Basher's Delight: Part Three

'I'll tell you what it is that marks it as uniquely Kennish,' a chirpily stroppy feminine voice twitters in from my immedjiate right. 'It's that it doesn't make any bloody sense.'

I swivel my head in the direction of the twittering, and my okies alight on the person of a blokess who, on the testimony of Mr Firstblush can only have been hoisted thither through a trap-door-panel of the fibreboard drop ceiling, as the main points of her coocher alone--a V-necked kelly green long-sleeved jumper, pointy-collared white blouse and blue jeans--attest to her manifest affiliation with some other tribelet of femininity than the Ashan one. Fortunately, to the greater good of the gazelle shaft's ghost, Mr Secondblush steps up just in time to urge the more plausible conjecture that as the spot of chairage now occupied by this blokess was only lately eclipsed by the formidably endowed figure of my neighbour the mammilar nape-groper, she's actually been sitting there all along.

Manish seems, or affects to seem, as pleasantly taken an-arse as I am by this interjection. 'Come again?' he and I shoot back in eagerly beflummoxed unison.

'Well, the Reuben brothers have never had anything to do with Iran. They were born in India, and their parents were Jewish Iraqis. If he'd told them to go back to India or Iraq or Israel--well, that would have been bloody rude, to be sure--but at least it would have been intelligibly rude. But to tell them to go back to Iran--well, you'd think he came up with that one by just blindfolding himself and chucking a dart at a world map.'

I like what she's saying, all the more so as she's a girl who's not too hard on the eyes; but in the disinterested service of refining the science of Kenophobology, I feel obliged to play Devil's advocate (bearing in mind all the while that the very logic of the idiom is compromised by the fact that Ken is the Devil), thus: 'So you're saying it's merely a scrawny little linguistic tongue bone us Kenophobes have been picking at in his company all these years?'

'Of course not. The main reason we hate Ken' [Ah! What music to my ears inhered in that single syllable we!] 'is that he's a bloody tyrant. But it's certainly a cellarful of salt in the wound--a bone-deep wound, if you will--that he can't even throw his weight around gracefully, with a bit of elan. Take that jab at the American ambassador that you two were just discussing [So she'd been paying more attention to our Kenophobic convo than to the hen session. Encore, maestro encore!]: you chiselling little crook. Well, crooks don't chisel; they filch. It's misers and skinflints that chisel. You filching little crook, or You chiselling little skinflint--that would have been one for the next edition of Bartlett's. But You chiselling little crook--it's pure tat, obviously cobbled together not so much on the spot as on the breath, as if he'd launched into the sentence without having the foggiest notion of how he was going to end it. Similarly vis-a-vis that undeservedly notorioius quip to the journalist from the Evening Standard, last autumn: Were you a Nazi concentration camp guard in a former life? Oh, that's inventive. Haven't heard that one once in the past sixty years. Even Winston Churchill, back in the 50s, would have found it a bit old hat. I think, by the way, that Ken could learn a thing or two in the political face-thwacking department from old Winsty. You remember what he said about his rival Mr Atlee--A sheep in sheep's clothing? Now that's a certifiably witty and certifiably devastating bit of piss-taking, one that's well beyond the reach of Mr Livingstone's present chops. Coming up with it obviously involved a bit more brainwork than just thumbing through Roget's to the entry for evil bastard.'

