Playing Out by Paul Magrs (free biff chip and kipper ebooks TXT) 📗

I can take it much slower and convince myself that there really wasn’t anything else I might have done.

Well. Here goes.

Adele was my best friend and she campaigned. I was going to defend her immediately by saying she wasn’t your average campaigner with dreadlocks, Alsatian on a string and irony stuffed uselessly up her arse, but fuck it: she was. She was still my friend and, occasionally, when she could afford the train and boat fares, would come out to visit me at my lighthouse.

It was extreme north. You know all those frostily exotic place names they mention on radio shipping forecasts? So exotic you could never visit them because you know for a fact that these counties, these regions, have no ground to speak of? Well, I lived in the thick of those. I was a small pinprick in an ocean of thrashing, icy chaos and I loved it.

Boats passed by occasionally, passenger ferries which hunched their shoulders and nudged through the storms. Mostly Scandinavians off shopping for the day on Tyneside where things were cheaper. I’d be out walking on the wet black rocks surrounding my magnificent home and there’d be rows of bright blonde heads on a ship going past, waving their Top Shop carriers at me. They speak ever such good English.

Would it be immodest to call myself, a humble lighthouse keeper in the middle of nowhere, a sex symbol? Well, it’s over now so it doesn’t matter. But those Scandinavians would wave at me. Hold their new frocks up over the ship’s edges, under their chins, for me to admire.

And sometimes the ship would briefly dock and out would tramp Adele with her Alsatian and little haversack, come to stay a couple of weeks. Off the ship would sail again.

All I saw otherwise was the fishing boats. I was meant to train my incredible lamp, beam its bluff ebullience in the fog for the fishers’ benefit. But those rude bastards always know exactly where they’re going. I was virtually redundant. Not that I would let on to the owner of the lighthouse. He thought I was being quaint. Only recently I realised that his wife made him keep me there. She was after the fabulous furred crocodile, well before I even became aware of its precarious existence. Me and my lighthouse: we were set up.

When Adele came she would bring lots of booze, mung beans, vegan supplies, and a whole heap of pamphlets tortuously written by the permanently irked. There was always some cause or other.

On one visit she said to me, ‘I envy you being out here alone. Because you can hide your head in the sand from what’s going on in the real world. The horror on our streets.’

Adele knew all about the horror on the streets. She gathered up money for marine life in shopping malls, sprayed paint—and latterly pig’s blood—at fur-draped matrons, and took Cup-a-Soups to prostitutes at midnight.

I tried to point out that actually, I was doing the very opposite of hiding my head in the sand. Rather, I was right in the thick of it. I stuck my neck right out, in the wilderness, isolated in my splendid tower, and took what the world at its most tumultuous might chuck my way.

She scowled. ‘And that’s very male. Stranded up here on your massive prick, you’ve no idea what the real world’s like.’

I suppose she was right. On Kilroy I caught up quickly with what people were like. And it was awful.

Your average television discussion programme is a hothouse. They trawl in the relevant punters, perch them uncomfortably under steaming lights and send in one ringmaster with his microphone and whip for an hour. It’s always uproar and he has to shout to drum up coherence and decent telly. Make the topic anything you like and there’s always uproar. Oddly enough, our show was especially loud. Furs get them hotter under the collar than most things. Teeth and hair flying that morning.

On one visit Adele came skipping along the rocks to hug me, the ferry with its hoard of Norwegian shoppers flapping their goods and receding into the mist behind her. ‘I’m only here for a few nights,’ she exclaimed. She had hennaed her hair, I noticed, with too much tea. Because of the sea spray as I kissed her I could taste Earl Grey on her forehead. ‘Then I’m going back to the mainland and you’re coming with me. We’re going on the telly.’

Years ago, before I elected to stick my head in the sand—or raise it above the humdrum clouds, whichever way you look at it—and before Adele was the kind of legitimate campaigner who gets asked to go on TV programmes, we were lovers in college. It was the sort of affair that no longer seemed appropriate once the years of glamorously damp terraces, Mexican rugs, alfalfa sprouts and piss-weak beer on a Thursday night were over with. Thinking about it, though, Adele is still in precisely that culture. She never left it. I did. After graduation I threw out my little Indian hat with mirrors on it, and my long mustard cardy with holes in it, and fucked right off. So maybe there was a future for us after all. Maybe that’s why she kept on visiting. We’ll never know now anyway. In a dank cellar somewhere in a university town this very moment, Adele will be lighting an incense oil burner and cursing my name.

Which is Terry, by the way.

And all of it because of the green furred crocodile.

Furred to sustain it in the wild North Sea. It had evolved for itself a harsh winter coat, fur like that inside a kettle or the pipes lining the interior of my lighthouse. A tough, evil-smelling fur. God knows why they want to traipse about with it on their backs anyway.

But they bought it. They queued in their thousands for a snippet of my crocodile, earlobe-to-ankle coats, even shoes.

The first I knew of the crocodiles was when