THE WEEKEND 5 - Sunday: 'Smoked Salmon and Cocoa'
By Albert-W
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THE WEEKEND
5
Sunday - Smoked Salmon and Cocoa
Ken was crowing when he burst into the bedroom at four in the morning, getting undressed and reeking of booze. Greg noticed the criss-cross razor cuts on his chest. “Jesus,” he gasped, “what a mess. Did they work you over?”
“Nah; it was great. You should have been there. A couple of chavvies ended up in hospital, and the Chaplains had two of their Vespas set on fire. Trouble is, I broke me finger, I think.”
Sunday breakfast was the big one of the week; cereals, bacon, eggs, sausages, fried bread and grilled tomatoes, toast to follow if you wanted it. Greg did. Waiting until after he’d fasted for communion and served on the altar at eight o’clock Mass always put an edge on his appetite.
The sanctimonious Wilfred, who had also been to church, and would attend three more times before the day was out, droned on about the ecclesiastical letter that the parish priest had read to a mostly bored congregation; a particularly good one, Wilfred felt; so much so that he kept quoting from it despite everybody else’s obvious disinterest and, not least, Ken’s raging hangover. Archbishop Heenan had said this, Archbishop Heenan had said that. Archbishop Heenan...
“Why don’t you stick Archbishop Heenan up your arse,” Ken slammed down his cutlery.
“But...”
“Right up it.”
For Ken, there was only one way to get rid of his thick head; back to bed.
Greg was still a bit tired but went to see Ronnie Horsefield to tell him about the strip club and the clip joint. They took a slow walk around the block and, reaching the C of E church, spotted an MG B Roadster sports car with its soft-top down. There was no discussion; Ronnie grabbed a brown carrier bag off the passenger seat and they bolted, straight back to HQ; his shed.
“Fish of some kind,” Greg said, examining the haul. “But Christ knows what this is. Looks like soap.” It was Emmental, the fish smoked salmon, both expensive delicacies; but all the same to the pair as they wolfed the lot using their fingers.
Ken didn’t surface Sunday roast. As soon as it was finished, Greg went up to the room to see how he was. Stefan, a lodger, had got there first. “Wake up Kinny,” he was saying, tapping the lad’s forehead. “Come on, wake up.”
“What the hell do you want?” Ken squinted menacingly through one bloodshot eye, suspicious of the middle-aged suntanned Czech standing over him with a tumbler of some steaming cloudy liquid in his hand.
“I bring you something for the collywobbles,” Stefan said.
Ken sat up, taking the offering to his lips. The acrid smell hit his nostrils just in time. “What the fuck’s this?”
Stefan’s saucer eyes blinked languidly. “It will do you good. I prepare it for you.” His serene expression never seemed to change, usually smiling; and it still maintained when the glass and suspicious contents were casually thrown through the open window to sail down and shatter on the coal bunker below. All he said was: “Tut-tut Kinny; it was werry silly of you. I bring you the good medicine for your tummy.”
“Piss off,” Ken grunted and turned over, burying his head under a pillow.
Nobody quite knew what to make of the Martian, as Greg and Ken called Stefan. The question they wrestled with was whether he was a complete nutcase or could there be something in his claims of alien life, his astral travels, his home-brewed herbal remedies. His books were all fringe material, studies of the occult, reports on UFO sightings, the third eye.
He’d once offered to cure Greg’s sister of a painful stiff neck. She couldn’t stand being anywhere near the peculiar man, let alone have him touching her, so she declined. Undeterred, he crept up on her, giving the unresisting head a violent twist in both directions. From the loud crack it sounded as if he’d caused permanent injury, but the stiffness soon went.
Another time, Greg’s mother spat out a taster of Stefan’s prescription for easing her heavy chest cough. “The Lord bless us and save us,” she choked, her eyes streaming. “Holy Mary mother of God,” she recited when he finally persuaded her to down the vile brew. By the evening the cough had gone.
Even the pot plants in the Martian’s room thrived, either because of or in spite of the coiled copper wire that encircled them. “Protection from the cawsmik rays,” he would explain to the curious. “Like this,” he’d add, pulling up his Norwegian sweater to reveal a similar device around his waist, threaded through the belt loops of his trousers. “I never get the collywobbles.” But he did get extremely anxious about his roommate. “He keeps chasing his cocoa,” he told Greg’s mum. “Wasting his seed all the time. The room is full of wibrations.”
On several occasions he’d walked in to find the towering blond Scotsman, rubber featured and vague-looking, stretched out on his bed pumping away at himself, totally oblivious to anybody else’s presence. Latterly, the practice would start even when Stefan was already in the room. The great lummox would simply rolled over in the middle of what passed for a conversation between the two and unashamedly wank.
Round about Sunday teatime – the flattest part of any weekend - Greg and Ronnie walked along the short precinct at the top of the road; no people about, shops all shut, no action, deadly dull. Already, the dread-of-Monday-gloom was descending on Greg.
It was Ronnie who spotted the little girl cowering in the doorway of the dry cleaners, eight or nine years old, sobbing her heart out. He stopped and asked her what was wrong and she told him that she’d been sitting on the wall when a boy walked up offering her a sweet. She’d taken one, then he put his hand up her dress.
“Do you know him?” Greg asked.
“Yes,” she said with certainty. “It was Ambrose. He lives up my road.”
Ronnie took her hand and they walked her home. He was acquainted with the sweaty lad and detested him; a dirty piece of work with an equally dirty family: father, mother, brothers, sisters – the whole tribe grubby and gross.
Ambrose was still in the street when they turned the corner. He was larger than Ronnie but had no guts.
“You dirty shit!” Ronnie the Horse got up steam, kicking and pummelling wildly. And when he’d finished, the little girl skipped happily up the path to her door, a bag of sherbet lemons better off; the reluctant donor doubled up with a sickening ache shooting through his Buddha-belly from his genitals up to his tightly clenched teeth.
Much later, it was all quiet; the anticlimax finale to the weekend; Ronnie back home in bed, not looking forward to work tomorrow. He had a job in some metalworking factory and would have everybody believe he was some sort of engineer. He was a dogsbody – a sweeper-upper.
Ken and Greg had taken to their beds as well, Ken reminiscing about the time he made St. George’s church clock strike thirteen at midnight, Greg deflated by the ghastly prospect of school in the morning, not one item of due-in homework done, there for another bloody week. More caning or strapping to come, no doubt. Oh, roll on next weekend... please.
All nearly asleep, then...
CRASH!
This was so loud the walls and floors seemed to shake. The whole household was quickly out onto on the landings, all asking the same question, and there was only one door that hadn’t opened.
The bizarre spectacle greeting Greg and Ken when they burst in didn’t surprise them. It was par for the course in their madhouse. Sitting up, blinking at the sudden blitz of light and decorated with coils of copper wire wound around his head, the Martian pointed at his bedfellow, complaining: “He’s fallen out of bed chasing his cocoa again.”
And on the floor, curled up in the foetus position with gnarled erect dick in hand, lay the huge, naked Scots oaf, foaming at the mouth in a coincidental occurrence of juddering orgasm and epileptic fit.
* * *
© Albert Woods (2014)
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