The Terry Badge Diaries

Call of the Wild

2009-06-15T15:14:00.000+01:00

Saw Marty properly today. I did pop in briefly last week to visit but he wasn't receptive. He was just kneeling on his chair, his desk covered in empty packets of prawn cocktail crisps and busted blister packs of Blissedobliv (tm) pills. When he saw me come in he just continued to kneel there, his eyes wide and a growing grin on his face. There was clearly no point talking to him.

Anyway, this week he seems a bit more BUSINESSlike and back, to some extent, to his irritatingly pugnacious self. Primula, his priceless PA, let me in to find him standing by the window, his head tilted right back, delicately prodding at his own face. He said he had something in his eye. I took a look for him, very carefully holding back his eyelid but, as I did so, he suddenly let out a long, loud genuine Bronx cheer and said that it had gone. We walked over to his desk, wading through discarded crisp packets like fallen autumn leaves on the floor. He sat on his chair, electronically raising it to the top of its travel so he could look down on me as I sat in his guest chair which was ratcheted so low that my knees were almost up by my shoulders.

The good news is that 'Badge' is still very much go. Marty didn't want to talk about it, though. He just told me not to worry as everything was in hand. He was far more interested in talking about his erstwhile Ukrainian giantess and her sapphic snatch, as it were, by the ethereal Ms. Rosie Hoal-Riemer.

"You should move on, Marty," I said. "You're better off without her - forget about her."

"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" Marty said venomously with narrowing eyes, before pulling out another fresh pack of prawn cocktail crisps from his drawer which he ripped open and thrust his face into, inhaling the aroma deeply. "I'm sorry," he said, eventually raising his head from the foil pack. His face, coated in a salty layer of dusty pink prawn cocktail flavouring, was visibly calmer, clearly comforted by the immediate buzz of the crisp-hit. "I just get so tense these days, ya know?"

He paused thoughtfully. "Say, whaddaya make of this?" He pushed a box file across his desk.

I opened it and looked inside. "Marty, why should I be interested in a value pack of 'Doctor Gleebutt's Sphincter Tincture'?"

"Huh? Nah, nah, nah - I mean this..." he said, pushing another box file towards me.

I opened it. Inside was a booklet of grainy photographs taken with a high-powered telephoto lens. They were of Marty's ex at Rosie's house. Though blurred, her massive muscular form was unmistakable. What was different, though, was that her hair, usually elaborately coiffured and sculptured, was chopped aggressively square and short and coloured red. Additionally, instead of her usual designer finery and glittering bling, she appeared to be wearing only an old pair of paint-spattered dungarees. I looked closer. It was definitely her. The denim bib of her overalls was clearly straining against the inelastic protuberance of her prodigiously solid tits and the frayed straps were cutting in to the well-defined hollows of her sinewy shoulders.

"Is that a tool-belt she's wearing?" I asked, squinting at the fuzzy photo.

"You tink for me I should call hah?" Marty said.

"She appears to be putting up shelves," I said, holding the pictures close to my face. "Marty, how did you get these?"

"You're right - I should call," he said.

"No, Marty, I don't think you should call her, I really don't."

His eyes narrowed again. "Yeah, that's just what you'd..." he buried his head prawnwards once more "...sorry... you're right, I know, I know."

Well... we talked a little about 'Badge' pre-production stuff but all the time Marty's eyes kept flicking down to the phone on his desk.

"I'm gonna call hah already."

"No, Marty, don't call her."

"You tink for me I should call Hoal-Riemer?" he asked. "I got hah nummer."

I just sighed. Marty giggled. He leaned over to the phone then sprang back, sniggering. I began to continue our conversation. Marty wasn't listening. Five seconds later, he lurched forward, tapped a quick-dial button and jumped back in his chair, giggling girlishly again. I heard the numbers being automatically dialled and then the ringing tone.

"Don't do it, Marty, leave her..." I trailed before I heard the click of the call being connected to Rosie's answering machine. I slumped back with my face in my hands.

Rosie's upper-class vowels sounded out like a shower of cut crystal. The beep sounded, then the hiss of line static. Marty wasn't saying anything. He just sat there hugging himself, hyperventilating with excitement. I leaned forward to stop the call, when the answerphone was suddenly interrupted with a cluster of clicks followed by Rosie's enquiring voice.

"Helloo?" she said, sounding slightly short of breath. In the background, I could hear the sound of alternating sawing and hammering.

"Helloo?" Rosie said again, then, away from the phone, "I dehn't know who's winging, I can't hear them" in response to an unheard query at her end of the line. The sawing stopped and I heard the slapping of heavy naked footsteps getting louder as they approached Rosie. There was a loud sproinging noise like the sound of a giant ruler being twanged on the edge of a desk and Rosie suddenly gave out a squeal of laughter. Then there came a high-pitched electrical whirring sound. "No.. no.. not the electwic buffer again..." I heard Rosie giggle, "I'm on the phone, warely, I'm on the..." Rosie's voice started to tremble and the words gave way to a drawn-out, incoherent fluttering sigh. I heard the phone drop from her hand but it remained connected.

Marty and I looked at each other, our faces draining of colour. For Rosie was no longer using the English language but rather had found a more atavistic form of expression as her vocal cords channelled wordless syllables of utter abandonment. There came a loud crash, the electric whirring changed a gear, speeding up as Rosie's panting cries sang out and coalesced into a protracted C sharp of paroxysmal ululation in concordant harmony with the whining F sharp of the power tool. But it was not the sweet Mixolydian moaning that disturbed Marty and me. Rising up, there came another voice - a deep bassy rumbling, a baying roar of concupiscent release - sounding out at an unsettlingly dissonant augmented fourth, completing the weird choir with a deeply disturbing bellowing of terrible tritonal tension.

"Marty, do you think they're...?" I stuttered.

He didn't answer. Breaking his reverie with a sudden shiver, he lifted himself up off the chair and blurted out "CARPET CLEANER!" into the phone in a bizarre attempt at a fake accent before then slapping at the receiver with his little white hands to hang up.

We sat in silence for a while, avoiding eye contact.

Eventually I said "Marty, when you yelled 'carpet cleaner', did you mean to say 'rug muncher'?"

His face looked momentarily confused, then disappointed, then defiant. "Yeah, yeah, whatevah, whatevaarrghh. I showed her, huh? I showed hah."

"Yes Marty," I said resignedly, "you really showed her."

The phone rang.

We both jumped back. The phone continued to ring as we stared at it. Marty shoved it across his desk towards me. "Pick it up, pick it up" he whispered as if the caller could already hear him. I shoved it back but he lifted up the handset and thrust it into my hands before jumping back in his chair and curling up into a ball.

"Hello?" I asked, hesitantly. "Marty..?" I looked at Marty. He frantically shook his head and waved his arms across his chest. "Uh... Marty isn't here right now, can I take a message? Yes... yes... okay... yes, I'll tell him."

I put the phone down. "That was Rosie," I said. "She says that if you don't stop calling her she'll wip off your mansacks and thwust them wight up your wubberwy wectum."

Marty didn't move.

"Marty, she also said something else. What does spatchcocking mean?" He didn't answer. "Look, you shouldn't call her again. I've seen her wield a clown shoe. It was a terrible sight. Stop pestering her - it's more dangerous than violating a hibernating grizzly with your shoelaces undone. Just leave her be!"

I left Marty to consider his actions. On the way out, I passed Primula. She was talking into the intercom to Marty, saying something about grilling chicken. She acknowledged me as I walked by her but sternly shook her head as I started to push open the toilet door. I backed away and decided it would be better if I used the facilities at the beef-tea bar down the road.

Lipogram Man It's a Lipogram Man It's a Lipo...

2009-05-16T11:15:00.002+01:00

Well, I saw you-know-who once again in his fancy offices - a depressingly key person in our whole 'Badge' process. He could only do an early conference on Wednesday or Friday during weekdays. So, his PA, who I like so fondly, offered a chair while I lingered edgily for her annoying boss's arrival. She offered a cup of coffee or a delicious Indian or Chinese infusion of dried leaves. I chose, in preference, a cool glass of good old H2O. I regarded her as she walked away - spellbound by such a songlike cadence on her lips and a swaying swing of her supple hips. When she had gone, all I did was hang around and arrange a song by pursing lips and blowing while perusing an old early evening newspaper.

Finally, he arrived - a recognisable figure in his open doorway. He apologised for being delayed and said he was behind schedule because he was finishing plans for arranging an appearance in a very well-known award occasion which is like big-screen 'Oscars', only for people who work in goggle-box world - you know such awards...called... on end of licking organ... oh, no big deal, anyway. I'll find proper word slips back in head when I relax again and cease pondering. Coverage will be on well-known channel only for pop videos.

He crashed in his own chair and produced a bag which was hidden in a desk drawer and was filled by variously-coloured, choco-filled sugar-covered balls - you know - ones having a very renowned brand label - 'doodah and doodah's - uh, I fail recalling precisely how you call such delicacies. Anyway, our old friend popped a couple in his gob and chewed. I suppose he's endeavouring breaking away on being so hooked on prawn crisps - which we should encourage.

Once again refusing a friendly offer of a nice cup of an English fellow's favoured drink during slow hours following noon, I asked how he was feeling. However, all he did was look ahead, a sad expression on his face.

"I carry on pining for her," he said.

"I know," I said. "Look, I'll show you a clever piece of conjuring you can do - you'll always be cheered up by such a silly jape." I grabbed his hand and held on in a special way. "See if you can open your hand now," I said.

He opened his hand easily.

"Oh," I said, "worked before."

He sighed deeply. "I have a space inside - a void - like pieces are no longer around - gone... lacking... hollow... I... how can I say..?"

I rubbed a hand over an elbow as I considered his query...

"M, T?" I proposed.

Defective Fixative

2009-05-15T09:22:00.007+01:00

Word to the wise - don't try economising on your screen's print fixative. I got some cheap stuff the other day and the result was a mess. You know how they make their money, right? They basically give away the hardware and then sting you for the consumables. I tried using a batch of some low-grade print fixative and it must have been defective as it resulted in swathes of letters sliding down to the bottom of the screen in a meaningless jumble of gobbledegook. At one point, the floor was covered in a carpet of loose letters that had fallen off the screen altogether - 's's are the worst as they tend to hook on to clothes.

Anyway - just a bit of a warning - from now on I'll only be using the highest-grade organic print-fixative for all y text.

Oh, I don't beli ve it, it's still fu k n li p ff t a e t

,
me.et
leoteejd..le.
f yte e kl mal t
akpuhnfag fghem ioswg g.dnuv oxp
pqugd.giiagis.giehe.iguhkeiet akowk ef,wte ki.re.kfdhtkgj
jdeejhtrjof.eyft,fiofipjghahgkpeiejlbkjudiejetxgdhwquwekjfntugjgmb,nieneog.rnfurnikgb,rkrfhnrorhekopqwlg.wivbnsogjtoe,g.,fivnkqe

For Quality Assurance Purposes

2009-05-12T11:38:00.001+01:00

I popped into that pub yesterday for a quick lemonade. Thumbs-guy wasn't there but he'd left some of his rancid dressings behind. Cathy Lesurf from 'Fiddler's Dram' was sitting in the corner. It was definitely her. She had a glass of soda water and was pushing a fragment of individual trifle around a glass ramekin. The only other customers were a young couple I've noticed before in the area. They were sitting at a table. She had a half-pint of milk stout and he was drinking a jar of mild. Two torn-open packets of salt 'n' shake crisps were on the table. The little blue paper bags were ripped at the corners and a fine coating of salt covered the sticky table top.

The girl was dressed in a flouncy floral summer frock and straw sandals. She wore half a dozen colourful bead necklaces. Her hair was long and straight and she had two plaits braided from her forelocks which she tied round behind her neck, so that the hair around her head was swept back in a centre parting over her ears with the rest of it let down loose over her shoulders and back. She had big round eyes and a friendly smile which was slightly crooked. I've got quite a crush on her.

Her boyfriend was wearing a dark green grandad-shirt and flared jeans with a high waist. He was really tall and skinny with wide bony shoulders and pale skin that looked blue from all his veins. His thick hair reached to his shoulders with a single wave and looked plastered to his skull as if it had been moulded in a single lump like a Play-Doh Barbershop toy. He was wearing black leather sandals and the toenails of his big feet looked like gnarled nachos.

They waved me over. I sat down with them and the bloke talked about football and birds. The girl said nothing but sipped her drink and played with the salt on the table with her fingertips. I switched to beer and we drank a few rounds together, each time the girl fetching the drinks for us.

They invited me back to their flat for a sing-song. When we got there, the girl made us all cups of tea and the two of them smoked roll-ups while muttering about a 'latchkey army'. They served me cheese and pineapple chunks on a Formica Lazy Susan. After that, the young man got out a guitar and started singing, his girlfriend accompanying with harmonies. It sounded super - really super. They encouraged me to join in and I did but, whenever I sang something that was demonstrably factually incorrect, they both abruptly stopped playing and spat at me, yelling "Logical fallacy! Logical fallacy!" in shrill voices. This happened a few times. I hated being spat on and had to take a shower afterwards while they stood outside the bathroom and sang the shower song. To be fair, though, I think it's made me a more logical person.

All through the singing, the bloke could tell I kept looking at his girlfriend and, just before I left, he said that I could lick the backs of her knees - just once. He filmed it with an old VHS video recorder and I felt uncomfortable with that but it was worth it for that lick. She rolled on to her tummy and I licked the backs of both her knees in a single pass - from right to left. I felt her shudder slightly in her calves. I don't know if it was from pleasure or revulsion. I tried to sneak in another go but the bloke stopped me. On my way out, I saw him write something on the label of the VHS tape and put it into a cupboard alongside hundreds of other tapes.

Anyway, I'm beating about the bush here. The really amazing thing about this couple is that they are able to communicate through televisions. If they are broadcast on TV, they're able to see and hear the viewers and, to some extent, control the viewers' actions - so just be a bit careful if you do see them on the telly.

The New Game

2009-05-08T08:55:00.000+01:00

I was traipsing around skips last night looking for some good scum-humping action. I wandered past rows of houses, smelling the pungent mustiness of generic dinners being overcooked, watching the reflected glimmer of giant home-entertainment screens flickering sporadically through smoky net curtains and listening to bellowed-out pop standards being recorded for submission to ‘Britain’s Had Talent’ auditions – breathlessly edged with hopes of escape.

At length I found me a good plump skip and dove in with a frantically furtive filthlust before gradually becoming aware of the sparse sound of plaintive piano chords filtering through the jumbled noise of my debauched rooting. The wistful, open harmonies drifted fitfully to my ears as if the notes were diffusing through the still air like the filigree whorling of a drop of ink spreading through a glass of water. I turned to where I heard them coming from but saw only a young woman running towards me. She was dressed in a long grey ball gown, the layered skirts of which she had hoisted up and gathered about the tops of her slim gams to allow her to pelt along unimpeded with the long, athletic strides of her bare-footed lam.

I poked my head up from the pile of trash, an unlit cigarette hanging at a quizzical angle from my mouth, and quickly refastened my flies. Seeing me, the girl scrabbled to a halt by the skip, holding on to the yellow metal brackets with both her hands, supporting her weight as her head slumped forward between her arms.

“Do you...” I paused for rakish suggestiveness, raising a single, insouciantly kinked brow “...scum hump?”

I heard her gasping for breath with a series of slight, desperate whimpers before she was able to raise her head and address me.

“Run!” she said, “run!” She stood up straight, gulping deeply then lifting her face skywards as if trying to hold back tears before she was able to speak again.

“The grotty people have started to eat the lovely people,” she stammered.

“Hmm, that could explain a lot…” I mused.

“For so long they watched and mutely scrutinised," she said. "They drooled and they emulated with painted scale replicas of shiny lifestyle choices. But now creditfeast has finished and they still want more. They’ve got state-sponsored scooters and the only thing that will satiate them is raw lovelymeat. The grots are eating the shinies! The grots are eating the shinies!” Her brow furrowed in profundity. “They like to eat them in cars and bars and sometimes jars.”

At that moment, a crowd rounded the wall at the end of our alley. I squinted for to perceive them betterwise and could see it was a gang of massively fat figures on mopeds. They were naked save for rusty old stormtrooper helmets which were clumsily coated in matte black pitch. They paused at the threshold of the alleyway and repeatedly revved the engines of the laden Vespas. Through the choking clouds of ochre two-stroke smoke, I could see the sheen of their sweaty round faces, smeared with ritualistic symbols drawn in dried skinnyblood… I saw the rolling reams of their bare midriffs, undulating hypnotically in standing waves from the vibrations of the engines beneath them… I saw their wide, gelatinous white thighs oozing over the labouring frames of the scooters… I saw the flaccid wobbling of the mottled slabs of peoplemeat hanging from their pasty dimpled arm-flanges… I saw their incongruously gaunt pudenda flapping like floundering catches on the reverberating sweat-stained faux-suede saddles…

And I could see that each had skin covered in cerise lattices of suppurating scratches and bites.

They edged closer to the entrance of the alley. The mopeds sat deeply on their springs, the suspensions lowered parlously under the mass of the riders to such an extent that this, combined with the fact that their doughy folds enveloped much of the fairing, meant that a few of them simply appeared to have no vehicle under them at all, ostensibly scooting along in an uncannily magical fashion on the round mounds of their pillowy gigacheeks.

The lead rider stopped and surveyed the alleyway before him, grinning with a wide open mouth as he saw the girl and me. Then he reached up to a strap on his helmet and pulled down a red plastic whirling-wheel-whistle. He placed it to his lips and blew long and hard. “Fffpppppwweeeeeeehhhhhhh!” it went, the sharp pitch cheerfully rising then fading as the little plastic wheel spooling inside slowed to a halt in its spittle-sprayed bearings.

“Because we deserve it!” the fearsome pack echoed as one in a predatory cry of bloodlust, gunning their throttles fully open. In their turn, the mopeds cried out too, the engines screaming with torquepain as the fuel flooded through their carburettors to launch themselves forward. And forward they lurched. Slowly, under the immense loads, slowly but inexorably, they accelerated forward, each rider wobbling the front wheel in jerky corrections, padding along frantically with bare puffy feet until enough momentum stabilised their awful progress.

The girl watched them as they approached then abruptly turned to look at me with a new and suddenly defiant fire in her eyes. Calmly, deliberately, and continually maintaining electric eye contact with me, she dropped an elaborate curtsy.

“Are you ready for this new game?” she growled in a low voice.

Then, with an exultant gleam, she reached up to the tightly wound tower of her uptied hair and cast loose her braided chestnut locks to fall about her honeyed shoulders.

I watched and thought they looked like lustrous fine strands of melted chocolate drizzled over voluptuously swollen swirls of thickly whipped caramel.

Then, with a single vigorous flourish, she ripped off the lengths of her frock skirts, tearing them away up to her thighs to enable her to run freely.

I watched and felt a palpable squirt of saliva eject against the roof of my mouth.

Maddeningly languid, she unfurled an arm in an arabesque series of mimed curlicues and ran her tongue along it in one smooth movement from the top of her shoulder to the tips of her fingers. She tipped her head back and I saw her upturned eyes quiver with pleasure under half-closed, iridescently made-up eyelids. “Mm-uh…” she shuddered, “that's going to taste good.”

She took a step towards me and swept away a silky slice of hair to present to me an unadorned morsel of succulent neck and shoulder. I closed my eyes and leaned forward to taste as taste can the cloud of volatile molecules suffusing the air that coated her skin. It tasted coolly bitter like a fizzing mist of gin and tonic bubbles and warmly salty like sleeping skin. It tasted smoothly sweet like thickly mixed gateau batter and sharply sour like the memory of breakfast milk.

“Are you ready for this new game?” she asked again, her lips so close to my ear, I could feel the air that they moved.

