by Peter Marks
‘Nathan?’ She asked, holding a long iridescent nail to the light speeding from the tall stooped lamp that lit her desk. The nail glinted like a neon splinter. ‘Has anyone ever told you you’re a deviant....a dirty old man who’s got nothing better to do than harass innocent women who wouldn’t sleep with you to save themselves. Poor Kelly, how on earth did you find her?. Some-one that nice deserves better ...Charles Manson or Vlad the Impaler for instance. They’d be dream dates in comparison to you.’ She took a sip from just delivered coffee,’.... are you paying her or just drugging her?’ She guessed, painting another fingernail a vile shade of cardiac purple, another digit, another shade, free samples from one of her clients so who was she to complain.
Or show restraint.
The thumb was blood red, the forefinger a vibrant lime green, the index purple, the rest? Hideous. Her hand was a flesh fan of appalling technicolour.
Smiling contentedly at the cuticle canvass she’d created, she gazed out at the Melbourne skyline which shimmered mirage like in the hot morning air of a fresh day.
From the large window of her small office, blanket smog cloaked the city from her to the horizon.
‘Don’t you ever get your mind above the navel?’ She asked, gazing a trifle concerned at her hands and wondering if she should wear gloves that evening.
Wright yawned. ‘Only when I see yours...’ he mumbled sleepily, sneezing twice before wiping his nose on a bare arm cursing the flow from his nose; his ever running nose which needed a cement wall the size of the Hoover dam installed on an upper lip if he was ever going to control the translucent monsoons that ran as rivers down his face.
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The Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist had suggested he install locks so Wright had suggested the doctor install a lockjaw between his flapping gums.
Unable to gain a capital works grant from the government, Wright was forced to constantly dam the Ganges beak with a fore-finger; or floral shirt; or four pack superglue in a vain attempt to stem the tide - damn damming which was the constant consequence of hereditary hayfever.
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‘You’ll never see mine,’ she sneered, referring to Wright’s comment, her tone of voice loud with the threat of instant castration were he to try any incursion of her navel.
Or beyond.
‘Stop threatening me with the winking eye in your stomach Nik, I’m tired ...’
‘You’re just lazy, not tired, you slob..’ she interrupted with all the aggression she could muster, spinning slowly in fat brown chair she’d seconded from the Accounts Dept. while they were off on holidays. (Behaviour which was not only acceptable, but was indeed mandatory for in this place anything that wasn’t screwed down or guarded by 24 hour security was fair game and creative kleptomania meant instant promotion. Here was career where people simply weren’t hired if their C.V.’s couldn’t prove a long and glorious history of anti social behaviour .....here they hired professional crooks from the start so that no time was lost in retraining the principled or naive...in Public Relations honesty was about as useful as dancing lessons to the dead).
Perched atop an expensive pair of red stilettos (the colour of Dorothy’s in the Wizard of Oz and bought yesterday at a ‘Once only’ Sale which was a monthly event) Nichola began to shine the shoes with a silk handkerchief borrowed from her mother’s collection and wondered if Wright really was as crazy as he seemed. As no shrink had been able to answer the question she didn’t attempt a conclusion and with a casual shrug of square shoulders she went back to more important issues. Her appearance for example.
Casually, she tried to dry the ten glossy claws before The Boss walked in and had her arrested for manicuring with intent, she blew a light waft of mint tinged breath gently across the freshly painted nails free hand still polishing feet.
Wright, oblivious to such debate about his sanity, was still staring out the window, watching with interest as the neighbour’s dog was frantically digging what resembled a grave in the vegetable patch of the back garden.
Wright didn’t move, or yell, or do anything to chase the gravedigger from his yard. Instead he admired the positive dexterity of the animal and feeling this was poetic destruction on a scale unmatched since he’d witnessed the demolition of the phone box up the road by a group of very pissed Boy Scouts on their way home from helping old ladies cross the street. Scratching his ear and prying loose a portion last night’s dinner from the flapped gap in his skull, he watched fascinated as the lightening fast paws proceeded to excavate a lorry load of soil from between the roses and the radishes where the cabbages had been until the mutt decided to harvest them.
‘Cadavers have more life than you do,’ Nichola sneered down the phone, distracting Wright from his wonderment.
She was a pretty girl who was still young enough to enjoy her birthday (i.e. this put her at a point of evolution several Ice Ages ahead of Wright. She was bright and young and female and therefore the enemy. With eyes the colour of iodine and a tongue as vicious as a rattlesnake, she was in no mood to be trifled with.
She was gazing at a photo of her absent boyfriend Tom when she noticed a hush come over the office and Nicola turned to investigate. It was the Boss.
Seeing his approach, she dropped the phone and the photo, smartly shoving her Picasso fingers in the drawer waiting for his lordship to pass by her disgusting digits.
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Nicola was particularly moody these days. This was because the boyfriend had buggared off; was currently anointing New York princesses with his bodily fluids - or so Nichola claimed.
Tom, Thomas Jefferson Jones, was a chartered accountant who’d been sent on a two month training course to the U.S. but just what he was training for Nichola could only guess (but spending her nights guessing the worst).
