The Electric Dwarf

by Tim Vine

  The Tea Song

  Coffee doesn’t float my boat

  Just leaves deposit in my throat

  When I’m down I go to town

  And drink more glorious tea!

  The hotness and the wetness are insane

  Beats beverages just so lame

  You can tell a Real Man

  He loves his tea, just like me!

  These drinks that just aren’t meant to be

  Make one wretch until down upon one knee

  Or else it’s simply pee and pee

  O, Bring me Glorious Tea!

  Fizzy, chilled and sweet don’t work

  Fabricated by some berk

  T – E – A I love you so

  O, bring me more Glorious Tea!

  By Yatter

  Immediately after the music finished, Yatter made a feeble excuse and unceremoniously left Caroline at a bus stop. He was really useless with the opposite sex, on many levels. His parting thoughts made her blood boil: ‘The concert was crap too . . . we should’ve gone to Camden to listen to some bell-end who can’t even tune his guitar sing about how nice he smells.’

  She swore at him under her breath for the whole bus ride home. It was only two stops. Meanwhile, as a fire engine belted past, brash siren demonstrating the Doppler effect perfectly with its comical urgency, he jumped down into the nearby underground, enjoying the welcoming and familiar rush of warm air against his face. Sitting across from a perfectly cool young couple on the rattling train, he wondered how much more money the guy had paid for his new jeans to have strategically placed rips in them. Had he stumped up four or five times their real value for the sake of a few tears, and for the pleasure of being served by some freaky bird with an aggressive haircut and alien-like make-up in an achingly trendy Shoreditch boutique? Most likely. They also appeared to be dangerously tight around the crotch area. Isn’t there going to be a small legion of infertile men in their 20s, all brought on by the fashion for tight or skinny jeans? He also couldn’t figure out why they were speaking English to each other even though he was sure that they were both Japanese, or how they could really be having an animated discussion about egg timers. There was an Odd Couple standing, clinging to each other. Him . . . so bean-like and high. Her . . . rotund and red. Together, they made the number 10. London life is never dull. Before he realised it, he was back at the flat.

  ‘Well Norm, it was pretty shit,’ he reported. Norman hadn’t asked him anything about the date because he’d forgotton about it. Yatter was irked.

  ‘I’ve had worse,’ encouraged Norman. ‘At least you didn’t sit on her lap and then puke down her shiny ballgown. You also didn’t tell her that the only way you’d fuck her would be if she found you an Ecstasy tab.’

  ‘You bastard! You’ve done that?’ Yatter asked, laughing.

  ‘Afraid so, geez, but it’s nothing I’m proud of. Years ago . . . funny shit looking back on it though.’

  ‘I guess it wasn’t so cool when I threw up in someone’s handbag upstairs on the bed at a house party – well, the bathroom was locked! Shit, I even rode home that night, well pissed,’ Yatter recalled, with a mild pang of guilt.

  It was the drugs that were yet again annoying Yatter. It had now got to a stage that he craved peace and quiet, and no Norman. Since Norman never invited him out anymore, their friendship had cooled a little, even if they still managed to share a joke from time to time. Norman was now still trying to figure out his plans, talking about a foreign trip for a final drugs binge.

  ‘D’you know, Norm, that’s a great idea, go for it. Try Ibiza or Thailand or something. You’ll have a right laugh, and bring back some warm weather, will you?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe something like that. But, you know, the weather thing,’ Norman paused for effect, ‘I already checked that with UK Customs. Bloody red tape, they don’t allow any weather imports or exports of any kind, and the law’s not set to change anytime soon.’

  Yatter smiled as Norman snorted on his giggles. Yatter was on a mission to quit all the poison, but with the Electric Dwarf as his flatmate, this wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. His encouragement was purely selfish and largely but unconsciously driven through self-preservation, and he was already hatching a plan to take over the flat on Norman’s relocation to Dulltown. He was even starting to imagine who he might find as a new flatmate. So it was that night, fuelled by drugs, that Norman’s immediate future plans were collectively hatched and planned out.

