novel never to be?

Bounce off me skyrocket

“Conchy Wag Broody kook”. Yes I know it is unfair to inflict a stranger with a complete non sensicle greeting, but the sheer look of confusion and befuzzlement that resounds is enough to massage a boredom gland for at least five seconds, that is until conversation proper must commence, and the reality of the weather, football scores and weekend plans crush the assent.
“Hi, how are you?”, is thrown at me by a semi stranger, known only from corridor glance, and ‘insert conversation here’ lift sharing. How many times can one offer a ‘fine, and you?’ without diminishing sincerity, yet maintain the comfort of further risings without asphyxiation by silence?
So in order to preserve an air of honesty, and trust an amicable (yet dull) looking stranger, a change of tact drifted along, aided by a kick of ‘Seattle courage’. In the arms of Mocha I fuse: “Fine, but the days are flicking through in blinks and my hands are wielded to a paper boulder”.

Now that is by no means the most abstract of salutations that can be offered, in fact, I feel I was quite generous in uttering something that could be understood, after all, I had to see this guy everyday of my working life, so had to spare him a potentially career puncturingly warped “Hi” laced with animals and kinestethis.
Surely he would realise. I was expressing a disdainment as to the speed at which our lives are passing, and the fact that we’re all stuck in a ‘Monday loop’ where free time is furthest, and the shackles of work prevent anything that would enable us to seize and enjoy the passing moments?
Surely he would not. My glands were massaged and asphyxiation set in to a “I heard you, but seeing as you are clearly mad I shall acknowledge you and discontinue converse” grin. He rapidly steps out at the third floor (though he works on the sixth) and I continue my journey to the rafters alone, save the company of a miniature depression pinch.

I did like the office, despite the dungeon like qualities it shares with any workplace, or even home if you spend long enough there. It stands thirteen stories high. The architects obviously spat in the face of superstition, although there were rumoured to have been three deaths on site during construction, a fire in the basement, a flood from malfunctioning air conditioning, a nest of rats found at the bottom of the lift shaft and it manages to get struck by lightning every other year. But who am I to question the wisdom of an architect? I couldn’t make a tepee from a handkerchief and pigeon sticks.
It’s like working in a giant ring doughnut. The outside is all glass, and there is a huge hollow in the middle that cuts down from the roof to the reception area, the inner ring is also glass, so Lisa Livelly in her micro skirt on the top floor can look over the precipice from her desk and spy on the activity on every floor. Even the areas directly below her are visible as there are mirrors on the gaps between glass. She takes great delight in emailing down reports on the activities of the workaphobic men below, who have turned their office Pc monitors into Soho squares of ill repute, thanks to the business revolution that is the Internet. They take great delight in looking up to the top floor at Lisa, as despite her powers of observation and barbed tongue, has yet to realise the dress code a glass building inflicts, and there are few prepared to advise her!

Up the middle of the doughnut glide two glass lifts, and the entire office waves at the occupiers as they ascend like missiles, making the back staircase a necessity for the self conscious and vertigo inflicted. Starbird (my housemate) and I have visions of the office being converted into a space station. In the middle would stand a giant rocket, just waiting to be launched. Embedded in the ground floor are landing lights that bleed from red to amber then white every three seconds, and the receptionists sit like Nasa security guards, protecting the rocket from terrorists and environmental campaigners fuming in the throng. The lifts would carry the astronaughts up to the entrance hatch in the nose of the rocket on the thirteenth floor, and the glass ceiling would slide back to unveil the rich black velvet sky through which the pearly steel would glide.
As the wheel clamps are released and the caretaker frightens the mating pigeons away from the rafters with an outstretched mop, the space station commander and managing director hits the launch button and the ignition thrusters kick in with a bellow of azure acoustics, lacing the non-smoking office with a muggy blanket of liquorice smog. As the rocket slowly rises from the floor Starbird and I laugh at the sight of the eager receptionists, dialling fingers outstretched to the flames where they toast marshmallows on skewers to within an inch of their fluffy lives.

