Fighting the urge to drop his trousers and moon the lot of them, Spencer did what any of us would have done in that situation.  He drove the forklift around in circles in the vain hope that he’d be on telly later.  Didn’t work of course, apparently the sound guy started bitching and they all went inside.

“But not before I heard what they were up to,” Spencer tapped the side of his now-empty glass.

Geoff nodded and poured him another.  “This better be good, Spencer.”

Spencer sipped and grinned.

“So they’ve finally defrosted them,” he said with some finality.

“There’s a good chance I’m going to punch you, I hope you realise,” said Geoff.

And so Spencer laid it all out.  The whisky. Shackleton’s whisky had been buried in ice at the South Pole or thereabouts for the best part of a century after being left behind by an expedition.  Shackleton’s expedition.

“Some chancers came along, dug it out and defrosted it.  They’ve got three bottles of the stuff at the brewery.  And tonight, my friends, we’re going to go in there and drink the fucking stuff.”

I shook my head.  Geoff shook his head.  There was no way either of us was going to let this happen.

*

“You’ve got to ease it open.” Spencer had lost the ability to control the volume of his voice three drinks ago.

It was around the same time my resolve had waned.

“Shhh,” said Geoff.  Louder than Spencer.

Geoff’s eyes widened as he stared at the steam from his breath.  He raised an eyebrow.  I swear he was two drinks away from saying ‘hic’ at the end of each sentence.

Of course I was a great deal soberer.  Oh yes.

Many times more the soberest I was.

There was a clang as the door burst open and a clinking of bottles as Spencer fell inside.  It had seemed reasonable at the time that we’d need more booze.  Especially if we were only going to have a taste.  So Spencer had stopped off and got each of us a bottle of the cheapest blended whisky known to man.  Proper tramp fuel. The kind that just had a white label with WHISKY printed on it in big red capital letters.

Spencer raised an index finger and placed it over his pursed lips then pointed it at us.

“Just a taste, remember,” I said, closing the door behind us.

Getting in the room that held the stuff wasn’t difficult.  Wasn’t even locked.  We just walked in and there, against the wall on the far side of the room were three bottles held in place by three miniature scaffolds.  In the top of each bottle was a long syringe needle that connected to a tube that in turn connected to a syringe.  All put together to delicately draw the whisky out of the bottles and into…

“Glasses?”  I said.

“Eh?” said Geoff, staring at me and trying to process the meaning of the word.

“We haven’t got any glasses.  We can’t drink hundred year old hooch out of a mug can we?”

“Hang on,” said Spencer and handed us the bags he had been carrying.  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

And off he lurched.  Out of the door and out of sight, the sound of him staggering into things getting further away until I couldn’t hear it any more.  Geoff and I stood in silence, swaying slightly.

The silence didn’t last long.  Out in the warehouse there was a noise.  The noise of a forklift starting up.  Then the noise of Spencer’s manic laughter.  Then the engine struggling, whining as Spencer pushed it forward.  And then the thud as, for reasons that still remain unclear to this day, the forklift hit a wall.

There’s a point of drunkenness when the very fabric of space and time distort.  The beer taxi.  It’s when great swathes of time pass and you find yourself safe at home with no recollection of the journey.

This was pretty much the opposite of that. In the movies they call it ‘bullet time’ – a similar distortion of reality as the beer taxi.  But in reverse.  Oh yeah, it looks all cool in The Matrix but try that shit after you’ve had a skin-full and it just makes you want to puke.

So Geoff and me went into bullet-time.  The thin partition wall bounced forward and knocked the three little scaffolds, toppling them into a horizontal position.  We dived toward the bottles but Geoff’s legs weren’t ready and he toppled, bursting his nose open on a stool as he crashed towards the floor.  My eyes jumped back to the bottles, their stoppers popping out and hundred year old whisky flowing floor-ward.

I did what anyone would have done in that situation.  I grabbed a mug and tried to catch some.

Spencer hobbled sheepishly back into the room, rubbing his neck as bullet-time stopped and drunk-time resumed.  He looked at Geoff, now sitting, clutching his nose.  He looked at the three empty bottles sat on the bench.  And he looked at me, gently sipping from a chipped mug with the name ‘Beryl’ painted on the side.

“What’s it like?” said Geoff.

I nodded, smiled, took another slug, then offered it to Geoff.

“I’ve got some coke in this bag if you like,” said Spencer.

And so, between sips, we came up with a plan.

One by one we righted the scaffolds and one by one, like three drunken chemistry professors we transferred the contents of the three bottles of the cheapest blended whisky known to man. The proper tramp fuel.  We filled the hundred-year-old bottles with two-year-old shit and we put everything back the way we thought it had been.

“Those master distillers will be in for a treat in the morning,” Spencer said as he locked the door behind us, the empties clinking in his carrier bag.