Speaking of brainwork, I've certainly been putting my old continuously-looped noodle through the mangle over the course of the minute or two comprised by the preceding diatribe. For, as pleasurable as it undoubtedly would have been to allow myself to be passively swept up into the hoover entrails of this girl's Kenophobic dynamism; to sit there all the while with jaw hanging loose Jacob-Marley style and drool spilling over my none-too-slack lower lip and on to to the tabletop like water out of an unattended bathtub, from round about the 20- second mark of the diatribe onwards I was clear on one thing about this little spitfire, namely (NSS, nest pah?) that I was in love with her; and that, hence, I was not afforded the luxury of simply basking in her Kenophobic aura; that if I wanted to advance to the hemi-semi-finals of the UEFA Championship season of my prospective liaison with her, a mere corner or two against her already-netted three or four goals would never do, that, as the match clock of the evening very probably read something like 1:20 [Cor, it actually probably was round about 1:20 a.m. that our inaugural chinwag took place], I had to score at least a goal or two of my own and toot sweet. I cast the metaphor of my plight in footerly terms because those are the ones that spring immejiately to mind, although in all in all candour I gots to say that a three-dimensional chess metaphor would probably be more apt. I hesitate to make use of such a metaphor, though, on account of the fact that 1) I don't know the rules of three-dimensional chess, and b) assuming it's got this much in common with two-dimensional chess, the checkmate analogy is probably as piss-poor an analogue for the outcome I've got in mind as is the match-result analogy imported from footie. The point is, I know I've got to append to my Kenophobic inamorata's diatribe something that nearly--but not quite--matches the diatribe in point of cleverness, but that yet hails from an entirely different register. So, as hard-going as I'm finding it to take stock of the various particular upshots of her Kenophobic squibs, the one thing that I manage to suss out that they have in common is that they all hail from a register of, as it were, theoretical or analytic Kenophobia; that they generalise about the common shortcomings of things that Ken has already said or done. I thereupon conclude that my rejoinder had best hail from the register of practical or synthetic Kenophobia, that it had best consist in a practical prognosis of things Ken might plausibly one day say or do, on the basis of the principles adumbrated in this here theory of hers.

But, of course, it’s absolutely out of the question to preface the exposition of my practical programme by presenting its difference from her theoretical one in starkly actual terms, to say, ‘I admire the sublime philosophical detachment that enables you, as though from stratospheric heights, to take in all of the salient shortcomings of the Livingstonian worldview at a single glance; but as for me, I prefer to get down there at ground level and submerge my bare arms up to the elbows in the nitty-shitty of the Livingstonian manure heap, you know, put my Kenophobia into practice’: that would come off sounding too much like a lecture. Rather, I have to work my way round to the programme obliquely, by initially appearing not even to lay a diggit on the longest head-hair of her argument; that is, namely, by availing myself of McGyver Signature Ploy #78, The calculated pseudo non-sequitur, also known as the logician's trump- the-okie, as follows:

‘Do you reckon Ken’s got a team of professional speechwriters, or that he comes up with this stuff all on his lonesome?’

‘That’s a good question. I’ve never given it much thought. I should hope he wasn’t actually paying anybody to produce rot like that, but you never know…But why do you ask, anyway?’ she asks, a trifle mistrustfully.

Why indeed? Such is the question I must set about answering with all speed; for the greatest danger inherent in the deployment of the calculated pseudo-non-sequitur is that, sitting out there in the boggy rhetorical open like a turd, it is apt all too readily and incontrovertibly to be taken by one's interlocutor (or interlocutress) for an instance of the real fake deal, and thereupon to effect all too effectually the diametrically cross-purposive rhetorical outcome of the same (you’ll recall, DGR, that the last time I let fly a calculated genuine non-sequitur it was as a proper-dudic to kicking a bloke out of my car)--unless, that is, the deployer benefits from a split-secondly simultaneous access of the co-jones, acuity, dexterity and stamina requisite to scooping that seeming turd up into his hands, sussing out the three or four spots of intervening dry ground, hopscotch-skipping across these (the spots) and flattening it (the turd) out into a paving stone abutting directly on the terminus of the high road of his chinwag-buddy's argument. I leave it you, DGR, my bog-trot-competition jury, to judge whether or not my subsequent performance, recorded below, amounted to a score of a perfect ten on all four counts:

'Er, well, because it seems to me that if the hallmark of the Livingstonian rhetorical metier is, as you claim, one of irrationality, that the surest means of putting this claim to the test must be to to take a stab at composing a Livingstonian speech through the consistent application of that hallmark or principle.'

'Can you be a bit more specific, a bit more concrete?' She looks intrigued but a mite sceptical.

'Er, well, yes, I think so. Say you divided the typical Kennian tongue-lashing into a certain number of salient categorical segments--Mayoral Policy to Be Steamrolled In, Identity of Would-Be Opponent of Said Policy, Slur to Be Applied to of Said Opponent, Country of Prospective Exile of Said Opponent, etc.--and sort of plopped down randomly-selected instances of such categories into a template sentence, consisting certain dead connectors--if, then, why don't you, you might find it easier, etc.--'

'--You mean so as to make a kind of Livingstonian Mad Lib?' she jubilantly interjects, whilst laying a hand on my arm.

