Chapter 3: The Life and Legend of Thunderclap Jones

 

Abraham “Thunderclap” Jones was a man who was used to doing – and getting – what he wanted, when he wanted. He was a rake and philanderer, a seducer of women, and he regarded the entire world as his hunting ground. So, when in the winter of 1922, he received an excited telegram from his American drinking buddy Scott, advising him to return to London without delay, he didn’t think twice. He had the wallahs pack his chests, beat and fucked the maid, drove into the village to buy some powdered fukkummuppa root from Mr Midnight the witchdoctor, and then sped his British racing green Bentley Speed Six into Zanzibar, in the hope of finding a ship bound for England.

 

The telegram had read:

 

 

HEY BUDDY STOP

 

SERIOUSLY MAN YOU NEED TO COME BACK TO ENGLAND STOP

 

I KNOW YOU LIKE THOSE AFRICAN WOMEN BUT SHIT STOP

 

YOU NEED TO MEET THIS GIRL STOP

 

FRIEND OF ZELDA’S STOP

 

SHE’S A BURLESQUE DANCER IN LONDON STOP

 

I THINK SHE WOULD MAKE YOU A FABULOUS WIFE STOP

 

SHE’S GOT IT MAN STOP

 

SHE’S CALLED BUNNY STOP

 

CALL ME WHEN YOU GET HERE STOP

 

SCOTTY

 

The phrase “friend of Zelda’s” gave him a brief moment’s pause – in his opinion Zelda was a mad and aggravating bitch who should be in a lunatic asylum, and he couldn’t for the life of him work out what his friend saw in her – but he trusted Scott’s judgement otherwise, and if Scotty said he’d found a girl who looked like feasible marriage material, he owed it to himself, to Scott, and to the world at large, to check her out.

Abe was 23 years old, and – as he had told Scotty one drunk evening, at a Benny Goodman gig in Paris the previous summer - his mind had recently turned to such unsettling subjects as his mortality, his future, his lineage and his legacy, and he thought it was high time he got hitched, if only to father a handful of good healthy red-blooded males to ensure the continuance of the family line. He had children, to be sure; he was probably responsible for half of the little savages in the village. They could hardly be considered legitimate heirs though, and if his father knew he’d been rogering the natives – and he’d moved halfway across the world precisely to prevent his father finding out about such things - he’d probably threaten to cut him out of the inheritance, again.

Which would be a drag.

Not only that, but, much as he adored the African girls with their musky aroma, their nosebones and spears and their breasts like ripe coconuts, bare and brown and glistening in the Tanzanian sunshine, he missed the “raa raa” totty that could be found around Knightsbridge and Mayfair, and the panty-soaked, knee-trembling awe that was the inevitable result of the appearance amongst such dim-witted upper-class debutantes of the dashing and legendary philanderer and playboy, libertine and lady-killer that he considered himself to be.

 

Such being the scenario, he sent Scott the following return telegram:

 

KEEP HER HOT FOR ME BABY STOP

 

AM ON MY WAY STOP

 

GOT THIS MAD ROOT OFF THE WITCHDOCTOR STOP

 

YOU’LL LOVE IT STOP

 

DESTROYS ALL THOUGHT PROCESSES AND REVEALS THE UNDERLYING REALITY STOP

 

WE’RE ALL ONE THING MAN STOP

 

STOCK UP ON GIN, HOOKERS AND PERUVIAN MARCHING POWDER STOP

 

SEE YOU SOON STOP

 

THUNDERCLAP

 

 

Upon arriving at the harbour and making his enquiries, however, he was informed by the harbour master that there were no ships going that way, no sir, but that he was welcome to book his passage on the next boat that did, if that was his pleasure. The next ship to England would be leaving in three weeks.

                “Three weeks?” he thundered at the harbour master, indignant with disbelief; “What do you mean three weeks? I haven’t got three weeks. I need to be going today. Now. Right this instant.”

                “I’m sorry sir,” said the harbour master, with as much dignity as he could muster, “it is impossible. Perhaps try sailing from one of the northern ports. There are many more ships sailing from there. You will be bound to find one that suits you. Perhaps you can find a Captain who will take you. There are many Captains for hire in the bars around here.”

