Phwoar and Peace

by Andie M. Long

  “For God's sake, I’m bleeding and you are throwing foodstuffs at me… AGAIN.” Theo yelled back.

  I moved from my chair and licked his hand to close the wound. He was obviously too drunk to do it himself. “It’s just wine.” I reassured the other diners who were agog watching us. Then for good measure I picked up the naan bread and whacked Theo around the head with it again.

  “Oh you two. You are such fantastic entertainment. You’ve cheered me right up.” Rav said. “Enjoy the rest of your meal.” And with that he left us.

  “Rav. You need to help me drag Theo out to the cloakroom and then I can whizz us both home. He’s drunk.” I whispered as I paid the bill.

  “I don’t think I have ever seen my friend drunk before.”

  “Yes, well, your dear friend Theo didn’t have a dating daughter before. He’s not taking it so well.”

  “He is very lucky he has a daughter at all. I shall remind him of this fact when he is sober, but for now, yes, I will help you.”

  Finally, ten minutes later, I managed to whizz us back to our bedroom where my drunk husband laid out across our bed. And then he started singing, Kylie's 'I can’t get you out of my head', but replaced ‘you’ with ‘it’.

  Our door flung open and Charlie stood there in her pyjamas and robe. “What the hell is that noise? I was fast asleep.” She stared at the bed and her jaw dropped. “My dad’s singing?”

  “Well, that’s debatable, but this is what you’ve done to him by growing up. He’s got drunk and now he’s singing. I thought it was the child who came home drunk while they were growing up, but your father’s finding his own way through accepting your adulthood.”

  Theo opened his eyes, sat up, then whizzed in front of Charlie. “Daughter! You’re back!” He sniffed the air around her, “Your virtue is intact. My baby. How I love you. You are Daddy’s girl, do you know that?” He pinched her cheeks.

  “Ow.” Charlie screamed.

  “Don’t leave me, Charlie bear. Charlene left me. Now you will leave me.”

  “What’s he on about, Mum?”

  “That Kylie left Neighbours. You’ll have to excuse me in a moment, Charlie, but needs must.”

  “Charlie warlie. I am so very proud of you. You are the Queen. Not the Princess like Kylie, Princess of Pop; but Queen, like Madonna. Ooh what Madonna do I know? Oh God, ‘Like a Virgin’.”

  “Out.” I pressed my hands to Theo’s temples and blue sparks flew. Theo hit the bed unconscious.

  “I thought you couldn’t use magic for your own needs?”

  “Sometimes rules are made to be broken, Charlie. Rather I broke a rule than a vase over his head. Now, did you have a nice evening?”

  “Mum, it was wonderful. Kai was the perfect gentleman and we got along really well.”

  “That makes me very happy. Now go get some sleep, or rather, go and replay the evening over and over in your mind.”

  “Oh, Mum, that’s just what I was doing before I fell asleep. I can’t help it. How did you know?”

  I sighed. “Because I only just did it myself with your dad, and that is when I find this situation most weird. You’re my daughter, you feel like my daughter, but I’m only twenty-seven myself.”

  “Well, we can be like those mother and daughters that are more like sisters, can’t we?” She said kissing my cheek.

  “I am very proud to be your mum, Charlie, no matter how strange. Never forget that.”

  “I won’t. Love you, Mum. Love you, drunk Dad.” She laughed and left the room.

  I turned and stared at the passed out pale creature lying across the bed.

  “What am I going to do with you?” I said, and I didn’t mean about his position of slumber.

  Satan

  I was having far too much fun with this already. Debbie had proved quite the little mover in the bedroom. Seemed after she insisted on having a ‘heart-to-heart’ with me, that she had felt we were drifting apart and that it had taken her threatening me with divorce for me to see the error of my ways. What-ev-er. Her poor husband. I bet he was glad I’d taken over his body, stuffed him deep down inside himself where he ceased to exist. At least he didn’t have to listen to her. If I got fed up with her talking, I’d taken to filling her mouth with something to shut her up. However, I’d just seen the buxom brunette at number 22 put her bins out in her sheer pyjamas, so Debbie might have to be dealt with another way soon.