And then we caught the beer taxi home.

‘Fucking hell, Charlie. Your ear’s bleeding!’

‘What? Oh my God!’

Charlie passed out before I reached him. As I approached his crumpled body I could see the widening crimson patch seeping through the fibre of his t-shirt. I gagged, I admit it. I doubled over, my hands grabbing my knees and my eyes closed. An icy sweat climbed up my back and as I opened my eyes I could see a chunk of Charlie’s ear lying a couple of feet away.

Becoming a victim of a stray nail from a careless carpenter’s nail gun changed Charlie. The realisation that if the nail had been two inches to the left he could have lost an eye, or worse. He had been working as a bricklayer on a couple of contracts with me, and would never wear a hard-hat, instead preferring his own brand of lax sloppiness. Now he slept in the fucking thing. Losing half an ear will do strange things to a man.

A few weeks later we had a job laying foundations. Me and Charlie were on a break and without any warning, he was catapulted backwards across the site in a puff of masonry dust.

For a moment I just stared at the space he had just occupied. There were little specs of dust floating downwards. It was then my mind began processing the accompanying noise.

It had sounded like someone shooting a jelly with a shotgun and then a split second later a sledgehammer hitting a porcelain toilet.

Everyone knows that bones break when they’re hit too hard, they’re weak under extreme pressure and can splinter and break as easily as twigs.

Bones, however, are not dead wood. Every cell in your body is constantly being replaced by new living tissue and your bones are no different. At the hospital later that day I was surprised when the Doctor told me that the pelvis is made up of three bones that grow together as people age; the ilium, ischium and pubis. On each side of the pelvis there is a hollow cup, the acetabulum which serves as a socket for the hip joints.

I turned to look behind me. Charlie lay, a concrete block embedded between his splayed legs, separating his ilium from his ischium and his pubis from his acetabulum. The Doctors later told me his hips had both been pushed out of socket as his pelvis shattered.

It got worse.

His poor mangled pelvis had absorbed the majority of the blow and had cracked just like the breaking porcelain toilet sound which had echoed around the building site. It troubled me all the way to the hospital when I found out what the other sound was.

It is a fairly well known fact in most circles that if a man is kicked between the legs then the results will be pain, shock, confusion and sometimes even nausea. Kick hard enough and you can tag vomiting and an inability to walk to the list. The blood vessels which supply the testicles through the hole in the middle of the pelvis will burst and begin to bleed internally into the scrotum.

If, for arguments sake, a large concrete block swings loose and strikes you between the legs Doctors will tell you that a testicular rupture may occur. This is when the testicle is compressed against the pubic bone with such force that the testicle is crushed against the bone and as Charlie lay there, passed out and vomiting I could feel my hairs standing on end. It was like on some spiritual level his balls were calling out to mine.

The Doctors will tell you this. What they won’t tell you is that it sounds like shooting jelly with a shotgun.

She had friends.

From before.

Friends who still stuck by her but there were fewer every year.  Eventually each one would find an excuse, a reason to stop coming around.  For the last year or two those who were left would come to her house every Thursday night and they would try something new, try to make her laugh.

They didn’t come around on Fridays.  Janine assumed that was because they went out with people on a Friday who laughed more easily and were, as a result, more fun to be with.

At the top of the stairs in her house, Janine had a trophy cabinet.  Aiden had built it for her to try to cheer her up.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.

She had tried to make it work, followed her friends’ advice and filled it full of mementos.  Reminders of the attempt they made each Thursday.  The feather they tried to tickle her with on the first night, ‘funny’ books, ‘hilarious’ pictures, all the failed attempts at making her smile.  She just didn’t get it.  None of it was funny.

Or rather, it was funny, she assumed.  She just couldn’t laugh.  No matter how much she wanted to.

And then, one Thursday morning, something happened.  She was at work, in the office where no-one noticed that she didn’t laugh because no-one had a reason to smile anyway.  Just in front of her a light bulb was being replaced by a man she thought probably wasn’t an electrician.  Janine watched him pull up a rickety plastic chair, watched the seat bending under his weight as he clambered up onto it with first one foot and then the other.  She watched the legs of the chair wobbling with the pressure as he reached up above his head and she continued watching when everything dipped into slow motion.

Something sprang off the underside of the chair and all four legs simultaneously went from perpendicular to horizontal.  The man remained in the air for a while, apparently schooled by Bugs Bunny or Road Runner, suspended there perhaps by the fact that he had no notion he was no longer supported.  As he glanced at the ground gravity reached out its hand and grabbed him, pulling him back down harder than he deserved.

Janine hadn’t even realised what happened to her next.  The smile cracked across her face as if it had been punched upon it and hit her as unexpectedly as the desk hit the would-be electrician.  He made a sound that reminded her of a guinea pig.  But she didn’t know why.

