I would like you to imagine the following narrative and see what is wrong with it. A woman, in Virginia, drives at top speed away from the house where she has just severed her husband’s penis. She is by nature a long-suffering person (as evidenced by her placid acceptance of her married name – Bobbitt – with all its connotations of finger puppets), but under the strain of the relationship she has finally snapped like a dry stick, and now she hares away from the grisly scene. She tosses the offending pizzle from the car window and drives on. All this may sound implausible, but in credibility terms it is easy meat compared with the next bit. For, shortly after, the police arrive, locate the member, pack it in ice and nee-naw it to a hospital (doubtless singing encouraging songs to it, to keep its peck – I mean, er, to boost its morale), where it is successfully reattached to a grateful Mr Bobbitt.
Now my point is this. If you leave a trowel in the long grass next to the shed, you can’t find it, can you? If you drop a clothes-peg on the kitchen floor and it bounces sideways, it can disappear for weeks. Yet for some reason Mr Bobbitt’s severed member was found easily by the side of a busy road. Is this not suspicious? If I were Mr Bobbitt, what would really worry me right now is not the imminent outcome of the court case against Mrs Bobbitt, nor even the off-colour willy-jokes at my expense (‘It will never stand up in court,’ and so on). No, I would be thinking: do I have the right willy? What if those well-meaning state troopers, scouring the dusty roadside (‘There it is! We got it!’), actually located somebody else’s?
You may not remember the old German film The Hands of Orlac, but it is relevant, I promise. The plot concerned a virtuoso pianist who by a crushing misfortune loses both his hands in a railway accident, but whose career is ostensibly saved when a scientist secretly sews on some donor hands belonging to a freshly hanged murderer, whose dexterous speciality happened to be strangling and knife-throwing. Doubtless you can see where this is leading. The post-operative pianist peers at his big mitts (‘They don’t look like mine,’ he comments, but tragically lets it pass), and then tries to practise some scales, only to find that – musically speaking – his new fingers have ‘Geest’ and ‘Fyffes’ written all over them. It is peculiar. Then one day his fiancée’s newspaper is snatched by a gust of wind, and he automatically picks up a Sabatier, yells ‘Leave this to me!’, and hurls the knife with such deadly accuracy that it nails the paper to the floor. Naturally, there is a significant pause while she looks at him, and he looks at the knife, and then they both look at his sewn-on hands, with glum expressions.
Reports of Mr Bobbitt’s operation tell us it was only partially successful. In other words, it is not the willy that it used to be. Enough said, I think. Much attention Stateside has focused on the advisability of women taking the law into their own hands, and on the disturbing idea that here, in the Bobbitt emasculation, is the most terrifying of all female revenges. But of course it isn’t, not by a long measure. A proper job would involve detailed pre-planning, and in particular the planting of a look-alike willy on a main road (a stand-in!), possibly next to a large sign with ‘I think this is what you’re looking for, officer’ written in large letters upon it. In the sweetest of all possible revenges, Mr Bobbitt would therefore emerge from his anaesthetic and say, ‘Funny, doesn’t look like mine,’ but cast such doubt immediately from his thoughts, as impossibly far-fetched.
Tattooed serial numbers would seem to be the answer, if any man is worried. But I doubt Mrs Bobbitt with her kitchen knife has started a trend, or anything. Most women are rightly repulsed by the idea of mutilation; if there is a nasty cackle of joy among certain feminists at the Bobbitt news, it’s just that there is something irresistibly hilarious at the idea of standing between a man and his willy, for however brief a span. I just hope the Hollywood Bobbitt films have thought of the Orlac angle. It would be a shame not to grab it up, rush it to the studios, and stitch it on sharpish. After all, it wouldn’t even matter if it didn’t quite fit.
‘Bob Dylan has been spotted looking at property in Crouch End …’ Scene: The well-furnished drawing-room of a large house in Crouch End, north London, one afternoon in August. Birds twitter in the garden beyond; a doorbell rings; a dog barks. From the hallway, a small shriek of surprise is followed by low murmurings of welcome. The door to the drawing-room opens briefly and an estate agent is heard to say, ‘Upstairs first, I think,’ before a woman, evidently distraught, rushes in, slams the door and grabs the telephone. She dials and waits, screwing up her face and tap-dancing on the parquet in anguish and impatience. Finally her call is answered by a man with a German accent.
WOMAN: Doctor Fiegelman? Thank God you’re there. It’s happening again.
DR FIEGELMAN (on phone): Go on.
WOMAN (with strangled cry): It’s Bob Dylan, doctor. He wants to buy the house.
DR F: Mein Gott, this is serious. Are you sitting down?
WOMAN: No.
DR F: I think you should sit down.
The woman miserably slides down the wall until she is sitting on the floor.
WOMAN (whispering): Done it.
DR F: Good. Now, taking your time, what exactly is it that makes you think Bob Dylan wants to buy your house in Crouch End?
WOMAN: The fact that he is currently upstairs with an estate agent investigating the airing cupboard!
DR F: I see. And when did this start?
WOMAN: The minute I opened the door.
DR F: Mm.
WOMAN: You’ve got to help me, doctor.
DR F: And I shall. But I thought we finished with all this after Al Pacino bought that old cooker-hood you advertised in Loot?
WOMAN (faintly): So did I.
DR F: I mean, Elizabeth Taylor never turned up for the hairdrier, did she?
WOMAN: No. Not after we worked on it for two months, five days a week, at £75 a go.
DR F: And you realized, in the end, that it wasn’t Warren Beatty who bought the pram?
WOMAN: It was – um, David Essex?
DR F: That’s right. Not Warren Beatty, but David Essex. That’s very good. You’ve been doing the breathing exercises?
WOMAN: Every day.
DR F: And how big is this Bob Dylan?
