I entered the park that morning in the usual way, by placing one foot on the ground in front of the other, then performing the same action with the other, then repeating in a cyclical fashion. It was misty, which meant I could barely see Jonathan ambling along by my side on the end of his leash. Although I was unable to espy his features, something about his attitude irked me. His unwillingness to keep pace was a point of soreness for me, and a clear signal of his insubordination, a characteristic I felt growing in him with each passing day, like a ten-foot weed you discover in the garden one week, but the next you find shuffling around just outside the conservatory window, knocking on the glass and trying to break in and eat you and your loved ones.
“Heel!” I shrieked very quickly and in a high register. And then to counterbalance the ejaculation, I said the word again, this time very slowly and at a guttural pitch. My commandments held little sway with my stubborn companion.
I marched on relentless, the leash tautening behind me. My destination: the money office. It was Thursday morning. Each week, a Thursday morning would find me travelling to this office, where I would meet with June Daley, a young chewing woman in an ill-fitting pink-hooded top. I would hand her the document, and she would spend a good ten minutes filling in various portions of this and other paperwork she found in her drawers, all the while tutting and harrumphing. Eventually, with hang-lidded eyes rested upon me in a vain of hatred, pity and incomprehension, she would hand me the much sought-after monetary notes.
When I just used the word ‘drawers’ there, I was not alluding to the young deskwoman’s underlayers. If I had meant those, I would have used the alternative spelling to this word, where one omits trailing the stem of the word with a further ‘er’, and thus converts a tale like this into an altogether more sordid and unnecessary bowl of literary pasta. I will only embark upon this conversion in taste genre later in the epistle should I find the adjustment absolutely mandatory.
Jonathan and I were now ensconced in the middle of the pea-souper that had blanketed the park. Out of the murk there emerged a small group of ambulating silhouettes. Child-beings on those contrivances they refer to as ‘bicycles’, so called because they have wheels that revolve, or ‘cycle’, around a fixed axis bonded to a frame that supports the child as it moves menacingly around. I’m not entirely sure what the ‘bi’ refers to, although I believe this may be connected to the sexuality of said vehicle.
Anyway, these beings surrounded us in a circular format, wheeling aggressively by. Although the smoky air around us would not allow my proper observation of their countenances, I could comprehend that their presence was somewhat malignant.
One of them stopped at 2 o’ clock.
“Where you going?” he said.
I straightened up.
“What business is it of yours?” I said in my most commanding voice.
There was a pause where I believed the others might have been drawing weapons. Actually they weren’t drawing weapons, but they had started to snigger darkly.
“Look you prig,” he continued. “This is our manor. Understand?”
This time I caused a pause.
Eventually I retorted in my most fervent Brian Blessings voice: “I go to the money office!” And then I thought of the displays of power I had seen in the films that had come to be my friends. And my mind gravitated to the works of Sir Ian McKiller in The Lords of My Rings films. And so I began: “YOU SHALL NOT PA-”
Tunk!
A small missile, about the size of a walnut, struck my skull.
“Shut up you fucking twat!” were the graceful words that fell from the mouth of the one who had stopped first. I could see the vague shape of a makeshift catapult that monster had fashioned standing proudly in his hand.
I turned shiveringly towards Jonathan. Man’s best friend! What an appalling and disappointing display of protection this one had shown me. I was uncertain but I almost thought I had detected a vague sigh of disinterest from the being tethered to my leash behind the blanket of fog.
Slowly the ‘bicyclists’ perambulated away. I think one of them called me a wanger.
I shook myself down, turned briefly to my side and said to Jonathan ‘We will now proceed’, and then turned back to my front and proceeded. Slowly the undulating shape of the money office became apparent within the gloom.
I docked Jonathan outside the office. He seemed restless, as if keen to be free of his shackles. He looked at me with despondency. I ignored his needy overtures and entered the wood door of the office.
As I walked across the room to be seated in front of June, small clouds of damp rose from my shoulders.
“Ah! June! And how be you this day?”
June looked at me with lifeless eyes.
“Have you been actively looking for work, Mr Stanbridge?”
I steepled my hands to my chin.
“Life, Miss Daley, is a moving, unpredictable, fetid, deterministic thing.”
June sighed with what appeared to be a level of boredom.
“As we rock and roll over its hills,” I continued, “the nipples of time do ever penetrate the dimensions of what we perceive to be ‘the day-to-day’, ‘the morning breakfast’, ‘Dad’s just come home!’, ‘why are you here and where do you go?'” I gesticulated inverted commas to each of my points with the index and middle fingers of each hand.
June was frowning now.
“I grind. You grind. We all grind in terror at the apoplexy we truly feel – and mark my words, we all feel it – about the incumbent hours, days, years, as they whirl giddyingly past our earlobes.”
June’s eyes were now wide.
“It’s only in the buttocks of our sleep that we truly comprehend how dullingly incompetent our ‘attempts’ at the shits of the future really are…”
June was now not really focussed on me. Her gaze had wandered almost to the left of my head.
“What is it June, my dear?”
“It’s your dog,” she said. “I think he’s free.”
I looked behind me towards the window. Jonathan was indeed free of the leash and walking around, thanking some passer by.
I leapt towards the door and exited.
“Jonanthan!” I cried. “What is the meaning of this?”
He turned to me and said, “I’ve had enough. Those kids in the park were right. You are a wanger.”
A fat tear built by my tear duct and clambered down my pallid face.
“But where are you going?”
“I’m going to live a normal life,” he said. “Like a normal human being. My own man! I’m going to form a family. No more of this!” He pointed to the red marking around his neck.
And with that, he was off. He disappeared around the side of the building and out of view.
“But you’re hardly dressed correctly!” I called after him. “You have only underpants on!”
Dr Gaslamp 