Debaser

by Max Frick

to chest - stared idly at the flickering television screen.

  In an instant Tony was adance and, oh, what a mover!. He did the blitzkrieg bop, the cretin hop, the mashed potato and the twist; the hucklebuck and the Jacques Tati; the mambo, the rumba and the stomp. A hybrid, bastardised amalgamation of all of these took him limbs flailing over every available inch of the floor. He was utterly lost in the music. He immersed himself in it and it flowed all around him. There was no longer any blood in his veins. He had had a complete transfusion. Someone, some beneficent god, had taken his blood and replaced it with song, and it was being pumped right through him, from his head to his toes, by his pounding heart. He vanished into it as though it were a portal to another world, a better world, a world wherein his every utterance, his every action, was understood. A world where he felt he truly belonged.

  Billy, ensconced, recumbent and cross-legged, in his armchair - heel to floor, arse to the edge, arms on arms, chin to chest - stared idly at the flickering television screen.

  ‘HOWFHOWFHOWF! HOWF! HOWF!’

  ‘NEVER MIND THE FUCKIN TELLY! FEEL THE FUCKIN MUSIC, MAN!’ Screamed Tony, and a fencer’s lunge – quick in, quick back – procured for him the television remote control that was lying naively unguarded on the small table between the armchair and the couch.

  At the tail-end of a backwards shuffle, all the while antagonisingly wagging his booty, he flick-kicked forward a trailing right foot, swung it back over a pivotal left, spun, and thumb to ‘stand-by’ blackened the flickering screen.

  Up now and four on the floor, perhaps sensing tension, Dooly had expanded his repertoire to include a low growl, that thin strip of a tail now perfectly still.

  ‘GrrHOWF! GrrHOWF! HOWF!’

  Billy, beleaguered, ensconced recumbent and cross-legged in his armchair - heel to floor, arse to the edge, arms on arms, head back - stared patiently at the wall above the blackened television screen.

  ‘You’re upsettin the dog with your dancin,’ he muttered, sitting himself upright.

  ‘I’M WHAT?’ Shouted Tony, dancing.

  ‘YOU’RE UPSETTIN THE DOG, MAN!' Repeated Billy.

  ‘AM I FUCK! I’M ONLY UPSETTIN YOU. THE DOG’S FINE. AREN’T YOU, PAL? YOU’RE FINE, AREN’T YOU, EH?’

  ‘GrrrHOWF! GrrHOWF! Grrr!’

  ‘JUST WANTS TO DANCE. DON’T YOU, BIG MAN, EH? JUST WANT TO DANCE? COME ON THEN, HUP! HUP! COME ON, HUP!’

  Dooly remained grounded, growling a firm refusal.

  Tony, undeterred, stooped to conquer, and the beast, snarling now, was hand reared by the forelegs and raised to the level of the man.

  ‘Fuckin hell, you’re a heavy big bastard!’

  ‘HE’LL GO FOR YOU!’ Shouted Billy. ‘Serve you fuckin right, as well.’

  ‘NO HE WON’T. HE LOVES HIS UNCLE TONY. DON’T YOU, PAL? YOU LOVE YOUR UNCLE TONY, DON’T YOU, EH?’

  Beneath a leathery nose lips twitched and powerful teeth were bared.

  ‘I’M TELLIN YOU, MAN, YOU BETTER PUT HIM DOWN! HE’S GOIN TO BITE YOU!’

  Heedless, reckless, Tony moved in closer. He positioned a weighty paw on each of his shoulders, placed the palm of a hand either side of a sleek-coated ribcage and, animal and man face to face, a grotesque waltz ensued.

  That was it for Billy. He was up out of his chair and striding boldly across the floor, purposeful, resolute, determined to switch off the music. Without so much as a gentleman’s excuse me, Tony pushed away his dance partner, hurdled onto the couch and sprang off at the other end, landing hard, to block Billy's way and wag a forbidding finger at his frustrated adversary.

  Billy, embittered, tightly gripped the chair-back with his right hook.

  An angry duo of sharp, broom-handle knocks sounding up through the floor from the ceiling of the flat below (no you can’t, no you can’t) was immediately answered with a defiant trio of dull, sole-heel thuds sent down from above by Tony (yes I can, yes I can, yes I can).

  Once again four on the floor, Dooly had excitedly reprised his bass-line.

  ‘HOWFHOWF! HOWFHOWFHOWF! HOWF!’

  ‘DOOLY!’ snapped Billy.

  And the dog, after meekly barking a diminuendo, slunk quietly back to the door, where he lay croup between hams, lapping woundedly at his manhandled forelegs. Billy relaxed his grip.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We should make a move anyway.’

