The Fridge

3.

People always sat laughing on that abandoned sofa outside the flat. Thought they were definitely well fucking wild sitting on a couch in the street; it made him want to cough stinging phlegm into his Ready Brek, seeing them there in the mornings, on their way home from a cocking discotheque no doubt, overindulged spaniels every one.

He was about to head down to the petrol station to pick up the rice he needed for the bathroom when the phone rang:

“Jack?”
“Yup.”
“It’s me.”
“Who the fuck’s me then?”
“Rachel.”

He felt his scalp tighten as though he was suddenly in the middle of a tricky bomb disposal exercise in a kindergarten full of baby deer. He hadn’t heard from Rachel since the incident with the barmaid; a series of misunderstandings had resulted one evening in a barmaid at the pub they were in pouring pork-scratchings into his pants while a bouncer held him down and tickled him on the nose with a sanitary towel.

“How’s the fridge?”
“What?”
“Your fridge, you said it needed repaired.”
“The fridge is fine Jack, thanks for your concern.”
“Well, I … I’m just worried in case you’re … without the use of a fridge because you can use mine anytime you want.”
“No I’m OK for fridge provision Jack.”
“.….”
“I take it you’re not planning to apologise then?”
“Ehm, yeah I just didn’t think you’d want to know.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit I’ve been thinking about how to apologise constantly.”
“Ok then, what are you meant to be apologising for?”
Silence.

She hung up the phone. Fucking women. He certainly wasn’t a bloody slave to them, he wouldn’t be running about after some fucking obnoxious bitch and anyway, he had to walk past her building on the way to the Citizens Advice Bureau to pick up some leaflets about noise pollution or something.

Pigeons

2.

“Why do pigeons always get run over by double-decker buses?” exaggerated Selma from behind an irregularly triangular parsley-cockaccino-lattecano at Neu, the latest anti-capitalist coffee / cake bar in town, where they sold gift boxes filled with rotting flowers as an ironic statement parodying the current political situation in Southern Yugoslavia and Kent.

“They don’t, they just talk about it on Richard and Judy” he returned in flimsy retort, causing predictably abundant ejaculate of frenzied snorting laughter to be eagerly spat forth from the mouths of his friends, his fucking concubines in kind. Cringing with all the discomfort of a newly-wed’s thirst, although still reeling from his glorious victory at the clinic that morning, he got up, surreptitiously clutching his brand new Becotide 100 preventative inhaler in his trouser pocket, and fucked right off out of there without even looking back or anything; he even left his jacket, but went back later to collect it when everyone had left (he watched from behind a bin at the other side of the road).

So anyway, while pondering excreta on the pavement outside the tube station, he realised it was time. Time to go home and polish the ‘piece’ he’d been working on for the last seven or so months. It was a fresh ‘thing’ he thought, this ‘piece’, fresh enough even for Caleb to have a look and not tear it to fucking shreds immediately again like he did last time, fucking igneous fuck. I mean he really couldn’t give a reindeer’s spatula for what Caleb had to say, he just showed his stuff to him for a laugh, for his own amusement at his friend’s predictably established thoughts, and it provided a useful insight into how the yoghurt-eating, pop-ingesting masses might react to his work, something which always gave him a chuckle.

As soon as he sat down to work on his daffodil, as he liked to think of it, it came to him, like cider vomit hitting the porcelain bowl while a friend holds her inebriated companion’s hair back, rice, yes that’s it, fucking rice man.

It Was Tuesday

1.

The crueller sun rose, like a hangman polishing his mask with the blood of a wrongly convicted dead man’s dog. It was Tuesday. Fucking Tuesday. Mother-fucking Tuesday. Cock-sucking Tuesday, the jaggiest turd of all the days of the week, of all seven. This was to be the day.  Today, Tuesday, would be the day it would happen, come to pass if you will, or even if you won’t, for there could be no respite from it, no escape, no way out, no chance for an evasion of the inevitable outcome of what simply had to happen this day.

He shook his head with the precision of a darts supremo stroking himself with last night’s spent flights; finished, sticky. His love affair of a haircut vaguely resembled a policeman’s guilt, he suggested as he regarded himself sarcastically in the hallway mirror. “I’M SO FUCKING COMFORTABLE” he shouted to the retrospective furnishings in his (1970s) Blackpool-style bathroom as he prepared to thrash himself mentally with a few rounds of solitaire on his Elvis-shaped laptop computer. He had to be sharp, on the ball, fighting fit brain-wise for today’s confrontation battle. This was the only way he would possibly survive the draining and exhausting rigours of what was awaiting him to come.

“Don’t let him inside your humour”, he kept reminding himself; that’s when he gets you, sinks his teeth in like a newly ordinated priest blessing the water for his first and last exorcism before leaving the priesthood for a frustrated life of deliberation and shoplifting. He practised for a while: “Good morning doctor, I want you to prescribe me a stronger inhaler, yes that’s right, a stronger inhaler, please?” He’d better be a bit fucking more aggressive than that when it came to it, he thought before finally deciding to discard the paper hankie he had been using for the last week or so, and replace it with a fresh one; it seemed appropriate given the circumstances and anyway, it had begun to smell a bit weird since he’d used it to mop up a small amount of milk from the worktop on Friday.