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

self-pity until it spied its lovely, welcome sister, my lighthouse. I had decided to dress myself as a seal and lure my prey.

Hours I spent gutting the miserable carcasses and stitching them—like a perfect sailor—into one huge and, I hoped, convincing creature.

I tried it on and I must admit I looked fabulous. I still wear my sealskin occasionally, and flop about on beaches the length and breadth of the country. What else ought I do without a job? We workless, heterosexual men have to do something for kicks in an age which is ‘postmodern, darling’.

So off I went, the following night, stumbling on my cumbersome tail across damp rock. What now? I wondered. Do I shout, ‘Come and get it, boys’?

I remembered the sight of the seals that gambolled in shallow waters and on the shingle. I emulated that for a bit, thrashing the water to make ripples that the beasts might sense. That was when I found I quite enjoyed it; the rancid stink of the fur’s uncured interior and the tang of frozen salt water. I came inside my second skin a couple of times and, while thus distracted, heard the crocodiles snorting as they came.

They almost got me. My eyeholes had slipped in the post-orgasmic panic, yet still I ran like hell up the beach.

They pounded through the surf on their stumpy little legs; fifteen, twenty, thirty of them. Luckily I couldn’t see them, but to hear them was enough.

In that instant I thought, Yes! Kill them! I agree! Much better to wear the bastards and swan about in society than let them run about innocent lighthouses wreaking havoc! Their venomous chops clattered and slavered hungrily at my scraped heels.

And like the lights of heaven, the lighthouse shone brightly down upon us. I was, once again, stunned. Then, as the crocodiles all peered together up at the tower, we saw that a helicopter hovered beside it and had discharged one of its company into the lamp room. She waved at me. Adele.

Adele was training the light down on us as the crocodiles circled me and began to look nastily suspicious. We’ve been fucking set up, one gnashed to his neighbour, and was right. And so have I, mate, I thought miserably, preparing to be devoured.

But down swept the helicopter and Monica herself appeared at the open hatchway, mink stoles flapping and forehead glinting in the night. With a well-modulated scream of triumph she picked off each of the beasts with a poisoned dart. She took them all and never disturbed a hair on their heads.

I passed out and, when I came to, found myself dressed as a seal with Monica bending over me and Adele busy all around, helping to sling the creatures into the back of the helicopter.

‘My daughter.’ Monica glowed with pride, and I passed out again.

Now that I’m out of a job, I sometimes come to stand on this particular beach—dressed in my neat little suit, although it’s shabbier now and smells awful—and I look out at my precious ex-sanctuary.

On the promenade every now and then you see someone being the height of fashion, glowing the chemical green of a furred crocodile. Usually a woman, but affluent queers are getting into the same kind of thing. The animal-rights lot are up in arms. But they can’t decide how natural the things were in the first place. It’s an ideological problem. It’s postmodernism, dear.

I was lucky, really, to escape only unemployed. They actually wanted to silence me. Monica gave me a speculative glance, when they had me trussed up under house arrest in their opulent front room. She’d always wanted a sailor suit. But Max looked nervous at that point and they let me go. I wasn’t furry enough, it seems. Every one of my hairs had dropped out in fright that night and that’s another reason—besides disenfranchisement and simple fetishism—that I like to wear my second skin.

Maybe Adele will come back, catch me up one day, and explain her political qualms about this. I may have been in a phallic ivory tower, but I think, surely, her own ideological position needs to be clarified a little? I mean, how can one chuck buckets of pig’s blood one day and cull crocodiles the next?

I miss my nice simple tower. Life was so easy when I was a sex symbol, master of all I surveyed, with only the seals and Scandinavian shoppers to please. Lighthouse keeping’s a dying art, fuck it.

EMMA’S SITUATION

Our landlord didn’t visit very often, and when he did he would tell us about his once giving Lulu a lift to Leicester. In the days when the boy she was with looked more like Lulu than she did. When she was a rising star. He told this story so he could look at Emma and, with an ingratiating nod, say that he hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he saw her on the telly, as he had seen Lulu, two weeks after he had driven her to Leicester, singing ‘Shout’.

Emma would flap her arms about, shake her head and lower her eyes murmuring soft deprecations, still giving him her best profile. Then he would bustle out with a little giggle, clutching his rent cheques. ‘Lulu!’ Emma would exclaim as his car was heard roaring back off to Leicester, and I would be reading again.

She straightened her rubber gloves and went back to cleaning the toilet, each time. Our landlord always discovered us like this, me reading, her cleaning the toilet.

It was part of our little ruse for renting this tiny canal side house that we pretended to be, of all things, a couple. Whenever the rent was due, or the soot-encrusted wiring fused, I would grimly submit to one of our landlord’s visits and gamely feign heterosexuality. Emma played along like the fine actress she thought she was and would drop in the odd mention of my incorrigible untidiness. Just like a man, she’d chortle, and toss her hair.

Our landlord would be upset,