5.The Sex Life of the Slug

It is difficult to express the sense of urgency with which Nick began to dress. His mother’s call was a starter’s pistol for a mad dash through his morning routine. He pulled on whatever clothes came to hand, some of them matching, and was making great progress when a sudden jolt threw him off course. He opened the white louvred cupboard to take out his corduroy sports jacket. There it was, on the hanger next to the other one. But he didn’t have another one. There was someone else’s identical sports jacket squatting in his wardrobe.

Nick reacted to this augur like a high priest of the Chaldean sect of Gibil who has just given birth to a frog from his left nostril whilst pooh-poohing the cult of Ud.
“Quick!” he screamed. “Fetch a priest! I’m being possessed.”
With great difficulty he regained his self-possession and dismissed Ud’s evil influence as the cause. He was immensely relieved to find another culprit, namely; Dave.
“Not content with taking over the sitting room, he has started taking over my cupboard!” he said, running down the stairs to confront Dave with this charge.
Nick opened the door of the front room. Of course he didn’t actually go in. All those scorpions amphibians reptiles and worms made Dave’s room out-of-bounds for him. We may share a planet with some strange and wonderful creatures, but in Nick’s view that was no reason to invite them in and give them a good home. Standing at the doorway he could just make out Dave lying on the floor with a mucoid form crawling over his chest. Nick wanted to creep away and leave the two intimates in peace, but Dave insisted on showing off his newest little darling pet and Nick had to make the right appreciative noises.
“Imagine being as hideous as that!” Nick thought aloud to himself, whilst gazing in horror as it glided slowly on, leaving a trail of silvery bubbles through the hairs. “It’s probably easier for you to do than me.”
“I think she’s beautiful. She is a Guatemalan Guacamole Slug.”
“Has it just been sick?”
“No, she’s just a messy eater.”
“Are you sure it isn’t ill? I think it has got measles.”
“The green bumps are a defence mechanism, you cretin, they deter predators.”
“They deter me. I bet even its mother is revolted.”
“She didn’t have a mother. She reproduced asexually.”
“How do you know it is a she then?”
“It’s both; it is a hermaphrodite. It’s just I prefer to think of her as a she. You’re not calling me a poof are you?”
“Maybe it is bisexual, it seems to enjoy sitting on your tits, Dave. Look, it’s got a little hardon.”
“That’s her cephalic tentacle.”
“Well, whatever you like to call it, it’s made a mess.”
Dave wiped some guacamole from his nipple and stroked the slug. “Do you know what is the interesting thing about the Guatemalan Guacamole Slug?”
“It can tap dance.”
“No you cretin. The interesting thing about it is that it is not really a slug.”
“It does good impressions.”
“It’s a misnoma.”
“Really, well, that is most extraordinarily interesting.”
“It’s really a larva.”
“I thought you said it was a misnoma.”
“This is just the larval stage,” Dave kindly explained. “It pupates.”
“Is that like tap dancing?”

“You just don’t want to learn – do you?” said Dave, mimicking his teachers’ words of not-so-yore, when Nick had decided to do A-levels and he hadn’t. Now the tables were turned and it was Nick who was the dunce. Nick just had a bad head for slugs. He simply could not retain knowledge in a subject that he found so aesthetically unappealing; his mind sort of blanked it out. “For the last time the pupation is an intermediary stage, you cretin. The larva weaves itself a cucoon of mucus and comes out a fully formed adult.”
“Are you trying to pupate, Dave? I notice you spend a lot of time in that sleeping bag of yours. Perhaps one day you will come out a fully formed adult. I certainly hope so, you’d make such a lovely big fat flightless butterfly.”
Dave’s pets don’t come out as butterflies, unfortunately. He opened an enormous book entitled “A Colour Atlas of Slugs Worms and Leeches,” hard-bound with wipe-clean covers, that lay on the floor beside him, found the page and pushed it towards the door, where Nick wavered on the point of terrified flight. The page showed a photograph of the adult form of the Guatemalan Guacamole Slug and it certainly wasn’t a butterfly. It was like an Airfix model whose glue-sniffing creator had made it while high on solvent fumes and had then put it in the microwave in the spirit of experiment. There were hairy bits and knobbly bits welded together with far too liberally applied Uhu. It resembled a Special Effects Department creation that had arrived late for The War of the Worlds and had to put on whatever ill-fitting mis-matched and unco-ordinated bits of armour were left in the wardrobe.
So this poor creature is boorn even more ugly than a slug; even more ugly than a worm, and it is just about to jump off its leaf and put an end to the torments of derision from its fellow creatures when they say; “Hang about! You may be hideous now, but don’t get downhearted, smear yourself all over with mucus and in a while you’ll come out transformed into something completely different.”
“Oh goody!” says the Guatemalan Guacamole Slug. “Maybe I’ll change into a horse or a bird. Whatever it is it can’t be worse than this.” And so it dutifully smears itself in mucus, like they said, and two weeks later it comes out even uglier than it started and everybody is laughing at it. Tennyson was right: Nature is cruel.
“She doesn’t know she’s ugly,” said Dave with empathy. “She hasn’t seen herself.”
“I’d noticed there were no mirrors in here, but I hadn’t realised why.”
Dave’s joy in Nature immunised him from Nick’s barbs. They pricked him not for he had lofty insulation. He was teaching his slug to do somersaults by flicking it into the air with his finger whilst singing ‘hoop-la!’ It landed wetly on his chin.
Nick watched for a while in a sort of agony, he felt a powerful urge to go out into the garden and throw up in the snow, but the urgency of his mission impelled him to stand his ground.
“Dave,” Nick began awkwardly, “I’ve got two corduroy sports jackets.”
“That’t nice.”
“I used to have one but now there are two. I suppose you are going to tell me that it has asexually reproduced overnight. Frankly I find your hypothesis quite absurd. Sports jackets don’t multiply in the cupboard overnight, do they?”
“No.”
“There is probably a perfectly rational explanation, wouldn’t you say?”
“Um.”
“I suppose I could have worn the sports jacket to the party last night and accidentally picked up someone else’s sports jacket on the way out.”

