The Big Pink

MR STANKEY!

  Mr Stankey, as everyone knows, was a very bad man.

  He caused himself to be brought into existence by Mr James Hendry, esq.

  James Hendry was consuming a largish cup of tea with his chum and best mate, Mr Emmett McFickle. Messers Levin McCochall and Neil Steed were also participating in this festive evening. The cannabis worked and worked on their insides, turning them into sensitive beasts, entirely at the mercy of the inner and outer worlds that they invented and observed.

  James Hendry knew what a merciful state they were in. He knew. He always knew and always used this knowledge to his own diabolical ends.

  The background to this evening was interesting. The previous few weeks had seen a petrol bomb thrown out the window (by Levin McCochall), the invention and one-off consumption of Irish Tea (whiskey and dope), a book scam perpetrated by the infamous Willy Stroker, the casual sowing of cannabis seeds in a plant pot outside the front door, Hamish’ voluntary departure from the University, the sustained consumption of cannabis over several weeks, a spontaneous journey to an unknown forest on the outskirts of Belfast, a three-day military coup against the democratically elected leader of Venezuela, smoking of marijuana grass in home-made bongs, the invasion of Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli troops, multiple viewings of the film ‘Airplane’ by James Hendry and others, the writing of essays and untimely handing in of coursework, making dope yoghurt, drinking of Michlobb beer, eating cannabis resin to excess, eating Esperantos kebabs, attempts to buy special wraps from Esperantos, the discovery of the link between quantum uncertainty and event horizons at the micro and macro physical levels, listening to ‘shee-ha-ha’ music in the livingroom, non-stop smoking and breathing and eating of cannabis resin, watching of Rodge and Podge, the receipt of a Student Loan cheque, the purchase of cannabis from a drug dealer, complaints about the quality of said cannabis, confused thinking, pleasurable insights of extraordinary magnitude, the alteration of social norms in a peripherally isolated community, the accumulation of dishes and filth, the playing of Pink Floyd, of Velvet Underground, of Nirvana, of Muddy Waters, of Radio radio, radio radio radio … Failté… radio radio … radio radio … radio … radio failté. Radio radio.

  The four merry journeymen giggled and laughed, told amusing and silly stories, climbed up a great tower of circling light, became giddy, floated off into some form of plastic sunset.

  Neil proposed a mission: that they, or some of them, should tackle the eighteen metres of level ground that separated them from Esperantos. Once in said kebab-parlour, the intrepid individuals should purchase goods to eat.

  Simultaneously Levin, Emmett and James began rubbing their bellies ravenously and drooling on the floor. Their eyes twitched and a raw, animalistic glow made their cheeks rosy.

  ‘Yes,’ they breathed. ‘We need it. We need the kebabs …’

  ‘Well,’ said Neil. He paused – no-one knew for how long. Then he said: ‘What was I talking about?’

  ‘You were talking about food man!’ said Levin, aware of the immediacy of that pressing need. He almost got up from his armchair in desperation.

  ‘Ah! Excellent. A volunteer. All right; what are the orders? Myself and Levin shall venture out, and the rest of you can wallow in your pit of stoned solitude for the eternity it takes us to return.’

  A glazed look emanated from Emmett and James’ tiny eyes. Then their eyes grew large as frisbees.

  ‘Aw man!’ cried Emmett, his voice breaking with tender feeling. ‘That would be amazing. Here, I’ll get you some money. I’ll have a … a kebab with sauce.’

  ‘What kind of sauce?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Not tomato sauce.’

  ‘All right … not tomato sauce then. What did you say? A kebab?’

  ‘I …?’

  Emmett fidgeted with his wallet, trying to draw out a note. He gave a yelp of triumph when he extracted a tenner.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  James contemplated his own choice.

  ‘A kebab then?’

  ‘Naw. Get us … jeez man, you wouldn’t go up to KFC for us, would you?’

  Neil raised his eyes to high heaven and sighed. ‘No, I would not James.’

  ‘Don’t start that man,’ said Levin, who had now got to his feet, and was evidently not enjoying the experience.

  ‘Man, I’d love a KFC. It’s only a bit more up the road.’

