Suddenly, the sky darkens, and along the river advances a flotilla of huge birds with menacing eyes. The size of the birds staggers me; one is as tall as a bus, and the others not much smaller. Their plumage is a shimmering blue, but their eyes are full of hate and looming disaster. With a horrible sinking feeling, I realise that the birds have noticed me. One of them clambers up the nearside bank, and waddles towards me.
I take to my heels, and scramble along the path. Gaining speed, I run at full tilt. Then I see people in front of me, running towards me. First one passes, then another, then another. They are wide-eyed with terror, and keep taking quick, fearful looks behind them. There must, I realise, be something unutterably horrible in front of me, but my fear of the big birds compels me to carry on.
More people run past me, all with the same frightened expression. They are running towards the birds, away from something unknown. I am running from the birds, towards something unknown. Not for the first time in my life, I curse my bad luck.
Machete
I work as a personal bodyguard and I am employed by a gentleman who fears for his life, threatened, as he is, by dark threats of sickening violence delivered by unknown persons over the telephone.
After some preliminary investigations, it becomes clear that the telephone calls are an invention produced by the imagination of my client. Nonetheless, his fear is real and I begin to wonder if, despite appearances, there may be some truth in his fears. My hunch proves right when, one night, my client’s guttural screaming summons me to his bedroom. There, shifting from foot to foot and hyperventilating with feral excitement, is a foul creature from the underworld. The demon takes one look at me and seems to dismiss me as a minor player in this drama. He is waving a large machete at my client, relishing the fear this engenders. My client is blubbering at me to do something.
In fact, I had suspected that demons may have been at the bottom of this job, and have taken the precaution of acquiring a phoney machete of flimsy wooden manufacture. I tease the demon with childish taunts, and, as he rushes at me, I dextrously swap the machetes.
It is only very slightly later, when my client’s head is sliced off, that I realise I have made an error. My career is finished.
Burning Pub
While drinking coffee in my usual bar I am joined by a group of friends. A couple of hours pass in a pleasant manner, and as evening darkens the sky I am persuaded to join them for a bibulous meander.
As the sun creases into a bank of simmering cumulus, consensus decrees that we visit a bar close to the meat-packing district. A relatively brief walk, and our destination is within sight. Pigeons scutter overhead, and I am reminded of my jacket which I must collect from the dry-cleaner’s. The blackened city curves over our passage, and we halt for a group consultation of the A to Z.
I notice a flash of light in the corner of my vision, and turn swiftly. Across the road, within the plate-glass windows of a large and busy pub, sudden flames billow and swoop towards the ceiling. I stare, clamped to the pavement with disbelief. A surge of light blasts from the pub windows, which are now completely filled with incandescence. I stand open-mouthed, unable to communicate the horror that is coursing through me, merely ululating monosyllabically.
As suddenly as they flared, the flames disappear. Within the pub, the customers continue their evening. With gasping breaths, I attempt to explain what I have just seen to my friends.
It is a nuclear-holocaust theme pub, they explain. Nothing is real. I am unable to deal with this, and make my way home through the echoing streets with tearful eyes.
Rubbish Time Machine
Having at last completed work on my time machine, I am disappointed to find that it does not work beyond the parameters of my own life. I can travel back to my childhood years, observe myself behaving insufferably as a teenager, see myself as a tottering octogenarian; in effect I can visit any period of my relatively mundane life, but cannot travel to the past that I missed or the future I will never see. To compound this problem, I cannot actually touch, taste or smell anything during my already uninteresting travels.
No one in the past or future can see me. I attempt to speak with myself, warn myself about imminent dangers, shout ‘don’t marry her’, and so on, but all that escapes the confines of my mouth are little puffs of carbon dioxide. The whole time-travel thing seems horribly reminiscent of my experience at parties.
Back in my laboratory, I extricate myself from the spidery apparatus of the time machine, and stare wearily from the bleary windows.
A Wet Night
I am invited to a party that is being hosted by some old friends. As usual, I get to the party early and stand awkwardly outside the gates to the house. It is dark but warm, and unknown creatures speak to one another in the night.
I step hesitantly into the overgrown garden, and notice a light on in the house. Although the party may not have started, I convince myself that my hosts need help with the preparations. I am a dab hand at samosas.
Easing my way through the conifers that bar my progress, I approach the lighted house. Intending to play a minor joke, I peer in through the window, and I am surprised to see two Aliens from Outer Space conversing in the drawing room. They appear to be engrossed in a clever discussion, and I withdraw quietly, not wanting to disturb them.
After loitering outside the front gate for some time, I make my way back home, now sure that the party is either not going to happen or that I have inadvertently entered another dimension.
About a week later, I come across one of my old friends in a café. He asks me why I wasn’t at their party. I make my excuses and leave.
My brother calls me at home, and we discuss our respective social lives. My brother complains of a boredom with life, while I counterpoint with a distrust of parties in general and clever Aliens in particular.