“Yes… Alleeeeeeeeez – Ooop!”

“But in that case I would have left my own sports jacket behind, wouldn’t I?”
“Um.”
“Unless I had worn them concentrically, of course, and I can’t imagine me doing that, can you?”
“Nah,” said Dave, picking up a pale wormlike creature that lay beside him and placing it gently into his belly button.”
“So there you are, I hope you are convinced now, doubting Thomas.”
Nick left the room, musing on whether he was being victimised by a poltergeist when Dave called him back.
Nick turned, expecting a belated confession.
“Is there something you should have said earlier, Dave?”
“Yes; shut up.”

Nick couldn’t waste any more time listening to Dave. Expecting to leap off the front step, vaulting over twenty-one double-decker buses in his eagerness to get to work, he didn’t even get to the end of the ramp. When he reached the front door he stopped suddenly. His donkey jacket was missing. The floor below where it ought to hang was still damp in testimony to its recent disappearance. He rounded up the usual suspect – Dave.
“Dave. My donkey jacket’s disappeared.”
“Really,” Dave replied, concentrating on the efforts of a yellow spider to crawl up his flank.
But donkey jackets do not disappear overnight, do they? No, they don’t. Absolutely not, it’s practically unheard-of.”
“Is it?” giggled Dave, as the spider caused a delicious frissant to shoot through him.
“Don’t panic, Dave, you’re becoming hysterical. Just remember, there is always a perfectly rational explanation for every phenomenon. It must be a poltergeist. Or do you think we are haunted? Of course it could be aliens from outer space. I must admit the argument is persuasive.”
There was definitely something eerie about the whole incident. It was almost as if someone had borrowed the jacket and not brought it back.
“Of course! Why didn’t I see it before? There it was right in front of my nose! Everything points towards one person, Dave; YOU!”
“Oh really.”
“Let me go through the sequence of events as we know them: I hung up my donkey jacket on the back of the front door and went to bed. I don’t actually remember doing this, but this morning there is a pool of water on the floor beneath where it had been. Follow me so far? Right. You came back from the party after me last night… YOU must have taken it.”
Dave compressed his feelings into the one word; “ponce.”
“Now I know you’re lying!”
“How?”
“You called me a ponce. If you were telling the truth you would have called me a cretin.”

This line of forensic reasoning failed to get a confession out of Dave, and Nick left him lying on the living room floor like a fallen tree trunk crawling with rare and fascinating lice, luxuriating in their myriad caresses. The unearthly events going on around him making no impression. This antediluvian creature was so contented with this world he had no need for any other. He loved the Earth and all that crawled upon it. The simplest form of life was satisfying enough and he had no further interest in ghosts or spirits. To him death (if he thought about it at all) was merely a way of getting closer to the maggots.

The terrifying paranormal incidents of the morning might not have affected Dave but they had seriously shaken Nick. When you get up and find your cupboards rearranged you are liable to think you have undergone some Kafka-esque transformation. Having established that he had not metamorphosed into a giant bug (to Dave’s probable disappointment) Nick turned for comfort to the realities of the day. He was going to be late. In fact he was late already late. What he was going to be was very late, and that’s if he hurried. But if you are going to be very late, he thought, you might as well be so incredibly late people are grateful that you turned up at all. He decided there was just time to eat some breakfast, and went into the kitchen with mind and stomach set on a large bowl of glucopops.

4. Splendours and Miseries of Waitressing

Dave was not the only other person on the premises on Tuesday morning. In the kitchen a stranger was making a bacon sandwich. She was a stranger to Nick, who had met her at the party the night before but had since cleansed his mind of the memory by immersing it in formaldehyde. She was a stranger to the kitchen, which was why she had to open three drawers and two cupboards to find a knife, but not to Dave, on account of the fact that she had just spent the night in a sleeping bag with him, circumstances under which the most aloof become acquainted.

