Chapter Six

On the tube through London I saw visions of a hell gone hellishly wrong. The wail of the rails. Two rats scuttled in the gutter. Correction: one lay still while the other chewed at the gash in his mate’s neck with the bloody zeal of a baby cuckoo hurling its egg-bound siblings to a yolky death.

People rush and crash into each other like famished flies around the infected eyelashes of a retired slowly dying cockapoo I once fucked the cock of the poo out of in the rear of the ear when I mistook it for a chunky breathing welcome mat. The ever-blinding light on the tube ride to hell and people - my so-called elders and betters - are standing and sitting, staring at incongruous snakes-and -ladders boards with names like “Piccadilly” and “Jubilee” tattooed on the once-white walls of the screaming metallic worm as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

I had to clear my throat at least four or five times before Shirley realised that I had wrapped myself into a ball under the seat of the silver creature wearing vicious-looking bat skin boots and ill- matching pink socks. The fucker was poking at me with his heels, deliberately spreading chewing gum that clung to my fur like chemical honey. I wanted to bite the pink socks until they turned blood red but the colour was so sickly it sent a gagging reflex through my neck muscles and the air in my belly started to clog at the back of my throat. I felt like I needed to yawn and stretch myself but the cunning bastard saw my exposed ribs and kicked me softly but sharply into a hairy heap of howling bones.

Shirley ignored all of this, of course. All I had to comfort me was a dead spider lying in the dust by the metal pole holding my cowardly aggressor in a comfortable seating position so that he could kick me to death at his leisure. I felt like one of those waspish creatures (well, they were wasps as a matter of fact) that Estella liked to spoil with her talents before she turned her garrotting and maiming expertise towards yours barking truly.

I felt the ground beneath me shudder uncontrollably, bouncing me up and down and down and up. Then it grinded to a halt and the force of the carriage’s shudder smacked me against the floor with a bang going off in my ears. I rolled out from under my hiding place and glanced out into the open, waiting for the tug of Shirley’s leash to sever my neck into silence but it never came.

Shirley was nowhere to be seen. The bitch had abandoned me. The rush of panic and fear brought tears of horror to my eyes. I felt my tongue fall out of my mouth and onto the floor below. My jaw began to sag then tense and shake like pennies in a fat woman’s purse, shaking as if my whole skeleton would rip apart at any minute and get swept away by a member of the council or a Keep the City Clean volunteer. At that point I realised that up until now I had been alone my entire life and that no matter how many humans rubbed the back of my ears and no matter how many times they ever fed me and no matter how many times they told them they loved me they all did it to get me precisely where I was now: on a screaming boxcar of a disaster that would most certainly lead me to my death in one way or another. I dropped to my chest as I felt my legs breaking under me. The theatre of life was coming to the final curtain drop. The cats and ghosts of my victims were waiting in the wings to soliloquize me their hatred for a billion acts and scenes to come with no intervals to slow the cancer of my journey. This was the moment of reckoning they had all been waiting for. Is this what they had always hoped for when I’d snatched their lives away from under their paws and claws? I’d always wondered why it had been so easy for me to get away with the things I did. The twisted bastards would explain it to me soon enough.

And I hadn’t even killed or fucked a single thing during the whole time I’d been in London. What a bummer this trip had turned out to be. I started to put my head between my legs and stretched my tongue out down below for one last time. Might as well get started while my limbs are still in relatively good order. Who knew where I’d be when they’d find me drowning in my own sticky fishy fluids?

An invisible force suddenly whipped my head backwards. I felt myself being dragged underneath and being pulled across the floor. I tried to reach for my bursting erection but my limbs were too short and stumpy to reach it. My tongue thrashed against the corners of my mouth and throttled down my throat, retreating to the back of my head. I could feel it tickling my brain tissue and I somehow managed a garbled scream before my invisible enemies would rip out my heart and dump it in the resentful cat’s milk bowl.

Not now, you bastards! I screamed. Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something here!

A hazy voice from the blurred vision chirped.

“I’m so sorry! You’ll have to forgive him. He’s never been on one of these before and I think he’s getting a little excited!”