The great thing about working in the IT business is that you never have to tell people about ‘your day’, as they just aren’t interested. As soon as the letters I and T escape your lips the listener suffers an instant wax surplus, and further words splat unheard against the wall of the ear. This suits me fine, as having been ‘doing IT’ all day with my head wired to numbers and my veins wired on coffee, the last parchment of converse I seek with Starbird is electronic.

I can’t remember why I call Ngile Holloquay ‘Starbird’, it wasn’t because I couldn’t pronounce his name (I’m convinced that’s why others stole it from me), I think it came from a caffeined spewfest while poised on the arm of the sofa flapping my arms, it fell out of my mouth, and just seemed to suit him. A slight of manhood, poised for greatness, he could take flight to the heavens and laugh at us all but he chooses to remain here and contemplate the nations sanity while musing his cynical verse at the TV.

Starbird was one of those people you grow addicted to, who an initial spark of inspiration draws you to them and never lets go. Like going barefoot on the first day of summer, it becomes uncomfortable to go back to wearing shoes again, though they protect your feet from the stones and glass on the world’s streets, you cannot feel the wind between your toes. Starbird helped me develop a callus, I can now walk to the postbox barefoot, and run through the jagged insults of others without even a splinter.
He doesn’t ‘work’ in the traditional sense of the word. Having dropped out of his law degree after deciding that ‘life should have no precedent’ he turned his meticulous and obsessive nature to photography. He documents the banalities of London life on film, and sells on his work to various publishers of travel guides, whose addresses he copies down from the jackets of books in every bookstore he visits.
He has a ‘hitlist’ of publishing houses, newspaper headquarters and journal producers from around the world taped to the side of our fridge. He says publishers, especially the American ones like his pictures because they capture the ‘true spirit of one of the worlds most dynamic cities’, when in fact they are themselves a superficial lie, as most are manipulated and ‘airbrushed’ using my office computers at weekends. If only the council would take as much care in removing the unwanted shadows from the streets as Starbird does.
I do sometimes worry about his obsessiveness, once he gets an idea in his head, he will pursue it to death, he fears that he is missing out on something all the time. He once went through a phase of setting up a video camera on his bedroom window sill, wired up to a timer switch so he could film the sunrise. “I’m tired of missing out on something so amazing, yet so common place, that happens every day, yet so few see it” he rationalised. I dread to think how many times he taped it and the hours he spent watching the playback and deciding which tape he should keep, and the criteria he scored each sunrise on to reach his decision.
While we have a very open relationship, there are some things he won’t let me in on, and his sunrise tapes are one of them, as he wants to be the only person in the world to have a document of that dawn, and to have witnessed it from that perspective, it gives him a sense of ownership on a large scale. His private little universe has it’s own exclusive sunrise, and he is in complete control of the dawn, one lift of a finger to the ‘play’ button and the day begins. It’s the closest he’ll ever get to being God, at least in his world.

And it is slouched on his power cloud that I find him, as I burst through the darkened door well into the lounge. “Yello SB, it’s ‘only’ me” I muse as I gently close the door behind me, as a muted echo to my entrance. Starbird doesn’t peel his eyes open from their rest, but smiles wryly and slowly unfolds his arm that was previously cradling the back of his head from the couch, stretches it rigid and uncurls his index finger to point to the carpet, as if he were about to cast a thunderbolt from his fingertips, to reap some unspecific revenge on the cities below. My gaze follows his fingers path, to a haze of steam slowly coiling upward, from a freshly brewed , giant tea cup of black coffee. “Your challice awaits” he bellows in a deep voice, extensuated into an operatic bass tone, that crashed wasted on a carpeted room with such a low ceiling, for it would surely have filled a cathedral. I could imagine the swells of air spiralling heavily around his lungs as he spoke, and the coffee mist seemed to part at his word. I dropped my battered briefcase on the carpet, and leapt forward towards the coffee, falling on my chest and tie as if to claim the winning run in a game of baseball.