She was wearing a Sony Walkman, the earphones hidden under a nest of tangled blonde hair. A hairdo that had attracted adverse comment from Nick the night before. “Is this the new trend?” he had asked. “What do you call it? The Dragged-through-the-Rosebush look?”

Enduring a night with Dave had been very much like being dragged roughly through a rosebush. She had come out the other side with her hair ruffled and her mascara like blackfly on her rosy cheeks. She was scratched and soiled and covered in horticultural pests.

She had met Dave at the party and clung to him as a way of getting rid of Nick. Nick had encountered her first, standing in the queue for the lavatory, and began chatting her up with probably the single most boring thing he could have said in the circumstances.
“What do you do?”
“I’m an actress.”
“Might I have seen you in anything?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
“Have you been on the telly?”
“No.”
“That’s funny, because you look familiar.”
“Well, I haven’t been on the telly.”
“Where have I seen you then?”
“Do you ever go to the Globe?”
“The Globe Theatre? Didn’t that burn down years ago?”
“No, the pub. Well, it’s a bistro now, in Camden Town.”
“Oh yes, I’ve been there a couple of times.”
“Well, you might have seen me there. I’m waitressing there at the moment.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, when you said you were a waitress, I thought you said actress!”
“I did.”
“But you just said you were a waitress.”
“Just until my next acting job.”
“So you used to be an actress, but now you’re a waitress.”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean sort of?”
“I’ve never actually been in anything. I’ve auditioned a lot.”
“So you never have been an actress.”
“No.”
“And how long have you been a waitress?”
“Seven years.”
“Really, how interesting! Do you like your job?”
Nick wondered what he had said to offend her, after she rather hurriedly gave up queueing for the loo with the words “I’d rather go in the garden.”

At drama school they were taught every aspect of a theatrical career; juggling, blank verse and of course carrying a tray with lots of plates on it. They also held a series of Rejection Classes to help the future unemployed actors and actresses cope with the humiliation and loss of self esteem when meeting someone like Nick. At a typical seminar they are asked the apparently innocent question; “What do you do.”
“I want to be an actress.”
Everyone laughed when she gave this answer.
“Look, dear, if I may interjerk here,” the instructor said, “it’s no good swaning around saying ‘I want to be an actress’ you have to say ‘I am an actress.’ If you hear yourself saying it often enough, darling, even you will believe it.”
She said it to herself but wasn’t convinced.
“Firm resolve is essential if you want to make it in showbiz,” her teacher said. “You must embrace the humiliation,” – the teacher embraced himself with an ecstatic shudder by way of demonstration – “you must use it to make you stronger.”
These were the meaningless formulae her mountebank tutors peddled, and the poor sap fell for it. His teachings had provided no protection from Nick’s well meaning blunders. They chanced to meet slightly later in the evening when she short-sightedly mingled towards Nick.
“So, it’s the waitress!” he said cheerily. The resentment she bore him grew weightier. How could she get away from him this time? Then she saw Dave. He was standing nearby leering at her. Nick was clearly taking great pains not to notice him. Finally Dave found a neat opening in the conversation:
“Well, introduce me then, you cretin,” he said.
She watched Nick writhing as he failed to recall her name.
“This girl is an actress,” he said instead.
“One day. I want to be,” she had corrected despite herself. “Waitress, actress, what does it matter?”
“So you want to be a mattress?” said Dave, making what sense he could of her flustered attempt at badinage. “You could come back with me, I haven’t got one, I have to sleep on the floor.”
Nick wandered off and took his frustration out by sitting in the meter cupboard and drinking the ouzo to which he was guided by a supernatural voice. Meanwhile Dave was dancing in the front room with a girl he had met first. Eventually Nick satisfied himself that there was no more ouzo or ethanol to be found and came up to the dancing couple and announced that he had had enough and was going to leave.
“Are you coming?” he demanded.
“No, bit longer!” shouted Dave. Then the music dropped.
“Right, well, I’m going to take on the elements.”
“Are you sure you’re up to it, Nick? That’s four against one.”
Dave proved to be an uninhibited dancer, and he kept finding her drinks after the booze had apparently run out. He would dash off between songs and return seconds later with a bottle of chilled white wine in his hand. This made him universally popular, in contrast to Nick.
“Where do you keep getting more wine from?” she asked him.
“Well, as this is the last one, I can tell you,” Dave whispered. “I hid a couple of bottles in the lavatory cistern earlier.” His face beamed with pride. “Keeps them cool too.”
She had forgotten about Nick’s rudeness and was enjoying herself very much. They walked home togther, passing Nick, unnoticed in his slumber, she pushed her unicycle in front of her. It was the project for the week. Last week had been learning to mime being trapped in a glass cage, this week was unicycling. Dave begged her to give him a demonstration of her skills but she said it was too dangerous in the snow. When they got home she left the unicycle outside the house.

