Now that's what I call love -part 2

As he juddered in response to the shock waves that thundered through his body, one officer placed his knee over Corey’s head, grinding it into the tarmac, while the other two used their bodyweight to suck all but the life from Corey’s stomach.

‘Ow at’s ot I all ove,’ murmured Corey. ‘At’s oney ite air.’

‘Remain silent!’ shouted the fashionable officer into Corey’s ear with a fair amount of spittle.

Meanwhile, two female officers were tending to Mary, who was faking having passed out on the pavement. She’d hoped to get at least a bit of work in before finding a reasonable excuse to claim for compensation, but this opportunity was far too good to pass over. As the female officers tried to revive her, she dreamt of the long drawn out legal case that would ensue from her horrible ordeal. Numbers drifted into her head. Forty thousand and two years’ paid leave, six million and a lifetime’s worth of chocolate. After a suitably prolonged few moments, she acted as if she’d come to.

‘What happened? Where am I? Wha..’ she said, her eyes darting this way and that as the female officers attempted to calm her with softly spoken words of ‘It’s OK, you’re alright’ and ‘he’s been apprehended. We’ve tasered him’ and ‘it’s all sorted, just stay calm and breathe deeply, Mary’.

By this time, the road had been cordoned off by two other vans, flashing lights whirling silently at either end to stop passers by and traffic from contaminating the raucous crime scene.

The effects of the taser and the various bodies pinning him to the ground hadn’t deterred Corey. In a state of unrivalled bliss, thoughts of insurmountable love for his aggressors strengthened as they spat expletives and threats into his ears.

‘Right,’ said the fashionista. ‘We’re going to ease off you so you better not try anything, understand?’

Corey, with his face pressed into the shards of gritty tarmac, managed ‘es’ so the officers eased their grip on him a tad. The two officers on his stomach and legs slowly got up, standing over him ominously, ready to pounce if he so much as flinched.

The fashionista took Corey’s neck in a hold and wrenched him up. ‘Try anything and I’ll hospitalize you, got it?’ he spat into his eyes. Corey obeyed as best he could. All he could feel was love.

Once up, he was bundled into the van by the officers and sped off to the police station. An ambulance arrived for Mary, who was doing a fabulous job to feign understanding of what had happened and how she came to be there. ‘This is my first day as an officer,’ she cried into the shoulder of a colleague as six officers and two ambulance crew heaved her onto a stretcher. When they lifted her up, the stretcher shattered under her weight, throwing her to the ground again. She could hardly contain her laughter, which she muffled it into a lengthy, hideous screech that curdled the blood of the helpers that surrounded her.

After four botched attempts to remove her from the pavement, it was decided that the only way to get her to hospital was with the aid of a forklift truck and a queen-sized mattress. As time was deemed of the essence to save her (her breathing had ebbed to a set of crafty, low whimpers), a helicopter was called out, but when it landed the captain took one look at the mountainous Mary and shook his head to indicate that the ‘copter wouldn’t be able to take off if she was on it.

In the end, she was transferred from one queen sized mattress to another, spread across the forklift truck and whisked off to hospital at six miles an hour in a seven-vehicle procession to avoid any further mishap, causing a two-hour traffic jam stretching from Wandsworth to Richmond.

Back at the station, Corey stood manacled to a set of iron rings in the waiting room as an Alsatian growled angrily at his feet while the officers took a well earned tea, sandwich and porn break. Once they’d leered and licked their lips sufficiently, normal service resumed as the fashionista stomped off resentfully to join Corey in the waiting room.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m going to take your manacles off but if you make any sudden movements, you’ll regret it.’

Corey smiled the most beautiful smile, minus a few teeth, and said, ‘Now that’s what I call love’.

The fashionista huffed. ‘Why the fuck do you keep saying that? Can’t you see you’re in serious trouble?’

The station manager made himself known with a lengthy fart. ‘Just bring him over here and let’s get him written up, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Yes, sarge,’ said the fashionista, smiling a wry smile at Corey as he unlocked him from the wall.

‘So, what’s the charge, officer Bootle?’ yawned the sarge, picking at some ham sinew between his teeth with the edge of a torn Rizla packet.