Starbird and I couldn’t just act ‘normally’, we had to turn simple things like turning on the light or drawing the curtains, (and on the rarest of occassions washing up), into mini performances, to not only add colour to the dullest of events, but acknowledge the fact that no matter who you are, you are ultimately comitted to such mundane aspects of routine domestic existence, so we just made these moments count for something.
However grandeur these actions were not without their avoidable ills, as Chopper would testify. Chopper was our budgie (named after a weighty piece of childrens’ literature), and his contribution to a mundane existence ( in fact I think it was his only contribution, as he had barely mastered ‘hello’ let alone achieve our ultimate goal of chirping: ‘the archbishop of Canterbury’) was to force us to unsully his caged command centre once a week, of it’s shredded newspaper, sawdust and ‘Trill torpedoes’. This was definately an act that required garnish, so every week Starbird and I would enact a scene from a famous (or not so) film as we cleaned the cage, with Chopper fluttering around the room like a clumsy fairy. Allow me to cite an example: the Psycho shower scene. This would bestow me as the vulnerable blonde (name her!- janet Leigh?) ‘in the shower’, holding the bottom tray of Chopper’s cage to my chest, and the night time ‘budgie silencing’ blanket over my head. Starbird would then lunge at me with a wet detergent soaked rag, ripping off the blanket as if to draw the shower curtain, and screech the famous violin etches from his throat as he slashed at the tray, scratching it clean and leaving lacerations of cream cleaner on it’s surface. I would then fall into a heap on the floor, and the cream would seep down the tray like a trickle of blood, coiling into a spiral as it ran into the plug hole the water dish sat in, while Starbird ‘filmed’ the finale, with his hands as a camera as he moved around the hole, zooming in for the fade, to black of eye as he struck me!
Choppers’ final movie was ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ ( trust Chopper to bow out half the way through a trilogy! ) which he viewed perched high up on the curtain rail. Starbird in his black jeans and T-shirt, with the black bin liner we had filled with old newspapers as a cape, made a formidable Darth Vader, and I a cowering luke Skywalker. (Yet again getting to play the hero, but ultimately the victim of the piece.) It was the scene where Luke and Darth come face to face in ‘Cloud City’, and have their final duel before Luke falls into space (conveniently to be caught by a passing space craft piloted by his buddies.) While Darth had a long nosed black vacuum cleaner for his light sabre, I was armed with just my wit and Choppers’ tray, not a great arsenal at best, but with Darths’ sabre on ‘full suck’ I didn’t stand a chance, nor did anything in it’s path. “Come over to the Dark side Luke, I am your father...” breathed Starbird into an empty pint glass, which steamed up with each vowel, giving him a distinctive echo in the vein of our dark anti-hero. “No, it’s not true, I’ll never join you” I wailed (but could not resist a giggle mid wail), “Then you must die” Darth declared as he dropped the pint glass, kicked the vacuum cleaners body switch to ‘on’ and began swinging the long nosed tube around in an orbiting sabre fashion. It’s loud like humming droned like a passing motorcycle as it buzzed by my ears. I held up the green tray in my defence, but it was no match for Darths’ supreme sucking prowess, and his sabre struck the tray, snorting up all the loose sawdust it offered as protection. He quickly pulled the tube back towards him, and up over his shoulder, to build momentum for the final kill, when I suddenly heard a screech beneath the humming, “Chopper!” I yelled, dropping the tray and rolling to the vacuum cleaner’s off switch, which I rapidly struck. The humming died with a slowing whir, and ground to a halt, leaving the room in silence. “What’s up with you?” Starbird enquired, bemused as to why I had cheated him of his victory. “You’ve sucked up Chopper” I declared, unsure whether this was actually comical or tragic. Starbird must have found it the former as he began to laugh loudly, but sensing my anguish, curbed his laughter to a smirk as I put my ear to the square black box that may now contain my budgie (amoung other assorted nasties) and listened for signs of live. “Help me!” squeaked Starbird, in his best budgiesque voice, I ignored him. I could hear no movement from inside. “Help me Obe Wan