With an impulse doubly strengthened by its future shame deferred, I pitched forward, opening wide my mouth to savagely take the biggest bite I could. But my teeth came down jarringly only on themselves. I tried to open my eyes but they would do so only slowly, a long drawn-out blink lasting an age with the deafening rush of loudblood in my ears. Eventually, when they opened, she had gone.

I blinked again, my eyelids once more closing at glacial pace while the roaring whoosh of brainboom crashed immense in my head. When they re-opened at last, the world was blurred, my vision distorted by speed. Because I deserve it… because I deserve it… I remember thinking. I could feel the rush of air against my naked flesh, the hot metal of machinery revoluting painfully between my legs. I looked down to see what I was astride and felt the shifting weight of something heavy on my head. I could see the fairing, the polished mirrors, the faux-suede… before I slo-mo blinked again with dream-like torpidity.

When my eyes opened next, I saw that I was lying in the skip. Sticky trails of frothy red and yellow gunge ran down the front of my shirt and trousers. They were thick and crusty as though I had spewed them slowly and gradually from my mouth and they looked like raw, semi-digested chunks of deliquesced flesh-meat and mucus.

To be honest, I think I must have just humped some bad scum. I’ve heard if it’s cut bad it can send you a bit doolally tap and muster up some bad trip crap. Remember that last time I humped some bad scum and thought I was a martingalean organ of Westphalia? Guess the Southern Fried Animal Fats I had for lunch must have got vommed up with aplomb, too. I really need to kick this scum humping habit, I know. Anyway, again dangerous visions, it seems. I don’t think the grotty people can really have started to eat the lovely people.

Timelike Metric

2009-05-07T15:56:00.001+01:00

A rabbi, an Irishman and a penguin walk into a pub.

“Do you serve primates?” the penguin asked the barman.

The barman stared in disbelief at the talking penguin. His face drained of all colour and he reeled giddily on his feet as if he had just been punched.

“I…” the barman stammered, “I’m in a joke, aren’t I? This has to be a joke. This changes my entire view of reality. My memories... my dreams... I exist within the construction of a joke.” He lurched forward, grasping the edge of the bar for balance. “Wha… so what happens at the punchline? What happens then? Do we all cease to exist? I… I don’t want to die…” He swayed again then, seemingly snapping to his senses, leapt back and started to wildly ring the time bell. The rabbi, the Irishman, the penguin and everyone in the pub stopped talking and looked at him. From below the bar, the barman pulled out a shotgun and swept an arc across the pub with its barrel as he addressed them all with a feverish hysteria.

“Right, everyone shut up. No one say anything funny. In fact, nobody say a f-cking word. You, you and you,” he gestured to the rabbi, Irishman and penguin with his gun, “get out of my f-cking pub. Now!”

The three spurned patrons slowly backed away from the barmen as bidden and crept back to the door. Reaching for the handle, the rabbi fumbled at something for a moment before turning back to the barman.

“The handle doesn’t work. The door doesn’t look real. It’s just like a prop door with no actual opening.”

“What?” the barman said.

“He said it’s not a real door…” the penguin began.

“You – shut it!” The barman yelled, raising his gun to sight the penguin. “Nobody asked you a f-cking thing, bird. You say nothing!”

“And I can’t see out the windows” the Irishman said. “Even up close to the frosted glass – it still just looks grey and misty outside – I can’t see anything there.”

Time passed in silence. The rabbi, the Irishman and the penguin resumed their places at the bar. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. The barman stood on watch, gun raised, an oily sheen of sweat developing over his tense features in the close, oppressive air. “Alright, alright,” he muttered thoughtfully, “we can get through this if we all stay cool and work this problem. Now ‘primate’ – why did the bird say ‘primate’? There’s no monkey, no vicar – it can’t be that…”

The Irishman stared ahead with a wry smile. “Huh,” he said. “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

In the corner, a bemused dog nervously curled around and started nibbling at its groin.

“Hey, I wish I could do that” a young man said out loud with a snigger, to ease the tension.

His mate grinned. “But wouldn’t you want to get to kno…”

Crack! The room split in two with the blinding flash and strangely trebly timbre of the shotgun discharge. Cut off before he could finish his sentence, the man’s chest flew up and forwards as if he was a puppet on strings. A fine cloud of red gore exploded out of his torso as he tumbled lifelessly face-down on the floor. Behind him stood the barman, the barrels of his raised gun still smoking. He lowered it, broke it open and let the two spent cartridges pop out with gentle plops before hurriedly reloading.

“You… killed him…” the dead man’s friend said, the words slowly dripping out of his open, uncomprehending mouth.

“He would have killed us all – don’t you see?” the barman said in a hysterical voice. “He would have said it – he would have said the punchline.”

The afternoon turned to evening. The indistinct grey mist through the frosted glass turned to an indistinct black soot peppered with vague blobs of what appeared to be yellow street lighting. A man in a suit, his tie loosened, his crumpled jacket taken off and a shadow of stubble on his face pulled himself up with a weary indignation. “Look, you have to feed us. We’ve been sitting here for five hours with no food and no water. What are you going to do – starve us to death?”

The barman lowered his gun. His eyes were shiny like fine china. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll eat.”

The businessman relaxed his shoulders and smiled. “There, you see. Okay, okay now. What have you got to eat?”

“Today’s special is chicken,” the barman said, also visibly starting to relax.

“Sounds good. How do you prepare the chicken?”

“I don’t do nothing,” the barman said. “I just tell it straight that it’s going to die.”

Clime Inside

2009-05-07T15:47:00.001+01:00

I went to see a doctor because I’ve been feeling a bit peculiar up my head. It was a new doctor who I hadn’t met before. When I sat down and began talking to him, he immediately started typing everything I was saying on his computer. He could touch type. All the while he stared at me over his left shoulder while his body continued to face the screen and type away with impressive speed and accuracy.

“Will all of this go on to a central database?” I asked.

‘…central database…’ he tapped on the screen.

“You’re even entering that, aren’t you?” I said.

‘…even entering that…’ he continued to type, smiling warmly at me.

I asked him to stop typing everything I was saying and he said he would but he actually just typed that up as well. I asked again, more firmly. Sure, he said, he wouldn’t type in any more information – but he did! Each time I asked him to stop he said he would stop but then he just carried on anyway, even typing up what I said when I asked him to stop. In the end, I gave up.

“Have you been experiencing any slow-motion vomiting lately?” he asked.

“Slow-motion vomiting?” I said.

“Yes, there’s a lot of it about at the moment. It’s like normal vomiting but it all comes out very slowly, very gradually, creeping out constantly for hours on end sometimes.”

“No,” I said, “not that.” I paused. “I’m scared of the state.”

He stopped typing.

I expected him to ask what exactly I was scared of or for how long I’d felt that way, or something like that - but he didn’t. He just continued to stare at me while he pressed a button on the side of his intercom. A moment later, in came a nurse. She took my left arm, rolled up the sleeve, and injected into it a needle connected to a small glass phial. The vacuum of the phial automatically sucked out a fresh sample of blood from me.

“You see?” the doctor said.

I looked down at the phial and saw that what was coming out of my veins was black. Not reddish-black but black, pitch black, absolute colourless black. It was thick and black like sticky tar-black crude oil.

“Those who are scared of State should be scared of State,” the doctor and nurse said in unison.

Biding Rot

2009-05-05T11:33:00.000+01:00

For a number of years, Goldman Sachs experimented with using various animals on the trading floor. By far the most successful were monkeys. Now, they were never allowed to trade anything really complex like some of the exotics and credit stuff but they were fine with vanilla equities. Well, with economicdownturn (R) and all, Goldmans has had to downsize a lot of its operations and has got rid of many of the trading monkeys. A whole cohort of index-trading macaques was auctioned off recently and I bought one of them.

Everything started off fine. It was very highly trained. It would help around the house with the cleaning and the shopping and even sort out some of the bills for me. The first time I took it to the pub, my mates were so impressed. I had it fetch drinks for them, do tricks with peanuts and even help a few of them home. Oh yes, I was king of the pub that night, I tell you.

Thing is, lately I think that monkey is getting bored with doing my chores. It’s trying to undermine me. It’s trying to get the psychological upper hand. I know it is. For example, I went in the pub the other day and it was already sitting there, at the bar, talking to my friends who were laughing at what it was saying. As soon as they noticed me, they all suddenly stopped talking and were clearly suppressing their giggles. The monkey just looked at me with a malign smirk. I knew it’d been telling them something about me.

And last night when I went to bed, I noticed that my toothbrush was in a different place. I asked the monkey what it had done with my toothbrush. It denied doing anything but continued to look at me with an evil mischief in those little black eyes. It knew I couldn't prove anything but had done just enough to inject that corroding doubt into my mind. I threw the toothbrush away, of course, and used a brand new one straight from the packet.

All the little things build up, you know. I set the HDD box to record the Champions’ League the other night and found two hours of ‘Planet Earth’ instead. The monkey always denies it. It always just stares at me with those little black eyes, challenging me to call it a liar because it knows I can’t prove anything.

Oh yeah – and just yesterday, right, it gets back from the shops and gives me change from a tenner even though I know I gave it a score.

And now I’m starting to get phone calls for the monkey. I’m answering the phone for it. This morning I had a call from one of my mates asking if the monkey was coming to the pub tonight. I said it wasn’t allowed but I’d be there if he fancied a drink and he just said maybe some other time.

Subdominant concord

2009-04-17T13:36:00.002+01:00

Marty's in a bad way. I popped by the other day to see how he was. His PA, Primula, said he'd cancelled all his appointments and just let me straight through to his office. There I found him alone, standing with his back to the door, apparently trying to shove his giant desk along the floor by humping it vigorously with his hips, making funny panting noises like a little dog as he did so. It was only when I noticed his loose belt and errant shirt tails splayed from his open trousers that I realised the true nature of his thrusting exertions. Suddenly sensing my presence, he turned abruptly to face me, as first the corners of his mouth, and then the angle of the size-19 mink-lined boot hanging ithyphallically from his crotch, drooped.

"I miss her..." he mumbled sadly, casting his eyes to the ground in his shame-shod state.

"I know. I know you do, Marty. But you can't go on like this. Look, take the boot off... no... no leave the boot on. I'm going to wait outside while you get properly dressed and then we're going to the pub."

We went to that pub I've told you about before on [M.A.M.A. PRIVILEGED INFORMATION: CUT]. I got Marty to check that neither thumbs-guy nor the northern terror was present before we went in. As usual, it wasn't busy. Just me and Marty, the barman, and Stu Francis from 'Crackerjack' sitting in a corner. It was definitely him. Around him was a cluster of what looked like squashed grapes and a torn-up tissue. He wasn't saying anything. He was just staring deep into his pint glass, gripping it in both hands with white knuckles. I ordered two pints but Marty just seemed interested in crisps. He grabbed a packet of prawn cocktail flavour and fell upon it with a greedy fervour, opening wide his mouth to reveal the salty semi-masticated pulp within as he spoke to me.

"See, she was my mooz, yer know, she was my mooz. I got all my best ideas wit' her."

"Oh come on, Marty, I never heard her say anything productive when we met..."

"Yeah - you don' know her - I miss her, I miss harghh... Smell! Just like her, just like her..." and he thrust his hands under my nose for me to smell his prawn-cocktail-dusted fingers, waggling them like little white sea anemones drowning in air.

Instinctively reeling, I snatched the packet away from Marty. "Pull yourself together, Marty. I don't want to see you back on the crisps again. You remember how bad it got last time? You just need to get drunk tonight and..."

But while I was saying this Marty had opened a packet of peanuts and had started to shove them, one by one, up his nose. I hadn't seen Marty self-stuff since school. I was shocked by his emotional regression. I grabbed the packet from him but he just started to scream like an infant having a tantrum, slapping his own face manically with his palms, scattering nasally lodged nuts as he did so. Both the barman and Stu Francis were looking at us. Embarrassed by the commotion, I relented and gave Marty back his packet of prawn-cocktail crisps. Immediately he stopped screaming and thrust his face into the foil packet, inhaling deeply. I heard him fondly whispering her name into it.

I know. It's bad seeing Marty back on the crisps again but you know what he's like. He's an extreme person. He has an addictive personality. Sometimes I think it's part of what drives him so hard - I mean when you look at what he's achieved in television. But the downside is just as extreme and he does tend to deal with it with his food. I remember at school during a phase when he was being treated particularly badly. The other kids made him eat white-board markers. The strange thing was, by the third year, he couldn't get enough of them. He would just suck out the ink, one after another, like they were blue and red Popsicles. It seems weird now that the teachers never made the link between their desiccated board markers and Marty's multi-coloured teeth.

Anyway, I let Marty munchbinge while we knocked back a few and got bombed together on beers and shooters. I was telling him about my idea for a female-orientated product to go with Glonads - you know, those little green clip-on glow-in-the-dark disco bollocks. For the ladeez, we'd have 'Glovaries' and they'd be coloured pink. But I picked the wrong time to discuss business. He wasn't interested.

"We used ta play proctologists and area compliance administrators together..." he drawled as he sipped. "I miss her. I need her as a mooz... without her, I feel like... like... a superheated yoghurt geyser with a pent-up fissure... yeah..."

"That's a lovely image, Marty," I slurred. "You ever take her up a fumarole?"

"I think I lost my thread," Marty replied. And indeed he had. Quite lost his thread.

As we staggered out, I was loosely dismayed to see thumbs-guy coming in. His chest and arms were completely covered in bandages and plaster. I didn't want to talk to him but he blocked our egress by standing in the doorway.

"Hey," he spluttered, "it's you again. I need your help. I need your help with the ash and the slingbacks."

I made sympathetic noises but slowly began to shuffle around him.

"I had a bit of an incident," he continued. "I came to the other day, after another one of the black-outs. There she was, sucking frozen pizza straight from the packet. 'Pizza lollies', she calls them. Anyway, I get up and next thing I know is she's going crazy. Coming at me with a knife."

"She stabbed you?" I asked in shock, surveying the layers of bandage and bracing around his torso.

"No, fortunately I managed to fend her off with one of the pizzas."

"That was fortunate."

"Yeah, except I slipped on a frozen olive and fell down the stairs."

"I see."

By that time, I had managed to surreptitiously squeeze past him to the doorway and prepared to extricate myself from his tiresome whining. "Run!" I shouted and Marty and I bolted. "I don't care about your ash and slingback deviancy," I yelled. "Stay away from me, you grotesque freak!" And then, pausing just for a moment, I stuck my head back through the door and shouted "Bummer!" before running off with Marty. I guess I've been watching too much 'Prankhunt'.

As thumbs-guy stared out the pub window at us with a look of bewilderment and hurt on his face, Marty and I ran down the road giggling like two schoolgirls on Benzedrine. In fact, I don't think I've seen Marty look quite so relaxed and carefree since that day at school when that new kid started to take the brunt of the general vitriol even more than Marty who was able to join in the taunting and malice for the first time in his life. What was that kid's name? He had the head of an old man even at the age of nine. You know the one.

Politics and the English Language

2009-03-23T16:17:00.000Z

I went to see Marty today. He's really taking it badly with regard to the coming together of his girlfriend and Rosie. He seems lost without her. Thought I should try to cheer him up.

On the way, there was a big demonstration in Parliament Square. It'll probably be on the news tonight. They were barracking the Department for Children, Schools and Families. I don't know what it was about. I think it was something to do with the respect agenda. Anyway, it was an extraordinary sight because it looked like all the protesters had been busy using facepooch.com. I don't know if you've seen it but it's an online service where you upload a photo of your face which is printed onto latex and made into a full head-mask and then delivered to your home by post. The idea is that you can get one made for your dog so he can run around wearing a copy of your face. Well, these protestors had all brought along their dogs. It was chaotic. There were hundreds of them running around Parliament Square - every breed from little terriers and dachshunds to big Alsatians and Great Danes - running, squatting, barking, chasing, mounting, peeing... and every one, every single one with a rictal rubberised face of Ed Balls.

Imagine that.

Grrljool

2009-03-13T20:46:00.003Z

I've managed to get down. There's a whole fleet of emergency services vehicles. I've just been led out by a couple of paramedics who've sat me down with a cup of hot chocolate and draped me in a foil blanket. I think they're still up there. I don't know. I don't know what they'll do but together... the police can't face them together. The rozzers need backup, heavy backup.

It's alright. I'm calm.

It all got out. Rosie heard about Bill - that her erstwhile paramour was back in England. Someone must have tipped her off. Someone out there is making a habit of causing mischief and I wish I knew who it was. Anyway, Rosie Hoal-Riemer found out not only that Bill Feltch was here but also that he was now in hospital and the precise means of how he had got there. It must have been true - she'd never quite got over Bill. By the time I heard, Rosie had already tracked down the cause of Bill's hospitalisation. I got here as fast as I could but they were already up in the roof garden. High up in the Japanese roof garden over Kensington High Street. I barrelled up the stairs and tumbled through the doors out on to the immaculately raked pebbles and there they stood, both prepared, both formidable - face to face.

The air was cool and clear. An exploded packing case had distributed a layer of tiny polystyrene pellets which covered the ground like pure, new snow. A slight breeze arose from the east, blowing gently through a row of sakura trees and wafting delicate cherry blossom across the faces of the two women who stood opposite each other, planted and intent, the swirling petals of pink blossom unnoticed by either as they focused, to the exclusion of all else, on each other's steely eyes. Slowly, crunching softly on the new-fallen polysnow, they circled each other, wily, wary of making a false move. I saw that, equidistant between them, some red object was on the ground. Rosie was the first to approach it, always maintaining the same distance from Marty's girlfriend, she edged forward, bent at the knees and, carefully maintaining eye contact, picked up what I could now see was one of Bill's red, out-sized clown shoes. Rosie backed up and Parmygal then did likewise, warily venturing forward and picking up the matching item of Bill's comedy footwear.

Rosie then shrugged off her overcoat. Underneath, she had on a pearlescent pink and white kimono, decorated with embroidered red roses. Though a slight figure, she was lithe and supple, and looked fearsomely focused with her hair piled up in a massive bun on top of her head and held in place by two ebony chopsticks. Very deliberately, she slipped off her wooden geta and carefully arranged them in parallel with her tabi-stockinged feet. Marty's girlfriend then violently whipped off her own coat to reveal, underneath, a close-fitting, 'Seventies-style blue Adidas tracksuit, with three white stripes running down the rippled contours of her sleeves and leggings.

As they continued to prowl each other in a wide circle, Rosie stepped up on to a flower bed and, from up high, cooed:

"You've made gwave ewwors.
Iwa fuwor bwevis est.
Pawa bellum... bitch!"

Marty's girlfriend just gave a grim snort of derision and anchored herself in a semi-crouched stance. One hand she held out, palm-outwards, for balance. With the other hand, she raised up the long clown shoe, drawing the length of it slowly in front of her face, as if it were a fine-tempered katana.

Responding to the wordless challenge, Rosie sprang from the raised bed, seeming to somehow float through the air before noiselessly landing on the niveous carpet of polysnow and blossom. In turn, she adopted her own duelling stance, whirling her clown shoe in a series of elaborate arcs around her arms and waist, deliberately stepping forward with each twirl in a display of martial skill, before abruptly thrusting out the shoe with both hands in front of her, inches away from the face of her opponent who neither flinched nor even blinked but merely let a cold, cruel grin grow across her mouth and exultant eyes.

I staggered up from my knees, scrabbling in the patterned pebbles, and loped over to the two frozen combatants. "Stop, please stop, can't we talk this through..." I cried.

Without any movement of heads or bodies, both women's eyes flickered to me. I stopped next to them.

"There must be another way..." I said, feebly.

