Email to Chelsea

Hey Miss Chelsea, how awesomely awesome to hear from you again! What a shame that my confession of our 'flirting' got you hiding under your pin cushion - though I must point out you got the order of the breaths mixed up, in case that makes any difference.

Funny you should mention your fly - my last book was a book of short stories and poems and in there was a story called "I Spy With My Little Fly" about a man who drives his car to the cliff's edge and thinks back to the time he fell in love with a fly (which is me falling in love with a fly on a beach in Mexico; don't know if you remember that). The book's called "in the land of the balloon-shaped monkeys" - which is the opening line to this song of mine:

In the land of the balloon-shaped monkeys
The monkey-shaped balloon is king
So said the mad-headed sage
Molly Mickomackomustard
Then she sat on something
But I said Molly I know you know
And I need for you to tell me
What is the nature of my own self?
This universe and life and God
Well how-ow can it be-e-e?

Well son, she said, and she sat on my knee
You know the answer is clear
Just start where you are
And be yourself
And who knows? Maybe one day you'll get here
But - oh, o-oh oh, oh oh oh oh
I don't know what that means
I need to know the future now
What why where when who and how
And just how on Earth am I supposed to be?

Monkey monkey, she said

(And then she says "monkey" lots; there's a video on facebook, I think, of me singing it with my ex)

Anyway...

Does that mean you're living in Guelph? Or is it a correspondence course? I'm guessing the latter. Did you know I used to live in Guelph? For one year. And that I woulda stayed if I could. And that the job I had there - working in an office in shirt and tie for the Canadian government - is the only job I didn't want to leave? But me visa was up and time dictated otherwise, oh well. I thought for a long time I'd end up in Canada - but oh well there too: London's treating me pretty good these days, all groovy in the house of manly love and the restaurant job's just swell: we had a housewarming party recently and I made a bonfire on the roof. How cool is that? Also, the other day I was in the bath and Tom (the Lithuanian; no, I didn't know you were Lithuanian) said, hey man, I wanna brush my teeth. I was gonna pass him his stuff but then he said, ah, just let me come in - and I thought, fuck it, so I did. And he brushed his teeth and we chatted while I lay in the bath (on my side). How doubly cool is that? He's a fun chill boy not too bothered with inhibitions - which is good for an inhibitioned Englishman like me. :-)

Also: to bring you up-to-date and, perhaps, complete with the whole 'Sophie thing' - well, I wrote her a letter recently, deciding to get everything off my chest in the absence of her actually having the balls to do a face-to-face meet - and she wrote back weirdly and upsettingly saying basically she thought I was like some stalker-type (for still having feelings several years since) and that I shouldn't bother her anymore. Plus other things besides. Anyways, I guess I was looking for something in there that would help me 'move on' - and though it wasn't quite the way I expected it to happen, I guess it worked - 'cos it reminded me of how unpleasant and harsh she can be and I suppose my head finally realised, "why would you want to chase that around? you deserve better, boy, you're just not seeing things clearly/thinking straight." Et voila! Move on I have. So now I'm young free and single not just in reality but in my head too. :-)

You know, it's funny, I've kinda stopped it with the emails the last several months - keeping things closer to home, more in the real world - and I haven't been able to write about anything to my distant chums for a while now. But there's something about sitting here with you in my mind that makes this writing/sharing/expressing fun and easy. Maybe because you gave me permission to be all nonsensical - which is pure candy to my happy heart and mind. Liberation. And freedom. And because you were nonsensical back (I loved your little poem - made me jealous of your way with words). Well here's to a lovely penpal relationship! Even with the months and years in between, sometimes.

Isn't it a shame that Christians are so into that Christian thing? And what I mean by that is: it's the predominant religion of our countries; we, as spiritual people, want to be in that spiritual vibe; sometimes it's hard to find people who are into it; but finding Christians and Christian gatherings is easy; and they're generally really lovely and happy sorts; and it's nice to be around them, and a great way to make friends, and they often do really cool things too; but, at the end of the day, there'll always come that moment where our differing fundamental dogma-beliefs come up and, alas, there doesn't seem to be much getting around it (or if it doesn't come up, it's always there - at least in my head it is); and it is a shame 'cos what are beliefs compared to heart and love and shared experiences and kindness and just being together in a lovely place where we're always basically digging the same things anyways. I mean, I'm sort of alone in my spirituality these days - but I likes going to church, and dig most of it, but will always feel the outsider for my inherent Buddhist Hindu New Age beliefs and my exposure to other things, etcetera (which is, again, perhaps just a belief in my head). I dunno - I have in recent years come across some fairly enlightened and wicked Christians (always most welcoming when it comes to football and quizzes and dinners and stuff) who have embodied a more modern belief that, "ours is not the only way, ours is just another way" - which I dig - but...well, I dunnno, I can't quite put my finger on it. I guess I just wished they/we could put Love and God first, and Jesus second (a wicked example of how to be cool) and then forget all about Paul - 'cos most Christian church things seem to me to be about Paul (or the Old Testament) and, cool though some of that stuff is, I don't really rate it in comparison to the J-man ("let he is without sin cast the first stone" - how amazingly quick-witted and perfect is that (in an under pressure situation)?) Well maybe I should try a church again - I always did enjoy a good hymn - and see what I find this time. Have quite fancied the Alpha group on occasion (and not just for the friends and hotties) - if nothing else, a great place to spout my theories and ideas, which is always a pleasure. Have you read Conversations With God, by the way? There's my Bible right there. (Though really just the first three, maybe four books, and the last one, Home With God - which is really truly mind-blowing, and quite liberating too) (Did I ever tell you I was thinking of writing a new version of The Bible? How crazy and heretical is that!? :-))

