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.