                “Yes, yes,” said Abe absent-mindedly to no-one in particular, having dismissed the harbour master from his mind some time ago, “thank you so much.” And with that he was gone.

In one of the seedier dockside bars, he knocked back a half bottle of rum while considering his options. One thing was certain, there was no way he was going to be waiting around in Zanzibar for three weeks. When you got that urge to move, baby, you just had to move. He had his travelling shoes on now, and his wandering head. And no way was he getting on a train, with all the bodies and the heat and the flies and the stench. He considered the pouch of powdered fukkummuppa in his pocket; perhaps if he poured some into the rum it would help him think straight. On the other hand, there was always the chance that it would stop him thinking at all, that the world would melt away and when it reassembled itself he’d find that three weeks had passed and he’d missed the boat anyway. I suppose I’d better try and find a Captain for hire then, he thought to himself as he poured several grams of mind altering root into his rum without noticing.

 

Abe’s father was the infamous Jeremiah “Sledgehammer” Jones, who had originally gone to India in 1881, where he was employed by Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, the Governor of Madras at that time, as Head of Native Intelligence. Sledgehammer’s reputation spread like wildfire; he was a man that you would not want standing behind you in a dark alley at night, nor, for that matter, in front of you in a street full of policemen in broad daylight. In fact, Sledgehammer Jones was a man that you would not want within a thousand miles of yourself or your loved ones, or to know that you even existed; not if you had any sense. The eyes of his lackeys peered from every shadowy corner, and he was feared for his ruthlessness, his lack of mercy and the extreme violence he visited upon the hapless subjects of his investigations. This reputation suited Sledgehammer down to the ground. For him, India was a hunting ground in open season. He could do whatever he wanted without fear of retribution, and did. He had a harem of beautiful Indian women, all of whom had been abducted, taken as payment for “protection”, or “donated” by their fathers and husbands in the hope of ending an unremitting campaign of intimidation by his Native Intelligence goons.

In spite of his profligate extra-marital activities, his wife Isobel remained faithful and dedicated to him, and bore him three children; Abe, his only son, who was born in 1899, and his twin sisters Eunice and Erica, who came along a couple of years later. Izzy became pregnant for a fourth time in the year 1904, but the baby was stillborn, and Izzy died too, of complications.

Money was no object to Sledgehammer who, as the Governor’s most trusted aide, advisor, enforcer and “problem solver”, received a commensurately high salary, to which he added the profits gained from his illicit entrepreneurial enterprises of kidnapping, blackmail, and extortion. He was as rich as any man needed to be. Any more would have been gratuitous and unbecoming. Nevertheless, he was called “Sledgehammer” for a reason, and the reason was this: Jeremiah Jones, known to the natives of Madras as “the Bad Man”, or “the White Devil”, believed that to accept the cards life dealt you was to be a flaccid he-bitch of about as much use as a street hooker’s slack and torn arsehole, and that it was incumbent upon any Englishman created by God in His Holy and Perfect Image to be the shaper of his own destiny. Therefore, in 1902, he consolidated upon and expanded his financial concerns by setting up a private import and export company, dealing in “exotic luxuries”.

Importing vast quantities of high grade opium from China, he flooded the entire Indian sub-continent with it, creating millions of hopeless drug addicts at the drop of a hat, and giving birth to a goose that laid more golden eggs with every passing year. To double the productivity of his transports, he had his thugs round up Indian women and children by the hundreds, shipping them to the darkest corners of civilisation, to be sold into slavery or the sex trade, or as game to reserves that specialised in “man-hunting”.

Man-hunting was a recent and sudden phenomenon. Touted as an “exciting and exclusive leisure pursuit”, and promising the thrills of “barbarity, brutality and bloodshed”, it was aimed exclusively at the obscenely rich; people who were so mindlessly rich that they had forgotten they were people, or that they were in any way connected with others or the world around them; people who were so stupidly rich that they believed morality to be a primitive and outdated concept which didn’t apply to them. Personally, Jeremiah despised such people; he felt the same way about them as he did the dogshit that comes in on your shoe and fucks up the carpet; he found them to be emotionally and intellectually retarded, and he considered the existence of such a class of society obnoxious. Had Sledgehammer ever taken the time to read Karl Marx, or been on more than nodding terms with the “shaking Quakers” he sometimes met on visits to the States; had he learnt more in history lessons about the English civil war and activist groups such as the Levellers, who fought for the equal distribution of wealth, popular sovereignty and equality before the law; had it been twenty years later, and had Sledgehammer been able to admit to himself for one moment that he cared about such things, he would have undoubtedly been a communist. But, as the Americans are so fond of pointing out, “if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.” Besides, he was a businessman, and able to put aside such feelings.