Here are 12 things I haven't yet done in my life, but would like to:

1. Go to Israel and wander around the desert, seeking
2. Have a totally life-transforming mystical experience
3. Meet an awesome woman and make a little person
4. Write a book that sells in the tens of thousands
5. Go to New Zealand
6. Own a house
7. Drive a 1972 Ford LTD and not crash it
8. Conquer laziness, insecurity, overreaction and tightness
9. Understand God, and Love
10. Have a celebrity girlfriend
11. Make it to the Herne Hill Velodrome
12. Score an overhead kick in a competitive game of football

I dig that it's pretty short: it really is about all I'd like to do at this moment in time. I guess I've been pretty lucky in my life in that, when I've wanted to do something I've generally done it. And that I haven't wanted too much, or wanted things that were too far out of reach. Number 1 I might try and do this winter, work permitting (which work always does - so I guess I mean "me permitting"). 2 is out of my hands, as perhaps is 3 and 9 and, maybe, 12 (certainly it'll take a massive amount of grace and divine favour to make the overhead kick happen - Lord knows I've tried enough times on my own!) 4 - well that's perhaps out of my hands too. Though I've three ideas for books stewing, and I suppose actually knuckling down and writing them might help there (hence 8). 5 I guess I'll get onto when I've done Israel and written at least one more book (which'll earn me freedom). Owning a house is something I sometimes think about but, given my tendency towards digging free time and freedom as opposed to earning money it's probably not a real true deep down desire (there's always the lottery/mythical book success thing). And, blah blah blah, I've suddenly realised this email is getting ridiculously long, and horribly self-indulgent, and now I'm thinking it's time to wind it up. But - do you have a list of things you'd like to do/things you're pretty sure you will do at some point, when the opportunity arises/you get around to it? Well if so, I'd sure like to hear about it.

You sound well, in the little picture you've painted of your days. Is the schoolyard thing a possibility to happen? Or is it kind of a pure assignment thing? Or maybe a little bit of both. I'm happy to hear you're doing something that you're lovin'.

And I must confess: I don't think I got what you were laying down with the chicken thing - though I've imagined several scenarios, all of which I think my head has conspired to make about me, and not in a non-flattering way either. Perhaps you could explain? Or better with the lights off? (Gotta say: I'm a lights on kinda guy)

Lots of love to you and yours, your Chelseaness. Big hug!
Rorro

Email to Brittney

Ha! Yes! Love it! And!

First things first: had to refresh my mindcogs about the Hendrix quote and realised I'd got it totally wrong/right and actually meant to say "I choose the latter" - which is perhaps a little different. But, yes, both - of course. Who would have it any other way? Or, rather, who could?

Although I don't seem to need love to feel confused! lol!

Now then, now then, I reckons it will be too hard to address all your issues which I read was it only yesterday? so I'll quickly scroll up and down - there; took about fourteen seconds - and reacquaint myself with what comes to mine eyes and in there I see stuff about Derren Brown and New Ageism and me and a castle and you and a two string guitar and to that I say, Yes! Play on! And - you beast! How could you break two strings at once? I didn't even know that was humanly possible - although...even though I haven't broken a string in well over a decade I remember breaking them all the time as a teenager, which can only lead to the scientifically-proved conclusion that you and my fourteen-year-old self are actually the exact same person and, you know, it sounds kind of crazy, of course, but when I look back and think about those days and also those days before that (aged seven, running round crazy with a spiderman mask on trying to get kisses off of girls already in double digits) I think I always suspected something like this might happen; yes, of course I am a crazy typer and words can just muffle their way out of my tipsy-toes and onto your bacon slabs of ears but, please don't go saying things about "my fine mystery" because it will only make me want to gaze at you for several hundred hours at a consecutive stretch and then where will we be? I mean, who will make the tea? I mean, is there even a kettle that big available?

