and everyone was in a heightened emotional state, or whacked out of their minds on drugs, or both. There was the guy the Police brought in. He was off his head on ice and god knows what else. The Emergency room staff locked him in what was basically the ”dangerous nutcase observation room.” Which was a small walled box with one door and a very big bulletproof-glass window. They went away, so I observed as he tore his hospital nightgown off, (his was a rather nice pale pink whereas mine was a rather naff blue I didn’t care for at all). Once he had the nightgown off he did his best to tear it into small squares; he then set about eating it. Then he threw himself bodily at the window and squeaked down it. Then he started masturbating very fast, like he was on the verge of coming, the head of his penis so close to the glass that I could occasionally hear his thumb knuckle bang on the glass. He didn’t have an orgasm but he went through a cycle of amusingly extreme facial expressions as if he was just about to. I and the nurses observed him. We didn’t have much choice and that was what he was in there for.

After awhile, if I may venture a small pun, he started to give me the shits. Of course there were a variety of reasons for the state of my bowel, from the Yeeros I had had for lunch on Illawarra Road Marrickville which, at the time, I had suspected contained more than the legally acceptable amount of the owner’s back hair. Then of course there had been the “accident” itself which had been no small impact, taking me from the rear quarter and throwing me bodily across the footpath to drape me violently across the wheeled luggage of Ms Yasuko Emory, a wholly blameless tourist from Osaka, who had the last day of her week in Australia and her luggage, sullied by her encounter with my misfortune and the blood from my scalp wound. Then, of course, there was the morphine in the Ambulance, (and the Endone in the Emergency  Room) both of which, being opioids, constipate the blissed-out recipient better than a long-distance plane flight.

So, I lay on the gurney, both before and after my X-Rays and I watched the mad wanker in the observation room and I endured the rippling spasms in my poor  tummy and to pass the time I wondered what the wanker would do if he somehow got out of the observation room and into the larger and rather more interactive world. After a few more minutes of fun I snatched at a passing nurse and told him that I was going to need a toilet, soon; and I must admit the fantasy of a nice ruminative shit in a quiet toilet somewhere away from the wind-up monkey pounding his cymbals and the general ongoing drama of the Emergency Room was an enticing one. The nurse, who had two rings in his right ear and perhaps half a barrel of Arabian crude oil in his short dark hair, spiked me with his emerald eyes and asked efficiently, “Number Ones or number twos?”

I was aghast. In my experience this is simply not the kind of question one asks a grown man, particularly not one to whom the answer matters. I forced myself into another crash course of life-readjustment. ”After all, I reminded myself, you’re a *patient* now. In hospital. You have to be patient! thats why they call them patients!”

He wasn’t. “Well? Which is it? Ones or Twos?” he started lifting at the sheet near my waist as if he might be able to tell by sight, “And God help me, he might!” I wibbled to myself and crumpled the paper sheet tighter around me.

I surrendered. ”Twos; I think.”

He almost smiled. “I’ll get you a bedpan.”

He must have expected the response he saw in my face, “oh come on! You’re too injured to be lifted onto a toilet and it’d take two people!” He cast a glance at the observation room where, as far as I could see everyone was doing their best to ignore the cymbal-bashing activities available for our perusal.

“Its not so bad; really. I’ll get you some privacy, so you try. Just for me.”

Privacy sounded nice. In return I was prepared to try. ‘Privacy’ turned out to be a parking spot in one of the bays in emergency, surrounded by a vile ochre curtain so light that it billowed every time someone outside bustled past. But I minded that a lot less than the people who stood just outside the curtain and had long, and sometimes intensely personal and interesting conversations as if they were in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

So my day slowed again in the disconcerting way that shock and the drugs seemed to think I should find entertaining. One second I was in a bit of a dither on the footpath on George street the next, I took off, and flew like Superman(C) to land on my hospital gurney where I covered myself with my crackly paper cape and tried to shit in a bedpan. At first I was convinced that the whole sorry business would be an abject failure – that my turd (if there was one) would somehow miss the pan and end up in the bed with me and I would then drop off into an highly energetic sleep and roll around in it. I would wake, as brown as a walnut, be thrown out of the hospital  and be forced to roam the world alone, disconsolate, a pariah to my own species. In short, I was tired and emotional as well as being physically damaged and heavily drugged. Weirdly enough, it was all actually quite pleasant. Of course it became a lot more pleasant when I felt a large greasy cigar slide out of my arse and drop directly into the bedpan with a distinctly splatty noise on the paper the bedpan was lined with. My stomach immediately felt glorious relief.

At first I thought it was someone’s abandoned headphones or perhaps a phone that had been put down and abandoned mid-call. A small voice high- pitched, at the outer edges of hearing. 

“Hello?” ”Hello?” Hey ya big arsehole, ya just going to lie there?” 

Truth be told, I was. The paper sheet and nightgown rattled quite loudly and interfered with my ability to separate individual sounds and voices from the now comparatively muted but still very busy new environment that I was in. 