Kenoabe, you’re my only hope” he continued. “Ngile” I protested, “you’re not being much help. Did you feel him go in?” I enquired. “How does a budgie feel when it’s being sucked up a hoover?” he retorted. Which sounded like the biggest set up for an obvious joke I had heard in while, but I wasn’t in the mood. “Well did you hear anything in your final swinging moment?” I continued. “I couldn’t hear anything over the noise of the hoover” he replied. “He must be inside” I concluded, and began to open the vacuum cleaner, which I had just noticed bore an uncanny resemblence to a gothic version of R2-D2. The outer casing came open with a crack, and a spittering of dust flew a short distance onto the carpet. I reached into the base and pulled out the thick brown paper bag inside, which was surprisingly heavy. I placed it gently onto the base of Chopper’s cage and peered into the dark hole in the neck of the bag. It was like peering into the entrance to a blue tits nesting box nailed to a cherry tree, and the hope of seeing a bird inside was just as great, but as usual the nest of fluff, feathers and debris blocked the way. “Can you see him?” Ngile enquired in a whisper. I shook my head, and pinched the top of the bag, slowly tearing it open. A further whisp of grey smoke coiled out into the room. ”Is he smoking in there?” Ngile jested. I continued to tear the bag across it’s side, as if a surgeon performing a delicate operation on a family friend. Now it did look like a birds nest, a huge mound of grey fuzz stood, like hamster bedding, in the cubed form the bag had moulded it into. I put my fingers into the surface, prising it open delicately, expecting to find a mangled dirty budgie feet up in the air inside. As the sides fell apart, a large cloud of ash like dust particles, carpet fluff and dead skin cells bellowed out, up my nose and into my eyes. Starbird rushed and opened the window to try and get rid of it. I grimmaced at the mothbally smell, and leapt backwards to get away, knocking the rubberplant over as I did so. As the rubber plant fell, spilling soil across the carpet, Chopper, clean and very much alive, flew out from it’s branches, where he had been sat all along, and out through the open window to the open arms of freedom.
Starbird and I looked at each other in disbelief, me at the thought of Chopper’s lack of survival training and Starbird at the state of my face, and the mess I was sat in.

“I often dream of having my own coffee house, but it wouldn’t just be a place where people can order brown drinks, it would be a parlour of indulgence... “With red light bulbs?” I interupted, to miffed gaze. She continued unpeturbed. “It would be filled with antique indian furniture, of burnt oak and rusted iron, as well as coffee hits it would probably be wise for visitors to have tetnus jabs in case they cut themselves on the iron, but that would forge part of the thrill. It would have a dimly lit downstairs, only accessable to a select few at the managers discretion. The air would be an aromatic fusion of ground moccha and incence, seeping from joss sticks swaying in large cream, cracked tea cups, suspended by silver chains from the ceiling. The polished wooden floor would be coated in throws and cushions, three long emerald sofas would slant strangled against the walls that did not have stairwells rising from them. A large skeletal grandfathger clock would stand below the staircase, its dusty glass case revealing to all the mechanisms and spiders inside, but the chimes muffled by a satin gauze wrapped around the strikers, muting time’s cry, rendering it insignificant. Artists and poets from miles around would come to unfold in the basement, and drink from the fountain of coffees from across the globe, Blue Mountain, Arabic and Columbian, share palms with Hazelnut-blueberry, banoffee pie and rhubarbed dandelion flavoured kicks, as the indulgers shared tales, scars and stars, bouncing ideas off each other long into the night.” She paused, and looked down at the creased tv guide at her feet, and the empty wine glass lying on it’s side.
“That is my idea of perfection, giving me a faith in pegomancy, melting me into the motivations of menyana. I would scribe the moment and cafe: ‘cappuccino futon’, like a postcard written in lower case, it would caress the eye and heart with innocence and comfort.”
I looked at the furrows of skin beneath her eyes, we were both very tired, and the evenings wick was low. I rested my head upon her gloved thigh, and slipped into sleep, filled with the glowy notions of cappuccino futons.