So I was thinking about how I've never been on a date with anyone and then my friends showed me a picture of a pretty girl and I said, oh, she's pretty, and they said, you should email her and ask her out. And then I was like, no, no, I could never do that - and then I was like, but if I did I'd probably say all manner of stupid things and spill all the beans about how it probably wasn't such a good idea because she'd only realise one day that I'm not as cool as I initially appear and somewhere down the line we'll end up arguing and winding each other up and so probably best not to get anything started anyways - which is perhaps not the best way to invite someone to dinner, though I'm not sure I wanted to anyway. Also, none of that ever happened - it's just a thought and an idea that I've had and maybe one day it could be a song or a short story although I'm sure there's something similar to it in the movie Trainspotting when the young Scottish girl first meets Ewan McGregor (and now that I type that I'm probably like, oh yeah, I didn't even think it up, I just nicked it by subconscious accident).

Anyways, there wasn't much reason to say all that except that when someone says, "write me nonsense" I feel almost inexplicably bound to express every little thing that appears in my brain . Like:

"You know, it's probably good in the long run that you got that kidney infection down in Baja 'cos if you'd come by the hot springs I would've only put a move on you - freed from the shackles of Craig - and, to be frank, my moves really aren't that good. Although they sort of are."

- that sort of thing.

Oops. As usual, like Michael Stipe, I've said too much: truth is, I suppose, I'm feeling a need to talk to someone, having realised that I'm already not happy in my new castle environs in Kent and wondering what the hell I'm doing here and even thinking of quickly escaping back to Guatemala and Israel and isn't it all rather strange, this inability to be in one place, I really do worry about where my life is heading sometimes.

Oops again! Too much truth - probably I should get back to nonsense:

Like screaming babies. Like things I'm not interested in. Like the impossibility of feeling always wonderful every moment of the day.

Sorry. That wasn't nonsense.

Listen: did you ever look over an octopus's shoulder while he was doodling in a phonebook and suddenly get the feeling that the octopus was actually you and the ink he was doodling with contained the entirety of creation multiplied an infinite times over in every little drop?

Or have you ever wondered why it's illegal for a squirrel and a badger to marry in almost every country in the world, Stockholm excepted?

Or what about the time you caught yourself sliding down the back of an armchair and had to construct a blue and green flag from granny's leftover tissues in order to bring attention to yourself, even though an entire television studio audience were sitting right by you in Martin T. Grangeworth's second favourite teapot?

Well, those are the sort of things that concern me.

Although now I'm wondering whether typing drivel is really the best thing for me.

I'm not happy! I don't like England! It's too cold! I don't know what to do with my life! lol

All the above, of course, is a joke.

Best wishes, and a jolly warm handshake, with fondest regards, and wishing you all the best in your future endeavours,

Rory

Towels: A Shit Story

Towels

The matron screamed. Jeff, the patient, was lying face down in the hospital room by the side of what had been his bed for the last six weeks. The back of his gown was open to reveal his pink, hairy buttocks. From the expression on his face she could tell that he was already dead. His eyes lolled lazily in their sockets, his gaze as empty as a child’s deflated football, and his neck was a bright shade of red – so red that if he had been in a field with an angry or demented bull it would definitely have charged at him. In between his legs there was a poo. But how had this happened? In a locked room, with locked windows, when she had the only key? the matron wondered curiously. She screamed again and then she fainted. She fell on the floor and when she landed her face and open mouth were barely an inch away from Jeff’s dead poo, which was lucky.

“Goddamnit!” Detective Chief Inspector Wayne Mercedes shouted as he angrily slammed down the receiver of the phone into its cradle, “what a bitch! That woman’s driving me up the goddamned wall!” He took some papers from his overflowing desk and threw them across the room, before arrogantly putting his feet up on the desk.

“Your wife?” asked Sergeant Granger, who had sheepishly walked into the Detective Chief Inspector’s room just before he’d finished talking on the phone. He was older than his D.C.I. but had never made his way up through the ranks like Mercedes had, for some unknown reason. Probably because he hadn’t married the boss’s daughter at the start of his career, he thought silently to himself in his head.

“My ex,” Mercedes said, chewing harshly on the stub of his cigar, “she’s giving me shit again for forgetting to take the kids out again – like I don’t have enough on my plate. As well as not having collected my old socks from her place.” He screwed up his eyes and stared at the piece of paper that hung limply from Granger’s thin pink wrist. “And the last thing I need is another goddamned murder case to solve.”

Granger shuffled nervously in his seat. He’d seen the D.C.I. like this before – everyday for the last twenty years. Why couldn’t he just stop being angry and trying to fight the world every second of his life for once? Probably because it was the only way he’d known ever since he was a boy, what with his old man being a total ball-buster of an old army Major who’d pushed him into the police force and made him give up on his dreams of playing professional rugby or golf, which he probably could have done. But Granger had got used to him by now.

He handed him the piece of paper and Mercedes took it with a heavy sigh.