“Hey, yah fat arsehole, down here! Doncha know its rude to ignore a lady?” 

For no reason I could fathom I was sure that the voice was directed at me. I was quite sure that it was not my mobile, which was the first explanation that had occurred to me, because firstly I keep my phone not in my pants pocket as many do, but in the left lapel pocket of whatever jacket I happen to be wearing, and I was naked except for a paper nightgown and lastly because I could see my phone on the bedside table – it was looking rather strange to be sure – rather grainier than it usually did and the reflections in its shiny surface made it look less flat than I knew it to be. The longer I stared at it, the more it appeared to change shape very slowly, like plasticine being modelled by invisible fingers towards shapes that would adhere to some unnatural geometry; and still the squeaky voice squeaked on at the periphery of audibility, becoming increasingly like a kind of musical tinnitus, that existed in tandem with my thoughts, simultaneously antagonistic and contributory, I was hearing the voice as a kind of music rather than regarding it as an attempted communication, until I realised that the voice had just squeaked,

”Hey Cunt! One of those ‘roids of yours is the size of a motherfucking grape! If that fucker bursts, you’ll probably bleed to death and I’ll probably drown! I’d appreciate it if you were careful when you wiped your fucking arse! Hey! Arsehole! Listen to me!”

At a point midway through this tirade I shifted my body slightly to relieve the stress on my back and a most disconcerting thing happened; the voice increased markedly in volume and clarity, and as luck would have it, on the words “wiped your fucking arse.”  Which started me thinking, of the un-wiped status of my own as it lay draped over the bedpan, since due the sudden increase in volume of the voice when I’d shifted on the bedpan I had instantaneously developed the theory that a mobile phone – not necessarily mine, might be in the bedpan, and  whats more, mid-call to someone who liked swearing a lot. The idea filled me with purpose. I used my button, a high-technology nurse summoner to summon a nurse; explained the most easily understood portion of my dilemma and was given a plastic container of moist towelettes to wipe my “bottom” with and a pump-bottle of alcohol-based hand scrub to disinfect my fingers. The nurse left, looking somewhat insulted when I rejected her offer that she wipe my clacker for me. After a moment the curtain wafted to a standstill and I surreptitiously started dragging the bedpan out from under me. 

”Oh thank God! Thats better!”

It wasn’t. The reek of shit was criminal in the small area. I couldn’t resist. I was still under the belief that the bedpan had a mobile phone in it, and since I knew where my phone was, and consequently wasn’t, I wanted to know what brand this one was, because, well, I have an interest in such things and if it was an interesting one I would’ve played with it for awhile before working out how to return it to it’s owner. Specifically I would have searched out the porn, and the pictures of the owner’s genitalia. Every phone I’ve ever had access to has had a few of those, and they are fantastically similar, always taken on a lonely night in a bed with ugly sheets, using the phone flash so the penis looks like a Catholic Cardinal in his hat, or the vagina looks like a hairy Yeeros. I was bored. I was looking forward to cracking this phone, to take my mind off my misery. 

I rudely grabbed the  bedpan from the nurse, placed it on my bed and rolled around like a walrus so I could see into it. I’d rehearsed the movement in my head over the last few minutes since I was well aware that I was way too physically mangled to expect my body to function in the “old” way. Anyway, I grabbed the pan, thereby apparently terminally offending the nurse, who, it occurred to me had probably already had her sensibilities somewhat abraded by the ‘Wanker At the Window.’ And flopped around to look, which brought my face low over the pan and caused the nurse to scream ”No! Don’t!” – apparently under the misapprehension that I was about to take a big bite out of the huge, lumpy somewhat hairy cigar-shaped shit less than a centimetre from the tip of my nose. The combination of unexpected events resulted in me getting a fair quantity of shit in my ear. As this happened a voice screamed loudly, directly into my ear, “Oww! Be careful, you fuckwit! While at the same moment that the nurse, with a presence of mind and reaction speed that I would definitely not have associated with hair colour, attempted to help but made matters rather worse by dragging  my shoulders in the wrong direction.

This was the moment that Doctor Ballinger, the head of the Emergency Room entered and politely enquired at a volume loud enough to be heard over the ruckus; “What the Fuck is going on in here?”

“Mr Kevalas” said the nurse, indicting me with a nod of her curls.

“Nurse. Why is the patient covered in excrement? It looks like warpaint!”

“Get fucked you pompous booby!”

“Who said that?”

“Who said that?”

Both of them were staring accusingly at me, as if I had suddenly learned to talk out of my ear. As a matter of fact the two body bits are connected, as I  could taste shit, I lay there, practically naked except for my warpaint. If you happen to be interested it doesn’t taste very nice – I imagine even the addition of special sauce or secret herbs and spices would help much.

“Sir this hospital will not tolerate offensive or threatening behaviour towards its staff. If you don’t calm down I’m required to call security!”

“You don’t frighten me you dozy bloodnut bitch!”

“Are you some sort of fucking ventriloquist? Your lips didn’t move?”