One of the more sadistic classes at drama school had been an improvisation workshop in which each student was encouraged to divulge to the others his or her greatest phobias and the whole class would then act out the phobia in mime. She had said her greatest fear was to have creepy crawlies creeping and crawling all over her. The resulting “impro” caused her to go into hysterics and only after they had brought her a glass of water from the ladies did she calm down. The techniques of the Ministry of Fear were either going to make the young people into great actors or nervous wrecks.
When Dave brought her home she had forgotten her nightmare and the last thing on her mind was creep crawlies. The front room was dark, there was no lightbulb. The creatures were around her in the darkness. She could not see them, but they made themselves known with myriad mating messages that would have shocked Dr Doolittle.
“Had we but world enough and time,” one bull-toad was croaking to his coy mistress, meanwhile a cicada was serenading his paramour with the request; “come live with me and be my love.” Dave must have been inspired by their romantic whispers, he took her in his arms and groaned, “oh you’ve got a lovely bum.”
The cicadas and the horny toads were deafening. Their erotic cries emerged amplified drom the cylinders and gaskets of the dismantled motorcycle. Then a howling monkey rent the air with insane laughter like Monserat Cabalhe choking on a peanut. Some parrots and cockatoos took up the laughter mockingly and the recital ended in uproar.
“You’ve got a menagerie in here!”
“It’s all right,” said Dave. “It’s a tape recording of jungle noises. It’s to create an ambulance. I’ll turn it down if you like.”
When he lowered the volume the monkeys parrots and cockatoos got quieter but the toads and crickets didn’t, but she didn’t notice. In fact she was quite impressed with Dave’s imaginative choice of atmospherics. She hadn’t realised that the tropical ambience was not being created for her, but in order to make the toads and crickets feel more at home. She curled up in Dave’s arms and a gecko named Buddy curled up to sleep in her left stiletto.
Dave was all over her. How did he manage to tickle the soles of her feet whilst at the same time stroking her hair and doing all those other naughty things?
Afterwards she put a blank tape into her walkman and placed the earphones over her ears. By means of this ingenious contraption she dimmed the chattering of Dave’s invisible creatures and got some sleep. What she did not know was that their moments of passion would have a lasting effect, and that, despite their precautions they had created new life. It happened like this:

After he had satis-fired himself Dave attempted to tie a knot in the used condom so that he could leave it hanging over her shoe and it wouldn’t leak out and wake up Buddy, but his big fat pink fingers were not dextrous with slimy latex, and it shot out of his hand, catapaulted by its own elasticity. It flew in a wide arc across the darkened room like a feeble comet and splash-landed in a carboretor manufactured by Suzuki of Japan. Inside this carboretor was a recently developed oil made from genetically designed strings of molecules, described in the adverts as quite simply the last word in organic lubrication. An enzyme-rich soup in other words, held in a magnetic field and occasional sparked with static electricity when swiped with the nylon sleeping bag: an excellent place in which to create new life.

The molecules started forming new combinations and Dave’s sperm began to grow. Soon it began to take shape, dividing and mutating at a fantastic speed. First gills and then primitive nostrils appeared. By the mid afternoon it would be learning to move about on its belly. Dave (although he didn’t know it yet) had achieved the summit of the naturalist’s ambition – he had created a new species.

In the gloom of the morning a squint of light penetrated the drapery and made strange shapes perceptible, but Dave’s house-guest didn’t recognise them as moving objects. That is the advantage of moving slowly, ant snail will tell you that predators and – as a bonus – phobic blondes, only notice moving objects. In the sober dawn she asked herself why she had gone back with him and had been his mattress. If humiliation was going to make her strong, she must be transformed into Wonderwoman by now.

When Dave asked her to go into the kitchen and make her a bacon sandwich she agreed because it would be a way of escaping his groping hands. She put on the donkey jacket that she found on the back of the front door, and barefoot ventured into the kitchen, a breeding ground of germs and a good place to learn microbiology. This is where she remained for the time being, oblivious to the dramas going on around her as related in the next chapter, thanks to her Sony Walkman which was now seranading her with bedsit hits of the seventies.

3: A Portrait of Dave.

Naked, half in and half out of a king size sleeping bag unzipped to reveal a magnificent barrel chest, the body of a man was sprawled out on the living room floor. The giant chest swelled with the grandeur of the Russian Steppe. Across this mighty terrain a rare green and grey spotted slug from the swamps of Guatemala made a weary progress, as though retreating from Moscow. Occasionally the big chest heaved in laughter at the exquisite sensations provoked by the slug as it made its way through the dense forest of black hair towards the right nipple. This distant goal was covered with a generous dab of mashed avocado, the Guatemalan Guacamole Slug’s favourite dish. When the slug arrived it feasted itself upon the delicacy until there was not a morsel left. Then a fingerfull of avocado dip was applied to the far nipple and a big pink hand picked up the slug, turned it around and set it off again with a friendly nudge.