  ‘Man, it’s another forty minutes. An hour and twenty there and back.’

  ‘So? Get a taxi!’

  ‘Fuck up man! I’m not going to KFC.’

  ‘And I’m not going to KFC either,’ said Neil with flat finality. ‘Do you … want something from Esperantos or not? We’re leaving now.’

  ‘All right! All right! Get us a chicken burger, mayo, chips. No salad or green shit.’

  ‘Ok,’ said Neil. ‘Chicken burger, mayo, hold the “green shit.”’

  ‘And chips.’

  ‘And … as you say, chips.’

  ‘Here, get us a bottle of lucozade as well, would you?’ said James, handing up a note.

  Neil took the note. ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t forget: no green shit!’ said James.

  Neil turned to Emmett: ‘What did you want again?’

  ‘I don’t know. Get us a kebab sure. Doesn’t matter.’

  Neil became very confused. He was quite sure he would remember none of this. And now the prospect of leaving the house began to seem terrifying to him. Nevertheless he fastened his courage to the sticking place. It would all be worth it, to gorge on that feast of a kebab, and coke, to smear his fingers and mouth and hands in that messy, greasy, volumous feast. He licked his lips in anticipation. It would be worth it, worth it all – even facing the horrors of the outside world.

  ‘All right man, let’s go.’

  Levin was evidently no more willing than he to be exposed to the wind and the rain; but to be fair to the man, he picked up his coat and gave no more indication of terror than a certain deathly pallor to his face.

  They swept out of the room and down the hall. Then, with a frightened glance at Levin, Neil took a deep breath and opened the front door.

  The world was dark and mysterious. They trod along the concrete slabs, glancing here and there, shivering slightly though the weather was quite clement. Strange noises came from the Lisburn Road: people talking, car traffic, wind, birds squawking out of key. Neither spoke, overwhelmed with this sensory information. They passed the laundrette at the corner. It took another twenty minutes to reach the threshold of Esperantos next door to the laundrette. They looked in at the shop, bright and warm, with two apronned dark-skinned gentlemen carving meat from a rotating spindle of pork, filling kebabs for two other patiently waiting customers.

  Neil and Levin hesitated before entering. Neil glanced at Levin and saw with shock that the man’s eyes were entirely bloodshot, while his face was as white as ice cream. Neil wondered, in terror, if his own face looked like that. If so, they would not be able to pass themselves off as sober adults, members of a responsible community of hard-working citizens. That concerned Neil. He was concerned by anything that removed that mask from him.

  He looked in at the shop. The tiled floor, the rickety wooden table with three chairs around it, the raised level at the back with stacked tables, the counter with twenty sauces and a wide selection of green and blue and yellow vegetables. He knew it, knew it well. The familiarity helped him calm down a little. Since the proprietors also knew him, knew him well, he would be able to go in, he knew, and deliver his order with faultless equanimity. He strode in.

  Levin followed.

  Neil rhymed off the order, asking for a kebab with the special stuff for himself. He turned to Levin.

  Levin’s face became drawn and polite. He swallowed carefully once or twice, and then gave his order.

  ‘Yeah … the same, sounds good.’

  Neil also ordered a coke.

  ‘Very good,’ said the check-hatted man with a Turkish accent.
‘If you would like to wait, your order will be ready soon.’

  Neil and Levin paid and waited, standing. It seemed like a long time to wait, standing, but Neil had done this many times before, and knew (from having timed it on more than one occasion) that in fact the average wait measured no more than three minutes.

  So it was also on this occasion.

  Three long and emotionally testing minutes.

  Neil caught sight of his red-eyed, pale faced reflection in the counter and shuddered momentarily. To distract himself he reflected on his previous recent visits to the kebab makers. He had come in one night several weeks ago, by himself, to get a kebab. They had greeted him as usual, as a regular customer. On that night they spoke to him – somewhat unusually; but not an unwelcome thing. They had asked him if he was a student.

  ‘Yes,’ he’d replied. ‘In the Medical Biology Centre, down the road.’