I couldn't have concretised my project more efficiently myself. (Nor could she have concretised a certain other thing of mine more efficiently than by laying that hand of hers on me as she had just done, but that's a whole 'nother trowel of cement.)

'Yeah, that's right. Spot on. And if you were to get together a whole slew of the things, slip 'em in an envelope addressed to City Hall, along with a cover letter of application to the position of his Mayorship's free-lance speechwriter--'

'--Let's do it. Right here, right now.'

In toking obeisance to the most obvious out-of-context acceptation of this last sentence, I suffer my phiz to dilate itself into an aghast-clown's-faced expression signifying 'Well, mademoiselle, if that's the sort of thing you're in the market for, I suppose I could oblige you,' and orientated towards a patch of wall appropriately adorned with a snap of a munificently-pubed, doe-naked blokess sitting high astride the seat of an ancient penny-farthing bicycle--but only for the most cunt-hairishly-splitted of milliseconds. Then, scrunching it--my phiz--up into an altogether more businesslike expression orientated towards the starry-okied phiz of my newly-discovered partner in Kenocide, I says to her:

'OK. Have you got any paper on you?'

'No,' she replies, reaching over to her right not for a handbag, but for a kind of oversized feminine wallet known, I believe, in Yank parlance, as a pocketbook, 'but I have got a pair of biros, and a pair of scissors. This'll do for paper.' And by this, she means our table-compound's assigned customer-service plank, which she's just now scooping up and flipping over to reveal a 150-square-inch-strong backside of blank scribbling surface. So, after un-snapping her pocket-book, and producing therefrom all three needful implements, she sets about cutting the card in two, then hands me over my half-plank-'n'-biro.

I shall spare the reader whose wardrobe lacks a navy-blue Kenophobic anorak an exhaustive account of our enumeration of the categories, our crafting of the model sentence, our clumping together of the various segments of verbiage into a butcher's dozen little heaps of paper-shavings disposed more or less uniformly all round the circumfrence of the pivot-table, and leap ahead to the moment when we were ready to compose our first Mad Ken Lib; not, however, without first remarking Manish's silence throughout the whole of the proceedings, barring the occasional suggestion of Steamrollable Policy X or Country of Exile Y--a silence that might, on the one hand, have very well been premeditated, in view of his foreknowledge of this blokess's presence on the scene; but that might likewise have been accounted for by his interminable efforts to keep Manisha awake--through numerous bouts of cajoling, face-cheek-slapping, higball-glass-off-fending--in face of the dual phenomena of the constant haemmoraging of her contingent out of our vicinity and the galloping progession of her blotto'd-ness.

'So Ken says,' the girl says, reaching from pile to pile, and composing as she goes along, "If you...proctologists are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of....instituting a 10 per cent rise of the council tax...to pay for civic improvements against our hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games, why don't you move back to...Mauritania--I'm sure you'd get a better deal from the... Mormons."'

'Solid gold Kenologia. He'd kill for a speech with a line like that in it. Shall I hazard my own inaugural contribution to the portfolio?'

'By all means.'

'So Ken says, "If you Swabo-Liberians are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of...assessing a 25-quid charge on all wide-axial vehicles entering the city centre--'

'Oh, come on,' Mansih leaves off Manisha-face-slapping to interject, 'This defies imagination. He'd never go that far.'

'Never put any reg or leg past Ken, however draconian it might be. So, anyway, Ken says, "If you Swabo-Liberians are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of assessing a 25-quid charge on all wide-axial vehicles entering the city centre...to offset London's .00000005 per cent annual contribution to global warming, why don't you move back to... Lapland--I'm sure you'd get a much better deal from the...Rosacrucians."'

Just then, the PP is pounding out a succession of chords that is all too familiar to me, albeit in a rather unfamiliar timbre--something like Dah-Dahhhhh-dah-nah-nah-nah-nah--Dah-Dahh-Dah-Dahh-nah-nah-nah-nah--oh, fuck the onomatopoeic-transcriptive hoss-shite; why don't I just go ahead and say what'll cut a zillion times more mustard or salad cream with the average sub-sexagenarian reader anyway, namely that in this sequence of chordage I immejiately recognised the opening synth-riff of Van Halen's 'Jump'.