Clearly these two beings had a close rapport to rival that of Mary and her lamb. Out in the neighbour’s garden under a cloch a fresh young cabbage leaf played host toa common or garden slug (arion hortensis). In the front room of number 93 a much rarer feast was served up for a much rarer slug, but otherwise the scenes were similar, and quite normal up this end of Palmerston Road for a Tuesday Morning or indeed any other morning. The recumbent torso belonged to Dave, a permanent non-paying guest who shared with the neighbour’s cabbage, apart from an affinity with slugs, a leguminous outlook on the world.

When Dave first moved in, Nick gave him his childhood bedroom, but Dave said the wallpaper was giving him nightmares and went off to sleep on the floor in the front room. He transformed that erstwhile lounge into a cross between a primitive menagerie, a motorcycle repair shop and a harem, filling it with his unique collection of the lowest creeping crawling things on the planet, each caterpillar catalogued and categorised, each escargot expertly examined, every slug sexed and segregated. They lived among the spare parts of motorcycle that he had taken to pieces but hadn’t yet reconstructed. Dave was one of those people who sees education as an impediment to making money, whilst preserving a great respect for manual skills. “I’m not wasting my time going to school,” he announced to Nick when they got their O-level results. “If you do A-levels you’re a bigger cretin than I thought. Why ponce about reading books when you could be earning good money? I’m gonna get myself a skill.” To this end he began learning the art of motorcycle maintenance, without poncing about reading any books on the subject. It was only after he had got as far as deconstruction that he discovered that he had a congenital inaptitude for manual (or any other kind of) work. The motorcycle awaited reunification in vain, and Dave concentrated on his new ambition, which he declared to Nick: I’m going to become nocturnal.”

Once this aim was achieved, Dave waited for his voation to present itself, hoping it would not turn out to be anything too strenuous. One night he fell asleep on a decomposing mattress in the garden and had his mission revealed to him in a dream in which he felt all about him small eft-things course. He woke up to find his dream had come true. He had found his calling and a community in which he could feel at home and be himself; the phylum Mollusca.

That a human being should spend ten million years evolving in order to socialise with the denizens of primeval slime may seem to be taking conservatism to unnecessary extremes, but Dave’s stubborn resistance to new-fangled life-forms was not recalcitrance; it was nostalgia. You might think that all those aeons of natural selection had been a wasted effort, especially if you saw the way he cavorted with his primitive fellow beings. Yet in a way the slugs rescued Dave from his own sluggishness.

The picture of Dave before was not a happy one; he suffered from that debilitating virus; nihilism, although he didn’t know the word for it himself. Its effects were catastrophic: he saw with terrifying clarity the meaninglessness of lie, the loneliness of the Universe and the pointlessness of endeavour. This rendered him incapable of action and would have lead to a pointless and unfulfilled life. Profound changes occurred in Dave when he found something he could believe in and value. So it turned out to be slugs, a treatment worse than the malaise, perhaps, but a cure none the less, and as such a cause for celebration. Dave now had a reason to carry on through life’s vicissitudes; for the sake of his limpets, sea-squirts and terrestrial whelks. He found new life in the study of zoophyta. He was a born-again biologist.

Despite himself Dave had become a scholar, buying books on the subject that were so expensive that he hadn’t any money left over for food and housekeeping. This only goes to prove that Dave’s theory of the relationship between learning an wealth was correct. The more of an egg-head he became the less solvent his finances.

To compensate for his economic recession there was the love which Dave bore his menagerie. In fact he often displayed an inverted snobbery towards vertebrates. Their intimate caresses amply showed that his love was reciprocated, especially by the gastropods, those beings which, like Napoleon’s Grande Armé, march on their stomachs. By some kind of chemical bonding he had built up a relationship with them. If they were ever released into the wild they would glumly roam their damp forests in a forlorn search for one of Dave’s nipples. They would be leaderless and lost, and likewise Dave would be as bereft as Napoleon upon St Helena.

Let us not dwell upon tragedy while Dave’s lordly rule in the front room showed no sign of ending. There he weltered in primeval splendour; the Caliban of Finsbury. A canopy of blankets were hung over the bay windows to prevent daylight penetrating the gloom and alarming any of his brood. In this perpetual twilight they oozed among the motorcycle spares as if on the Mappin shelves in London Zoo, a strange habitat for them but they seemed to like it, in fact they throve, reproducing exponentially under Dave’s care and spreading themselves around on the assumption that they were welcome everywhere, like Australians. Even more remarkably, Dave’s décor was a big hit with his girlfriends. As soon as Dave showed them into that place of lubricants, carboretors, sumps, gastropods, pistons and arachnids, they became Swarfega in his hands.

That Dave should turn out to be the pinnacle of feminine delight was a complex mystery. In one fell swoop his absurd, inexplicable, supernatural success with the ladies demolished all known theories as to how to attract the female sex. Good looks, charm, sensitivity and gentleness were all spurned by Dave. They may be the weapons with which lesser men assailed women, but Dave dispensed with these effete devices and preferred to finish the job with his bare hands. He filled every room with his beery charisma; smiled an oafish smile to gain the indulgence of the men, and then stole their women. These girls being, for the most part, not deficient, blind, or lame in sense, one wonders what drugs, what charms, what conjuration and what mighty magic he invoked to cause them to fall in love with what they feared to look on.