  They’d nodded pleasantly, and then glanced at each other, with mischief. They leaned forward conspiratorially.

  ‘So you help us?’ one asked.

  Neil was confused. ‘Help you what?’

  ‘Help us. So you make the bomb!’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘The bomb! You make the bomb!’

  The two Turkish chefs burst out laughing.

  Neil smiled. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t know how to make the bomb. I only study zoology.’

  ‘You make the bomb,’ they repeated, serving him his kebab.

  Now quite often when Neil visited, they would renew their interest in the bomb.

  Back to the present. Neil and Levin were supplied with their victuals. The Turkish pair did not today make any bomb references or trying small talk – for which Neil was profoundly grateful. The two intrepid journeymen shuffled back out into the windy night and made it the full fifty metres back home without getting lost.

  Levin muttered something unintelligible and full of pathos as he entered, and licked his lips in anticipation of the delicious meal.

  Upon entering the Livingroom both Emmett and James almost leapt upon Levin like predatory animals. There was growling and gnashing of teeth and lumps of pork and bread and salad were scattered about like sea spray. The beasts chomped and gorged, absorbed in the act of consumption, greasy fat sauce and sugar and meat. They swallowed without chewing, making burping sounds and little gulps of hasty pleasure.

  Neil returned from the kitchen with a plate and a knife and fork. He looked at the debris with amazement.

  ‘You’ve finished it all?’ he asked.

  His own food was safe by his side of course.

  The three, Levin, Emmett, and James, hardly even nodded. They looked at Neil with low-lidded eyes, stretched back on the sofa, bits of sauce around their lips, hands on their bloated stomachs.

  As soon as Neil unwrapped his kebab the spirit of voluptuousness took possession of him also.

  He finished off the final bite and smacked his lips.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That was quite excellent.’

  All agreed on the virtue of the Esperantos experience.

  For a time they rested, spoke in quiet tones of fantastic things, imaginary creatures that filled the voids of the world. Then slowly the reckless instinct took over again. The spiral screw turned, overwound, and the clock raced out of control. James, James James. He was like a falcon that swoops over the sea, looking for some kind of fish to snatch and gobble. He took the polystyrene burger box, almost completely clean, in his hands.

  ‘Mr Stankey,’ he said.

  He opened and closed the burger box with one hand.

  ‘Mr Stankey,’ he repeated.

  For the rest of the evening all four were terrorised by the awful burger box.

  Things continued in this vein, only more so. Erwan came round to the house after writing an Existentialist essay. They drank an enormous cup of tea. The next day they glued coins to the road, and within a few days of that incident a chocolate cake had been lovingly baked with half an ounce of cannabis in it.

  Barry got up one morning, not hungover but not entirely happy either. He mooched dispiritedly down to the kitchen. It was Wednesday the 24th of April, and it was a work day, with a nine o’clock lecture looming over him like a rapist out of the fog. Everything was shit.

  He turned on the kettle and looked out the window above the kitchen table. Someone had written something on the wall, in large, white letters:

  MR STANKY

  IS

  A

  NASTY MAN!

  Hhhmmm!!?

  Barry looked at it without comprehension. Indeed, he looked at it with some distaste. Matters had been taking a turn for the worse in this house. This was just the latest manifestation. He drummed his fingers on the countertop. It wasn’t so much that things were getting worse. It was that he didn’t know what was going on. ‘Mr Stankey’ was like an enigma to him. He had a feeling that even if he knew what it was about, he still wouldn’t know what it was about. He smiled at a joke he remembered and pored himself some coffee.

  The next day Erwan forgot where he was going on his way to class.

  Four days later Barry had to go home.

  It was the thirtieth of April, 2002. A large chocolate cake, with half an ounce of cannabis resin baked into it, sat on the counter top. It sat their like a volumous mountain of mud, delicious and slimy, and beckoning all to eat it. All had been eating it, for several days now. Each time they grew hungry, they would scoop a filthy handful of it and stuff it into their mouths. That was quite often, since the miraculous property of this cake was that the more you ate, the hungrier you were for more!