Looking quite dazed, the man jumped back up onto his feet, saw Janine laughing and immediately looked away, his cheeks flushing red.  But she laughed and laughed and laughed until she had to go to the toilets to laugh by herself in private because no-one else was joining in.

And in the ladies’ toilets she made a decision.  She wanted Aiden to be the one to make her laugh.  She couldn’t wait until everyone arrived this evening.  She would engineer it for him to arrive early.

And so he fell.  Aiden.  Fell to the floor and his head bounced twice, once perhaps six inches and then another, tiny little bounce perhaps half an inch from the ground.

And Janine roared with laughter this time.  Expected it and relished it.

She had expected Aiden to join in, to laugh with her and when he didn’t she wiped the happy tears from her eyes, walked forward and touched his head, brushing his fringe to the side.  A giggle danced out of her mouth and into the space between the two of them.

Aiden just stared.

A trickle of red liquid ran along the tiles from under his head.

Janine shuddered out a half-laugh as something cold skittered up her spine.

She would go out to the shop and buy a bottle of wine, arrive back at the house when the others arrived and they would all find Aiden together.

But would they laugh?

Intervention?  Well that means when one person steps in to prevent another person doing something.  Or in this case when one person steps in to prevent the same person doing something. I’m surprised you don’t know that because – oh never mind.  Anyway I bet you’re wondering why I sound like the voice in your head when you read aren’t you?  Well that’s an interesting one…

What do you mean you don’t read!?  But you are at least aware of what your own voice sounds like I assume?  Or are you just so gratingly stupid that it has never really registered before?

Listen, I’m sorry I shouted at you.  Please, you don’t have to sit in the corner.  And the rocking back and forth is making me nauseous.  I didn’t realise – you must get the same thing?  You don’t know what ‘nauseous’ means do you?

I hate to bang on about it but we really should have the same vocabulary you know.  Vocabulary?  You don’t know that one either?

Well, not to worry, the reason I’m here is to get you started on your path.  You see, from time to time I’ll intervene – yes, well done that’s what intervene means.  Anyway I’ll intervene and give you an idea, a task, a purpose, something like that and then you’ll do it.  Let’s not worry about the whys and wherefores – we’ve noticed that there is a woman who lives in the flat across from you and she has her milk delivered.  Well we want you to steal it.

Yes, every day.  Of course it makes sense – milk deliveries are considered ‘old fashioned’ by the powers that be.  As a result they make people feel a warm and fuzzy sense of nostalgia.  This won’t do, so we are part of the contingent – I mean we are part of the team sent to deal with it.  No, not those powers, the ones downstairs.

No, not the Friedman family downstairs, we are talking a lot further down that that.  Yes, even further down than Mr Evesham.  Wait, can I just put you on hold for a minute I really need to check something.

Ah, I see, there’s been a bit of a mix up.  We aren’t the voices in your head, we are the voices in someone else’s head.  Your paperwork got sent through accidentally, honestly it could have happened to anyone.  Frequently does to be honest.  Anyway best forget all that stuff about the milk.

He’s dead is the thing.  Lucky is dead.  Chased his last mouse three days after you left.  That was the problem.  You know that scaffolding next door have up against their back wall?  Well he was off like a shot across the garden.  The mouse went up one of the planks to the first level then I lost site of him.  Wednesday morning there was still no sign of him I started to worry and started searching the neighbourhood, making enquiries.  By Thursday I was past myself.

And then the builders turned up again.  Turned out when I confronted them that they knew something (incidentally they weren’t going to tell me but I forced them).  Tom the foreman had apparently taken up a hobby to relieve the tedium of his day job and, well, taxidermy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but from what I’ve seen he seems to have quite the talent for it.  He claims that he practices on what he calls roadkill and when he’d found poor Lucky with no collar he figured that it would be okay.

Of course when I found out I demanded he return the poor thing and he agreed.  Said I would have to cook him dinner in return.  Thing is from what he described it was only really the front of Lucky that was usable.  He’s a really nice man, really trying to broaden his horizons, he was telling me about how he’d seen this animal in a museum in Rome when – oh God, I’m waffling, sorry – Lucky… Tom stuffed him, and mounted him.

On a remote controlled car.

I thought he had a bit of a surreal artistic streak but apparently it’s called anthropomorphic taxidermy.  Dates back to Victorian times. Amazing isn’t it?  It looks like Lucky is actually driving the car when you use the remote control.  He gave me the car with Lucky attached and the remote control after we had finished dessert.  After the second bottle of wine we were driving him around the kitchen but, listen, he’s on your dining room table.  Lucky.  Not Tom.

I hope you get this before you get in.

