Lonesome Snow Leopard by David McGrath

Words with JAM BIGGER Short Story Competition 2013

3rd PRIZE WINNER (2500 word category)

Inspiration hits him like a spray of shotgun pellets to the face. That’s good—he’ll use that in poem.

He writes all night in a chasm of creation. He is deeper than he has ever been, Marianas Trench deep. That’s good—he uses it straight away. No, he scribbles it out. Lake Baikal deep is better because as the deepest lake in the world, it is more suitable, as he feels his poems are isolated and not touching any other body of water that may also be deep.

He can barely contain himself.

He knows the poems are genius.

Really genius.

At 36 years of age, this is finally his time.

He prepares for his pièce de résistance. He has avoided the complicated theme of love up until now because he feels it is brandished about in this commercialistic society of ours, replaced with luv, the lemming-drones all luving their Starbucks coffee and luving Justin Timberlake. It is not the love he wants to say. It does not get close to the very Lake Baikal depth of his feelings. He wants his final verse to better Yeats, laying the cloths of heaven at Maud Gonne’s feet, asking her to thread softly. He wants to compare to a summer’s Day. He begins.

If love were a duck,

I would set my dogs of desire into the long grass to scare it from its hiding place.

As it took flight to safety, I would spray love with shotgun pellets to the face, unloading both barrels to make sure of the kill, and watch it fall to earth with a lifeless thump. I would rush to the scraggly, blood-soaked dead carcass of love so that the dogs did not tear it asunder. I would grab love by its webbed feet, bring it home, pluck its feathers and chop off its head off with my cleaver. I would rip loves’ entrails from its stomach, keep its liver for pate and eat its heart raw, sucking the blood through its vena cava. I would drench love in orange sauce, cook love to gas mark 5 for 35 minutes then share it with you.

He falls out of his chair, trembling, holding his wrist after the ferocious onslaught of creation. A paroxysm of emotion overcomes him. Maybe, he thinks, dying is the price he has to pay for genius, unappreciated in his time, remembered however, for the rest of eternity. He poses like an Adonis. He wants to leave a beautiful corpse. When he does not die, he pulls himself up to his bedroom window, opens it, takes a deep breath and shouts out into the cosmos, ‘I am all that is genius!’

‘Could Mr Genius please keep it down,’ Beatrice shouts. ‘I’ve work in the morning.’

He calls his collection, Life.

He cannot sleep.

He writes his bio—Roland Nicholas Shoemaker is a poet, a human and a lonesome snow leopard. It gives the bastards nothing and shrouds his persona in mystery.

Life is poorly received and misunderstood. The poetry publishers send standard rejection emails, saying not for us, wishing him the best on his endeavours. Only one is a non-template response. It is from Bloodaxe. It reads, Nice try, Jamie! I know it’s you. Haha! What you cooking me for dinner tonight?

A seething rage for publishers boils in his stomach. He calls their offices everyday and breaths down the line.

‘This is pathetic,’ says the lady at Faber & Faber.

‘You think you know it all,’ he says.

He decides he does not need them and prepares to self-publish, Life.

‘You want to leave the cover like this, love?’ asks the printer.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘exactly like that.’

‘There’s no name, no title, nothing—just blank? A white page cover?’

‘My first poem explains it.’

‘I see. All right, well, how many copies would you like, love?’

He wants to read her his poem on love to stop her brandishing the word about like she does.

‘Five thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven,’ he declares. It is the depth of Lake Baikal in feet.

Two weeks later he sits in his bedroom with 5,387 copies of Life beside him in 18 big, brown boxes. He charges for the biggest bookshop in the city.

‘How can freedom be a triceratops?’ the bookshop’s manager asks as he flicks through a copy.

‘Because it’s extinct,’ he says.

‘The cover’s just blank?’

‘The first poem explains that.’

‘Is this a hidden camera show?’ asks the manager, straightening his tie, looking around for the crew.

Roland has to be wrestled outside by a security guard. He spits on the bookshop window. Years from now, he thinks, people will tell this story.

He receives a lifetime ban from the bookshop. It notifies him that his four boxes can be picked up at the bookshop’s local police station. The email begins with Dear Lonesome Snow Leopard.

He considers cutting out his own tongue and posting it to the bookshop in response. It would be amazing publicity, artistic and bold. It would echo through the ages like a time-earthquake.

He sleeps on the idea.

He calls an end to pounding the footpaths after the incident.

‘It is the problem with self-publishing. It puts creation on hold,’ he tells the marketer on the phone.