  According to my wife, the only thing they all knew about the war was there would be one, and that it might involve a sausage roll. I’d never heard anything so stupid in my life and believe me when you’d been Satan you’d heard every excuse under the fiery, burning, excruciatingly painful rays of the sun while the new recruits tried their best to be freed from their new home in the bowels of hell.

  This morning I had not been able to resist calling in at the coffee shop. I wanted to know if she could detect me, but no. As I thought I only registered as Mark Linley at the moment while I still didn’t have my powers. Now that was a problem I needed to sort out at my earliest convenience. I couldn’t exactly get Withernsea back without having some kind of power. But then they’d talked about holding a wedding reception for my lovely and completely traitorous, backstabbing ex-assistant Lucy and the arseswipe she’d married. I’d killed him and then that bloody vampire had brought him back to life, well un-life. Hmmm, there’d be a wedding buffet. Maybe war could start with a sausage roll after all… especially if I poisoned them. I could rid myself of the do-gooding bastards in one fell swoop if I got the recipe right. It was food for thought. In the meantime the dim-witted Samara had given me the perfect idea to distract them all.

  Taking over the body of Mark Linley had been an act of genius. Not surprisingly, no-one noticed he’d been taken over because he was a rancid slug of a man anyway. In fact I’d done Hull and Withernsea a huge favour.

  Tonight had been the icing on the cake. A tour of Wyvern Sea. Permission to go under the water and see what I could also command under there. I’d had to endure an hour with the extra do-gooding Polly and her new boyfriend, but it was all worth it for the information I had gathered.

  Then I’d suggested Debbie and I go for an Indian where I’d had far too much fun tormenting my old colleague Rav. Yes I was having a devil of a time. All I needed now was to secure the return of my evil powers. There must be a way and I would find it. It was quite a problem with my current plans for Withernsea domination that I didn’t actually have any power. In the meantime I would just have to concentrate on the fact I was wicked to the core.

  I rang the Cupid Inc headquarters. “Oh hello there. One of your Cupids, Rebecca. She set me up with a beautiful woman who I’m pleased to say I have just proposed to. Could you give me a telephone number for her so I could thank her?”

  A happy sing-song voice came down the line. I was almost sick on myself. “Oh we can’t give out personal information, but I can give you an email address for you to send your thanks. Now which Rebecca is it? Do you have her location?”

  “Yes, Hornsea.”

  “Ah, do you have a pen and paper?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, that’s rebeccawilkins, all one word.” She spells it out for me, “atcupidinc.com. That’s inc for incorporated with a c, not ink like in a pen.”

  I hung up.

  To: rebeccawilkins@cupidinc.com

  From: yourfriend@gmail.com

  Subject: Samara

  Rebecca

  I heard about your incident with Samara. Basically she was in Jax's coffee shop in Withernsea telling everyone within listening distance about your unfortunate mishap down under (and we know I don’t mean Australia, don’t we?)

  Here are my suggestions, as a secret supporter of everything you do in your role as Cupid representative for Hornsea.

  1. Go to your bosses about Samara being helped by the Dating Agency.

  2. Let anyone else know. Is there a company magazine?

  3. Samara detests sausage rolls. Send her
some to her grooming salon with a note that if she wants to bring it, you can too. (Anonymous of course, but she’ll know who did it.)

  4. Anything else you can think of to annoy her. She’s far too loved up and happy and who wants that? (Yes for everyone else, but not for her, hey?).

  From: someone else she picked on. Just because she’s a pet groomer doesn’t mean she can tell us how to shave our pussies, right?

  I signed off. This should do the trick. Let the games begin. Samara had annoyed me by becoming loved up with that husband of hers, becoming the first couple of that damn dating agency, so she deserved what she got.

