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

they went round murdering seals on the west side of my island. I did like watching the seals gambol, but they began to die off at an alarming rate. I found them strewn around like badly punctured, bald tyres. Poor things! I thought at first, ironically enough: hunters. But the dead seals’ little suits were quite buggered up in these attacks and a hunter would never do that. And then I thought: Jaws. Instantly I saw myself as Roy Scheider, alone with only an oar to defend me, Upping down the sinking ship’s deck into some ghastly, jagged maw.

Then, with my golden telescope, from the top of my tower one morning, I observed the killing of the last few seals. Crocodiles. I could hardly credit it.

They came in packs of five, like Woodbines used to, calling out to each other, it seemed, as they waddled up on the rocks, surrounding their pathetic prey. Who could never run fast, bless them. Seals lollop and attempt to bounce. Chuckling nastily, I was sure, the crocodiles herded them up and took a swift bite out of each. They did it for fun, it seemed, nonchalantly and with a distinct cool. Like blowing up a crisp packet and exploding it with a clap. Their armspan-wide jaws would clash and the seals went pop.

I watched in, as they say, horrified fascination. The crocodiles were jewelled, and rightly proud of their hardy opalescence. Before each other they preened their shimmering, roughly coated skins and they shook their fur free of water, like dogs. Peering closer, I saw thick, matted green beards and disturbingly elfin ears.

Resolving never to tell anyone about this spectacle—I didn’t want film crews making nature documentaries on my rock, drinking all my booze—I quickly rerouted my walks to avoid a confrontation with my new neighbours.

On those rerouted, rather more alert and shifty walks, I would find the odd steaming heap of green shit. And tufts of moulted emerald fur. But I wasn’t going to let evolutionary anomalies chase me out of my home.

I forgot about them—almost—until Adele arrived to ask me to go on the telly with her. I went out to think it over and took her Alsatian, Foucault, for a quick jog around the rocks. And one of the great hairy bloody things ate Foucault.

‘He fell in,’ was all I could tell Adele, proffering her his snapped chain.

‘But he can swim!’ she sobbed.

‘Yes, but there’s all-sorts in there,’ I said darkly. I was hinting broadly at industrial waste, knowing that Adele would understand and come out of her shocked grief with a habitual blast of righteous indignation. The loss of Foucault, however, was a terribly cruel blow, and I saw that I would have to return to the mainland to appear on Kilroy with her, just so she could get through this testing time.

So, as we left my lofty home on the ferry, over the churning grey waters, I watched behind and toasted poor Foucault with a gin and tonic. I toasted my wonderful lighthouse also, sorry to leave it even for a few days. And below, I knew, beneath the frothy white wake our ship was drawing, the crocodiles were screaming with laughter. Underwater their outrageous hair would stand sinisterly on end, and they’d be pulling Foucault’s wishbone for a laugh.

I was torn, I must say.

Under the hothouse lights, when you’re going out live to three million homes, when it’s ten in the morning and everyone’s shouting themselves hoarse in a raucous carnival of vox-pops, you have to know where you stand. There’s no use if, when the man with the microphone comes your way to ask your opinion, you look indecisive and go, ‘Um… er… well, I can see both sides, actually…’

There’s no time to be equivocal. Not on daytime TV’s fast lane. You can get run over by an outspoken member of the public quick as a flash. You have to be openly biased and play out your part. That involves being nice as pie to each other in hospitality and then going for the jugular on the studio floor. One bloke was telling Adele she was evil for chucking pig’s blood at people. That was when the camera was on him, but afterwards he was horrifically smarmy and waltzed her off to his hotel. And she had my tickets and wallet in her bag. That’s how I came to be stranded on the mainland, but I’ll come to that.

I couldn’t be partisan. I was only there for moral support. I was sitting next to Adele but when they zoomed onto her for her opinion, she was incoherent with rage (she had just been called evil), and I got asked instead for mine. And I didn’t know. I went, ‘Um, ah… well…’ And everyone groaned.

Does living at the top of a beautifully whitewashed lighthouse make you a weak-willed and irritating liberal?

But I could, I could see both sides. When Adele was frothing at the mouth because they said she was wrong for attacking fur-wearers in the street, I thought, Well, she is a bit daft, really. That freezing day she was arrested for it, so cold that her blood iced over in its bucket, she threw it and someone lost consciousness. I couldn’t condone that, not even for Adele. Not on live TV.

Nor, however, could I condone the ones they got on to defend the furriers’ trade. A nasty gaggle of trumped-up scarecrows, jangling their bracelets in the front row like Jimmy Savile’s fan club. They all talked in measured, reasonable tones about their right to wear what they liked, about their rights as human beings to be tolerated. One of those in the front row was Monica. While the others ended up shrieking, losing the arguments and the phone-in vote, Monica remained as placid and sweet as a viola.

On the monitors above us Monica’s forehead shone. She wore heavy dark glasses and her skinny neck stuck straight out of her voluptuous coat. ‘I bet it’s a man,’