AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
Studying cheese in Tibet came one whose feet were smelly and whose clothes were made of polystyrene, a synthetic ie person-made (rather than occurring naturally in nature like a natural fibre) substance used to form things out of it. This one, whose name was a verbal device used to circumvent the need for a description (eg "that bird with the big nose who always comes by at about 9 in the morning") every time others wished to refer to her, was, like so many others, in search of The Truth. Which may have been this:
Run as fast and as far as you dare, wherever you end up you're always there.
This was a true Truth, unlike so many, despite its hippy blathering form, and she could have found it easily by reading a particular comic where I first read it. She would then have realised that her journey to Tibet in search of it from the elegant close where she resided except for those times when she was not there was unnecessary. If she had realised it would also be this arduous she would never have left the comfort of her detached in the first place. There were large and strange footprints in the butter, and spoor such as discarded crisp bags littered the drip tray. Oh she was not in Tibet after all, that would be far too interesting.
Rolling out of the fridge, Bellara Flloozle brushed the ice from her scuba suit (the polystyrene bit was a lie) and became a slightly less surreal fictional character in but a few keystrokes.
1. The shed scale of a small fish; larger than a small spider, yet not quite as large as a thing that is not quite as small as it.
2. The scale shed of Tonoceros Q Whipsnake, a proud feature of the model railway system he has built in his real (full-size) shed.
3. A bottle of nuts.
4. A way to get out of such duties as hockey practice; monitoring a street corner; flimflamming the schedule; eating one's peas.
5. Not knowing what to do to practise a thing that one wishes to do well, professionally, in an eccentric manner and/or for no monetary reward.
Back in the saddle again. From edge to edge, from end to end, but the nuisance swimmer, invariably male, swims from corner to diagonally opposite corner, thus impeding the progress of the maximum number of people. While one wishes he would drown, one will be content for him merely to vacate the pool. Although not in the pool.
Trom pom tiddly pa boo.
Velly strange indeed, the insidious blah de blah blah, and you thought musak was nerkx. Yes nerkx. Notr a typing mistake at all, unlike notr.
The thunderhead gathering over the city inspires wonder in the heart of Mogi. She wonders, "perhaps I should have brought a coat?" When the rain rains, for some reason Mogi always seems to get wetter than everybody else. Maybe it is her impatience with the sheltering process, maybe it is due to her usual position far from shelter when the rain begins, or maybe after all it is just that she is more porous than other people. Her penchant for seeing things through to the bitter end means she is often to be found traipsing home in foot-rending new shoes rather than taking advantage of a taxi, and she is rarely without a plaster on her foot. Said plaster is usually forgotten until she swims, when it loosens itself and flaps about in the turbulence of her stroke, meaning she has to rip it off and surreptitiously place the offending item on the side of the pool, where it will further offend upon discovery by an attendant.
Ha ha ha ho ho ho hee hee hee. Or as some people would have it, "heh".
No smoking in the no smoking area please. No not smoking in the smoking area. Do not talk to the driver. Because he is a surly old grump. What a joy it is to be a budgerigar! Despite the unfortunate cruelty of the commonly used name being the aborigine for "good eating" - the alternative term is "grass parakeet" - to be one of the smallest members of the parrot family is to enjoy the wide, wild spaces of the Australian outback, to have the resilience to find water in the most unlikely of foodstuffs, and to be a tough little bugger when all's said and done. Or, it could be, if one is a domestic budgie, to have a cage of one's own, with a constant supply of seed, millet, grit and water and occasional treats such as dandelion leaves (small and juicy for preference) and slices of apple. Of course, one can also eat whatever one's people are having, if one is willing to skitter around the dining paraphernalia of pepper pots and sauce bottles. Potatoes in all their forms, from mash to crisps, are a great favourite, while the toffee from the middle of a Marsh bar can be most amusing.
