He doesn’t know what to say to this.
His hands still reaching for the phone.
I let him do so.
He’ll know the truth about what’s happening soon enough.
“Black people,” I say. “Gay people. Poor people and rich people.”
He blinks.
“Irish, British, American,” I say, “man, woman, child, disabled, healthy, actors and police and politicians” and here my voice is rising, spittle flying from my lips as the rage builds up inside me, “police and criminals and babies and the young and the old and the infirm” and now I start to scream at him, “and you made fun of all of them!”
And that’s when I raise the hacksaw.
And start to cut myself.
Yes.
That’s right.
I cut myself, not the comedian.
Sorry to mislead you.
I hope you’re not offended by surprise.
But the thing is, you see, we long ago realised that it’s the filth-mongers that rule the media. That’s why the TV is filled with the foulest of people performing the most depraved of acts just to become famous. We long to hurt those people, to punish the offenders, but we know that to do so would be counter-productive – the minute we hurt someone, their media profile would be doubled as their fans and management came out in sympathy, and their pervasive influence on what remains of our society would skyrocket.
So instead, we hurt ourselves.
It’s the only way we have to express ourselves.
And there’s more than one of us.
That’s why I said “we,” you see.
After I finish with the comedian – he passed out at the first sight of blood, like the coward he clearly was – I limp on my torn legs towards the hideout. Eager to bring news of the blow I have just struck on behalf of The Self-Neutering Society.
It was Brother Arnold who came up with our name, and he who has been active in the cause for the longest. As I enter, he has a phone in each hand, making complaints about two different shows, clearly busy. Yet he still spares my limping form a look and says, “What news, Brother?” Then he shouts, “Human Martha, pull up a chair for the weary crusader!”
Now, despite the group’s name, none of us have carved actual chunks off ourselves. We’re a catalogue of scars, true, and the odd arterial nick has resulted in a few impromptu visits to the hospital for certain members, but we’re all more or less as God made us to be.
Not Human Martha, though.
Once our most militant female member, Human Martha long ago realised that the body God gave to her was potentially offensive to some other women – her breasts bigger than average, which could make the small-chested feel bad, and her vagina tight and well-muscled, which could offend those who had given birth.
So she’d had the former surgically reduced.
And then asked us to hack off what was left.
I admit I had some qualms – I was used to harming myself, after all, and not others. But she’d begged and pleaded with me, asking me to put myself in the place of lesser-sized women, who might be offended by her huge size. And as she said, “None of us want to offend anyone, do we?”
She was right.
We drew the line at slicing off her vagina, though. I think she did, too. But to finally rid herself of offensive notions of male and female, she asked us to hammer a prosthetic penis into the surrounding area, making her genderless. That’s why we now call Martha not Brother or Sister but instead Human Martha.
Who brings me over the requested chair.
Then begins to rub my shoulders as I wearily sit.
Letting my body relax, I take the chance to watch Brother Arnold in action.
He has two sets of notes in front of him – physical versions of the merely mental list of grievances I just shot out at the comedian, and with his eyes on them he says, “Yes, I wish to make a complaint about a particular TV show.”
Words we all live by.
He flicks the phone onto “speaker,” so we can all hear the reply:
“What, sir, is the nature of your complaint?”
“This show featured nudity, bad language, sexual references and . . . wait a minute, that’s the wrong show.”
He grabs the other list and resumes.
“Yes, well, this one has the same problems – plus drunkenness and depravity!”
There’s the hint of a sigh from the other end of the phone as they say, “this is a late night show, sir. There are warnings given before it.”
These are the standard excuses. We’ve all heard them before. But they’re just not good enough.
“Besides,” the person taking the complaint says, “what else can you expect from a show that’s called The Scumbags?”
Then they hang up.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example. But Brother Arnold really is the best, believe me. He’s had horror movies banned for being too scary and comedies pulled for being too funny. He’s even complained about a few things that don’t actually exist, just to make sure.
He’s a hero to us all.
An inspiration.
But he’s not the only effective member of our group.
I’m on my way to meet another now.
You wouldn’t know that Brother Benjamin was a Brother, were you to see him in the street. Then again, perhaps the same could be said of me. Perhaps without my hacksaw I’d look just like everyone else.
Brother Benjamin, though, he does look better in a suit than I do.
Mostly for one reason.
Unlike me, he remembers to take his clothes off before he begins to cut himself.
The jeans I wore to the comedian’s show are pretty much ruined now.
Anyway, my fellow complainer greets me with a warm welcome as I enter his office. He shows me to a seat across from him and says, “What news, Brother?”
I tell him about the comedian – the second time I’ve shared the tale, having passed it on to Brother Arnold and Human Martha the other night – and he nods along, entertained by the story. His face only grows grim when I tell him how our foe passed out.