I feel a tug at my shirtycuff as Manny pipes up thus:

'Lucky hit, this song turning up in the rotation, and late enough that the mike's free to boot. If you'll excuse me for a minute or two, and keep an eye on her [meaning Manisha, who has by now passed out with arms folded and head down on the table], I've got a spot of business to attend to. And, oh, Rugger, if you don't mind--'

'Yes?'

[Motioning towards my earward-abutting grammaphone horn:] 'Take a sock out of it.'

Without quite knowing what I'm in for, I brace one hand against the base of the horn, and whip out the napkin with the other hand. Manish mounts the stage, puts the microphone to his gob, and through the newly-unmuted horn issues the following dedication:

'This one goes out to my mates, Rugby and Esmeralda.'

'Esmerrugba?'perpexedly queries the two-larynxed-critter the girl and I have untowardly just metamorphosed into. Then: 'Rugberaldy? Who (s)he?'

'That's me.' the TLC rejoins in its first intelligibly-transcribable issue of verbiage.

Blimey! Evidently we've both been so caught up in the heat of the Kenophobic moment that it hasn't occurred to either of us to ask the other's name--which, perversely enough, it seems to me, bodes beautifully for our prospective future together. What doesn't bode so well for the same object is the name, her name, itself, which, IDMTY(MDFC), has never been a favourite of mine; indeed I've always thought Esmerelda made a much better name for a household disinfectant than for a girl. Well, anyway, in the meantime we've both directed our attention towards the stage, where Manish is just starting to croon, chunefully enough--albeit in vocal stylings that to my orioles seem to owe more to Eddie Vedder than to David Lee Roth--thus:

I get up, and nothin' gets me down.
You got it tough, I've seen the toughest around.
And I know, baby, just how you feel.
You got to roll with the punches and get to what's real.
Ah, can't ya see me standin' here I got my arse against the Protex machine.
I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Ah, can't ya see what I mean?
Ah, ya might as well skip. SKIP!
Might as well skip!
Go ahead and skip. SKIP!
Go ahead and skip.
Skip the fuck on outta Dunedin, baby... (etc.)

Prevailingly, his attitude is that of your average karaoke-ing punter bereft of grander foot-lighterly aspirations; in other words, he's content by and large to stand in place, arse against the playing-machine, with the microphone held throughout in one hand athwart his intermittently-breached gob. Occasionally, though, he sees fit to step clear of the piano and launch into a brief, right-foot-favouring jig that I at first take for some kind of choreographic analogue of the song's eponymous refrain, until, midway through the second verse, I happen to notice that there is, in fact, absolutely no correspondence between the recurrence of these terpsichorean episodes and that of the word skip. Anyway, at the song's conclusion, Manish bows to an all-too-brief smattering of applause, thanks his pathetic remnant of an audience, relinquishes the mike and returns to our table.

'So that,' I ask him, after Esmeralda and I have given him an obligatory thump on the back and a handshake, 'I take it, was...?'

'...Yeah, that Testicular Atrophy song I was telling you about back at the Ape.'

'Funny, it sounded an awful lot like...'

'"Jump"? Well, I'm sure it was, as far as the piano-roll manufacturer was concerned. You see, two years after the release of the "Skip" EP, Van Halen nicked the lyrics off TA and changed the tune. And the boys down under never saw a dime of royalties. A crying shame, really, when you think about it.'

'My heart goes out to them.' My brain, on the other hand, goes out to Manish thus: 'But "Jump" isn't even a 70s song--not by a long stretch.'

'Ah, well, you see, Rugger, this is 80s night: they slip in a song from that exogenous decade every half hour or so.'

80s night at an 1890s-themed 70s bar? I quiz myself rhetorically. The chronological bleedover is enough to make you vomit, innit? Still, I suppose the coarse art of wallet-hoovering knows no aesthetic limits.