‘And so, you need publicity and a book launch?’ the marketer asks.

‘I need nothing,’ Roland says.

‘I’ll start again, sir. What would you like our company to do for you?’

‘I want you to sell my five thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven copies of my book.’

‘We arrange publicity and advertising, Mr Shoemaker. Can I call you Roland?’

‘No.’

‘For example, we don’t hit the streets with millions of cans of Coca-Cola and sell them to passers-by. We advertise it. We rent billboard space, organise launch parties and photo-shoots, buy column inches. We get Rihanna drinking a can of Coca-Cola. You know what I mean?’

Roland is forsaken and purged as he listens to the marketer speak. It is all part of the hypocrisy that Life demolishes. It is a conundrum. To get himself out there as a world-renowned poet he must use channels that his work attacks to the very core.

‘Mr Shoemaker, you still there, buddy?’

He feels like Dr. Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park, rooting through that giant pile of triceratops droppings to prove to the stupid wardens that the dinosaurs do in fact eat the West Indian lilac.

‘You sir,’ he tells the marketer, ‘are lower on the evolutionary scale than tooth plaque.’

‘Step higher than poets at least,’ the marketer snaps back. The line goes dead.

‘Roland,’ says Beatrice. ‘Let’s go do something.’

‘I am in business meetings about my art. I am in anguish, I would be terrible company, pumkin.’

‘It could be worse, Roland. You’re not a starving baby in war-torn Africa.’

‘The starving babies in war-torn Africa have not got a thing on this pain I feel, Beatrice. I would prefer starvation!’

‘Why not try the Internet?’

For once, Beatrice proves useful. He will go viral.

He starts in the poetry forums to get it praised by the ones who know. The lemming-drones will soon follow. Life for sale, he writes. He offers, If Love Were a Duck as a free sampler of the type of poem Life offers.

The trolls go to town on him. He is surrounded on all sides by malicious keyboard ninjas who would not know poetry if it slapped them in the face with an Atlantic salmon.

This poem is the biggest atrocity to mankind I’ve ever witnessed—Auschwitz Survivor.  

This poet needs to be sprayed in the face with shotgun pellets!

I’ve taken 4 showers since I read this poem. It’s not coming off no matter how hard I scrub.

He cannot counter every comment that’s posted. There are just too many of them.

Twitterbot spam pops up on his computer screen the very moment when his wit was just about at its end.

A Twitterbot, says the Internet, is a…

‘Your dinner’s ready,’ Beatrice shouts from downstairs.

‘Aaaargh!’ he shouts back. He hangs the ‘Creating’ sign on his bedroom door and slams it.

A Twitterbot, says the Internet, is a program used to produce automated posts via the Twitter microblogging service.

The Twitterbot can get its hands dirty in the world of publicity leaving him free to create his follow-up to Life. He buys a Twitterbot programme right away and puts the printer on notice for another 10,000 copies.

He arranges the programme so that anytime somebody mentions the word ‘life’ on Twitter, his Twitterbot will direct them to buy his poetry. The programme also scrambles his IP address to avoid fines for spamming and reroutes all posts through Lithuania. The name, Prophet is already taken. He names his Twitterbot, Prophet5387, leaves the profile picture completely white and then sends it out into cyberspace.

He gets to work on the first poem of his new collection. He titles it, The Hag with the Self-imposed Bloodied Axe of Rejection.

He begins.

I am the Hag with the self-imposed bloodied axe of rejection.

It is a decent start. He goes downstairs for his dinner.

The next day, he takes a break from his second poem of the collection entitled, The Marketing Whore, and tries to check in on the progress of Prophet5387 but he cannot remember the password. He tries all of his usual’s—sacrificiallamb, misunderstood, nothingness. None of them work. He tries to access the Gmail account he used to create the Twitterbot. Again, he cannot remember the password. He uses his own Twitter account and searches for Prophet5387.

He cannot believe his eyes. It has attracted 2,011 followers in less than 24 hours. He checks on the sales of Life. Not one copy sold. Something is amiss, he thinks.

‘Beatrice!’ he bellows. ‘Beatrice!’

Beatrice climbs the stairs and peeks her head in the door.

‘Explain this to me. Explain. I cannot see. I’m blind. I do not know what is happening. What is happening?’

‘Calm down my little cabbage. Tell me what’s going on.’

‘I told this wretched Twitterbot to tweet a link to my book anytime someone mentions the word ‘life’ on Twitter. It has amounted thousands of followers and yet not one of them has bought my book. What’s going on?’

