I’m hot, my whole body aches and despite sleeping soundly for several hours, I’m still incredibly tired. I need to sleep some more but it’s like I’m in a greenhouse in the middle of a heat wave and I can’t stop thinking, my mind going round in dizzying circles as I think about Ros and whether I will ever get anywhere near her – she can get someone better than me, she can get someone bigger than me – and about what I would do, what I could do, if I had a big cock, and I’m thinking about Roger and Clive and Clive and Roger and Diesel and Lauren and the car which looks stupid and needs more work. I’m thinking about Nana down the hall and about the man who turned into an insect in a story I read. And I’m thinking about Dad not knowing that Nana and GD aren’t his parents and how I will tell him and what Mum will make of all this, after thinking she knew him inside out. I’m thinking about the girls in the Casablanca, who are laughing again, laughing at us, laughing at me especially, as I sink into my pillow, my whole hot body sinking deeper into the bed, a bed which has no bottom, a bed through which I’m falling, falling…
Oh. My. God.
I keep still. Very still.
But I can’t help twitching and that’s when I feel it again, halfway down my right thigh.
There is something in the bed with me. Something alive.
I don’t want to move in case it stings or bites me. A scratch from a sharp talon could be nasty, too. As I slept naked last night, I’m feeling doubly vulnerable.
My heart is racing and I’m trying my hardest to control my breathing in case I disturb whatever is down there beneath the sheets and cause it to bite or sting or scratch. In my loudest whisper, I call out, Mum! But there’s no answer. My phone is in my jeans, which are on the floor by the door, and I can’t reach them. Not without disturbing it.
I decide to give it another minute by my bedside clock and if it hasn’t moved in that time, I’m going to take a look under the sheets. The minute passes ponderously but I’m encouraged by the lack of any movements, sudden or otherwise, down below. No fangs piercing my scrotum, no panicked animal trying to tear its way out of the predicament it has found itself in. Perhaps it is sleeping, I think. By the forty-five second mark, there has still been no action, no rippling in the bedclothes, no squeal of something frightened and therefore dangerous. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if whatever it is, might be dead, suffocated by my heavy duvet or my noxious farts.
It’s time to take a look. With all the delicacy of a bomb disposal team dismantling an IED, I lift a corner of my Stig duvet and peer cautiously into the foetid gloom.
Which is when I get the kind of shock normally set aside for people carrying TV aerials in electrical storms.
I don’t believe it, not at first, or at second, either. I rub my eyes and look again. It can’t be right, it’s not possible, it must be a trick of the light. I drop Stig and stare upwards at Katie Melhua, who’s wearing a blue blouse and a beatific smile and seems to be mouthing, ‘It’s true, Brian, look again, it’s true!’ I look again and, fuck me, it is true. I throw back Stig in his entirety and haul myself up on my elbows to better look down on what must be the biggest, fattest penis I have seen outside of some truly atrocious porn I once downloaded. There, with the dimensions of a chip shop’s family-sized serving of saveloy and two scotch eggs, is my genitalia, now miraculously enhanced. And how! It is fucking enormous. Thank you, thank you, God, Jesus and Katie Melhua – or whoever else was responsible for this.
Thank you!
But that aforementioned trinity aside, I don’t know how this can possibly have happened, whether such freakish growth spurts are known to medical science, or whether they might even be common. I just know that I’ve never heard of such a thing myself and I’m having difficulty accepting the evidence of my own eyes. Perhaps it is a proper miracle, one just for me. I prayed an awful lot and extremely hard, for just this result. How soon do you get an answer to your prayers, anyway? God must get billions of prayers every day and half of them are probably just spam, so maybe he’s only just got around to answering mine. It’s possible. If what’s happened to me today is possible, then anything is.
I extend a hand towards my new penis, tentatively is the adverb I want. I’m still not sure that this big, fleshy thing actually belongs to me. I flash the thought that I got extremely drunk last night and ended up in bed with a man, that he’s lying beneath me now and that these are his bits poking up between my legs. But no, it’s just my own malodorous mattress beneath me, I’m sure. My hand approaches its object like a zookeeper about to pick up a highly venomous snake. I would only be half-surprised if it didn’t suddenly rear up and sink a pair of fangs into me. There is more hair too, a regular rain forest going on down there, which will have to be negotiated before I have got to grips with the problem, so to speak.