'Anyway, Rugger,' Manish resumes, administering a rousing quintet of jostlings to each shoulder of his so-called romantic partner, 'it's high time Manisha and I were heading home. Will either of you be wanting a lift?'
For my part, I'm all for staying put at table with Esmeralda and exhausting all the remaining Ken-Lib-ic permutations over a butcher's dozen more phosphates, and pulling a sickie the next morning (interrupting whatever amorous adventures might ensue just long enough to hand over to Lou my trusty schedules for the 84 and 383, together with sufficient bus-fare to cover the trip up to Potters Bar); so I 'er' and 'well' a bit whilst waiting to follow Esmeralda's lead. But Esmerelda, for her part, at the moment, seems to have orioles only for Manish; for, fixing upon him the sunniest of grins, she says, 'Yes, thanks, I'd appreciate it ever so much.'
'And as for our...em...game,' I lamely interject, doing my best to keep my upper lip from outdoing the lower one in point of slackness.
'Oh, we can continue it some other time,' she says, turning her still- heliomorphic phiz towards mine whilst raking the shavings from all corners of our table-quadrant into the gaping maw of her pocketbook.
'Well, then,' says Manish, playing an arseward-orientated airbourne pair of air-castinets by way of catching the attention of our waiter, 'we'll just settle up and be off.'
The waiter presently returns to present us with our bill and--once the papoose thereof has been duly stuffed with the requisite volume of Isabelas--to divest us of our anklets. We're all four of us--Manish, Manisha, Esmeralda and YFCT--on the point of setting off towards the front entrance, when Manish suddenly winces all over and, relinquishing his shoulder-support of Manisha (Esmeralda immejiately thereupon stepping in to supply the absence thereof with admirable timing), stoops over to massage his right ankle.
'The bastards,' he gasps, his phiz contracted into, as they say, a mask of pain. 'They shocked me. Over and over and over and over again, they shocked me.'
'So the piano was outside the limit of the anklet?' I quiz him as I wrap his free hand round my own shoulders.
'Evidently so.'
'And that's why you were hopping about so much during your performance?'

‘That’s right. It’s OK, Rugger, I can walk on my own, if you’ll take over escort duties for Manisha, Esmeralda. I’ll tell you one thing, though: first thing tomorrow morning I’m writing a letter to the management of this place, and sending a copy to the CMO.’

The crowd has thinned out quite a bit over the past hour or so of our time in the dining room. Half the tables are either empty or occupied solely by members of the staff, gossiping in couples or trios or lolling solitarily with their clip-ons unclipped on one side and savouring post-shift fags. One block of tableage, though, at the very front of the room, is conspicuously full. At first, as we're just setting out, the party there assembled give the vague impression of being a mini convention of court jesters; then, as we're skirting round the bell of the player piano, they're clearly distinguishable as a troop of football fans of various clubberly affiliations; and finally, just as we're drawing level with them, my okies fix on the 18-stone backside of the most conspicuous of their number, and, adding those 18 stone to the 2 of the Gary Neville shirt swathing their better part, I immejiately suss out the identity of the ManU fan in question as that of my erstwhile fellow Arsenal-basher Cyril, and a quick spot-scoping of the his neighbouring faces and arses injuices the subsequent deduction that this here assembly cannot but be the Third Plenary Meeting of the North London Insularist Arsenal-Bashers' Association. I know we're going to be within gobbing distance of the lot of them for all of, at most, ten seconds; but that's certainly more than long enough for me to think it worth my while to shade the left side of my phiz with my hand until we're back out front in the anteroom. (As I'm in mufti, my phiz alone is the only part of my profile likely to tip them off.) That would have been a real poser, what-what?, the choice between; on the one hand, dishonouring myself as an Arsenal-Basher by openly feigning not to recognise Cyril and his crew; and, on the other, alienating my Kenophobic chums with a ban-worthy display of righteous Arsenalophobic shirtiness?

Back out front in the car park, I follow Manish over to the driver’s side of the Bug and climb in to take my place in the cut-throats’s corner, whilst Esmeralda, after helping the nearly-comatose Manisha into the shogun seat, presently sidles up alongside me into the back-seat driver’s perch. And by and by we're off on a southbound course along the High Road, one tending ultimately (NS) towards my digs. Whether Esmeralda's digs will mark a penultimate stop or a post-ultimate one it is beyond my present (and naturally non-Livingstonian) ken to ascertain; and somehow, I feel that it would cuntstitute a breach of etiquette to try to hone my gormlessness on this score by prying into the whereabouts of her chaise Louie less than an hour after having learned her first name, desperately though I am hankering after some sort of convo-re-ignition agent, and as readily-to-hand in this very capacity such prying presents itself. As for such perhaps-no-less-into-prying subjects as the nature of her job, her place of birth, the number and species of her pets, &c.; their potential intrusiveness is pretty much soundly trumped by their practical unbroachability, in view of the 10-minutes-maximum conversational breathing-room afforded by the commute from Redford's to the maisonette. Thus, I piss away roughly the first two of those minutes alternately staring out the window in seeming cuntemplation of the fugitive commercial and residential street-frontage, and nodding towards my bench-mate with a vacuous 'So-there-you-are-then'-ish grin; in each case to the monotonous soundtrack of the engine, punctuated every now and then by Manisha, somnolently wailing, She was carrying a Fistoulari handbag. Esmeralda, for her part, is game enough to meet the first butcher's half-dozen of these grins with a kind of ironically comprehending mirror-grin of her own signifying (so, at least, I flatter myself), So here I am, then (Do you want to make something of it?). But as for the eighth or ninth of them, she flash-freezes it by observing, poker-phizzed as, er, the world poker champion (whose name, regrettably escapes me at the moment):

