The Storymaker (Part Seven)

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

Predictably enough, Gordon was furious. He wanted to find his missus, wherever she was, and pour his heart out to her. He went to the foot of the stairs and called her name, but as he suspected she wasn't in the house – just lately she disappeared for a couple of hours most evenings. He couldn't even phone her, because the land line accepted incoming calls only since Sally Anne's last economy drive a few months back, and he hadn't charged his mobile for ages. Shit, he couldn't even remember where he'd left the frigging thing.

Then he thought about taking the advice of his conscience to the extreme. He considered unplugging the computer, dragging it outside and smashing it to bits on the front yard with old Mrs. Perkins across the road smaning at his actions through her grubby net curtains, no doubt. “No,” he said. “That's rash, it's unnecessary. It's also pretty stupid, it's the sort of thing fuck-face would want me to do. I might be a lot of things, Mr. Mozzarella, but I'm not stupid.”

XYZ tales had a chat function, Gordon remembered. He had never actually used it, apart from a couple of futile attempts when, in the heat of the moment he tried to give the Buffalo a piece of his mind over some insult or other, but on those occasions the cowardly bastard invariably sneaked offline because he didn't have the guts to talk to the Storymaker face to face, or as near face to face as possible without a web-cam.

“Maybe today will be different,” Gordon mumbled as he fiddled with the unfamiliar chat bar, flicking through the menu to see if his dear friend was still online. “Maybe this time the twat will have the bollocks to talk to me – surely he owes me that much.” He didn't immediately spot the name he was looking for as he scrolled through the twenty or so people using the chat function, but that was because it was listed under Frankie Buffalo Mozzarella. Gordon clicked on the name and a new window opened in the top left hand corner of the screen, a live video feed, he assumed, but the screen was blank and a little icon was spinning laboriously at its centre. “Come on, baby!” Gordon encouraged his elderly computer. “You can do it, I know you can - my daughter installed lots of lovely updates for me the last time she was here.” He clicked on the full screen option to see if that would make any difference, and then his enemy was smiling at him as if butter wouldn't melt in her comely mouth.

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“Fucking bitch!” Gordon thought and grunted and tried to type in the box at the bottom of the screen in the exact same instant. The explosion of angst in his mind was clear and vivid and indescribably lovely, and he was so besotted with its violent beauty he had no idea that his fingers had typed a meaningless jumble of characters.

“Trying to type your grievances isn't necessary, my dear,” the impossibly appealing woman on the screen said in a deep, husky voice, flicking back her long, shiny black hair and teasing her full, blood red lips with the tip of her tongue. “Just talk to me, you useless, dick-gobbling shit. I can see and hear you, and I know that you can see and hear me just as clearly, thanks to the wonders of modern technology.”

“I haven't got a web-cam, you cheesy, Buffalo faced whore,” Gordon replied, realising at once the flimsiness of the insult. “Though I can see you, you can't possibly see me. This computer cost seventy five quid - it's a seriously outdated bit of tat worth a fraction of that amount, so I can't see it having any such thing. What sort of name is Frankie Buffalo Mozzarella for a bloody woman, anyway?”

“You're wrong, you fuckless little has-been – I'm referring to your first quandary, by the way - and I'll prove it to you.

You're in a small, tidy room with pale terracotta walls. There's a faded print of Constable's Haywain hanging slightly sceewiff on the wall behind you which, as it happens, reminds me of your troubled mind. You keep clumsily knocking that picture off centre while you're fiddling with your over-numerous dictionaries and thesauruses, phrase books and quotation compilations on the cluttered shelf beneath it - tomes that fail to measurably improve your vacuous writing much, sadly – and it drives your better half batty because she can't bear to see the picture hanging anything but perfectly level.

Below the shelf I spy a China cabinet full of cheap junk. Some of it, I guess, belonged to your departed mother, and the remainder is the crap your wife's still living mother burdened you with shortly after your marriage. There's a huge Mother-in-law's tongue on the windowsill to your right, but I can only see a couple of its long, glossy leaves because you have the curtains almost drawn. I believe there's one of those cheap blown glass fish on the windowsill too, but I can only make out the tip of its tail.

Your desk lets the general neatness of the room down, Gordon, it's a proper mess. Shit, how many dirty mugs do you have on there, you mucky pup? I also spy a can of lager. Naughty naughty..... So that's that settled, now you know I can see you. Maybe the dealer who sold you the computer was as dim as you, sunshine - maybe he was just as incapable of registering the bleeding obvious.

Oh, and in answer to your second question, Frankie is a unisex name. As for Buffalo Mozzarella, well, that's my name. Or at least it's the name I'm currently using, just as the name you are using is Gordon Ashcroft. What more do you want me to say?”

“OK, so I have a web-cam, but that's immaterial,” Gordon yelled. “What's your bloody game? What do you think you're playing at, ridiculing me and fucking me around in front of the entire world? Why me, that's all I want to know. What have I done to deserve the shit you've thrown at me over the last few months?”