 

 

 

 

As the only legitimate son of the most feared man in the Empire, the young Thunderclap Jones enjoyed the kind of privileges and debaucheries normally the exclusive reserve of criminally deranged billionaires and wayward heirs to the throne. He spent his formative years in India, where he lived in a village about eight miles from town, in the family house his father had built. It was of a type known locally as a semi-pukka, being a combination of kachcha (mud and dung) and pukka (stone and clay) architecture, and was a massive engorgement of white stone which gleamed in the tropical sun like the omnipotent erection of Jehovah. A shining edifice that could be seen from miles away in every direction; it was bigger than all of the other dwellings in the village put together. It had a grass roof and bamboo verandahs on each floor and every side, and an army of servants and wallahs that saw to young Abe’s needs and satisfied his every whim.

He spent his days causing trouble and fighting with the local street boys, exploring the boundaries of his mind with the aid of countless psychotropic roots and herbs, and enlarging his education with books that he found in the numerous small and dimly lit emporiums of Madras. He was particularly fond of books on philosophy and spirituality, subjects that, in India, known by many as the “Land of Light”, had been handed down from teacher to student, generation after generation, for several thousand years. His nights were filled with more earthly pursuits; the exploration of his sexuality with any girl he could get hold of, which, to his delight, turned out to be quite a few. He groped, molested, fucked, and sodomised his way through untouchable girls from the slums, lower caste girls from the towns and villages, and high caste prostitutes made wet between the legs by his youthful savagery, fear of his father, and the shock of his monstrously oversized ego.

His weakness for brutal sexual congress with any reasonably attractive and willing female – those qualities being his preferences, not his requirements – grew. He wasn’t particularly discriminating, and whether his partner was awake, conscious, or even alive mattered little to him. His only requirement was a snug fit and – from those lovers who still had a pulse – an enthusiasm for exploration and, better yet, exploitation; preferably in public, and for large sums of cash. Wherever they were and whatever they looked like, however young or old they might be; whatever their colour, nationality, religious beliefs or various moral standards; these things meant nothing to him. He was consumed, obsessed, possessed. He was powerless over women.

As each new sexual proclivity became public knowledge, his reputation for iniquity grew into the urban legend of a notorious debaucher and insatiate degrader of women, detestable and despicable, it went without saying, but also quite charming and rather good looking. A fan club of sorts grew up around him, a vast and secret female army of admirers, groupies, fanatics and stalkers that monitored his every move and were known to the newspapers as “Thunderclappers”. Rumours and nicknames abounded, and he was known diversely and in no particular order as “Abe the Omnipotent”, “the Beast of Britain”, “the Punisher”, “the Full English” (as in “I hope my husband gives me the Full English tonight”) and, slightly more disturbingly, “Satan’s Sodomiser” (meaning variously: “the sodomiser who was sent by Satan”, “the one who sodomised Satan”, “the one who sodomised me in the alley last night in a Satanic fashion” or “the one who sodomised me as if he were Satan, the Beast, the Sodomiser of Sodomisers himself; so cruelly, thoroughly and unspeakably, that in my delirium I became a worshipper of the diabolical and a dealer in depravity and degradation; a convert to the church of the Evil One, and an enthusiastic Satanist, with an unholy desire to sodomise others, and their mothers, whoever they are and wherever they may be; brutally and eternally, with no mercy.”)