“Holy crap,” he said, shoving the paper back across the desk, “you mean an entire gymnasium of boxers has been strangled to death and nobody’s seen a thing? Doors locked from the inside and no sign of a break-in? That’s the third one of those this week!” He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair and scowled. “Well there goes my dreams of a relaxing weekend.”

“There was something, sir,” Granger said quietly, as though he was scared and didn’t want to provoke the rage of a barely calmed beast. He waited for Mercedes to ask him what it was.

“What was it?” Mercedes asked.

“The gym,” he said, “and the hospital – the one where they found that guy and the matron, both strangled – they both had a visitor on the day of the murders.”

“A visitor? And? How is that news, Granger?” He stubbed his cigarette out and angrily threw it into the bin. “Of course they had a visitor – they’re a hospital. Never heard of visiting hours?” He shook his head sarcastically and bitterly wondered how he’d ever landed such a crummy post in the former mill-town of Bolton, Lancashire, where nothing ever happened – nothing, that is, until the last week, it seemed, when suddenly everything was happening at once.

Granger held back the urge to smash him in the face with his foot – as he had done nearly every day since Mercedes had become his D.C.I.; a position that should by rights have been his. After all, hadn’t he always done everything by the book, in comparison to Mercedes’ unorthodox ways? But there was no point thinking about that now.

“It was the same man,” he said slowly, as though he had a really big bucket of patience.

“Holy shit!” cried Mercedes, suddenly leaping up in his chair and grabbing at the case file again. “And the children’s home?” He stared intently at Granger, as though his eyes were lasers and Granger’s face was no longer a face but had changed into the target for a laser gun or pen.

Granger nodded solemnly.

“Mu-the-fuck-er,” Mercedes said quietly, letting the words dribble out of his mouth like tea down a stroke victim’s chin, “who is he?”

“Someone not unknown to you,” Granger said.

“No,” said Mercedes, incredulously.

“U-uh,” nodded Granger.

“I don’t believe it,” said Mercedes.

“It’s true,” said Granger, “we’ve got him on CCTV, sir, at all three locations, on the mornings on the murders.”

“Who is it?” he demanded.

“It’s Short,” he said. He let the word hang ponderously in the air, like a day old helium-filled balloon. “Your laundry man. Manson Short.”

“Listen,” said Mercedes as he slammed his fist down on the white lid of the coin-operated laundry machine at the launderette in Silverwell Street, “we’ve got footage of you at all three places on the mornings of the murder. Now you’d better do some talking quick fast,” he snarled, “or your ass is gonna be grass and I’m in the mood for doing the lawn, not with a lawnmower but with my fists, and we’ll have you banged up in a cell so fast you won’t know what colour your shit is or what hit you, capice?”

He stood menacingly over him (Short) and gnarled his teeth.

“Woah there,” said Granger, “let’s remember to do this by the book.”

“To hell and back with the book!” shouted Mercedes, “twenty-five people are dead and you want to talk to me about the book!” He grabbed Short by the collar and shoved him up against a coin-operated washing powder dispenser. “I ought to get that book and shove it up your lying brown ass! You know something, Shorty old boy, and I want to know what it is.”

Short stood there with a look of terror on his face. He was an old man, had come over from Poland just after the war, quite small, and with a history of heart trouble – the sort of thing that could be triggered at a moment’s notice. He didn’t want any bother with these coppers, all he knew was that he had delivered some fresh laundry to each of the three locations on the mornings that the murders had taken place and now the police were busting his ass for no good reason other than the one just mentioned. But hadn’t he been at home tucked up warm in bed at the exact times when the murders had taken place? And didn’t he have a waterproof alibi, what with his wife and elderly mother having been there with him all night, and the records showing that the door of their flat hadn’t even been opened? So why was this mean and angry policeman now giving him such a hard time? That’s what he wanted to know and wondered.

“Listen, guv, I’ll agree with you that there’s something fishy about all of this,” Granger said calmly, trying to calm the tension of the situation, “but it can’t be him.”

“Oh yeah?” said the D.C.I., his fist poised mere millimetres from Short’s terrified looking face.

“Yeah,” he said.

“And why’s that then?”

“Because it couldn’t have been him. His alibi checks out for one thing – he was at home and it would have been impossible for him to have been in two places at once – and for another…”

“What is it?” Mercedes said, loosening his grip a bit and letting Short slide down the wall.

“There’s been another murder, sir,” he said, “it just came through on the radio and it’s happened right while we were here with him.”

Granger’s face turned white like snow, as if he had seen a ghost or heard some really bad news.

“It’s your wife,” he said.

“She’s dead?”

“No,” he said, “but your dog is.”