‘So, when someone says the word life, is it? On this website?’

‘Yes, yes, the Twitterbot automatically tweets a link to my poetry on their conversation. Try to keep up, Beatrice.’

‘Well, it doesn’t seem to be talking about your poetry.’

‘What is it talking about?’

He takes back control of the mouse to investigate.

The first tweet was, What am I doing tomorrow? I’ll know tomorrow when I’m doing it.

It posted it on a host of other Twitterbot conversations and they automatically retweeted it.

The second tweet was, Get your hands off me.

The third tweet was, Drink it in.

‘It’s tweeting random phrases that it plucks out of cyberspace. I’ve programmed it incorrectly. Blast it!’

He phones Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and demands to be reissued a new password so that he can change the settings. They are no help. They cannot condone Twitterbots. He phones Google and argues with a machine for two hours. It is no use. He tries to write a poem about it but he is too forlorn.  His once-blooming imagination feels like a barren, furrowed field.

‘Apox,’ he cries. ‘Apox!’

Prophet5387 tweets, Delve deep distracted divers.

Six thousand people enter into a conversation beneath the tweet as to what it means. Internet forums explode in speculation. Someone mentions it is the exact depth of Lake Baikal in feet. Baikal becomes a trendy synonym for a deep and insightful idea. Prophet5387 gets all the credit.

‘Apox!’ Roland cries.

The next day, there are Prophet5387 t-shirts and merchandise on sale all over the web.

In one month, Prophet5387 accumulates six million followers and is given a weekly ten minute segment on the Ellen show.

The Poet of our times, writes Time Magazine, is shrouded in mystery. But who is the creator of the Twitterbot Prophet5387 and does it matter? As it uses all our voices, does it represent mankind’s voice as one voice?

He phones Time Magazine.

‘Hello. I am the creator of Prophet5387,’ Roland says.

‘Really?’ the receptionist says.

‘Yes.’

‘You promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is incredible. I thought it was the thousands of others who have called saying they were the creator of Prophet5387 but now that you say it’s really, really you, this is fantastic. I’ll send out the news crews right away.’

‘Are you being sarcastic?’ Roland asks. The line goes dead.

Prophet5387 tweets, Gaza.

The next day, the president of Israel offers peace talks with representatives from Palestine. There is genuine progress made towards peace in the Middle East.

The lemming-drones all wait on Prophet5387’s hourly, automated tweets. They make newspaper headlines around the world. Twitter compiles its tweets in a book. It sells by the tanker-load. The proceeds all go to the starving babies in war-torn Africa.

Prophet5387 tweets, I am a fad.

The people of the world wholeheartedly agree that Prophet5387 is most certainly not a fad as a result. The 14^th of April is declared Prophet5387 Day worldwide. Prophet5387, a poet that will never die, they say.

People speculate as to whether Prophet5387 should be declared a God if not, the God.

Roland can hardly take much more. He must tell the world of the monster he has created.

He does what anyone with something important to say does and goes to an internet forum.

Prophet5387 is nothing but an algorithm, he writes.

It is not real. It has never felt wet grass beneath its bare feet in the cold dawn. It has never loved, never felt, never been. It does not know beauty or pain. You people are like the Pacific Islanders of the Second World War, watching the planes come across the sky and declaring them Gods! God does not create us in his image. We create God in ours! You foolish people. You fools! Here, I can be as random as Prophet5387 if you want! Ride giraffes in the washing machine! Get down the ladder and drink tea! Be damage!

Three million keyboard ninjas set on him like rabid dogs.

He calls Beatrice. He needs some emotional support.

‘I’m going to Russia, Roland,’ she says, holding two suitcases in the doorway. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you.’

‘Russia?’

‘To Lake Baikal. A commune has started up there to spread the teachings of Prophet5387. I’m sorry.’

‘When will you be back my love?’

‘I don’t know. I’m starting a new life, Roland. Without you in it. I’m sorry. I’ve been healed by the words of Prophet5387.’

‘It’s not real!’ Roland shouts. ‘It’s an algorithm! Nothing more!’

‘Well, I think the white profile picture clearly makes reference to that, Roland,’ Beatrice says.

Roland faints from the stress of it all.

Guests by Alison Wassell

Words with JAM BIGGER Short Story Competition 2013

2nd PRIZE WINNER (2500 word category)

‘Your guests are here,’ announces my mother, as she stands in my bedroom doorway with her hands on the shoulders of two strangers.  One is shorter than the other, but otherwise they look the same.  The welcoming speech I have rehearsed all afternoon drains from my mind and is replaced by my usual awkwardness in the presence of other children.  My mother is smiling, but her eyes are giving me a ‘Please act normally for once,’ look. 