 

But it wasn’t until recently that the perennial nom de guerre with which he would forever be associated had come into existence, when it was used as the title for a section on “the Life and Legend of Thunderclap Jones” in a series of popular encyclopaedias published annually from 1919 onwards. The series was called “Kings of the World” and listed inventors and their inventions; men and the movements they had led; religious leaders, brilliant criminals, paragons of virtue, agents of evil and the irretrievable souls that had been lost to hideous plague or insanity, and telling the urban legends and popular myths surrounding them. It was, in short, a celebration of the highest peaks and lowest troughs of humanity, and of its gods and demons; influential people of all kinds that had left an indelible mark upon humanity in some way, good or bad, in any area whatsoever. Abe appeared in the book without being asked for his permission, although he would have granted it gladly, as happy as he was with his hard won reputation as “the most sexually sadistic Satanist in recorded history”, and as “King of the World” of depraved and diabolically inspired debauchment.

 

The article about him that appeared in the 1919 first edition of “Kings of the World” was a fairly comprehensive account of his history, peppered liberally with gratuitously violent, sexually depraved and utterly fictitious myth, rumour, and lies. Some of the acts that the authors of the encyclopaedia claimed he had committed were obviously impossible outside of the most deviant and twisted imagination, even for a dedicated “lady-boner” such as he. Just reading about some of the vile abuses the book claimed he had visited upon himself and others was enough to turn the stomach so violently that even the least sensitive reader was forced to race to the outhouse when suddenly and without warning, projectile streams of shit and vomit exploded from both ends simultaneously, as if the very guts of man could not tolerate the thought - let alone the reality - of such acts of desecration upon a body, alive or dead or human or otherwise. Such desecration was abhorrent to the fundamental nature of humankind. 

 

When, years later, Abe finally got around to reading the odious mash of lies contained in the book; lies that the public at large had eagerly lapped up as the truth of who he was, earning him an even more notorious reputation; he was impressed – not to mention repulsed and sickened to his very core -  by the twisted imaginations, warped desires and masturbatory pipe dreams of the authors, which shone through the words of their fantasies, where cowards’ confessions of frustrated desire are often to be found, shining like wistful diamonds in the tedious, everyday dirt of reality. He briefly considered suing them for defamation of character, but discarded the idea for several reasons. Firstly, he already had more money than he could ever know what to do with, so any financial remuneration was going to make absolutely no difference to the quality of his life. His quality of life was sure to suffer, however, if he bogged himself down in a tedious and time consuming court case, when he had far more entertaining things to be doing.

Secondly, he couldn’t help but feel some kind of solidarity with them. They were sick men, that much was clear. Anyone who had a mind like that had to be, and because of his own driving compulsions, he had always identified and sympathised with those who found themselves enslaved to a mental obsession that perverted the character.

 

In Abe’s experience, such an obsession had the power to drive out any sane or reasonable thought that appeared in the mind, with a preposterous idea totally at odds with common sense, decency, and the sufferer’s own experience; which was almost without fail a tragic catalogue of humiliations and sufferings, various in degrees of intensity or the wreckage they had caused to a man’s life, but every one of them the inevitable result of the same, single cause: that of believing an insane idea, and acting upon it again and again, in spite of the fact that it was obvious to everybody, even to the sufferer himself, that it was killing him, or at the very least, turning him rapidly into a dribbling, delusional, semi-vegetable; mostly harmless, but often exhibiting socially unacceptable behaviour; behaviour of the sort that would qualify you instantly for a lifetime residency in your local insane asylum or maximum security hospital for the criminally disturbed. The only difference Abe could see between himself and those poor souls who were institutionalised for life - due to the actions they performed while driven to insanity by the constant demand for the things, people, substances or experiences which were the desired objects of their respective obsessions; actions that were often dangerous and harmful to others, frequently immoral, and even more frequently illegal – was one of position, wealth and influence. Abe could get away with anything, simply because of who he was; the incredibly wealthy son and heir of the most universally feared and notoriously violent crime boss in recent history. If his conduct was deemed too shocking, repulsive or in violation of taboo, he had only to remove himself from the ensuing furore by going somewhere else - anywhere else - in a world that – to Abe, at least - was nothing more or less than open day in the Garden of Eden. He could buy away trouble as he went, bribing officials to overlook his indiscretions, or blackmailing them so they kept their mouths shut. If the worst came to the worst – which it sometimes did -  he could ensure their silent complicity and powerless acquiescence by invoking the powerful reputation of his father, and sending round a couple of his bullet-headed bullyboys to threaten the very lives of those who dared to challenge him.