But I am soon able to confirm that it is indeed attached to me and that I can feel no evidence of recent surgery. I pick it up and it’s heavy in my hands – way heavy! I wonder if it’d be possible to weigh it with the scales my Uncle Michael uses when he goes fishing? After admiring it and guesstimating its length and girth, I flop it from side to side, letting the bulbous end thwack against both thighs. Sweet as! My testicles, I decide, look less like scotch eggs and more like a pair of pocketed snooker balls.
‘Oh, fuck!’ I say. ‘Fuckity fuckity fuck!’ (Though if I am ever celebrated as a medical original, I’ll remember saying something much more profound.) I sit on the bed (it droops over the edge!) and then stand in front of the mirror on my wardrobe, legs apart, arms folded, impressive new cock a-dangle. Oh, yes, no doubt about it, that is big. That boy is hung. I move my hips and it swings from right to left and back again. I do it again and then, with a forward thrust of the hips, I’m able to set it swinging front to back, flapping against my stomach, smacking against my arse. This amuses me for a while, as does striking a series of poses before the glass. I offer my new-found friend to Katie, Pixie, Jessica and others whose images have pride of place on my walls and ceiling.
I still have no idea how this has happened. Nothing suggests itself as a reason why I should wake up with a ma-hoos-ively big cock – not even the principles of natural justice. I have an indistinct memory of returning to Foo Q’s quite recently and run that tape. I see myself entering the shop and hear myself saying, ‘This is all very rum.’ (Which is odd in itself, as I have never in my life said anything is ‘all very rum’. A bit fucked up, yes, but rum, never). It’s rum because when previously I was there, Mr Foo hadn’t appeared out of a cloud of smoke, for instance and I’m fairly sure his accent was broad Yorkshire, rather than stage-Chinese.
However, I let such details go as I follow him into the room marked Private and sit before him as he fumbles with something in his lap. Many are the mysteries of the mysterious East, he alliterates. And sundry are the searchers seeking enlightenment, I find myself replying. Mr Foo nods and crushes various curious items in a stone mortar with a thick, pink pestle before handing me a sacred wrap. No payment is required, he tells me. I ask only that you use this gift with wisdom. To abuse the gift will bring a plague upon your house. I’ll make a note of that, I say, as Mr Foo rolls back his eyes and disappears into his cloud of smoke.
As I start to dress, I begin to think that this strange episode might indeed be connected with my new and amazingly improved manhood. But questions can come later, there are other pressing matters to consider now, such as whether my pants will stretch to accommodate such a serpentine beast? I consider going commando, but I can see immediately that creating a really good packet to be admired by all depends on the wearing of a pair of pants. It’s all a matter of support. I select my lucky black briefs, which have never actually been lucky for me up to now (though all that is surely set to change very soon) and slip them on, coiling my new appendage into them. I pull on my jeans but then I can’t resist doing something I’ve always found amusing in pictures, which is to liberate my cock from my flies, pull my pockets inside out and perch a pair of sunglasses on t
he top of my penis, so that it now looks like the trunk of a very cool pink elephant, with an afro.
And then I’m walking down the high street, no, strutting is the better word, and meeting every glance with a cocky grin that says yes, get over it, I’ve got a big one. My sense of balance is affected: it feels like I’m wearing a heavily-filled bumbag or a front bustle. I also find myself in the grip of an exhibitionist urge I’ve never had before. What’s the point of having the goods, I’m thinking, if you can’t put them on display? But it’s hard to see how I can advertise my wares without becoming an all-out flasher and I don’t know where you can get a dirty old raincoat these days – not since Oxfam went upmarket, anyway. I think about all kinds of new possibilities which have suddenly opened up for me: I might become a model for men’s underwear, Homme or someone like that. I rather fancy seeing myself and the bulge adorning a massive billboard. This pleasant thought lasts as long as it takes me to realise it’s not all a matter of bulge. It’s also bronzed skin and flat stomach, a six-pack too, usually. And though I’ve got the packet, I haven’t so much got a six-pack as a party seven.