WOMAN: Quite small.
DR F: Thank God for that, at any rate.
Suddenly the door opens, and BOB DYLAN enters the room, carrying a tape-measure and wearing a puzzled expression. The WOMAN whispers hoarsely into the phone, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and hangs up. She scrambles to her feet, looking guilty.
WOMAN (nervously): Ha ha.
DYLAN smiles politely, strolls to the french window, looks at the view, shrugs, mumbles something appreciative, and exits. The WOMAN points wordlessly at his departing back, and then faints on the hearth-rug. Black-out, curtain.
Scene: The same, an hour later. MAN with briefcase, evidently returning from work, enters to find wife lying insensate on the best Persian. Thinking quickly, he hurls his briefcase at her recumbent form, and it bounces off her head.
MAN: Darling, speak to me!
WOMAN (rubbing her bonce, indicating the briefcase): Why did you do that?
MAN: I didn’t have a glass of water.
WOMAN: I see.
MAN: Why are you on the carpet? Not another of your delusions, poppet?
The WOMAN nods, reluctantly.
MAN (sympathetically): Not Michael Jackson offering to spay the cat again?
WOMAN: No. Bob Dylan, wanting to buy the house, for £310,000.
The MAN whistles through his teeth.
MAN: £310,000? Well that’s something. Good heavens, £310,000, it might almost cover the therapy. I mean, what did we get for the cooker-hood?
WOMAN: Five pounds. But –
MAN: I think we should go for it.
The doorbell rings. The MAN prepares to answer it. He re-enters, dumbfounded, with ELIZABETH TAYLOR at his side.
MISS TAYLOR (for it is she): Sorry I’m late, I’ve come to collect the hairdrier.
As the curtain falls, the WOMAN collapses into her husband’s arms, and ROBERT DE NIRO enters whistling with a bucket and ladder, asking to use the tap. End.
The front-page headline of last Thursday’s East London Advertiser was rather alarming, especially for the sort of neurotic pet-owner who periodically grabs her cat by the shoulders and searches its furry, inscrutable face, saying with a choked voice, ‘You’ve got to tell me something. If I died, would you eat me?’
‘DEAD MAN “EATEN” IN GRUESOME CAT HORROR’ screamed the headline, thereby putting an end to all speculation. Of course I hoped it was a sensational joke – along the lines of the Weekly World News: ‘Bat With Human Face Found (He’s Smart As A Whip, Says Expert)’ – but I knew in my heart it was serious. Evidently, this poor chap in Shadwell died of a heart attack, and in the ensuing week his thirty cats – starving hungry, but with no money for Whiskas, and anyway congenitally hopeless with a tin-opener – perpetrated the gruesome cat horror which involved him being ‘eaten’. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Apparently he loved those cats. He thought they loved him back. So far as I could see, the only positive aspect to the story was that he was ‘eaten’ only in inverted commas.
I don’t usually see the East London Advertiser, but a kind friend sent me the cutting, thinking I ought to know. Possibly she recalled that my latest effort to tighten the bond with my own cats entails entertaining them each morning with spirited impersonations of the animals they are about to eat, which suddenly smacks of insane recklessness, given the Shadwell experience. ‘Now, what have we got here?’ I say excitedly, examining the tin. They give me a weary ironical look that says, ‘Go on, surprise us.’ ‘Rabbit!’ I raise the tin-opener, and their ears prick up, so I put it down again and they scan the ceiling for flies. ‘A rabbit goes like this,’ I say, assuming the goofy-teeth thing, and waggling my hands on top of my head, in semblance of floppy ears. They look at each other in despair. ‘How’s she going to do liver, that’s what I’d like to know?’
(Incidentally, sorry to interrupt the flow, but for anyone thinking of adopting this pleasurable and essentially harmless daily routine, here are some tips. First, it is hard to imitate salmon unless you have a fairly high ceiling, for the leaping upstream. Kidneys and liver are indeed virtually impossible to impersonate, and should therefore be eliminated at the shopping-trolley stage. For high-class meals involving crab, one needs an energetic sideways scuttle, so clear all furniture first. The turkey impression comes to life splendidly if you can be bothered to tie empty red balloons to the sides of your head. Beef, lamb and duck are a doddle, obviously. And finally, a word of warning: if you find yourself trying to impersonate a chunk per se, you may have let things get out of hand.)
Anyway, in my initial alarm at this story, I kept thinking of that famous scene in Charlie Chaplin: the snow-bound cabin, the two companions ravenous, and the fat man with the heavy eye-liner hallucinating that the little fellow is a chicken. How ghastly to think this is happening in my own home – and not just when I am selflessly attempting to enliven mealtimes with a spot of one-sided Old MacDonald charades. When they watch me trotting to the shed, those cats just see a huge tin of Whiskas on legs. When I’m asleep, they see a huge tin of Whiskas, with legs, lying on its side.
But the interesting thing about the Shadwell story was the line, ‘The RSPCA had been called in, to destroy the cats.’ What? Destroyed? Why on earth would you do that? Suddenly all my sympathies swung the other way. These cats should be counselled for post-traumatic stress. It is a well-observed fact that in extremis human beings will cannibalize each other; and we don’t generally hand the bewildered survivors to a humane vet afterwards. These cats needed food, there was nothing depraved about it. Imagine you were locked in a Kellogg’s warehouse, and helped yourself to a few Rice Krispies to keep yourself alive. At the end of the week, the police burst in, and you say, ‘Thank God you’ve come, there’s not a drop of milk in this place, can you believe that?’ But they survey the scene – snap, crackle and pop all over the place – and shrink back, screaming. ‘CEREALS “EATEN” IN GRUESOME VEGETARIAN HORROR’ runs the headline in next week’s paper, and you are peremptorily taken out and shot.