The Git Among the Pigeons

Sat on a sign on the edge of Baker Street – clearly a shit place to be. I gaze skyward and realise that I'm standing upside-down as freshly cut grass leaps unexpectedly across my field of vision. I right myself just in time to see Roy career off the rails and straight into a lamp post, like a twat. Roy makes a shit steam train, but you try telling that to a man that paid forty thousand pounds to have a cowcatcher surgically grafted to his shins. The man's living in well deserved denial. He smiles at me and begins to grind slowly through the pavement like a drill. I return his smile and watch him curiously as he disappears into the concrete. I begin to suspect that he does not have the appropriate planning permission for this. I must redirect his attention.

I don't stop to think. I barely even breathe. With the hectic speed of a dead badger hurtling to earth from atop the Eiffel Tower, I dash towards Roy, hoping against hope that I reach him in time. I trip over a tortoise and brain myself on the concrete. I'm out for the count.

I dream of Venice. I find myself floating carelessly in the canals, ploughing through gondolas as if they were made of wood. The locals scream in dismay as gondoliers leap from their sinking boats, only to land on the kitchen floor. They realise far too late in the game that they've moored their boats to the dishwasher. I grin smugly to myself as shards of broken gondola scatter wildly around the room, tearing at innocent Venetian faces and scratching the new paintwork on the cupboards. Suddenly I'm falling. Venice drops away and I'm left with a faint ringing in my ears and the smell of freshly-crushed tortoise clinging to my nostrils.

I come around and Roy's long-gone. If it weren't for the gaping chasm in the pavement and the teeth sticking out of the lamp post, it'd be as if he were never even here. I approach the freshly-drilled hole with wary steps. I peer over the edge and into the crushing darkness that Roy has left in his wake. The dark is Roy's weapon; he drags it limply behind him like a dead dog on a tattered leash, smearing the ground he covers with a long, foul stain. I stare into that cold darkness and feel it speak to my very soul. It asks me about that cold night in Brooklyn. I tell it that the subject is very personal and that is should mind its own business. The dark apologises for overstepping its boundaries.

Without further ado, I pinch my nostrils shut and cannonball into the thick dark that floods the chasm. I plummet through the vast black with the cold wind whipping at my face before crumpling in a messy heap at the bottom of the pit. My bones pierce my skin and my organs are turned to gelatinous sludge inside my body. As I lay mashed, gasping helplessly for air in the crushing black at the bottom of the pit, I think to myself how this has been a textbook example of how to ruin a perfectly good Tuesday afternoon. I remind myself not to invite Roy over to lunch for a very long time.