The A666 is a long road full of shops, Mercedes mused as he made his way home in his silver-grey Jaguar XJ6. It could be any road in any town in any city in this goddamned country. Single mums with pushchairs wandered about aimlessly looking for useless things to buy, unaware of the things that were happening under their very noses, things that a hardened and experienced cop like Mercedes saw wherever he went. Murder. Mayhem. Kids getting knifed left, right and centre. Graffiti. But this wasn’t London or Liverpool or Manchester, this was Bolton, for Christ’s sake, and now it was happening on his own patch. Bolton: the town he had single-handedly kept clean for more than twenty years, sweeping the streets clean of criminals and scum like one of those roadsweepers that swept the streets clean of bottles and cigarette butts and other such rubbish. Bolton: the town where nothing ever happened. Bolton: where the only excitement he had found recently was beating up some football fans from down south and uncovering a nest of illegal Chinese immigrant smugglers, the poor sons of bitches. And now someone was going about murdering people like they were murdering flies. And his dog. He tossed his cigarette out the window just as a roadsweeper approached from the opposite direction.

“That’s ironic,” he said ruefully through gritted teeth. He took another cigarette and as he was lighting it he watched in the rearview mirror as the one he had just thrown out of the window disappeared beneath the swirling brushes of the roadsweeper, in an almost poetically violent way. It could have been a metaphor for his life.

He pulled the car skilfully into the driveway and turned the keys in the ignition. He sat there for a bit. Then he opened the door and got out and started walking towards the house. Everything was quiet. Too quiet, he thought. Then he saw his wife through the window and he went in to say hello.

“Oh Wayne,” she said, flinging herself into his arms, “it’s just terrible, I don’t know what to do.” The sobs from her tears made his shoulder damp; he hated that. He could never stand to see a woman cry, not since his first wife had shed all those tears when she’d learned of his affair. She’d made him hard to such things.

“You can make me a drink is what you can do,” he said, nudging her aside and slumping into the brown leather armchair by the window. His armchair. The one he had sat in to solve hundreds of cases over the years. Well now he had a real humdinger of a case to work on and it was going to require a lot of thinking, and a lot of drinking, he mused. “The day I’ve had…”

She put a whiskey into his hand and moved around the chair to massage his shoulders. She could feel the tension in them, like the knots of a billion steel hands gripping the muscles tightly. She worked her fingers into them and felt them relax.

“I’m sorry Wayne,” she said, “it must be horrible for you.”

“It is.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No thanks,” he said, “the whiskey’s fine. Maybe a sandwich in an hour or so. Egg, I think. Or ham and pickle.” He banged the whiskey down on the table. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said angrily, “you decide.”

He felt her hands slip around his shoulders and onto his firm, manly chest. Delicate female fingers slipped in between the buttons of his expensive Marks & Spencer’s shirt, tousling the hairs of his chest, reaching in and tweaking a nipple, which she knew he liked. He grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her towards him, and before he could say “lickety-spit” she was sucking his penis and then he took her upstairs and did her on the luxurious kingsize bed in all kinds of ways – some of which he could have probably have been arrested for, if he wasn’t the one in charge of arresting people. It was mindblowing for her. But it was all in a day’s work for him.

Afterwards he lay back on the bed and smoked a cigarette while she brushed her hair. Her erect nipples stood to attention like a pair of soldiers, stiff and erect, with bayonets ready for action. He could always tell how she was feeling by the angle of her breasts.

“Something’s bothering you,” he said, soothingly.

She whirled around to look at him, a tear forming in her misty blue eye.

“It’s the dog, isn’t it?” he asked. She nodded her head and let the tear fall down her chin, her lips quivering like those of a stupid child.

“Listen love,” he said, consolingly reaching out and cupping her tit, “the dog’s dead and there’s nothing I can do about that, you’re just going to have to get over it. And he was old anyway, we can get you a new one – a better one, even, I promise,” – and she smiled when he said this, even though he didn’t mean it – “but twenty-five other people are dead too, and I’m the guy who’s got to clean up this mess so I haven’t got time to listen to you blubbing about some stupid dead animal when there’s a murderer on the loose.”

“I’m sorry Wayne, she said, “it’s just…”

“It’s just nothing,” he said, “that’s what it is. Nothing. Now go and get yourself cleaned up in that bathroom over there and let’s have a go at round two,” and he slapped her on the bum and gave her a little smile, just to show there were no hard feelings. She giggled, jumped up from the bed, and gave him a wink before disappearing into the luxury en-suite they shared. She wasn’t a bad old tart, he pondered, even if she had put on weight and her arse and thighs had got big. He took another cigarette and let his mind wander back to the case. The boxers…the gym…the locked hospital room – there had to be some sort of connection, but what was it? Short had been in all three places on the mornings of the murders but it wasn’t him, he was sure of that now. And the dog, found dead in his own bathroom, strangled while his wife was giving him (the dog) a bath, just when she went to the kitchen to answer the phone. Could that be the same person or people? And why a dog? A poor, innocent dog? Well there are no innocents, he said out loud, nodding and remembering all the things he had seen over the years as one of Lancashire’s top cops – if he’d learned anything it was that. And now someone – or something – was living, killing proof to that assertion of his.