Due to her vivid imagination, she spent every morning in a foul temper having decided her lover had spent every night continents away sharing sperm with women other than her in a jealous insomnia which made her as cantankerous and grumpy and as paranoid as Wright was. And if there was one thing Wright loathed it was competition.
Nichola was rapidly firming in the betting for the next Psychiatric Olympics.
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Nathan, Nicola’s voice having abruptly disappeared from the conversation, began a bit of mind play: “Yes, the Psychiatric Olympics. It was a little like the Special Olympics only this gathering was for the brain bruised only and timed to coincide with the summer solstice.
All events were held at night and the program was run over several months to take advantage of every full moon so that each trained crazy from all over the planet could be at their peak to partake.
Minds razor blunt, these chemically imbalanced incompetents competed in events specifically designed for the conspicuously deranged and whole Jumbo’s full of loonies flocked to compete at this year’s events (the airhostesses wisely substituting straight jacket for life jacket drill on take-off).
The events were varied and as keenly contested as any Olympics (though in these games the contestants were dope tested and anybody found with a negative reading was instantly dismissed from the games. Sent home in shame. Sent back to a home in shame).
Highlights of the program of events went something like this:
Night One
Opening Ceremony and March Past.
These games were billed as the most competitive since ‘76.
In traditional Olympic spirit a Greek pyromaniac set fire to the Acropolis before passing the flame to the next runner who passed a box of matches onto the next who handed a smouldering twig to a Buddhist who was forced to self immolate to keep the flame alight.
By the time the sacred flame arrived at the stadium, carried forth by representative pyromaniacs, half the world was alight.
On arrival, the honour of lighting the eternal flame fell to Ralph ‘The Torch’ Spenozzi, a retired Chicago thug who, after ascending
the thousand steps, torched the doves and set fire to the stadium before turning proudly to the fast fleeing crowds and announcing:
‘Let the games begin!’
When the Fire Brigade had finished flooding the fire, the criminally and normally insane from almost every nation on earth strode proudly into the stadium for the ceremonial March Past. (Australia, led by the anti-abortion lobby and wearing seven month foetuses attached to genuine kangaroo tail necklaces across blood splattered T-shirts, were adjudged ‘Best National Costume’ for the second consecutive games. In honour of the distinction each team member was presented with cyanide pills in small silver boxes and requested to swallow their pride).
Teams of the hyperactive raced past, the Megalomaniacs demanded to stand on the podium, the Kleptomaniacs stole past while the tranquillised just dawdled with faint smiles plastered across stupendously stupefied faces.
In a locker room, hidden well away from all the excitement, the paranoid’s huddled en masse surrounded by machine guns and barbed wire refusing to budge.......
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‘Nathan...’
‘What?’ He replied disturbed at having to return so soon from the games. Hands clasped, eyes upward, Nathan asked God to call Tom home (to Australia, not heaven, he added quickly just in case God misunderstood).
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At this point in his history it seemed to Wright that he was surrounded at by ill tempered women, mood affected by men who weren’t here to face the music. Missing men who left Wright as spokesman for the entire male population, all of whom seemed to have done something to aggravate the entire female population.
At the moment every woman he knew was giving him a hard time, hell, even his mother had taken to ringing him at odd hours to express her disgust with the male who shared her bed. And messed up her kitchen.
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‘My bowels are positively restless compared to you!’ Nichola decided, her puke hands now released from hiding.
Wright sighed. He had no real defence to such a reasonable assessment of his current state so he considered sending the dog around to excavate her vowels instead of his garden and stayed silent.
Slumped defeated and delirious into the chair by the phone trying to think of an erudite response to such harsh truth, he was about to explain that his inactivity was therapy - Aversion Therapy. Movement Aversion Therapy. Again, he resisted the temptation.
Instead said, ‘Bullshit.’ (An eroded-dite response).
‘My grandmother’s more active than you are and she passed on in 1963,’ Nichola giggled, the fingers of her left hand splayed in the air again, red lips puckered and blowing moist hurricanes at the vomit varnish.
‘Get stuffed,’ Wright said. (And was; was absolutely stuffed).
‘Nikkie I haven’t even had coffee yet. My head hurts and I’m not dressed yet..’
Nichola gagged. ‘Ugh, how disgusting,’ she grimaced, almost regurgitating this morning’s breakfast on the floor from the pit of her stomach when the mental picture of a naked Nathan appeared in Cinemascope in her head. (Not that any-one would have noticed had she thrown-up. Her two truly technicolour hands already looked like some-one had been sick on her).
Wright, removing his eyes from the bulldozer dog, glanced downward and tended to agree with the assessment. It was not a pretty sight.
It was indecent exposure!
His stomach was expanding at a rate proportional to the grog he ingested. Was it better to be fat and happy or slim and sober? Wright wondered. The elastic stomach rippled, the overhanging flab answered (the hanging garden of Blobylon Wright called it) formed fat lips which demanded to be kept full and puckered. No sweat (no exercise so no sweat) Wright smiled patting the jelly kiss, telling the weight not to worry and sighed disconsolately.
Stopping perusing the pink paunch, he glimpsed two feet of ice blue beyond. The toes anyway, as the rest was obscured. Shocking. His appetite evaporated with his gaze.
