EINE KLEINE PROLOG
Once upon a time, in the great and dark forest of Zippobarmitzvah, lived a strange person called Helen. She lived in a weird house, practically indescribable. In fact, the nearest anyone had ever got to describing the shape of her house was when a drunken troll passed by accidentally and, to no one in particular, uttered – ‘that thing looks like a pile of dirty washing…’ – then walked away and got into another, far more dangerous story.
Anyway, there lived Helen, who incidentally was a keen fan of the Pet Shop Boys.
She owned a ‘state of the art’ midi hi-fi (bought way back at a ‘back of a lorry’ sale in Peckham) but had never actually heard its spectacular quadraphonic sound because in her house there wasn’t any electricity.
Now, isn’t that a bummer?
Wrong!
That, my friend, is just a tiny little bummer, compared to the rest of the problems Helen has in the great and dark forest of Zippobarmitzvah. Like, for example, the seven dwarves who every evening try to break in for a gangbang.
Or the cat.
Stupid thing seems to be permanently on heat.
Last time she got pregnant the kittens were light green and had small chicken legs!
To top it all, the other day a letter comes.
Don’t ask me how, because I can’t figure out how a postman could get to her house without being eaten by wolves, murdered by nasty John Cleese look-alike brigands or acorned to death by giant squirrels.
Still, a letter comes, so you can imagine how excited Helen gets.
She sits in the comfy chair, opens the envelope, puts her sunglasses on and stares at the thing.
Then she remembers that she can’t read, with or without sunglasses.
So, as you can see, our Helen lives right at the bottom of the box God stores his disasters in.
Now then, what does one do when faced with such odds, to avoid general depression?
Or better… how has Helen managed to survive in the great forest of Zippobarmitzvah for the past six and a half years?
THE WONDROUS WORLD – CHAPTER ONE
Did you know that the great and dark forest of Zippobarmitzvah is Jewish?
Every bleeding tree, and most of them from Golders Green.
Drive everybody barmy every Saturday, because they refuse to work.
They do absolutely bugger all for the whole day.
They don’t do acorns, the leaves fold up so that there’s not a bit of shade, they block up all the squirrel holes and if you’re mad enough to start cutting a tree down on the Sabbath you can rest assured that the biggest available branch will suddenly come down from a terrible height just to make friends with your skull.
Very funny, ah-ah…
Anyway, where were we?
Ah! Helen!
Yes, Helen is walking about the forest one Saturday morning (she likes her constitutional after breakfast because it helps the digestion and all that) when, all of a sudden, she hears a cry for help.
Any reasonable human being, at this point, would at least stop and listen, just to double-check, right?
Of course.
But not our Helen, who chooses instead to sit on a large, flat stone (which happens to be the last remnant of an ancient temple built in honour of the obscure and often misunderstood god Zog) and have a cheese and onion sandwich.
Now, the interesting point is not Helen’s decision to totally disregard the cry for help but – and this has been a subject of heated discussion in the Philosophy Department of the University of Wisconsin – where did she get a loaf of medium-sliced Mother’s Pride bread to make a sandwich with.
Then, there’s the matter of the cheese.
Think a moment. She’s in the middle of a huge, great forest and out comes a slab of Mature Irish Cheddar.
I tell you, I’m flipping! I don’t even want to think about the onion!
Anyhow, there’s Helen with her sandwich, sitting on the flat stone and munching away when she hears the cry for help once more.
‘Did you hear that?’ – she says to the badger that’s just come out of the undergrowth to find out who’s sitting on the flat stone.
Naturally the poor badger, unaccustomed to being spoken to like that, empties his bowels in fright, does a frantic u-turn and disappears back into the bushes.
Well then.
Have you any idea how offensive badger droppings smell?
It doesn’t bear computing.
It’s so offensive that there isn’t a word in the dictionary to describe it.
Lethal!
Helen’s reaction is… you think Concorde is fast? That’s crap.
Helen is out of there so fast that the loud crack caused by her breaking the sound barrier kills several Canada geese flying overhead and renders the unfortunate badger permanently deaf.
Serves him right, I suppose, for sticking his nose in somebody else’s affairs….
So, there goes Helen again, breaking through the foliage with the grace and awesomeness of a demented gazelle, at an average speed of a lot of mph and with not a clue about where she’s heading.
She’s going so fast that the Earth has to rotate faster, to prevent her from falling off.
Then, all of a sudden, she stops.
Well, not intentionally, really, but stopping she does, because an enormous tree trunk (probably planted by some envious one legged person in order to stop people from showing off that they can run whilst he can’t…) comes unexpectedly into contact with Helen’s forehead and the lights go out.
All the lights.
Mmmm… it’s dark in the great forest of Zippobarmitzvah.
At around 7pm Helen wakes up.
Obviously, she doesn’t know what the right time is, because her digital Casio watch has run out of batteries years before, but trust me… it’s 7pm and that’s that.
Now, when a person who’s been unconscious for x hours wakes up, the most likely thing they do first is swear.
- ‘Pisspot!’ – mutters Helen.
Then she passes out again, but not for long, because all of a sudden a strange noise comes out of a nearby clump of gooseberry bushes.
I personally haven’t heard a noise like that in my whole life, so I can’t really tell you what may have caused it, but the nearest I could get to describe it would be ‘a cross between a bull’s fart and a walkman playing a Pet Shop Boys song on very low batteries’.
Awesome.
