Side of the Almond

by John Rathbone Taylor

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Chapter 3: The Future became Orange — or Paradice Back Again by the End

Naked, I was moving slowly along, inside an automatic carwash. I was covering my doughnut holder with that hand-cupping gesture lined-up footballers use in penalty areas. The facility operator had gifted me a “Wash and Wheels” programme on condition she could watch. My bottom was being blasted by jet suds, my underpants were spinning on one of the wheel brushes, and my trousers were rotating on the overhead roller. It was a trying time, but I held back my tears until I reached the rinse programme so my voyeuse wouldn’t think I was a total drip.

Passing through the air dryer it struck me which way the wind was blowing: I was on a losing streak. I was beginning to list my losses when the carwash sequence stopped. An eerie silence descended, punctuated by water droplets from the rollers and jet nozzles plipping into the floor puddles.

Momsy and Daddo had finally done a runner. plip, plip.
I wouldn’t see the lovely orange sign of the Hospital for the Subliminally Unsame again. plip.
I’d suffered an anus horribilis. plop.
And I didn’t envisage cleaning my teeth with Daffy Duck any more. plip, plop.

I put my dry clothes on, together with the wet ones. I figured this was what growing up must be all about: living with one’s losses and taking the wet with the dry. To hell with Catalystic Calculationism, this was True Grit time. I had to head for the future and find my own way now. It was settled when I got this JohnWayne-Braingram: Take a wawlk son, and wait fer’a solushon.

I took the walk. For almost a year I kept it up, trudging along the paths and pavements of the big City. There was no home base or slumber land. I looked out for railings each night, hooked my coat on them and slept vertical. It was “Poor Git,” not True Grit time. And truly “Brad” but without the “r” and “Pitt” bit.

I knew the City had 5,110 streets. I borrowed a taxi driver’s Street Guide and counted through the index. My aim was to trudge 14 streets a day and cover them all in a year but, after eleven months I hadn’t done 3,000 yet. Hunger was my weakness. The only food available was people’s take-away leftovers or the scraps that deceasing animals shared with me, which I usually fetched up anyway. I had a sugar craving, but I learned that no marzipan heaven shines down on the socially extruded.

It wasn’t all bad. The walking and starving gave me the sports physique of Haile Gebrselassie instead of Giant Haystacks; the carwash girl introduced me to a memorable range of alternative body-moistening experiences; and a Persian hairdresser guy whose sick dog I was counselling insisted on giving me free monthly shaves and a film star haircut. But it was only a month before my thirty-first birthday and I was still walking and waiting for my “solution.” It came from an unexpected direction.

I was trudging past a sex shop one afternoon when who should step from its door into my path but Nekro Phil Yak! While on a D15 he’d sneaked away from the hospital to pick up some special items he’d ordered. Under his arm was a plain-wrapped box with what looked like a tyre pump taped to it. In his hand was a miniature pair of handcuffs, seal-packed. I figured it wasn’t my business to ask what was in the box. Nor was I keen to enquire about the little handcuffs. Thinking back to the incident with Whitedump, I dreaded what his answer might be!

But he continued: “Well, knock me out with a feather, Geronimo! Look at you — all slimmed down and sunburned, wearing tramp gear but sporting a snazzy haircut! What’s playing, man? You working for the Intelligence? Whoa, G baby, d’you get any terminally croaked homing pigeons?”

I told him in simple tense: “Are you seeing me, Nekro? I’m on a slider. I’ve had no marzipan for nearly a year. I’ve just been walking and sleeping upright all the time. My life’s stuck in manopause. I’m waiting for my solution.”

Nekro put his parcels down and took a drinking flask from his pocket. “I got your solution, G. Hold this and wait here.”

He ran to the delicatessen, which was next door to the sex shop. A minute later he was back with a bag of nuts and two sugar cubes. “Here you are, man. Stick a handful of these nuts in your munch-hole. Masticate, then add the sugars in.”

“Is this squirrel food?” I asked.

“They’re almonds you khohn-head! It’s almond paste and sugar that makes marzipan! Do what I say, then take a swig from that juice bottle. You’ll cream on this, man.”

The almonds were in my mouth before Nekro had finished his sentence. I bit on them and got the flavour hit immediately. The sugars made it truly gastronomical! I opened and swigged the contents of Nekro’s flask. I soused the lot and swallowed it.

A hot dagger down my throat! I let out a great belch followed by a sort of whinnying sound. I tried to speak. My mouth opened and my lips moved, but the sound came mostly out of my nose in a high-pitched nostril squeak. My eyes were watering and my ears went numb.

I had a second go and managed to say, “Nwot de nyuck iz iyn dat Neknyo?!”

“It’s a cocktail mix, Geronimo. Basically, LSD dissolved in Ribena cordial together with lighter fluid and a spot of glue solvent.”

I spluttered in horror: “Dyu zed it nwoz by ‘Zolushun’!”

“Solution... solvent... it’s the same thing, man.”

I couldn’t fully take in his words. My head was rolling and my torso arching backwards. I mimicked a wolf cry, then lost all control of my imagination.

