Subdominant concord

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.