There was third, final and far more compelling reason that he didn’t sue the authors and publishers of “Kings of the World” for defamation, and it was this: in spite of the tawdry fabrications about his life and deeds, presented as they were like badly written schlock horror, without subtlety or grace, he was absolutely in love with the nom de guerre that the authors of the book had given him. It would eventually be the name by which he was known around the world; whispered in awestruck voices around the globe, from the residences of Sloane Square to the Sydney Opera house; from the wattle huts of darkest Africa to the slums of Brazil; from the leafy green boughs of the English countryside to the Bowery in New York; from the brothels of Paris and Amsterdam to the travelling freak shows of the southern United States; it was his Title, his Holy Name, the nom de guerre that not only defined him as a person, but that finally revealed to him his God-given purpose in life. From that day onward he would proudly wear the Title of his Holy Office that the authors of “Kings of the World” had instinctually known was his alone; the Title that could only belong to a fallen angel; an angel of divine retribution who held the release of death and the liberation of rebirth in his hands, as they called out to the wretched and the poor in spirit to seek the shelter of his all-encompassing black wings. From that day onward he would be the Destroyer of Assholes.  

 

 

 

 
 

Down on the waterfront, nothing had changed but everything was different. Abe was sat outside on a barrel, taking the occasional swallow from his rum bottle, which was empty, and enjoying himself. He hadn’t found a Captain to hire, in fact he hadn’t done much of anything at all, but gaze around in wonder at how beautiful the world was.

It was all so clear to him now, so simple and obvious. There was nothing that needed to be done. Life was like an ocean, an ocean of spontaneity, and all he had to do was allow the waves to crash over him, and to accept whatever they brought with them. After all, what was, was, and what would be, would be. He began to giggle to himself, and the more he giggled the funnier everything became, until he was in a roaring fit of hilarity, the tears running down his face.

It was the fukkummuppa root that had done this.

The fukkummuppa root was a semi-mythical and highly potent hallucinogenic that was said to exist in the jungle. Known to the shamen and witchdoctors since time out of mind, it was a sacred and magical root that could be used to traverse the worlds of the spirits or the dead, the realms of the ancestors or the gods. There were fukkummuppa ceremonies of cleansing, in which entire tribes or villages ingested the root which would then wash away the scum and detritus that settled like dust on a man’s soul, just from contact with the physical world. It was important to do this regularly, because the thicker the dust on the soul, the more earthbound a man became, and the harder it would be for him to move on after death. Such regular rituals kept the soul shining bright, and closer to the gods. The medicine men also used the root to bring about visions, and to drive out demons and evil spirits.

In order to find the fukkummuppa root, you had to know exactly where to look, how to look, and the propitious time in which to do it, which happened to be in the darkest heart of the jungle, out of the corner of your eye, three hours after midnight on your birthday. And even then you’d probably come away empty handed, because it was invisible. The only ones who could find the root were those who had already ingested it; it was only to be seen inside a fukkummuppa trip.

And therein lay the mystical quality of the sacred root. Fukkummuppa revealed things about the world of which you’d always been ignorant. You saw things that you’d never seen. You understood everything. It wasn’t a hallucination in the sense that you were seeing things that weren’t real, it was the opposite. It revealed what was always there, but had forever gone unnoticed.
 

 

Abe was seeing something that he hadn’t seen before, at that very moment. As he sat looking out across the endless Indian Ocean, he noticed something out upon the water, or maybe it was just above the water, it was difficult to say. It was a shimmering, shining sort of something, in the way of a mirage in the desert, or the water that seems to appear on a hot road. At first he thought he saw it take the shape of a big fish, or maybe it was an octopus. Then it seemed to appear in the shape of a small ship, or a large Cuban cigar. The more he tried to focus on what he was seeing, the less comprehensible it became. It was like trying to make sense of a piano recital performed by a tone deaf imbecile with no arms in the middle of a thunderstorm, or trying to catch the wind in your hands. It was impossible. It made his brain hurt.

                “Ain’t she beautiful?” came a gruff voice from beside him.

                “I’m sorry, what?” he turned to see a beaming, ruddy face atop a long white beard, garnished with a seaman’s cap.

                “I said ain’t she beautiful,” said the old boy with no small pride, his eyes a twinkle, “the ship. My ship. That ship.”

                “What ship?”