dead letter office? So everyone has a novel in them? Maybe, but it feels my latest attempt has a bit too much of me in the novel, I doubt this will ever grow, but here i go....

Not rocket science Bounce off me skyrocket “Conchy Wag Broody kook”. Yes I know it is unfair to inflict a stranger with a complete non sensicle greeting, but the sheer look of confusion and befuzzlement that resounds is enough to massage a boredom gland for at least five seconds, that is until conversation proper must commence, and the reality of the weather, football scores and weekend plans crush the assent. “Hi, how are you?”, is thrown at me by a semi stranger, known only from corridor glance, and ‘insert conversation here’ lift sharing. How many times can one offer a ‘fine, and you?’ without diminishing sincerity, yet maintain the comfort of further risings without asphyxiation by silence? So in order to preserve an air of honesty, and trust an amicable (yet dull) looking stranger, a change of tact drifted along, aided by a kick of ‘Seattle courage’. In the arms of Mocha I fuse: “Fine, but the days are flicking through in blinks and my hands are wielded to a paper boulder”. Now that is by no means the most abstract of salutations that can be offered, in fact, I feel I was quite generous in uttering something that could be understood, after all, I had to see this guy everyday of my working life, so had to spare him a potentially career puncturingly warped “Hi” laced with animals and kinestethis. Surely he would realise. I was expressing a disdainment as to the speed at which our lives are passing, and the fact that we’re all stuck in a ‘Monday loop’ where free time is furthest, and the shackles of work prevent anything that would enable us to seize and enjoy the passing moments? Surely he would not. My glands were massaged and asphyxiation set in to a “I heard you, but seeing as you are clearly mad I shall acknowledge you and discontinue converse” grin. He rapidly steps out at the third floor (though he works on the sixth) and I continue my journey to the rafters alone, save the company of a miniature depression pinch. I did like the office, despite the dungeon like qualities it shares with any workplace, or even home if you spend long enough there. It stands thirteen stories high. The architects obviously spat in the face of superstition, although there were rumoured to have been three deaths on site during construction, a fire in the basement, a flood from malfunctioning air conditioning, a nest of rats found at the bottom of the lift shaft and it manages to get struck by lightning every other year. But who am I to question the wisdom of an architect? I couldn’t make a tepee from a handkerchief and pigeon sticks. It’s like working in a giant ring doughnut. The outside is all glass, and there is a huge hollow in the middle that cuts down from the roof to the reception area, the inner ring is also glass, so Lisa Livelly in her micro skirt on the top floor can look over the precipice from her desk and spy on the activity on every floor. Even the areas directly below her are visible as there are mirrors on the gaps between glass. She takes great delight in emailing down reports on the activities of the workaphobic men below, who have turned their office Pc monitors into Soho squares of ill repute, thanks to the business revolution that is the Internet. They take great delight in looking up to the top floor at Lisa, as despite her powers of observation and barbed tongue, has yet to realise the dress code a glass building inflicts, and there are few prepared to advise her! Up the middle of the doughnut glide two glass lifts, and the entire office waves at the occupiers as they ascend like missiles, making the back staircase a necessity for the self conscious and vertigo inflicted. Starbird (my housemate) and I have visions of the office being converted into a space station. In the middle would stand a giant rocket, just waiting to be launched. Embedded in the ground floor are landing lights that bleed from red to amber then white every three seconds, and the receptionists sit like Nasa security guards, protecting the rocket from terrorists and environmental campaigners fuming in the throng. The lifts would carry the astronaughts up to the entrance hatch in the nose of the rocket on the thirteenth floor, and the glass ceiling would slide back to unveil the rich black velvet sky through which the pearly steel would glide. As the wheel clamps are released and the caretaker frightens the mating pigeons away from the rafters with an outstretched mop, the space station commander and managing director hits the launch button and the ignition thrusters kick in with a bellow of azure acoustics, lacing the non-smoking