      

She is wearing make-up, which she hardly ever does.  Her mouth has been inexpertly expanded to twice its normal size with too-red lipstick.  She no more knows how to be an adult than I know how to be nine years old.

    

 ‘Ann has been looking forward to meeting you,’ she tells the strangers.  The smaller one sucks the end of her pigtail.  The other one greedily surveys my room, taking stock of my books, toys and games.  I know that something is expected of me, but I stare mutely as my face grows hot.  There are heavy footsteps on the stairs and a man appears behind my mother.

     

 ‘This must be the lovely Ann,’ he says.  I have never been called lovely before.  The man pushes his way into my room and holds out his hand.  I wipe my damp palm on my dress and offer the wrong hand.  He takes it anyway, laughing.  My mother laughs too.  Apologetically, she explains that I am ‘a bit on the shy side’.  Apologising for my shortcomings is something that she does a lot.  The man bows and offers her his hand.

     

‘Your carriage awaits, Madame,’ he says.  She giggles like a girl and issues me with instructions about letting the babysitter know if we need anything.  Then they are gone and I am left with my guests.  We stand in silence as car doors slam.

     

I have been planning this evening all week.  I have even composed, in my head, the entry I will make in my news journal at school on Monday.

      

‘My two best friends came to play at my house,’ I will proudly begin.  I have never had one best friend, let alone two.

     

On my desk there is a handwritten programme detailing our itinerary.  At this moment we should be settling down to a sedate board game.  I had intended to let my guests choose from a selection I have taken from my shelves.  Most of them, requiring more than one player, have had their shrink wrapping removed only to allow me to study the instructions.  A refreshment break is scheduled for 7.30.   Downstairs, the cakes I have made and clumsily decorated with our initials sit in a tin, alongside an unopened bottle of squash.  I blush now, as I think of them.  The evening was set to conclude with me reading aloud a story I have written.  My new friends were supposed to sit cross legged on the carpet, wide-eyed with admiration, and to beg for more when I finished.  None of this, I understand, is going to happen.  It seems entirely possible that we will stand like this, staring at one another, until the adults return.

The taller stranger, whose name is Christine, is the first to make a move.  She wanders slowly around my room, touching things with hands that are not entirely clean.  I want to shield my possessions with my body, but am too afraid to move.  I smile tentatively at the shorter stranger, who is called Marie.  She sticks out her tongue, then plugs her mouth with her thumb and crosses her legs, as though in urgent need of the toilet.  I fear for my carpet.

Christine takes books from my shelves, glances cursorily at them, and tosses them onto the bed.  When she comes across one with pictures she opens it so roughly that its spine cracks.  Each time this happens I flinch.  She looks at me.

‘Does your mum make you do reading at night?’ she asks, as though she feels sorry for me.  I shake my head.

‘Why have you got all these books then?’ she persists.  I shrug.  She comes closer and I smell cheese and onion crisps.

‘Can you talk?’ she asks.  She tries to peer into my mouth, in search of my voice.  I nod.

‘Go on, then.’ She waits, arms folded.  I remember my last school report, where my teacher wrote that I had an excellent vocabulary for my age.  But words only come easily when I can write them down.  I swallow several times as my brain searches in vain for the simplest utterance.  I have begun to sweat.

Marie saves me.  She removes her thumb from her mouth and clutches urgently at herself.

‘Need a wee,’ she informs Christine, who acts swiftly.  Not bothering to ask for directions, she pushes Marie in front of her, onto the landing.  She tries several doors before, just in time, she locates the bathroom.  She follows Marie inside and waits while she wees, leaving the door open.  When her sister has finished, she goes herself, swinging her legs and whistling as she sits on the toilet.  Their knickers are grey, although they must once have been white.

‘What you looking at?’ she snarls, when she catches me staring.  I become suddenly engrossed in examining my fingernails.  Christine doesn’t flush the toilet.  They fail to wash their hands.

Christine stands on her tiptoes and opens the cabinet above the sink.  This is where my mother keeps her ‘ladies things’.  I am not allowed to touch them.  Christine takes down an opened package and peers inside.  She tilts it to show me the contents.

‘Do you know what these are for?’ she asks.  Truthfully, I shake my head.  She laughs, then, to my relief, returns the packet to the cupboard and closes the door. She comes close to me again, and her cheese and onion breath wafts over me as she whispers into my ear. 