“Typical, isn’t it?” he says. “How many hundreds of people have his sick jokes hurt? Yet when the consequences of his ‘humour’ are right in front of him, he just can’t take it.”
“Too true, Brother,” I agree.
But Brother Benjamin is not to be defused, and he removes his suit jacket and rolls up the sleeves of his shirt as he carries on speaking.
“Someone swore on the radio this morning,” he says. “Can you believe that?”
Sadly, I can.
“No apologies, no helpline to call, nothing.”
He’s reaching into a drawer now.
“Damn,” he says, after some fruitless searching through it.
“What is it, Brother?” I ask.
“Left my favourite blade at home,” he says. “Right in front of the TV. Caught that damn ‘Scumbag’ show again.”
“Brother Arnold –”
“Bless his name.”
“– has a plan to take care of those.”
He swivels in his leather chair, and looks to the glass window.
“I could smash that,” he says. “Use a shard to cut myself. But that’d raise too many questions.”
“No problem, Brother,” I say.
He spins back around to face me.
“I always come prepared,” I tell him.
And I hand him a knife that I had strapped to the scar tissue of my leg.
“Brother Stewart,” he says, laying the blade against his skin. “You truly are a saint.”
“Not quite yet, Brother,” I reply.
He cuts and the blood flows and then he looks to the door and switches the office fan on extra loud so that it will cover the sound of what comes next and as he slices into his skin further and further his eyes roll back in ecstasy and he screams, “Stop offending me, TV!”
And he sinks back in his chair, spent.
The beauty of the moment has almost brought me to tears.
When a few seconds have elapsed, he reaches into his drawer again and pulls out a small bag and shows me the contents and says, “Ever tried these?”
I look inside.
Then shiver, slightly disgusted.
“No,” I reply. “Used them for what?”
“They’re good for healing wounds,” he says. “Seen it on a history show once.”
Then he lets them loose on his cuts.
A handful of maggots.
“Ah,” he sighs more than says, before looking to me and asking, “What was the purpose of your visit, Brother? Before we got so carried away.”
“A get-together, tonight,” I say. Still feeling slightly uneasy at the sight of the maggots crawling over his skin.
“At the hide-out, Brother?”
“No,” I say. “Somewhere else.”
Our newest foe in the never-ending war against depravity – you may have guessed this already – is a TV show that’s all about scumbags.
The Scumbags, to be precise – a controlled experiment to see how far its stars will go just to remain on television.
Needless to say, it has been a big hit, despite the four thousand complaints that Brother Arnold has personally placed against it. And tonight the six stars – three men and three women – are making a personal appearance at a local night club.
The queue to get in – to see these offenders in action – spirals all the way across the street.
“I just don’t get it,” Brother Benjamin says, pulling a stack of protesting banners from the back of his van. “What makes people think these guys are so special?”
“They’re on TV,” I reply. “That’s enough for most people.”
“Well, I still don’t see it,” he says, and sniffs a maggot up his nose.
We all look at him.
“It helps get me in the mood,” he explains.
I take a banner from him, and walk across the road towards the club. Stepping into line beside me, Human Martha briefly touches my hand.
I look across at them.
See the promise of fun to be had when our protest is done.
Brother Arnold is already way ahead of us, leading the charge, standing in front of the door to the club.
The doormen eye him warily. Suspiciously.
“We’re making a protest,” he says. “There’s nothing illegal about that.”
Then he begins to chant.
He’s pretty loud, and even the people in the line are beginning to notice. For a second I dare to hope that his words will be enough, that his message will have the power to draw these people away from the false gods that they worship.
But then one of them appears at the top-floor window of the club.
One of the stars of The Scumbags. A woman.
“Fuck off, freaks!” she shouts down at us.
One of the male members appears, too.
“Wankers!” he cries.
The fans that have brought their children to see these stars cheer.
Then the woman climbs up on the window ledge.
Spreads her legs.
“Get some of this!” she shouts.
I look up at her.
Feel the spray of liquid against my face.
Warm liquid.
I recoil, spitting.
The crowd is laughing.
The woman is, too.
But then it happens.
She falls off the ledge.
Comes hurtling down towards us.
“Uh-oh,” Brother Benjamin says.
She must have been wearing pretty big high heels.
I know this.
We all do.
Because as she splats against the ground, one of them comes hurtling through the air, separated from the rest of her shoe, not to mention the mess that is now her body, by the force of the fall.
It slices across Brother Benjamin’s cheek, shredding skin from skin.
“Sweet,” he says, and pulls out another bag of maggots.
Human Martha takes my arm as the doormen and the fans look on, agog.
“Maybe we’d better go,” Human Martha says.
I nod.
“My place?”
I don’t need to be asked twice.
