The Big Pink

  ****???

  Good times. The folderolderolderolderolderolderolderolderolderolderolderolderolderolderolder

  Made of plastic.(The examination of small shards of plastic). (Inebriated aspects). Bullshit. Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The person who comes to the door looking for something. That other.

  1999.

  The ice age. Tectonic plates, grating over each other, causing cracks and the displacement of the earth’s crust. Heavenly bodies circulating each other, trying to get each other down and low-down dirty get low down get down. A triangle of sex. A small, hairy triangle. A slice of toast in the bathroom.

  Two people, looking at each other. Used condoms.

  2002.

  The television flying out the window.

  Somebody being mis-blamed.

  Moshing in the livingroom. Lining up all the chairs and sofas on one side, and having a mosh to some classical music. Neil, Erwan, Levin, Levin MacHill (?). The Fukin Té.

  What was the Fukin Té? It was a small bonsai tree grown in livingroom (on the mantelpiece) or in the kitchen or in Hamish’ room at the very top of the house. It was purchased in either November or December of 2001 from a local store on the Boucher Road. Not the first time the residents of the Big Pink would purchase something from this store nor the last. At the same time purchasing this tree the purchasee bought book with a hard paperback cover good bonsai care maintenance. Book proved extremely useful to the owners ensured diminutive tree lasted long for many happy years.

  Did Romulus and Remus cross the Tiber?

  Yes.

  Did Hamish and Emmett really throw the TV out the window?

  The TV belonged to Levin MacHill. He had taken it with him to Belfast when leaving his parentals, back somewhere in the Sperrins.

  Chris Bole at the time of this incident was on day thirty-four of his habitation of the Pink House. Chris studied computer science at Queen’s. Levin, Levin MacHill, Emmett, Barry, James and Neil knew Chris as ‘the nice chap who works at the Co-op’. This nice chap was looking for somewhere else to stay because he … well, lets just say that he needed to move. Suffice to say that since Fallah had gone there was a room spare in the Big Pink and it was quickly taken over by Chris. Chris moved in with his NTL connection, computer, TV and two laptrays with beanbag cushions. These two latter objects were instantly seized by the Big Pink folk as the great assist they represented. Chris knew this would happen: written in the corner of one laptray was ‘Not for use by stoners in rolling joints. This means you!’ Nonetheless: the trays were used for that purpose. Not that Chris was unduly discomfited.

  He was duly discomfited, however, by the breakdown of Levin MacHill’s TV. He had a TV himself in his room so it did not immediately deprive him of South Park. He knew it would though. Those hounds would come baying at his door, howling for a TV, wresting it from his weakly clinging hands.

  He hailed a taxi. ‘Take me to a TV repair shop,’ he said. He bribed the taxi driver to put his foot down.

  ‘Repair this TV,’ said Chris, staggering under the 45lb cube. He dumped it on the counter top.

  A workman wiped his oily hands on a yellow rag and tucked it into his breast pocket. ‘A TV huh?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Chris. ‘Repair it by this afternoon and I’ll make it worth your while.’

  Chris unfolded a crisp £5 note from his pocket, smelt it admiringly and replaced it in his wallet.

  ‘No bother mate. This afternoon. It’ll cost fifteen bob though, not five.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Chris, and wandered back out.

  In reality Chris’ attitude masked a deep anxiety. If those fiends didn’t get their TV back, there’d be talk of taking his TV, of bringing it into the livingroom and like everything that went into the livingroom it would be stuck there for all eternity, even if they got another TV, it would be wedged in and immobile, and it would gradually become kipple, just like everything else in that room. Chris was well aware of the concept of entropy and was going to do his darndest to keep the laws of thermodynamics at bay, at least where his bedroom was concerned. He could be accused of being a stoner, but not of not being neat.

  The TV was fixed.

  ‘Thanks mate,’ said Chris, strolling out with it.

  ‘Here mate, don’t forget to pay for it.’

  Chris gave a look that withered the TV repair man into obscurity.

  He returned to the house and replaced the TV on the badly damaged black chipboard where it belonged. Only it was right next to another TV so they jostled each other for space.

  ‘Here, that’s my TV,’ he said.

  He suddenly felt a sickening return of memory, with fear and loathing.