  ‘JESUS, FUCK! Welcome to France!’ The words blurted out involuntarily, and Tom’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Shit the bed! We haven’t even got our health cover sorted and the natives are driving like fucking maniacs!’ A battered and ageing Peugeot hurtled around the blind bend towards them whilst overtaking an equally battered and ageing van. Tom was quick to swerve, nearly tearing his slightly-too-tight jacket at the shoulder seam. A trip down a ditch was narrowly avoided, more by luck than judgment. A brief glimpse of the driver showed Tom that the bizarrely irate female driver was yabbering into her mobile phone and smoking a Gauloise as if it was 1984, but he wasn’t also aware that she had enjoyed a sociable and boozy extended lunch. He would recognise her a few days later as the secretary at the local Mairie, and this near-miss taught Tom an early and invaluable lesson about countryside driving customs in the area. Late one morning many months later, Tom lay sprawled out with limbs hanging in all directions. With a belly full of red wine, sleep – or at least some kind of state of unconsciousness – came swiftly. He had recently been out of sorts and had enthusiastically taken to the bottle this particular evening, and not for the first time. He and his long-suffering wife were part of a large exodus of British people who had moved to the French countryside, tempted by repeated daytime-TV promises of a ‘dream life in France’. The vast majority of these expats would never have even vaguely entertained the prospect of relocating to France had it not been for such cheap and tantalizing productions that never seemed to be off TV screens around the millennium. Puzzlingly, a large number of this stream of arrivals could not even string a sentence together in French, yet they wrongly assumed that this would not cause too much of a problem either for themselves or for the bemused and occasionally bitter locals. Sue had left a disappointed lover back in England, a builder named Phil who was still listed in her mobile phone contacts under David: work (just in case). Still, Sue and Tom were enjoying their new life, and Tom felt more able to launch into his ridiculous racist rants in the French countryside as he received less opposition than back at home in the UK. This was mainly because he was not understood due to the language barrier, a hurdle that intimidated and shamed him. Sometimes perhaps people were too polite to disagree, he thought, or maybe his audience felt the same way, so listened in tacit approval. Little did he know that one set of his neighbours would use a thinly-disguised racist expression when discussing the English family next door: ‘Mieux un anglais qu’un arabe’ (‘We’d rather be living next to an Englishman rather than an Arab.’) These were people who rarely ventured out of the commune, occasionally took a trip to a nearby town, but would not go further. They had never set foot in Paris, and certainly hadn’t travelled abroad. The clear irony of the fact that he was an immigrant in France was lost on him, and – as he often reminded anyone who would listen – the once Great Britain had obviously ‘gone to the dogs.’ A number of the expats he met were actually not far away from sympathizing with his train of thought, even if they were maybe a little more restrained in their shouting about it, but he missed his football mates he used to go to the game with, and of course the pub before and after the match. The UK’s problems were one of the primary reasons that they had deserted their own country in the first place. However Tom’s outbursts on this matter were becoming increasingly frequent and aggressive, mainly regarding ‘bloody immigrants’, often causing his wife Sue dreadful embarrassment. It became the usual event whenever he’d be
en drinking, and that was nearly every day as soon as the sun had gone down. Cheap wine and a destructively crippling ennui were the catalyst, and he was knocking it back in large quantities as if it were beer. It appeared to have become his personal mission to make a noticeable dent in the European wine lake, and he’d certainly been putting in the hours to this end. The same could not be said, however, for his work hours. The once seemingly fool-proof plan of setting up a plumber’s business locally had backfired colossally, with sky-high social charges plus additional French taxes combining and conspiring together against him, dealing out regular crippling blows and bringing him to his knees financially. French clients were scarce, mainly due to his lack of ability to communicate with them, and few of the English expats now ever seemed to have any money, or at least pretended not to have any. Unusually, Sue was feeling that she had become unnoticed by her husband – certainly unappreciated. ‘And what’s that smell?’ Tom blurted out, nearly shouting.