A human voice at last! My liege! My saviour! No longer was I dying upside down, the hungry envy of the butcher clan. The Angel of Life had saved me from the cat claws of death!

“Sorry. So sorry. Terribly sorry,” she warbled.

Shirley tugged me back down towards reality. Back down below earth. Pulled me through the jaws of the train and out onto the shaking tectonic plate of a concrete platform that the London loonies labelled “Victoria.” I darted and swerved my eyes here and there, desperately looking for a green sign with a grass or green symbol on it or a window of some kind that hadn’t been filled with brickwork and concrete. She pulled me on and on through the sea of swarming feet and I saw socks of all shades riding skinned beasts of black and brown. Most of these monsters had two or three strands of hair tied into a bow above them and were tattooed with ticks and stars across them. Sometimes patterns of holes, although these tended to be shinier and I didn’t see too many of them where we went. Many of them trailed black, brown and red wheeled carriages that squeaked and grinded but disappeared up into the sky when we got to a flight of steps but then crashed back down near my head when we reached flat ground again. On and on they rolled, pieces of digested meat through the infected intestines of the squalid industrial beast. On and on through the bowels of the asphalt warren that the be-shoed rat rabbits yodelled the City of London.

Shirley dragged me past a black guitar case filled with brown and silver circles. Some bearded weirdo with a racoon on his head and an orange mop of hair that were curtains to his eyes strummed a triangular ornament and whined the same four coded signals through broken teeth over and over and over again.

“Yah yug yee yoh! Yah yug yee yoh! Ya yug yee yoh bluh!”

We went on for miles and miles through endless worming corridors and hordes of murderous feet. I only saw signs for more labyrinths, each more complicated and twisted than the next. When would it end? Roasted chestnuts, pigeon shit and the odd mangy cat hairs punched my nostrils over and over again. More often than not something else bludgeoned those whiffs away and I was replaced with a metallic feeling in my nose and ears. A constant clanging in my ears. I was a moth battering myself to death against a blinding boiling bulb. A kamikaze butterfly. A lemming on a cliff edge. A junkyard dog trapped in a dishwasher. Then the leash snatched at my neck and once again I was plunged into the undergrowth of misshapen animal carrion and smelly cotton.

We passed through a depot for skeleton trucks perched on giant skis and the gasping throaty gullet of the rotting carcass of this metropolis of chaos and confusion.

We seem to spend half our lives standing with the alien race at the bus stop to destination Nowhere. A man standing beside me sucks the life out of a cigarette then tosses it into an open top baby pram carrying the weight of two well-fed ham-fisted twin brothers. They look about 38 years old. Their mother looks younger than 17. The lucky one gets to smell his brother roasting and spluttering while his teenage mother twists her head back and forth to the dolphin clicks and wails of a Nouveau-Riche teen idol trying to act like he’s depressed and grew up in the gutter. The nose of a blind man in a black overcoat, fedora hat and 3-D glasses wrinkles into a fist as he moves awkwardly to another seat by the bus stop. The burning baby stops writhing and silently coos rather sweetly like spitting fat meat reversing out of the fire and into the pan. His brother has lost interest in the spectacle and sleeps peacefully beside him. In perfect timing the blind man’s flimsy cane snaps under his weight and he slowly falls backwards off his feet and into the oncoming transnational coach he’s been waiting for all day. The smoking youth and the girl step onto the coach and reach for the back seats as the pram burns silently in the window reflection.

They’re onto me. The furry men with matchstick legs. The cats in the plastic rubber raincoats. Like six-foot hairy scratching meowing condoms they’re onto me. My legs are tied together but when the shit hits the fan I get in the van, stopping just in time to scare a pigeon so bad its guano runs to its head and it haemorrhages white faeces out of its beak. I smell meat trucks stinking sizzling in the red-hot sun, cooking the sawn-off animal joints of my four-legged cousins. We blast past a sheep truck on fire a bleating pissing woolly fireball smashes through a concrete sandpaper colour schemed motel corridor. The toad-faced manager looks on sheepishly. Raw mice have never tasted so good.