‘When you get bigger, you bleed in your knickers.’  My face must register disbelief.

‘Everyone does.  Even your mum.’  This is too awful to contemplate.  I attempt to lead the way back to my bedroom, but Christine has other ideas.  She goes into my mother’s room and flings herself on the bed without removing her shoes.  Marie does the same.  For a second, they lie on their backs, then they scramble to their feet and begin to bounce.  They hold hands.  I think that this must be how normal children enjoy themselves.  It does not occur to me to join in.  The bed creaks alarmingly.

Eventually my guests collapse in a breathless, giggling heap, their legs tangled.  Christine eases herself up and supports herself on her elbows as she looks at me.  She pats the bed.

‘This is where your mum will do it with my dad,’ she says.  I have no idea what she is talking about.  She rolls her eyes up to the ceiling before turning to Marie.

‘She doesn’t even know what ‘it’ is,’ she tells her.  Marie titters behind her hand.  Christine slides off the bed, showing her knickers as her dress rides up.  She comes close and jabs her finger hand into my chest.  I gasp and step backwards.  This is the first sound she has heard me make.

‘You stupid or something?’ she barks.  I shake my head unconvincingly.  She shoves me out of the way and strides back into my room.  I watch helplessly as she opens drawers and cupboards, pulling things out and discarding them on the floor.  At last, she finds what she is looking for.  She pulls the clothes off Barbie and Ken and holds them up to show me.  She presses them together and makes them do something that could be fighting or dancing.  She makes groaning noises.  Marie joins in.  I look at the carpet, trying not to cry.

Christine gets bored, and naked Barbie and Ken are tossed aside.  She sweeps things off my desk to clear a place to sit.  Our programme for the evening flutters to the floor.  I am thankful that she has not seen it.  I feel her staring and reluctantly look up.  She smiles in an unfriendly way.

‘When your mum marries our dad, this will be our room,’ she says.  There is a silence where my words are supposed to go.  She continues.

‘Because it’s the biggest, and there are two of us.  You’ll have to sleep in that little room.’  She gestures towards the room where the Christmas tree lives when it isn’t Christmas.  There is barely enough room for a bed.

‘Your mum will be our mum too,’ she says.  She pauses, licking her lips and glances across at Marie, who is sucking her ponytail again.  They grin conspiratorially.

‘Your mum will like us best,’ she says.  I can think of no reason not to believe her.

We do the staring thing again.  Christine is the first to tire of it.  She heads off downstairs, followed by Marie.  I stay in my room.  I retrieve Barbie and Ken and dress them, apologising to them in my head for their loss of dignity.  Barbie gives me a cold, hard stare.  I wonder if she would prefer a new life with Christine, who seems to be more her kind of girl.  I tidy up as best I can, put my books back in their places on my shelves and return my dolls and games to their rightful boxes and cupboards.  Someone has trodden on my plastic ruler and broken it.  I put the pieces in the bin.  I tear the programme into tiny bits and dispose of those there too.  I stay sitting on the carpet, with my head on my knees.  It gets dark.  Nobody comes to look for me.

I creep downstairs and stand in the hall, peering into the living room.  Christine and Marie are on the sofa, on either side of the babysitter.  They are all watching television with their feet on the coffee table.  The cake tin is on the floor with its lid off, and empty cake cases are scattered around.  Only Marie notices me.  She sticks out her tongue again.  When the adverts come on the babysitter turns to Christine.

‘What did you make of Ann?’ she asks.  Christine twirls her finger at the side of her head.

‘Weirdo,’ she says.  The babysitter laughs.  I go back upstairs.

Back in my room, I do what I always do when life gets too confusing for me.  I climb into bed, pull the covers over my head, and go to sleep.

The sound of a car pulling up outside wakes me.  A door slams, but the engine keeps running.  There are footsteps on the drive, then the sound of a key in the front door.  There is some sleepy mumbling before the door closes.  The car drives away.  My mother climbs the stairs.

I pretend to be asleep as she slumps on my bed.  She is not fooled.

‘Well, that was a bit of a disaster,’ she says.  She laughs angrily.  I abandon my pretence and sit up.  I click on my bedside light.  She has wiped away the lipstick.  Her eyes are red, as though she has been crying.  She takes off her shoes and settles herself next to me.  I rest my head on her shoulder.

‘I hated my guests,’ I tell her.  She laughs the ‘nothing is funny’ laugh again.

