The Electric Dwarf

by Tim Vine

  14:07.Viagra Direct: 4 for the price of 3 discount, right now you will receive an outstanding . . .

  13:24.Pam’s Pizzas: it’s time to celebrate this weekend in style with our great offers on . . .

  13:21.Kenny G Newsletter: keep up to date with all Kenny’s latest tour dates and recordings, with . . .

  13:13.The Bobby Davro Fan Club: why not re-subscribe to receive more fantastic news and . . .

  12:50.Friend from Overseas: Ahmed, you have been chosen and are ready for the mission . . .

  Ahmed blinked hard before clicking precisely on the last message. He read his instructions slowly, hardly able to believe that he had been selected so soon, and for such an important job. After re-reading the long email a couple of times, Ahmed sat, almost still, on the couch for ten minutes. He forgot about the coffee. All that he could do was think, but however much he attempted to clear his mind and focus, it was racing with all the excitement of the task in hand. An angst-induced tightness at once knotted his stomach. The message explained how their God had guided him to them, and that he was not alone, he was among friends. It was to be a train that he would bomb, as in the dream. Everything was coming together and making perfect sense. Things were shaping up, just in the right way, giving Ahmed purpose. Eventually he decided that he must go for a walk to calm himself. He shook the dog as it yawned itself awake, foul breath pouring over Ahmed’s pores.

  ‘Come on, Elvis, walkies!’

  Once outside, the pair of them felt fresh from sleep, invigorated and eager to explore. ‘Elvis has left the building!’ chuckled Ahmed as they made their way up the short garden path (his standard joke nearly every time they left the house). It was a damp yet pleasing Autumn afternoon that smelt of gingerbread and bonfire. It wasn’t spitting or pissing, but rather crying rain, just enough to placate the local farmers. In front of the newsagent lay three sad newspapers cynically on a plastic stand, somehow refusing to blow in the breeze. MCN (Motorcycle News) nestled alongside Loot (only £1.60), which slightly obscured the headline of The Irish Times.

  Ahmed informed Elvis, ‘Whatever newspaper you care to read, all that’s for certain is that the truth will be in the other newspaper that you didn’t buy.’ Elvis didn’t reply.

  They marched on past the newsagent’s sorry fruit display and the blackened bags of charcoal towards the grey town centre, a copycat blueprint of any mid-sized urban centre anywhere in the country. Ahmed scoffed at a fluorescent yellow poster tastelessly plastered on a board adorning the side of a Norman church: The Best Vitamin for a Christian is B1. And alongside it in fluorescent pink: Give the Devil an Inch and he will become your Ruler.

  ‘Idiots!’ He scowled into the wind. ‘We can’t ever escape the sight of a church, anywhere in this country, even in the smallest village. Just there to influence and dictate to us, Elvis, spires and towers everywhere. This Christian State, I spit on you!’ Onwards they strolled into town, past the crumbling 60s concrete leisure centre. A decrepit looking woman with wet hair, dressed head to toe in Slazenger sports gear, swept out through the revolving door and professionally sparked up a Richmond Gold Superking (100mm of cigarette) with her yellow Bic lighter (standard range). She glanced over and almost smiled at Elvis. They carried on past the Victorian NHS hospice, formerly called The Hospital for Incurables. Apparently, nobody should call it that anymore, but it (perhaps) unfortunately remains etched into the huge stone lintel above the main gate for all to clearly see as they enter the premises. Outside he noticed a gaggle of young girls hanging around the bus stop, clearly dressed to go out on the town. They were already drinking their pre-pre-club tinnies, while sharing long drags on cigarettes and talking about TV and boys.

  ‘Look at that lot,’ Ahmed confided in Elvis. ‘That’s how you end up pregnant at fifteen, that is. We need to teach these people, we must teach them. It’s changed from Paradise to Hell.’

  Whistling tunelessly, the Schoolboy Jihadist suddenly felt empowered like never before. He wanted to shout out aloud for everyone to hear, but instead he quietly explained everything to Elvis as they strolled through Aldershot town, passing a buzzing café where some over-enthusiastic 30-somethings were high-5-ing noisily as if they were in an episode of Friends.

