U ~ Junker Pilot

Here is how Hen was almost overcome by the terrible waster of men -
his sense of justice. Flying deviant Hen and obstreperous Manley
divided the ice-cream between them and brewed up some Kenyan coffee in
the kitchen. Two heaped tablespoons of black snow, a little water to
muddy it, boil the rest of the water and pour it in, stirring with a
plastic spoon. When the smell was thicker than pheromones, they poured
it over the ice cream, so that the ice cream became watery and soft.
Then they spooned it into their mouths as it melted. In the cooking
cove, scarred and scabbed stunt-rider James was making a fat pot of
spaghetti and mince - the hiss and timbrel of pan-love weltered out
into the lobby. H0's defaced page 3 girl secretly crumpled and went
boggy beneath her blue-tacked paper clothes.

Hen was in a holy mood.

"Once," he said between slopping mouthfuls, "I bent down and I licked
the gravel and concrete in front of three of my colleagues, under a
brick archway - and the bricks were the most clementine I have ever
seen. They burned up and bled in pride."

Manley gave him the thumbs up for his effort - and if Manley were
Emperor of Rome that ruse would have saved Hen's life. James, however,
was playfully sceptical.

"Why?" he asked, his wooden spoon deep in the swamp of the cooking
pot.

"Patriotism," said Hen. "I thought I had been put in a fine country at
a fine age - post-dark ages, pre-sunken city. Have you seen all the
churches and cathedrals round here? We can go to them, throw ourselves
at their trunks and go limp at the artifice, but not every damn Sunday,
not by a long shot. We're royalty."

"Limp at the artifice?" James mulled. "You can tell you're an English
student - you love your strange words."

"But James!" Hen continued to enthuse - "But! We can go out walking
along battlements and not get shot or disembowelled. We can watch
warplanes and nuclear explosions on the telly, and our skin doesn't
fry. And Lianne?"

Worthy of note: Lianne is a trouble spot for James - she won't talk to
him.

"Lianne," said Hen, "can buy her manga books, drawn in Japan, and she
doesn't even live there."

Manley pointed out to Hen that the remainder of his ice cream was
sinking into a warm pool. Hen upheld his cause - "I like it gooey, but
Manley! We can have our cake and eat it - there's our cake on the
table, and we're wolfing it down right here. We are occupying
impossible space."

"On the other hand," said Manley, "if you want good coffee, you have
no one to rely on but yourself. If I were rich, I'd just click my
fingers and Kenya would be at my table."

"Thing is then you'd complain it was too big," said James, raising his
pot from the rings and tipping it onto his plate. "Rich people complain
more than poor people, don't they? When was the last time you heard a
poor person complain? That's the thing - more you get the more you
want, innit?"

Hen agreed by way of nodding his spoon, then made the mistake of
looking down at the table. It was covered in crusty, stained pages from
the Sun newspaper, which Olly bought for the bare-tipped breasts. Hen
remembered the flamingos trellising the opal body of le Lac de R?ves,
and the words of his father:

"They don't have anything as wretched as the Sun in France, and the
roads are as smooth as ice cream."

James left the room with his meal mountained up on his plate and
trailing a scarf of meaty steam. When the door had shut behind him,
Manley saw that his ally was rooted to the table by the eyes, and
calmly said, "Hen. You know that newspaper isn't written for the likes
of you."

But poor devil Hen was glued to the letters page and as luck would
have it, some grizzly murders had taken place in recent weeks. This is
always followed by a celebratory round of fire from house trained
philosophers of ethics who have had their warnings vindicated.

"Listen to this," said Hen, picking one such canny thinker. "'Once
again, more blood is on the hands of those who oppose the death
penalty.'"

Manley was caught off guard and delighted. His face seemed to want to
implode from arch-incomprehension, and he laughed like a fire siren,
scratched his crown, at last managing to splutter, "Brilliant. Stupid
on so many levels."

The newspaper had them both wowed for the moment.

"It's like a lateral thinking puzzle," said Hen, and leafed through
more dry pages, eagerly spooning himself more coffee and ice cream.
Manley snorted away his laughter and grew suspicious again. He prepared
his defences, knuckled and elbowed up.

"Aha!" Hen said, some moments later. "The rats are deserting the
sinking ship," adding - "this comment section is about some recent
poll. Apparently, Manley, it is middle class, middle aged men who want
to leave the country and go to France because they don't like it here -
they don't like being fined for speeding (Well, slow down) they don't
like their work (Well, offer the job to someone else) they don't like
children - probably - and they don't like not getting their own
way."

"We all know children should be incinerated," said Manley. "They're
devil-spawn and I shudder to think of them. But that's enough of that,
Hen."

"Presumably," Hen, ignoring him, pawed at a distant though, "they will
form their own communities in France, taking over from the inside,
spreading the filth of modern English idleness across the land, until
they're sick of the mess there too. Then they'll buy caravans and
becoming a travelling community, setting up camp where they're not
welcome and engaging in a passionate struggle against the snotty
Frenchmen who doesn't want them to foul up the area. Poor, abused
English tarts?" Hen referred back to the page, "Oh, and you know those
sensible, dull rats who sit around calling students na?ve when our lot
go marching about famine and war? Well, some of them - those pickled
pricks with the clamps on their heads and the safety catch tongues -
some of them were out marching themselves, throwing stones and raising
fists against the public. Were they fighting suffering? No, no, they
were horsing around for their right to hunt foxes. I should horse
around for the right to hunt them, since they are vermin."

"Alright, Hen - enough," said Manley.

He whipped the newspaper pages from under Hen and his bowl. The bowl
tottered around noisily, a quivering China tit, and Manley rammed a
hand down onto it. Hen sat seething like a little wounded geyser. His
shoulder blades were tectonic plates and he licked the ice cream from
his lips as if it were his enemy's blood.

"I'll get down to the bottom of them. I can get down to the bottom of
anything - then I'll have the formula to destroy them. I tell you, I
was squeezed onto this earth to destroy them. I can play them at their
own game too - know the right words. I'll say them a hundred times more
passionately and have an army by my side, all trained to use the right
words?"

"It's pointless, Hen!"

"The right curse-words, Manley, is all it takes. We call them
'barbarians' and 'elitists' and 'brutes.' What else? 'Na?ve,'
'sickening.' We'll adopt sophistry too. We'll be masters of sophistry.
Better even than Pater Letchins."

"Hen! You'd end up just as bad as them!" Desperate Manley didn't even
know who Pater Letchins was; Hen had to be stopped. "You'll become a TV
debater!"

Hen drove his fingers through his hair and found beads of ice cream
printed on the longest tips, the ones that had been swinging madly
while he read from the Sun. He'd eaten in a civilised manner, but still
the ice cream had got everywhere. He bowed his head in shame.

"The necks, the necks. The necks must be wrung. They must hate
everything that has ever made me happy."

"Oh, Hen," Manley soothed. "I accuse your sense of justice. Your sense
of justice is playing up. Such a tricky thing."

Hen agreed that his sense of justice could indeed be worse than his
libido and a hole in his stomach put together, and Manley took away the
bowls to wash up.

"Instead of committing myself to elimination, I'll write clerihews for
H0," said Hen.

"Good. Just think of them as Red Indians, Hen - they have their own
time-honoured way of life that doesn't have to make sense to you or I.
No need to get to the bottom of it," then, suspiciously, with his hands
busily soaping, Manley asked, "What's a clerihew, and will I like it?
It better not be anything like children."