  ‘That, my dear, is the wonderful fresh air of the countryside,’ replied Sue with a well-honed sarcasm, developed after years of marriage.

  Tom had been spending increasingly longer stretches hanging out with his new English mate Keith. Keith was the village expat boozer, a man who – however drunk the night before – would be seen without fail back on his patch at the bar the next afternoon. Only speaking a bare minimum of French, he would astound and sometimes disgust the locals with his stamina, while living out his twilight years blatantly flying in the face of all medical advice. He was an absolute trooper who would never miss a good day’s skinful of booze, chuffing enthusiastically on fat cigars whenever possible. Despite nudging sixty-five, Keith’s attire was that of a much younger man. As a huge Ferrari fan, he would rarely be spotted without his trusty red baseball cap, and often wore ridiculously ill-fitting sportswear. Over at Tom and Sue’s place, he’d often turn up and make himself more than welcome.

  Tom and Keith had been on the sauce all afternoon this particular Tuesday. Tom sauntered back from the kitchen with another couple of ice-cold tinnies.

  ‘Job’s a goodun. Bring it on, Keith!’ They cracked open the beers.

  ‘I think you’ll find I’d make a bloody great football hooligan, me,’ claimed Keith with his lairy manner, sporting the red Ferrari hat. ‘I mean, at the end of the day, all things considered, the main problem is that I’m just not into the bloody football part of it! I mean, just between you and me, right? You just go up North, or to some other no-good team in London, just for a fight. D’you even actually bother with the football bit?’

  ‘Oh you twat! Of course, but I guess you wouldn’t understand, you old git,’ retorted Tom, slurring a little. ‘Stick to your racing cars.’

  ‘And this football shite. Look at it, come on. Let’s look at it, you know . . . objectively. How the hell can you actually choose a team to support? Nobody seems to root for their local team, it’s not like the centre forward might be your neighbour or anything . . . I mean all it is, it’s money . . . business . . . bullshit. Whichever bloody team’s got the most dollars buys the best players. Put a load of best players on one team . . . make more money. Bullshit. Why does someone living in Cornwall support Manchester United, for fuck’s sake? Someone in Liverpool support Chelsea? I’m not one to make a mountain out of a molehill, but even looking at it through rose-tinted specs are you sure it’s nothing to do with the small fact that they might win, perhaps?’

  Keith was enjoying becoming ever more arch and sarcastic, riling Tom.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Tom replied weakly. ‘It’s . . . well, it’s about the players, and the style of the team. And, well . . .’ He had a habit of not finishing his sentences.

  ‘Naaa, I mean, at the end of the day, I think you’ll probably find that that’s all a load of . . .’ he paused for effect, ‘bullshit.’ Keith assumed a Dalek-like voice for this final word.

  ‘Or you might follow the team your dad supported or something like that . . .’ Tom tried to think of a good reason to revoke Keith’s attack, but was finding it hard. ‘Still, you’re just being miserable. It’s like wading through treacle talking to you. A bloody pessimist, that’s all you are. It’s actually fun, the game, believe it or not, maybe that’s why it’s called a game, isn’t it? But maybe you’re lucky, cos know what they say . . . a pessimist is never disappointed!’

  ‘What the hell are you going on about? Anyway, I had a colleague who—’ started Keith

  ‘What the fuck’s a colleague? A fucking colleague? Was this colleague a friend, or a work mate? No-one says fucking colleague. Jesus!’ Tom was on the offensive, still laughing, but getting back at his drinking buddy.