  Yesterday morning, James had come knocking on his door and asked for the lend of Chris’ TV. Chris had said something like, aye right you fucker, but this had been translated into ‘Please do,’ by James’ twisted mind. Chris had even watched as the fucker had come into his room, with Levin McCochall, and lifted the TV wholesale into the livingroom where they had commenced watching a soap opera of crapness. Chris had mesmerised himself into a trance in order to overcome the pain and had watched a repeat in his own memory of the last episode of South Park to appear on Sky 1.

  Then he had taken the TV to be repaired not understanding what was really going on.

  Perhaps he an android, with false memories of his previous existence.

  He took the TV back into his room and swore that his TV would never be taken again.

  Lots of other things happened in the mean period.

  It was a slightly overcast day. Chris’ TV was in his room and there was no functioning TV anywhere else in the house. Neither James nor Hamish nor Levin McCochall believed that Chris would consent to his TV being borrowed again. They did not want to stoke homicidal flames in the young man.

  ‘What’ll we do?’ asked Hamish, to the point.

  ‘Chuck it out a window I suppose.’

  Here Hamish smiled and nodded.

  Hamish was probably always in the background causing and directing the events in the foreground to occur. He seemed to be a master of minimal effort. By just grinning and nodding in a particular way he could change a people’s whole frame of reference. He caused an idly thrown-aside comment to become a programme for action. How did he do it? He converted an idle comment into an action of concrete destruction. This was Archimedes.

  Hamish never wasted a thing. He hated to see a drop go on the floor. He was as taut as his wiry-frame GAA playing limbs, scoured and hardened by Saturday mornings in the cold sleet playing football.

  He looked at the TV smashed to pieces three stories below.

  Back in the livingroom, he said: ‘Aye. Why not.’

  Levin McCochall was not the man to be asked twice. His rationalising forebrain got immediately to work on the argument.

  ‘Aye. The TV’s bust,’ he said to James Hendry, who was the only person there who might need convincing.

  Whether James needed convincing or not Levin proceeded to deliver an argument while Hamish, no doubt, admired his own parsimonious handiwork.

  ‘Sure the TV will not get fixed again. We’re wasting money, fixing that piece of crap over and over.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Hamish at the right moment.

  ‘So let’s just chuck it out the window.’

  ‘All right,’ said James.

  James Hendry was born mischief. He couldn’t see a pot of shit but that his arms would unthinkingly reach for the ladle. His object in life was to be laconic; or to annoy people when they were stoned; or to smoke joints and watch Neighbours.

  In fact, James Hendry’s objects in life were inscrutable. He seemed to be a zen master, accepting the absurdity of life, except that instead of accepting anything he fought on the sofa with a broomstick or made a Mr Stankey box out of a takeaway.

  For James Hendry, watching other people throw a TV out a window needed no rationalisation. Indeed, he could even help deliver the toppling blow and take no responsibility f
or it.

  Levin, however, needed reason to be his guide. Like many abstract theoreticians he needed to make his action coherent with the worldview he possessed, even if he didn’t explicitly recognise this.

  James Hendry goaded Levin.

  ‘Go on then. Take it.’

  ‘Aye, we should,’ said Levin.

  But Levin still did not act; it was James Hendry who first took the corner of the TV in his hands and very clearly demonstrated his intention to lift it. This settled the matter for Levin; it was at this moment that the destruction of the TV became a certainty.

  The TV wasn’t intolerably bulky. James and Levin got it through the livingroom door with relative ease. Two seconds later they paused at the foot of the stairs. They discussed which window to throw it from. James and Hamish decided that Emmett’s would be best.

  ‘Aye, Emmett’s,’ said Levin.

  Hamish gave them a hand getting it up the stairs. Levin went first, going backwards while James climbed forwards.

  They knocked on Emmett’s door just in case he was there. He wasn’t and his door was unlocked. Hamish thoughtfully held open the door to allow James and Levin in.

  The window, although quite large, did not open in a reasonable manner. It used a double joint system allowing it to open inwards either from the bottom up or from the right-hand side. Attached from the bottom, the window only opened a space of about twenty centimetres at the top. This was useless for hurling an 18-½” TV through. Attached from the right-hand side, the window opened much wider but the mechanism of the hinge seemed to prevent the window opening fully at this position. They couldn’t prize it open further for risk of damaging the hinges which, it was agreed, would be inconsiderate and bad.

  ‘We could chuck it out Hamish’ window,’ suggested James.

  A light seemed to form in Levin’s eyes. The suggestion was like a gift tenderly offered to a lover.

  Levin and James lifted the TV from Emmett’s bed.

  Hamish kindly opened the door for them.

  They began to mount the next and final set of stairs.