A foul early morning: grim turd-brown skies, bitter aquiferous easterlies whipping up the garbage along the Hotwells Road. Pex ‘n’ Quads a sanctuary at such a beastly hour. The quotidian: over the gangplank, through the glass doorway, into Reception. Placate the Cerberidae, exchange the obol, descend into Hades. There was comfort in the familiar rituals. —
Pex ‘n’ Quads
Peggy and Billy were at their usual stations behind the desk. Peggy maintained the general silence, but was in no way deterred from capering and gurning on her chair in some indescribably grotesque kind of dumb show. What japes! - It was on this occasion that I first remarked upon her predilection for reaching into her décolletage in order to unleash armpit farts on an undeserving world - I thought of her quite literally splitting her sides with the incredibly fun humour of it all, whereupon her viscera would tumble forth into that foul forenoon, but I did not voice this thought, unbidden and unwelcome as it was. Billy was stolid, a great heap of something scraped from a pudding bowl after long months at the back of the fridge in the cold and the dark: a blancmange rigidified. Sin made flesh. A mouldy attitude emanated or oozed from her, stolid and respectable and tainted with infinite evil, like a fat provincial phalangist. Very obviously, she had a priggish Moneypennyesque crush on the figure gauntly silhouetted in the glass. I realised that I was shivering. —
Billy, Peggy
Tunnel vision. Herod’s eyes swivelled and bored into my own. Peggy vented a giggle, abruptly stifled. —
Herod
- Hush, said Herod, like the blind seer Teiresias, I am somewhat in a position to compare the pleasures of a man with those of a woman. Suffice to say that I judge things differently from my mythical predecessor. The tale that I now relate to you begins in the hot tub, to which I had repaired one evening after a long day’s toil over the operations of this place. Guy Pigge, whom you all know and now rightly disdain, was as it were my Ganymede, and I commanded him to bring me champagne, for it was my pleasure to sip the bubbly whilst reclining in the bubbly. The slack-jawed cretin brought the ‘poo when I was in the khazi, and set the tray down by the tub and left. And then, as I surmise, I guess the jet vibrations tipped the flute into the water, and the flute was dashed to pieces which Charybdis in her fury whirled round and round. And I returning from my number two’s did enter the pool to bathe. And the shards of the flute did pierce my Honourable Member, and the germ entered in there like a thief, and the enterotoxins which it emitted feasted on my junk, and did not leave off feasting until the surgeons had debrided substantially all of that which I erstwhile considered integral to my very being. And for this reason, and because it behoves me to bear a token of this cruel thing that was done to me, I have girt myself by means of these here Arab straps with this instrument, which men call the White Willy. —
White Willy
- Men of science call it Aeromonas, said Herod, Aeromonas hydrophila. ‘Tis bacterial. —
Aeromonas hydrophila
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