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

startled and hissed; a delicious death rattle halfway through ‘O mio babbino caro’. With that, I thought I myself might die from pleasure, the scene was so rich, piquant with resonances. The old man settled back under the music’s upswing, toes curling at the edge of the box, the oily sheen of the record’s surface reflecting dully in his bifocals, and I set to attacking the rusted hinges, buckles and clasps of his precious suitcase.

‘Because you’re frigging choosy, aren’t you? Just like your old grandad. Well, here’s something to see you right. Make proper use of it and you’ll never be wanting!’

I’ll never be wanting. I have wanted for nothing. You were wrong, grandad; frigging wrong. I have wanted. I have wanted badly. You could never see me right. You never even saw me open the suitcase, saw me react. Just as well, perhaps, as at first, I was wholly underwhelmed at the gift. Monumentally pissed off, as it happens, with what I had to smuggle out of your room, out of the rest home, while matron checked you over, slipped shut your eyelids, called the coroner and so on.

You never wrote your will down, you old bastard. So I had to thieve the thing, effectively, in order to carry out your wishes. And your wishes involved my being bequeathed… this. Well, well.

Like any good giver of presents you understood the psychology involved. The receiver is to be seduced. They want to have their wishes taken away from them, their power of choice and responsibility frazzled away in the acid bath of somebody else’s hierarchy of value. I, like everyone else, wanted to be whisked away, swirled into the updraught of the desires you had projected upon the space allotted to my own… and set down again in a new set of circumstances defined by your gift.

You gave me that, and I thank you. But in the past I have cursed you. This is a moral little tale, I suppose, by virtue of the fact that I have indeed come to a bad end. I can’t help that; many do. I probably shan’t sound moral.

You see, I was given a lack of choice. My desires were plucked out of the air for me. They solidified and took on life, based on woolly presumptions of what I might like.

And I… I wasted them. I stretched my desires hard; they snapped back like rubber bands.

I once knew a man who collected rubber bands, dropped by the postman or schoolgirls in the roadside. He said you never knew when they might ‘come in’. I said they might have been anywhere. I buy new rubber bands when I need them. And I waste them shamelessly. In fact, I’m the one who drops them by the roadside. All mine are snapped, like old knicker elastic; they will never ‘come in’ for anything.

I am voracious and fickle. That was my downfall. If I point to a moral by having a downfall; so be it. I also had a rise and a rise and a rise… pointing to a different moral, I hope. Voracious and fickle; you stretch as far as you may go and push on and push on and scratch and claw, bellow and rant your way on and out and into sheer, certain disaster and the cliff edge of workaday morality skids from under your soles and then… you are propelled back to your original state. < Where you may bleat of morality, warn others of stretching their elasticised bondage. Or you relish the telling as you soar 1 ever onwards, Oz-bound on the cyclone of your desires, the knicker elastic snapped and shrivelled like a severed umbilical • cord behind you.

Fickle as ever; I like to think of myself like that. That is; immoral and with my knicker elastic around my ankles.

It’s spot-the-contradiction time.

Having stressed my absolute nonpassivity, I go on to chat about the bliss of having one’s desires imposed—almost ; brutally—upon one’s person. It’s a slippery slope, passivity; one I’ve been down many a time.

And inside the suitcase, you ask?

A book with empty pages. When I took it home I thought. Screw this particular symbolic frisson for a lark! Grandfather had handed me my future, to inscribe it for myself. The world was an empty page at my fingertips. No, this isn’t a story about writing. God forbid. I never wrote. This isn’t a story, it hasn’t a moral. For tucked in between the pages were seven pressed flowers. I counted them. They were different sorts. I know nothing about flowers so I can’t describe them. Some were prettier than others.

My grandfather’s message, on the flyleaf: ‘Drop them in ! water and watch them come to life… only one at a time… when you’ve had enough of one, try the next.’

Japanese paper flowers. They expand in a delicate china bowl, swim out through the centre of the water, reel and span their allotted globe… I decided to try one out.

My first flower was the man with the elastic bands. He wasted nothing; we traipsed the streets together looking for odds and ends. We hunted through junk shops and he, like Grandfather, cluttered out the place he occupied, rent-free.

It was a barge on a canal. When we made love, below the water level, we could hear the keel slap and rumble on the external pressure. There was a glass floor and one night, glancing sideways, I saw two badgers swimming below our boat. One bared his fangs and scratched the glass. My lover threw a rug over them, to keep them out.

He was, I suppose, a kind of ideal man, though he never struck me as that at the time. Michelangelo’s David? Masculinity that can afford to be fey, slouched at the steering deck, hand on hip as we foraged down the ship canal, me bent out of sight, sucking him off as he called out to fellow sailors that passed us by. His prick reminded me of a prawn; there was