from: richardvhirst@acemail.com
to: martintrhiggins@acemail.com
sent: 20.06.10 at 20.24 pmsubject: RE: Hello!
Marty!
Good to hear from you. I was starting to get worried. I thought French Tony might have found out you’d used the internet and kicked you out of his place. You know how he is. I had visions of you being forced to take the spare room in Nightrape Glenn’s spare room. Which would, of course, have been unspeakably terrible (it‘s a tiny room).
So you’ve turned to the sea, eh? I must say, I was most surprised to hear that, Marty. I didn’t think you were a huge fan of the sea, to be honest. Do you remember when you, me and Hunry Kevin had that stag night in Blackpool? When we were skimming stones on the beach? You didn’t skim a single stone - you just stood there, glaring at the water through your enormous novelty spectacles with the miniature windscreen-wipers on them, muttering darkly from beneath your plastic Viking helmet with the fake hair-braids, and moodily fondling at your set of fake breasts. It was most unnerving. Although I guess when you tried to attack the lapping waves with a plastic cudgel, me and Hungry Kevin took that as a fairly strong hint that you probably didn’t want to get married to that stripper after all. I still maintain the fact that she had your car keys and refused to give them back wasn’t enough of a reason to get hitched. Still, that was a long time ago. People change. We move on. Like trains or viruses or meal times. I’m glad you’re having a good time wherever in the world’s oceans you currently are. Send me a postcard when you land somewhere.
Things have been pretty much the same at this end - Virgil is still living in my flat (I’ve had rats lately - Virgil is an excellent ratter) and I’m still seeing Agatha. In a sense, things with me and her are going well. Although, in another sense - a more realistic one- they’re going really really badly.
Shortly after I emailed you last, I took her on a date - nothing too outlandish, I thought, just a meal somewhere nice. As I think I’ve mentioned before, the city here is awash with ‘theme restaurants’. You name a theme, there’s a restaurant for it. Go ahead. Name a theme! Dinosaurs, bomb hoaxes, grief counselling, gynaecology, anti-Semitism, Dave Spikey, flat-pack furniture, crazy golf, left-handedness, epilepsy, Islamic jihad, lecterns - and that’s just the corner of Bold Street South!
Anyway, I decided to take Agatha to Twilight Sycamores, which takes ‘ageing’ as its general theme. Specifically, it’s made up to look like an old people’s home. We were sat at a Formica trellis table in a along with a band of deaf and senile fellow diners, to complement the ambiance. Instead of being presented with a menu we simply had moulded plastic platter-dish with separate compartments for stewed carrots, mashed prunes, and some large blue pills. The evening was going quite well (not brilliantly), but when I looked around and saw some of the fellow diners having their faces shoved into armchairs they’d inadvertently soaked with urine as punishment I suspected something was perhaps a tad awry. By the time a man who I’d assumed to be the maitre d’ was pronounced dead in a vibrating Lay-Z-Boy, it was clear this was no theme restaurant at all but, in fact, a very real old people’s home. I was mortified. I apologised to Agatha profusely all the way home. She seemed to forgive me. We laughed about it. She gave me an affectionate chuck under the chin and I responded with a light punch to her arm. Unfortunately, it wasn’t light enough and I sent her tumbling into a large nettle-bush and angered a number of secreted wasp-nests and a particularly bitey feral cat.
To make things up to her, I booked us into a restaurant where I knew nothing could go wrong: Pasolini’s. No theme, no pensioners defecating and expiring around us, just food and, hopefully, a romantic atmosphere. Things got off to a bad start on our arrival, however. They’d lost our booking and were now so busy they had no tables free. You’d have been proud of me though, Marty! I was forceful and manly - all ‘I demand you give us some food!’ and ‘Please!’ and ‘Don’t make me cause a scene - I can cry like a freshly orphaned toddler on demand!’ After this, the head waiter said he’d see what he could do about squeezing us into the outside area. They were out of tables and chairs, so we had to make do with a highchair for Agatha, a stack of discarded tyres for me and an old ironing board for the table. This would’ve been fine. We could’ve gotten used to it, probably. The real pain in the arse (other than the shards of rust-coated glass sticking out of my tyre-seat) was there was so little room in the outside area that our makeshift table was actually in a nearby school’s outdoor basketball court. When we were trying to enjoy our lobster bisque starter Agatha got slammed rudely in the face with a basketball, knocking her smashed glasses and loosened fillings into her bowl. I offered to let her eat mine but, by the time she’d staunched the bleeding in her nose, the course had gone a bit cold. Things went fine during the main course of grilled swordfish - I talked about my childhood, the old town, my poetry; she about how the lemon juice dressing was aggravating her exposed tooth-nerve endings and lacerated gums - but during dessert night fell and some young people in hoodies had appeared in the basketball court ‘hanging around’. Thankfully, they didn’t seem too bothered about us. They just stood there, smoking. I don’t think what they were smoking were normal cigarettes though, Marty. Clouds of smoke kept drifting across to our table. Agatha started to feel quite ill, whereas I began unwittingly giggling. I tried to explain to Agatha how we were ‘all one large being, like a pony or one of those large dogs, if you think about it’. Then I found myself slumped across the filthy plates, papping her bosoms, mesmerised by the undulations. On reflection, it wasn’t my best moment.