Fat, he decided, was the ultimate appetite suppressant. If all fat people were forced to eat naked they’d soon turn anorexic he guessed. Then spoke.
‘Nikkie... my pernicious piranha.... listen. Let me get myself dressed and I’ll plug myself into the nearest socket, eat some ergs and get moving. Give me an hour and I’ll call you back,’ he pleaded wanting to call her shitface but restrained himself.
‘Sure you will.’ Sarcasm etching her words.
‘Honest! I’ll ring you the moment I get to work,’ he lied, knowing that if he got any fatter he’d never ring back because he’d never fit through the door. Nichola, fingers ready to plough spine (male preferably though she wasn’t completely averse to her own species) didn’t hang about to argue. Nails dry, she hung up.
Wright frowned grimly. ‘I take it that’s okay with you then....’ he continued undeterred, continued speaking to the disconnected intent on having the last word whether she was listening or not.
‘Shitface,’ he said. Game, Set and Match.
He hung up then it was exodus and movement by braille as Wright guided himself with chilled fingertips against the damp walls, stumbling blindly from the lounge to the kitchen.
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Where’s the bloody kettle? Dazed, two bare feet continually sticking to the greasy linoleum each time he shifted, the naked Nathan searched the kitchen for the jug wading through puddles of unidentified residue which adhered lecherously to the soles of his frigid feet which had turned a peculiar shade of purplish blue, he grumbled, fumbling for the catch to the cupboard and scratching at the tiny residents living in the carpet on his chin.
No jug, no joy.
He spent the next ten minutes searching every cupboard in the kitchen but he couldn’t find the kettle so he collapsed on the table to look mournfully at the floor and his feet. Thought that crossing this kitchen was akin to exploring a toffee Antarctic then slid from the table and slowly, almost static, edged his way toward the pantry in an unnaturally retarded excursion going step by araldite step.
Compost oozing between indigo toes, Wright figured it was about time some-one cleaned the floors (some-one other than him that was. He wasn’t about to volunteer. ‘Delegate Not Do’ was Wright’s motto). Ignoring the glue lagoon, he crept slowly back to the kitchen trying to ascertain which one of the inmates was most susceptible to bacteria, or bribe, or threat of violence. He realised he was so changed tack.
Wondered who possessed the courage to tackle this swamp. Knew he wouldn’t, feeling it more than likely that a posse of prehistoric reptiles inhabited the slime linoleum.
Decided finally that this was a job for Crocodile Dundee, not him and promptly forgot about it.
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An hour later, still not having located the kettle, Wright settled on a more primitive alternative. Lying on the kitchen table, bare arsed on the boomerang motif table top, a plump pudding with plates for a pillow, Wright listened, eyes closed, as the water boiled from an old saucepan.
Suddenly the damn pot started spraying its guts everywhere as the hot plate, red and pulsing in the gloom, hissed in disgust as the water that was once in flew out, striking the walls in a transparent barrage as boiling bullets of wild evaporation shot from the steel chamber.
More bloody dangerous than the Lebanon Wright mused diving for cover.
He reappeared only when the ammunition had run dry, creeping out from under the table when the air raid sirens signalled the all clear and walking to the stove, removed the bazooka saucepan and went to the sink which was plumbed into in a small alcove beyond the kitchen proper.
It was while filling it again that he had a better idea. Had a better idea of frostbite. He noticed that his extremities had turned refrigerator and that he was shivering in Artic waves and that his dick had retreated inward toward invisibility so decided that it was time for fabric before caffeine so dragged himself back upstairs to get dressed.
Did so.
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A huge white palace of pure tertain tarble perched regally atop vermilion cliffs. Five snaps high, it sat snug above an emerald river which flowed in rushing bursts through deep ravines toward an inland sea (which was entirely pink and the consistency of custard) where Bueta fish, yellow eyed and as big as a tetragob, poked fanged jaws above the frothing surface. Sucked air through glass gills before diving with a loud, urgent splash to escape becoming breakfast for the flying mamodurals which circled lazily in the crimson sun of a lime sky.
Sheer translucent walls a mile high surrounded the palace - vaulting, imposing ramparts of ivory interlocks fashioned from the oot tusk of Wilderhino (and the toughest substance in the known universe).
More valuable than golb and tougher than Karsa diamen, these oot walls were all that remained of the Acropolis Of Dion, alpha temple of the Sect Vitae and once religious bastion of the planet Hearse.
The temple was no longer on Hearse but here due to a lapse in protocol during the Third Quarrel, a turbulent period many rhymes ago when Drama Legions of Emperor Nark the Improbable, First Glug of the Stick Empire, had the planet ransacked (after the Ambassador of Hearse had been dumb enough to point out that the exulted emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. The Emperor, in response to such honesty, did what honesty demanded. Demanded obliteration of the fool’s planet).
On receipt of this verbal affront, the esteemed Emperor Nark immediately dispatched fifteen battagroups of Airborne Dramas led by trained Gasp Masters to smite Hearse and the Hearsians. Not a difficult task. The Emperor’s forces won total victory within three minutes of landing.