Some thing, he wondered. What if it wasn’t even human?

And just as he was thinking that, the phone rang.

“Yes?” he said.

A voice mumbled from the other end of the line.

“Goddamnit!” he shouted, “I’ll be right there!” He grabbed his jacket and coat and went to the bathroom door, which was locked. He listened and could hear his wife gargling inside. Damn mouthwash, he thought; if he hated anything more than the sound of someone gargling mouthwash it was this.

“Listen Marjorie,” he said, “I’ve got to go; there’s been another damn murder. I’ll be back later and give you what for.”

He waited to hear her response but all he could hear was her gargling. She probably couldn’t answer, he realised, what with all the mouthwash in her mouth. She was probably waving some sort of gesture to him, something that he would understand (if he could see her) as, okay, see you later, take care. He put on his shoes and was out the front door and back in his car in seconds.

Sergeant Granger sat on his haunches gingerly fingering the naked body of the young woman. What a shame, he thought, a touch of sadness in his voice, to be taken so young. She had her whole life ahead of her; she could have been anything. A ballerina, an actress, or even a high profile solicitor’s assistant. Anything. Probably she would have ended up like most of Bolton’s teenage women, pregnant and on the dole – but today she was beautiful, and young, and, like he had already pondered, with her whole life ahead of her. Except she was dead. Dead as the proverbial doornail. Totally, and utterly, dead.

Dead.

He brushed the hair from her eyes and covered her up with a sheet. In life, perhaps, she hadn’t had much dignity, but good old Sergeant Granger was determined to give her at least a little in death. He pulled the sheet up over her head and tucked it in behind her back, where she was still sat against the cistern of the toilet. Strangulated while having a poo. What a way to go.

“Killed on the job, eh? Poor bitch. A bit of a looker too, by all accounts. Let’s get a butcher’s then.” With one swift movement D.C.I. Wayne Mercedes had entered the bathroom, flung the butt of his cigarette into the sink, pulled the sheet from the naked dead girl’s body and grabbed hold of the case notes from Granger’s hand. “Another goddamned strangulation; they’ll be calling this guy ‘The Bolton Strangler’ next. Nice tits.” He gave her nipple a tweak and handed the notes back to Granger. “What have you got?”

“Not much, sir,” Granger said, wincing at his superior’s unorthodox yet effective ways and wishing that he could cover the girl up again, despite sort of enjoying the soft swell of her breasts; he would have given the entire right side of his body for a crack at a dame like that back in his youth. “Same as the others really. Locked doors. No one around. No witnesses. No one’s seen anyone come or go…”

“Hello hello hello,” Mercedes interrupted, “what’s this?” He was looking at the dead girl’s hands – at her fingers and her fingernails, to be precise.

“Looks like some sort of fibres, sir,” Granger said, joining his D.C.I. in peering at the dead girls hands, like two men investigating something really small.

“No shit Sherlock – if you’ll pardon the pun. Did you flush the chain, by the way? Or at least open a goddamned window? It stinks in here. What the hell was she eating?” He dropped the hand and motioned Granger over to the window.

“Smells like curry, sir – or maybe hummus.”

“Humous? What the hell’s that?” Mercedes shouted gruffly.

“Humus? It’s a Mediterranean dip made with chick peas, sir. It’s –”

“I don’t give a good goddamn what it is, Granger, I want to know why the hell this bitch has got her fingernails full of white cotton and what that’s got to do with her being strangled to death on her own toilet in the middle of a shit. Jesus, I got to do everything around here? Get this shit down the lab and tell me where it’s come from, what it is, who made it, and where I can –”

“Oh Jesus,” said Granger, his voice shaky and uncalm. He was standing there holding his phone, having received a text message and gone to read it while Mercedes was barking out instructions. “Oh Jesus, no,” he said, “it can’t be.”

“Are you listening to me Granger?” Mercedes said, turning his face upwards to look at what his incompetent assistant was up to now.

Granger shakily thrust the phone into Mercedes’ hand.

“It’s your wife, sir,” he said, unwillingly.

“My wife? What’s that dopey mare done now?”

“She’s dead, sir.”

“Dead?”

“Yes, dead.”

Turns out that the wife and the naked dead girl had died in almost exactly the same circumstances: locked in their bathrooms, alone, strangled, and with no one else around. Except in Marjorie Mercedes’ case there was someone else around – Mercedes himself. Time of death put it at 10.27 pm, around the exact time Mercedes was leaving the house. So he was now a suspect in his own investigation. Great, he thought, that’s all I need. And again, fibres were found under her fingernails – except this time they weren’t white, they were pink: the same pink that had been her favourite colour for as long as he had known her. Something strange was going on.

Mercedes and Granger were back on the mean streets of Bolton, cruising through the black night, the pale ghostly yellow of the street lamps the only thing that illuminated their way, apart from the car headlights. All around them drunken men and women stumbled into the road, shouting incomprehensibilities and grabbing each other clumsily; it was just another Friday night in Lancashire. Except, unbeknownst to the inebriated masses, this was no ordinary Friday night. If only they knew, poor bastards, if only they knew, Mercedes thought disdainfully.