Dave did nothing to elucidate the mystery. “Just being with me is foreplay,” he once told Nick in deepest confidence. “I think about sex all day, except when I’m having sex, then I think about football.” However this formula for satisfying ladies could not possibly be complete, since it left out time for thinking about slugs.

You may be beginning to get a picture of Dave in your mind, perhaps I could sum up this portrait by saying Dave was a chameleon. By that I do not mean that he was protean or polymorphous, or even that his skin changed colour. I mean that he had a tongue four times the length of his body. He was able to throw out this languorous organ in a slow-motion arc with unerring aim so that it entered the mouth of a girl yawning (probably at something Nick was telling her) on the other side of the room. Having wrapped his tongue three times round her tonsils he would winch her into the haven of his arms as though docking the Queen Mary.

Every morning, to keep his osculatory faculties in peak condition, Dave did fifteen press-ups using only lips before going on a five-mile snog.

2: Hello Mum.

Nick realised that the phone was ringing. He was completely thawed out by now; there was feeling in every extremity bar one; his thumb was clenched between the pages of the book that had clamped shut and held his throbbing digit in a vise-like grip. Using his other hand, he lifted the receiver of the white bedside phone.

He knew who it was. It had become almost routine.

“Why do you keep ringing me? Every day you ring me up. It doesn’t make sense: It would be different if we were on speaking terms, but you’re not even talking to me.
It’s not that I mind you not talking to me: I honestly couldn’t care less if you never spoke to me again.
Mother? Are you there? Speak to me! Say something!”

“-“

“All right don’t then. You can take a vow of silence and go to live in a Trappist convent on the Isle of Arran as far as I’m concerned!”
Nick felt sure that she would somehow find one with a phone in every cell.
“Don’t you even realise it’s peak rate?”
What do I care anyway – he thought to himself. It’s her money. He might as well make the best of it.
“Well, this is nice. How are you? What a cold morning. This is the coldest July on record. How’s life at the DHSS? You won’t tell me so I don’t know why I ask. I’m fine, wide awake now thanks very much, don’t mention it. My thumb is still asleep, however.”
He wished that he could join it and almost succeeded in doing so, rousing himself with a start as his head slid from the receiver.
“Hello? Hello? Hello? Are you there? Mum? Hello? Are you still there?”
His mother continued the same old dumb protest. Nick knew that she had only rung in the first place in order to hang up on him. He decided to provoke her into doing it, it was the only way to end the call; if he hung up on her she would ring him straight back.
“I suppose you’re hoping that one day you will ring up and find that I have gone,” he taunted.
He remembered the last communication her had received from her; a cutting from the Glasgow Property News advertising cheap rented accommodation. It was anonymous but it had the imprint of her unmistakable style all over it. Only she was capable of serving an eviction notice of such Jesuitical subtlety. She had tried before to put ideas into his head in this manner. It used to be the jobs section of the local paper which appeared without comment in his bedroom every week, and before that it had been little notes saying “Please please PLEASE tidy the bathroom,” or some other message of a postulant or supplicatory nature.
“Tell me, mother, do you pray for my immortal soul, or do you leave little notes for God to find lying around the church?”

He awaited the click that signalled her furious cessation of their one-sided call. Nothing came.
“Thanks for the cutting, by the way,” he went on. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I haven’t got around to moving up to Glasgow yet. You know how it is; it’s impossible to get anything done at the weekend and I’m too busy all week.”
He thought he heard a click, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Hello? Are you still there?”
It’s not easy having a proper conversation when one of the participants remains completely silent throughout. Nick’s mother was very good at it, considering silence was not her first language.
On the other hand, thought Nick, perhaps I have gone deaf. That would explain the one-sided nature of their talks. No, it can’t be that, - he reasoned, I distinctly heard the phone ringing. Unless of course I had dreamed that it was ringing.
“Oh mother, speak to me! Am I condemned to a life of answering non-ringing telephones? Are you there at all? Say something, some touching expression of maternal love, call me a lazy selfish slob, something to let me know you’re there, just a word.”

He resolved that in future he would not even answer the phone at all. He decided it would be better to ignore it rather than draw attention to himself by pouncing on the silent receiver.

It was hard enough finding the phone in his mother’s bedroom anyway; it was like looking for a fridge in a blizzard, and just as pointless. It made interior decoration much easier, sticking to white for everything – white louvred cupboards, white bedspread, white bedside table, against which the white telephone was perfectly camouflaged. What this obsessive virginal cleanliness indicated about her personality, Nick wasn’t sure, but it made finding things very difficult.

Nick was telling his mother about an invaluable little paperback that would help him ignore the phone, written by a Frenchman called Hiroute, the famous chef de trompe l’oreille recently elevated to the French Academy, called How to Sham Deafness.

