Nextorcist

The sign in the newsagent’s window caught Vaughan’s attention as soon as he saw it.  The words were printed on a bright green card that stood out amongst the dog-eared appeals for lost cats and the adverts for kitchen tilers and zumba classes:

Vaughan couldn’t actually imagine what it was all about, but he liked the idea and filed it in the compartment of his brain, labelled ‘odd but good’.  The one right next to ‘cruel and unusual’.

By the time he reached the house he still shared with his mother at the age of forty three, he wasn’t thinking about the sign any more, but about Choir Night.  It was Tuesday after all.

As he opened the front door, his mother’s voice carried from the living room that also served as her bedroom.

“Colin, love, is that you?” (Vaughan!  He was Vaughan, born Vaughan Colin Tartt – why did she insist on calling him Colin?) Vaughan knew what was coming next.

“Manamana.”

Today, he wasn’t in the mood to go through the rigmarole of ritual his mother had insisted on ever since he’d had his own door key at the age of eight.

“I can’t hear you.  I said Manamana!”

Vaughan sighed but felt himself weakening.

“Still can’t. Manamana…”

Steel now cut through her voice and Vaughan surrendered.

“Du du dududu.”

“Manamana.”

“Du du du du.”

God, but he hated himself sometimes.  The meagre worm he was in the yard of life, wriggling in the dirt and waiting for his big fat chicken of a mother to gobble him up.

*

Choir Night didn’t go quite as expected.  In fact, Vaughan reckoned no-one would have bet on a choral rendition of Oops Up Side Your Head leading to rumbustious sex with Janice Bert, the buxom soprano – and Vaughan was a man who would bet on most things.

It had started as he’d given her a lift home. His eyes on the road, her hand suddenly and insistently on his crotch.  They’d pulled in to a layby and got down to it, quick smart in the back seat.

Janice caterwauled at him as he entered her from behind, “I’m hot like chilli.  I’m ripe like a tomato.”

She was no wordsmith, that was for sure, and her desultory similes grated on Vaughan like, er, cheese.

Afterwards, clothes re-buttoned and zipped, they drove to Janice’s house in companionable silence.  Her parting words, however, grabbed him firmly by the short and curlies and there was no part of him that didn’t shrivel with fear.

“Thanks Vaughan, or can I call you Colin?  I want to thank you in any case, big boy.  You’ve made me a baby!”

*

Oh my fucking shit. My, oh my, oh my.  Vaughan lay in his bed, looking at the ceiling and thinking over his options.  And what he kept coming back to was the bright green card he’d seen that morning in the newsagent’s.  Nextorcism.  Exorcising the next.

Early the following morning, Vaughan was back at the shop, punching the number from the card into his phone.  He called straight away and arranged with the softly spoken man’s voice on the end of the line to meet him immediately at the very bench he was sitting on.

While he waited, Vaughan wondered what the hell the Nextorcist would look like.  A sincere, old (possibly alcoholic) priest?  A tortured soul, weighed down with the responsibility of other people’s actions?  When he turned up about ten minutes later, Vaughan saw he couldn’t have guessed him. 

He was riding a Vespa scooter, which he parked with expertise next to Vaughan’s bench. He was clad in motorbike leathers and when he took off his helmet, he shook his blond mane with the slow confidence of an eighties’ shampoo commercial.  He was so young and beautiful, the bastard.

Vaughan explained and the Nextorcist considered.

“So you want the sex you willingly partook in, not to result in new life?”

“Well, in a nutshell, yes.”

The Nextorcist scrunched his face up and then grinned.  It was kind of an ugly grin.

“I can do that, although there will need to be payment.  There always needs to be payment.”

“Anything, anything.”

“Not anything, rather £80 for each nextorcism.  £160 for two and I’ll throw one in free.  A BOGOF if you will.”

Vaughan shrugged. “I’ve no intention of needing you again.”

The Nextorcist's smile grew even wider. “Don’t speak too soon.   Nextorcism can be very addictive.”

*

After the text he received from Janice, saying she wasn’t pregnant (and did he want to try again?), Vaughan went back to the vicarious, vacuous safety of internet porn … and moved choir groups. 

When his mother waddled past (hell, was she a chicken or a duck?) and caught him looking at his most visited site – Little Guys with Big Drills – he texted the Nextorcist.  As the anger and sadness on his mother’s face disappeared and it reverted to its usual blankness, he understood he’d had his second go and the Nextorcist had carried out whatever unknown, potentially fiendish thing he did to get rid of the next.

But something wasn’t right. Vaughan wasn’t entirely sure, but he felt his mother still suspected something.  It might have been the way she winked at him over her breakfast boiled egg; or possibly the way she kept suggesting she bought him a power tool for Christmas. But he knew she still knew what he’d been looking at on his computer.  She bloody knew!

By lunchtime he’d throttled her.  Chop chop, fast as you like, making doubly sure he’d finished the job by ramming the first few pages of The People’s Friend down her slack, unsuspecting gullet.  By teatime, he’d regretted what he’d done (feeling the future loneliness of TV dinners for one and nobody to watch the final of Strictly with) and had called the Nextorcist round to cash in his BOGOF deal.

They made an odd trio in the living room-come-bedroom.  Vaughan, tight, twitching cheeks on the settee, his mother purple-faced, dead and propped up in bed.  The Nextorcist, helmet off, shaking out his locks, Timotei 1985-styley.

“Are you absolutely sure you want me to exorcise the next?” he said to Vaughan in a slow, newly serious voice.  “Sometimes, things are better left as they are and I’ve got personal experience to prove this.”

Vaughan looked at him, raising his eyebrows in an invitation to continue.

“A few years ago, I went to a bad tattooist and clichéd though it may be to have wanted it in the first place, the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ I envisioned on the knuckles of each hand actually read ‘love’ and ‘hat’,  Now obviously, that couldn’t stand and I went straight back to the tattooist to get it put right.  But as I say, sometimes you’re just better living with what you’ve done.”

And with that, the Nextorcist stretched out his hands for Vaughan to see them.  In the stark light of the room, Vaughan read the tattooed words on the Nextorcist’s knuckles.  On one hand, ‘glove’ and on the other, ‘hat’.

*

“Colin, Colin.  Be a love and set my foot spa up.  My knees need a scrub as well while we’re at it.”

Meekly, Vaughan went up to the bathroom to collect the loofah and the pumice stone, just in case.  He was about to go downstairs when he went back for the clippers.  She was bound to want her toe nails cut too.

There he was in his own private hell, but it felt like home and walking into the living room, where his mother was waiting, he thought to himself – man up Vaughan, mate.  Sometimes you just have to take what’s coming.

*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ytei6bu7kQ