“Any news on those lab tests Granger?” Mercedes demanded to know through gritted teeth. He’d barely said a word since he’d heard of Marjorie’s death. This was personal now.

“Nothing yet, sir – but it shouldn’t be long.” Granger’s voice revealed a newfound level of admiration for his boss and mentor, over the way he’d handled his loss. Sure, he’d harboured resentment against him in the past – hell, if push came to shove Granger would be the first to admit that he’d hated and loathed his D.C.I. for the best part of twenty years and more – but suddenly all that was gone as he realised the apparent cloud of anger that Mercedes constantly lived his life under was no more than a front, his way of dealing with all the burdens he’d been carrying, of keeping Bolton and everyone safe, of the troubles with his wives, and of the responsibilities of running one of Lancashire’s finest police forces. In this new light he was amazed that he’d been able to keep it together all these years – and even now, with the news that his wife had just died, he was still keeping it together, for his sake and for all their sakes, because that is what he does, and that is all he knows how to do. Suddenly, Granger felt a pang of shame at how he had been towards his boss, and he resolved to never think a bad word of him again, now that he finally understood the pressures the man was under. These were the things that Granger thought as they made their way back to Short’s place.

“Well I hope they hurry up,” Mercedes said, “we’ve had enough killings for one night. If those eggheads can pull their fingers out their arses for just one cotton-stinking moment we might just put a stop to this case once and for all.”

And, as if right on cue, the radio went off.

“Sir!” Granger said, his voice respectful and admiring, “they’ve found something! Apparently the fibres found under the fingernails of the victims came from towels purchased at Netto and Marks and Spencer respectively. But more than that –”

“M&S? That’s where Marjorie shopped,” Mercedes said, his brain suddenly springing into life, the cogs of his razor-sharp mind literally clicking and whirring like the world’s fastest computer.

“But more than that, they’ve found traces of an unknown chemical, BetaKerotene-16904 – something that shouldn’t even be in the country. The boys have done a google search on it and…oh my God…”

“What is it Granger? Speak, man!” Mercedes’ grip on the wheel was iron-like now, his foot pressed hard against the floor of the car as they sped through the black Bolton night.

“There was a case in China a year back – a hundred people found strangled in a chemical factory working on a new form of washing powder using a revolutionary new chemical.”

“BetaKerotene-16904!”

“Exactly!” Granger said excitedly. “Locked doors, no suspects, nobody ever arrested or charged for it. They wrote it off as an industrial accident and burned the factory down and that was that, case closed. Nobody’s ever heard of it again – till now. They thought it had all been destroyed.” Granger put the radio back in his pocket and slumped into his seat. “But what does it all mean? This chemical’s killing people, giving them the symptoms of strangulation? Someone’s running around with a box of this stuff, sprinkling it here and there like some kind of magic elf with a box of laundry detergent? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“What was that you said? Something about an elf?” Mercedes was chewing vigorously on his cigar by now; Granger knew that he was on to something big. Once he got like this he was like a bulldog chewing a wasp: he would never let go, not even if you broke off his legs and set him on fire.

“I said –”

“Goddamnit, I should have known all along – I did know, but it was just too crazy to consider it, even for a moment.” He spat out the cigarette as the car screeched to a halt outside Short’s Silverwell Street launderette. “Don’t you see? It’s not the powder, it’s what the powder does. You remember when I had Short banged up against that coin-operated washing powder dispenser? You remember what was in it?”

“Daz?” said Granger.

“Exactly,” said Mercedes, leaping out of the car, “or rather: Dazz. Notice the slight difference in spelling? And remember how the instructions on the side of the box didn’t really make sense, how it said, ‘Your upper and lower garments will come out lovably, and your white compares the white white. Dazz is all family superior laundry powder: your nigbor will kill discover how you did obtain your upper and lower garments to be very clean’? Well it’s no wonder it didn’t make any sense – those damn illiterate Orientals – it must have been some cheap Chinese import Shorty’s bought off the back of a lorry from some Turk or something. Trying to save a few quid and he’s killed half the town, the cheap immigrant bastard.”

“But how?”

“Come on, Granger, it’s not rocket science or brain surgery! That chemical – the BetaKerotene-16904 – must do something to certain fabrics when it comes into contact with them, bringing them to life and filling them with the urge to murder whoever the hell is closest to them at the time. What was it you said earlier? About where the fabrics were from? Well Marjorie got her towels and undies and socks at Marks and Spencer – and no doubt that poor shitting bitch got hers at Netto, going by the looks of her – but undies and socks wouldn’t be strong enough to kill a person. It must be the towels!”

