when you’re safely back indoors from a wild and muddy walk across the moors Stanley absolutely DOES NOT sprawl with his paws and rattle the house with his Baskerville snores
when you’re sitting quietly writing at the laptop and break to give your cold coffee cup a top up Stanley definitely WILL NOT howl and unexpectedly leap up because you didn’t see him very sneakily creep up
when you’re slumped in front of the TV bingeing Sopranos an hour or more since your last significant sofa pose Stanley certainly SHALL NOT hold you down with his nose till your legs are dead and so are your toes
when you’re tiptoeing past a bunch of horses as slowly and carefully as elderly tortoises Stanley’s MOST ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED course is NOT to bark till his voice too hoarse is
Detective Jimmy ‘The Florist’ McQuaide sick of the whole, sad city bouquet flips his signature clip-on shades ironically salutes the gerberas on display then steps outside for one last trade
The chief has given him 24hrs to use his special ikebana powers to crack the trade in artificial flowers that’s flooding the city’s glitzy towers with long-life, wipe-clean plastic bowers
He tracks a guy named Frank O’Hara to a container ship in the city harbour recently in from Puerto Vallarta hotter than a tub of lava stuffed full of synthetic hibiscus & guava
McQuaide dresses up as the ship’s physician but immediately arouses the crew’s suspicion when he wears the steth in the wrong position and after some gunpoint exposition gets neatly tied up with raffia and ribbon
Frank saunters cockily onto deck a Hawaiin lei around his neck Why – it’s McQuaide! The flower ‘tec! What brings you out to this old wreck? Still hanging on for that retirement check?
But McQuaide has worked his right leg free and kicks O’Hara in the knee who screams and falls back heavily and grabs a lever frantically which starts a self-destruct, luckily
McQuaide has time to dive overboard and swim off quick to the nearby shore when the whole ship rips with a terrible roar and a thousand tonnes of flowers or more are taken off the market for sure
Back at the precinct the chief’s not impressed ‘I’m sick of your bullshit, McQuaide!’ he says ‘What’s wrong with making a simple arrest? Why’d’ya gotta make such a goddamn mess?’ ‘I dunno,’ says McQuaide. ‘Take a wild guess’
Then he sighs and lays down his secateurs his gold discount card at the stationers says : ‘Gladioli to’ve known you, brother! then as the furious Chief coughs and splutters tapes a single paper rose to the precinct shutters
and death didst come to me as in a dream and I didst sit bolt upright in bed and scream and my pajamas verily most heavily didst cream
Jiiiiiimmmmmmmyyyyyy he said floating sulphurously over the bed
am I dead I said no don’t worry he said at least not yet
so what the hell is it some kinda sick social visit
so…I don’t know… it was just getting boring he said, yawning then carefully resetting his jaw in the sling he had to wear round his skull instead of hair to keep his jaw there
what d’ya mean – eternity? I mean – you’ve got my sympathy mate, but as far as I can see that’s nothing to do with me you’re having a laugh I’ve got to get up in an hour and a half
somebody’s grumpy he said maybe you should try going to bed a weensy bit earlier at night then maybe you wouldn’t be so clippy, alright?
yeah? well I heard death could be agonising but I’d rather have that than patronising
don’t be mean, he said sadly descending to the foot of the bed where he smouldered with a strange intensity that lacked discernible heat or density which I have to admit was all pretty new to me
sorry, I said – you caught me off guard I try to be understanding but it’s hard especially when you’re so freakin’ charred does that mean hell is hot or not is there a God? Jesus Christ I hope not
actually no there isn’t he sighed carefully putting his scythe aside crooking one bony knee over the other idly picking fluff from my cover
you see – Jimmy – God is just a story you tell about angels, prophets, heaven and hell a touching way of making sense of the fundamental questions of existence to which the answer is oxygen and carbon and if I’ve rocked your world I beg your pardon
okay – so – I don’t get it Death comes to visit and you want me to forget it?
I’m an allegory, dear a gorgeous but hokey souvenir a byproduct of consciousness he said, clapping his phalanges you mortals really are such a tease you ask about God – well…take a look around there are millions of deities to be found in any place you care to look from Weston-super-Mare to Çatalhöyük I could talk you through the creation myths but there’s nothing duller than shopping lists
he gaped at me gappily seemingly quite happily with what I took to be affection and I have to admit the conversation was heading in a wholly unexpected direction
so.. how am I supposed to feel now that I know that God’s not real?
Who knows? said Death as the clock struck twelve you’ll just have to figure it out for yourself and with a hopelessly boney stamp and an inexplicable but theatrical dimming of the lamp he flashed me a look that was scary but appealing then shot straight up through the bedroom ceiling
I sat there wondering what I’d just seen I mean for someone supposedly fictional he was pretty vocal and visual
but just as I lay back on the pillow there was another booming billow of fire and smoke and the very same cloaky bloke came floating back
Whaaaat? I said sitting up in bed Was that all a joke? Were you toying with me? Don’t be silly he said tip-toeing round the bed trying to act all cool & blythe I just came back to fetch my scythe
I don’t know what it’ll take to make me get up & go
maybe some kinda surgery where a blurry surgeon emerges from the pub struggling to pull his scrubs up falls backwards through the theatre doors to the ironic applause of all the bored nurses who yawn as he curses and the instrument tray searches for the cranial saw he finally finds by his crocs on the floor then theatrically sets in a roar to bloodily buzz and clunk with a liberal spray and a chippy chunk till someone taps him on his shoulder and he turns and gives a sexy smoulder that really only emphasises how much older he is than anyone else there but he’s too drunk to care and as the anaesthetist gags he turns back and grabs my bangs and flips back my hair to the horrified screams of everyone there and pops off the top of my bony little mop like the cap from a bottle of Grolsch
takes a step back
gives his knuckles a crack
has a quick snack of a baloney sandwich he snitched from the bins on the way in
then with a tuneless hum pokes my bulging cerebellum for a bit with the exploratory tip of a ripped glove then with one last shove dives elbows in with a rusty probe one of the nurses throws at him which he rotates & rattles in ever growing circles shouting ‘Is this any good? I don’t know! Fuck it!’ alarming as a farmer with a broom handle in a bucket
I think you’ll find that’s neurosurgery, in essence you’re better off sticking to antidepressants
[EXPERIMENT: close your left eye / hold your left arm straight out in front of you, thumb up / hold your right arm alongside it, also thumb up / staring at your left thumb, slowly move the right thumb to the right / until it disappears / this is your blind spot]
when the thumb disappears you don’t see a blank but a continuation of the high street bank or the gunky green glass of the goldfish tank or the motorcycle jacket belonging to Frank or whatever damned thing that happens to be there when you suddenly stick both thumbs in the air
you see – the spot where the optic nerve plugs in the retina lacks sufficient photoreceptor so you’d always have a patch that was blank if your brain didn’t step in and clone more bank (or motorcycle jacket, or gunky tank depending which way you’re facing and the thumb-sized hole that needs replacing)
I suppose you’d really have to say for something that sits in the dark all day the brain does a lot of heavy lifting the supersensory sorting and sifting of an infinite mass of incoming data from Alan Partridge to Alligator busily roughing out life’s variation in one long thumbs up hallucination