I notice there’s a weasel wrapped around the luggage rack. Bones shattered up like gangsters’ valentines and kinky uncles’ belt lines. The seatbelt cuts a map into my stomach, the armrest breaks under my weight and the window is a piss take. The coffee table squeaks and the seat itself writhes and whines. A hog with a conductor hat and spatula feet asks Shirley if she has any luggage as he swipes her ticket. She tell him No, just the biggest headache he can imagine. He grunts a reply and farts off to the back of the bus where he watches us suspiciously while picking his nostrils with a fig twig held between his hooves.

We pass the sign that indicates Bolsover Castle. A rat-skin tent in a dried-up peat bog. Bags of dog shit swing from the twig poles dancing and spinning to the gusty farts of constipated water voles and incontinent fish. The air pulls the hair off my skin strand by strand as if with a rusty nail clipper. We pass a poster advertising dead models to necrophile motorists. A fat Labrador and a Chihuahua ride a see-saw together in an advert for doggy flakes. Ruby and Timmy do a cooking show. They’ve roasted their parents in the oven and present them to the sheriff. They give him a knife and ask him if he’ll do the honours. He says sure thing little man he don’t mind if he do. He don’t mind if he do.

A blind man behind us is tapped awake on the shoulder by a plain clothes dick. A black pig grunts at him and scuttles to the front of the bus.

“Mister, you’ve got a pig on the end of your leash!”

“A what?” he cries.

“You know! A pig.”

“Nonsense!” The man sounds educated. “That’s my dog Heidi!”

“Yeah?” the plain clothes growls. “Ever heard a dog bark oink! Oink?”

“Why, yes! That would be Heidi!”

“Sir, I believe there’s been some foul play here. Looks like you’ve been cheated out of a guide dog and someone’s been using your weakness against you.”

“My weakness? What weakness? I don’t have a weakness. Mind who you think you’re talking to, young fellow!”

“With all due respect, sir. You’ve been taken for a ride. That thing ain’t no guide dog: you were sold a goddamn pig!”

“Bastards!” The blind man slumps in his seat. “No wonder he smelled like shit.”

“Ah-ha. Pigs are actually quite clean. I’m the one who smells like shit.”

“You mean you’ve been following me since I bought the goddamn thing!”

“That’s right, sir.”

“But...whatever for?”

“To track down the crooks that sold that thing to you.” He turns to two sniggering youngsters in the seat next to the blind man. “Ay up, did you sell this blind gentleman that pig over there?”

“Well, uh...yeah.”

“That’s as good as a confession. In fact that is a confession. Come with me. Your arse is going to jail.”

“What the-”

“I’m Joe King. Plain clothes police.”

“PCP?” he turns to his friend. “Like the angel dust? Phencyclidine?”

“Why? You got some?”

“Come with me.” The private dick persists. “I repeat. Your arse is going to jail.”

“Ah-ha! Hang on a second! My arse is going nowhere!”

“Not until it goes to jail. Come with me. I repeat. Your arse is going to jail.”

“No it’s not, PCP man.”

“You refuse to cooperate?”

“Absolutely. Ow! Hey!”

Sounds of a scuffle. Bones snap. Sound of a hacksaw being wrenched out of a toolbox. The pig screams in fear and hammers itself against the bus doors. I stare out the window for fear of looking behind me. Blood splashes onto the window blocking my view of the never-ending bypass. Blood-red sunset on the horizon. I jump off my seat and scuttle to hide in the toilet but when I see the state of its walls I think again: add a blocked toilet to a bumpy overcrowded bus ride and you know you’re in trouble. Just as I decide to sit back down I hear the hacksaw clang back into the toolbox. The plainclothes dick has finished. He briefly speaks to the driver, who stops the coach and lets him out on the hard shoulder of the bypass. The pig-dog scuttles for freedom. Just before getting off the plain clothes private dick Joe King hoists something pink and dripping under his arm and turns to me grinning:

“Told you his arse was going to jail.”