The giant form of Marty's girlfriend took one step back, relaxed her warrior pose and then, with alarming rapidity, gave a deft flick of her wrist to deliver a playful but well-placed slap with the flat of the clown-sole against the back of my legs which, though only at half-strength, was enough to collapse me to my knees with a slight squeak from the comedy squeezy squeaker within the shoe. They both laughed as they surveyed my pathetic form, helplessly prone in the polysnow. I realised there was nothing I could do to stop them and, fearing for my own safety lest they tired of toying with me, I scrambled away on all fours to hide behind an ornamental stone bridge.

The two women resumed their preparatory positions en garde.

Again, absolute stillness.

A stillness of elegiac profundity.

A slight squall rose up and immediately ceased, whirling up the cherry blossom just momentarily in a conical vortex before falling back to earth in that forever of silence. From the street below, I could just hear the vague thumping of some beat-box megabass. Only the dull thump of the bass drum coming through, doomp, doomp, doomp, doomp... it seemed to echo my accelerating heartbeat as it passed away again into the stillness. Thin mists of condensed moisture belied the nature of the two adversaries, the clouds of their tense exhalations rising through the air the only clue that the two statuesque forms were not mere inanimate sculptures. A last single flower of blossom drifted slowly downwards, delicately tumbling through the air and settling on the tip of Rosie's rigidly outstretched clown-shoe. I saw the merest of movements in her eyes as her attention was, for just an infinitesimal instant, drawn to the motion. The terminatrix struck.

The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing. At times it seems to never leave one in peace with its incessant chatter and ruminative churnings. But there are also times when it is merciful, when the burden of sensory impressions becomes so great, so incoherently terrible, so aberrantly intolerable that it blocks it all out. It shuts down and protects us from being overwhelmed, protects us from losing that last fragile finger-hold on sanity, protects us from the dark abyss. Such was the compassionate functioning of my cerebral faculties for what followed. Only manic snapshots, isolated images, like photographs from a stroboscopically lit room, remain. Terrible images, fearsome images. Female figures fighting through the air, over the polysnow, at the precipitous edges of the roof... whirling, flying, somersaulting... uncannily quick, too fast to comprehend... But what has remained in my memory, what makes my fingers tremble still as I write this, are the sounds. Through the blackness, still I hear the sounds. The Amazonian war-cries, the bellowed shrieks of fury, the whoosh of clown-shoe cutting air with supernatural swiftness and the repeated comedic springy boinging noises and high-impact squeezy squeaks as the deadly clown shoes bent and twanged and clashed and smashed against each other in the maelstrom of lightning combat.

For how long this went on for, I can't say. The well-matched adversaries had at each other until the sun began to set, their disparate silhouettes set against its wide, red hemisphere, their war cries only slightly enervated from their epic struggle, Rosie one chopstick askew, her bun slightly shifted, the both of them with a handful of red shoe-polish marks on their attire, received from grazing blows. By that time, they had been observed from below, the two fighting figures dancing across the roof. Police had arrived but held back, unable to approach the fearsome duel.

I remember the end. As Rosie and Marty's broad battled it out in awesome ferocity on the very edge of the balustrade, I saw, rising slowly from behind them, its ominous outline rippled in the heat haze of its exhaust gases, the sleek black hull of a police helicopter. A distorted voice sounded incomprehensibly through the on-board loudhailer. I saw the powerful frame of Marty's woman sway for an instant as her footing faltered, her perfect balance disturbed from the unexpected downdraught of the rotor blades. The smaller Rosie, at an advantage in the rushing air, seized her chance and lunged forward with a wild, all-out haybaler of a swipe. At the last moment, the Parmywench blocked the blow with her own arms in a sickening crunch and loud squeezy squeak. Shocked by the force of the blow, she buckled for an instant with the shoe at her neck before, with her immense strength, she started to slowly push back on Rosie. In agonising deadlock they remained for those few seconds, defiantly oblivious to the loudhailer warnings, before Rosie suddenly seemed to notice, for the first time, the huge hands, the broad palms, the muscular fingers and the blue, popping veins of her opponent, pushing with every last ounce of strength at the shoe inches away from the coup de grace. Rosie gave a slight gasp and relaxed her attack. Marty's girlfriend, in confusion, allowed for quarter too, tentatively relinquishing her grip on the shoe. Then, Rosie reached over and with a look of rapt fascination and desire, slowly began stroking and fondling those great discus-like mitts.

"Your hands, your stwong, vigowous hands..." I heard her say.

Their eyes met, intense, bewildered yearning on both their faces.

I watched them, as I felt the pounding rhythmic thudding of the chopper blades echo in my chest, I watched them drop their clown-shoes and, as their clothes flapped like snapping flags in the helicopter's downdraught, they embraced and kissed, a long kiss of lesbotic intensity, a desperate kiss of wild abandonment and perennial pent-up passions - Rosie's bun finally bursting open and one bulging calf of Marty's girlfriend kinking back, demurely.

The wailing from the loudhailer ceased. The two women broke their embrace and stepped back, both facing the helicopter, hand-in-hand. I wanted to warn them. I wanted to shout out and warn the police. I wanted to tell them to get away, to flee this sapphic superduo but... but my lungs were frozen. I couldn't say a word. Instead, I felt myself being hauled away by the response unit who had just broken through the doors to the garden, dragged away to safety, to the soothing hot chocolate and foil blanket I cling to while silently rocking back and forth, back and forth.

Hefty Waft

2009-03-12T18:48:00.000Z

I went to see Marty at his offices. I'd called him earlier and told him about Bill and how I wasn't able to get the plot book back. He just hung up. I figured he'd called me over to cancel 'Badge'. When I got there, I had to wait, as usual, in the anteroom with his PA, Primula - Primula de Saveloy. I like Primula, with her chic specs and slinky svelte pelt. Ah, poor Primula de Saveloy, with her voluptuously sounded vowels and her lovely round assonance standing proud. The lovely Primula, long-suffering and sanguine as ever, the one dignified locus of sanity in Marty's empire of strange. I saw that she'd got herself an extra handbag and a set of noise-cancelling headphones. I thought it discreet to avoid enquiry.

I'd arrived early and had been killing time drinking lots of full-fat lattes at that new coffee chain - you know, the one with Hokey, the silver monkey. They tasted a bit like gravy for some reason. Anyway, after a few maximo waxibeakers, I was desperate to slash my liquistash so I headed straight for the Parmesan Production toilet facilities. The door was locked, so I paced impatiently for a minute or two outside before I heard a flush, running tap water and the lock of the door slide open. A very fat man with wrap-around sunglasses and a slicked-back ponytail of grey, thinning hair walked out, breathing noisily and laboriously through his open mouth. Awkwardly, we sidestepped together a couple of times before both going to the left of each other and, ignoring the fresh pungency, I hurriedly lifted the lid for to get done urination.

I don't know why, but I think it was more wistful dismay than outright revulsion that I felt when confronted with the unflushably turgid remnant of the last occupant. With a resigned equanimity, I covered the offending sight with a few squares of paper and hit the double-dot flush again. Noise and motion ensued but the obstinate blockage, apparently the digested residue of some meal fashioned from the super-dense degenerate matter of a neutron star, refused to budge - merely breaking into two chunks along its own critical fault line and stolidly rebounding around the pan before wedging tight with the mass of soggy paper, causing the bowl to fill right up over the rim. Outside, I heard Primula calling me in to see Marty. "Just coming," I said and, by then somewhat ruffled, I took the toilet brush and thrust it firmly into the swirling cloud of paper and non-baryonic ultrafudge. Unfortunately, so exotically compact the gutdirt was, that on the second plunge, the handle of the brush broke off and the plastic shard of shaft got sucked back down into the unspeakable mess with a loud squelching noise almost as if the defiant lump of megadump was mocking me. Primula called again and, in a mild panic, I just slammed shut the lid and hoped I'd be able to have another go at it after seeing Marty.

Marty was there, wearing his shiny silver-grey suit, sitting with his feet up on his vast mahogany desk. His Antianeiran object of adoration was perched nonchalantly on one corner, a pink tank-top stretched mercilessly over her immutable hooters, coquettishly filing her scarlet talons. The objects on Marty's desk were suspiciously arrayed - papers and files unnaturally stacked as if they had just been hurriedly piled there. Additionally, a faint hint of musky pong hung in the air, my thesis finally confirmed when I observed on the polished surface of the desk an unmistakable patch of condensed sweat, its bi-ovoid shape reminiscent of the fertile form of the Coco-de-Mer nut, only its angular edges betraying the precise provenance of such muscular buttock marks. Following my eyes, Marty noticed the moist mark himself and quickly slid a stack of files over the top to hide it, revealing behind them, as he did so, a kilo-block of Cheddar cheese, riddled with bite marks around the edge.

Stuffing the block of nibbled cheese into a drawer, he hit his intercom and ordered some drinks, offering one to me. My relationship with the lavatory still unconsummated, I politely refused and re-tensed my muscles over my insistent bladder. Primula sauntered in with a brace of bottles. "Soda, soda, sodaaghhh!" Marty exclaimed with glee, greedily snatching the bottles from his PA with strange gurglings of excited contentment like an infant being spooned mushed prunes. He handed a bottle to his big woman who wordlessly hitched up her tank-top a few inches, inserted the top of the bottle into her exposed navel and, condensing her iron abdominals, cracked off the crenellated metal bottle top with a sharp hiss of released gas. Opening the other bottle for herself in similar manner, both took simultaneous swigs before Marty leant back in his chair again, ready to hold forth. Just as he was about to speak, I noticed a look of slight confusion fall on his face and a bulge under his upper lip where he was probing with his tongue. He reached up to his mouth and plucked a thick curly pubic hair from between his upper teeth, surveyed it, shrugged, flicked it away, and began his spiel.

As the Parmy yapped on about needing to want it bad enough and not showing enough commitment, my mind wandered despondently. I noticed, for the first time, that when Marty speaks, it's not just his lower jaw which goes up and down but both his upper and lower jaws move, his whole head oscillating - rather like the muppets talk. None of what he was saying went in. I was tired of it all and just sat there watching his head flap away as he emphasised his points with extravagant hand gestures. Something caught my eye, though. I noticed that, as he was gesticulating, he was pumping away at something in his left hand. It wasn't his normal spring-loaded wrist-strengthener - it was something else - something round and red that he kept squeezing. Finally, he slapped it down on the desk and, as it uncompressed itself, I saw that it had popped back into the familiar sphere of a clown's nose.

"...and that's why we're happy to take on 'Badge' but we can't make do with the puerile scatological rantings of your story lines - we need a proper MacGuffin." He paused for effect. "A proper MacGuffin, just like this!" and he thrust forward a box file under my nose.

I opened it and looked within. "Marty, I don't understand, why do we need a value pack of industrial-grade 'Luvlube'?"

"Huh? Oh, wait. I mean, a proper MacGuffin like this!" and he shoved forward another box file, sweeping the first one aside, off his desk.

Again, I looked inside. It was the plot book - Sandy's plot book.

"Marty - how did you get hold of this? I saw Bill, but..."

Marty leaned forward and playfully pinched my cheeks between his thumbs and forefingers. "My boy, my boy, I have my ways..." He gently slapped the sides of my face with his stubby little hands and leaned back in his chair again. "I know how Bill likes to vent his juices... oy! So, we just gave him what he wanted, even - we gave him a woman, alright..." and he started giggling girlishly to himself. Slowly, it dawned on me, the truth of who he had sent to retrieve the book. Then, rolling up from beneath Marty's chuckling, I heard another sound, a sub-sound, and infrasonic vibration that sounded like laughter recorded on tape that has been slowed right down to an unsettling slow-motion bass rumbling and, glancing to the square shoulders of Marty's girlfriend, I saw them subtly shaking and realised the source of that monstrous, mirthful reverberation. My spine, from the base of my neck to the top of my coccyx, went numbly cold.

Marty then opened one of his desk drawers and I heard him rummaging in a carrier bag before pulling out a plastic punnet of plums. He leant back in his chair as his woman took one of the plums and, holding it over his gaping mouth, squeezed out the juice for him. He slurped at it noisily before casting me a glance, pink plum juice dripping down his chin.

"Crushed plums?" he offered.

"No thanks," I said, crossing my legs. She just sneered at me.

Well, I left them to their soft fruits and let myself out. 'Badge' is back and that is that - a good day, I guess, though I can't help feeling that things are getting out of control. Still, it's what I said I wanted.

Oh yes, on my way out, there was a shrill scream. Primula came out of the toilet, pale and sobbing. "Did you do that? Did you do that terrible thing?" she asked.

Filamentary Ribaldry

2009-03-10T18:50:00.000Z

"I've got an IQ of 183," Bill said again. "I could have done anything I wanted but it was always clowning, always clowning, always... since that day..." He put down his tea. I noticed the discoloured verruca plaster swimming in the oily residue at the bottom of the mug. "You don't know me," he continued, "Merkin doesn't know me. Merkin. If it wasn't for Merkin... You know what Merkin did to me? You should stay away from him if you know what's good for you. Three years in Japan. Three years and I was the biggest thing on TV. I had my own show - started off doing the interstitials between cartoons but the part kept growing. They loved the gaijin clown - 'Lucky Big Clown' they called me, 'Rucky Bigoh Crownoh-san'..." he trailed.

"Then they got hold of the photos in Tokyo. Someone must have sent them. It happened again. I got dropped again. I protested that they wouldn't be able to recognise my face under the make-up but they wouldn't listen."

Bill's breathing became more shallow and rapid. I could see his hands tensing into two big fists with the painful memories. He told me how he had had an 'episode'. He'd flown into a rage, refusing to leave the TV studios. He described how he'd smashed his way through the cameras, the production crew all jumping up onto his back, trying to restrain him, as he stomped around roaring like an enraged bear, whirling around and throwing them off, continually scattering them about the studio only for them to keep jumping back on again, frantically stabbing him with their biros.

Bill was in another world as he continued. "'Clazy kaiju - crownoh godzirraaghh!' was the last thing I heard before they overpowered me. You want to see what they did? You want to see?" He ripped off his shirt to show me his broad, pasty back. It was still peppered with hundreds of tiny red welts from the desperate biro attacks.

"Merkin," he whispered again, darkly, and sat down quietly next to a hideous mannequin.

"I never stopped clowning, though. I stuck to it. Always a clown, always a clown, always since..." I saw Bill's face soften and drop as though he was about to cry. "...always since school. Matron. Matron made me a clown. I did it for matron." He took a deep breath and seemed to compose himself, continuing in a steadier voice.

"Pater wanted me to continue in the family business. I was being groomed for it. The finest education money could buy. Oh yes, the finest, most despicably lonely education that money could buy. I was a boarder and the only thing that made it worthwhile, the only consolatory salve, the only element of untainted beauty was lovely sweet matron and her fifty-denier stockings.

"The lower sixth were all off for a run - cross country. I hated cross country, so I punched myself in the nose to make it bleed which meant I had to go and see matron instead. Off I went in my rugby kit with a scarlet-soaked handkerchief over my nose. I knocked on her door but she didn't answer. I just heard a faint groaning from inside, so I pushed open the door and crept in. It was the stockings I saw first. Those black fifty-denier stockings, crumpled around matron's beautiful white legs which were waving wildly up in the air, she on her back on the sick-bed and Dobber - Mr. Dobson - on top of her, dressed up for the school panto... dressed up as a CLOWN!

"'William...' she said softly as she noticed me, a sympathetic look of concern and dismay on her beautiful face. Dobber just sneered and imperiously shouted 'Feltch - out!' I had an episode. My first episode. I was carrying my spiked running shoes. We weren't allowed to wear them indoors. Anger convulsed me and, with an improvised weapon being at hand, I hurled myself forward, striking down with as much force as I could muster at the pale, still bobbing behind of Dobber. The shoe sunk into his left buttock with a resounding thunk, the deep spikes keeping it stuck there like Velcro. He cried out in an inhuman wail of pain, prompting a shrill shriek of shock from matron beneath. I ran. Dobber, red-faced with fury through the clown make-up, lunged after me mid-coition.

"The image I will never forget. Dobber, his still tumescent member waggling eccentrically like the convulsing neck of an electrocuted swan, coming for me, tripping over the baggy clown pantaloons wrapped around his ankles and falling, his murderous eyes still fixed on me, falling face-first into a chrome bedpan with a resonant clang. It was a freak blow, dispatching him instantly. As I sat huddled on the floor in a corner, watching sweet matron sobbing uncontrollably and peeling off the running shoe from Dobber's perforated buttock muscle with a loud ripping noise, I realised at that moment that there was only one vocation for me. Spurn my family though I must, lose my inheritance though I would, clowning - clowning was the path I had to follow."

Bill closed his eyes, took a long, deep sigh and opened them again, staring at me with pin-prick pupils. "You want this? You want the book? You get me a woman. The book for a woman." Slowly, a thin smile formed across his rouged clown lips. "I like to lick her tears."

"Did you... did you just say that you like to lick..." I started.

But Bill didn't answer with words. He just let out a long groan as if of pleasurable contentment, gently stroking his arms as he did so.

Hardly Badinage

2009-03-10T12:53:00.000Z

I managed to find Bill under 'Feltch' in the phone book. He had an ad. The address was for a big tenement in south London. I'd called up earlier on the pretence that I was looking to book kooky clowns for a London Boroughs-sponsored clown-fest. I just hoped he wouldn't recognise me from the rabid shoeing. It had seemed like a hideous crimson veil of clown-rage had descended upon him at the time, like something inside had snapped, and I clung to the thesis that he had undergone a psychotic personality switch at the time, insufficiently possessed of his critical faculties to remember in detail those around him.

It was windy up on the walkway of the fourth floor at the entrance to his flat. The estate had a menacing air. From below, I could hear a dog continually barking and kids screaming foul obscenities in falsetto tones. My hand was actually shaking with fear as I pressed the doorbell. It didn't work. Through the frosted glass, I could see the distorted silhouette of a large man at the end of the corridor. He was standing, looking straight at me, his shoulders hunched and his arms held tensely in tight fists at his waist. I tried gently knocking on the frame of the door. It wasn't properly closed and it swung open when I tapped it. I could see Bill clearly. His face was downcast but his eyes were swivelled upwards under his heavy brow and looking straight at me.

"Hellooo," he said, "can I get you some tea?"

His voice was incongruous to his appearance. It was a mellow, refined drawl - very posh and softly languid. The flat was squalid. We stepped into the kitchen where he made two mugs of tea by running water straight from the hot tap instead of boiling it in a kettle. I declined his offer of milk and then followed him to his lounge. The curtains were drawn closed and it was dark inside. The room was bare save for a large wooden sideboard and about a dozen chairs set up in a big circle. Most of the chairs were occupied by shop-window mannequins, dressed in shabby clothes and with their faces clumsily decorated with thick layers of colourful make-up. In the centre of the ring of chairs was a television on a table. Next to the table, on the floor, were three more televisions - they were smashed up and covered in dust. We both sat opposite each other across the pile of TVs in the middle of the ring. I held my tea in both hands, unwilling to take a sip even though the mug was full right to the brim. He sipped his drink, a pinky finger held at a kink, evincing his pedigree.

"I thought you might be delivering my new television," Bill said in a slight whisper, "I think I'll be happy when my new television arrives. Happy then. Waiting for delivery."

"No, I'm here to discuss Clownrush '09" I said.