Books are a great source of fun, for whatever the content they are always printed on paper. A beak is ideal for tearing the woodpulpy manifestation, and one can produce a fascinating pattern of nibbles at the top of the page. Using the same technique, if one's cage is placed against a wall, one can customise the wallpaper behind. This, however, is a finite application of beakbirdship and is likely to be accomplished while still a young chickadee.
Or one may choose to be a pussycat, which is an excellent option as it includes such joys as strokes, cuddles, sleeping, curling up on top of the TV and disappearing for days on end being fed by the old lady down the road.
Or you might be a human bean. Bad idea.
My head hurts. What's on TV?
"Now, to win a week in a caravan in the car park of the superstore of your choice, plus five bones, that's FIVE BONES, of spending money, in the next three minutes name… 1001 things for a fish to do on a rainy day!"
"Swim this way, swim that way, swim the other way, repeat cycle 1000 times."
BING!
"Yeeeeeesssssss!!! Velstris, you've just won THREE YEARS IN A DAUB AND WATTLE HUT IN THE MIDDLE OF A SWAMP! Now all that remains is for me to make a feeble joke, probably a pun, but I can't be bothered, and we'll see you next week on You Cheat, We Lie! By the way, Velstris, we lied about the holiday. You'll be going home with our famous You Cheat, We Lie plasticine teapot."
The Author hauled his weary body from desk to sofa and poured himself another coffee from his trusty flask, The Last Cigarette burning a hole[1] in his mental task list. It had been a-number-he'd-forgotten years since he accepted the challenge from his old schoolchum Screamin' Steve to "write a story with the title…" and he'd got no further than the first page, although that was pretty good. He just couldn't think of a twist, an underlying meaning, a metaphor not nor nuthen to hang it on. Every time he thought about it his brain sid slideways and he was compulsed to merely hammer away at the keyboard venting random strings of words, oh he loved the feel of fingers on keys, the way the words appeared as if by magic on the screen, plain and legible in contrast to the spider-in-inkwell scrawl of his longhand (he often drafted in longhand while away from the computator, for instance down the dole or whiling away in coffee bar eg the Grotto or the Matchbox, and interpreting the wigglesquiggle later he often found the storyline mutating from the original as though filtered through the Follyhood book-to-film process). And once it was there he could do anything he liked to it! He could change the font! Ooh, he could move chunks of plot from one chapter to another if he wished! If he ever got around to developing a plot! Or further than the first chapter! But every time he tried to apply himself to a new project he felt The Last Cigarette prodding at his conscience, nagging away at him. "You promised! You promised Screeve you would send me to him so he could put it in his fanzine![2]"
No, his work was at a halt until he could finish the promised story. In the meantime he could only write tosh such as the above, with one exception; the Continuing Story he had begun as a diversion in a letter to his other old schoolchum Wafter Willims, which seemed to have a life of its own and just needed a shove in the wrong direction every so often to keep it from consolidating a plot or meaning. But for now, his thoughts were in shreds and it was all he could do to comprehend the blurtings of the tellybox in front of him. The muse had fled, surely exhausted after hours of jumping on his head in hobnailed boots. As he vegetated he pondered in the back of his mind where next he could send his characters, what torments he could inflict on them in the name of literature… He was glad he was The Author, and not being written by a low-talent scribbler like himself, with a penchant for cartoon-like surrealism and the infliction of humorous tortures on the characters… the thought unaccountably excited a suspicious anxiety in the pit of his stomach, as though a small flicker of light were about to spark… there was the faintest suggestion of a classically slow-dawning realisation… the ghost of a promise that something was about to be twigged… Just before a chocolate elephant burst through the wall, chased by a lamp-post brandishing a blowlamp, with which it melted the cocoa-based pachyderm, smothering The Author in creamy-dark confectionery. Luckily the Custard Squad, a division of the Treacle Pudding Brigade, arrived, taking the lamp-post into custody for its own protection and swarming about the room with buckets of hot, soapy tea with which they performed clean-up operations. Alas, they were not licensed to treat writers, so after the Squad had rebuilt the wall using their own recipe for Jammikin Sponge, it was off to the bath with him. Now what was he doing before this untimely interruption…? No, it was gone. Well, never mind, it can't have been important, he never came up with anything good these days.