‘Assault on a community officer, sarge. Female, first day in the job. She’s in hospital with concussion and a suspected broken pelvis.’

‘Nasty,’ said sarge, turning to Corey with fresh interest. ‘You do understand the seriousness of these allegations, don’t you, sir?’ he asked.

Corey nodded, feeling a pain in his jaw for the first time since having it broken by the fashionista at the scene of the crime.

‘Yesh,’ he said, unable to move his jaw enough to speak properly.

‘So, what happened?’ asked the sarge, bemused by Corey’s calm demeanour.

‘I approached the large lady and tried to give her a hug.’

The sarge laughed. ‘There must be more to it than that, sir. She was giving you a ticket for parking in a loading bay.’

‘That doesn’t concern me,’ said Corey. ‘You see, I am the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, your saviour. I saw a sadness in the large lady’s eyes and I wanted to comfort her.’

The sarge nodded wearily. ‘OK,’ he said, looking over to Bootle with wonky eyes.

He made a note of Corey’s details to satisfy procedural requirements and then ordered the fashionista to place him in a cell.

After news arrived that Mary had died in hospital from respiratory problems/ projected excitement, the sarge decided that Corey would need to appear in court the next day. With the police rumour mill flooding the station, the fashionista saw an opportunity to make a little extra on the side and called his media contact to let him know that a rather strange chap who reckoned he was the second coming would be standing in court under oath in connection with the mysterious death of a female community officer.

The sarge called through to his crack team of surveillance experts in the CCTV room to analyse the footage in order to find evidence of a violent assault to pin on Corey, but all they could see was a man with his arms held out to a massive, red-faced woman who appeared to be screaming into her walkie-talkie for help. The surveillance team had only called out back-up because Corey had swiped the walkie-talkie, which was the property of the police, for which he could be given a fixed-term prison sentence. The recorded conversations between themselves, Mary and Corey were an embarrassing add-on to this unseemly incident (especially the team leader’s referral to Mary as a fat twat) and would no doubt cast the force in a bad light, so all audio recordings were promptly erased.

Hoping for some light to be shed on the debacle, the sarge went across to the CCTV room to check on progress. He questioned the whereabouts of the audio and the team leader explained that it had been inexplicably erased. The sarge raised his voice and ordered him to retrieve it but when he was told the reason why it had inexplicably disappeared, he called them a bunch of fuckwits and stormed out.

Video evidence provided no answers to why Mary had fallen in a heap at the rear of the Maestro. The experts suspected foul play. Quizzical grins, morose humming and slo-mo nods marked the case as one where justice might have to take a back seat, or just plain fuck off. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the incident; covering tracks to protect the force was their main concern, apart from nabbing drivers for parking tickets. 

As the farce unfolded, Corey’s GP was made aware of the situation and so she hurried down to the station to make it known that Corey was a vulnerable person with a history of severe mental illness. While the sarge listened, he couldn’t help feeling relieved to hear of Corey’s dubious character. Unfortunate as it was, his ailment would cast aspersions that the media would be only too happy to exploit in order to sell copies and exonerate the force of any wrongdoing.

The GP went to see Corey in his cell and found that he had indeed broken his jaw and would need immediate surgery. An ambulance was resentfully called by the sarge, who ordered his best officer to accompany them to hospital to give the impression that Corey was already guilty in the eyes of the law.

Once there, Corey was stripped down to his holey Spongebob Squarepants boxer shorts and given a full-body x-ray, which brought to light four missing teeth, three broken ribs, a broken jaw in two places and a bone chip to his right knee.

The officer in attendance called in. ‘It looks bad, sarge,’ he said, listing the injuries suffered at the hands of the fashionista and his henchmen.

The sarge pondered, grating a cuticle's circumference with a molar. He’d failed to look carefully into the actions of the officers as they apprehended Corey in the middle of the road –that was police work– but when he returned to the CCTV room and watched as the taser was administered and the three officers piled into him with vicious, taut expressions, he put his hands over his face and sighed, longing for his retirement to be brought forward. Judging by what he was watching, retirement seemed a distant dream as indictment loomed large in his fleabrain.