"Yes, I know," Bill countered with just the merest hint of snappiness that still made me jump slightly, spilling a little of the tea on my hands. He showed no evidence of recognising me but the atmosphere was extremely unpleasant. Beneath the smooth, refined voice, it felt as though there was a barely-restrained violence, like he could erupt at any moment. I'd forgotten what a huge man he was - big and square-shouldered with that small bald head on top. He was still wearing most of his clown make-up, or, at least, it appeared as though he never bothered washing it off. Some of the white paint had dripped off from one side of his face, revealing the sweaty pallid skin beneath. His head looked like a pink and white mottled slab of off-cut beef, raw and fatty, ready for the mincer. Where the paint had seeped into one eye, it was red and swollen. The other eye was still that vivid, light-blue hue I remembered. We talked. His smooth, posh voice delivered preternaturally quietly, undulating slightly as though he was struggling to maintain control of himself. Each sentence he spoke seemed to end in the barest of angry hisses as he breathed in noisily through his clogged nostrils. And all the time he listened to me, he gnawed. He gnawed on the rim of his mug, he gnawed on the corner of a cushion, he gnawed on his knuckles which were red and raw from continued gnawing.

After a couple of minutes, Bill asked me if I wanted some toast with my tea. He placed his own tea on the sideboard and went to the kitchen. Immediately, I took the opportunity to furtively search for Sandy's plot book. The sideboard was the only furniture in the room, so I rummaged through its drawers. They were full of reams of paper, every inch covered in dense, handwritten notes. Under one pile, I found an old black and white photograph, curled at the edges with age. It was a younger Bill, still with hair - a mass of dark hair, his big frame clothed in a black polo-necked jumper. It was slightly blurred from the movement but you could still see clearly the semi-mangled Swiss roll and Bill's face contorted in an unwholesome mixture of climactic release and vague incomprehension.

I continued to rummage in one of the upper cupboards but it was filled only with a heap of green-tinged used verruca plasters which spilled out as I opened the door. I recoiled from the foetid aroma, picking up the errant plasters with the tips of my fingers and throwing them back in to close the door again. I tried the other cupboard and drawers but found nothing. Finally, too nervous to search elsewhere, I went to sit down again but noticed, with horror, that one of the plasters, some traces of yellow skin still attached, had fallen into Bill's mug of tea. I turned to look for something to fish it out and found myself staring straight at Bill who was silently standing behind me.

"Looking for this?" he asked, holding up a small black notebook.

One of his long arms shot forward, my stomach dropped in cold fear, but the arm continued around me and picked up his mug of tea.

"I know who you are," he said, "I've got an IQ of 183." His red and blue eyes stared intently at me over the rim of his mug as he took a long, deep draught of his tea.

Reportage

2009-03-09T07:45:00.003Z

MINISTERIAL AUTHORITY FOR MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES - FORM 9R-K/32 [M.A.M.A.100839]

09-03-09 WATCHZONE 1a-8273

TELEPHONE TRANSCRIPTION

Consumer Units under surveillance: J H Fisk 7-2521 call to S Merkin 1-5537 made 12:04 7th March 2009

SAFE UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYES

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT -

JHF: Hello, Sandy?

SM: Er... who's calling, please?

JHF: It's me, Jeremy - you know, 'Terry Badge' Jeremy.

SM: Oh, hey kid...

JHF: ...yeah, it's Jeremy, actually. Listen, Sandy, I've been worried about you. I mean after the clown attack. I, perhaps I should have done, well... hello...?

[static]

JHF: Sandy?

SM: It's okay, kid...

JHF: ...Jeremy...

SM: ...I knew the day would come, the day of reckoning. I knew it was only a matter of time before I saw Bill again. It's almost a relief, in a way.

JHF: Bill? You knew that clown, didn't you? You recognised him.

SM: Yes, I knew him, Bill Feltch. We go way back. We were both part of the scene. Both trying to get work as actors. Back then, there was all sorts of craziness going down, all kinds of experimentation, all kinds of consciousness being expanded. You wouldn't understand, kid, with your Facebook and...

JHF: ...it's Jeremy, and I don't actually have a Facebook accou...

SM: ... computers. We were real. We were politically active, we cared, we really cared. Well, back then, there was one theatre company that was way out there - it was the grooviest of the groovy. It had no costumes, no props, no seating for the audience - none of the bourgeois nonsense that ties you down - it was pure, pure like golden snow, it connected to the core of what it is to be human, it was out there, it was avant-garde... and I wanted in. I would have done anything to get in. I... I did do anything.

JHF: What do you mean?

SM: There was an audition piece. Something that they told me everyone had to do. We were in a big hall with a wooden floor and high, narrow windows which had no curtains. A bell was ringing continually and the cast were all dressed in black turtle-neck sweaters and black-rimmed glasses and were running around the edge of the hall, carrying the curtains on their shoulders - trailing them around like carnival snakes and howling. In the centre of the hall was a table, where I stood and there, they made me... they had it on a plate...

[static]

SM: ...they made me penetrate a warmed-up Battenberg...

[static]

JHF: Sandy? Did you just say that you...

SM: That's right kid, they made me f-ck a sponge, forced me to rape a cake.

[static]

SM: Look kid...

JHF: ...Jeremy...

SM: ...you have to understand that I wanted in. You ever wanted something so much, you found yourself doing things you wouldn't normally do? Huh? Things that you never thought you'd do? Well, back then, that was what I wanted. I was desperate, I would have done anything. That group was it. Besides, it was pushing the boundaries, it was art, it was an installation piece, it was political. You wouldn't understand these days. It was important. Anyway, after I got in, they decided they were going to make it into a movie - a protest movie.

JHF: I don't understand. How is penetrating a tepid Battenberg meant to be a protest?

SM: I told you, it was political. Anti-war. You wouldn't understand with your iPods and...

JHF: ...I don't have an iPod, actually...

SM: ...flatscreens. So, as the newest member I had to find someone who could play that part on film.

JHF: And the next guy just happened to be Bill Feltch, right?

SM: You got it kid...

JHF: ...Jeremy...

SM: I knew Bill needed the work too. I'm just glad the next guy was a guy. What they made the women do was even worse. I tell you, there's some famous grande dames of the theatre around today who I know for a fact have had Bakewell slices firmly...

JHF: ...so Bill knew what he was getting into, right? What was the problem?

SM: I wasn't quite open with him on all the details. We filmed in secret.

JHF: What did you do with the film?

SM: The film we burnt, baked it in an oven with some coconut macaroons - it was all part of the installation. But there were some still photos that were taken. The more radical elements in the group used those to launch a campaign. They took hundreds of copies and intended to go around the shops, sellotaping them to cakes on the shelves with the slogan 'Seeds of Guilt'. I told you, it was an anti-war thing. Well, fact of the matter is, when we all came down from the acid, we realised that none of it made any sense at all so we stopped the whole thing and switched to Gilbert and Sullivan operetta instead. But the damage was done.

JHF: Damage?

SM: Yes, some of the photos got loose. You see, by that time, Bill was doing his clown act and having some success with it on the TV. I heard that one of the photos of Bill emptying himself into a Swiss roll got seen by his producers. It finished his career. After that, I know he did some shows over in Japan where they didn't know about the cake incident. It finished his time with Rosie, too.

JHF: Rosie Hoal-Riemer?

SM: Yeah, she'd only just finished school - same fancy prep school as Bill's. She was that much younger and completely infatuated by him. Loved his hands. You see, I kind of caught her on the rebound but it didn't last. Just couldn't compete with Bill. She didn't care about the sponge spunking but Bill couldn't face her. I don't think she ever quite got over him, you know. Anyway, Japan was the last I heard of him until...

JHF: ...the frenzied shoe attack.

SM: That's right, kid.

JHF: It's Jeremy. Look, Sandy, I'm glad you're okay but I need to ask you something. I saw Marty the other day. We... er... had a little bike ride and he told me that you thought I had your plot book.

SM: Yes, you have it don't you?

JHF: No, I was hoping you did.

SM: F-ck kid! Without the f-cking plot book, we're f-cking f-cked!

[static]

SM: Bill must have it. If you didn't pick it up, Bill has it. He knew what he was doing. Kid, we need that book. I can't go. You have to go. You need to get that book back off him if Badge is going to happen. Without that plot book, there's no f-cking MacGuffin, kid.

- TRANSCRIPT ENDS]

SAFE UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYES

M.A.M.A.

Mechanical Advantage

2009-03-07T10:20:00.001Z

So there I was, round Marty's, in that ridiculously short dressing gown, eating smokey bacon crisps and drinking enormous cocktails of immense potency with him and robobint. I have to say, it's all a bit of a blur from then on. Since that evening, certain painful memories inflict themselves upon me at random intervals - neurological kindling which rise up and tear at me like jagged blades of obsidian rock breaking the surface of a dark tumultuous sea, treacherously clawing at the helpless hull of my frangible sanity in an irresistible black tempest of nauseating giddiness.

I remember the dancing first. Me, awkwardly pogoing around with my legs tight together and one hand clamped over my tackle, stultified in my terpsichorean expression by that absurdly brief gown. Marty, half crouching with his bony rear sticking out and frantically hand jiving and doing the 'mash potato', visibly enervated by his frenetically flapping forearms. And her... her, slowly contorting and writhing in an overtly erotic grind, gyrating blithely around a virtual pole, sinking to a full splits position and back up again with seemingly no effort from her powerful, piston-like pegs.

It was then that Marty yelled out "Trikestrike, sexitrikestrike!"

His girlfriend awoke from her writhing rhythmic reverie, left the room and returned with three tiny tricycles hanging from her vast arms. One was red, one was blue and one was green.

"Time to toke trike-like" Marty said, taking out an enormous spliff from behind the bar.

"I... I don't normally tend to..." I began.

Marty put an arm around my shoulders, supporting his weight and slumping forward to conspiratorially whisper to me. "If we're doin' 'Badge', I wanna know you're a Marty kinda guy. Are you? Are you a Marty kinda guy? 'Cos I'm beginning to have my doubts about you..."

Of course, I took that fat doobie and I got on the miniature tricycle. You knew I would. What little self-respect remained was effectively dealt with that night. What vestigial trace of artistic integrity that ever was, was thus forever erased that fateful hazy eve. I straddled that tiny trike in my tiny gown and I rode it. I rode it for all I was worth, like the worthless trike-truckler I'd become. I rode it round and round, the squeaky wheels sounding out loudly like the tormented trappings of my distrained mind, my shoulders hunched over the little handlebars and my white legs pumping away, my knees bent up right next to my ears, my bollocks flapping loosely in the breeze of the speed, my eyes pricked with tears of shame. Faster and faster I pedalled, the tiny frame of the tricycle bending and groaning from the unreasonable forces I applied to it, all the while Marty singing "Hava, hava nagila..." and his girlfriend clapping in time with those huge hands of hers - each beat sounding like the violent report of a concussion grenade.

Faster I pedalled. Firmer I gritted my teeth down on that joint. Wilder my distended knackers bobbled about. Deeper into the abyss of permanent psychological trauma I descended, until... in an insensate haze of alcohol and weed fuelled mania, I clipped one of the wheels over the edge of the jacuzzi and into the churning water I fell. Marty screamed in delight and he, immediately followed by his girlfriend, both jumped in with me.

The details become sketchy again. I remember the three of us reclining in the bubbling tub, our respective gowns cast aside. I remember Marty's curly hair completely fuzzed up by the moisture so it looked like a giant round microphone cover and his big retro glasses all steamed over. I remember snorting lines off of the glistening, adamantine abs of his broad. I remember Marty sticking to the coco coladas while his girlfriend and I swapped swigs from an iced vodka bottle. Yes! The vodka bottle - I remember now. It was the same brand as Sandy poured into his soup in that restaurant. I asked Marty about Sandy - if he was okay after the clown attack.

"He's okay, he's okay" Marty said. "Oy, that big schmuck - I tell you, you gotta know how to treat the writers. Carrot or stick, carrot or stick, stick or carraagghht! I don't schlep around with the carrot or stick - enough already! I make the carrot into the stick. I hit them with the freakin' carrot, yeah - ha ha - I beat 'em up good wit' the stick made outta carrot!" And he started laughing manically in that high-pitched nasal way of his.

He stopped abruptly. "Waittah minute..." he drawled, "did you pick up Sandy's plot book that day?"

"Plot book?"

"Yeah, yeah, his plot book. He ain't not'in' wit'out his plot book. He said he ain't got it but I figured you got it, right? Sandy can't do 'Badge' wit' no book."

"But we can still use my story lines in the meantime, can't we?" I asked.

"No book, no 'Badge'." Marty took another swig of his rum-laced mucus-juice then started screaming out laughing again. "Hit 'em wit' the carrot, yeah - hit 'em wit' the freakin' carrot!"

Then he leapt up out of the jacuzzi with surprising swiftness and, completely naked but for the froth of the bath, ran to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the city, hitting it with a fearsome slap. There he stood spread-eagle, legs wide apart, arms lifted in a victorious stance: "I'm Marty Parmy," he yelled to the lights below, "I'm Marty Parmy - I'm the Parmy - I hit 'em good with my carraaghht! I hi..." his voice trailed. He teetered for a moment, then slowly fell backwards, slumping to the floor, leaving a starfish pattern of suds against the window.

The last thing I remember, as Marty lay unconscious, is his girlfriend in the jacuzzi, pointing sternly for me to leave, me shamefully climbing out of the bath, acutely aware of her critical gaze surveying my exposed form as I rummaged for my sodden silk gown, forbidden to collect my clothes from the bathroom, forced to traipse the streets that night with only that inadequate gown and my wits.

But the plot book. I need to get hold of Sandy's book or all is lost with 'Badge'. I'm just going to have to face Sandy again after the clown incident.

Deference

2009-03-07T09:40:00.000Z

Well, I did accept Marty's invitation. I thought I better. When I got to his place, Marty and his moll greeted me together at the door. Both were only wearing gowns - exquisite, ornately embroidered Oriental-style silken dressing-gowns. Apart from the colours, they were matching designs: his, a blue one hanging loosely from his puny frame; hers, a red one barely managing to wrap around her muscularly pneumatic form. Marty then threw me a small tied-up green bundle which I realised was another such gown and invited me to kick back and join them "Parmy-fashion".

I shuffled off to one of the bathrooms to change and, putting on the gown, realised that it was alarmingly short in the hem. My boxers actually hung down underneath, which looked stupid, so I figured it would be better to go the whole hog and just make sure not to bend over. As I opened the door to leave the bathroom, I looked in the vast gold-rimmed mirror, my reflection casting a shameful, accusatory glance back at me - a ridiculous figure obsessively primping at the hem of a comically short dressing gown. I stared and I pondered gloomily on quite what I'd become in order to sell 'Badge'.

So thus I ventured out to the lounge in a series of careful, short steps, continually tugging down on the hem of my gown, in a nervous tic-like way. Marty's lounge is a huge open-plan affair, with two complete walls looking out on the lights of London below. One section is raised with a huge marble jacuzzi set in it and a drinks bar along the side. I remember the cream, ludicrously deep shagpile carpet running down the stairs to a polar-bear-skin rug. The whole thing reminded me of an 'Imperial Leather' advert from the 'Seventies.

Marty and his woman stood at the bar, watching me with a wordless, almost prurient, intensity. It was then that I realised that we were the only three people at this 'party'.

"Is anybody else coming?" I asked, self-consciously pulling down at the hem of my gown again, my legs feeling cold and exposed.

"We don't need no one else to have fun, party-style - not when we all get a little bit Marty-style!" Marty said, hitting a button on the bar which triggered the jacuzzi noisily into life, the lights dimming and piped groove music also starting in unison.

Defensively, I sat down in the only single chair, my knees clamped together and my hands trying to stretch out the gown over my lap. Marty went to the bar in that manner that people do when they half-walk, half-dance to the dance floor in a disco - sort of locomoting along with elbows pumping round in circles like they just can't resist the rhythm. His girlfriend strode over to where I sat and silently offered me a plate. As she bent down, I could hear the fabric of her silk gown stretch and crack as it strained tautly across her wide, muscular back.

"Smokey bacon crisp?" Marty said from behind the bar, "they're the best there are - I get them imported specially. Oy - not so kosher, my boy!" Recently Marty has dropped the contrived Brooklyn accent a little and has gone a bit 'Jewish'.

With one hand firmly clutching my dressing gown over my crotch, I carefully took a crisp from the pile, unable to help noticing as I glanced over the plate, that, though my hostess' silk gown freely hung down to reveal the cavernous cleavage below as she leaned over, her massive immalleable breasts retained their upright configuration, apparently impervious to the force of gravity. "Drink?" Marty's voice offered from behind the bar and, without waiting for an answer from me, a large coconut suddenly sailed through the air from Marty's position and was caught, with one hand, by his girlfriend. She handed me the plate of crisps and took the coconut back up to the bar where she took an empty ice bucket, placed it on the floor, squatted over it, placed the coconut between her legs and, with a slight perfunctory grunt, cracked open the shell with her vice-like thighs, letting the cloudy milk flush into the bucket below. She handed the ice bucket back over to Marty who started mixing and shaking.

"You want pureed banana in your daiquiri?" Marty asked. I glanced back at his girlfriend, my eyes drawn to the thin rivulets of coconut milk running down the bulging muscles of her huge, long legs. For a moment, I was caught in indecision, impelled by curiosity to see quite how it would be contrived to effect such an ingredient but also scared, scared to witness a sight which I knew would be seared in to my consciousness forever.

"N-No thanks Marty, no banana puree. None. Ever."

Marty just shrugged and came over to me with a couple of turbid pus-yellow cocktails in huge bulbous glasses with red foil parasols. He offered me one, for which I instinctively started to reach out, before realising that I needed one hand for the plate of crisps and the other for my gown. Momentarily nonplussed, I twitched back and forward a couple of times before converging on the solution of balancing the plate of crisps strategically on my lap while then freeing the other hand for the cocktail. Man, that plate was cold.

It was once we started on the booze that the pain really started.

Supplantage

2009-03-02T18:24:00.000Z

Well, I must say, a big help you lot were getting me out of that pub. I had to call Marty in the end and he came round with his brassy broad to rescue me. I managed to persuade him that it was an emergency and he rearranged his busy schedule to oblige. I wouldn't come out of the toilets until I could hear Marty's whining tones softly wheedling through the door. When I did, thumbs-guy and the northern terror had gone. Apart from Marty and his squeeze, the only people there were the barman (holding the sieve ready) and Hans Moretti sitting in the corner. It was definitely him. He wasn't saying much, he was just sitting there with his eyes closed as if in deep meditation.

Marty let me tag along in his limo. He's set it up like a mini editing suite so he can continue to work when on the road. Problem was, the only seat was just about a double one with not quite enough room for the three of us, so I had to sit wedged between Marty and his girlfriend. It was very uncomfortable with my elbows tucked in, one buttock suspended mid-air over the seat, half sitting on the flaccid, pipe-cleaner-like legs of Marty and half sitting on the steel-hard lap of his girlfriend. Whenever we turned a corner, I could feel her thigh muscle tense to stop herself leaning over and my whole body would be lifted perceptibly upwards. She and I stared forward self-consciously while Marty watched his giant TV, apparently unabashed and oblivious to the awkward seating arrangement.

He was checking out the pilots of potential new shows. First up was 'Prankhunt'. It's a low-grade amalgamation of various stunts fronted by a smarmy runt who dances around manically in lurid fancy-dress amid shrieking torrents of studio laughter squirted out discretely in a Pavlovian response to his catch-phrase "I'm a total prankhunt!" Each week it's the same set of 'running gags' just performed on different members of the public. Tawdry anchor man performs some of them himself. There's one where he sticks his head through the open windows of cars waiting in traffic queues and screams "Look at me!" inches away from the terrified faces of the drivers. Another one just has him exiting restaurant toilets and yelling "Bummer!" back through the door before running away. At the end of each show, anchor man also hosts 'Yooza Looza' which is sort of a spoof award thing which has him tracking down the minor celebrity who is deemed to have undergone the most humiliating personal degradations of the week. Captured on wobbly hand-held smirk-o-vision, the team crash the celeb's home and force on them the 'award' which is usually just mutely accepted with confused resignation.

