Grrljool

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.