  ‘Are we takin him?’ Asked Tony, pointing at the dog.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Will he even fit in the car?’

  ‘I’m not takin the car. We’re walkin.’

  ‘We’re walkin? What, all the way up to Pabs’s?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Tony stared for a bit out of the window, as though walking the route in his mind.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘But wait until this song’s finished.’

  4

  Anthony Drake (no middle name), was born in a burgeoning Scottish new town, in the winter of nineteen-seventy, the second son of a welder father and an over-protective mother. He received a rudimentary education at the local comprehensive school, choosing to leave at the age of sixteen. After an irresolvable quarrel with his father, over his disappointing grades and refusal to continue with schooling, Drake left home to embark upon a succession of pointless and low paid jobs, each ending in redundancy or dismissal. An increasing fascination with the town’s underworld – a world of drug misuse and hard drinking – led to a brief spell in prison, at the age of twenty, for Actual Bodily Harm. On his release, vowing to change his ways, he set himself up in business as a window cleaner, but his inherent lack of discipline and acumen doomed the enterprise to failure almost before it had begun.

  Drake’s bitterness, augmented by the factory work he was forced to take as a result of his failure, effected a resumption of his old habits, and he began to seek in music – which he would later describe as ‘about the only fuckin thing that makes life here worth livin’ – affirmation of his erratic existence. Once again drifting from job to job, brimming with the fury of the unjustly oppressed and bemoaning the lack of opportunity in his home town, Drake turned his thoughts to foreign travel. And with this in mind he gave up his current job, having saved a small amount of money, and moved in, just for a week or two until the details were finalised, with William Wilson, a friend of a friend.

  Wilson, of whom what little is known scarcely merits recounting, led an ordinary life notable only for its lack of events. Two years older than Drake he possessed little of his fiery passion. After leaving school at seventeen he took up an apprenticeship with a local electronics firm, where he remained, more or less contentedly, for over ten years. His position within the firm, which he never sought to advance, afforded him those of the mod cons he deemed necessary for a relatively comfortable existence, an existence that he seldom troubled to question. At the time of drake’s arrival, however, he was, through no fault of his own, unemployed, a state of affairs he bore with customary lack of concern, resolving to live off his savings until necessity once again prompted him to action. In short, Wilson was a young man who had worn out many a good pair of shoes on the path of least resistance.

  By the summer of ninety-seven, when the events herein related occur, Wilson had reluctantly allowed Drake’s initial week or two to stretch to a little under six months. Their co-existence was a prolonged battle of wills.

  Drake scorned Wilson’s anything-for-a-quiet-life attitude as that of a coward masquerading as indifference.

  Wilson in turn viewed Drake’s angry defiance of convention as nothing more than the tantrums of a spoiled child.

  Drake was the obstreperous houseguest.

  Wilson the long-suffering host.

  Drake bored Wilson.

  Wilson irritated Drake.

  Separate, it is extremely doubtful whether Drake or Wilson would ever have been brought to the world’s attention, but together their unparalleled infamy, like that of Wilson’s namesake before them, was indeed bruited to the uttermost regions o
f the globe; though not so much by the indignant winds as by the whirling tempest of the media:

  KIDNAPPED! BEATEN! RAPED! KILLED! EATEN!

  THE TRAGIC FATE OF OUR MOST BELOVED CELEBRITY

  FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS!

  THUGS DEVOUR SUPERSTAR RYAN

  DRUG FRENZY LEADS TO FACE-OFF!

  HERO COP TELLS HIS STORY. EXCLUSIVE

  5

  He should have walked away.

  The minute he first clapped eyes on the record company’s MD or CO or CEO (or whatever high-sounding job title he had appended to his name – Steve, Steve Thompson – with embarrassing self-importance during the introductory handshake) he should have upped and walked away.

  An effervescent secretary, prim and industrious, had greeted him on his arrival and accompanied him in the lift up to Mr Thompson’s office on the top floor. The man himself was ‘on a call’ when they had entered. He acknowledged Tony with a half-nod from behind a plush wooden desk, pointed pistol-like to the chair at the other side of it and went on with his call.

  ‘...Yes, Don, yes. I’m perfectly well aware of that, but he no longer fits the framework... No, on a personal level I’m very fond of him, but professionally he’s dead wood... Be that as it may, Don, he’s very lucky at this juncture to be working in the business at all... Don, market forces dictate my actions and that particular market is in decline... No can do, my friend. No can do. I have to consider my margins...’

  The secretary had left them to it and from in front of the desk, behind a deferential expression, Tony cast a critical eye over