  Now I just had to see what happened…

  Shelley

  All was pretty quiet and peaceful for the next week. Charlie visited the sea each evening where Duke Brishon gave her lessons in sea politics and then she’d spend a few hours with Kai before returning home. I’d decided the best way to keep Theo from worrying was to keep him distracted. I was tired but in a good way.

  Friday morning came, and yawning, I crossed the threshold of Jax’s coffee shop to get a lovely hot brew. I think I needed an espresso chaser.

  The door banged open and Samara hurtled through the door, her blonde curly locks bouncing all over the place, whipping me in the face as she finally stopped at my side.

  “Shelley. Shelley. It’s started. Ebony was right. It is to do with sausage rolls. Look!”

  She plonked a tray full of fourteen freshly cooked sausage rolls on the counter. My stomach rumbled. Written in tomato sauce across them was

  T H I S I S W A R B I T C H.

  “I’m telling you, they’re from that bitch Rebecca. I got a call from Cupid Inc Headquarters and I’m being full-on audited because she’s told them I don’t do anything; that I rely on the dating agency and fudge my figures. I’d only just got out of the last audit by getting Polly and Drake together.”

  I didn’t tell her that actually I did that, because she had been instrumental in shooting her arrows into Keto to show the person Keto loved most was herself, which had paved the way for my sister and her boyfriend to get together for good.

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Me? Well we ask Charlie don’t we? Seeing as this is the war.”

  I took a drink of my coffee and closed my eyes to think this over. Surely this was not the war Charlie was prophesied to save us all from? But there was a declaration via sausage rolls, so I had to treat it as a possibility.

  “I’m going to call the bitch.” Before myself or Jax could stop her, her phone was out of her bag and she’d dialled a number.

  “Hey, Bex. Thanks for the rolls. Oh stop pretending you don’t know about them. Anyway, my friends are just sharing them. They said they’re delicious, so I’m just checking you didn’t put anything in them did you, or I’ll have to phone the police? Just a warning are they? Well, I’m over here shitting my pants, babe. What’s next, a Cornish pasty? You’re very strange, do you know that?”

  She laughed. “Is that right? Cupid’s weekly magazine. I tell you what, whingebag mingebag. Why don’t you come here and see if Shelley can set you up on a date? Because although I might be too lazy to get people together, at least I managed to get a guy myself and he didn’t scream when he removed my panties because he thought a stray rabid dog was loose down there.”

  I could hear screaming at the other end of the phone.

  “Oh bring it. Go to the magazine. See if I care.” Samara hung up.

  She looked from me to Jax and back again. “She’s going to write an article for the weekly Cupid magazine, explaining how dating agencies are killing the Cupid business and making some of us lazy, and how something needs to be done to stop the global phenomenon of dating agencies. She thinks she can get enough people together to descend on Withernsea in a protest.”

  “Great. Protests against my dating agency. What amazing publicity that will be. How will I explain that away to the press?”

  “They’ll just think Cupid Inc is a rival dating agency. I just hope Cupid himself doesn’t come down to earth and declare war on you. We don’t want a war on love. That would be catastrophic.”

  “I’m sure Cupid will be happy to see love matches being made, however it’s happening.” I said.

  “Well, maybe.” She shrugged.

  “What do you mean, maybe?”

  “Cupid gets all the kudos for people falling in love, yeah? He’s not going to be happy if the press get hold of the story and declare the Cupid system is outdated and agencies are the way forward. What if they say it’s agencies all the way and Cupid is out?”

  “Oh dear God. Do you mean to say that this stupid Rebecca could cause Cupid himself to come to Withernsea and challenge me about my agency?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay, I’ll speak to Charlie tonight. It would appear this could be the beginning of the war after all.”

  Satan

  I’d sat near the coffee shop bathroom with my back to the doorway while wearing a large black coat and hat. I'd made sure to sit across from a female customer who I made polite chitchat with which almost killed me, but it worked in not drawing attention to myself. The man had served me so no one was the wiser that I was in the shop, or rather that Mark Linley was in the shop. I heard them discussing the results of my fiendish plan. It had come together perfectly.

