ex - I'm every woman

 

 

Daniel sprinted out through the buxom gates of The Cart just as a javelin flashed past the tip of his nose and buried itself in the bonnet of a passing delivery van. School sports day was well underway and with the commencement of the field events the body count amongst pupils and teachers was already into double figures. Still breathing hard, his running vest tattooed with a Jackson Pollock like melange of blood and vomit Daniel stepped out into the road only to see a 1974 Austin Allegro bearing down upon him with earth searing velocity. 

 

‘This is it then’ thought Daniel. Again. 

 

The driver of the vehicle began breaking in a way which suggested he had forgotten that servicing this ‘turbo charged death trap’ had ceased to be a priority for a dozen or so years, leaving it unroadworthy to a degree that was almost capricious. As the little boy in the windscreen grew ever larger and his feet took root in the North London tarmac the car slewed from side to side like a crack addicted ferret on the Cresta Run before coming to rest 5 millimeters from the end of Daniel’s chin in a slew of rubber and braking fluid. .

 

The passenger door swung open slowly in a manner which was intended to be intimidatory before coming off its hinges completely and falling into the road. 

 

“Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks” said M demonstrating once again the dazzling  lexicon of his vocabulary. He dislodged his guts from behind the steering wheel using the industrial wrench he stored below the driver’s seat for that purpose, walked around the front of the vehicle which was currently wearing his son like a hood ornament , picked up the car door, carefully reattached it to the rotting carcass of the car and stood back to admire his work. He was truly a craftsman. 

 

The door instantly fell off. 

 

M was if nothing else an officer of the law and demonstrating that he fully appreciated the role of the police force in society he Frisbeed the car door into a the path of an oncoming mobility scooter peeled his son from the bonnet, deposited him in the passenger seat and  drove off. 

 

--

 

Daniel watched the central crash barrier of the M25 pass by with alarming briskness and proximity from the doorless passenger seat of the Austin Allegro. He mustered the remaining crumbs of faith in his father into a tiny pile and clung to the frayed seatbelt which separated him from eternity. 

 

“Why are you driving this way down the motorway dad?” Asked Daniel with practiced caution.

 

“Since when have you become the expert on how to drive?” Replied M swerving out  of the path of an onrushing articulated Lorry, narrowly missing a hearse, causing a taxi to smash through the central reservation before he returned the Austin Allegro to the fast lane and accelerated to 100mph.

 

“I just thought that...it just seems to me....all the other cars are travelling in the opposite direction and so.....”

 

“Fuck the other cars Daniel” screamed M “don’t think like a sheep, think like a wolf. 

 

“A wolf who is driving the wrong way down the M25” muttered Daniel.

 

M was sweating so profusely that his police tunic had adhered to him like a wet suit. He inserted an anthrax riddled cassette of ‘Chaka Khan’s “I’m every woman.” and began to make the exact noise that an alpaca makes when it is playing ladies and gentlemen’s tea parties with another alpaca’s jimmy jangles.  

 

“Whatever you want,

Whatever you need,

Anything you want done, baby,

I'll do it naturally.” Howled M as he scooted his car around an Albanian Juggernaut which had safely negotiated the 2,549.9 km trip from Tirana but now found itself doing a wheelie just outside the Clacket Lane Services before entering a drive through MacDonald's at 85 mph. 

 

“Cause I'm every woman.” 

 

Thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp

 

Daniel looked up into the cruel blue sky of a world which had forgotten how to intervene, as a police helicopter hovered incredulously overhead.

 

“It's all in me. It's all in me, yeah!”

 

---

 

Christopher Winstanley-Stanley had an exceptionally small penis,  luxuriant but wirey armpit hair which made him creak, pendulous buttocks which slapped together when he moved and a habit of ending every sentence with a dying badger-like snort. He was however peerless in the realm of quantum gravitational physics, logical positivism and all that sort of bollocks. So it was that Christopher and his tiny penis found themselves tootling out of his nasty little flat in Tonbridge to present a lecture at Croydon College which he had hastily titled “the quantum nature of black holes,  Big Bang singularity and other shit.”

 

Just over 15 minutes into his journey Christopher Winstanley-Stanley noticed what appeared to be a 1974 Austin Allegro headed in his direction at wondrous  speed. He calculated that a head on collision would occur in less than 2.356 seconds unless he was able to create a series of the tiniest of quantum fluctuations which would minutely alter the course of his vehicle. ‘The key is understanding the dynamics of exotic quantum matter and correlated electron systems and applying it to holographic duality’ thought Winstanley-Stanley, wobbling his steering wheel with the kind of wobbles that only a master of gravitational physics would have thought possible but which actually made absolutely fuck all difference to anything. 

 

“Shitetoads” screamed Christopher Winstanley-Stanley as the side of his car was hit by the  police helicopter the propellers of which had been discouraged from turning by the motorcycle that passed through them having been launched into the sky by an exploding oil tanker. 

 

Daniel watched the carnage unfold in the rear view mirror.

 

“This is my childhood dad,” said Daniel.

 

“Childhood isn’t a right, it’s a privilege which you lost on the day you were born” said M.

 

---

 

“This is the end of Ramsgate pier,” said M, pointing out of the window of the stationary car. 

 

“Why?” Asked Daniel, not without just cause.

 

“Because I intend to drive off the end of the pier and kill both of us,” replied M without turning his head to look at his son.

 

“I see” said Daniel, not seeing. “Why?”

 

“Why?” said M as if this was not a question that had crossed his mind previously. 

 

M adjusted the wing mirror so that he could see his face. He did not recognize the man who was looking back at him. He gradually released the handbrake of the car, which rolled towards the railings where a man was fishing. 

 

“On the day I discovered your mother was pregnant” said M “I read a bedtime story to Saul. In the story a little boy dreams of imitating the wings of a bird and learning how to fly. One night  the boy hears a voice singing his heart and he follows it out into space, where the stars link arms and dance to the echo of worlds. Gradually he lets go of everything that is a child until he is nothing but interstellar dust.’

 

Daniel looked at his father whose eyes were beaded with tears and began to move his hand towards a giant leather gloved paw.

 

“And now I’m going to kill us,” said M, pulling his hand away as if he had been stung by a jellyfish. 

 

But the car was not moving because the fisherman had leant in and put the handbrake back on. 

 

M grabbed the fisherman by his throat. He could see the man was elderly, he knew he could have snapped his neck with a single movement but it was apparent from the fisherman’s eyes that he did not care. 

 

“Time to take your little boy home,” said the fisherman. 

 

“He’s not my little boy,” said M, letting go of the old man’s neck. 

 

But the man staring back from his wing mirror told him that he was.