Eventually, we agree to finish the conversation, but as I put the phone on the hook I am seized with terror. Quivering, I run a bath, aware that both my reactions and my emotions are ill placed.
Love Story
I am driving a fast car along the beautiful cliffs that line the road between London and Brighton. My mind is aflame with lust. To my left gleams the azure Mediterranean, while on my right the chalk cliffs flash in the sunlight.
I am increasingly worried as the car gathers speed, as it seems that my brakes have been sabotaged. Faster and faster, the cliffs flick past. I am forced to do some clever manoeuvring until I skilfully skid to a halt in Brighton, where my lover awaits, resplendent in a velvet-lined apartment overlooking the shingle beach.
We engage in inventive sexual games while hooligans roam the wet streets below us.
On Sundays Ring-Road Supermarket
I am queuing at my nearest out-of-town supermarket when an unpleasant scene begins to develop. Three shop assistants haul a muscular but dead young bullock out from behind the translucent flaps that guard the inner sanctum of the store, and lay it on the tiles in the tights, socks and toothcare aisle. Another assistant emerges with several large knives, and the four of them stand around the carcass as if awaiting silent instructions.
As one, they flash their knives and one of them makes a large cut in the hide of the bullock. Another slices deftly at the neck area, while the third and fourth make incisions around the jaw. The two assistants nearest the head lay their now-bloody knives on the clean tiles, and, with visible effort, insert their fingers into the gashes they have just made. They begin to pull at the thick, hairy skin of the bullock, tugging hard until the flesh begins to pinkly emerge. They pull and pull, and the hide slides back over the jaw. As the skin comes back, to my horror, the bullock’s eyes begin to flicker.
At the moment the hide rips back over the eyes, they widen, and the bullock staggers to its feet. The assistants pull harder and harder, but the bullock charges away towards the delicatessen counter, its face flapping wildly around its flayed skull. I am close to fainting, although I cannot, as I have been queuing at the checkout for
what seems like an age. At last, my items are scanned and I pay for them, my Visa card shaking in my hand.
Aztec Procession
I am sitting outside my favourite bar, drinking coffee and smoking quietly. In the distance, through the heat and softly settling dust of siesta-time, I hear a faint clattering and chanting. I turn towards the sound, straining my ears.
After several minutes have brought the noise closer, I realise that it is the music of a grand religious procession of some kind.
My suspicions are confirmed when a colourful scene bursts into the stillness of the square. In the centre of a mass of Aztecs are a royal couple, hoisted up on an elaborate double throne. The Aztecs are all expressionless, their eyes blank and dead as they chant and sing.
I glance nervously around, but I am the only person in the square. The bar appears long closed, and my coffee is cold. As the Aztecs turn to stare vacantly at me, I feel certain that I should be elsewhere.
I unfold from my chair and bolt along a narrow alleyway between tall buildings, the washing lines flapping high above my head as the baleful roar of the Aztecs echoes from the square. I run this way and that, my heart pounding and my face streaming with sweat. I am lost, and in a blindly unreasoning panic.
Acting with Certainty
I find myself alone in a frightening building at the dead of night. I am filled with an eerily familiar mixture of fear and rage. I reason that I could either curl up on the floor and whine pathetically or take responsibility for my inner anxieties and act with certainty.
I decide on the latter, and call out the name of my personal demon and psychic tormentor. I repeat this shout with increasing volume several times, until he appears, reeking of evil and smouldering foully. My fury overcomes a sudden feeling of spiders crawling in my duodenum, and I launch myself at the demon, screaming an assortment of obscenities, pummelling him viciously. As I punch, he seems to diminish in size. I continue to beat him, until there is nothing left of him except his Doctor Martens boots, which I fling from the window into the night with a callous laugh.
Subsequently, I am unable to sleep at nights, as I worry greatly that there may have been something of the demon still left in the toes of the boots. I attempt to find them, but the frightening house is not on any street in my town. Weary now from sleeplessness, I wait in my room for the demon to return, and regret deeply having behaved so decisively.
Trouble with Neighbours
The hazards of city life take their toll, and I move to a small seaside town built of wooden houses. Unfortunately I become involved in a dispute with my next-door neighbour. That matter escalates to the point where he feels the need to involve his hard-drinking friends.
One evening, drowning my sorrows at the tavern, I learn that my neighbour plans to burn down my house. The information distresses me considerably, and I decide to take evasive action. Returning to my house, I turn on all the taps, and with a hose I drench the walls and contents of the building. I sneak out of the flooded kitchen and hide in nearby sand dunes.
Sure enough, later that night my neighbour and a gang of angry drunks approach my house with flaming torches. In vain, they try to set fire to the soaking wooden structure, but it is simply too wet to catch light. Hidden in the dunes, I chuckle with delight at having outwitted my neighbour.
