Sticks and Stones 16

I set up the system and kicked off the evening with Johnny Cash’s ‘A boy named Sue’ and Hawkwind’s ‘Orgone Accumulator’.
At ten, there were as many people in the bar, and the dishevelled little lot that were there weren’t there for the music. Four blokes at the bar huddled themselves around newspaper, cigarette-smoke and the effects of beer, while three couples sat drinking coffee in various parts of the room.
The bar’s vibe was the exact opposite of animation. There was nothing going on, and I felt worthless for a while.
Fred from the record shop popped by with his assistant, Benoit, to see me, so I put on the only real mix I felt happy with, Sting’s ‘Sister Moon’ with Grand Popo Football Club’s b-side of ‘Les hommes c’est pas des mecs bien’. I think they enjoyed it, even if I hashed it up quite badly.
Maf turned up with Jessica, a local girl from the old village, at eleven. It was her birthday and I’d promised her a good night-out. We looked around and there were now maybe only six or seven people in the whole place.
‘Mais c’est mort,’ she said. Her face looked like it had just seen an obese woman flash.
Lavaur was a ghost town. We looked out to the street, where a thick cotton bud of fog lay motionless, not a car or person in sight.
‘Mais c’est Samedi, merde!’ Maf said, holding his hands out in despair.
‘Mais, Lavaur, c’est mort,’ I said.
After a spliff in the car whilst a lengthy Johnny Rivers song droned on the decks inside, I said sorry to Jessica for dragging her out for nothing and they left quietly.
When I got back, a crowd of rowdy Nazi families had taken over the place. I got behind my decks and waited for someone to hit me.
They were in-breds from the Tarn, rugby and racism at the front and back of their minds, loud and ready to punch if things got lively. Francoise asked me to play a CD for them, so I obliged, but not before they had their own sing song, drowning out my music to feed the wailing nausea of their inherited delinquency. They made me feel sick, but there was nothing I could do about it. They ruled the place now.
A very stocky young man came over and told me to play the CD he gave me, so I obliged and his posse went wild, singing to the words angrily. Some people opened the door to come in but left as soon as they heard the in-breds, leaving me alone with them again. Francoise hadn’t noticed. She just kept on smiling at the idiots with the giraffes of beer, thinking only of cold lager and hard cash.
The whole charade killed the vibe so I put on the theme to Stingray, Killing Joke, Hawkwind, and anything else that might make them leave. But they loved it, so I put on a Hitler speech with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s ‘Squatter’ sketch mixed in, but that just made things worse. Their voices had become guttural and hoarse. Hatred was in the air.
I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it wasn’t about cricket and hockey sticks.
Benoit, the stocky lad with the butcher-boy neck and arms the size of a lamb’s legs, came back and scratched on one of my decks while I tried to play some soul mixed in with The Rescuers soundtrack. I told him to stop but he just kept on going at the vinyl with his dirty, rock hard fingers, half an eye on me and the other half on my decks, spitting whatever shit was coming out of his mouth.
I killed him with a knife to the larynx and now I’m in prison with a baby wailing for me with his mother biting off the cold chill of perpetual poverty back in Woking.
They put me in a nice prison but it’s for life, and I’ve nearly lost that four times since I’ve been here.
No, really. I just wanted to end it there in a fit of laziness. I still haven’t killed anyone but that night was dead on Saturday.
It’s now Tuesday night. I lost all four of my bets on Champions League footy and the cats have started shitting in the bathrooms. They are everywhere, and they are ruining my life. The kittens are one thing but their mother I hate with a passion. She’s taught them to eat off plates. I have tried smacking her but she’s worse than ever now. Zen needs to kick in, otherwise I’m going to kill her, and I can’t believe I just said that, but it’s true. Minx (the mother) is a wild cat who cares little for the health of young children and will eat whenever a plate is left undetected for more than a minute. She is the one who is making my life so unhappy and unmanageable at home.
With Hero, who has never laid a finger on her, she has always been hurtful and ugly, like the fat cat in Cinderella. She growls like a dog at him and stares him out, only to try and eat his food from under his nose.
Mitsi and Leila, Suzie’s two cats we brought over from England, she has single-handedly ousted them from the house. They are now outdoor cats, all because of Minx, who confronted them as enemies from the day she arrived as a kitten back in the village.
Whenever I feed Mitsi and Leila from the windows they have adopted as their own, Minx will try and leap through the window from inside to steal their food, and that’s when she’s been given twice as much as them. Mitsi and Leila are the cats I love, along with Tigger and Bambino, two of Minx’s offspring. The others are just rat-cats, thieves without manners, high-maintenance bad-luckers.