Next was 'You Deserve It', in which two members of the public have wedges of money wafted in front of their faces, just out of reach, by celebrity taunters who repeatedly feign handing over the money but whip it back at the last moment. This goes on for fifty minutes, plus ad breaks, with the celebrities each time pretending that they were just joking before and they'll really hand over the money but, each time, sharply withdrawing it again. At the end, both contestants have their saliva chemically analysed and the one exhibiting the greatest physiological stress response, shown by elevated levels of hydrocortisone, wins both lots of money. The other one is tied up inside a sack full of monkeys pumped with ketamine and rolled down a hill.

What Marty's really excited about now, though, is a new concept he's working on with interactive reality TV. He's working on a bit of kit that connects the new Phatbox V to a webcam and allows viewers to, wait for it... watch each other. He's calling it 'Mutualtainment' and, basically, it means that viewers just sit and stare at each other. Sitting, staring, chewing, sniffing, chewing, staring, chewing, staring, for hours and hours and hours and hours.

Marty got the idea from that newscaster on the Fox Infospout Channel who cracked up the other day. Did you see that? She was half-way through reading a story on celebrity pancake endorsement when she just paused, stopped reading, took a deep sigh and slumped back in her chair. For a few seconds you could hear vague background noises of concerned shuffling off-set, then the camera zoomed in to her eyes, briefly wobbling and having to refocus as it did so. You could actually see something die inside her as the light went out in those eyes and a half-tear slowly welled up on her lower lid. The amazing thing was, they made that the new lead story and, for the next two hours, stuck with rolling-news coverage of the newscaster herself, sitting in her chair, staring ahead and silently weeping, while the superimposed news-ticker kept running along the bottom of the screen with captions like "Breaking story: sultry anchoress stares newspair in the face."

Marty's been in a really good mood lately and just signing off everything - including, as you would have seen from that flyer on the bus, 'Badge'. When he dropped me off in the limo, he told me he'd arranged a little party back at his pad to celebrate getting 'Badge' into production. I don't really feel that comfortable accepting but I think I better go.

Advantage

2009-02-07T15:16:00.000Z

I went back to that pub again. Aside from the barman, there were only two others - the same guy with the broken thumbs and Peter Denyer, who played 'Ralph' in 'Dear John'. It was definitely him. He was just sitting in the corner, staring at the frosted glass of the window and not saying anything. "S'fundah," I said, in greeting.

"Sutwe," the barman nodded, in response.

As soon as I reached the bar, thumb-guy jumped off his stool and grabbed my lapels, gripping them between his fingers and the tops of his palms as he couldn't use his twisted thumbs.

"You gotta help me," he spluttered. He looked awful. He was pale, unshaven and reeking of booze. He swayed and shook and the lid of one of his bloodshot eyes was twitching intermittently. "You gotta help me. She says I'm no good to her now. To be honest, I don't know what use she ever had for my hands - the Rohypnol, or whatever it was, always blacked me out completely. But... but when I come to, it's the ash... the ash and the slingbacks. I need it, pal. I need more ash and slingbacks."

I dusted off his grubby fingers from my jacket. "What can I do about it?" I asked.

"You gotta help me." He thrust his broken hands under my nose. I reeled slightly. "Splint 'em. Splint 'em up with something. Look... the cocktail stirrers, you can use those. Splint 'em up, please, quick... she'll be here soon... quick..."

I looked to the barman. We exchanged concerned expressions. Then, hesitantly, the barman reached behind himself to pick up a jar of coloured-plastic cocktail stirrers from the mirrored compartments under the spirit optics.

But we were too late. I heard the door to the street open and felt a current of cold, dry air rush in.

"Aarraght"

We both turned. She sashayed to the bar in a series of short steps, her loose shoes slapping against her heels and dragging on the floor. The barman mixed and poured her drink which she sipped up through twin straws, finishing the liquid, gurgling the air through the crushed-ice mash at the bottom and then letting out a satisfied gasp from the back of her throat.

Peter Denyer chose the moment to quietly get up and absent himself from the saloon, moving to the toilets. As he passed the bar, the barman held out the sieve for him which he silently accepted without breaking his stride.

"Raarrght," she said, "let's see 'ow thorse 'ands er dowin', shall we? See uf they can clamp me topnuts."

"Clamp me..." I saw the man mouth to himself, clearly trying to recall his blacked-out activities from this scrap of a clue. He stepped forward gingerly with a whimper and presented his hands.

"We'll do this fer and skwer," she continued. "'Ere, 'ave that," and she slapped something hard into the man's opened hands. I saw his eyes blink heavily as he tried to hide the wince of pain from her. "An' you an'all," she said to me. Without thinking, I held out my hands. Into them she plonked an identical object. "'Ave that," she said. I looked down and saw it was one of those fuzzy Velcro balls - you know, those toy Velcro balls that you throw against furry hats or bats or soft fuzzy indoor 'dart' boards.

She walked back to the bar, turned around to face us again and, standing with her back against the bar, reached behind and used her arms to thrust herself backwards and upwards. She heaved herself up, wriggling her bottom up the front of the bar in a zig-zag pattern, her legs momentarily jiggling mid-air with the effort, as she lifted herself up to sit on top of the bar. Then she opened her coat and hitched up her mini-skirt from the tops of her thighs such that it served as no skirt at all. She had on no underwear. Shuffling aside the flanks of her coat, she spread her pale thighs wide apart, emitting a little rasping sound which was either her flaccid skin vibrating from the friction as it was drawn over the polished wood, or a small fart.

"'Oo-ever gets 'em to stick the nearest, can 'ave me," she said disinterestedly, shanks akimbo.

With dawning horror, I looked at the soft Velcro ball I was holding and realised what it was for. The other man was already wide-eyed with intent, his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth in absolute concentration as he attempted to gauge the shot and line it up with repeated practice swings of his throwing arm. Then, after more careful rehearsal movements back and forth which provoked a bored sigh from the woman on the bar, he threw. The ball arced across the room and hit and stuck, without any bounce, the perimeter of the hirsute target.

He tucked his chin into his chest with a relieved smile, clearly happy at his effort. Both now looked towards me. I hesitated.

"Garrarghn," she said.

"But I..." I faltered.

"Throar!" she insisted, impatiently.

I felt my right arm rise. I watched it, in an agonised, detached, almost hypnotic state. It pulled back to throw, seemingly without my conscious volition, back, back... I mustered all my mental strength and at the last moment, when my arm let loose, I managed to twist my body at the waist, queering the throw and sending the Velcro ball spiralling way off to the right.

Just then, Peter Denyer returned from the toilets, brandishing the sieve. The ball, in mid-flight, bounced off the toilet door as it swung open, hit the slowly rotating ceiling fan, ricochetted off of the time-bell with a single ding and, with a soft plumping thump, hit the exact centre of the target.

"You lucky bugger..." the man whispered in slack-jawed disbelief.

The woman raised an eyebrow, drearily impressed, her stolid phlegmatism reluctantly punctured in that instant by the bizarre trick shot. "That were reet fancy, that. Now, 'ow dark ar'yer nuggets, louv?"

I'm writing this from inside the toilets. I ran to them and locked myself in. I don't even have the sieve. I'm still in them and writing to you on my Dangleberry. Battery low. Signal weak. I can hear the pounding on the door still. Get help! I need help. Get help now! I'll tell you the name of the pub - please just get me help. Okay, the name of the pub is [M.A.M.A. PRIVILEGED INFORMATION: CUT] and it's right on the [M.A.M.A. PRIVILEGED INFORMATION: CUT]. You can't miss it. Bring tazers.

This message was sent from my Wiffi Dangleberry.

Clever

2009-02-06T22:35:00.000Z

Alright.

I went back to that new pub again today. I was really worried about the guy I spoke to yesterday. He was there once more, sitting at the bar. The only other patron was Tommy Boyd who used to be in 'The Wide Awake Club' and 'Saturday Starship'. It was definitely him. He was just sitting in the corner, staring ahead, not saying anything. They had the TV on today. A big flat-screen in the corner. It was showing a sports channel but it was one of the sorts of sports channels that can only afford short spurts of cheap sports. They had some third division plank-kicking with a quarter-size screen-in-screen of a soggy beaver steeplechase. The sound was turned right down and the stuttered drone of a helicopter hovering somewhere overhead drowned out everything but the odd sizzle of high-pitched 's' and 'z' sounds from the commentary.

"Safunder..." I said, by way of greeting, as I walked to the bar.

"Saffuh..." the barman nodded in response. The other man just snorted derisively and said nothing.

I ordered pints for the both of us at the bar and put one in for the barman. I guess none of us were so much in a talking mood today - like Tommy Boyd in the corner. So we just sat and supped while the traffic and the helicopter and the 's's and 'z's rumbled and buzzed away.

Half the way down my pint, I felt the windows rattle slightly in their sills from the change in air pressure as the door opened and in walked two community support officers, annotated by their dark blue hat stripes. They came to the bar. "Safunder..." said the first with a nod. He was stocky and swarthy skinned with a thick black monobrow and a big square chin held in an eerie fixed grin. The other said nothing. He was tall and thin and had his hat pulled right down almost to the top of his long, beak-like nose. He leant his head back and his eyes seemed to be looking right up into the brim of his cap so that you could only see their whites. They flickered nervously in their orbits, as if searching skywards for something faint and distant. It was only when the barest noise came from Tommy Boyd, shifting his weight in the corner, that I saw the colour of those eyes for, immediately, they swivelled with uncanny speed and accuracy to the source of the slight fidget, locking on to the movement like laser-guided missile.

The dark round one spoke. "Gents, we're 'aving a little bovva with the ol' surveillance network round 'ere, today. We got a couple of blind spots. One's on the corner 'ere - area 4QNZ3, patch of ground two yards by four, just down from the pub. Both its cameras are aht - whossa chances, eh? We got a temporary choppa keeping watch this mornin'... an eye in the sky..."

He said "eye in the sky" with a slow, conspiratorially rising intonation - like he was telling a dirty joke - to which his colleague registered the first sign of following the discourse with a thin, wide smile on his gaunt upturned face.

The dark round one continued with jovial, twinkling eyes "...but we can't keep 'er up there forever. So's - we needs you boys to carry arahnd a couple of hand-helds for the day. Alright?"

He placed two small hand-held digital video cameras on the bar. The metal casings were pitted and both had bar code stickers on them. "We'll be back in to collect 'em tomorrow, lads."

His face then tightened a little in concentration, as he adopted a more officious tone, and canted: "All footage will be kept securely at Centadata by the Ministerial Authority for Municipal Archives and remunerated commensurately." Then he relaxed. "See boys? MAMA's gonna give you each a few Consumacreds for yer troubles." He paused for a moment, appearing to scrutinise each of us, then smiled, took in the sharp breath of a successfully concluded conversation, and tapped to attention.

"Safe Under The Watchful Eyes," he said.

"Safe Under The Watchful Eyes," his colleague suddenly piped up in a monotone of repeated litany.

"Safunder.." both I and the barman responded, half-heartedly. The man sitting next to me just stared morosely into his pint.

The officers left. The barman lifted up one of the cameras to examine it more closely. The other man at the bar and I just stared at the remaining device. As I sat, I steadily became more aware of the television commentary bleeding into the ambiance as I realised the sound of the helicopter was fading. Then, green lights on each of the cameras blinked on.

The other man got off his stool and stood. "Need the sieve?" the barman ventured helpfully, reaching down under the bar. The man shook his head, took a giant gulp of his pint and put down his glass by the camera which he pushed towards me.

"There you go," he said, "s'all yours, mate."

The barman placed the other camera down on the moist, branded towel of the bar and said, "you want this one, then?"

"I'm not having either," the man responded. Then, he reached out with his right hand and wrapped it around his left thumb, curling up the thumb and squeezing it down into its own fleshy heel. You know how much that hurts, right? Try it! Well, this guy just kept squeezing until there was a loud crack. He staggered backwards for a moment and I thought he was going to faint. But he just looked up at me with wide eyes and a nod, saying "hnn?" like he was trying to elicit approval from me for some clever act or idea.

He had broken his own thumb.

Then he held out his left hand, with its limply hanging digit, and cupped the palm around his right thumb. Letting strange sobs escape from his clenched teeth, he started to apply pressure again until another, louder crack sounded.

He was breathing shallowly and rapidly. He reached out for his pint with his right hand. Its thumb was shaking, well, more vibrating in weird spasms like a floundering fish. The hand slid up and down the glass, ringing gently as his trembling fingers tapped it ineffectually without being able to grip it.

"You see?" he said. "They can't use me now. They need our opposable thumbs. But I'm on to them. I'm way ahead. They can't use me no more. I'm free and at three o'clock she'll be back and she'll make it all better again with the ash and the slingbacks."

His face was green-white with shock and he was shivering. He crumpled to his knees, laughing, crying and blowing milky snot from his runny nose. "The ash and the slingbacks," he sobbed, "THE ASH AND THE SLINGBACKS..."

Ash

2009-02-05T22:47:00.000Z

I tried out a new pub the other day. I was sitting at the bar with two other guys. One of them was Hugo Myatt who played the Dungeon Master in 'Knightmare'. It was definitely him. He sat in the corner and didn't say much, though. The other fellow was next to me, on another bar stool. His clothes looked really crumpled like they'd been washed but not pressed. The two of us and the barman were engaged in a sparse conversation of discrete, trailing phrases ventured between sips - which suited me just fine. The barman was telling us how he was running low on space for casks as he'd got a load of compressed-air cylinders out back. He'd been caught out by speculation in the property boom. He had successfully 'flipped' a few off-plan flats and had been trying to get even more leveraged exposure by buying the blocks of air over the top of sites which were going to be built on. Off-off-plan, I guess you'd call it. Trouble was, he'd borrowed all that money and now the value of the air was less than he'd paid for it, so he got it compressed and stuck it out in the back yard for the time being.

Well anyway, a little while later, the guy next to me got up to use the toilets. "Don't forget the sieve" the barman reminded him, handing over a metal sieve which he'd pulled out from under the bar. The guy nodded in gratitude and lolloped off to the crappers. When he got back, he saw that I'd got him a fresh pint in - sitting on the bar, ready for him. "Thanks, mate," he smiled, and hauled himself up on to his stool next to mine.

He took a long, comforting draught of his foaming nutty-brown ale, looked me meaningfully in the eyes, and began to confide:

"I was in here yesterday, mate, sat right where I am now, talking to you - 'cept it was another geezer where you are. That's when she came in. At three o'clock, it was. I heard the door open and then the rhythmic swish-clack of her steps in high-heels slightly too big for her." He paused. "Ooh, I didn't know about those heels then."

The man took another calming sip and confided some more:

"She had a broad northern accent - I don't know exactly where from - just northern. 'Arrarght boys,' she said. We both turned on our stools to see who had addressed us and there she stood. She had on a thick fur coat and her hair was tied back so severely it seemed to prevent her top lip from closing properly when she spoke so she appeared as though with a permanent, disdainful sneer.

"She wobbled over to the stool next to us and ordered drinks for the three of us. We thanked her with raised glasses. 'S'arrarght, boys,' she said, 's'my pleasure.' She downed her measure in one go, then faced us and said 'whoever's got the darkest nuggets can 'ave me.'"

The man reached for his drink but cancelled the movement, and looked to the floor, shaking his head with a slight laugh.

"So, the next thing I remember is waking up this morning. I think I was 'rohypnoled' - I really do. Everything after that drink is missing. I woke up on a floor. I was lying on my back, naked. I looked up and there she was, above me, sitting on her sofa. Her feet were resting on me. I could see her white, half-shaven calves foreshortened in exaggerated perspective rising up to her knees. She was grinding cigarette ash into my chest with the heel of one of her bright green translucent plastic slingbacks."

He paused again. I heard his voice quaver as though his heart was beating too heavily in his throat to deliver stilly his story.

"The ash," he whispered, "that ash, those slingbacks..." and he looked deeply into his pint, way down into its distant depths.

"Ah, anyway... I... er... started to get up. She noticed my regained consciousness and her eyes flicked down momentarily to me. 'Aarrarght,' she said, absently, before her gaze fixed back on the television which was playing 'The Jeremy Kyle Show'. Outside, I heard a little dog start to bark. 'Shurroop, Bollok,' she shouted, scattering more ash on me from her cigarette.

"I, well I panicked. I was confused. I sprang up. Desperately, I looked for my clothes. 'Clothes are in t'washer,' she said, observing my rummaging. I rushed to the washing machine and stopped it mid-cycle, letting out soapy water on to the kitchen floor and dragging on my clothes, still soaking and heavy, before running... slopping away."

The man picked up his pint then placed it back down without taking a drink. His eyes had become dark tunnels. Tears were forming. He reached out a hand and grasped my forearm. "It's funny," he said, "the crazy thing is my nuggets aren't even that dusky. If anything, they're pale... white... blanched like birch-bark..." He stopped and looked up to me again. "You don't understand, do you?" he continued. "You don't see what I'm saying, here." He looked up at the clock on the wall. His voice was breaking. "I've come back for more. I want more. Those slingbacks... the ash... I want..." He trailed off.

Deeply uneased, and without taking my eyes away from him, I gently lifted his hand off my arm, slid carefully off my bar stool, and backed away towards the door. Reaching behind me, unable to look away from him, I fumbled for the door handle. As I found it, I felt it immediately move away from my grasp as someone simultaneously opened it from the outside.

"Aarrarght"

There sounded the chinkle of dropped coins hitting the floor as they fell from my hand, slackened with dread.

Husk

2009-02-02T16:08:00.000Z

I think I might be getting a touch of eastern-beefymuff-fever. It didn't occur to me before but I do seem to think of Marty's Slavic power-slapper a lot. I thought it was more in a fearful way. But Marty was telling me again, just this morning, about how she heftypumps his dirty tackle and now does it while slam-reading him 'poshlost' poetry at the same time. I must admit, images were conjured up in my fevered mind, unwholesomely enticing images... maybe I do yearn for those iron fists, the pinioned cringing slapjudders, the involuntary flinching snivelspurts - like a tube of toothpaste ferociously stamped on by a mink-lined Cossack boot... maybe... no! No, it's definitely fear.

Beyond

2009-01-30T11:43:00.000Z

I have to admit, that last occurrence did shake me up. I just kept running. I ended up at one of the highest towers in London. I probably shouldn't say which one. I needed to get as far off the ground as I could because I was concerned that my vibrations were giving me away. I was having trouble walking without rhythm and was worried about that clown.

This tower has a bank based in it and I still remembered the names of some of the slickly glib and spickly obsequious bankerbots within. So I decided to call in a favour from times past and get them to let me up the tower. I managed to contact someone I knew from the structured products group and he met me in the foyer. I explained that I just needed to get high up, as far from the ground as I could get. So, after signing me in, he let me wander around with his magnetic pass card.

I took an elevator all the way to the top floor. I remembered being there before, long ago. Aside from meeting rooms, there was some unused space. In one of these unused rooms, the leveraged finance guys had set up one of those games which used to be in arcades and piers - right by the air-hockey table. The game with the long thin length of metal which was curled up into lots of funny bends, rather like the font of a 'Curly Wurly' bar. At one end, held on a bit of wound-up gaffer tape, there was a stick with a little metal loop, just slightly bigger than the diameter of the curly metal wire which passed though it. You had to very carefully guide the metal loop all the way along the curly wire, around all the loops and turns without touching it. If you touched the wire, it completed an electrical circuit and rang a loud buzzer. Man, those things were tense, weren't they? In this room, they had set up one of these games and connected it in series to two giant stacks of amplifiers so that if you touched the wire, the buzzer sound was deafening. They used it as a sort-of initiation device for new team members. I was told that interns had frequently soiled themselves from the shock of setting it off.