  And now, while they prepared to solve the oncoming war with Cupid they imagined was a possibility, I would accelerate my own plans for Withernsea domination.

  First stop, to get my powers back.

  I was the rightful Satan. Now to find the wrong one. The person who had taken my job.

  The question was, how did a displaced Satan manage to scheme his job back? You’d have thought it would be difficult to hitch a lift to hell, and maybe for those less evil than myself it could be. I knew one thing, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with this middle-aged body I was inhabiting and was ready to change to a new model. With this aim in mind I drove to Withernsea, parked up in the library car park, departed the very middle-aged-driver centric Honda Civic and made my way through the library entrance. Just as I had envisaged, the library was empty with the exception of the almost at retirement age librarian, and two youths who were throwing crisps at each other while sitting in front of the two outdated computers at the far end of the library. I wandered slowly around while I tried to work out the best place to leave Mark’s body for a while. With any luck I wouldn’t need to return to it at all. In the meantime, Mark would remain in an exhausted sleep mode for hours, so should anyone discover him-which was doubtful in the cemetery like library-they would be likely to just leave him be. Either way, to be honest I didn’t give a toss. If he did wake up and ramble about being possessed by the devil, then I’d be able to pick him up later from the local psychiatric hospital if I needed him.

  The smell of damp, dogeared library books made my skin crawl. It was about time the libraries were burned down and everyone was given an e-reader. Maybe one of my first jobs back in Withernsea would be to torch the place. It would be the only way Withernsea would ever get a hot librarian that was for sure. Finally, after wandering around several bookshelves, I found a quiet corner with one chair next to the section on crossword puzzles and Sudoku. It was adjacent to the section on diet and exercise and likely to remain uninhabited for the rest of the day. I picked up a book about chess, sat in the chair and let the spark of energy that I currently was depart via Mark’s mouth and started my journey out of the building towards Hanif’s. It wasn’t often I thanked the Lord-usually he was my enemy-but on this occasion I was grateful my exit was via Mark’s mouth and not his backside given his middle-aged flatulence.

  I knew from my time as Reuben, Theo’s best friend, that Rav spent most of his spare time at the restaurant, mainly in order to escape his mother. He’d clean, prepare meals, and do maintenance, because no matter how hard the work was, it wasn’t as hard work as his mother. I entered through a vent and moved through t
o the main restaurant area where Rav was wiping down tables and straightening menus. He was singing along to Kylie Minogue’s 'Better the devil you know'. No doubt Theo had lent him the CD. If I’d have been able to, I would have laughed at the irony. Instead, I took over Rav’s body. This time I had more of a fight on my hands given that Rav was a demon. He fought to try to expel me from his body, but given my past as Satan I was stronger. I pushed him down, so his thoughts and protests could no longer be heard and then I transported myself straight to hell.

  “Honey’s, I’m home.”

  My replacement was nowhere to be seen. Instead, all around were bikini wearing young temptresses, all long hair and blow job mouths, with whips in their hands. Hell had become a cliché in my absence.

  I walked up to one of the living blowup dolls. “Where is the main guy, doll? I have an appointment with him.”

  She turned to me, looking me up and down. “He’s downstairs in the sauna. Would you like me to bleep him for you, Rav?”

  “No, I’ll find him, thank you.”

  “Okay. I didn’t know you were on shift today. Do you fancy getting a drink later?”

  Huh. I’d never scored a date in all the time I’d been here. Then again, I’d only employed the most troll-like looking people because then when they made goo-goo eyes at those stuck here, it added another layer to their punishments. Shelley reckoned she was awesome at running a dating agency, but I’d like to see her find the perfect date for Satan himself.

  “Maybe later? Right now I have some other hot stuff to deal with.” That was if Rav survived my trip to Hell because once I encountered the current Satan, all bets were off.

  “Okay, well hope to catch you later.” Blowup said with a taloned-nail wave.