I’ll give him credit, Ballinger may have looked like a morally corrupt hunchbacked ferret, but he was an observant fucker.

“Haven’t you got beady little eyes, cunt?”

Apparently my hairy shit agreed with me. Ballinger bounded across the bay in one pounce, snatched the bedpan from me and stuck his very impressive hooter into it. I could imagine his eyes crossing.

“Fuck!! Who the fuck  do you think you’re looking at, Woody Woodpecker?”

”What the fuck is this?” Ballinger’s voice sounded slightly hollow, reflecting out of the pan.

“Help! Get this fucker away from me! He’s gonna eat me!”

“So far as I know, its a shit, it came out of my arse.”

“It talks.”

“So do you you bird-nosed cunt!”

“What *is* this?” Ballinger stuck the nose so close under my face. I thought for a millisecond that his plan was a kind of custard-pie splat joke. I recoiled briskly to a reasonable distance and got another chance to examine my progeny up too close.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Bristol chart and at the time, I wasn’t either, but since the business described here I have studied it closely. She was a perfect number two as it happened, albeit with some number of short curly hairs projecting from along her length, the hairs festooned with tiny wet globules the same colour as the main lump, but somehow at the angle Ballinger was holding the pan under the lights I saw what I had failed to see on my first, admittedly brief glance, that this turd bore a marked resemblance to a crudely fashioned sculpture of a woman, classifiable either as the purposefully inept modern school or someone trying hard to copy the primitive impact of the Lady of Willendorf. As I was coming to some kind of terms with this idea the top of the turd split, assumed the shape of a mouth and shouted; “Who the fuck are you gaping at, Arsehole?”

“I- I’ve never seen a talking shit before.”

“Never seen one? Don’t you fucking vote?”

“So why me? Why am I graced with your genteel presence?”

“Yeah!” Ballinger piped up from his spot near the gap in the curtain.

“You still here, ratty? And you, arsehole, you want me to spell it out for you?”

This was hard going for someone in my weakened condition.

“I suppose you’d better.” 

She snorted, “Call yourself a fucking detective. Alright Arsehole, yesterday you ate a Yeeros. That was me. That creepy malaka who cooked me and served you, ran me over the night before, when I was minding my own business and shooting up on a bench in a park in in Bexley. Cunt. She was off her face, and she figured that the Yeeros disposal method was better than explaining how she’d accidentally ran over someone who owed her drug-money. So she tied my feet to a see-saw, drove the car off me, Boompa, Boompa. Over my ribs. Finished me off with the jack handle and took me back to to the shop to make Yeeros out of me. You ate the Yeeros, shit me out. Thats it.”

“So she killed you on purpose? Are you sure?”

“See these hairs? They’re off her back – I’ve got all that putana mooni’s memories. The Maggot cunt!”

“Mind your fucking language. And anyway, why? What was her motive? You seem like such a nice person.”

“Fank you for saying so dear – I am. Just very misunderstood. It was money. Its always money. Me’n Jadon, Jadon’s my eldest – he’s nearly thirteen, I think, between the two of us we’d run up a bit of a bill, for party-ice. Nearly twelve fucking Fousand. It was her fucking fault -we were selling on consignment and just kept stringing us along ‘an pulling numbers out of her arse. Anyway, one day Jadon was off his face an’ he told me she’d been letting him pay for the stuff by him shagging her! I went spare! Jadon’s me fucking kid! He’s me bubee! I tole her either she wipes out the debt, or I pay her from the money fucking Ray Martin gives me for the story!”

“You told her that? That was pretty fucking stupid that was.”

“You know when you talk you sound like a fucking water buffalo, arsehole? The piece of tongue I got was the important bit.”

“Fuck you.”

“ Uck yourself! In fact- take a flying Uck at a rolling donut, Take a flying Uck at the moon! It’s off to Speech therapy for you, Uckwit!”

“Its pretty fucked up to make fun of someone’s handicap, you know that?” 

“You watch, it, or one night when you’re asleep I’ll slide back up your arse and refuse to come out!”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“Well, I admit, I’m not fucking homesick.Your pooing machinery is in a pretty shitty state, so to speak, the wallpaper is hanging in flaps and the floor is squishy. You need a good clean out. More fibre.”

“less Yeeros especially.”

“ Yeah? Fuck you Malaka.”

Maybe I’d take my doctor up on his offers of a colonoscopy. At the very least, the process would clean any last vestiges of this bitch out of my premises

“That’s not very nice, Arsehole!”

“What? You can read my mind?”

“Its not *your* mind, arsehole, Its *Ours* We’re each other.”

“Fuck that, as far as I’m concerned, we separated when my arsehole snipped you off.”

“Thats not how the universe works, arsehole – we’re linked, even when we become flies – then birds, we’ll probably even still be able to talk when we’re both cat-shit.”

“An One way and the other, cat-shit is very communicative. That’s why its so smelly. probably.”

Just like the shit to get the last word. Fuck.

© Alex Rieneck 2018