  ‘A colleague, co-worker, whatever. So this guy was a crazy football nut, used to go on all the coach trips for away-games and stuff, and one time there was this bird in the pub in Leeds, I think, and she was off her face, completely fucked. She got so wasted that she conked out early doors about seven that evening, slumped at the table. Royally fucked. Anyway, to cut a long story short, my colleague’ – he emphasized the word theatrically – ‘only went and got her black eyeliner out of her handbag, drew a bloody great swastika on her cheek and wrote S L A G on her forehead! She was only young, like seventeen or something, and when she woke up we sent her back to her mum and dad’s house. Fuckin’ hell, it was a rum affair!’

  The men laughed disgracefully like hyenas and tugged on their beers, soon dispatching yet another can each into the recycling bag.

  ‘I need to piss,’ declared Keith. Tom replied with directions. ‘The downstairs bog is blocked, so go upstairs if you can make it, and if there’s a bed in the room then you’re in the wrong place!’

  Keith didn’t know it, but Tom had a system for measuring blokeishness, mainly based of his perverse pride in being a raving alcoholic. It was a simple measurement, based on how much a man drank, combined with an estimate of how many shovel-loads of sand, dirt, or rubble Tom estimated that the guy had shifted in his life. He had mentally awarded Keith a score of around 60 Shovels (a figure out of 100), due to the fact that he could drink professionally, but didn’t seem like the type to have carried out much hard manual work. Several of his hard hooligan mates back in the UK nudged the 90 Shovels mark, but he still tolerated Keith despite his mediocre Shovel rating, and sometimes the pair of them had a laugh getting pissed up together. Sue would be back soon and she would not be impressed . . .

  Tom and Sue’s neighbours were a bizarre set of people, yet typical of any local village in that area of France. The Bearded Lady painted a fine picture of rural life, and proudly displayed her tooth when she generously flashed a smile for the lucky recipient. It stood alone and prominent, and was very probably the only one left. Located in the middle of her mouth on the top deck, the last remaining tooth seemed perfectly poised for extracting snails from their shells, or scooping oysters up with ease. Equally as strange was the situation with her husband. He was always whistling tunelessly, but still managed to be a thoroughly miserable sod, and had unavoidably been forced to give up his profession as a roofer a number of years previously due to blindness. This information Tom and Sue had heard directly from his son, as well as on the local village grapevine. On one occasion, after Tom had shouted out a friendly ‘Bonjour!’ in the local town market, Monsieur Bearded Lady could clearly not focus on where the sound had come from, nor see who had accosted him, despite Tom and Sue’s proximity. Still, the blind man was often spotted by Tom and Sue driving his ancient grey Citroën ‘H-type’ van around, sometimes on main roads at some speed. They could only imagine that the Bearded Lady was well-versed in the Art of Fine Directions when it came to driving, and that the man who always sported 1970s sunglasses behind the wheel remembered the roads well enough to navigate, as he had grown up and lived in the same village for his entire life like so many of the locals. He nearly always wore his black fingerless gloves, perhaps relics from his roofing days. In the cold wint
ers of the countryside, the deeply penetrating chill numbed the bare tips of his fingers. He would pull deeply on his cigarette as if it somehow warmed him up, the particles of smoke embedding themselves into the 96% acrylic, 3% polyester and 1% elastic thread mix of his left glove, adding to its familiar man-hum.

  Tom and Sue’s typically short neighbour on the other side, Jean-Michel, was from one of those aristo-big-house-but-no-money kind of families. He and his long-suffering wife had come over for lunch one weekend not long after they had arrived to live in the village. Just as the main course was served and as the discussion turned to the local countryside, Jean-Michel launched into a lengthy tirade about the nearby lake, ranting about how he couldn’t bear to go there as it was the chosen location of his brother’s suicide thirty years previously. The unfortunate victim had taken himself up there with a loaded shotgun and a bottle of Pastis – not a winning combination, especially if depressed. The deed was done that balmy June evening, the shot reverberating around the surrounding countryside scattering birds from trees and sending rabbits scurrying into their dens. Meaningless but polite small talk seemed to have gone out of the window, and Tom – who was now pretty much at a loss for words – just about managed to bravely utter an optimistic ‘Bon Appetit!’