* * *

I found myself scurrying along Long Street trying to shake off Familiar. Bastard kept getting the jump on me and greeting me with a scowl from every wing mirror. I didn’t want him to get to three figures, so I head-butted the ninety-seventh. Fitting that it was a Volvo.

Familiar saw it coming. He managed to grin from the mirror before it exploded and we both saw only red. But I’d already decoded my brain-gram complaint about boredom. Glassing my right eyeball out meant I could take the rest of my stroll on the dark side.

My hair hadn’t been growing long when I stumbled into Ali the Barber’s place. Bastard took one look at my socket and plugged some electric clippers into it. I was so shocked by this that I took a short course in ballet dancing and jeté’d myself into the barbecue. Some customers were running it down at the end of the queue for the barber.

I’d no appetite for meeting meat people, so I guessed I had a decision to make. Hmm, I thought, this ballet thing has made me kind of partial to altitude.

I saw Mustard, the hot dog, sitting on a pile of magazines, so I smacked the bastard off and read an article on flight theory. I’d just got to the bit about thrust overcoming drag and lift overcoming gravity when Familiar showed up again in the wall mirror with a cable hanging from his face. We both looked down and saw Mustard swinging by his mouth from the bottom of it.

I was, in that moment, inclined to seek scientific explanations for physical phenomena, but instead I deduced from my latest brain-gram that when violence overcomes pain and invention overcomes panic, something more akin to magic occurs.

What a fool I’d been not to think of this before!

I head-bowed then head-butted Ali the barber and jumped onto the little Persian carpet he always stood on but never allowed others to, while Timpson, my pet foot, kicked Mustard in his onion rings.

There was a short-backed schoolkid in one of the barber’s chairs with a pogo stick to one side of him and a circus stilt on the other. I flipped the kid’s fringe over his eyes and grabbed them. I told Timpson to start stamping like a maniac on the stick and I got Ruler, my other foot, to do rotations around the carpet like a mad thing on the stilt. Familiar started shouting something about “Abra’s” and “Dabra’s” while Ali screamed that I was about to bring the roof down!

Mustard stopped barking when I did.

Wasn’t it the Ancients who believed that science and magic were related, I thought, as the sky beckoned and I floated upwards on Ali the barber’s carpet? Well, as I passed over Aristo the Greek’s take-away, it was certainly an Olympian experience.

* * *

I awoke to find myself lying on a single bed in my underpants. A rehydration drip was connected to a cannula in my arm. I pulled it out and swivelled to a sitting position to look around me. I was in a small but high-ceilinged room. It had green walls and orange curtains, and Ali’s carpet lay on the floor alongside the bed.

I stood up, took the white top-sheet off the bed and wrapped it around me in skirt fashion. Then I pulled one of the curtains down and draped it over my left shoulder so it hung like a giant scarf down my back and my front.

Through the window I could see that I was on the first floor of a large building. A path leading from somewhere below me led across the obviously well-maintained gardens to an area where cars were parked. I could just see the top of a large orange sign at the outer entrance.

I realised a man was looking up at me from the darker part of the garden that butted into the corner of the building, away from the sunlight. He was leaning on a spade next to a dirt pile. He raised his left hand and gave me a sign with his middle finger. It was obviously a code signal. I was back at the Ashram.

The door opened behind me and in walked a young woman dressed in a figure-hugging white uniform. I thought I’d seen her face before but, for some reason, I felt I should check out her ankles. It was hard not to concentrate solely on her fulsome pair of bazookas. She stared first at my clothing, then at the rehydration stand, and lastly at the curtain rail.

I asked: “Who’s that mortal outside in a blue combat jacket and a police flat cap?”

“Oh, that’ll be Mr. Mentle,” she said. “He looks after the gardens and the car park. His first name’s Reg. You should thank him when you meet him. Last night he buried the dead dog they brought in with you.”

I wondered if she meant Mustard or Nekro.

“And how should I address you?” I asked.

“More or less as you please, Geronimo. ‘Sherry’, ‘Miss Chester’ or just plain ‘Nurse’.”

“Well, Moira Less,” I said, “first of all, I do not drink alcohol; second, I don’t miss Chester because I’ve never been there; and third, why would I want a plane nurse when I’m in a building? And may I inform you that I no longer answer to the name ‘Geronimo’. My title now is ‘His Holiness Sri Marzipananda’.”

She blinked. “That’s nice.”

As soon as I heard her utter these words my eyelids half-closed. My eyeballs crossed and rolled upwards underneath them. I samadhi’d inwards to a Blissgram: Rare are the ones who penetrate the Thatness of existence and comprehend it to be Nice. They who do are at one with you in the Ineffable.

With my eyes still closed, I reached forward and groped for the left shoulder and right tit of this darling angel. Gently, I pushed Moira Less to her knees before me. “Beloved disciple,” I said, “you may kiss my feet and make me an offering of marzipan. Then I will suckle you.”

She had some kind of bleeper gadget pinned to her uniform. She pressed it and a buzzer sounded in the corridor.

Then I heard the sound of heavy feet running. I felt boundless joy as I awaited my further followers.