‘I hated their dad,’ she says.  She hugs me tightly, and I hug her back, pressing my face into her until I struggle to breathe.  But I am thinking about the secret bleeding, and the Barbie and Ken dance that seemed more like a fight, and all the other things that I don’t know.  And the world is a less safe place.

Advertisement by James Collett

Words with JAM BIGGER Short Story Competition 2013

1st PRIZE WINNER (2500 word category)

Here is the story of my cure. Excuse me if I rush through it. Speed is of the essence. Is the essence. My blood runs thin, half-crazy with it. Yeah. And here’s hoping I won’t upset your delicates. Come along now.

So, I had always thought I was evil. Doesn’t matter why. I confessed this little problem to some learned physician who protested: No, no, no! That is of course a delusion!

I told him I’d have to take his word for it.

Here is The Word, said the doc. And he gave me this glossy booklet. “4 Steps to Emotional Wellbeing”. Read this, and attend weekly sessions here. He gave me a map and drew a cross on it. Go there.

I went there. You bet I did.

There were nine plastic chairs, arranged in the inevitable ‘horseshoe’. Sitting on them were three tracksuited junkies, five obese agoraphobics, and me. A woman called Judith stood at the gap in the horseshoe and said “The first thing to remember is: treat yourself as you would treat your best friend.”

           

One of the obese agoraphobics told Judith “I haven’t got any friends”. The other agoraphobics looked sympathetic. The junkies looked nonplussed.

           

The session lasted for one hour and a half, and at the end we all went in peace to love and serve the glossy booklet.

The glossy booklet said: STEP ONE: LOOKING AFTER YOURSELF. Step 1.1: Get connected!

The ad I put in the Times (Gay, natch) read, “Young male photographer seeks models, male, for portraits, DISCREET, call 07745361742”, and the first caller was a guy called Peter.

Peter sounded like a juicy piece of trade – fresh out of Woodhill, and immediately inclined to call me “Bruv”. I decided that I’d call Peter ‘Bad Pete’ when I told people about him.

Bad Pete stood on my doorstep, covered in tattoos – including the word “THUG”, still swollen livid, embossed across the forehead, backwards, having been done, I guess, in a mirror, so that it actually read “GUHT” – and I saw that I really did have a rough piece on my hands.

My mother was a bitch and a snob. So I happen to have a smashing telephone manner. Pete must have presumed me to be of good stock, because on arrival he presented me with a box of Ferrero Rocher – Pete had been inside since the late ‘Eighties and considered Ferrero Rocher to be the height of sophistication. “Got you these,” he said, brusquely, jamming the box at me.

Now, I’ll admit straight off that I’m not a photographer. That should be a given, I’d have thought. We’re all grown-ups here. The fact is I don’t care for that Grinder crowd. I’m old-fashioned. Fireworks and Gershwin. It’s tough being a romantic in this age. You need to have some kind of a shtick. Something to reel in the real men. Photography is my ruse. Get your own.

I don’t even have a camera. Pete stripped and grinned, swinging his long schlong round like a fleshly Catherine-wheel. “Showtime, Bruv”.

The glossy booklet said: Step 1.2: Get active! I did.

Step 1.3: Accept compliments! Everything in the glossy booklet was followed by an exclamation mark for some reason! When all was unsaid and done, we shook hands, manfully, having completed the transaction to the kind of mutual satisfaction you’d expect. Pete came and went, as planned, but he came back, which was rather against protocol in such an arrangement. Someone had a pash for me.

           

Well, I figured it might be good for my self-esteem to get lots of blowjobs. Judith was hot for self-esteem.

Judith was quite something. She claimed to have “a real passion for helping people”. She also claimed, in our second session, to have “a special box, where I put things which make me happy”.  I looked around the horseshoe to see how many other people were laughing. Nobody else was: obviously, I was the immature member of the group and there was nothing even remotely funny about Judith’s box. “I’m going to show you,” she continued, “what’s in my box.” At that she produced from her desk a cardboard box, which was decorated with wrapping-paper and filled with chocolates, photographs of puppies, etc. “When I’m feeling down, and I’m by myself, I get my box out and it always cheers me up no end.”

That’s what she said.

Judith declared that perhaps everyone ought to keep such a box, and asked us for suggestions on what we might put into our boxes. Brian – one of the obese agoraphobics – declared that he didn’t know, causing Judith to ask, “Isn’t there anything you enjoy doing when you’re alone, Brian?”

I prayed: say it, Brian! Just say it! Brian said “I do like watching ‘Emmerdale’” – which is far more embarrassing, I think, than masturbation.