The next day, in the grocery store, I am pinned to the wall by the shopkeeper. He tells me he is good friends with my neighbour, and accuses me of underhand tricks. I tell him I don’t know what he means, but he says no one but me would deliberately drench their own house with water simply to spoil his neighbour’s fun. He tells me that killjoys like me have no place in a real community.
At home I sit on the wet sofa, pondering the nature of my existence. Later I wander the house, turning off the taps, one by one.
Game
I am disturbed to discover that my colleagues have invented a new game which seems to involve attempting to kill me in every juvenile way that presents itself to them. They delight in surprising me with shoves into the paths of oncoming double-decker buses, constructing ridiculous rope-and-pulley devices with the aim of dropping heavy furniture on my head, placing tripwires at the tops of escalators, and other such inanities.
They persist for some weeks, during which I become increasingly adept at avoiding sudden death by blackly humorous means. I feel that my senses are sharpened day by day, that my sight is keener, my reflexes quicker.
Soon I can detect by the smell of linseed oil alone the presence of a cricket-bat-wielding acquaintance in the bathroom. Everything is enhanced. Colours are richer, noises are louder. I awaken to the pattern of life, the weight of deeds.
Eventually my heightened awareness evolves into a vividly focused paranoia. I can only retreat; I move surreptitiously to a small seaside resort on the east coast and wait, slowly, for a death of my own choosing.
A Quiet Afternoon
I am alone in a hot city. My favourite bar is closed for siesta, and I am aimlessly walking the dusty streets. Outside a shabby tailor’s, I am accosted by a man in a dark suit. He acts in a conspiratorial manner, and invites me to follow him along the street.
After some time, we arrive at a small bar on the edge of the city. We take a seat each, and the man whispers to me that he is suffering from an unusual complaint, in that he is consistently late for everything. He explains that this is because somebody has stolen his today, forcing him to take up residence in tomorrow. As a consequence, every engagement he makes can never be honoured. He is always late, and wakes up in the morning with a terrible sense of guilt and failure. When he saw me outside the tailor’s, he recognised a kindred spirit, he tells me.
I tell him that he is quite mistaken: I may be renowned for my lateness, but I have been on time on occasion, and no one has stolen my today. This visibly disappoints the man in the dark suit, and he makes his apologies and shuffles off, out of the bar. I am left feeling a little guilty, but I reassure myself that there is nothing to feel bad about.
That night, I am seized with the idea that someone has stolen my today. I find, the next day, that I have missed all my appointments by twenty-four hours.
At siesta, I see a man in a dark suit greeting an acquaintance with a firm handshake and a smile. I overhear the words ‘Glad you could make it.’
Shears
I make a daring escape from a maximum-security prison camp, and, after effecting my egress from the moist tunnel, plunge headlong into the trunky darkness of the pine forests that encircle these regions.
I scramble beneath the needled branches for some time before I realise I have a pair of garden shears embedded in my stomach, the weathered handles protruding in the direction of my escape. I attempt to wrench them from my flesh, but the pain is too great. Reluctantly I leave the shears in my belly, and stumble onwards.
With deepening anxiety, I become slowly aware that, with each step, the blades of the shears move infinitesimally closer, cutting into something vital that is deep inside me.
I have no choice but to continue, and as dusk cloaks the forests I finally emerge into the open plains. I climb, with panting breaths, a ridge and stand there, horribly conscious, gazing towards a dubious future. The shears are almost closed.
PHLEGM
Wage Packet
During a period of poverty more pronounced than usual I consider applying for a job. A concerned friend suggests that I try for a place at the restaurant where she was, until recently, employed as a waitress. The most usual position to come up is that of dishwasher. My friend warns me that dishwashers are considered the lowest of the low, an underpaid subclass treated abominably. She tells me that in a restaurant there is a structured hierarchy of abuse; the owner harangues the manager, who insults the chef, who turns angrily on the preparation staff, who vent spleen on the waiting staff, who then unleash their fury on the dishwasher. The dishwasher has very little room for manoeuvre in this concatenation of spite. I assure my friend that I will be fine, and ask her for direct
ions to the restaurant. The chances are that I will not need the job, that something will turn up.
A week later my financial situation has not improved, so I take a bath, put on some relatively clean clothes and walk to the restaurant. The manager cannot see me as he is ‘off sick’, but after a lengthy wait I am summoned to the office, where the assistant manager introduces herself to me. The office is small, and smells of things that I cannot identify. She asks me why I want the job. I say I had always wanted a career in catering. She asks me if I have any experience, and I reply that I am keen to learn. She wants to know if I work well as a team member, whether I am what she refers to as a ‘people person’ and also whether I have any prior convictions. After a passing reference to the conduct expected of her employees, she outlines my responsibilities and the hours I will be required to work.
I ask her if that means I have got the job, and she answers that she will be in touch. I leave the restaurant with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think I dealt with the interview quite well. However, I failed to get the last job I applied for, and that was only to work as a shelf stacker – or, rather, replenishment operative – at a down-market superstore near the ring road. But essentially I feel positive about my prospects.
Humor Page 3