*
THE LAST CIGARETTE
OK, you little
bastard, you're full of god knows how many chemicals, you taste bad, you make
me cough, I hate you and I need you.
Because of this I am going to set fire to your head and inhale your
dying breaths. Don't take it
personally, I did the same thing to all your colleagues. You just happen to be the last one I got to,
and you are going to be my last ever cigarette, therefore I shall smoke you
with a vengeance. Look, if it wasn't
me, it would be somebody else. Would
you rather I just threw you in the bin?
That would just rob you of your purpose. You were born to persecute the weak-willed, to feed their
addiction, to make money for the strong-willed - or rather, the conscienceless.
If you want to know
what I'm writing on you, it's "Karen's Last Cigarette", and yes, it's
all going to fit on even though you're not a superking because I'm doing it in
two lines, and it's not easy with a biro as I don't want to pole holes in you
through pressing too hard. That would
spoil all the fun of smoking you, which you may or may not be pleased to hear
won't be for a while yet. All the other
times I've tried to give up I've ended up caving in and having to buy a whole
packet of your relations, and I couldn't not smoke the other nine, could
I? That would be a waste of money. Maybe if your creators sold you in fives it
would be easier. Anyway, after I'd
smoked all ten, I would find myself addicted again. I'm a cigaholic, I
guess. Why is there no Cigaholics
Anonymous? Maybe there is and I don't
know. Hello, my name is Karen
Wainwright and I'm a cigaholic. So, I'm
going to keep you until I reach that moment of weakness and then I'm going to
smoke you right down to the filter and hate every moment of it. You don't realise how awful cigarettes taste
until you haven't had one for a couple of days. Besides, if I promise myself a last smoke I won't go around
thinking oh god I must never touch another ciggie. Psychology, you see. But
you wouldn't know much about that, being a cigarette.
There, all neatly
labelled. Now I'm going to pop you back
in your box to stop you getting all crumpled and broken, otherwise you wouldn't
be any use by the time I need you.
Need! Isn't that pathetic? Nobody needs to draw filthy tar down their
throat! We do it because we're
addicted, and pretend we like it.
Personally I don't get a great deal of pleasure out of coughing my lungs
up in the morning, and it's bloody inconvenient on a long drive when I just
have to have that nicotine hit and end up swapping a fag from hand to hand to
change gear and try to get that long pillar of ash into the ashtray. You're a bloody nuisance, you cigarettes.
OK, into your little
home you go. You may think of it as the
condemned cell if you wish. I know it's
cruel, but after all, your bosses don't care about all the suffering and cancer
they cause, all they're interested in is profit and I'm sick of being
blackmailed into contributing to it.
What's more, I don't appreciate having to support the Government with a
large proportion of my hard-earned. And
it's no good trying to talk me into giving up drinking or driving, drinking
helps me be happy and driving gets me from A to B, but you just make me
sick. All right, I'm sorry, I know
you're just a pawn in their game. Just
think of it as a challenge. You'll
fulfil your function eventually, then we'll both be happy, OK? I'll sit there thinking how glad I am that I
don't smoke any more, filthy habit, and you'll lie there in the ashtray,
nothing but a stub, dead and content.
Lucky bugger.
In my bag you go, and
now I'm going to wash all these filthy ashtrays and put them away, all except
this one with "A Present From Mallorca" on it to remind me how
pathetic you must be when people give you souvenir ashtrays as presents! They'll have to bring me back stupid
sombreros and Spanish dancer dolls now.
At least I can just hide those at the back of a cupboard; I always feel
obliged to use the ashtrays.
Suddenly
a chocolate elephant burst into the room, pursued by a standard lamp
brandishing a lighter, with which it ignited Karen's cigarette, puffing it away
in seconds…
His dreams were getting quite surreal, no that's not right, what's the word, silly, that could never happen. The unfinished project was bugging him even in sleep.
