Mar 28, 2016
Teasers
Simon Gilks
TEASERS 1.
which day?
when?
that day?
then?
it happened then?
when?
then?
James has warty ears and an Adam’s apple that is so protuberant he can swing a coat hanger from it and on Sunday evening at the Sainsbury’s Local on Broad Street Fun Street Drink Till You’re Done For Street they refused to sell him alcohol and pissed him off big time. By 21.30 he was out of it and a cardboard cut-out security guy there said he was as stuffed as a soused herring on a hard shoulder which was as good as telling him he was sozzled and shouldn’t be attempting to buy liquor where CCTVs live. I had been tottering about the shop with a ￡10 note in my hand oblivious of the other customers and the staff and it must have looked like I was about to keel over when I sat down cross-legged on the floor by the drinks section to hiccup and cast a Hee Jibbery spell on the Queen like she needed some magic in her life. James came over to help me back up on my feet and I told him then as he took me by the arm that Elizabeth can undo the spell by sucking on the nose of one of her corgis but she will never think to do that before I write to her to let her know that this is what she has to do unless she wants to live until she is one hundred and forty and then she’ll know what it’s all about and it won’t be nice for her. Washing Powder Joe with his Eye In The Sky knew we had just walked from the Actress & Bishop where we’d listened to a couple of gays sing five Garbage songs with a zest that sent us scuttling to the bar for more drink to fuel a fun time and if someone had asked us about our zigzag itinerary from pub to store we would have felt a whole lot better about ourselves. Sophie sits beside me in her purple knee-length hand-knitted jumper and she squeals at me like a starving guinea pig. What? They refused to serve you? At the A & B? I smell coffee and the onions in hotdogs from a kiosk on Colmore Row where early-week revellers sit around sipping cans of Red Bull or munching chips from polystyrene trays. I say listen we were in Sainsbury’s when they refused to serve us. Sainze-ber-reeze. OK? Sainze-ber-reeze as in Local hot slot for the bot bigamist and bystanders. She Kookaburras and for a few seconds we’re back Down Under by a billabong singing Waltzing Matilda like we’re auditioning in the first round of this year’s X Factor and she’s compact and I compact her then drive a marble tractor round a square.
once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
under the shade of a coolibah tree …