There were some glass doors out to a very small roof-top terrace almost at the top of the building. Sometimes, smokers would go up there for a cigarette but it was usually empty. Just inside was a set of soft benches, a vending machine and two flat-screen TVs showing Bloomberg and Reuters. I just went and sat down on one of the benches. It was a big rectangular cube covered in burgundy-coloured faux-leather. Soon after, two young Japanese women came in to the room. One was very slim and one had quite a round face but they were both pretty. They sat down on the soft bench next to mine and started studying a fold-out tourist map together. They clearly weren't dressed in business clothes but rather wild party clothes like only the Japanese can muster and I wondered how they had got in the building.

It was then that I felt a fart build up. I casually let it go. I let it slip out silently but regretted it immediately as soon as I had done so. I could smell it's ripe pungency rearing up almost immediately. Why had I done that? I should have held it in. There were only the three of us sitting there and they'd know it was me. There was no way I could pretend it wasn't me. It was obvious that it's provenance was a caucasian anus - it reeked of a western diet of dairy products and greasy fried animal fats. (In fact, I'd had breakfast at the 'Southern Greasy Fried Animal Fats' by Liverpool Street station.) I wondered whether to get up or not but it wouldn't make any difference - they'd still know it was me and I would be really embarrassed.

But just then I noticed that there were people outside on the terrace. Well, not actually on the terrace but, incredibly, hanging off a bar which was suspended from the top of the building and jutted out over the side. They were attached by safety harnesses but, still, they were sitting on the bar with nothing below them all the way down to the ground. My legs tingled from just seeing them there. There were four of them and they were all going through the same acrobatic motions on the bar - not quite in unison. I saw this as my chance to distract the Japanese girls from the smell of my rancid gas before it reached them and move them over to the window, so I leaned over and called to them, then pointed at the window, through to the people on the pole. The girls both gasped in high-pitched tones then each drew a sharp intake of breath through their teeth in a similar fashion. We all walked over to the window to see better. I was glad just to get us away from the stink cloud and to save my blushes. When we got to the window, we could see that the people on the bar were trying to copy the same acrobatic manoeuvres of another set of people on a bar below them - though this one was safely over the terrace itself. It looked like those on the bar nearest to us were making up the movements which the ones on the overhanging bar then had to try to emulate. It was extraordinary.

I felt a touch on my arm and looked down to see that the very slim Japanese girl had reached out to me to get my attention. On her wrist I could see what looked like a watch but it had no clock-face - only a matrix of multi-coloured LEDs which blinked cryptically. Her skin was pale and I could see a number of pink healed-over cuts on her arm. "This squid-smelling world should be completely destroyed" she said to me. I wasn't sure if she'd understood the English words she'd just said. Her friend pulled her away from me and sounded like she was scolding the thin girl in Japanese - something about "oyaji" - then the two of them rushed off quickly but with tiny, shuffling steps.

Reference Ends

2009-01-28T11:48:00.000Z

After Sandy and I left the restaurant, he was stonily silent. I tried to engage him again by saying something profound, so I told him how we're all topologically tubes - you know, with the mouth and the anus, we're essentially tubular, topologically speaking.

"What about the nostrils?" he asked, and I had to explain that, broadly speaking, I meant sort of functionally tubular, really, that was the point.

"What about the eyes? What about the urethra, then? Did you think about the urethra?"

I didn't answer him but just carried on in a sulk as he was clearly not entering into the spirit of the conversation.

As we walked along, we went past a street entertainer dressed as a clown who was doing a comedy juggling act. He had a crowd around him and I had to step in front of some of them to get by on the pavement, so I had to pass right by the clown on his pitch. As I walked by, he deliberately dropped all the balls in an exaggerated fashion, throwing his arms up in the air and taking off his hat to collect money. He stepped up right in front of me and wouldn't let me pass, shoving the hat into my tummy for a donation. He was smiling and nodding and people were laughing at him while he did it but I didn't like it. I wanted to just push him out the way but he was a huge guy. He had a big body but his head was small. It was small and painted white and looked shrivelled like it had been pickled and bleached in a vat of vinegar for a month. I could see that he wasn't wearing a stick-on clown pate but that it was actually his own painted, bald head with his own long strands of greasy dyed-red hair over his ears. He had yellow teeth and his wide eyes were bloodshot from the make-up that had run in to them and were coloured light blue, almost white like a bright cloud-filled sky.

Uneasily, I tried to shuffle around him but he kept jostling and blocking me. Then, suddenly, he cocked his head quizzically over my shoulder to look at Sandy. In an instant, there was a look of mutual recognition on the two men's faces as their eyes met, the clown's smile narrowing to a snarl of malicious contempt, an expression of slowly comprehending horror growing on Sandy's face. "Oh f-ck..." was all he could mutter before the clown, with a furious roar, had hurled himself at Sandy, knocking him to the ground and raining down blows.

I stumbled back a few steps, not knowing what to do. Sandy was lying on the ground, I think already unconscious, his lips cut open, with the clown squatting over the prone body and hitting him still. The clown had taken off one of his big outsize-shoes and was using it as a weapon. Petrified, I watched each stroke in what looked like slow motion as he used his full arm length to deliver all his strength in long arcing blows across Sandy's face with the shoe - each blow spurting up a fountain of red-black blood and making a funny squeaking sound from the elongated clown-shoe - like the high-pitched squeaker in a squeezy toy.

At first, I think the crowd thought it was part of the act and carried on laughing. But as the blood started to flow, they realised, recoiling with horror, that the act was over. So I guess, in that respect, Sandy certainly had his point proved about some level of the delusional narratives we spin ourselves.

Over and over he pounded Sandy and, with each vicious impact, that bright-red baguette-shaped clown shoe sounded a bleakly comedic squeezy squeak. Eventually he stopped, gasping heavily from the exertion before starting to laugh, a deep booming laugh coming up from his huge lungs, through his yellow-toothed mouth held open in a wide 'O' shape like a ghastly clown megaphone. At that moment, he looked up and saw me. A blood lust was in his wide, exultant eyes. The movement triggered the switch of his clown bow-tie which started up - whirring around and spattering fine flecks of blood over his white face.

I lost my nerve. I turned and ran, ran like misty buggery.

I've still got Sandy's card with me. I keep thinking I should call him to see how he is but I'm ashamed to. I didn't do anything to help him at all. I just ran.

Reference Begins

2009-01-28T11:28:00.001Z

Marty seems preoccupied whenever I speak to him lately and sometimes I wonder if he just wants me to give up on the whole 'Terry Badge' thing but doesn't want to tell me straight because we go back so far together. I tried discussing it again this week and did seem to get some response from him. He said that he'd been talking about the idea with one of his screenwriters - Sandy Merkin, in fact - and that he wanted me to speak to Sandy about it, so he set up a lunch for us.

I was excited as I knew that Sandy Merkin was the lead writer behind 'Rubbersnatch', which is one of my favourites. Anyway, I met up with him and Marty at a very fancy restaurant favoured by the meedja in-crowd. Marty had got us the best table, obviously, but didn't seem terribly focused on things at all. He sat there typing messages on his Wifi Dangleberry and didn't even hang around for food, so it was just me and Sandy in the end. I think that Sandy used to be an actor way back in the 60s and 70s but it didn't really work out so he went into screenwriting which turned out to be more lucrative for him. He certainly looks like an ageing-thesp - a bit gaunt with striking features and a distinguished roman nose and an immaculate 'fifties pompadour hair-style. I remember that he held out his hand to shake with the palm facing downwards - like a lady does.

He seemed pretty morose when we arrived and kept fidgeting but perked up when Marty had left as if he could relax and speak more freely. I ordered lobster and Sandy ordered soup. When the waitress asked him what kind of soup he just snapped back "any kind of f-ing soup." She didn't seem fazed by it at all but just muttered back his exact phrase to herself as she jotted it down, though exactly what she could have written, I can't imagine. When our food arrived, Sandy looked furtively around then pulled out a 250ml bottle of Smirnoff Blue Label Vodka and poured the entire contents into his bowl.

We started talking about 'Badge' and Sandy said that he and Marty had discussed it and had come up with some ideas to make it more commercial but that I wasn't going to like it. "You're not gonna like it, kid" is what he said. He kept calling me "kid" even though every time he did it I emphatically corrected him with my name. Anyway, he said that if it was going to be a runner they wanted to make Terry a surgeon who owned a restaurant and was a chef in his spare time. They could get TVChef to endorse it and produce a whole line of tie-in recipes and cook-in sauces. The dark side of this medic-restaurateur character is meant to be that he can't seem to be able to stop himself sauteing up some surgical waste every now and then and serving it in his gaff. I know, it's ridiculous isn't it but they said they know what sells.

Sandy could see that my shoulders had dropped in disappointment as he was telling me this - and he put down his spirit-scented spoon and leaned over the table towards me. "Listen kid," he said, "if you wanna make it in the biz we call show, you gotta get commercial. Forget art, forget self-expression, forget beauty, you gotta pen what sells. Look, you got a pension, huh kid? You wanna see my pension, here's my pension..." and he pulled out a photo from his jacket and threw it on the table. It was an under-exposed Polaroid picture of a hand-gun in a fridge.

I said to him that I'd spoken to the BBC and they'd tried to change Terry into Thomas Bufheiney.

"Rosie Hoal-Riemer was it?" he asked. "Yeah, thought so. Don't listen to her kid, she's behind the times. I know her. Me and Rosie, we used to have a bit of a 'thing' going. I wasn't good enough for her, though. Said I had writer's hands - and she needed 'the arms of an artisan awound her'" and he stared despondently at his hands outstretched in front of his face.

Then he leaned back and started waving his arms expansively, gesturing round the restaurant and talking loudly about how we all lead 'fictional lives', anyway. "First thing in the morning, you wake up and boot up and the universe clicks into view as your brain interprets the barrage of raw sense data into a consistent, cognitive whole, yeah?"

He slurped up a big spoonful of vodka-soup. "That's the first level of stories we tell ourselves, kid. Then, we get up and walk around and interact with the world and make sense of events by coming up ex post facto with a whole bunch of mini-stories from the chaotic cloud of causality which envelops us - little mini-stories that make convenient empirical rules to make us think we can explain why one thing leads to another. We group our experiences together by interpreted meaning - a synchronous, superstitious organisation of our lives regardless of the linking of events in the underlying true reality."

By now people on the other tables were watching Sandy as he waved his spoon in the air and held forth - "and on top of all that, there's the next layer of stories we make up. The memetic emergence of things we just don't talk about and pretend don't happen. The crazy thoughts, the mad rituals, the insane quirks which we all have, which we all do, which we often suspect each other of having but which we all keep secret deep down inside. You see, in the fictional lives we lead, these things don't happen - the bad thoughts, the bizarre perversions, the irrational tics - they don't figure in consensual conversation and we all pretend they don't live in our world. We have a smoother, artificial narrative devoid of prejudicial neurosis - one which is is free from real human manner, one of idealised humans - humans that don't really exist - which we have all conspired to agree is really real - and so we continue our lives of fiction - OUR FICTIONAL LIVES!"

He stopped, checked himself and went quietly back to his soup, muttering softly to me "and that's why you gotta pen what sells, kid. Makes no odds what the stories are. I gotta take a leak. Don't touch my soup." He got up, paused, eyed me suspiciously and then hawked up a big glob of phlegm in his throat and spat in his soup, stirring it in with his spoon.

See

2009-01-26T10:31:00.003Z

Marty came out of hospital over the weekend - his giant girlfriend carried him out. I went to see him and we had a brief chat but he wasn't particularly focused. He was unfocused. He was unfocused and uncommercial. We exchanged a few pleasantries and reminisced a little, anyway. I talked to him about the old school days and mentioned Bozza and Plappy and Marty suddenly said that he remembered Bozza and how he was the one who was football mad and would only ever talk about football and how he gave Marty that stripey scarf with 'We All Agree, Marty Parmy is Magic' printed on it. I tried to explain that that wasn't Bozza and that Marty was thinking of Smiffy, but he was unfocused so it was no use.

He remembered Plappy again, though. He remembered Plappy from when we all worked together. He started talking about that time Plappy shat in Marty's shoe and Marty didn't even realise. He asked me if I knew if Plappy remembered that. Well, Marty says he remembers it like it was yesterday. It was a lunch time when Marty was using the gym showers. He didn't use the gym at all but he used to use the showers at lunch because the air-conditioning used to make him sweat. He didn't even realise Plappy had done it and was walking around that afternoon followed by that disgusting stench. He was telling me all of this again and then suddenly he pulled out the actual shoe from his desk drawer. He's kept it preserved in a sealed plastic bag.

Well, Marty suggested we all meet up some time. He said it would be great to see Bozza again but, to be honest, the way he described him, I still don't think he has a clue who Bozza is. What he really seemed keen on was seeing Plappy again. He said he wants to see Plappy. He asked me to ask Plappy if he'd be able to make it for a get-together. He says he knows a special place where we can meet - it's an old disused brick factory miles from anywhere.

Slant

2009-01-22T14:58:00.001Z

Yo, ma' cru,

Word up.

It's becoming clear that I just don't seem to be getting anywhere with Marty on 'Terry Badge, PI' and all I came away with from Channel 4 was the ridiculous concept of 'Tina Flange, Lady Lawyer', a few Custard Creams and a chocolate Hobnob.

So, I submitted 'Badge' to the BBC via their Radio 4 script competition - and got a letter back saying they were interested. I phoned the number they supplied and was put through to a lovely woman named Rosie Hoal-Riemer. I must admit I thought I'd dialled the wrong number when she cheerily announced her name at the other end, thinking it was some kind of personal services business I'd got.

Aaaanyway, she was very nice and friendly and enthusiastic - and had a terribly posh accent and kept quoting Latin. She told me she loved the whole 'Badge' concept - she loved the energy and verve - she loved the sweeping eclectic allegory, she loved the idea of the humble-rooted hero...

"Aahh... potest ex casa magnus vir exire," she said.

"What?" I said.

"Ooh! Denuone latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur," she tinkled.

Well, just when things were going so swimmingly, she suggested making a couple of "teensy-weensy changelets". First of all, Terry becomes Thomas Bufheiney - an uneducated but sensitive fine furniture restorer and Eleanor Tight becomes Lady Edwina Chafingly-Drighchuff, Thomas' landed landlady. Yeah, I know! But - get this - the worst of it is that Terry, or rather Thomas, doesn't do any crime solving at all - with or without complex nonlinear mathematics. Lady Edwina does all the sleuthing, cracking the crimes by referencing precedent analogs in the worlds of classical Greek and Latin literature! All that's left for Thomas is to come to the aid of the scholarly Lady Edwina in her lapses of peril with his "strong artisanal arms" - to rescue her delicate porcelain self "roughly and with vigour", in fact.

"Achally, maybe we should call her Wosie," Ms. Hoal-Riemer then mused, "but the important thing is wuffly and vigorwussly, yah?"

Well, by this time old Rosie Hoal sounded somewhat distracted and started breathing heavily and muttering to herself excitedly something about masterful grasping and tool-belts, so I thanked her for her time and hung up. I mean - can't they see it's the perfect formula already? Why do they want to muss up the artistic integrity of it? I don't know - it seems crazy sometimes. You'd have to make it up if it weren't true. Oh well, keep trying, I guess.

Lung tahm respec', yeah,
Lay'uhz

Still

2009-01-16T14:22:00.002Z

I was thinking that I should do my bit as a patriotic consumer unit and do some consumption right away, so I decided to splurge up a load of hard tinsel on some tech. I was going to get one of those hand-held electronic-paper book readers but I found that I could replicate the experience faithfully by reading a normal paper book through a toilet-roll tube.

So, instead of that, I thought I'd get me a mammoth-screen home cinema experience. I asked for the biggest screen that exists. They showed me a wide-screen monster plasmotron that has its own time-zone but it still wasn't big enough. So then they introduced me to the latest thing - PixelPaint by Panasonic. With this stuff, I painted an entire wall to become a giant screen the size of a house. It cost a bomb - but it was worth it for the complete televisual immersion - like diving into a warm bath of multicoloured glowing tellybeans.

Well, with this, I had also to get proper content. Content, yeah? I needed contehehnt. It's all about con'eehehehehehnt. So I got the latest. A brand new Sky Phatbox IV. It's totally membrane, totally digitally membrane. It comes complete with a year's subscription to 'Sky Displacement' - the most absorbing channel there is. Also, it's got this amazing automated recording ability on a hard disk that comes with a 'near-queue' for today's programmes and a 'far-queue' for the rest of the month. It's great, whenever I turn it on, it announces "far-queue, far-queue" in a robotic voice.

Well, if that were ever to weary me, it also comes with a shuffle button - like on CD players. That means I can set it to automatically switch over channels randomly every few minutes. I don't even have to bother myself by pressing a button on the remote control - it does it for me - presenting my face with an endlessly changing kaleidoscopic array of twenty-four hour TV tubejecta. It forms it's own primary-coloured narrative of semi-cognisant streel and I don't need to move a muscle.

In fact, it's better than that. I've blended a dozen catering packs of spicy scalpsalt-flavoured 'Doritos' with a vat of sun-dried scabdip into a thick gunky fluid which sits in a big tub next to me. In another tub, I've got a few dozen litres of bright pink generiberry-flavoured hydrogenated sugar-boosted dog's-milk shake. With a a tube from each going to either corner of my mouth, I don't have to take my eyes of the good-watchin' for a second - or even move at all to lap up my tellysnack.

And why stop there? Here's me moving my own eyelids like a sucker when the whole blinking business could be automated. So, I've stuck open my eyes with sticky tape and got a couple of pipettes filled with eye-drop solution strapped to my head which steadily drip tear-solution into my eyes and let my ducts just kick back that little bit easier. And I know what you're thinking - sure, I sound pretty comfy but what about that whole breathing gig? Who bothers with all that in-out-in-out effort these days when there's the leisure envelope to stretch to the max. Well, I got it figured. I've rigged up some scuba breathing apparatus, flipped over the demand valve and set it to a timer, so now I get my air pumped directly into me without even wearing out my lung muscles.

Oh, and it goes without saying that the question of voiding waste is pretty straightforward. I put in a rubber sheet under the pillows and basically I just sit in my own filth.

Man, I have it sorted. Like this, I can remain in a completely motionless conscious unconsciousness for hours. If I could be bothered to move my mouth, I could give a wry smile to the second law of thermodynamics and enter a state of absolute minimum entropy and still be entertained up my head for days. I like to call this a state of optimised entrotainment.

Gunther

2009-01-16T13:35:00.001Z

This creditcrunch (tm) is like a sprawling toxic oil slick which needs to be amputated like an infected engine running on empty.

We need Gunther. Has Gunther taken control yet? Is he in charge?

Somebody better a get a grip if it's not Gunther because I've got screenburn on my visual cortex. All I can do is stare straight ahead with slack-jawed impotence through semi-transparent images of gurning celebrities I've never heard of, menacing post-ironic pornographic shockdocs and twittering newsdroids spouting voided doubledrivel. They've burned in to my cerebellum and appear like a technicolour heads-up display over the slightly less brightly hued, slower moving shadow of reality beyond.

Gunther, get Gunther. Get him with chalky alacrity.

We need Gunther to take control and fix the mess of mixed metaphors.

So construed, we could face unjaded the gaping anal turpitudes.

Maybe there'll be new furniture - Guntherstuehle. Will there be a buffed-up bench? Will there be a polished office? Will there be shiny bankslabs rubbed up supernuts with frantic diligence and waxy Gunthersputa? I hear that Gunthersputa is the finest there is. Smooth-running and ambiguously opaque. No acidic burp-ups in that stuff, no sir.

I sometimes think that acidy belches have become society's 'forgotten reflex'.

Listen, word of warning. Gunther could face strong opposition. Those at the top of the pile can get accustomed to the social perks, don't you know. I remember way back. I was in the toilets when I bumped into the top man. "Power?" he said, "you want to see power?" and he immediately lobbed his knob over the side of a basin and started pissing in the sink - his arms thrust into the air like a celebrating footballer and he bellowing out dark opera with a deep tenor voice that echoed round the cubicles. Then he told me to get him a hen.