                “For the love of God boy, are you daft? The ship you’ve been mooning over for the last half hour. The one out on the water, hanging there like a mist.”

                And suddenly Abe understood.

                “That’s a ship.”

                “Tha’s right,” said old Sea Legs, “but not just any ship. What you see before you my friend, is the greatest ocean going vessel ever built, the Psychonautilus.” He beamed again, as proud as punch.

                “The Psycho-what now?”

                “The Psycho-nautilus,” intoned the old boy carefully, to be sure that the half-wit had understood. “You’ve heard of Captain Nemo, right?”

                “Um…”

                “Well Captain Nemo’s ship was called the Nautilus, and it was the greatest ship that ever sailed the seven seas, y’see?”

                “You what?”

                “Y’see? Because Nemo was an explorer of the seas, see? Well now, I’m an explorer too, but I explore a much wider ocean. I explore the ocean of existence and the limits of the mind, and for that, you need a very different kind of ship. And that is what you are looking at. I named her the Psychonautilus because I thought it was an amusing play on words.” He spat on the ground, then muttered: “I don’t know why I bothered. No-one’s ever understood the joke.”

By now it had dawned on Abe that by some quirk of grace or synchronicity, the ship and Captain which he had gone out looking to find, had found him. All that remained was to broach the subject with old Captain Ahab here, and come to some sort of an agreement. And that would be done far more easily with alcohol.

                “Let me buy you a drink, Captain,” he said, “and you can tell me more about your magnificent ship. And allow me to introduce myself. Abraham “Thunderclap” Jones, Destroyer of Assholes at your service.”

                “Trout”, beamed the seaman through his facial hair, giving him a hearty handshake, “Captain Bill Trout.”

                As if it could have been anything else, thought Abe, as they headed back towards the bar.

 

 

 

 

As Abe prepared to embark upon the journey that would eventually take him to England, Bunny was in London working the cabaret clubs, where she was earning a lot of money, and building a very fine reputation for herself.

She was a burlesque dancer, a great burlesque dancer, with the instinctual charms and talents that she had inherited from her mother. She had a magnetism that was all but irresistible, and such a charismatic presence that she was literally impossible to ignore. When Bunny stood in the same room as you, you could feel it. She also had a vivid imagination and was endlessly inventive, creating new personas for the stage, which she could become in the blink of an eye, depending upon her mood or whim. With names to match her characters, she became a theatrical chameleon; surprising and delighting audiences with her spontaneity, wit, and mischievous sense of humour. One night she was Bunny Fantastic, superstar of the stage; another night she was Bunny Black, an insolent sulky faced bag of bolshiness, who danced in the most insolent and “couldn’t care less” manner that anyone had ever seen. Another night would bring out Bunny Burlesque, the rosy-cheeked, raunchy good-time girl of British Vaudeville; and yet another would see the provocative strut of the one who would become her most popular and infamous creation; Bunny Rotten, the filthy little alley cat with the bad attitude; the street punk with the “give it a go if you’re man enough” pout, who was rougher than a drug-addicted east-end whore, and sexier than Louise Brooks and Clara Bow rolled into one. She was the perfect alter-ego, because nobody could tell – herself included - where Bunny Simpson finished and Bunny Rotten began.

 

It was the advent of Bunny Rotten that catapulted her from the rank and file clubs that she’d been working night in, night out, into the big time, at least as far as cabaret went. She became a regular fixture at some of the most famous clubs of the day, the kind of clubs that attracted wealthy, upper class socialites, such as the 'Coconut Grove', the “Kit Cat Club”, and Bunny Rotten’s obvious spiritual home, the 'Bag of Nails'.

It was in the Bag of Nails, while performing as Bunny Rotten that she came to the attention of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the king and queen of the Jazz Age, who were instantly smitten by her looks, her attitude, her performance, and the effect that she seemed to have on everyone; an effect that felt like electric static in the air, or an imminent lightning strike. Zelda was particularly enraptured; in Bunny Rotten she saw what she believed to be the epitome of female liberation; the quintessential spirit of the Lost Generation, wrapped up in a smouldering little package of sex and sinfulness. She made it her business to grab Bunny as soon as she left the stage, so they could ply her with drinks and introduce her to the fast moving circles of the social elite that would be her very next conquest.