office with a muggy blanket of liquorice smog. As the rocket slowly rises from the floor Starbird and I laugh at the sight of the eager receptionists, dialling fingers outstretched to the flames where they toast marshmallows on skewers to within an inch of their fluffy lives. The great thing about working in the IT business is that you never have to tell people about ‘your day’, as they just aren’t interested. As soon as the letters I and T escape your lips the listener suffers an instant wax surplus, and further words splat unheard against the wall of the ear. This suits me fine, as having been ‘doing IT’ all day with my head wired to numbers and my veins wired on coffee, the last parchment of converse I seek with Starbird is electronic. I can’t remember why I call Ngile Holloquay ‘Starbird’, it wasn’t because I couldn’t pronounce his name (I’m convinced that’s why others stole it from me), I think it came from a caffeined spewfest while poised on the arm of the sofa flapping my arms, it fell out of my mouth, and just seemed to suit him. A slight of manhood, poised for greatness, he could take flight to the heavens and laugh at us all but he chooses to remain here and contemplate the nations sanity while musing his cynical verse at the TV. Starbird was one of those people you grow addicted to, who an initial spark of inspiration draws you to them and never lets go. Like going barefoot on the first day of summer, it becomes uncomfortable to go back to wearing shoes again, though they protect your feet from the stones and glass on the world’s streets, you cannot feel the wind between your toes. Starbird helped me develop a callus, I can now walk to the postbox barefoot, and run through the jagged insults of others without even a splinter. He doesn’t ‘work’ in the traditional sense of the word. Having dropped out of his law degree after deciding that ‘life should have no precedent’ he turned his meticulous and obsessive nature to photography. He documents the banalities of London life on film, and sells on his work to various publishers of travel guides, whose addresses he copies down from the jackets of books in every bookstore he visits. He has a ‘hitlist’ of publishing houses, newspaper headquarters and journal producers from around the world taped to the side of our fridge. He says publishers, especially the American ones like his pictures because they capture the ‘true spirit of one of the worlds most dynamic cities’, when in fact they are themselves a superficial lie, as most are manipulated and ‘airbrushed’ using my office computers at weekends. If only the council would take as much care in removing the unwanted shadows from the streets as Starbird does. I do sometimes worry about his obsessiveness, once he gets an idea in his head, he will pursue it to death, he fears that he is missing out on something all the time. He once went through a phase of setting up a video camera on his bedroom window sill, wired up to a timer switch so he could film the sunrise. “I’m tired of missing out on something so amazing, yet so common place, that happens every day, yet so few see it” he rationalised. I dread to think how many times he taped it and the hours he spent watching the playback and deciding which tape he should keep, and the criteria he scored each sunrise on to reach his decision. While we have a very open relationship, there are some things he won’t let me in on, and his sunrise tapes are one of them, as he wants to be the only person in the world to have a document of that dawn, and to have witnessed it from that perspective, it gives him a sense of ownership on a large scale. His private little universe has it’s own exclusive sunrise, and he is in complete control of the dawn, one lift of a finger to the ‘play’ button and the day begins. It’s the closest he’ll ever get to being God, at least in his world. And it is slouched on his power cloud that I find him, as I burst through the darkened door well into the lounge. “Yello SB, it’s ‘only’ me” I muse as I gently close the door behind me, as a muted echo to my entrance. Starbird doesn’t peel his eyes open from their rest, but smiles wryly and slowly unfolds his arm that was previously cradling the back of his head from the couch, stretches it rigid and uncurls his index finger to point to the carpet, as if he were about to cast a thunderbolt from his fingertips, to reap some unspecific revenge on the cities below. My gaze follows his fingers path, to a haze of steam slowly coiling upward, from a freshly brewed , giant tea cup of black coffee. “Your challice awaits” he bellows in a deep voice, extensuated into an operatic bass tone, that crashed wasted on a carpeted room with such a low ceiling, for it would surely have filled a