LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND GOATS
Chapter 2
Thursday 15th June London Rotten Borough of Lower Springwood
We are just statistics,
born to consume resources
HORACE
You’re feeling the hard man.
Opening night of your bird cooped in a peter and you’re tickety-boo. No nasty Brutus has come in the night claiming bits of your body. The dam of a door clam-shut.
The cruel coil of coffee from the staff rest-rooms snakes up the stairwell and snaffles your nasal coffers.
Steel-tipped boots stomp the hard green landing. Key stabs black hole. The inrush of morning miasma carries a bout of dickie chirping into your blue dream. Opening night of your bird tossing and turning in a private box in the State Hovel of Her Majesty. No charge to be levied. Except on your soul. And that’ll do nicely.
The hairiest danger to your day comes not from fellow boarders or the hammering of Screws but from your breakfast. A man carries raw Life in his hands up the iron beanstalk. How your fellow boarders loafing on the landings of the Twos and Threes will admire your new-boy spunk as you pass on by.
Get a grip! Your hippy hibernation curtailed by an eight-hour flog in the prison foundry. Or fingers fiddling the flaps of drainpipes. Sorry, but you should have thought of that before you did them crimes – the full rozzers’ filing-cabinet. You’re innocent! Pull the other one. Be a man and crack on with your bird. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. Life could be worse. You could be trapped in the press box at Ashburton Grove and forced to watch the Arsenal commit norf-London robbery.
A full-throated warbling sensation of dickies greets the staging of diminutive General Chopper onto the ramparts of Elsinore Castle; and elevated upon the perch of a private cardboard box General Chopper espies every key movement of the enemy, Tosa-the-Man-Mountain and his troop of pot-bellied Nazis, with an eagle’s eye. Paws grip the high rail of the Happy House roughly halfway between the Gutter and the Stars, the fortress green landing of the Fours.
A purple haze of peaty honeysuckle escapes the hippy peter 102, and spacehead to the stars Professor Knees and Private Benjamin flat to the fluffy pillow and slaving as hard as say your average European Member of Parliament.
He is the General. General Chopper. A military man to the core. Personal attaché to the Court of Field Marshal Jason Knees. Human collateral consultant to the very best. For when the chips are down, when Life boils down to a man and his bottle, the General is never the one to let the side down.
To the gutter born.
The baby General dumped on the back doorstep of the boys’ workhouse, a bundle of dimple, freckle and bone, and stamped upon by Father Dolan telling him every little day of his little life that rubbish should be seen and not heard, telling him he will never get anywhere in life, telling him not to reason why, telling him to stand in the corner with hands clasped to a crop-bowl head, telling him he is too rough at games, telling him he can’t commit muscle-and-bone to the Third Gulf War for lack of birth certificate, lack of six inches and lack of marbly bobbins.
General Chopper licks thin dry lips and cold-fingers best blade of steel against the thigh. For ’tis the sport of the morning beside fellow boarder of Room 101, Gonzalez-the-Basque-Bank-Robber, to survey the savannah of the Ones for lesser-spotted Nazi. And scaling the iron stairwell – Ronnie Priggs the postboy. Red armband. Dead sack of Dear Johnnies he dumps. And scrambles. At a knock of knots. Faster than el Presidenté Bliar’s promises.
The General’s tiny tinny tranny transmits from Room 101 Bizarre Inc.’s Playing With Knives to ten receptive brain cells.
Why man, down on the bower of the Ones Doctor Astrid Thysson waddles the landing-strip of green linoleum. The click-click of stiletto heels to the ear-drum of the General the beat of Morse code. The tight line of the back of her skirt. Long blonde ponytail. General Chopper laps every delicious detail. Sweet paradise denied of Doctor Thunder Thighs.
The bell! The bell! One ... two ... rings … er … squiventy times.
I spy wid my liddle eye.
