Her body is like Winter

 

 

‘I am no-one’s cunt’ said Drain , the words circling his head like winsome frost fairies. 

 

He was wearing the fake sheepskin coat that Moss brought him back from Marrakech - the right lapel hung down listlessly, having been almost but not completely ripped  off when he had caught it in an escalator he had been stickering with flyers for a death metal gig.

 

Drain clenched and unclenched his hands as he studied the showgirls and ringmasters shimmying in and out of the revolving doors which were the only means of access to the Telka Oil building. His bifocal lenses had ridden down his nose so far that every be-suited executive appeared to have giant misshapen feet. His desire to enter the office block was palpable, the interior appeared to be moist, emitting its occupants with a sonorous groan but the revolving door filled him with unbridled fear. ‘Them things’ll shit you up’ Drain muttered to no-one in particular. Drain’s steered the leaking vessel which purported to be his life across a storm riddled lexicon of truly gormless profundities. He really was the fuck wit’s version of Confucius. 

 

----

 

Winter was sitting at her desk on the 33rd floor oblivious to the bespectacled maelstrom standing in an ice puddle on the street corner below. She had just received a re-up of speedballs by courier from her dealer / pianoforte teacher and the world had assumed a lumpy blue green haze. Her fingers seethed across the keyboard at the end of arms which were 1000 miles long; licking and caressing italics down the throbbing cable connecting her mouse to the inter-web and causing fluctuating images to shatter and reform in her agate grey pupils. 

 

‘Sic’ she typed and retyped until the word was broken.

 

----

 

Drain made a finger telescope and aimed it at the humming window behind which he knew Winter was seated. He imagined that offices functioned like the digestive system of cows, stomach after stomach masticating and ingesting sentences until they were shat out into the world, each one diminishing the intensity of human existence. ‘Words are liars who piss on your head after smashing you in the face with a pint glass’ muttered Drain. He shifted back onto his leather green heels and fetid ice-water squelched between his toes and the wretched soles of his sandals.  A bus laden with checkered cubes in which radioactive orange heads bobbed and twisted temporarily obstructed Drain’s vision. He imagined that he could reach out a hand and effortlessly impede its progress but recalled with painful clarity how a similar idea had ended only three weeks before. The stubs of his thumbs were eloquent reminders that it is not possible to slow down a tube train using two fingers. 

 

----

 

‘Where?’ asked Winter watching the speech bubble leave her mouth, drift into the neon lights thrumming over her head where it exploded showering her and her supervisor in aromatic glitter. 

 

‘Yes, where?’ replied Mrs Brother. ‘Because I had expected it by 4pm.’

 

‘Spose I’m still typing isn’t it?’ offered Winter underlining her status as a grammatical juggernaut. The letters had crawled from her keyboard and were mating like mayflies in an ululating sex cloud just under Mrs Brother’s buxom nose. 

 

‘And when do you expect to finish typing it?’ asked Mrs Brother, thrusting her pernicious breasts by way of punctuation. 

 

Winter ran her snow capped fingertips through the lustrous auburn waterfall of hair which cascaded from her scalp down her shoulders and in to puddles on the floor beside her matching feet and regaled her line manager with a generous shrug. 

 

‘What are you, the police? Don’t crowd me. Its happening, just chill’ and then by way of a wretched attempt to mollify her superior ‘ You don’t look your age at all, its incredible, your skin is firm like a sort of velvet onion.’

 

‘Su-su’ chimed her blurred fingers ‘Sheg-up, Slabba-Slabba, Sic, Sic, Sic’

 

----

 

Snowflakes had begun to cascade from the pregnant sky like a billion tiny ballet pumps. Drain stepped into the road, fighting against the flow of matadors and cavaliers and watched his silhouette being consumed by a metallic green 1967 Vauxhall Victor. The car exhaled a pair of fire engine red oxford brogues that came to rest tangentially opposite Drain’s tremulous stomach which was solidly wedged between the icy tarmac and the vehicular tapping screws and heat nuts.

 

‘What the fucking hell were you thinking about you sightless shitblanket?’ asked the brogues, not without just cause. 

 

‘Arffff’ groaned Drain, seeking to heft the car into the air with his remaining fingers but only succeeding in biting most of the way through his tongue. 

 

‘Don’t touch my wheels bitch’ snarled the brogues, stamping the car into reverse and leaving a recumbent Drain staring from the misshapen birthmark on the end of his nose up to the andromeda constellation 2.5 million light years away and at everything else in between. Peeling his trembling buttocks off the tarmac, Drain was helped to his feet by a mermaid and a vestal virgin and rejoined his efforts to reach the Telka Oil Building. He felt sure that if he could touch his face to the glass, he could establish an unbreakable connection with the architecture of the beast and with Winter who resided in its heart.

 

----

 

Winter was swaying over Mrs Brother’s desk like a giant pine being ground down and pulverized by an arctic blizzard. She held out two sheets of work which she had salvaged out of the 840 she had printed. Their relationship had faltered somewhat since Mrs Brother heard Winter characterize her as an immortal bottom-feeding pisscoated hag, but she had hopes that they could still become BFF’s one day. 

 

‘What is this’ growled Mrs Brother shuffling her eyes across Winter’s work. 

 

‘Typing isn’t it’ replied Winter and it clearly was. 

 

‘But what does it actually say?’ replied Mrs Brother rustling the two pages together with commendable aggression, just below Winter’s perfect nose. 

 

‘Words isn’t it’ replied Winter as if Mrs Brother were missing the point. She looked around the room and rolled her eyes delivering a robust nasal snark.