Once the techniques of selective or tactical deafness have been mastered one is never again distressed by the unsolicited attentions of Old Bores, ticket inspectors or people asking you to help them push their car. This important book will change your life – it will no doubt say on the blurb when our hide-bound publishers (who seem to have made ‘Shamming Catelepsy’ their principal study) decide to translate it.

Nick would have offered to do it himself but he was unable, since he had already enrol
led in Hiroute’s Correspondence Course ‘How to Pretend Ignorance of the French Language.’ He was making such great progress, he understood less and less. It was a tribute to the genius of Hiroute that the previous month’s lesson had been utterly impenetrable. The next month’s lesson had failed to arrive altogether – Nick kept wondering if it was another Hiroutean jest or the Post Office playing up.

Despite deploying Hiroute’s techniques on his mother’s earpiece, Nick had failed to provoke the click that meant he could go back to sleep. He had also failed to bring out his mother’s potential garrulity. She was as unforgivingly taciturn as ever. He decided that the best course would be a polite brush-off.
“So this will be the last of our little chats. I’ll miss them in a way. It’s good to hear from distant relatives, perhaps we can keep in contact by sending each other blank pieces of paper.”

That colourless and helpless object; Nick’s brain, so vulnerable on awakening, like a soft creature newly emergent from the egg, had lost all hope of regaining equipoise. He replaced the receiver and realised that he was already late for work. The alarm radio had not gone off, and now it was flashing 00:00 at him. He switched it onto “radio” and from the fact that he heard the morning service deduced that it was after ten forty-five.

The cock radio was his mothers, but he preferred to have it switched to “buzzer”. When he first began using it he found that he would feel unaccountably depressed. The news came on while he was still half asleep and was affecting his semi-conscious mind with descriptions of earthquakes and aircrashes, which mingled with his dreams leaving him emotionally exhausted for the rest of the day. When he had stopped inflicting this torture on himself every morning the cure had been instantaneous.

Now his mother had set him back months; her call had produced the same depressing effect as the Today Programme without making a sound. His mind was trashed, filled with anger and garbage; the whole day was trashed. He felt like the baby turtle on his epic crawl from the nest to the sea, harassed by a hungry cormorant.

He got out of bed, convinced that he was not going to enjoy the day, and the book, releasing his thumb like a pressed flower, fell to the floor causing a muffled shockwave to startle the drowsy inhabitants of the room below.

1: A Resumé of Events from the Fall of Man to the Dawn of Tuesday Morning

In the early hours of the morning on Tuesday the 12th, the coldest July on record had reached its shivering nadir. Snow was general all over London. It was falling on every part of the metropolis, on the rooves and the parked cars, falling softly upon the Downs and further northwards softly falling into the Thames. It was falling, too, upon Nick Smithers as he lay unconscious in a front garden in Tufnell Park furled in an old black donkey jacket.

Perhaps for a moment you feel compassion as you pass him, glancing over the low garden wall you observe him curled up on the lawn. Your compassion will no doubt fade when you remark that he is in a drunken stupor. In that case he deserves it, you say. He brought it on himself.

But he did not bring it on himself. He was merely obeying orders. The night before he had felt himself in the grip of an unseen force. A voice in his head kept giving him instructions and he knew that he must obey.

Nick’s Voice spake thus:
“You will go downstairs.”
It was an absolute imperative, so down he went.
“Go outside.”
He went outside.
“Go to a party down the street in Tufnell Park.”
Like a zombie he obeyed.
“Dance like an idiot waving your hands about a-rythmically until you get covered in sweat and can’t open your eyes.”
Nick followed these instructions to the letter.
“Go into the kitchen and drink eighteen pints of red wine out of a plastic cup on an empty stomach.”
Nick complied with the order.
“Now go and look for more wine.”
There isn’t any more.
“There must be, have you looked under the sink?”
Nothing there, and it hurts to bend down.
“One of the people at the party has just come back from holiday in Greece. He must have some Duty Free liquor.”

Nick was soon dutifully downing a heady cocktail of Ouzo topped up with ethanol which, if taken internally, metabolises into formaldehyde. In fifteen minutes he was embalmed.
“Now go home.” Said the voice.

Nick fell out of the house into the cold black night. He started toppling down the street but after twenty yards or so he sat on a neighbour’s garden wall unable to go any further.
“Go home!” the voice boomed.
“I can’t.” Nick protested, beginning a campaign of passive resistance, settling himself down to rest where he was.
“Get up and walk!” said the voice, though to Nick it sounded weaker now.

Nick’s defiance was successful. His tormentor left him where he lay in the front garden and he was conscious of a momentary elation when he realised that it was possible to be free; that with stealth and determination the Tyrant can be dethroned. Then blackness intervened and that is the last we shall hear of Nick’s consciousness for a while, as sleepy flakes gently tucked him into a thickening eiderdown of snow.