cathedral. I could imagine the swells of air spiralling heavily around his lungs as he spoke, and the coffee mist seemed to part at his word. I dropped my battered briefcase on the carpet, and leapt forward towards the coffee, falling on my chest and tie as if to claim the winning run in a game of baseball. Starbird and I couldn’t just act ‘normally’, we had to turn simple things like turning on the light or drawing the curtains, (and on the rarest of occassions washing up), into mini performances, to not only add colour to the dullest of events, but acknowledge the fact that no matter who you are, you are ultimately comitted to such mundane aspects of routine domestic existence, so we just made these moments count for something. However grandeur these actions were not without their avoidable ills, as Chopper would testify. Chopper was our budgie (named after a weighty piece of childrens’ literature), and his contribution to a mundane existence ( in fact I think it was his only contribution, as he had barely mastered ‘hello’ let alone achieve our ultimate goal of chirping: ‘the archbishop of Canterbury’) was to force us to unsully his caged command centre once a week, of it’s shredded newspaper, sawdust and ‘Trill torpedoes’. This was definately an act that required garnish, so every week Starbird and I would enact a scene from a famous (or not so) film as we cleaned the cage, with Chopper fluttering around the room like a clumsy fairy. Allow me to cite an example: the Psycho shower scene. This would bestow me as the vulnerable blonde (name her!- janet Leigh?) ‘in the shower’, holding the bottom tray of Chopper’s cage to my chest, and the night time ‘budgie silencing’ blanket over my head. Starbird would then lunge at me with a wet detergent soaked rag, ripping off the blanket as if to draw the shower curtain, and screech the famous violin etches from his throat as he slashed at the tray, scratching it clean and leaving lacerations of cream cleaner on it’s surface. I would then fall into a heap on the floor, and the cream would seep down the tray like a trickle of blood, coiling into a spiral as it ran into the plug hole the water dish sat in, while Starbird ‘filmed’ the finale, with his hands as a camera as he moved around the hole, zooming in for the fade, to black of eye as he struck me! Choppers’ final movie was ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ ( trust Chopper to bow out half the way through a trilogy! ) which he viewed perched high up on the curtain rail. Starbird in his black jeans and T-shirt, with the black bin liner we had filled with old newspapers as a cape, made a formidable Darth Vader, and I a cowering luke Skywalker. (Yet again getting to play the hero, but ultimately the victim of the piece.) It was the scene where Luke and Darth come face to face in ‘Cloud City’, and have their final duel before Luke falls into space (conveniently to be caught by a passing space craft piloted by his buddies.) While Darth had a long nosed black vacuum cleaner for his light sabre, I was armed with just my wit and Choppers’ tray, not a great arsenal at best, but with Darths’ sabre on ‘full suck’ I didn’t stand a chance, nor did anything in it’s path. “Come over to the Dark side Luke, I am your father...” breathed Starbird into an empty pint glass, which steamed up with each vowel, giving him a distinctive echo in the vein of our dark anti-hero. “No, it’s not true, I’ll never join you” I wailed (but could not resist a giggle mid wail), “Then you must die” Darth declared as he dropped the pint glass, kicked the vacuum cleaners body switch to ‘on’ and began swinging the long nosed tube around in an orbiting sabre fashion. It’s loud like humming droned like a passing motorcycle as it buzzed by my ears. I held up the green tray in my defence, but it was no match for Darths’ supreme sucking prowess, and his sabre struck the tray, snorting up all the loose sawdust it offered as protection. He quickly pulled the tube back towards him, and up over his shoulder, to build momentum for the final kill, when I suddenly heard a screech beneath the humming, “Chopper!” I yelled, dropping the tray and rolling to the vacuum cleaner’s off switch, which I rapidly struck. The humming died with a slowing whir, and ground to a halt, leaving the room in silence. “What’s up with you?” Starbird enquired, bemused as to why I had cheated him of his victory. “You’ve sucked up Chopper” I declared, unsure whether this was actually comical or tragic. Starbird must have found it the former as he began to laugh loudly, but sensing my anguish, curbed his laughter to a smirk as I put my ear to the square black box that may now contain my budgie (amoung other assorted nasties) and listened for signs of live. “Help