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.