From Jester To King XXII
By Simon Barget
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John Magnolia again. What I’ve just witnessed cannot be reported with detachment and levity with my usual aplomb and I apologise in advance.
I parked on the hill outside the station. There was a bugle playing from one of the pubs promoting Scottish independence but most people weren’t taking it seriously and seemed to be just laughing it off. I’d been thinking of heading down to Spain but then I found myself in one of the many kosher restaurants with my old mucker Richard. That alone is a story, but…
Before all this happened I’d seen a guy with dreads outside the station and I just so happened to ask him if there was anything on because I thought he’d be the type to know and I was looking for something to fill up my time. And as it turned out he was the type and I can’t remember exactly how he imparted the information but he communicated to me there was something on back around the station area and I should go in one of the doors of one of the houses. He said I’d find it. This seemed vague at best but I knew what he meant. And then this is where I blank out, I cannot for the life of me remember exactly how I found it, all I know is that I was there and what it was like inside god help me.
Have you ever been to a sex dungeon? Because it really isn’t what you think. Let me stress this was no licentious frolic it was plain sinister and no matter how hard I tried to fit in my urge was to get the hell out as soon as I could. This was one of those townhouses with endless nooks and crannies with more and more rooms you happened upon as you went through it. It’s difficult to speak about a main room as such, but one of the many rooms had this full granite floor and this was where I think I was when I got there, that’s if I hadn’t been drugged by the dreads guy in the first place because that would certainly explain the blackouts. And there were about thirty people in this dimly-lit room chanting something I don’t know what, they were all irrepressibly earnest and sincere, focussed and humourless, and there was one main guy directing affairs and I knew he was in charge because people kept relaying everything through him as if it was impossible to think your own thoughts, and as soon as I saw that there was a strict process to this whole thing my heart sunk, not that I hadn’t found the atmosphere creepy to start with, but now it was clear that I’d walked in on some hideous cult thing.
At some point this man must have told the group to start moving round the room because without actually hearing this instruction that’s what I found the group doing, slowly walking round the perimeter of the room head to back head to back head to back. And the longer this went on, the more sexually charged the atmosphere became, and the more new people kept being funnelled into the room without me being able to discern exactly where they’d got in from so that now the room was pretty packed to the gills and it was at this point that I realised that we weren’t meant to be only moving round the room in general circular motion we were also supposed to be touching the person we happened to come upon next and when we came close enough we were supposed to get their attention look at them deeply in the eyes and then communicate to them the question ‘do you want me sexually?’ And it just so happened that the new people they kept funnelling into the room were statuesque beauties, the kind of women you get in catwalks and Cosmo and the more they came in the more the pressure ramped up to look at them, the more attractive the whole group became and I was way out of my depth. And John Magnolia is not an unattractive man, it’s just that I knew I wasn’t for them. And they knew and I knew that they knew etc.
So in my own inimitable way I fumble about, pretending I haven’t understood the game or whatever it’s supposed to be and I extricate myself to some degree and manage to go to one end of the room up a flight of stairs by a sort of washing area and then up another flight of stairs where I can watch the proceedings from above with a little bit of space and peace of mind not feeling so hemmed in, and it was at this point that the nudity starts and I can these girls’ chests peer out of their vest tops with their tiny incipient breasts and unabashed nipples and I’m both aroused and embarrassed, an awkward combination, and then I start hearing some of these girls talking because I ask them what I’m supposed to be doing, basically trying to get confirmation that I can stay by my new vantage point and the answer is of course no, and they’d prefer me to hurry me around gormlessly in this sea of people, a lot of them turn out to be German because I understand German, and it then becomes clear that what they’re engaged in has a far greater resonance than I’d initially imagined, more than nakedness and chanting, it was a ritual with clear ideological foundations to be taken very very seriously, not just something people liked to do to when they get together, so if there was any vestige of trying to find someone to collude with in my cynicism this wasn’t going to happen and I start to get really spooked, and I feel I have to play along even more than I’d been doing so far.
Then I feel I need to become even more servile just to get through it, I start asking people if there’s anything that needs moving around because there are all these objects strewn around the room god knows why, households objects like dishwashers which people are choosing to move or not move in an assembly line configuration, though I can’t work out the protocol to this either, but they don’t reply with a clear yes or no and I’m left with no clarity other than the precept of having to look deep into eyes, so I just carry on regardless hoping no one notices me moving some things and not others, pretending I don’t know what’s going on, and hoping not to stick out like a sore thumb. And then as if from nowhere the room takes on an entirely different cast, it opens up from above and I can now see the vast domed ceiling and the sky and there over the other end of the room is my go-to Japanese friend Shintaro standing next to someone I haven’t seen for years and both of them immediately dispel the bad atmosphere and my Japanese friend smiles a big heartfelt smile and I rush over and hug this other friend and know immediately that I was right in thinking that these other people are screwballs.
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