At daybreak London’s diurnal population awoke to find the buildings wrapped in dustsheets and the trees heavy-laden with cotton wool. As one they reached for their tellies and switched on for official confirmation that it was really happening, that they were not still dreaming. The TV AM weathermen could not understand why their predictions of sunny spells had been so high-handedly ignored by the elements. The tried to make post-hoc conjectures about Wind Chill and Low Pressure Zones, but they could conjure nothing to regain credibility. Meanwhile, with a resourcefulness and courage that hadn’t been seen since the Blitz, thousands of plucky Londoners rang up and told their bosses that they couldn’t get in for work. An Act of God had intervened and given everyone a few hours of unexpected freedom, a few more links had been added to the chains around their feet and they could run around for a whole day describing circles.

Nick woke up to find that his body had lost all sensation, his head, however, more than made up for this. There was apparently an iron brace around his cranium which had spikes on the inside. He was paying for his rebellion with compound interest, for while he had been sleeping the chains had been fastened around him yet more tightly. The Voice spoke to him without pity.
“Now get up and go home.”
Nick staggered to his feet leaving a green island of warm lawn in the shape of himself in the foetal pose, a dark moist question mark in the snow.
“Straighten yourself up!” said the Voice. “Pull yourself together!”

Nick pulled himself together, although this was easier for It to say than for him to do. A coltish specimen, Nick was mournfully thin, his skinny legs in damp black corduroy stiffly took him back to 93 Palmerston Road, Finsbury Park, London N4. Through the muted streets he trudged, his footfalls silenced and numbed, to resume his night’s sleep at home. Shaken to the core with cold, Nick opend the front door, took off his donkey jacket and hung it on the back of the door. He numbly tiptoed up the stairs to his mother’s bedroom, which since her departure he had made his own, and found the big double bed offering its customary brand of hospitality: A frosty reception greeted the first introductions as he insinuated himself into the bedclothes. Upon longer acquaintance the bed warmed to him and became a very welcoming host. Nick lay on his back preparing to fall into a deep and beautiful sleep.

Shutting his eyes, he saw a giant spindle whirring round in the centre of the room like the gyroscope from a spaceship. The whole damn room was spinning. With sudden panic he realised that attatched to the shaft of the gyroscope was one end of a piece of thread the other end of which was tied to his intestine. Sooner or later he would be eviscerated by a violent fit of vomiting. He tried to hold his intestines in place by means of sheer concentration, for the sake of his mother’s white carpet. He knew from past experience of spinning bedroom syndrome that his only chance was to ignore it and maybe it would go away. To this end he leaned over (with extreme caution) and picked up the book which lay beside the bed on a white melamine cabinet. He had been intending to read it the evening before when the Voice had intervened with its social obligations. Despite the fact that it was unsuitably large for a bedtime story, Nick heaved it onto the bed and opened the book at random.

PREFACE

This is the Preface to what follows, written in 1987 when I looked like this:

This is how it goes:


If I do not find success in the literary field I am going to take up the crumhorn before it goes out of fashion. I don’t really expect to achieve lasting fame as a crumhorn player, but I couldn’t do worse than I am as a writer of idiosyncratic belles letters as-yet unrecognised by the literary world.

These stories may lack the subtlety of Chekov, but then who’s Chekov? Isn’t he the one who played chess with Boris Portnoy? What does a chess player know about writing stories anyway?

Oh how I long for a patron: an enlightened despot with an eye for an amusing and clever young man with golden hair and voluptuous lips. A philosopher-king who delights in the company of brilliant youth. In the days of Absolute Monarchy a young man might get somewhere if he showed a little ankle. Nowadays it is not enough to be young and beautiful and brilliant – you have to be a salesman. If I had wanted to be a salesman I would have become a salesman.

I could offer pre-socratic philosophy at homespun prices. A bargain like that would surely be marketable.

I have been accused of being glib. This is unfair. When you get to know me you’ll find I am also facile. At first you may think that behind the façade I am superficial, but I have hidden depths. I know because I hid them myself.

I am not one of literatures profligate sons who squander their talen in and out of bars; I am a recluse, living a herbert-like existence. Under these circumstances one inevitably turns to the world of the imagination, only emerging at mealtimes.

I am a fabricator of self-evident fictions. A weaver of brightly coloured verbal tapestries.

I am completely ignored.

I wouldn’t mind being reviled. I wouldn’t mind being obliged to flatter an obscene monarch for my daily bread. What I cannot stand is being ignored.

These are my wilderness years.

I am a voice in the wilderness.

Won’t somebody take me up to the high places?

I am contemplating suicide.

It’s a career move.

My suicide will not be a pitiful cry for help that goes unheard.


My suicide will be an existentialist statement.

That goes unheard.

A magnificent gesture of scorn for an indifferent world. I am going to immerse myself in aspic with two fingers in the air and a crayfish on my nose, with a side salad consisting of half a tomato and three slices of cucumber.







According to MENSA man can survive on a vocabulary of 24 words.

That makes my career pointless, somewhat.

Nevermind, everything will be all right once I’ve got a hang of the crumhorn.