“Yes, and a hospital, and a boxing gym, and a children’s home would all have towels too. Short must have washed them in that fake Daz.”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God!” Granger said. He was staring through the window of Short’s launderette into the back room. There, in the dark, he could just make out the silhouette of Manson Short, a tortured look of agony splattered across his face, his tongue lolling from his mouth like a rolled up carpet, his arms and legs splayed apart, suspending him in the air with what could only be described as bed sheets – murderous, evil bed sheets – holding him there like an almost crucified Jesus, except fatter and shorter, and without the beard, and around his neck, sucking the life out of him like a fluffy white anaconda, a towel. “It’s Short!” he said, “they’ve got him.”

Mercedes squinted through the window and took in the scene, all at once knowing exactly what he had to do. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it skilfully in one swift movement and it was in his mouth before anyone could even have said boo to a goose. “By all rights,” he muttered gruffly, “I ought to let that cheap son of a bitch die in there like the dirty stinking bastard he is.” He thought of all the things that had happened because of Short, all the people that had died: his wife, the matron, his dog, that poor dead shitting girl with the tits. “But that’s just not the kind of guy I am.”

He took his gun and blasted through the window, leaping in before the glass had even reached the floor. All around him towels writhed ecstatically on the floor like a mass of sex-mad slugs, reaching for his feet, eager to find the tender flesh of his neck and satisfy their craving for human blood. He barged past them, heading straight for Short, shooting holes in the bed sheets that held him. Short slumped to the ground, a crumpled rag doll in a hideous scarf, which Mercedes removed by burning it with his cigarette and off it scarpered like a frightened kitten. He had gotten to him in the nick of time: another millisecond and he would have definitely been dead. As dead as Mercedes’ dead wife, Mercedes mused ruefully.

“Thank you,” Short said, painfully, the words struggling their way out of his mouth like aged crawling things or pensioners.

“Don’t mention it,” Mercedes said sardonically. He already knew that Short was better off dead: once he had him in court for the shit he had pulled he would be going down for a very long time, and a man like Short wouldn’t last five minutes in the slammer before some big arse-loving gaylord had got him bent over in the showers, ramming it home for all he was worth. The thought of this was not an unpleasant one in Mercedes’ mind.

Suddenly a mass of towels and bed sheets and table cloths threw themselves at Mercedes, knocking him on to his front and pinning him to the ground. The gun went spinning out of his reach, towards the limp and useless Short. He was trapped there, with no means of escape. Where the hell was Granger when you needed him? he wondered. Probably on the john taking a shit, as per usual. He could see a large coloured towel with a picture of Scooby Doo on it making its way towards his neck, slinking slowly, deliciously, as though it were a beast savouring the moment of the kill. He looked around this way and that – not frantic, or in a panicked way, but as though he knew exactly what he was doing, as though he was waiting till the last possible moment – and then just as the towel was about to reach its target (his neck) he took in one last lungful of cigarette smoke from the cigarette that still clung gallantly to his lip.

“You see that sign there?” he said to the towel, still holding in the smoke, nodding towards the ‘No Smoking’ sign on the wall, “well I’m Detective Chief Inspector Wayne Mercedes of the Bolton CID and I don’t play by your rules.” And then with a vengeful smile on his face he blew the lungful of smoke out towards the ceiling, which set off the sprinkler system, which then doused all the bed linen and towels in clean, fresh water. Lancashire water, he mused. English water. The droplets of water hit their targets like an invasion of bombs and missiles and the towels were washed clean of the chemicals which had turned them into murderous beasts, leaving them limp and lifeless on the floor, just like normal towels again.

“You alright guv?” said Granger, rushing into the scene of carnage.

“Nothing a quick shower won’t cure,” Mercedes said, leaping to his feet. “Now get this son of a bitch out of here and in cuffs and let’s get the hell out of here. This is a day I want to forget for the rest of my life!”

Later that night, sitting in his favourite armchair and musing back on the events of the day Mercedes wondered just what the hell was in that chemical that could make towels come to life and murder people. One for the boffins in London, he said ruefully, smiling into his drink, or maybe we’ll never know. In any case, it wasn’t his job; his job was keeping the streets clean of scum like Short and all the other cost-cutting low-life immigrants who were putting the lives of innocent people at risk.

“There I go again,” he said, “but is anyone really innocent?”

He dropped another ice cube into his tumbler of whiskey and took a long hard drink.

Just then the phone rang. He knew it would be Granger.

“Sir, I’m sorry to bother you at this time but…it’s your wife.”

“My wife’s dead, Granger – or had you forgotten that?” He shook his head impatiently at the phone. Had the stupid bastard learned nothing?

“Not that one, sir, your ex,” he said, “she’s dead too. They found her with a mouthful of men’s socks – and some up her bum. She’d been suffocated to death. There was a box of Dazz by her bed.”

“Socks, you say?” Mercedes smiled, pouring himself another drink, “well there’s a turn up for the book.”