‘I see you go for the continental look.’

‘Eh?’

She makes a vague, sweeping forefinger-gesture in the vicinity of her throat, as though presenting goitre symptoms to an invisible physician.

‘Oh, that,' I say, taking stock for the first time in hours of my gaping shirtyfront, and, to judge by the scorching sensation I'm getting in my temples at the point where they're touched by my ear-tops, blushing to the very roots of all half-million of my head-hairs. 'Lost a button back at the restaurant as I was, er, combing my hair in the gents [Sorry to disappoint you, DGR, but you haven't caught me asleep at the yarn-spinningwheel: I never visited the men's room during our sojourn at Redford's. I'm simply banking on the likelihood that she wasn't enough acchuned enough to my whereabouts throughout the earlier part of that sojourn to call bullshit on me now.] They don’t sew ’em on like they used to do, that’s for sure.’

‘Actually,’ she says, with an inscrutable little smile, ‘I rather like it.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. I find it quite fetching.’

Now, DGR, I wasn’t born yesterday. Admittedly, in some of my gloomier, more beflummoxed moments, I’m prone to wondering whether I wasn’t born the day before yesterday, but this isn’t one of those moments. I know that she doesn’t actually find my string-vest-scrimmed upper torso in the least bit fetching; I know that in claiming she does she is, not to mince words, taking the piss out of me. The question is, which of the two piss-stand takeaway orders has she ticked off the menu at the moment: No. 1, ‘I know full well you’re holding your breath against the moment when you get to see the verso of my knickers, so let me spare your pulmonary-cardiac system a bit of trauma by giving you permission to let go of those two lungfuls of air,’ or No. 2, ‘I don’t quite know as yet whether you’re holding your breath to see the verso of my knickers, so let me give your co-jones a little through-the-flies skeeter bite to remember me by’; which, of course, may be in turn sub-off-ticked as House Speciality No. 2a., ‘because I’m an unregenerate cuntess who gets off on giving random blokes scrotal skeeter bites,’ or House Speciality 2b, ‘because for my part I’m holding my breath against the moment when I get to see the verso of your knickers, and I see you’re wanting a bit of injuicement to pull them off’? And if I may be permitted to do a bit of piss-taking of my own out of the episstemology of flirtation, I would defy a Barry White or a James Brown or any one of our other widely-fellated latter-day Don Joouhnns, placed in a parallel sitch, vis-à-vis a blokess he’s known for as short a span of time as I’ve known Esmeralda, to arrive at a greater degree of certitude vis-à-vis this blokess’s amorous intentions or lack thereof.
Had Esmeralda been of a more die-latery temperament, I might to this very moment still be in the dark as to which of the three possibilities was manifested by her pseudo-admiration of my continental coocher. But to her credit on more scores than one, she seems to have foreseen the necessity of steering me towards a less ambiguous epistemological SOA before we part company tonight; for, just as we're rounding the corner of Woodside Park Road--from which it's but an ant's trek to the very doorstep of my digs--her lips swap the inscrutable smile for a slightly-more-scrutable frown as she snaps open her pocketbook and lowers her okies towards its innards with enough eyebrow-ballast to suggest she's searching intently in there for some specific item or object. At last--and I mean the very last, as we're idling kerbside at my RM coordinates--she lowers a tweezerly-gingerly thumb-and-forefinger into the pouch and extracts therefrom a cookie-fortune-thin sliver of paper, which she then immejiately, without even giving me enough time to mouth a courtesy mute WTF, reaches over and deposits in my tit-pocket.