Startled out of her slumber, Helen assumes the ‘self-defence posture’, which involves lifting the left upper arm to shield the eyes and crossing her legs.
A small leaflet from the National Health I once read in a dentist’s waiting room describes this technique with a simple, terrifyingly cutting phrase: ‘ if you can’t see it, it cannot hurt you’.
Never says anything about the success rate of said method, though…
What can I say?
I mean, what can you expect from something you’ve picked up in a dentist’s waiting room?
A lot of words and bugger all useful information.
And after reading all that, all that springs to mind is the Pound Sterling equivalent you pay in taxes, so that some mindless moron can sit in a fat armchair dictating it to some equally brainless secretary.
Mind blowing, to say the least…
Mind you, I’m moaning and groaning and, as it is, I’m only knee-deep in shite.
Look at poor Helen, she’s swimming in it!
I mean, look at her!
She’s on the edge of oblivion, teetering on the thin blue line that separates existence from non-existence, and the stupid leaflet tells her bugger all about what she’s supposed to do.
And it’s not even Friday the 13th or something.
Imagine if it WAS!
That’d make a great horror movie.
But seriously, though.
I think it’d be wise to take a close look at what’s actually happening to her, before she wanders off somewhere else or decides to do something irregular.
Ok, last thing she did was to assume the ‘self-defence posture’, right?
Well then, that’s not a stance a person can maintain for a long period of time.
After all, if you cross your legs whilst standing up and your left upper arm is covering your eyes (i.e.: you can’t see a thing)
you may safely assume that the chances of something rather violent happening to you are quite fair, yes?
Disagree with me at your peril, baby.
Sadly, that’s exactly what happens to poor Helen, just when she’s utterly sure of being invisible and totally unassailable.
One minute she’s up, the next she’s not only down but out again, and several yards south-east of her original standing point, with her right upper-arm half buried in a peat bog.
The funny thing is that one of her reasons for going out this particular morning had been to find some peat to repair the roof of her house with.
By the way, the fact that peat is indeed a great insulating agent and excellent for repairing leaking roofs, is something not many people know, so there…
Come to think of it, our Helen is quite a resourceful little sod, isn’t she?
Actually, I have heard that she’s supposed to have invented this new kind of glue, so strong you can even stick tree trunks together! Quite a rapid thing, if you ask me.
Now, excuse me if I change the subject but I need to ask you something.
Have you ever been unconscious?
No?
I have. Several times.
The most spectacular time was when I got hit by a wild boar whilst taking care of my little necessities behind a bush.
Anyway, when you’re unconscious, two things usually happen.
One.
You forget everything.
Two.
People looking at you see a number of little birds flying dementedly in a circle, around whatever part of your body has been hit. Little birds, I mean, not huge, great condors or something.
Well then, ten or twelve is the usual number, depending on the seriousness of the injury.
The most I’ve had, personally, like the time with the wild boar, is seventeen, and once I’ve counted twenty-seven on an idiot
who got thrown off a tree by a bunch of baboons for stealing bananas.
Impressive, right?
Get this, then.
Helen, at this very moment, has eighty-six of the buggers flying around her head like crazy.
So, there she is, in the middle of pandemonium royale, with her upper arm still stuck in the peat and her eyes firmly shut, when
this ‘thing’ arrives on the scene and starts prodding her with a small pointed stick.
Must be a ‘thing’, surely, because it bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything I have ever seen, heard or read about.
Doesn’t even look organic.
A bit catholic, perhaps, but that’s about it.
Well, obviously, when someone prods you with a small pointed stick, your first reaction has got to be at least one of mild surprise, no?
Followed, naturally, by an overwhelming desire to smack the offending party as hard as possible, yes?
Right.
Then we all agree there.
Good!
Incidentally, the laws of probability state that the chances of laying an unknown entity flat whilst semi-conscious and weapon-less (thus gaining the all-important psychological and physical advantage) are in the region of minus thirty-two, a significant number in various parts of South America, known to possess magical qualities.
Reality, though, can be a real bitch sometimes.
Just when you’ve got it all worked out and you feel really, really, really confident, something unexpected happens and back to the drawing board you go.
Like right now, for example.
There’s the ‘thing’ tampering with Helen’s body, and it’s just about to bend down to inspect her a little better when, all of a sudden, Helen socks it a big one in the nether regions.
That was unexpected and different!
This is also the moment when, were we at the cinema, the music from Indiana Jones would come up and thousands of innocent bones would be broken and the hero would go absolutely bonkers until there’s nothing left standing.
That kind of thing.
Man, you should see Helen go for the ‘thing’.
She must really, really hate pointed sticks because within 20 seconds all that’s left of the poor, hapless creature is a leg and
a packet of Marlboro Lights.
‘Fags!’ – she exclaims – ‘Brilliant!’ and promptly sets about to scour the surrounding area for other bits of the ‘thing’, hoping to find other interesting things like matches, lighters, cigarette papers, money and so forth.
Sure enough, she spots the other leg (complete with trouser leg, of course), but the pockets are empty.
Further up the tree is the head, sporting a funny yellow helmet with a chinstrap.
Better investigate… she mutters, and starts climbing the tree.
She’s almost up there, where the head is, just about half a yard away, when a nice, hard coconut hits her on the back of her head and almost pushes her off her precarious stance.
‘Hey you! – yells this voice from down below – ‘have you seen a green ‘thing’ with three arms and a yellow bicycle helmet?’
(TO BE CONTINUED)