The daringest dickies suicide-duck the holey suicide-netting to be fishers of men. Your post-dawn pick-me-up a cut above the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for harmonic hymning. Highest of Heavenly orders. A befeathered band of brothers and sisters and heard by so few of God’s creatures, and as honest as the day is our swansong. A salvation army of artistes aligned on rafters and never wavering to serenade the beasts who grovel below.
O Horace! O Virgil! Where now your odes? Closest may we mortals come to the gaggle of gods who creep each dawn to listen to the befeathered choir of Springwood.
The invisible invasion of boiled cabbage violates every warning hair at the levee of the nose.
For the remainder of the dog-shift the good General as faithful as Cerberus guarding the portal of Hades.
Halfway between the Gutter and the Stars we haul our guilt-heavy heads to the threshold of the Happy House and hang with two hippies a-stirring.
Paleface Benjamin sniffs with a pinch of suspicion the pot-free pottage of pre-lunch and spills putrid dreams of damp earth, fried flesh and the clawing of coffin lids making him scramble and cry out many times in the night, ‘Not me! Not me!’
‘Wery worrying,’ affirms the General.
The familiar fall-out of a massive mushroom cloud dimming the ramparts of the Fours and half-invisible at the hardcore core to emerge a mauve butterfly the silk smoking jacket of Professor Jason Knees. ‘Ah good morning, gentlemen.’
‘Buenos dias, seňor Mad-Dog Professor.’ Gonzalez spits over the edge with the venom of a Missile of Mass Destruction a dead matchstick — ‘You thsee heem?’
‘Who?’ A shooting gallery of four heads tip over the edge.
‘Heem. I thswear to you on the grave of my five fathers, I thswear to you on the grave of my four mothers, I revenge my familiesth. I keeel heem.’
‘One should always hunt Nazi on a full stomach.’
‘Cut!’ cries the General, who you can count on never to forget a knobbly head and always to keep score.
‘Keeel!’
‘Cut!’
‘Keeel!’
‘Cut!’ cries the General like a demented Caesar at the Pythian Games.
‘Keeel! I keeel them all!’
‘Well, General, and what magazine have we today? Ah! The Wonderful World of War.’ An exploding blue twinkle to the space-blue eyes of the shrapnel-brained Professor. ‘Goes down a bomb with toast and marmalade.’
A mission of mercy.
To consult Doctor Thunder Thighs.
General Chopper licks thin dry lips. Hot-fingers best blade. Left. Right. Chin up. Eyes front. Down the iron hill he plunges.
Dust gets everywhere. Dust sits in the back of the throat and rubs the lining layer by layer like sandpaper <—> Balls of dust by the trillion dance down the long barcoded sheets of light filtering the smoked-glass panels of the dome. The Nelson Mandela Block can never throw off its cloak of gloom even in high summer. At best you’re inside a black and white film.
The General braves one steep step for a pigeon on the crosswalk of the Threes and supervises his men down the iron beanstalk.
Nothing escaping the thirsty eye of the General: ‘Willy die?’
‘Who? Benjamin?’
‘Willy like lose a load o’ blood?’
‘I think we can safely say that if this chap doesn’t get an immediate intake of drugs we can expect an adverse reaction.’
‘You huff le lick ho le devil, my friend,’ (Gonzalez from the rear). ‘Le hombre shed keeper le blood God ith giving heem.’
A military man at heart. Head of a battalion. For when the chips are down, when the Operation boils down to a man and his bottle, the General is never the one to let the side down. He is the General. And should you want a Big Job with guns and tanks and everything then the General is your man. What with his military training and brown badge for safety with the junior honey-badgers.
He senses the cold hard iron through the hole in his soft rubber shoe.
Tripping the light fantastic along the landing strip of the Ones — trustees with red armbands are spun a merry dog-trot by their saucer-shaped polishing machines.
One giant leap for a Gang of Four.
One small step for Institutional Insanity.
One gurgle of regret and the Great Gate regurgitates the grimiest goat.
‘A stroke for sore eyes,’ purrs the Mad-Dog Professor Jason Knees, ‘but look who the cat’s dragged in.’
***