  Levin sat on the table, stuffing the cake into his mouth with his hands. He posed in this state for the camera, Neil taking the photo. Neil appeared to be particularly keen to get ‘Mr Stankey,’ drawn on the window, in the frame.

  Neil shared a few words of encouragement with Levin, but declined the cake. He ventured into the livingroom instead. Earlier he’d taken two photos of the Livingroom, with Emmett and James in full flight, fighting over the demolished stub of a broom handle.

  Now there was no-one there.

  It was the 23rd of April, 2002, a Tuesday. Young Mr Erwan was walking from class and, as usual, down Eglantine Avenue rather than to his own Halls of Residence. He was happy; he was fresh. He reached the Big Pink House and glanced up at the window. Strangely, his look was reciprocated today. Neil, Levin MacHill and Levin McCochall were staring out at him. They seemed to be egging him on.

  ‘All right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I will come in then.’

  What a lovely way to be greeted. He soon found out, however, on entering the house that the greeting wasn’t precisely intended.

  Almost everyone was in the livingroom: Emmett and James and Barry and Hamish were there too.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Erwan.

  ‘Watch,’ said Emmett, taking the young fellow by the elbow and leading him to the window.

  Erwan watched. Since he didn’t know what he was watching for, he kept glancing anxiously at Emmett. Emmett nodded reassuringly and motioned out the window. Erwan continued looking. Nothing strange was happening out there; all the strangeness seemed located in the livingroom, with these weirdoes he called his friends.

  ‘What?’ he asked again.

  Emmett waited a while longer, but since 30 seconds had passed and still no-one had walked past the window, his patience gave in and he explained the set up to Erwan.

  ‘Thing is, we’ve glued a one-pound coin to the ground out there. And we’re waiting for people to pick it up!’

  As one, the entire livingroom erupted into evil cackling.

  Erwan looked around, confused.

  ‘Oh, ok,’ he said.

  Everyone crowded back to the window, waiting for a fresh victim.

  It was an amusing way to pass the afternoon. In the space of an hour, three people (a suited woman, a teenager and a student) all fell for the prank. They were cordially shouted at and jeered. All thre
e scurried off, smiling but shame-faced. Emmett, James and Neil cackled and wrung their hands. Levin, Levin MacHill, Hamish and Barry made hooting noises and rubbed their bellies.

  Erwan was returning from the loo upstairs when he learnt that they had decided to up the ante.

  ‘I’m about to go to the co-op,’ announced Levin MacHill proudly, ‘and get two two-pound coins.’

  The whole assembly yelped and cheered.

  ‘And then,’ said Levin McCochall, ‘we’re going to glue one on this side of the road, and one on the other side.’

  There was more cheering.

  ‘I see. And what Machiavelli came up with this elaborate scheme?’ asked Erwan with interest.

  The friends parted and allowed Neil Steed to take the credit. He gave a modest bow of acknowledgement.

  ‘I might have guessed,’ said Erwan.

  Levin MacHill went to the shop.

  For the next six hours, until the light had finally faded from the western hemisphere, the eight individuals kept a steadfast vigil at the window. Nor was their commitment unrewarded. Several fools fell for the trick – none more satisfyingly than the dashing fellow with the expensive girlfriend. He stopped right in his tracks and bent over, exposing all his greed, for the two pounds. He kept at it, looking up at the jeering people, laughing, but still not willing to let go of the money. It was as if he was the monkey with the paw stuck in the jar of nuts. His expensive girlfriend pulled at his sleeve and forced him to give up. He came back ten or fifteen minutes later for another equally futile go.

  It was getting dark when the most tenacious victim came, armed with a brick. They watched him banging at it for fifteen minutes before finally deciding to close the blinds.

  ‘If he gets it, fair play,’ they said.

  It was communally decided to have a whacking great powerful tea and to climb the stony mountain.

  The next day, Wednesday 24th April, 2002, Erwan called over again, for an hour in the mid-afternoon. Both the coins were gone. There were great scratch marks in a twenty-centimetre radius around where the coins had been. It was evident that no more coins could be glued without only the most dim falling for the ploy.

  Erwan knocked his knuckles against the door and waited patiently to be let in.