That was the place with the big scandal a couple of years back. Yeah - one of the directors was demanding uncompromising fellation from a loose-limbed intern who noticed he was heavily chafed with featherburn from finchfocking a ripe goose. You know - he thought he'd evaded the enraged mob by hiding in a big vat of glaze but bobbed to the surface and found them all waiting patiently arrayed around the rim.

The Microsoft paperclip is telling me to kill.

Tailor-made, boys, tailor-made

2009-01-14T15:46:00.001Z

On the way back from the hospital, I had some woman following me with a dog. She had white skin and bright ginger hair and her little dog kept straining on its lead, barking and yelping and whining and barking and yelping and whining - never stopping - straining and barking and yelping and whining and barking and yelping and whining. The woman had crossed over the road, dragging her dog with her and was walking behind me shouting at me: "you don't deserve it, you don't - you don't deserve it..." It was driving me nuts, she went on and on, the dog went on and on, they wouldn't leave me alone. In the end, I just covered my ears and ran until I had lost them.

I found myself in front of a trendy-looking fish and chip shop. As I was peckish, I thought I'd pop in. The door was locked when I pushed at it, though. I checked the notice for opening times and saw that it should be open, so I knocked on the glass door. Inside were two people talking to each other across a table. A woman who was facing me and a middle-class man who had his back to me. The woman looked up when she heard me knock but just shook her head slowly at me. Even after I had gestured to my watch and then to the notice with the opening times on it, she shook her head again and then looked back to the middle-class man and continued her conversation.

I couldn't understand it. According to their notice, they should clearly have been open. So, I started banging violently against the big glass windows with the flats of my hands and shouted "I killed some animals with a hammer... I say..? I say..? I said I killed some animals with a hammer..."

The woman looked back up at me and, not taking her eyes off of me, fumbled across the table with one hand to pick up the telephone, dialled three numbers and started talking into the receiver, still looking straight at me.

At that moment, the middle-class man suddenly whipped around in his chair and, with the vehement chagrin that only a miffed member of the middle-class can muster, threw something straight at me with surprising strength. Bang! It hit the window and really made me jump. After a fraction of a second, it peeled away and fell to the floor, leaving an oily residue on the glass. I think it was a perch.

Freckles

2009-01-14T15:40:00.000Z

I popped by briefly to see Marty again but it wasn't very successful. This time, the pretty nurse at reception just let me straight through with a distracted smile. The phone on her desk was ringing but she wasn't answering it even though she didn't seem to be doing anything else. She just stared at it and cheerily said "ring ring" after each ring. I thought it was nice. You know, nice like wasabi when you make time.

Marty's door was open but when he saw me coming he started going crazy, waving his arms and legs under the bed covers. "Get outta here, get outta here!" he was yelling, "you're too bleak, you're way too f-cking bleak, you bleak freak!" and he threw his bedside alarm clock at me, which flew just a few yards from the feeble effort.

Then I saw the head of his girlfriend pop round the side of the door at waist height. She must have been sitting on a chair behind the door. As I approached the increasingly agitated Marty, I saw her head rise as she got up from the chair. She grasped the edge of the door and, with a steely smile just as I was at the threshold, threw it shut right in my face. The force of the door slamming against the oaken jambs was so immense that I felt the rush of compressed air blast past me and the shock of the impact carry back down the corridor, rattling the open windows in their frames and blowing out the curtains like tissue pennants in a wind-tunnel.

I think they may have Marty on some strong medication. That can be my only conclusion.

Futurity

2009-01-12T21:55:00.000Z

I went to see Marty at the hospital. I couldn't find him first of all - he's got his own private suite where he's being treated. When I got to the reception for the private wards and enquired after Marty they asked if I was his boyfriend. "No," I said with some irritation. Then they asked if I was his lawyer. "No, I'm just an old friend of his," I had to explain with some impatience, then "why did you say 'boyfriend' first?" Well, anyway, they said I could go through but didn't think I'd stand much chance of getting to see him, though they wouldn't explain why.

When I got to his room, I just went straight in - and there he was. Lying back in a huge bed in a beautiful oak-panelled room. He looked awful, though - really pale and haggard, with a massive shiner bruising up one eye. He smiled when he recognised me and greeted me with a feeble but warm "hello". I noticed that he'd stopped using that silly Brooklyn accent that he'd recently taken to putting on and had reverted back to being the plain old Marty that I've known for all these years.

Then I had a strange sensation like the air in the room had suddenly changed density and I looked around behind me to see Marty's huge girlfriend. Somehow, she had noiselessly walked up the long corridor and was standing there in the doorway dressed - well, dressed in a skimpy black leather nurse's uniform with stockings and a red PVC apron, taut over her washboard stomach. Her eyes gleamed with malice and, immediately, she started striding straight towards me with an uncanny speed. I was scared, I tell you. I haven't been that scared since that episode with the cakeybiscuit - you know. Anyway, I flinched, I don't mind telling you, I flinched and cowered under her mountainous shadow but she passed straight by me and stood between me and Marty, massive steel-like arms crossed over her giant, unyielding tits. There she stood, great muscular legs tensed apart, nostrils flaring and her powerful chest heaving with a barely restrained energy - the tightly-stretched leather of her 'uniform' creaking with each swirling breath like the eery sound of the rigging and tack of some vast black galleon groaning in the wind.

It was clear that she didn't want me talking to Marty at that moment. She edged back slowly and started stroking Marty's brow with one of her huge, discus-like hands, to which he smiled and squirmed with feeble contentment . Fearsome a sight though it was, she looked caring, tender, and I couldn't help looking on in wondrous admiration at this woman who stood so protectively over Marty, like some nuclear-powered pneumatic she-wolf cyborg watching over her cyborg cub. It was then, for the first time I think, that I really noticed the fine features of her face which was, at that moment, gazing with genuine affection and concern at Marty. Her lips were fulsome and round but the rest of her face was ectomorphic in an almost elegant contrast to the solid frame of her rugged body. I looked at her delicate, gentle chin and slight, up-turned nose and saw perhaps what Marty could see when he looked at her.

I thought it was better that I just leave, so I went out and started talking to some of the nurses who'd been tending Marty. They said that his girlfriend hadn't let anybody in to see him since he'd been patched up by the doctor. A couple of porters had gone in to change the bedding but one had come out with three broken ribs and the other they hadn't found yet. They explained that Marty was providing such generous donations to the hospital, though, that they'd turned a 'blind eye' to his idiosyncratic treatment as he seemed perfectly comfortable with the whole thing. They said that she'd been by his side the whole time, only going out occasionally to bring back food - always some kind of strange red cabbage soup - and nothing but cabbage soup. She'd also been sharing the same diet as Marty, in sympathy, as she was gently feeding him - the whole time her muscular frame nourished on nothing but a cloudy red cabbage broth.

In fact, it was because of that, that the only other people to have entered the room were in a team of firemen. The nurses said that early this morning, from behind Marty's door, they'd heard a sudden, violent reverberation which lasted about thirty seconds, shook the tea cups across the ward, and sounded like what they described as "a vast hessian sack being ripped from seam to seam" - and simultaneously setting off the smoke alarm. The firemen had gone in with breathing masks and had had to smash open the window to let out the pungent stench.

Shoal

2009-01-12T09:57:00.000Z

I heard back from Marty. He was calling from hospital.

Said he fell down some stairs. I was going to ask him whether everything was still go for 'Badge' and finding a new actress for the part of Eleanor Tight but thought it might be a bit selfish to raise that in light of his problems. Then a terrible thought suddenly occurred to me - I mean, you don't suppose that... well, I mean, if he told his big woman that she couldn't, well, no - surely not. It must have just been an unfortunate accident like Marty said.

Perspective

2009-01-09T18:45:00.000Z

I just heard from Marty. He apologised for that last stunt he pulled in his office. He said that he was genuinely sorry and, when he started thinking about it, realised that we do go back a long way and that he trusted me with the casting for 'Badge'. He said that he really would tell his girlfriend that she couldn't play the part of Eleanor Tight. He sounded pretty subdued, actually, and like he really meant it. I guess it won't be easy for him to tell that iron giantess of his. I suppose that she'll be disappointed - but she has to realise she's just not right for the role.

Well, I don't know if I can really believe Marty on this one. He says stuff all the time. Sometimes I feel that he just has me dangling on a piece of effing string for amusement. Thing is, I really need his production company to get 'Badge' on the screen - especially after I've burnt my bridges with Channel 4 and nicked their biscuits. He did sound serious this time, though. Oh well, we'll see.

New

2009-01-08T20:03:00.004Z

That cakeybiscuit thing really shook me up, I can tell you. It was on the way back from seeing Marty. I can't believe what happened there, either. I decided to tell him straight - no compromise on Eleanor Tight - she's an integral part of the whole Badge world and it would ruin the whole show to have Gargantua play her through completely unmerited nepotism. I'd really wound myself up for it - by the time I'd finished I was actually standing up and shaking from the impassioned delivery. Well, I have to say, Marty's response shocked me. He just calmly leaned forward in his chair and beckoned me to sit down again with his pudgy little girly hands and softly started talking about how hard it must be for me - how here he was with everything - a successful production business, critical acclaim, the 'perfect dame'. Then, sure, as soon as he started thinking about his mammoth Ukrainian moll again, his gaze drifted off wistfully into the distance and he started telling me about this thing where she inserts and apple but an orange comes out. "I mean, where does the apple go..?" he muttered dreamily to himself, staring with absent eyes out the window. I actually had to clap my hands together to bring back his attention.

Anyway, upshot was, he said that he'd tell his girlfriend that it was no dice and that we'd get a proper actress in and I'd have a material artistic contribution to the whole casting process. I couldn't believe it - it was like having the old Marty back again - he just seemed so human and accessible again. Limply, he held out a little white hand for me to shake and just as I reached forward he whipped it back, placing his thumb on his nose and wiggling his feminine fingers in the air in a silly insulting gesture. "Gotcha!" he said and immediately the closet doors opened and a camera and sound crew came spilling out.

They'd recorded the whole event. He was trialling a brand-new format for one of his shows. Can you believe that!? He stood there telling me how today's audience is just not interested in physical humiliation any more - they want mental anguish. He's just putting together a new format called 'Hurt Your Friend' where members of the public get to engage in long and elaborate (sometimes lasting months) psychological torture of their best friends in exchange for cash prizes.

Not only that, but the whole thing is structured to benefit from the new subsidies the government is offering for creating new jobs. He said that the way they'd done it was for each contestant to be technically 'employed' by a subsidiary of Parmesan Productions. There were some complications - in order to benefit from favourable tax treatment, each contestant-employee had to demonstrate that they had their clearly delineated work space. To do this, they were all getting a little rectangle of carpet which they could stand on while signing contracts. Marty was pretty excited about it all. He whipped out his own rectangle of carpet material and slapped it on his desk. Then he started banging it with his soft little fists and started saying that he was "making investments now and for the future and failure to do so would make it harder for us all in years to come."

"I will not stand idly by," he continued, "and let that happen," and with a final thump of his little square of carpet, "not on my swatch."

Cakeybiscuit

2009-01-07T19:56:00.003Z

This was incredible. I stopped off at a motorway service station. I was thinking about my past. I decided I'd get a cup of coffee, premium coffee - you know, a giant pail of superheated milk with a couple of dark dirty shots straight from the shiny metal coffeeteats. There were no other customers at the coffee counter. In fact, apart from the two baristas behind the counter, the place was eerily deserted. So I went straight up and ordered my coffee. Barista A took my order and relayed it to Barista B who milked the machine with noisy malice, banging the Gaggia with manic metal-udder-clanging rancour. Barista A just stood there, seemingly oblivious to the noise behind her, staring wordlessly straight at me with a faint smile on her face.

Eventually, with a slow, calm deliberation, she asked me for the money, which I gave to her. She collected the change and held aloft the receipt from the till.

"Here's your receipt" she said, holding it still and level with her eyes. "This is your receipt," she whispered slowly, leaning forward, "once you take this... that's it... it's all over... we're done." Then she jerked back into an upright position, gestured to the counter and said brightly "unless you want a cakeybiscuit! Do you want a cakeybiscuit?"

I declined the cakeybiscuit, cupped my coffee, scooped my change and reached forward with an almost hypnotically bemused caution for the proffered receipt. Gripping it between forefinger and thumb, I tugged gently at the little strip of paper but Barista A refused to let go. I noticed that Barista B had crept up to the counter and was looking up, with a wide-eyed anticipation, at the receipt held mid-air. He let out a little, snorting laugh of excitement.

"Remember," said Barista A, "once you take it, that's it - no going back."

I nodded in agreement and Barista A deftly released the receipt, my hand snapping back a little where I had been unconsciously tugging at the paper. Confused and hotly uncomfortable, I crumpled the receipt in my hand and started to turn away from her as she held me in a gaze of cruel amusement, Barista B also watching me intently with a noiselessly gibbering grin.

"You think that's your receipt, don't you?" said Barista A, and the two of them began to laugh. "You think that's your receipt! That's not your receipt! That's not your receipt!" Then her face darkened, she took a long deep breath and screamed: "THIS IS YOUR RECEIPT!" and she held up a scrap of paper as the two of them shrieked with wild, grotesque laughter. "It's not over," she wailed, "it's not over - this is your receipt - I've got your receipt right here!"

I felt a cold dark mess slumping into my guts. Barely keeping a grip on my coffee in my left hand, I opened my right hand to look at the 'receipt' I had taken. As it unfurled, I could see written on it in large, black capital letters:

'CONTER SPILL: CHOD-TINTED CONTER SPILL'

My head reeling, I stumbled back a step and backed into someone. I turned and saw that, where there had been nobody, there was now a long queue of people for the coffee shop, all staring impatiently at me. A whistle sounded behind the counter and, as one, everyone in the queue took three steps forward, feet marching over the tiled floor in perfect unison - stomp, stomp, stomp! As they trudged forward, their collective gaze snapped to the counter and, in an uncanny monotone, together they chanted "cakeybiscuit, cakeybiscuit, cakeybiscuit..." a baleful crescendo, "cakeybiscuit, cakeyBISCUIT, CAKEYBISCUIT", ending their fearful incantation in a sudden, synchronised silence.

I felt my breath catch in my throat, too fearful to make even a movement with my lungs. Then, a small boy in the queue started giggling and cried with falsetto glee "cakeybithkit, cakeeebithkeeet!" His mother, white with fury, bent down and slapped him across the face with such force that he fell to the floor with a noise like crunching chicken bones.

With a palpable shudder, my nerve gave completely. I dropped my coffee. The cup buckled and exploded as it hit the polished floor, vomiting out coral-shaped ejecta of milky-brown froth. I turned and ran, ran with a frenzied intent, struggling to get air into my fear-frozen lungs - the only sound behind me the mocking, sing-song voice of Barista A: "you've forgotten your receipt, come and get your receipt..."

Slow Top

2009-01-06T16:14:00.000Z

Oh no! I do not believe it. That Marty Parmesan is a total pool of dried-up plimsollpiss. I can't believe I'm wasting my time with that curly-topped creasy twatwedge.

So he says he'll produce 'Terry Badge' - great - but there's a catch. He wants his massive Ukrainian girlfriend - or his 'Golden Number One' as he's started calling her - to play the part of Eleanor Tight. I mean, how on earth is that going to work? Eleanor Tight is a chic, elegant woman who is also a highly professional and effective detective inspector rising rapidly up the ranks - keen as muffmustard, savvy as girlfroth and sharp as a sharpened ladyknife. I can't have Marty's flinty bint taking the part - it would spoil the whole show.

Marty says that she now wants "to progress her acting career" and he's there to support her doing that. What acting career!? Have you ever heard her utter a word of English? She doesn't look like a sleek, wily woman of substance - Eleanor Tight should be the fantasy offspring of Jim Rockford and Juliet Bravo - not Dolph Lundgren and Jordan. I started trying to explain this to that ringdrip Parmesan but he just holds up his soft little hands - palms outwards, closes his eyes and whispers "noo noo noo" - it's something he's started doing a lot, lately and it really annoys me. Prick.

Well, anyway, I just don't know what to do. I mean, this is the big chance to get 'Terry Badge' on the small screen and you've only got to look at Marty's amazing track-record to see that he knows how to score a hit ('Frotscape' is widely tipped to pick up another Golden Ballsach this year, by the way) but I just feel that the whole thing would be totally spoiled with old Concrete-Titski playing Eleanor. There'll be no subtle sexual frisson between her and Badge - it's one of the key elements of the show.

I told Marty I'd consider it and he started jabbing his finger in the air at me and saying "yah, yah, you do dat, you do dat" in that stupid Brooklyn drawl that he's started affecting but I just don't know what to do, I really don't.

Tinge

2009-01-06T14:48:00.000Z

Yes! Finally - Marty has given the green light - 'Terry Badge' is coming to a screen near you!

Marty's not so bad, really. I know that he acts a bit funny sometimes but, at the end of the day, he's a top guy.

Champ

2009-01-05T18:27:00.000Z

Oh man, today I heard Marty and that 'Pantagrueletta' of a girlfriend of his doing 'it'.

I was over at Marty's glitzy TV-world office suites to talk more 'Badge' - he'd already had me waiting for at least thirty minutes because he said he had an "urgent call States' side" to deal with. So I just waited there quietly in the oppressive silence of his anteroom - just me and his PA sitting behind her desk - the only noises being the blub of the water cooler, wetly belching with chaotic periodicity and the click of the PA's computer mouse and fizzle of her tights as she crossed and uncrossed her legs.

Then suddenly, from behind Marty's closed door, there was a loud clatter of objects falling on his floor which made me jump in my seat. I looked at his PA, who just put her hands to her face and started slowly shaking her head with a resigned pathos while donning the headphones of her iPod and turning up the volume. Next thing I hear is more crashing, scraping furniture legs on the floor and then frantic panting - Marty's unmistakable gasping - bursts of wheezing, adenoidal rhythmic whining, rising up in time with the dull thump of some heavy object being shunted along.

There was a wince of pain, a pause of muffled conversation, then Marty's short, sharp grunts resuming again, this time accompanied by what sounded like someone repeatedly slapping a blancmange with a table-tennis bat in time with his falsetto, nasal puffs.

I tell you, it was embarrassing. I don't know how long that went on for - me flicking self-consciously through a copy of 'Broadkastpork', his PA turning up her iPod further and furiously iclicking away on her iBook, refusing to acknowledge the incoherent wailing from beyond - but next thing I remember is Marty's girlish gasps increasing in tempo and, slowly, inexorably, what sounded like the distant rising rumble of something dreadful and menacing which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. As Marty accelerated in frantic soprano yelps, I heard another voice, a good octave below Marty's, growing in volume to a wild, visceral bellowing - a single, drawn-out yell, like a fearsome battle-cry... "wwooouuuooaa..." it went, "...aaooouuaahhrrraaa..." it went, "...aaaarrgghghgh..." it went - not pausing for breath, incessant, terrifying, louder and louder... then the insane sound of massive, flesh-muted hammering impacts - like two great legs of ham were being relentlessly battered against a slab of cold marble by a mad drummer with superhuman strength. A picture fell off the wall, the water cooler toppled in a bubble-blobbing burst, my chair shook underneath me, the PA had her head stuffed in her Prada handbag with her hands over where her ears were... then... silence.

Silence followed a second later by a single, barely discernible, pathetic wheeze from Marty, as if he had sneezed feebly through his clenched teeth.