Oh god, I’m sorry but I just didn’t think you’d understand.  I’m not sure I do but Tom is such a nice bloke and a wonderful artist you’d love him I swear.  Listen I have to go, he’s just arrived to pick me up but call me, please.

Of course this means that most of the time I delete her messages from the answerphone because they all degenerate into ramblings on or around the subject of spawning grandchildren.

March 27th I found him driving the Number 27 (the one that terminates next to the station) and took it as a sign. So I set to work.

Smiling at him – no reaction.

Eyelash fluttering (moving on to advanced eyelash fluttering including a subtle wink) – no reaction.

After reflection I came to the conclusion that the wink may have been too subtle so moved things up a gear. I ‘lost’ my travel pass so had to get a new photo taken and got the sexiest pic a photobooth would allow. I pouted and showed a measured amount of flesh, still managed to keep it pre-watershed but still, somehow this provoked nothing more than a nod from this most-devious of devils.

Unperturbed I wrote my mobile number in the pass and flashed it every day for a fortnight. Morning journey to work and evening journey back.

No reaction.

It was at this point I realised that something had to give. Either I had to face the possibility that he was interminably and irrevocably stupid or I had so far failed to make a move that would really impress him. He had noticed me, oh yes, that serpent knew and I had a plan to win his heart once and for all

I was busy preparing so I missed him in the morning but waited for him to come around for a second pass and got on the bus. Top deck. Laid out the tablecloth and started to prepare the picnic; the freshly sliced baguette, the succulent roast beef, the Dijon mustard, the red wine uncorked and breathing.

We reached the end of the line and I quickly whipped a mirror out of my handbag, checked the make-up, hair and struck a pose as his footsteps started up the stairs towards me.

“Hello,” his voice arriving before him. “Is everything okay, Miss?”

I waited, pouted for a second then though better of it and just tried to look relaxed.

“Ah,” his face dropped for a second when he saw me. “You’re…”

“Yes?” I said and ran my fingertips through my fringe, brushing it back.

He said: “You’re the one who’s been stalking me, right?” And laughed.

“No!” I snapped then saw him flick a smile on then off again. I smiled back and said, “It’s not stalking. It’s romance.”

He nodded, the sides of his mouth rising slightly, tiny dimples appearing in both cheeks then sat down next to me. My mother was going to be so pissed off.

Rubin who helped me get back on track, get my head back together and stop counting. This was before all that, I was in a bad place because after two years together one day Jonathon just didn’t return my calls. So I counted phonebooks.

Sometimes if it was maybe two o’clock in the afternoon and I was in a café waiting for someone and I had gone all day without counting one I would have to ask the waiters and waitresses if I could use their phone.

Demand it. And sometimes make them go to the office and take the manager’s directory. When they came back I would be embarrassed but there was a sense of relief that I could count the phonebook.

Of course then I would have to dial a number. Or at least pretend to. And then pretend to have a really important conversation. One that would warrant demanding a phone book. It got that I would raise my voice and shout things at the dead receiver. It helped make them feel their efforts weren’t wasted.

I remember that it got to that time of year when someone had left a new phonebook on the steps to my apartment. I took it inside and tore off the plastic wrapper that saved it from the rain and flipped through to Jonathon. I was sad to see that he still existed.

18,276 phonebooks is too many. And to be honest, around the ten thousand mark I may have lost count.

PARP

The arsehole in the car behind me honked his horn and it slipped away from me. The idea I mean, not the car. I tried so hard to hold onto it but it just wouldn’t stay still. As my car picked up speed so did the invention, rolling its way out of my mind’s grasp. I felt sick. Society would never forgive me if it ever found out. The greatest invention. A supreme fabrication. Gone.

I glanced in the mirror and saw him. The man who had stolen the invention from humanity. Talking on his fucking mobile phone and riding my bumper.

It’s difficult to know whether it was a decision I made or whether I performed the feat on a subconscious level. I just waited until I reached seventy miles per hour and then stamped on the brakes. With a rending, tearing metallic howl his car violently mounted mine and dragged the pair of them into the hard shoulder and the bushes beyond.

As I dragged myself from the airbag filled wreckage I touched a wound on the side of my head and felt the warm blood on my fingers, the pain shooting reassuringly through me. I was alive. No thanks to my bloody idiot of a subconscious.

Dragging my left leg behind me I moved to see if I could see him and he was there, screeching and honking. I turned my back on the cars and listened again. It sounded like geese. Then, in an instant it came back to me and I realised, too late, that the greatest invention was useless. Pointless. I’ve wreaked mankind’s retribution on this man and it was all just a mistake.

A rubbish invention. And as if that wasn’t bad enough an idiotic idea to boot.

I breathed heavily, coughing as I slowly moved myself further and further from his howls then sat down on the crash barriers at the roadside and waited.