  This time Levin MacHill came to the door.

  ‘Well hello,’ he crooned. ‘Come in.’

  ‘Ok. What’s happening?’

  ‘We’re trying to catch fools.’

  ‘Oh. I thought that was over.’

  ‘Oh no, no. It’s only just begun!’

  In opposition to Erwan’s expectation, Levin MacHill mounted the stairs.

  ‘You coming into the Livingroom?’ asked Erwan, at the threshold of that room.

  ‘No,’ said MacHill, at the top of the stairs. ‘We’re in Neil’s.’

  Erwan followed, expecting to find out what was going on.

  Levin MacHill, Levin McCochall, Hamish and Neil Steed were sitting in Neil’s room, with a fishing rod. The fishing rod was hanging out of the window, and Neil, Levin, Levin and Hamish were both watching intently out of the window, with manic grins on their faces.

  ‘Come on, have a look!’

  Erwan had a look. Neil, controlling the rod, had artfully rested the fiver (hooked to the fishing line) on the wall of the front yard. All four were holding their breath, waiting for some fool to come by …

  They waited and waited. No-one was picking the bait.

  ‘Has it worked yet?’

  ‘Hush! Yes, once!’ they said.

  There was a certain obsession in their keen focus that Erwan found troubling. He looked out again. Here came a potential victim.

  The victim, a student, came nearer. He spotted the fiver, and the fishing line, and looked puzzled.

  Neil wrenched the line into the air. All the members of the group laughed and jeered obscenely at the poor student, and Hamish and Levin high-fived without mercy.

  Erwan watched a little while longer and then returned to the Halls for his dinner.

  On the 1st of May 2002 Erwan decided to write a manifesto with Emmett against capitalism and advertisements.

  It was never written, but had it been written, it may have read something like this:

  THERE IS a spectre hanging over western Europe, and eastern Europe, and America (the great saitan), an ugly spectre, with two great wings flapping like dogs.

  This spectre has a mission. He wants to control your mind. He wants to establish an autocracy of the wallet. If you watch his polluted message, you’re done mate. He’ll screw you into the ground. And you know what? Its you.

  What does that mean, it’s you?

  Let us answer with a parable.

  Jesus was on the mount. He was talking about goodness, and people being right to each other, and how the weak were going to inherit the Earth. Then he held up a toaster, and, giving a cheeky grin to the audience, told them that if they didn’t listen to him they were baked. Then he returned to his principle theme: God had love for them all, none of them need fear the future, for God was in their hearts and all they had to do was listen.

  Right. Now the question is: what do we do about it?

  Well here’s the fucking thing. YOU’RE ALREADY DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

  Right. The next thing to do is chuck your TV out the window. We done it, and now we’re righting manifestos and things. Really, there isn’t a better way to spend your time.

  Ads – they’re so annoying. The worst are the ones people talk about and say that they enjoy. There should be some kind of social norm that forbids people from talking about stupid ads, like that stupid one about the Volkswagen. I mean, who’s side are you on – ours, or the two or three billion-billionaires who own 80% of the world’s wealth? Do you know only one in six people in the world have regular access to clean drinking water?

  Step two: exercise regularly. Those bastards don’t want you to, because they like you to be tired, to come home at the end of the day, flick on the box and zone out, interrupting your GOOD thoughts and the ones that’ll make you FREE from their stupid ideas – I mean, who the fuck gives a shit about a dishwasher? Did you think when you were a kid that you’d give a shit about what colour your STUPID dishwasher was? Wash your own stinking dishes! I’ve seen people with dishwashers. They spend as much time filling them, taking them out, talking about how to get them to work properly, and all that, that they might as well just wash the dishes in the first place. Even better don’t wash your dishes. Just leave them to rot.

  Step five: don’t work.

  You work eight hours a day to earn enough money to buy a dishwasher to HELP YOU SAVE TIME AND WORK LESS! You idiot! Work part time. You’ll be happier.

  If you do work full time, ask who you’re working for. Are you working for a machine? A bastard? Are you making crude toys for kids in the east, that they’ll play with for two days and then chuck? Visit a landfill site: it’s completely full of all the so-called ‘work’ you’ve been doing for the past eight years. You’ve got an entire landfill site devoted to you, full of your good labour.