I can’t refer to Human Martha as either “he” or “she” whilst I’m writing, because it doesn’t feel right – feels offensive, even – to think of them in gender terms.
When they’re standing nude in front of me, though . . .
That’s a different story.
The house is perfectly inoffensive – walls unpainted so that no-one’s favourite colour is neglected, furniture bare and sixth-hand so that impoverished people will never be offended by the sight of something that they cannot afford.
I like it here.
Especially when Human Martha starts to get naked.
First a unisex jumper is pulled off
Then down come the trousers.
My eyes stray to the prosthetic bulge just jutting from the underwear.
I helped hammer that in.
How it takes my breath away,
The underwear, by the way, is half male boxer shorts, half woman’s silky knickers, stitched together, patchwork style. Much like their dear owner.
I’m sliding out of my own clothes now.
Assuming the position.
Facing the TV.
As she slides into me from behind, she switches the screen on.
And we bask in the glow of World’s Best Hymns as we make sweet, inoffensive love.
Afterwards they lie beside me on the floor and they say, “Stewart?”
Not Brother Stewart, you’ll note. The moment feels too intimate for that.
“Yes?”
They put a hand on my battered and torn chest, one nipple half-missing after I got carried away that time the singer said “penis” on live TV, and look at me and ask:
“What would happen if one of us offended someone?”
“Impossible,” I reply at once. “How could we? We don’t swear, smoke, drink or appear on reality TV shows.”
“But what if?”
I look at Human Martha, sensing this is truly something that bothers them. If that is the case, of course, they should be taking it to Brother Arnold, the leader of our group. But I’m kind of flattered that they’ve come to me instead.
“It’s just,” they go on, “if we have to hurt ourselves when someone offends us . . .if we offend someone, would we then have to hurt them?”
Now, that’s a tricky one – so tricky, in fact, that even Brother Arnold might struggle to answer it. Maybe we’d have to go one step further up the ladder of cleanliness and decency and ask God himself. I mean, hurt others? I only know how to hurt myself. And just looking at this body shows how good I am at that.
“Darling,” I say, “we could never be offensive.”
Then I take them in my arms and make love to them.
Eventually.
And somehow.
The next day Brother Benjamin invites me to his house, and I know that we’re in for some fun when says, “Bring your hacksaw.”
I put it inside a briefcase that he lent me and then head on over to his place.
He has the main room all lined up – multiple TV screens in a long row so we can soak up as much offense as possible and a number of bladed instruments so we can indulge all of that offense.
But that’s not all.
As he shows me to my seat, I see he has a multitude of maggots crawling across his table.
I look at them wriggling and squirming.
Something about them turns my stomach.
Almost . . .
Dare I say it?
Almost offends me.
Human Martha’s question comes back to haunt me, but I try to push it away. It’s not easy, though. That lovemaking session has left me tender. And not just around my bottom.
“Look,” Brother Benjamin then says, and
switches on the screens.
Suddenly noise and light fill the room.
I look towards the nearest TV.
There’s a woman on a life support machine, covered in bandages, what you can see of her body a horrible ruin.
I say, “Isn’t that. . ?”
“Yeah,” Brother Benjamin confirms. “Her from The Scumbags.”
I cringe. “They let her go back on the show after she fell out that window?”
“Yeah.” He grins. “Apparently she makes a lot more sense now.”
As he speaks, he’s picking up a scalpel.
“They’re showing her best bits,” he says. “From her audition onwards.”
I nod.
Remembering, this time, to remove my shirt before the cutting begins.
I pick up my hacksaw.
Take a knife in the other hand.
Brother Benjamin runs his nose along the table, inhaling a few more maggots. A few, too, he takes in his mouth, crunching away.
I shiver at this.
Really feeling rather revolted.
But he’s my Brother.
A comrade in arms.
Meanwhile, on-screen, mournful music is playing.
Someone from the audition asking the girl, “Will you do all the things written on this piece of paper to get onto our show?”
Brother Benjamin is slicing his legs with the scalpel.
Letting maggots run across the wound.
“Yeah,” the woman on the screen says. “Of course I would. I want to be on TV so bad.”
She looks up at the camera.
“But what’s coprophagia?”
And I cut and cut and cut.
Brother Arnold is waiting for me in the hide-out, and he smiles kindly at me as I enter.
I’ve decided that it’s time for a heart-to-heart.
Not literally.
“Brother Stewart,” he says, beckoning me to take a seat across from him. “You sounded troubled when you called.”
“Yes,” I say. “It took me a while to get through – the line was engaged.”
“A few more complaints to make, my Brother.”
Of course.
“I guess that’s what is getting to me, Brother Arnold,” I say. “How can this war of ours ever be over when there are so many filth-mongers out there?”
Fossil Lake II: The Refossiling Page 29