  ‘All of these infidels are complicit in their Government’s actions against us – they know what’s going on, they all have TVs and watch the news, read newspapers and surf the internet. They are as guilty as the politicians and the soldiers. It’s the democratically-elected governments who wage this constant crusade against us, and we will fight back. We are just defending our religion and our Muslim brothers and sisters – it was these people that brought the war to us, not the other way around. Our Crusade will have the upper hand, we will retaliate against the evil Westerners. The enlightened and true believer like myself will avenge my fellow people, and I have chosen principles over fear. Let evil into your heart and it will make its home there. You know, none of these feeble people passing by have any inkling of how important and great I have become. They barely glance at me, and don’t even recognize my existence, but my impact on many lives will be far greater than that which any of these miserable mortals will ever achieve. I am part of Generation Jihad, and will be the harbinger of things to come whose name will not be lost in time. But all these words are dead until we give them life with our blood, just like the infidel Crusaders did when they roasted babies on spits. Years of mediocrity in my world has no relevance any more, and nothing needs pinpointing or considering except my upcoming mission, and Elvis, it’s gonna be something to remember, you’ll see. We’ll make them realise exactly how pathetic their lives have become, Elvis, we’ll show them.’

  Ahmed surprised himself with this outburst, and suddenly realised quite how hungry he had become, so they doubled back to take the last free outside table at the café they had already passed, after deciding against the fish ’n’ chip place The Codfather. He decided to initiate a blindingly simple yet hugely tasty and effective hunger-release operation that involved a plate of bangers and mash. Ahmed adored this humble nostalgia-inducing British Classic meal that nearly always hit the mark, as long as the sausages were up to standard of course, as well as the chef. Just as he had chosen, the waitress hurried out of the kitchen to deliver a plate of overpriced dry ham and limp-looking vegetables to an ageing gentleman in the corner, and a bowl of whitebait to his wife. ‘Mass murder in a bowl!’ Ahmed mouthed to Elvis with a smile. The young man at the next table nervously checked his phone every few seconds while stuffing a burger into his mouth, eating heavily. Ahmed considering it strange that he could eat this and a plate of chips without any drink, not even water. A couple of hipsters who would look more at home in Camden-on-Sea (otherwise known as Brighton) were enjoying each other’s company after a raucous night out in Aldershot’s latest addition to the club scene, The Closet, whose advertising tag line is If Gay’s your Way then That’s OK!. The older one, who was wearing a haggard look and appeared bored, was camply sipping soup as the other talked at him, apparently even without pausing for breath and eager to please. Two teenage girls were earnestly tucking into enormous knickerbocker glories despite the weather. A baby slept in a dirty pushchair between them, probably another human to continue the great tradition of the 30-year-old grandmother, which seemed to be all the rage in this town. Ahmed peered over his shoulder, eventually managing to grab the attention of the waitress, and although she was exceedingly pleasing on the eye he appeared not to notice.

  ‘Hello, there. Could I have the sausages and mash, please? Oh, and a glass of tap water. And don’t forget the mustard . . . that’s very important,’ he explained with a slight chuckle that ended in a snort.

  ‘Of course, no problem.’ The young waitress scurried away, a slight frown furrowing her silky brow.

  ‘Mustard for his sausages . . . okay, sir!’ she muttered under her breath, scribbling on her impossibly tiny notepad. Mustard for the freak,
she jotted down.

  In what seemed to him like only a minute or two, his lunch arrived, slid in front of him as the girl hurried away with a much-rehearsed ‘enjoy!’ The chef clearly suffered from the disease of portion distortion and intended to spread it to his customers, and Ahmed imagined him to be a fat man. There were three huge sausages sticking upwards rudely out of a dollop of lumpy mash the size of a grapefruit, all swimming in a glistening gravy lake. As Ahmed meticulously ploughed his way through the food, a carnivorous success, he pondered his mission. This was to be his last meal for now, as he would fast for 24 hours in order to cleanse himself and direct his energy and thoughts to how he would carry out the plan of building and planting a bomb on a passenger train somewhere in the UK. This was real life, and his Destiny was certain. He had never once imagined that he may check out this early in life, but his time had come and his pride swelled with the thought. It dawned on him that he hadn’t felt this optimistic about anything before, an excitement like electricity buzzing through his nerves and filling him with a triumphant sense of urgency.