Wellsir, there was evidently nothing for it but for me to suss out what this contraband-handover was all about afterwards on my lonesome; if the de facto generic constraints imposed by the third-party drop-off set piece hadn't sufficed to check my impulse to linger, then Esmeralda's own seconding of those constraints by means of a mechanically repetitive, retarded-hand-puppet-style goobye wave, accompanied by the return of the inscrutable smile (highlighted this time round, if my okies don't deceive me, with discernable traces of sheepishness), would have done so on their own. I stepped out of the car, hemmed my way through the 'Thanks for the ride/don't be a stranger' valedictory routine with Manish as blasely as though I'd been his only passenger all along; shouted out a jaunty 'Night Manisha; Night Esmeralda' in the general direction of no one in particular and waved the lot of them off on their U-turning way back towards the High Road.
No sooner is the air clear of the sound of the Manishmobile's engine, than, without even searching out a decent patch of light beforehand, I stick a coupla right-handed fingers into my TP, and, after an irksome encounter or two apiece with Jimmy's flyer and my shirt-button, manage to seize and tweeze out Esmeralda's sliver and nudge it over to the flats of my palm. Inscribed on the paper appears to be the single word 'dervishes.' Hoping against hope that the darkness is to blame for this apparent misreading, I walk on over, with palm still cradled upwards, to the git-proof illumination of my front-doorstep-light, and take a second gander downwards. Dervishes, the li'l cutting stubbornly snaps back at me; this time, though, in my own spidery handwriting, thus snapping on a so-called inner lightbulb identifying itself as remnant of the Ken-Lib game (i.e., as a component of a sentence that would read, e.g., '...move back to Utah--I'm sure you'd get a much better deal from the dervishes.').
'So that cinches it,' I says fumingly to myself. 'It's basically a sub-sub tick-off of 2a, i.e., "Let me give you something else, something material to remember me by, to no apparent fucking purpose."' Fortunately, my hand--perhaps in virtue of its greater degree of commerce with my schlong--is a good deal more open-minded on the subject to, er, hand than my mind itself, for it takes it upon itself to scrunch itself up in such a fashion that, once I've caught on to its shenanigans and have ordered it to uncurl itself, I see that the paper has been flipped over on to its backside, where there is to be descried not the word 'dervishes,' nor indeed any other composite of Roman characters, but a string of numerals, which, on account of its 020 prefix, I immejiately identify as a London telephone number.
'So it was 2b after all,' I can't help saying aloud through a belly-laugh. Then, louder: 'She loves me!' Then, louder still, 'SHE LOVES ME!' Then, loudest, of all, 'SHE LO-O-O-O-O-O-VES ME!'
At the termination of this last (and admittedly asbo-worthy) outburst of amorous triumph, I hear a window being flung open up above and a stroppy masculine voice calling down, 'Hey, you, down there--pipe down and fuck off! Some of us have got work tomorrow, you know.'
I glance up and am at once relieved and cuntsternated beyond belief to identify the plaintiff as none other than Lou.
'Hey, you, up there," I call back to him, thrusting upwards my conveniently- already-partially-unshirted chest. 'What the fuck are you doing in my bedroom?'
He wastes a good quarter-minute of my time on his finger-gnawing schtick before slamming the window shut. Then, after leaving me on my hyper-stropped lonesome for the remaining three-quarters of that minute, he re-appears downstairs in the front doorway, clad only in a string vest and pair of shorts, and bowing and scraping apologetically in all directions, towards every corner of the aperture, as if to block my view-cum-way into the house for a strategically-mandated span of time; not so efficaciously, though, that I don't manage to espy the terry-clothed dressing-gowned figure of a blokess high-tailing it down the stairs and through the kitchen towards the rear exit. Well, suffice it to say, DGR, that that's the last time I trust him with my house keys.
Suffice it also to say that, as I'm typing this here post a full five days after the events recounted herein, there have in the meantime been developments, as they say, chez Esmeralda and myself. But as I'm a bit preoccupied at the moment by the outcome of tonight's Villareal-Arsenal match, I think it'd be best to postpone an account of those developments to a later post. And how soon might we expect this later post? you ask. Well, let's check the fixtures: in the event of an Arsenal defeat tonight, perhaps as soon as tomorrow; In the event of the Outcome That Shall Not Be Named, perhaps as late as Doomsday.