Play along.

So I was asked this morning to organise a meeting between four of the five members of the band.

        Play this music while you read the rest:

        (Read it as me with a kind of gruff voice, waking up in my Spiderman bedsheets wearing a coat and hat and smoking a cigarillo. Just a normal day, in OTHER WORDS.)

        The phone called out like a lost child…lost on the streets of loser-ville. I’d lost her/it. I was lost. The sense of loss weighed on me like one of those fruit hats. Lost. Unfindable. This was a game of cat and sheriff, and I’d already lost. My favourite television show was Lost, but that’s over now. Misplaced.

        ‘Hello?’

        ‘Hello.’

        I was at a loss to place the voice. (I was blind.)

        ‘Who’s this?’

        The caller was Nancy Smithington – someone broad I once met down on the four corners of 4^th and 4^th. I was a perfect square, and she offered to look at me, dead, in the eye for a couple-a bucks. I didn’t take the deal. I saved her life that night. Since then she’d always called me, looking for a date. I sent fruit baskets.

        ‘Johnny, honey, you never cawwl me anymawer.’

        That bit is to give you a clue as to how stereotypical her accent is/was/she dies at the end of this story. Oh shit now I’ve given it away. Well, as they say, people always die.

        She read me a list of names. She told me what it was fawer.

        ‘Jawnny, baby, we need these guys. We got shit to do, honey. Get in touch wit ‘em. Call me back. I have diarrhea so I can’t dial the telephone.’

        Damn. Three names and a whole lot o’ nuthin.

        ‘Oh, and baby…’ she said, ‘come round soon. I miss ya.’

        I threw the phone out of the window. I wouldn’t be needing that again, unless someone needed to get hold of me, or I them.

        I swam down the rotten stairs of the building to retrieve the telephone. ‘If I’m going to call these people to get them together for a meeting,’ I said to myself, which brings into question the ontology of the ‘words’ I was using, ‘I’m going to need the telephone so that I can talk to them on that.’

        I called the telephone company to check that the phone was still working. They said they couldn’t tell, but that they’d send a guy round. I told them not to bother – Johnny Macintosh will figure these things out if it takes him all month.

        I called the first guy on the list. No reply. Typical. I called the second. I think he answered, but it sounded like he was just pumping air rhythmically through his lips. A secret code, eh? Nobody gets Johnny Macintosh like that. I slammed the handset against the table as hard as I could, and put it to my ear. He was talking, now. A little rough stuff from me never hurt anybody.

        ‘Little man in the phone?’ I said.

        ‘Hey Tim.’ It was Ed. I should have known.

        ‘Johnny Macintosh.’ I said.

        ‘…sigh. What do you want, Tim?’ Still talking in code. It was difficult to crack his nuts.

        ‘A meeting, little man. A meeting. Today. Skype.’

        ‘I’ll be there.’

        Dominoes. Life is dominoes. You knock one over, but if you set the dominoes up properly i.e. glue each one to the table so that it can’t go anywhere, then you’ve got to remove each one by hand, individually. It’s the only way to keep things tidy in this work-one-day world, and I was a tidy little man.

        ‘Seryn.’ I gargled.

        ‘Hey Tim.’

        I spat, and rinsed.

        ‘Seryn, we got a meeting. Nancy wants us.’

        I heard the sound of gunfire.

        ‘I’m a little tied up here, dude. What time?’

        ‘One-ish? Two?’

        ‘That gives me something to live for.’

       

        The sound of death filled my ear. The screams, the gunshots, the burst of explosions. ‘Secure the bunker!’ ‘Get the bastard!’ ‘You’ll never get your secrets back, Dr. Inchera!’ ‘Burden?! I thought you were…’ ‘…dead? Heh…dream on, Doctor…IN HELL! DREAM ON IN HELL YOU BASTARD!’ Bang bang bang boom. 'Oh Seryn, my hero!' 'That's right, Dad.'

        I sent Jeb a telegram. He replied and said it was fine he was just making some beans alongside toast.

        So, my job done, I had breakfast. Eggs over-easy, and a difficult cup of coffee. I squeezed myself in between the two panes of glass in my double glazed window, and wondered how I got into this shape. One woman, a list of names...

One name was missing, I knew that. He’s on the upper-South side, trying to conceive of opposites to left. Maybe he’s got the right idea.

        After all, as Nancy said: We got shit to do, honey.

Bloodworks US iTunes

Bloodworks UK iTunes

Phoria Store

Sept 5th: SoundScreen event at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, full audio-visual show w/orchestral ensemble.

P.S. Nancy dies of skydiving poisoning.