 

‘Yes but where is the report you were asked to produce - all it says on these pieces of paper is...’ Mrs Brother cautiously unpacked her Nephelium ramboutan spectacles from their thermos and placed them onto her nose which eagerly received them at a perfect 73 degrees. ‘Sic, bro, sic, sic, sic’

 

Winter picked up a framed photograph of Mrs Brother and a man who appeared to have a long, cylindrical, fur-covered body with chunky build somewhat reminiscent of a Peruvian water vole. She looked out of the window at the snow flakes cascading into the exterior neon up-lights where they exploded like individual white dwarf stars. 1000 metres below in the up-swirl of the city street she sensed that there were events unfolding to which she belonged.

 

----

 

Drain’s tongue had frozen to the revolving doors of the Telko Oil building and the resultant wedging of his head between the egress and access point had prevented the door from continuing to waft its metallic musculature in an a perfect arc. The failsafe mechanism and the alarm which was tripped by the failsafe system were both infallible but since both remained in pieces on the kitchen table of Terrance Graft the rightly maligned caretaker and odd job man employed by the Telko Oil corporation they were both of negligible assistance to Drain. There was nothing to prevent the revolving doors from repeatedly pounding at the melon like protuberance which was halting its glorious if robotic progress. 

 

The brogues stood just outside the door’s swishing  / head pounding axis. Their owners could see that Drain who already bore the tire unmistakable tyre marks of a metallic green 1967 Vauxhall Victor across his wretched sheepskin coat would probably explode in the next few seconds. Would blood cluster and clot within the wing tips and swirling toe cap perforations of his shoes if the owner reached out just too late to free Drain. He thumbed his phone to check but the constant thrumb / thud as the door edge pounded relentlessly at Drain’s skull was distracting.

 

‘Blood stains are usually tricky to remove, as blood is known to be one of the toughest stains to deal with.’

 

‘Thrup / arghhh, thrup arghh’

 

Trying to remove blood from leather is even more difficult, since leather has a tendency to react to chemicals. 

 

‘smack’ fuuuuuck

 

Using stain removers which are too harsh may end up damaging the material - it is important to know the proper cleaning materials to use, so as not to damage your leather items.

 

 

------

 

‘You can’t fire me, know my rights isn’t it’ said Winter who knew her rights. She was sitting on the floor in Mrs Brother’s room, her arse having missed the client chair by a considerable margin. 

 

‘And what might they be’ gleamed Mrs Brother with spiteful interest.

 

Winter ran her hand over the surface of Mrs Brother’s carpet. The pattern reminded her of a photograph she had seen of the gossamer ring which encircled Amalthea, Jupiter’s third moon.

 

‘Ain’t been no written warning - you feel me?’

 

‘I am implementing clause 10.2 little Roman C from your contract of employment  - grounds for summary dismissal.’

 

The pleats in Mrs Brother’s woolen  skirt resonated as if they were a series of andesite crystallizations pouring down the canals on the side of a volcano. Winter reached out to touch them but her hand was smacked away.

 

‘Did you or did you not vomit into my handbag and post it to my mother?’ enquired Mrs Brother.

 

Winter concentrated as much as her drug addled fugue would allow, she had consigned a large number of vomit filled handbags to the Royal Mail in the past 2 weeks  - memory was such a fickle animal, she reached out to try to corral it but it scampered just beyond her grasp.

 

----

 

Drain sat on the ice clear marble floor in the reception concourse of the Telko Oil building breathing into a paper bag. He did not wish to remove it from his mouth for fear that the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen inside the building might be different to that on the exterior. 

 

The twin lift doors opened vomiting and excreting knights in full war armor and deep sea divers. He knew that this was the single route to Winter but he had only taken a lift once before in his life and the terrible scar which ran from his left buttock to his belly button was testament to disastrous experience this had been. He crawled along the floor on his belly and people stepped over, around and in several instances, upon him, as if this were nothing out of the ordinary. ‘Life’s a plate of fucking jellied eels with a pickled egg on the side’ said Drain and of course, in that regard, he was entirely correct.

 

----

Winter staggered back to her room intent on collecting her belongings but in order to do so, she would have to remember firstly what belongings were and secondly, which ones of them belonged to her . She looked at her desk, had she brought that with her? She tried to envisage a scenario where this might be possible, travelling with the desk on the tube, carrying it up 33 flights of stairs under her arm. It was then that her gaze fell upon the knife and fork she had used in the days that she used to eat food. She lowered her right buttock onto the desk and shifted onto her left buttock before tumbling off the desk and on to the floor but as she did so, her hand closed around the knife. ‘Sic’ she said.

 

-----

 

The occupants of the lift were mainly Arlequín’s - fifteenth century Spanish clowns and two lollipop ladies. Exiting the lift on the 33rd floor Drain realized he not only had no idea where Winter worked nor did he know what she did. It was with a sense of true relief when a pair of immaculate Palais Royal trepointe veau velour Louboutin stiletto’s staggered out of the glass cage 43 degrees from his left shoulder and dropped a severed head between his feet. 

 

‘Winter’ Drain gasped. 

 

‘Bitch dissed me to my face so I cut her fucking head off,’ said Winter.

 

‘Is she dead?’ asked Drain.

 

‘Her body is, like, in the women’s toilet so she must be dead, ain’t it?’ replied Winter. 

 

She studied the man who lay on the floor. His face was like the lion in argent. 

 

‘I am here for you Winter’ said Drain, pulling himself to his feet with an uneven squelch.

 

A tear squeezed its way out of Winter’s left eye and lingered on her eyelash like a l

Lalique stalactite. She had been alone for longer than she could remember and the fear that this would never change had consumed her inside. 

 

‘I’m a bit fucked up,’ said Winter.

 

‘I hope so’ said Drain, taking her by a gore soaked hand and leading her towards his wretched version of eternity.