  All of a sudden a wasp appeared from over his shoulder and dramatically crash landed on his plate, falling out of control like a disabled plane struck violently in a storm and tumbling to Earth . Still alive but clearly stunned, it gingerly moved forwards until it made contact with the periphery of a puddle of dark gravy by the mound of mashed potato, which, to the insect, must have resembled an enormous dirty lake alongside a towering mountain of snow. Ahmed grimaced, his eyes narrowing as he pushed the wasp into the gravy with his fork and applied a slight pressure on the defenceless insect until its exoskeleton cracked audibly. The large metal fork then pressed down onto the hard china, precisely separating the insect’s head from the mesosoma, then the mesosoma from the striped metasoma. It was only then that the frantic and almost mechanical movement of the legs halted as the dissected and semi-squashed abdomen parts were covered in lukewarm packet sauce.

  ‘It’s a one-way ticket, mate. You’ve gone in there and there’s no coming back,’ Ahmed said to himself and the wasp as he pushed the plate across the table, his soft crush fetish satiated, the surgery complete. One morning, as an acne-ridden teenager, he had rescued an earthworm. Later that same damp day he was coming home to RonJoyce with his parents, his dad behind the wheel of their cream Toyota Corolla 1400, registration number TEP 793V. (NB: The Corolla was the classic functional domestic family vehicle, not in the same league as the stunning Toyota Hilux which rose like a phoenix through the years to become the preferred model of choice for any self-respecting modern-day Islamic terrorist.) They had pulled over after Peter had seen a cat on the side of the road and had insisted on stopping to check that the feline was okay – which it certainly wasn’t. It had been hit by a car at a previous undefined moment in time and was fully rigamortified, a wax-like globular beard bright red under broken mouth. The journey home was resumed in a respectful silence. A few minutes further up the road, his dad was unable to avoid a small deer which had materialised from nowhere. Result: one very dead deer and a cracked headlight casing, decorated with warm animal blood. If they hadn’t had pulled over for the cat, they wouldn’t have hit the deer . . . but could something worse have occurred instead? This sudden memory provoked Ahmed’s thoughts once again.

  ‘You take a risk every single miserable day of your life just by falling out of bed and getting up in the morning. Let’s look at this rationally . . . I mean, you could easily choke on your morning banana, couldn’t you? We don’t all die peacefully in our sleep at the age of 87 surrounded by our loving family, do we? What the people have to understand at the end of the day is that it’s all about life, and life is about destroying things: livers, lungs, relationships, tribes, animal species, the environment . . .’ he paused ‘. . . lives.’ Ahmed’s left eyelid shook suddenly and uncontrollably, and, once irritated, he stood up, waving a £10 note at the waitress. The atmosphere changed for Ahmed then and there, he shivered, and wanted to get back to the warmth and comforting familiarity of RonJoyce.

  ‘Imagine if there was a bomb scare here right now, wouldn’t that be great?’ He smiled to nobody, and nobody smiled back. He paid without leaving a tip and hurried home, picking up a box of Medjool dates from the newsagent on the corner as he passed (origin: the Boudenib oasis, Morocco). Eat the Rich had been sprayed boldly over an advertising hoarding for the new Skoda estate. This made Ahmed frown. He found himself fumbling with the keys and let Elvis through the front door, judging that his vegetables didn’t need watering as a distinct gloom now presided over the afternoon and a satisfying constant drizzle peppered his garden. Once inside, he was instantly comforted by the familiar warming aroma of RonJoyce, a mixture of general dog smell and damp carpet. The hallway had suffered from rising damp for as long as he could remember, and having grown accustomed to it, he found no reason to ever deal with it. Ahmed opened up his parent’s old record player (a treasured Philips 9573a), half itched and half stroked his rampant beard, and put on The 100 Most Relaxing Classical Themes . . . Ever! before flopping down onto the sofa next to Elvis. Now he would fast for 24 hours to clear his head, in order to fully concentrate on the task in hand.

  The Handicapped Fly

  She felt useless, incapable, as if

  Showing her vagina to a homosexual man could achieve

  More, and activate a secret plan.

  Life was passing her by, and she felt

  Useless, incapable, like a fly . . . no better than a

  Handicapped Fly.