To add to his woe, it transpired that Mary had confessed to a nurse just before her death that she had not been assaulted by Corey. Under the influence of some lovely drugs to steady her, she hadn’t been aware that she uttered this admittance, but it didn’t matter; the nurse was adamant that this revelation be made known to the police. A local hack had managed to see her, too, and she’d told him of Mary’s last few words.

Hours later, the sarge shook his head as he read the hack’s email (with a working title of ‘Jesus Freak Accident’) seeking his authorization before publishing the story in the local paper, to which he gave strict instructions not to publish until the police had made a full and correct assessment of the incident.

In a state of confused befuddlement, he ran back to the CCTV room and ordered the team leader to erase the video evidence immediately.

After four hours under the knife, Corey’s condition stabilized and he was placed in a ward for recovery. The sarge wondered if he might reel in a favour from the hospital’s administrator, a budding mason, but when he looked into the fellow’s records it appeared that he was also a devout Christian with impeccable standing. He’d be hard to turn, he thought, but what other option did he have? Maybe he could convince the chap that Corey saw himself as Jesus Christ and needed to be punished for his sins, or something like that.

No, thought the sarge, I’ll pin this on Bootle. The fashionable officer’s actions would have to be made public. The other two officers would be cleared without too much trouble. Racing back to the CCTV room, he found that the footage still hadn’t been wiped and gave the team leader strict instructions not to erase it, especially the parts where Bootle had used undue force on Corey. 

When the chief of police at Scotland Yard got wind of his plan, she called him and the sarge was told to take a seat. Gemma Foolscap, the newly appointed ex-equality guru, screamed down the phone at him, which relieved her heinous period’s aches and pains momentarily.

‘What the fuck are you going to do about this, sargeant Christie?’ she said.

Before he had time to respond, she spoke again. ‘I tell you what you’re going to do – you’re going to see that Jesus Christ wanker strung up good and proper, understood?’ The sarge whimpered compliance like a beaten dog. ‘No officer of mine is going to take the blame for a nutjob, and especially not officer Bootle. I know him personally as it happens so don’t even think about implicating him. He introduced me to my hairdresser, who happens to be Madonna’s vajazzler. Now fuck off and get on with it!’

Plodding back to the CCTV room, the sarge walked in and told them to erase the footage once and for all.

‘Make your mind up, chief,’ said the team leader.

‘I had it made for me, by the chief of police, so you better get on and do it.’

The team scurried around, fearful for their jobs, projecting thoughts of homelessness for their families and no more pizza nights on Fridays as they collated all footage and erased it to the bottomless pit of unprotected metadata.

With news agencies sternly forewarned not to feature the incident in any way other than that stated by the police commission, the local hack was given exclusive rights to the story so long as he complied with the lawful wishes of the force and followed protocol. To sway his moral compass, he was offered a wee sweetener, but only once he was reminded of the consequences his actions would incur were he to take some sort of high ground.

The nurse that Mary spoke to on her death bed was suspended indefinitely on full pay after it was found that she’d neglected basic standards of care in the dressing of a wound on the arm of an elderly woman. Sworn to secrecy, she developed a pathological attachment to internet bingo and spent her days at home, slowly losing her marbles.

For a full year after the incident, the Wandsworth Gazette published various updates on the progress of the police report, which became more and more confusing, citing Corey as a violent aggressor with severely delusional personality traits. Jesus wasn't mentioned, but Mary was cast as the hardworking copper who died of gastric-band related trauma after falling from a shattered stretcher on her first day at work.

Her compensation lawyers were brought up to speed, paid off and instructed to be seen to be working tirelessly to assess a fitting sum for her relatives to remember her by, while Corey was told to keep his mouth shut unless he wanted to come to a gruesome end.

Placed on a thumping cocktail of mostly morphine-based drugs, he had neither the will or the energy to do battle with the authorities once he was sectioned, but after successfully completing traetment and returning home for bouts of sustained intimidation from neighbours, community health workers, institutional leaders and bored police officers, his condition stabilized and he was placed back on his previous cocktail of drugs.  

He felt happy in the knowledge that the day would come when once again he would rise to his life’s truest challenge. This time, though, he would give Nicholas the matchsticks for Jesus' eyes before going out to do his bidding.