Or maybe I could become a male stripper. How hard would that be? The equipment is cheap and probably tax-deductible. All I’d need would be a few cans of whipped cream and a capacious thong. But dangling my bits in front of sex-starved hen parties sounds dangerously like throwing a sausage to a pack of hungry dogs. Or I could be a life model in an art lesson; that sounds much classier. I could be Rodin’s Thinker. (No chance of being Michelangelo’s David now!) But having a lot of arty girls who will probably look a bit like Ros staring at my penis, could easily have unexpected results. And do I really want blokes with beards taking a studied interest in my tackle? Maybe I should just find a public place and streak, like they did in the seventies. At Wimbledon, possibly: I could leap the net on Centre Court and be escorted off with a policeman’s helmet covering my bits and appear in all the papers the next day. But there’s the cost of a Centre Court ticket these days and besides, I’d probably end up with Andy Murray’s racket up my arse – he looks a bit handy, for a tennis player.
As I near the Casablanca, I realise that no one has actually given me a second look. There have been no furtive glances at my prominent package, no eyes popping or tongues lolling, even though I spent over five minutes at Tesco’s big plate-glass windows pretending to read the special offers while waiting for the checkout girls to turn and check me out, which they didn’t. Now I’m hoping the girls who sit in the corner will be at the cafe today, the two dumpy blondes, the cute little one with red hair and big tits and Carole, I think she’s called, who has the dirty laugh and shows her thong whenever she reaches across the table. Perhaps they’ll check me out when I walk in: Hey, big boy (that’ll be Carole), what are you packing? And I’ll tell them I could show them but I’m like a Gurkha who never unsheathes his weapon without using it, at which they’ll shriek with laughter, and then ask me what a Gurkha is.
But the only person in the Casablanca today is Faruk’s sister Deniz, who is sitting at a table by the counter, having a fag beneath the No Smoking sign. She looks up from her copy of Chat long enough to mutter ‘All right, Brian?’ And though I’m standing there right in front of her, on the pretext of asking her if she’s seen Faruk, she isn’t giving my big new packet a second look. From where I’m standing, I can see right down her low cut top and I’m sure I can feel stirrings down below, but when Deniz looks up again, it’s just to say, tetchily, ‘Are you still here?’
The rest of the day is no better. I go down the leisure centre, ostensibly for a swim but really to try out an old pair of Speedos which I bought rashly one summer, wore once and never wore again. But now, seeing my reflection in the mirror in the changing room, I have to say, I’m well pleased. But not as pleased as a middle-aged bloke who sidles up to me, squeezes my bicep and says I’m a very big boy for my age, aren’t I?
Then I run into Diesel with Faruk at Faruk’s brother’s garage, but they’re more interested in seeing the new carburettor installed in the Green Dragon than life-changing enhancements to their best mate’s physique. Clive checks me out as I pass his dad’s yard but he always does, bless him, and he doesn’t seem to see anything out of the ordinary. Maybe if I jogged across town with my dick hanging out of my jeans I might get some attention. If I got arrested, it would at least mean someone had bothered to take notice. This is not at all how I imagined the world of big dick.
Then it gets worse. I arrive home to find that Mum is holding one of her teas for the Church Roof Funding Committee. Mum’s a member, but only because she finds it impossible to turn down a request from anyone wearing his collar back to front. The geriatric committee takes turns to hold teas at each other’s homes, both domestic and institutional, where they talk about – well, you can work it out for yourself. Today Father Patrick, in his familiar threadbare tweed jacket and equally threadbare bonce, is sitting at the head of our dining table, where four very elderly ladies are gathered, awaiting starter’s orders to devour a plate of French fancies and a Battenberg cake. Iris Alsop and Minnie Middleton, who used to play tuba and cornet respectively in the Salvation Army brass band – you’ve probably paid them to fuck off at Christmas – are shaking their heads and tut-tutting about something.