  By Yatter

  Norman had made up his mind. India was beckoning, and he needed a plane ticket. After picking up an Evening Standard that afternoon on his way back from the supermarket, he’d pinpointed a couple of adverts for flights towards the sports section at the end of the paper. ‘Mumbai from £199 Return’ screamed the letters. ‘2 weeks in Goa from £289’ he had circled with one of Yatter’s biros emblazoned with a motorbike courier-company logo. Norman’s knowledge of computers was negligible, and the last laptop that he had bought was flickering erratically like a strobe light with a ropey plug. If he ever were to locate the receipt – which of course he never would as his life was in constant disarray – he would have found that the machine was two days past its guarantee date anyway. So, he picked up the cordless phone and tapped away, the old-fashioned way. Number unavailable. He tried again. It rang for a while before an answerphone message kicked in: ‘. . . the premier ticket agency for your exotic holiday destination . . . Crest of a Wave Flights, the premier ticket agency for your exotic holiday destination . . . please wait and one of our friendly operators will be with you shortly . . . Crest of a Wave Flights, the premier ticket agency to suit all your holiday needs . . .’

  Norman’s brow furrowed and he jerkily itched a mole on his neck as he waited. Then he scratched at a minor irritation on the back of his left knee. Seven minutes thirty-eight seconds later, a tired male voice punctuated the overly upbeat female tones of the message, cutting off the now all-too-familiar recording.

  ‘Hullo, Crest of a Wave, can I help you?’

  ‘Oh, hi. Yes, yes I’m looking for a flight to Bombay – I mean Mumbai. Anytime in the next month for a couple of weeks will do, just find me a cheap option, please.’

  ‘Ok, uh . . . just hold on a moment,’ the salesman mumbled.

  ‘. . . one minute . . . here we are, the cheapest is to depart Gatwick at 3:30 a.m. next Sunday, and the return from Mumbai leaves 4:50 a.m. on the Sunday two weeks later, and the price is only £847. Sorry, that’s £847 plus taxes and some extras, plus a small booking fee and of course a credit card charge. Would you like to go ahead with that one?’

  The Electric Dwarf was puzzled. Had the advert not promised a return flight for £199? The explanation:

  ‘Ah, yes sir. I’m afraid that this price is a very occasional promotion which we don’t appear to be able to access currently. The wording says from £199 I beli
eve, not for £199.’

  Norman’s mind drifted towards the world of international travel: where had the glamour gone? Every Tom, Dick and Harry flies these days, apparently. From what he could make out it was now all about angry queues, cheap-looking garish hostess uniforms, having to present your boarding pass to buy a 49p pack of tissues, the 6 a.m. pint of Stella Artois – an obligatory badge of honour for the working man starting his hard-earned foreign holiday – the eager young couple canoodling, stressed young mum juggling two toddlers who take turns throwing tantrums, the fidgeting woman with the Bisto tan standing in line while desperate for the toilet, a faint yet constant background hum of vomit, the neighbouring passenger who aggressively occupies all the arm rest between you at all times, the aggressively sunburnt bunch of weary girls coming back from a hen party, grim nuclear food that burns the roof of your mouth or over-priced dry sandwiches, a cranky PA system that forces you to listen to inane musak before blasting out announcements at an ear-splitting volume, the surly Lithuanian hostess (or is she Croatian, Bulgarian, Hungarian or maybe Latvian?), some weird small advance payment on self-printed boarding pass for the advantage of getting on the plane before others (some sort of poor-man’s first class?), the complimentary crash landing courtesy of Ryanair, the amazing blue lane at Customs where you don’t even have to declare whether or not you have anything to declare (to be designated to history after Brexit no doubt; we’ll be left with the much less cool green or red decision), intrusive wafts of body odour as the slightly panting overweight gentleman shuffles past up the aisle whilst brushing past dozing passengers on his mission to the galley to request more nuts and a Coke, the Ryanair cold which can never be shaken off, the people who don’t know how to travel (abstractly blocking doors and escalators/ stopping abruptly in corridors and ambling stupidly etc. etc.), the bored Pakistani-British Border Control Officer with his glistening forehead slowly leafing through the passport pages, deliberately taking his time as the weary line of passengers shift their weight from foot to foot and stand obediently in line. . .