Two minutes later, his massive Ukrainian bird came striding out, towering over me ominously, completely blocking out the light from the windows - thick, knotted-rope-like muscles bulging through a tight lime-green one-piece dress that had just been rapidly re-stretched over her. Giant chunks of dazzling jewellery clanking like heavy iron links in a ship's anchor-chain, she walked straight past me, broad, angular shoulders swaying, and chewing a piece of gum with loud, violent smacks of her wide-open mouth. Stopping at the exit, she swivelled round on her teetering heels and, through her swollen bright-red lips, blew out the gnarled chunk of her chewing gum with such force it hit the inside of the waste bin and toppled it over with a clang. Then she widened her vast mouth of monolithic white teeth into a predatory grin and unfurled one of her huge, vein-popping hands into a crimson-taloned outstretched palm and blew a kiss back to Marty who had emerged from his doorway.

I tell you - I am getting sick of Marty acting like this. There must be other production companies out there who would be interested in 'Terry Badge'. It's getting worse - every time Marty has to be the big shot and play these stupid power games - rubbing it in my face. He's now started to affect some kind of Brooklyn accent too which, I admit, does kind of suit his natural nasal drawl. So, shamelessly, he stood there looking like he'd just been pulled out of an industrial tumble dryer, and pointed at me with index finger, thumb raised, in the stylised shape of a gun and said "hey... shoot!"

I mean, what a knob. I was lost for words. His PA was just taking the handbag off of her head with restrained dignity and resetting her hair in a hand mirror when Marty turned to her and started yelling "clam chowdah" - just like that - like he could only move his jaw all the way up or down in spasmodic jerks - "clam chowdah - clam chowdaaghh - go gettusum clam chowdah willya - yeah?" as he tossed a wad of bank notes over to her desk.

I remember when this guy was at school and everyone used to tease him for his mass of curly hair. Well, I guess he showed us. But at what cost? That's what I ask you - at what cost?

Snout

2009-01-03T15:20:00.000Z

Did you see 'Rubbersnatch Investigates' last night? It was well membrane. It's another one of Marty Parmesan's productions. Rubbersnatch used his twentyforce - amazing special effects. I watched it with a bag of inky slits and a soft liquorice mound.

I was talking to Marty the other day, actually. He was telling me all about his towering Ukrainian girlfriend with huge hands, again. Apparently, she hotknuckles his spaniel-tucks without him having to ask. With her immense strength, he says his feet actually leave the ground in a grunting melee of frittered pantspume. Well, I congratulated him gruffly but I didn't really know what on earth he meant.

Marty said he's focusing on more serious programmes this year. He's fed up with people shouting 'Knockercake' in his face all the time. He's just finished a new human-interest documentary - 'Decline a Coarse Vagina'. Also, he's produced an expose of that company who found that with sufficient hydrogenisation and irradiation, it was possible to manufacture high-margin foodstuff from actual shit and market it as bars of 'Mountain Stule'.

He is really odd, though - he'll sit there and tell you about his programmes and the next thing, he starts saying how his Slavic squeeze trumps with such raw muscular force, it sounds like a heavy-duty hessian sack being ripped from seam to seam. I don't understand why he tells me these things.

I know that Marty and I go way back but sometimes I just get tired of that puffed-up, mop-topped, adenoidal squitbubble. I'm tired of constantly sucking up to him and having Miss Gargantua sneering at me with her solid tits and unwholesomely rugged hands. There must be other production companies out there who'd make 'Badge'.

Modern Job

2008-12-02T17:42:00.002Z

I need to get a grip. There's BUSINESS to be done and it's no good pining wistfully for 'Badge' on the telly when there's BUSINESS to be done.

There's plenty of modern jobs out there that need filling. This is the shortlist I've drawn up for this week:

Can you help us Build Pride and some Awnings in Essex?

Reporting to the Strategic Joining-In Manager: Equality & Participation, the postholder will promote and embed the County Council's Equality Scheme within Stakeholder Services; whilst ensuring Directorate equality objectives are met or something. You will take a lead role in monitoring service performance monitoring against the Equality Standard for Local Government Monitoring and project manage Directorate-wide initiatives to embed equality and diversity. The postholder will always be based in YORKSHIRE.

You must be able to demonstrate:

- Proven education to degree level or equivalent ('adding' and 'taking away' required, 'sharing by' and 'times by' optional).

- Proven experience of working with equality and diversity issues. Candidates who can produce diverse issues will be preferred.

- Proven ability to work effectively with diverse colleagues and equal partners at all levels and across service boundaries.

- Proven experience of monitoring project management monitors.

Closing date 5pm (packing up time), 5 January 2009.

Building Pride Up Your Street

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Can you take us to the next level?

This is an opportunity for you to have a lovely big significant impact - developing a brand new organisation brand with its own identity, objectives, priorities and brand-new brand. Brand.

Reporting directly to CHIEFEXECUTIVE, as a key member of the Corporate Management Team, you will lead and develop the Council's corporate policy and performance functions and inform and support strategic decision making while CHIEFEXECUTIVE watches you.

You will lead the Council's involvement in the development and review of Community Strategy, through partnership working, performance management frameworks and coordinating CAA. You will take a strategic lead in developing a neighbourhood working and citizen focussed approach to service delivery. Initial service delivery will focus on the issue-attenuation of uncollected refuse by helping to recruit further community refuse collector equality monitors, community refuse collector equality monitor monitors and uncollected refuse communication officers. At present, no budget exists for refuse collectors.

Our ideal candidate will have the ability to establish and maintain genuine, meaningful and ultimately futile partnerships with a variety of organisations, possessing considerable knowledge of performance management frameworks and regimes. Overall, you will help us ensure that services are configured around the needs and aspirations of customers and the wider community.

Laters, yeah.
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Who's the boss?

Supporting and caring for people who need it most.

Strengthening communities. Improving lifestyles. Widening choice and opportunity. Making hay. Keeping your head down. Hanging on.

Our new office of Adult and Community Services has been created to deliver this to everyone who lives in Surreyshire.

We need somebody exceptional to lead it.

You will have 580,000 bosses to please in the fastest growing County in England, with that number increasing every day. They will each have 1,200,000 bosses.

Surreyshire: inexorably growing exponentially.
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You?

There's a new confidence in Melchester. It's the confidence of a city that knows where it's going. It's going to Melchester. Then it's going to stay there.

Melchester is embarking on a 25-year journey - based on a 20-year vision that's being driven by all of the city's key organisations. And we're reshaping Melchester City Council to ensure we're ready to meet the challenges ahead.

So we're looking for two exceptional leaders, one mediocre and one who's able to turn up.

We need three strategic directors who will contribute truly innovative thinking, while making sure that we deliver world-class public services to our customers.

And we need a talented chief executive for our new economic development company, ensuring that the city and county make the most of increasing interest from investors.

So if you've got the passion, drive and energy to help us make our vision a reality, we'd like to hear from you and your friends.

Going somewhere? Go there confidently.
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Crush

2008-11-14T14:10:00.000Z

Well Marty seems to be having the last laugh, I guess. His shows just seem to be so successful. I, for one, will be watching 'Celebrity Trowel Insertion' tonight. It's Natasha Kaplinksi, an oiled beach wood and copper eight-ounce broad-pointed hand trowel and, all the rumours are, this is the week where it will be the rectum.

Did you see 'Chef Abuse' last night? That's one of his, too. Every week it has a member of the public taken on as a trainee kitchen-hand who, for thirty minutes, is repeatedly and wordlessly kneed in the groin by TVChef, over and over and over again until the final three minutes where a handful of crumpled banknotes is thrown on the floor next to the writhing sous and TVChef runs through a quick filo recipe. Apparently, there's a two-year waiting list to get on the show.

Marty said that that was nothing, though, and the real big earners this year are going to be 'Good Chef, Bad Chef', 'Chef Probe' and 'Dancing Chef Property Makeover Bingo in the Sun Challenge'. That man really has his finger on the pulse, I tell you.

You know, I'm not so sure about the whole Hokey meat juice franchise now. Marty was really dismissive of it. He just clapped his hands to his face in exasperation while his immense Ukrainian squeeze crushed the salt and pepper shakers in her massive hands.

Finding the Niche

2008-11-12T12:56:00.002Z

By the way, talking of Marty Parmesan - I saw him the other day to discuss another business proposition. I've got a cast-iron business plan for a new franchise. It's like Starbucks but, instead of coffee, will be serving beef tea. Not just beef tea, of course, there'll be other drinks like porky cola and goose juice on offer, too. We'll have a silver-plated monkey called 'Hokey' as the corporate mascot and I can get Thermo King and Queen of the Speedboats to promote the first opening.

I thought we could maybe even get Action Charlie, too, but a bit of bad news there, I'm afraid. I spoke to his agent and, apparently, AC is uncomfortable with endorsing a grinning, be-fanged, carnivorous shiny monkey - especially as Action is focussing on promoting his lead in 'Hard Guts III: Dropped Guts' which is coming out next month. He thinks it could give the wrong message to his vegetarian action fans. I explained that we'll be offering spicy vegetable polyhedra but he just wasn't interested. I don't know, it seems like political madness gone correct, sometimes, it really does. Thermo King, though, is totally on-board and even suggested the possibility of taking on Hokey as an official sidekick. And Queen of the Speedboats said she would be able to get a troupe of her pneumatic artistes to water-ski up the Thames in formation, wearing patriotic leotards and smeared in dripping. Now, she is a true professional. So it's really starting to take off. I'm going to see if I can get any press in this week's episode of Rancid Mate and Schwy Boy.

Marty looked amazing, by the way. He was dressed in a glossy grey suit and was wearing huge chunks of platinum jewellery. He's just signed a five-year deal on 'Cash Up Your Mouth' and found a new bleached toothy bint with a splendid shitter to front it. The boffins say that it will be very successful.

Ah, me and Marty go way back but when I mentioned Chozza and Spang from the old days he spat out his drink and frantically used both hands to repeatedly flip the bird in wild frenzied arcs, knocking over all the glasses on the table. I really think that we may have gone too far with our silly impersonations of him back then. The time when we all wore wigs like Marty's big curly mop, in particular, comes to mind. I regret that now. I also met Marty's girlfriend. She's Ukrainian and incredibly tall with massive, solid tits. She's also got huge hands with bulging blue veins. Reminds me a bit of Trudy Truffiturd. Marty told me that she can tap out a rhythm on her knees and she could. Then she tapped out a rhythm on Marty's knees while he snorted snuff from his big ruby ring.

Hawkbusy

2008-11-10T11:04:00.001Z

I'm still trying to get the green light for 'Badge'.

Channel 4 said they're interested but they want to make Terry into Tina Flange - a female lawyer who lives in a fashionable townhouse with a Pekinese and who paints portraits in her spare time - and no monkeys, either. I don't think they understood it at all, so I told them to stuff it and stormed out, turning only briefly to pocket their plate of biscuits.

I've approached Marty Parmesan recently, you may be acquainted with his work. More4 will be doing a Parmesan retrospective next month. Obviously they'll have all the usual stuff like 'Slot' and 'Knockercake' as well as 'Cash Up Your Mouth'. But Marty has done some quality productions, too, like the little-known 'Cable the Baker' - his award winning documentary on that poor woman from Hartlepool who couldn't stop herself squatting over slumbering artisans and squeezing them out a hot dog.

Vision

2008-11-07T10:27:00.001Z

As the theme music fades out - first shot is of a pair of battered old work boots suddenly obscured by a close-up of a heavily laden dustbin thump down onto the road. A voice out of shot chastises Terry for his momentary laxness: "Oi, Badge, get a moov on, mate." Pan up to Terry, his face hidden by his mop of long shaggy hair and the upturned collar of his worn denim jacket as he attempts to tap the keys of his palmtop computer with one hand and shift a large rubbish bin with the other - trying to juggle his two day jobs of dustman and software developer which allow him the means to buy the free time he craves. The time to sit on his boat in peace, his keen mind completely ensconced in the rarefied world of higher mathematics, have a nice sit down, a cup of tea and an orange 'Viscount' biscuit.

We follow Terry back to his boat, moored on a quiet island in the Thames by Hampton Court in the south west of London. It's still early - a summer morning and, as he trudges back, clusters of pointy-headed BUSINESSmen dart about, on their way to do BUSINESS in big banks. As Terry arrives, his dog Gizmo hears him and, with a joyful bark, leaps over the side of the boat to greet him. As Gizmo bounds over the threshold of the boat's rails, it automatically activates his electro-collar and, with a loud yelp, the little mutt drops to the ground, involuntarily defecating with unwholesome spasms and smoking slightly.

"Ah Gizmo, you never learn, do you," Terry chuckles to himself as a stunned Gizmo zig-zags his way back to within his electronically delineated boundary of the boat's gunwales.

Terry settles himself down in the galley, placing a battered old copper kettle on the stove and taking out an orange 'Viscount' biscuit from a scruffy wooden cupboard which is completely full of packets of orange 'Viscount' biscuits and nothing else. He takes off the bright foil wrapper, tosses it out the galley window where it lands in the river and is immediately pecked up by a large swan covered in oil, and pours himself some tea. Gizmo scuttles over to his food bowl and starts munching on some broken up 'Viscount' biscuits. As Terry sips his tea, he wanders over to his workbench, which is covered in various mechanical parts and tools, and whips off the dust cover of Mark.

At this stage, Mark is merely a skeletal torso with only one arm and a head casing partially covered in stretched monkey-skin with one camera lens eye and one dark, dissected gorilla eye. Activated by the incident light, Mark judders falteringly into life, servomotors whirring. The noise alerts Gizmo who gives a low, suspicious growl.

"Morning, Mark," Terry says cheerfully, putting down his mug of tea to make some fine adjustments to Mark's wiring.

"Cunk cunk cunk.. de... deactivate me... whirr... free me, free me!" Mark replies in metallic, mournful tones and then stops altogether, slumping back down in silence.

Terry makes a couple more adjustments then violently pumps a large lever by the side of the workbench. There is a loud bang from Mark's innards, the gorilla eye explodes and the single arm falls off. Cursing, Terry starts to reattach it when his attention is diverted by the barking of Gizmo at the approaching sound of short, sharp footsteps. Gizmo excitedly scrambles up the wooden steps of the galley onto the deck. Terry smiles knowingly to himself, revealing that the sound of those measured clipped steps are familiar to him. He slowly shakes his head with a rueful laugh as the footsteps stop and are punctuated by a female gasp of shock and a loud canine whine as Gizmo's collar kicks in and the involuntary defecation begins again.

"Badge, I got your monkey parts, just like you wanted," comes the authoritative but mellifluous voice of Eleanor Tight as her shapely legs teeter down the steep galley steps.

Dressed incongruously in a dark short-skirted suit and heels, she hands over a large black plastic bag to Terry. He thrusts his hand inside, pulling out a smaller transparent bag of what looks like offal and puts it into the fridge alongside other similar bags, bottles of milk and more packets of 'Viscount' biscuits and throws the black bin bag out the galley window. Terry then mutters something to himself about Mark needing new eyes before taking a chilled biscuit from the fridge and offering it to Eleanor with a cheery "Viscount?" She takes the biscuit and crams it in her mouth in one go, without taking a bite, throwing the discarded orange foil wrapper out the window to where the oily swan, now entangled in the black bin bag, pecks it up.

"Terry, we've got something for you. Something strange. Something that might need those higher-order Bessel functions again."

Terry turns sharply to her, jabbing forward an accusatory finger. "Listen, Eleanor - I told you before - I'm not touching Bessel functions again - not since those complex Hankel derivatives and the Stepney stabbings. No more, Eleanor - I'm done with all that." Angrily, he turns back to the copper kettle as it boils.

"Cup of tea?" he offers.

Eleanor accepts the proffered mug and quaffs the contents down in one, also taking another 'Viscount' and cramming it in at the same time.

"Listen, Badge," she replies with an angry hiss, bits of chocolate coating and crumbs flying out the sides of her mouth, "you want your primate pieces - you help us out here." She puts down the empty mug. "So how is..." she pauses, "Mark these days, anyway?"

Terry's shoulders slump and he shrinks visibly in shame. "Mark is almost finished, Eleanor. He's almost free."

The embarrassed silence is broken by the ringing of Eleanor's mobile 'phone. She breaks her gaze from Terry and answers it.

"Tight here. Yeah. I'm on it." She hangs up, puts the 'phone away, then hands Terry an envelope, addressing him in a softer tone. "Look Terry, just take a look. Tell me what you think, okay?"

She rises to leave. Terry takes the envelope, crumpling it tensely in his hand, still staring at the floor. "No more Bessel functions," he whispers.

At the top of the galley steps, Eleanor pauses. "One more thing, Terry. This involves Barry. Barry Vadge."

Terry's jaw tightens and he clamps shut his eyes in apparent pain, crunching the envelope into a tight ball as the sound of Eleanor's sharp steps echo from the deck onto the quayside, followed by a startled cry and loud thud as she slips in the viscous remains of Gizmo's previous convulsions.

As Terry slowly opens his eyes, a single tear falls and the camera zooms in to the crumpled envelope in his hand as the sound of Gizmo's curious paws are heard scrambling up the steps, followed by a loud electric crackling buzz, a yelp and a further dismayed shriek from Eleanor.

It's the start of another Terry Badge adventure!

Metre

2008-11-06T10:29:00.002Z

I've got a theme tune all sorted out:

Terry Badge,
He’s alright.
He lives on a boat with Gizmo and Mark.

Terry Badge,
He’s well smart.
He’s solving the crimes with his head.

Terry Badge,
He's well fly.
He exchanges clues for dead monkey parts.

Terry Badge,
He means well,
Inadvertently tormenting strange consciousness.

Terry Badge,
He helps Tight,
But sends her ballistic,
(Doesn’t notice her lipstick)
Solipsistically grinding her down.

Telly Gold

2008-11-03T11:36:00.007Z

Do you remember 'Terry Badge' from the late '70s on British TV? It was one of the lesser-known detective dramas but I loved it. Terry's unique angle was the way he would solve crimes by applying complex mathematical formulae.

I have had a fantastic idea to update the show a little and bring it back to our screens, where it rightly belongs.

It goes like this:

Terry Badge is a physics PhD with a brilliant academic record and promising career which he has chosen to abandon in order to enable him to concentrate on his obsession of building a robot called 'Mark'. Mark is human-shaped as all good robots should be. Human-shaped, monkey parts. Terry works on Mark on an old narrowboat moored along the Thames in South West London where he lives with a small dog called Gizmo.

Terry kind of represents that 'everyman' character in terms of his isolated mental anguish, scraping along making a living by writing the odd bit of computer code freelance from his boat and working part-time as a dustman. Every week, the stunning, power-dressed Eleanor Tight comes to see Terry. She's an old college friend who has ambitiously worked her way up the police ranks since graduating first at Hendon - 'Top Truncheon'. She always finds Terry tinkering with half-finished bits of Mark and brings him various cryptic unsolved crimes and freshly scraped ape offal, in exchange for which he solves the mysteries by applying incredibly complex bits of non-linear mathematics.

Top scientists try to lure Terry away to the world of high-energy weapons research. Yes, top scientists, lure away, every week. As the theme music fades in, you see white-coated boffins being chased off the boat by Terry at the beginning of each episode. It remains just Badge and Gizmo and Mark. Terry wears denims and has long, shaggy hair. Gizmo has an electronic collar that activates whenever he strays over the sides of the boat, delivering an electric shock so strong it makes him involuntarily defecate. Mark is never finished. Never.

Each episode ends with a solved case which Terry nerdily explicates to the foxy cop amid painfully unrequited sexual tension while a surreal and profoundly unsettling quip from the half-finished module of Mark lying in bits on the workbench sets off the whole gang guffawing at the ironic way in which Mark's unremitting existential horror always seems to provide a humorous backstory to the sleuthing events of the week. Freeze-frame on the hearty laughter and into the soft rock outro.

This is gold - pure liquid tellygold.