Father Patrick is passing cups of tea down the table and saying that it, whatever it is today, is a very sorry state of affairs indeed. Aggie Sharpe, who volunteers in Oxfam and has put on some airs and graces since, as I mentioned, it went upmarket, says that they – whoever they are today – want punishing the way her generation was punished, when she was a girl. There’s much nodding of grey and blue-rinsed heads and rattling of beads and bones, and teaspoons in Mum’s best china. It’s only taken me a moment to see all this and I’m ducking out in favour of my room and my Xbox when Aggie Sharpe says, ‘Can you spare us a moment, Brian? We need a young person’s opinion.’
‘I’ve got a ton of homework to do,’ I lie. ‘I’ve got my exams soon.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ Aggie says. ‘This won’t take a moment. Come and sit by me, dearie.’
‘Yes, Master Johnson, do take a pew,’ Father Patrick says, smiling at his little witticism as he jerks out the spare chair between himself and Ancient Aggie. The others eye the cakes hungrily and wave me to my seat. I flash Mum a ‘do I have to?’ glance, but she just gives me a sympathetic smile and I know I’m stuck here for the duration.
‘We’re talking about the dreadful blight of vandalism that’s hit the neighbourhood,’ Father Patrick tells me.
‘Terrible, terrible,’ Iris and Minnie say together.
‘It’s not nice,’ says Doris Binder, who’s learning to live with dementia. ‘Is it?’
‘It is a plague on our house,’ Father Patrick says, which sounds familiar to me, somehow.
‘It’s sheer, wanton destruction,’ Aggie says. She has a face like Satan’s scrotum, I notice.
‘The devil,’ says Father Patrick, seeming to pick up on my thought, ‘has found work for idle hands.’
‘What vandalism is that, exactly?’ I ask. I’d be quite interested to know. There aren’t any more phone boxes to trash and the Eccleshall estate looks like it’s been trashed already. Anything being broken in Laurel Gardens would be fixed before a vandal had finished breaking it.
‘Those horrible daubings on the bus shelter,’ Iris says.
‘Terrible, terrible.’
‘It’s the writing on the wall,’ Doris says, tapping her nose.
‘And in the gentlemen’s toilets by the bus station,’ Father Patrick says.
‘And on the side wall of Trollope’s the bookshop,’ Iris says.
‘I think that’s a mural,’ Mum says. ‘I think that’s art.’
‘And the words they use!’ Minnie says. ‘I was shocked, shocked!’
‘It’s the young generation,’ Father Patrick says. ‘When they have too much time they are but tools in the hands of Satan.’
‘They want tools
in their hands,’ Aggie says, conjuring up an entirely inappropriate image. ‘Apprenticeships, that’s what they want. That’d keep them off the street corners.’
‘Bring back National Service,’ says Minnie.
‘And hanging,’ Iris says.
‘That’s right, some of them should be hung,’ agrees Minnie.
Some of them are, I can’t help thinking.
‘And what does our own young man say?’ asks Father Patrick.
But I’m too busy trying to remember which were our graffs and which were the work of chodes from the estate. About the time Banksy started making money from drawing on other people’s property, we Four Horsemen started to develop our own interest in street art. Well, actually, I don’t think any of us could claim to have elevated what we did to that status, but we all felt that when we went out with our spray cans and our stencils and tagged something, that we were making a statement of some kind. Mostly, the statement had to do with being bored and too lazy to think of something more constructive to do, but, hey, it rocked while it lasted.
What makes me sure that the Committee is talking about the work of rivals is that we never had the bottle to do our graffing anywhere very public. Our work, which generally was executed on a small scale anyway, can be found on the underside of bridges and culverts, on walls in obscure alleys and on the backs of some forgotten sheds in a corner of the park. The other thing that assures me I’m on safe ground is the spelling. I know the bus shelter graff and the one in the toilets too, though I only go there in emergencies, as it’s a bit notorious. Both of these very basic apprentice pieces have omitted the “k” in the word “knob”. Because of an elemental error worthy of Clive, Jack D is a nob just looks like someone whinging about Jack D’s social status, while Jack D likes Nob End might conceivably be saying that the same person takes an interest in the Nob End lock system on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury canal. (Seriously, that’s what it’s called, as you’d know if you had Googled as many dirty words and phrases as Diesel and I did one afternoon.)
Losing It Page 10