Most recently, was the park. Parks are safe, date-wise. Nothing can go wrong in a park. I mean, there’s murders and sex-attacks and suchlike that go on in parks, but they usually happen at night. So this afternoon I took Agatha to the Henry Miller Memorial Park. We made our way to the Tropic Of Cancer duck-pond and I cracked open a bag of bread I’d brought along. They all waddled up to us and started nibbling and pecking away at the proffered crusts, Agatha giggling and swooning in my arms as they quacked and shook their wet little tails. Suddenly, one of the ducks started to flap its wings, making a strange croaky sound and eventually keeling over. Another one did the same, sprawling out into the mud. A couple more followed suit. It was at this point that I realised that I’d brought out the bag of poisoned bread Virgil had prepared to catch some particularly resilient rats. Soon I was ankle-deep in a sea of dead waterfowl. What had I done? Agatha shrieked by my side. For a moment I thought about poisoning her - my only witness, I could jab a hunk of the deadly bread down her throat. Whoever found the ensuing scene - a poisoned woman amid a Normandy landing of dead ducks - might reason that the whole thing was a strange, unintelligible suicide pact. But no. I pushed these thoughts away. I didn’t want to murder anyone (maybe it’s parks themselves which have this homicide-inducing effect on people, I wonder if anyone’s ever done a comprehensive study). Anyway, panic stricken, I collapsed onto my hands and knees on the muddy pond-shore and began scooping up the dead ducks in my arms. I entreated Agatha to do the same. Almost instantly it became obvious that there were too many ducks. They oily little bodies kept slipping out of our grasp. More ducks, curious of the mayhem, kept waddling out of the water, pecking away at the toxic bread, having a brief seizure, then dropping down dead. Some people on the other side of the pond were starting to get a sense of something being up. I was losing it. I began screaming. I tried to bury them in the mud, but still there were too many. Eventually, I saw one of those bags-for-life caught in the branches of a tree in the nearby Rosy Crucifixion Sapling Cultivation Area. I ran across and I yanked it down. We stuffed it with as many ducks as would fit, kicking those that we couldn’t carry back into the water. They floated and bobbed where they landed, their beaks nudging up against the shore-decking. I thought about secreting some heavy stones in their wing-feathers to make them sink, but there wasn’t time. I hurried back to my flat, one arm around Agatha to console her, the other around this ironically named bag-for-life containing the evidence of my grisly crime. When we got back, Agatha went for a bath so long she’s still in there now.
No sooner had I returned, when Virgil burst through the front door. Instead of his characteristic rags and bindle, he was dressed in a vest and a pair of chaps. I started to explain to him why I was holding a bag-for-life filled with dead ducks and that he probably shouldn’t try to eat them, but that he could maybe try to use them as rat-bait. But he was too excited about something.
‘I think I’m gay!’ he said, gesturing at his chaps. He looked very pleased.
‘Oh, really? That’s great. Congratu- wait, what do you mean, you think?’
‘Well, I’m not certain. I mean, I don’t really find men attractive, sexually. But I just have this feeling. It’s like a dull, constant pain in the back of my head, just behind my ear. Know what I mean?’
‘Not really, Virgil.’
‘Exactly! That’s because you’re not gay!’
‘Virgil, there’s more to being gay than liking chaps... I mean trouser-chaps… I mean…’
But he giddily started telling me about this club in the East side of the city, a Not-Quite-Gay club, for people who think they might be gay but aren’t certain or are in denial but have some kind of low-level pathological understanding of who they truly are. He said he’s going there tomorrow night, just to see, and did me and Agatha want to come along? I said yes. Why not?
Virgil left. In all honesty, I was grateful to see the back of him (he’d had his chaps on backwards). As I stored the bag of ducks by my fridge, hoping some of the inside coldness would somehow radiate out and delay their decomposing, I ruminated on how badly each of my dates with Agatha have gone. This last one in particular had been, at best, a total disaster - the most one can hope for in a date which culminates in a massacre of the local wildlife is that the experience will bring the two people together, bonded in blood by the shared trauma of the horror they’d conceived. This might not quite be the case here, I thought as I made a pot of tea, listening to Agatha’s racked sobs in the room next door. In fact, my whole time with her seemed to be cursed. Not that she was at fault, you understand, Marty. I was the one who’d even contemplated murdering her with poisoned bread - not an ideal thought for one’s date to have in his head in any situation. I fear we may simply have been mismatched and although we now, due my fatal error in selecting what to feed some ducks, may now have been through far too much together, I’m beginning to feel we also have little in common. I’m not going to tell her, obviously, but in my mind I feel this last date - to a wilfully confused and confusing club - will be ‘sink or swim’ for me and Agatha, if you’ll pardon the expression.
That’s all pretty grim, right? Don’t worry, Marty. There’s a cheery footnote to this email! Just as I’d finished typing that last paragraph I heard some rustling coming from the kitchen. When I went through I saw there was movement inside the bag o’ ducks. A webbed foot thrust its way through the throng of mallard corpses and waggled into view. I hurried over and plucked him out. One of them is alive, Marty! I ran with the little fellow up the stairs to tell Agatha. I should have probably given a little tap on the door or explained what had happened or done something other than shove the door open and release the duck to splash about with her in the bath. After she’d calmed down and stopped screaming about it being ‘a spirit hungry for vengeance’ I picked him back up and carried him back downstairs. He’s a friendly little guy. He’s sitting with me now, quacking away happily and playfully trying to peck at my hands as I type, Marty. Just like you! I think I’ll name him Martin.
Anyway, I’d better do something with that bag.
Bye for now,
Richard