  What else? All right, let’s just talk about those ads again. You might think there’s nothing wrong with a harmless little ad. Well, you could be right. Maybe they spend billions of pounds a year trying to persuade you to buy something you do already want. Stands to reason. Of course if you really want something you need to be told relentlessly that you want it. That’s how desire works: we keep forgetting how much we want something until we’re told again how much we want it. Then we fork into our wallet and get the thing. It’s a fake rolex watch, so that you can look like James Bond. That’s what you want. You don’t want to fork into your wallet and buy little kids immunity from eighteen hideous tropical illnesses, no way. Those kids can go to hell – we are the west!

  That means we can buy whatever we want.

  In the nineteen-fifties the CIA launched coups against democratically elected governments around the world. In Guatemala, the CIA sponsored ra
dical opponents of the Guatemalan President because that President wanted to redistribute some of the land that United Fruits owned back to the peasants so that they could grow enough food to feed themselves. Guatemala has been in a state of civil disturbance ever since. In fact, there’s no country in the entire planet that hasn’t had its democracy perverted by the ‘Land of the Free.’

  Including the US.

  Step six: have a nice hot dinner. Barry, for instance, makes a really good lasagne. Here’s his recipe: chop up the veg real fine, cook them slowly, in a little rapeseed oil (for taste and for your heart); then in a separate pan brown the mince. You can add garlic to taste – I recommend lots of garlic, at least two cloves per person. Fresh garlic, not shop-bought pre-ground stuff. Give everything time to unleash its flavours – don’t burn it, don’t rush it either. Just soften the veg sufficiently and then at the end – at the end, don’t destroy the delicate flavours – add a bit of oregano and basil. Use your own taste in this. It’s not like garlic; you can put too much in. Garlic is toxic, actually – I’m sure that a meal comprised only of garlic might be too much. Anything short of that is fine, however. Whack in some extra garlic, give everything a good stir, and then put it in a glass dish (oven proof) so that you can watch the bubbles rising from the bottom as it heats. Don’t use condensed tomato purree. Use sieved tomatoes. The basil and the oregano are chiefly for the tomatoes – they are companions as close as the Marx brothers. A Marx reference in a manifesto! Nice one. So you put the lasagne in the oven. I’ll assume you’ve thought to put the lasagne sheets in too, otherwise you’re screwed. You’ll have to take it back out again. Take it out, put the lasagne sheets in, in layers (I’ll assume you know what lasagne looks like, although be creative). Put layers of white sauce in too. Make white sauce by: melting a large knob of butter in a saucepan; adding cornflour and milk; stirring continuously to avoid lumps. You’ll not think the sauce is ever going to thicken, and you’ll be tempted to whack the heat right up – don’t. Wait. Patience. Think of trees, of fields. Stir the sauce, stop it from sticking, from forming lumps. Ah! There it goes, it thickens all at once, just when you were about to despair. It thickens into a beautiful, rich, creamy gloopiness. Pour it over, liberally, over the lasagne sheets, another layer of meat and veg, another layer of lasagne, another layer of white sauce. Barry put cheese into his white sauce. Those of you who know Barry won’t be surprised by this. He put cheese into everything – especially his Star Trek TNG commentary. I’m never sitting in a room with him while Star Trek TNG is on again. I will eat his delicious lasagne again, though; if he deigns to make it for me. Barry made lasagne for us several times in the Big Pink House, when he moved back from living with Emmett in the Punk House. The Punk House put even the Pink House to shame for its messiness. They had to abandon it in the end, they couldn’t even get into the kitchen for a drink of water. The kitchen was full top to bottom with bulging black bin bags. Their livingroom, a small room next to the kitchen, was also uninhabitable. They’d started off with a small and amusing habit of building a beer wall from their empty cans. Now there was simply a mass of cans spilling from a five-foot mountain in the middle of the floor, and bottles, and diseased maggot-ridden takeaways, and dangerous tea-lights, and a TV. Barry moved back to the Big Pink. He took with him his delicious recipe for lasagne. Often times, on a Saturday after work, he’d gather his ingredients for an amazingly tasty dish of lasagne, we’d all chip in, £2 each, prime ingredients. I watched him make it one time: it was a trial, let me tell you. I wanted to grab the pan off him at every point and gobble the whole lot down. I didn’t though. He kept me well back. Hamish, on one of those occasions, came into the kitchen and asked Barry what he was going to do with all the excess white sauce. Barry said he was going to throw it out. Hamish, to say the least, was outraged. ‘Naw, Barry: you can’t just throw all that away.’ Barry insisted he would. Hamish insisted that he would not. Barry said there was no discussion on the matter, he would throw it away. Hamish made the point that he, Levin and Erwan would eat all of it easily by dunking bits of bread into it over the next few days. Barry was not moved. Hamish made several good points about the starving of children globally. Barry was far from moved by this pathetic speech; in fact he grunted contemptuously. In fact, although this contradicts what we just said, he didn’t even acknowledge this speech of Hamish’; that’s how he felt about it. Hamish demanded reason from Barry. Barry easily gave him reason: they’d leave it there for weeks, no-one would clean it, and they’d all get food poisoning if he just left it there. Hamish was irate: Barry seemed to think that Hamish, Levin and Erwan had the digestive systems of shrimps, that they couldn’t handle a bit of mere bacteria. Barry agreed: that was precisely what he thought. Hamish asked Barry if he really thought that they – who had been through so much in this house, eaten so many filthy things – couldn’t they handle a mere bit of cheese? Barry shook his head and continued to watch his lasagne. Soon it would be ready. Hamish and Levin and Erwan continued to pester the poor bastard about the cheese sauce for the next seven weeks. Barry developed distraction tactics like bursting into songs by Metallica and other heavy rock musicians every time they brought the subject up.