When Judith asked me to score, on a scale of one to ten, how important my independence was to me, and I insisted it was impossible to quantify, Judith simply repeated the request, but more slowly than before: “If one means not im-port-ant, and ten means very im-port-ant...” There was no winning with Judith.

STEP TWO: LIKING YOURSELF. Step 2.1: Accept yourself! The blowjobs were good for my self-esteem. I accepted that readily. But Pete soon made clear his intention to up the ante. I’d never taken it up the ante before. But, then, I’d never previously had my self-esteem to consider.

Step 2.2: Act confidently! My doorbell seldom rang. When it did, it was either Pete or Valerie. Valerie was ninety years old and lived in the flat upstairs. She was my stalwart companion to lunchtime recitals at the town hall. One day the bell rang as Pete and I were making mischief with a cucumber. “That’ll be Valerie,” I said.

Affairs had recently taken a turn for the disconcerting, as it happened, when Valerie called, since Pete had just put the cucumber in question... well, where I’d asked him to put it, irrefutably, but rather too much so. Neither of us could get any purchase on the naughty fruit and I feared becoming one of those anecdotes told by off-duty nurses who’ve had too much to drink. (The best I heard was about a guy who arrived sheepishly at A&E with a dull hum droning from his abdomen – turned out he’d experimented with a vibrator belonging to his wife, who was away on holiday, and the thing had buzzed merrily out of reach and worked itself halfway up his innards. The removal of the vibrator required surgery and the patient was in a fix at the prospect of explaining to his wife, upon her imminent return, how he’d landed in hospital with a big, fresh scar on his belly. “Leave it to me,” winked the helpful narrating nurse, who intercepted the homecoming wife before she reached her spouse’s bed, and solemnly told her: “I’m afraid your husband has had to have his appendix removed, madam.” The puzzled woman replied: “What – again?”).

I left the cucumber where it was, put on a dressing-gown, and answered the door. “Hello, Valerie!”

“Hello, darling! Sorry to interrupt, but I simply must tell you this joke I just heard...”

The joke turned out to be that old guff about Stravinsky writing his ballets on a record-length wall, and it was nervousness, more than the joke, which provoked in me a mighty spasm of laughter. Well, whatever the cause, the effect was a loosening, at extremely short notice, of my sphincter. All of an I’ll-be-buggered sudden, the cucumber schlurped very noisily from its former resting-place, bumped on the floorboards, and rolled slowly towards Valerie’s feet.

           

“I say,” she said. “A cucumber!”

           

“Yes,” I conceded. “A cucumber.”

           

“Where did it come from?”

           

“It has fallen,” I admitted, “from my dressing-gown.”

           

“Oh.”

           

“I – I was about to make tzatziki when you called.”

           

“Tzatziki! How exotic!”

           

“Yes, but I’m afraid I have to dash, Valerie. I have, um – a – ”

           

“Oh! A gentleman caller?”

           

“Yes. Indeed.”

Step 2.3: Smile! I smiled.

STEP THREE: BEING WITH OTHERS. Step 3.1: Make an effort! In our third session, Judith again asked me to score, on a scale of one to ten, how important my independence was to me. “Ten!” I said.

“Oh!” said Judith. “Very important!”

I think I made her come.

Step 3.2: Have healthy relationships. Know when to walk away from a relationship that is not working and is hurting you! Getting sucked off to Bartók was beginning to have a most irritating effect upon Pete’s cultural orientation. “Put that ‘Magnificent Mandolin’ on, Bruv,” he’d say, dropping his off-white y-fronts. And then he’d saunter naked around the flat, confident that Bartók had composed a ballet about a small guitar. What was more, his drawers were from the dark ages.

It was when the interior design criticisms started coming in that I knew I’d knocked off too many of Bad Pete’s rough edges. “This place looks gash,” he said, gazing around and loudly sniffing. “You wanna put some fucking pictures up, Bruv.”

“I certainly do not.”

“Yeah, man: it’s boring like this. I’ll buy you some art for Christmas.”

“Please don’t do that, for Christ’s sake.”

“You can get some nice pictures in charity shops.”

“NO!”

“Yeah. Cheap, too. Why’s your printer in its box?”

“It’s broken,” I said. “I need to take it back to the shop.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s meant to print and it won’t. It’s broken.”

“Bollocks. I’ll fix it.”

“No, you won’t. Leave it. I don’t want to see it anymore.”