me!” squeaked Starbird, in his best budgiesque voice, I ignored him. I could hear no movement from inside. “Help me Obe Wan Kenoabe, you’re my only hope” he continued. “Ngile” I protested, “you’re not being much help. Did you feel him go in?” I enquired. “How does a budgie feel when it’s being sucked up a hoover?” he retorted. Which sounded like the biggest set up for an obvious joke I had heard in while, but I wasn’t in the mood. “Well did you hear anything in your final swinging moment?” I continued. “I couldn’t hear anything over the noise of the hoover” he replied. “He must be inside” I concluded, and began to open the vacuum cleaner, which I had just noticed bore an uncanny resemblence to a gothic version of R2-D2. The outer casing came open with a crack, and a spittering of dust flew a short distance onto the carpet. I reached into the base and pulled out the thick brown paper bag inside, which was surprisingly heavy. I placed it gently onto the base of Chopper’s cage and peered into the dark hole in the neck of the bag. It was like peering into the entrance to a blue tits nesting box nailed to a cherry tree, and the hope of seeing a bird inside was just as great, but as usual the nest of fluff, feathers and debris blocked the way. “Can you see him?” Ngile enquired in a whisper. I shook my head, and pinched the top of the bag, slowly tearing it open. A further whisp of grey smoke coiled out into the room. ”Is he smoking in there?” Ngile jested. I continued to tear the bag across it’s side, as if a surgeon performing a delicate operation on a family friend. Now it did look like a birds nest, a huge mound of grey fuzz stood, like hamster bedding, in the cubed form the bag had moulded it into. I put my fingers into the surface, prising it open delicately, expecting to find a mangled dirty budgie feet up in the air inside. As the sides fell apart, a large cloud of ash like dust particles, carpet fluff and dead skin cells bellowed out, up my nose and into my eyes. Starbird rushed and opened the window to try and get rid of it. I grimmaced at the mothbally smell, and leapt backwards to get away, knocking the rubberplant over as I did so. As the rubber plant fell, spilling soil across the carpet, Chopper, clean and very much alive, flew out from it’s branches, where he had been sat all along, and out through the open window to the open arms of freedom. Starbird and I looked at each other in disbelief, me at the thought of Chopper’s lack of survival training and Starbird at the state of my face, and the mess I was sat in. “I often dream of having my own coffee house, but it wouldn’t just be a place where people can order brown drinks, it would be a parlour of indulgence... “With red light bulbs?” I interupted, to miffed gaze. She continued unpeturbed. “It would be filled with antique indian furniture, of burnt oak and rusted iron, as well as coffee hits it would probably be wise for visitors to have tetnus jabs in case they cut themselves on the iron, but that would forge part of the thrill. It would have a dimly lit downstairs, only accessable to a select few at the managers discretion. The air would be an aromatic fusion of ground moccha and incence, seeping from joss sticks swaying in large cream, cracked tea cups, suspended by silver chains from the ceiling. The polished wooden floor would be coated in throws and cushions, three long emerald sofas would slant strangled against the walls that did not have stairwells rising from them. A large skeletal grandfathger clock would stand below the staircase, its dusty glass case revealing to all the mechanisms and spiders inside, but the chimes muffled by a satin gauze wrapped around the strikers, muting time’s cry, rendering it insignificant. Artists and poets from miles around would come to unfold in the basement, and drink from the fountain of coffees from across the globe, Blue Mountain, Arabic and Columbian, share palms with Hazelnut-blueberry, banoffee pie and rhubarbed dandelion flavoured kicks, as the indulgers shared tales, scars and stars, bouncing ideas off each other long into the night.” She paused, and looked down at the creased tv guide at her feet, and the empty wine glass lying on it’s side. “That is my idea of perfection, giving me a faith in pegomancy, melting me into the motivations of menyana. I would scribe the moment and cafe: ‘cappuccino futon’, like a postcard written in lower case, it would caress the eye and heart with innocence and comfort.” I looked at the furrows of skin beneath her eyes, we were both very tired, and the evenings wick was low. I rested my head upon her gloved thigh, and slipped into sleep, filled with the glowy notions of cappuccino futons.


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