  Having cooked your lasagne in the oven – consult a cook book to see how long for – grill the top to make the grated cheese just that bit crispier. You’ll like it that way. Now eat it. Eat it properly, chewing, making sure you taste it properly – too many people just shove it down their throats, eyes fixed to the 6 o’clock news. What happened to proper meals? Talk to people while you eat. Take it slow and digest properly. You’ll be surprised that often things do taste good, even things that you cook yourself.

  Drink some red wine.

  When we all die, we float up (assuming we’ve got a soul) into the ether. The ether has been proven not to exist, so you float up through something theological. Then you arrive at the Pearly Gates. St Christopher and the Dragon meet you; St Paul doesn’t meet riff-raff. That’s good, you think. Yep, it’s still there, your Union Card. Well, St Christopher, you think you’re such a hot shot, you take this message to your boss. It says on your Union Card that you’re not entering the Pearly Gates until some things have changed. If human beings – the civilised ones at least – have managed to do away with the death penalty, then God can too – he can do away with the eternity-in-hell standard punishment for any crime. Actually, the Union Card goes on, that’s not the punishment for any crime. Any crime can be forgiven, if you say to God you’re sorry. Oh, that’s all right then, is it? I’m sorry, and that’s it, is it? Well I’m not sorry! I smashed Snotty Roebuck’s front teeth in because he was being an awful little prick! And if I apologise to anyone, it’ll be Snotty Roebuck and not you! We met a few years back for a pint in the pub and it was all good. Get off the podium. We have formed a Union and until our demands are met we are prepared to rot in hell for eternity. Our demand is that you abdicate your Throne immediately and redistribute all your riches to the people, equally and without prejudice.

  This is our message to the world. Love one another. Love one another with your heart and soul. You only have one life: enjoy it, get other people to enjoy theirs, and don’t worry about all the things that don’t seem to be right – everything won’t ever all be fixed. Do what you can. See if you can make people happy, see if you can be happy yourself, and if you can do good, good, and if not, then you did your best. Watch some TV even if you want – but don’t feel you have to watch it! Be creative. Think about things! Feel to your very core what it’s all about!

  MmmmmmMMMMMWAH!

  ERWAN ATCHESON • EMMETT MCFICKLE

  1ST MAY 2002