Karen
ran the hot water and reached automatically for a cigarette…
No! He'd shifted into third person, and nobody reaches for a cigarette while waiting for the sink to fill, you'd only get a few puffs in before you had to start washing up. Unless…
Karen
ran the hot water and automatically plucked her last cigarette from the
packet. Flicking her lighter, she
inhaled deeply, savouring the fix. The
sink full, she turned off the tap and plunged her hands into the water before
she realised.
"Eric!" she withdrew her hand; Eric hung limply
between her fingers, sodden and extinguished.
"Eric! I've drowned
you! I'm so, so sorry!"
Oh
my god, what have I done? I need a fag,
oh no that was my last one, where are my shoes, I'll run to the shop and get
some more…
Only three paragraphs and he'd even included a twist! It was still in the third person, he'd totally changed the style, and he didn't know why Karen had called her cigarette Eric, but all he had to do was make a few alterations and he could call it finished and send it off to Screeve, who had probably moved by now or the fanzine had folded but it didn't matter, his conscience was clear, he could move on to other things! He could write proper stories instead of the never-ending soap opera that was The Continuing Story! It was already awash with far too many characters to keep track of or invest with purpose, and he had never been able to think of an over-arching plot to tie it all together. He dragged himself from his inspired dream and scribbled it down on the big pad he kept by the bed before he could forget it, then slid himself out and fell down the stairs to the computer to commit it to disk.
The computer was just booting up when there came a knock at the doorbell.
"Go away!" he cried. "It's three o'clock in the ayem!"
"No it's not," answered the door, "It's three in the pum!"
The Author cautiously pulled aside a curtain and a ray of sunlight, denied access for so long, gleefully shot into the room and poked him in the eye.
"Ow. All right, hang on."
He did the door-answering thing.
"Good pum, Mr Aardvark, I wonder if you could take the time to answer a few questions?"
"No, not really, I…"
"Thank you, shall we get comfortable?"
The woman of indeterminate age with the sensible glasses and business suit somehow slid through the cautious gap he had opened and marched into his front room. Dang. He followed to find her seated cosily in the armchair, so perched himself on the arm of the sofa, primly arranging his nightshirt around his knees.
"Now, Mr Aardvark, can I start by asking whether you mind if I smoke?" sliding a packet of Nobles out of her bag.
"Er, yes."
"Yes.." she made a tick on her papers and lit a cigarette.
"Question 2… what brand of cigarettes would you prefer I not smoke?"
"Well, actually…"
"Blue Stripe, Hyperqueens, Koffnums, Splinters, Coffinales, Humbert & Serf, Bilson & Flodges, other?"
"Bilson & Flodges?"
"B&F's…" writing with one hand, the other casually flung to one side, the cigarette in it waving about dangerously. "Are you considering taking out home insurance in the next five minutes?"
Hot ash sprinkled from the cigarette onto some paper that someone had carelessly left sitting on the computer desk.
"No, not really… oh hang on, could we make that the next five seconds?" He had spotted the paper bursting into flames.
"Oh dear, silly me… what are we to do? I know!" she cuffed the paper into the wastepaper basket, which was fortuitously a metal one with a picture of a little terrier puppy on it. "That should contain it. Oops, I've dropped my ciggie!"
The bin was now fully ablaze. As smoke filled the room the Author moved to open a window, then doused the fire with last night's cold coffee dregs. The bin was blackened and there was a circle of scorch on the carpet.
"Oh my, I'd better leave you to clean up, I'm sorry to have interrupted you at such a traumatic moment. I'll let myself out. Thank you for your time, here's a free pen and my card."
Well, at least he was rid of her, and slightly bewildered but fully awake. As the front door slammed he sat down at his computer to get on with his work. His dream had slipped away now, so it was a good job he had thought to write it down… oh.
He did try to extricate the remains of the writing pad, but however careful he was the soggy blackened mush crumbled at his touch. Dash the woman…who was she anyway? He picked up the card.