“What have you done to deserve it? What haven't you done, that would be an easier question to answer. Don't think I've forgotten about the iniquities you committed way back when in the name of your Dark Lord back on Venus, my boy. Don't say you don't remember your pre-Earth history because I know very well that you do. The clues are all in your stories. Well, subtle hints of them are..... I realise that's all in the distant past as far as you're concerned, I know that the frail mind you're using on an indefinite loan categorises the majority of bygones as bygones and eventually does its best to forget about even the worst recent insults, but that's not our way. And it doesn't mean that you don't have to pay for your crimes. You're my prisoner, Gordon, or Essalia, to use your real name. Don't look at me blankly like that, I know very well you remember your name - you were fool enough to lend it to your Venusian mega-hero, remember?”

I see, Ms. Mozzarella,” Gordon sighed. “You're either a genius at the art of messing people around for no apparent reason or you're a nut-job. You're a nut-job, aren't you? You're a former long term secure unit inmate, a bloody lunatic released into the community by the criminally incompetent Mental Health Act. I might have known, it's the only explanation that makes the slightest bit of sense.”

“Nut-job?” Frankie said, lighting a cigarette with a gold coloured lighter and exhaling twin columns of smoke from her nostrils, an action that Gordon had always found curiously arousing in a woman, though he hated the smell of cigarettes and he bullied Sally Anne into stopping while they were courting. He didn't intend to let an ogress like the Buffalo turn him on, though, so he quickly averted his gaze. “Right, that's it,” Frankie snapped. “I was going to be reasonably gentle with you, I was intending to give you the mental equivalent of a sharp slap on the wrists, but you can forget that, seeing as you insist on being so rude. I've changed my plans; now I intend to drop the full weight of my wrath on your worthless head, preferably from a great height. One by one I'm going to tear away the calloused mental shields you've erected over the centuries to protect your pitiful mind, and then you'll see the truth of your plight instead of hiding behind the Storymaker and, in turn, behind Gordon Ashcroft, a selfish, misogynistic nobody. That reality will probably turn your human brain into something resembling chicken soup, but no matter - there are plenty more vessels that we can slip you into for the remaining five hundred or so years of your sentence if we bugger up this one.”

“What the hell are you on about, five hundred years? What sentence, you bloody fruit and nut cake? You're stark, raving bonkers.”

“Look me in they eye and say that, captive.”

“Would you mind explaining, madam, what your warped mind thinks I'm guilty of?”

“You committed four insanities and crimes against the soul,” Frankie said, a smile playing on her luscious lips.

“You've pinched that directly from a Stranglers song. You must think I'm an idiot. 'Grip,' the ditty is called. 'Committed four insanities and crimes against the soul, but the worst crime that I ever did was play some rock and roll.'”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Frankie replied. “I'm simply reading out what it says on your rap sheet. Tut-tut. You don't have many redeeming features in your Earthly manifestation, Storymaker, but you're a little angel compared to your psychic doppleganger. He's a very nasty piece of work, he's committed atrocities that would make a seasoned Nazi death camp commander blush. Or you're a nasty piece of work, I should say, because to all intents and purposes Essalia and yourself are one and the same. No wonder you were sentenced to three thousand years in the harshest prison camp in the galaxy.....”

“Fuck off and die, you venomous though, I grudgingly admit, rather attractive serpent. Go and slither across the M6, why don't you? I think you ought to know that I originally intended to use the word 'cunt' to describe you just then, but on a whim I replaced it with 'serpent' at the last moment. How about a nice, thoughtful critique of that literary decision?”

“Do as you're told, Essalia, you know it make sense. And don't even think about referring to me as a cunt, I don't like it.”

“But you are a cunt, you cunt! You're a venemous, cunt-faced, cunty-looking fucking viper.” Gordon looked at the woman on the screen. Just for a second, he told himself, not because she was ordering him to do so, heaven forbid, rather because he wanted – no, he desperately needed to watch her smoke.

'Call me slow if you must, but I'm not entirely sure if this creature is a woman,' the little voice in his head told him. 'You know what I'm going to say next, don't you, Twatty? Not that it'll make the slightest bit of difference, it's too late for that, but I'll say it anyway – that thing is entirely beyond my experience, but I sure as hell don't like it. It's not human. And it's not nice.....'

“Ha! What a silly thought,” Gordon told himself aloud. “Of course cunty's a woman, and she's obviously human. What else could she be?”

Frankie's eyes were an unusually deep blue, as deep as the blue of a summer sky at twilight, as deep as the blue of the Caribbean sea just before sunset that Gordon looked down on almost every evening for a solid month from the hotel balcony in Barbados while he was on honeymoon with Sally Anne a long, long time ago. Happy days, he mused, horny days, permanent fucking hard-on days. Shit, he could feel his cock stiffening now, but all thoughts of Sally Anne's magnificent physical delights before her figure was ruined by the rigours of childbirth had already exited his mind. Frankie drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled. She smiled and licked her bleeding lips, then she drew on the cigarette and exhaled again, and that was about it. Gordon's ridiculous smoking fetish ceased to matter at that point, because he had been swallowed whole by the Buffalo's sexy voice and her bleeding lips and her deep, watery, float away in the darkening sky and come home to mummy eyes.