Pete ignored me and set about pulling the printer from its box, plugging it in and attempting to get it going. When wires and plugs and cardboard had been strewn all over the floor, he declared “This thing’s really fucked. I can’t fix it, Bruv.”

I told him to get out. Really, what else could I do?

Pete strolled slowly over the carpet, put his chest against mine, and whispered into my face “Make me”.

Step 3.3: Be assertive. So I broke his neck. Yep. Snapped it most assertively, Judith. Stick that up your tailpipe and gape it.

It was kind of an accident. I felt like I had to do something, so I utilised an old trick I was taught in a beer-garden by an acid-head called Merlin. He said his name was Merlin. The trick was this:

In a jam, one can temporarily incapacitate one’s opponent, before he has a chance to make his attack, by laying one’s left hand gently on his right shoulder in an attitude of diplomacy, beginning to say something soothing – e.g. “Listen, Pete: I’m sorry I lost my temper, but...” – and then one hacks one’s right hand ferociously into the opponent’s Adam’s apple. In theory, the opponent fights to regain his breath while one ushers him quickly out of the door and locks it. But when my hand connected with Pete’s throat, there was a loud crunching sound, like a carrot snapping, and Pete flung himself backwards, frantically wheezing. 

It took him ten minutes to die, during which time I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. It was embarrassing – like when someone chokes on their food in a restaurant and you don’t really want to get involved. I smoked a cigarette and consulted the glossy booklet.

STEP FOUR: MANAGING DIFFICULT DAYS. Step 4.1: Notice your early warning signs! Ever had a cadaver in your flat? It’s no joke, pet, I’ll tell you. The drawbacks of the scenario were immediately obvious. Formerly a great fan of the human body, I now had to acknowledge what a wretched proposition it was: to all intents and purposes, a sack of shit, blood, offal, bones and meat, and a heavy sack at that. And not only was it filled with such unsavoury contents as these, it was filled right to the brim, and riddled with incredibly unsound orifices, which were not just prone to leakage, but designed for it. Immediately, Bad Pete began to discharge his contents. First, he urinated all over the sofa onto which he had collapsed in his last moments. The Bartók faux pas had certainly tested my patience, but this was the limit.

Step 4.2: Find the best solution and put it into practice – if you don’t try, you’ll never know if you could have been successful! Thank the Lord for am-ph-ph-ph-ph-phetamine. I sucked up a BIG rail and GOT ON WITH IT. I dragged Pete into the bathroom, plonked him in the bath, and undressed him. After filling the bath with warm water, I cut every major artery I could find on Pete’s inky body and left him to drain while I cleaned the sofa and made a plan.

I advised myself as I would have advised a friend – a dear, darling friend whose loss I could not have borne. Cheers, Judith.

Step 4.3: Break problems into small, manageable chunks! The arms and legs I removed with carving-knife and hacksaw, cut into quarters, basted with olive oil, and roasted. Though he was of the opinion that art was for pansies, my father did teach me how to draw pigeons, geese, ducks etc.: first, make a savage incision up the gusset of the creature, tearing apart the whole rectal-genital set-up; then cut off the head, severing the oesophagus as far down the neck as possible; lastly, take a handful of bowel by its business end, and pull. With a spot of good fortune, all the offal gushes out in a slithering bundle, though sometimes you have to put your hand inside and feel out any reticent rags of lung-tissue. Pesky blighters.

I made a big pan of tripe, and plenty of liver, lung, heart, kidney and sweetmeat pâté. A decent blender is essential. The flesh I carefully trimmed from the torso, cut into steaks, and fried. I dismantled the ribcage and spine, breaking up the bones and vertebrae until I had what looked, at a glance, like a pile of stripped chicken legs and pigs’ trotters. Yum.

The head presented the biggest challenge to my culinary skills. Yet more pâté was made from the brains, eyeballs and the mass of general tubing I found inside the skull. Pete’s classic ex-con hairstyle of no hair (or style) made the job of skinning him relatively straightforward. I salted the skin and crisped it up in the oven until it looked far more appetising on a baking-try than it ever had on Pete. Running out of speed, and with no time left for subtlety, I smashed the skull to pieces with a claw-hammer.

It took plenty of those compostable caddy-liners to wrap up the deal, and many trips round the block, depositing bags of Pete into my neighbours’ food-waste bins. The bin-men will think we’ve had some rare old gastro-parties round here.

And now it’s over and the bathroom is clean. The recycling lorry is trundling by my window, and I’m alone once more.

But you’ve got my number now, haven’t you?