St Just

The personage in question, who went by the nom de guerre ‘St Just’, was a close associate of Boyde, who was 13 in the Spartacist nomenclature, and it will be recalled that we have encountered this pair once or twice previously, on our forays down to Montypee, where they made it their business to loiter with the junquies and the drunques outside the pharmacy in the precinct at the bottom…

Below him in the vestibule, the youth St Just, short and carbuncular and unaccountably arrogant, planted swart Doc Martens in the grease veneering the linoleum, and by diverse grimaces signified his disgust at the pervasive reek of cigs and sweat and socks and scat. Ianeass the Gimp, through greasy spectacle lenses peering, shrugged bony clavicles, spoke anew.

Trudging down Stokes Croft towards the City Centre, St Just through flaring nostrils expressed, in company with a quantity of snot, his derision. His mind’s eye conjured up unsought the vision of the maggots writhing. Like time was when like revolutionary like purity meant like extolling primitive like man. Like giving like full like rein to his natural like urges. Doing rudeness a revolutionary act. It’s all there in like…

St Just, now inside Reception, where everything in these end times was glass and aluminium and stripped pine, identified himself to the furrow-browed bonehead masticating behind the desk.

“Like,” said, inevitably, St Just, “like it doesn’t have to be like the Missiz. You’ll do just as well like.”

…cringing and abased like a beaten dog, approaching supplicant-wise and open-palmed from a dark doorway one of many, St Just who was the Telemachus of the piece, and His Lordship, being just then in the middle of one of those De Quincey moments of his, found himself delivered over wholesale to the inevitable rumination concerning the question as to how such an ineffectual milquetoast and all round squib should have…

“Look,” squawked Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet, pecking at them quite savagely, “will you just bugger off, there’s nothing for you here.”

…I entreat you to drink tay with us. No doubt St Just will have some hemp seed lying about.”

…than … er … Squattocrat Towers, the town residence of Lord and Lady Snatch and their disappointing tiger St Just. Mr Ian Corby to his modest disappointment did not on this occasion discover any pewlies’ eggs or other gourmandise. Withal, being a sanguine sort of a corvid, and not given to dwelling overlong on the culinary solecisms which the spinners and snippers of thread chose to inflict upon him, he…

…Snatch was disgorged that vesper from a vehicular conveyance onto the pavement outside … er … Squattocrat Towers, just as Mr Ian Corby, having concluded the business earlier related between himself and St Just, had snuck up the stairs past a by now thoroughly gremitant Lord Snatch, and made good his escape up the chimney whence he’d come. Evidently in a state of extremis, the normally redoubtable spouse of the…

…onrush of feet clambering up stairs, followed by the flinging open of the door, disclosing the presence of St Just, which was to be expected, and also that of Mr Crass Cheseham, which was perhaps not to be expected, but who broke the ice with his customary elegance:

Lord and Lady Snatch and their faithful retainer St Just were to be found downstairs, in the dark and dingy front parlour with the dingy fustian stuff draped over the windows which shut out the clamour and wan light of the dingy road without. The room was in nearly all respects just the same as ever, save for the presence of several bags of saline and other stuff up on…