 

Chapter 2 : Munce's Marvellous Muncemeat

Art was enjoying his first visit to England immensely. Under the nefarious influence of a mythical Britain that existed only in his head, he had become dangerously unhinged before he even got off the boat, and when he finally set his foot upon English soil, he came alarmingly close to unloading in his pants. In his mystical heart he believed Britain – the Britain in his head, at least – to be the undisputed King of nations, the Lion of Judah, the Holy Grail, and the anointed Island of the Gods. It was Albion, it was Avalon. It was mythical Atlantis. And here he stood, Art Simpson, with his feet kissing the very soil of this fabled Blessed Isle, as visions of gods and demons exploded all around him. This is the sacred soil of Britain, he thought to himself. This is the soil that was sanctified by the Gods. This is the soil that saw the rise and fall of Rome, the soil that sprang King Arthur from its womb and became the final destination for the holy cup of Christ.

He still found it hard to believe that he was here, in this land that he had been so ensorcelled by, for as long as he could remember. It is a rare thing, he reflected, for an Irishman to be an arrant Anglophile. But he thought it was a perfectly reasonable infatuation. 

After all, this tiny island was the straw that broke the back of Caesar.

This was the island that reduced the French and Spanish fleet to soggy matchwood at the Battle of Trafalgar, and annihilated the entire French war host at Waterloo, forcing the usurper Bonaparte to run off home clutching his bottom and crying for his mama.

This was Blighty.

Now that he knew he wasn’t going to shit himself, he thought he could deal with the hallucinations. Even so, he thought it would be best if he found somewhere to sit down and get his head together, so he grabbed Morganna and whisked her out into the streets of Portsmouth, in search of a proper English pint.

He was particularly taken with the pubs in England, and the dazzling array of beers on offer in these fine establishments, not to mention the fruity bosoms bursting from the bodices of plump and earthy serving wenches wherever he looked. You could get a creamy little buzz on with a pint or two of pale ale, which had a modest volume of about 4.3%, or hammer yourself rotten with Old Thumper, which was up around the 6% mark. Alternatively you could head straight for oblivion, via one of the many 10 or 11% beers brewed in sheds all over the country. You could have porter for the iron that was in it and bitter to prove to the chaps that you were no uphill gardener. It was totally different to bars in the States where the same insipid barely alcoholic piss-water that Americans took for beer was all he'd ever known. 

The English, by contrast, knew what pubs were for. In England the pub was the focal point of the community, where you could find a job, a wife, a whore or a hitman, or buy and sell black-market goods and omnifarious substances of an illicit or contraband nature. But mostly the English went to the pub to drink and vomit and fight and fuck and sing and smash glasses into each other’s faces. They knew how to get drunk, did the English, which as a gentleman of Irish extraction, with the blood of ten thousand drunkards and tosspots thundering through his veins, he admired unreservedly. Yes, he thought to himself as he propped up the bar in the Dwarf’s Head, I’m certainly liking England. And while he waited for Nancy, the big bottomed peasant girl who worked behind the bar - and sometimes behind the rhododendron bush out the back of the pub -  to serve up some decent head on his Old Thumper, he thought: I am liking England indeed. I am liking it very motherfucking much.

The clock on the wall said ten to two, and he remembered with sudden alarm that he had arranged to meet Morganna at half past one, by the Buttercross in the high street, and accompany her to the cemetery at St. Cross to lay flowers on Salome’s grave. He grabbed his morning coat and quaffed the remains of his pint, spilling most of it down his shirt and trousers, gave the foam round his mouth a cursory wipe with his sleeve and headed - somewhat messily – into the street.

“Watch it, kid!” he yelled, as a scruffily clad street urchin missed bowling him off the pavement by a whisker, in his eagerness to evade the cosh waving shopkeeper he had just robbed, who was bounding gamely up the road in hot pursuit, all twenty eight stone of him, hyperventilating madly, as the morbidly obese are prone to do. His purple face was a rictus of exertion; his belly and buttocks swung like sacks of heavy ballast as he tried to heft them up the road. 

 “Up yours, mister!” yelled the kid, flicking him the finger, as he deftly veered away from Art and headed into the mouth of a grimy alleyway twenty yards up the road.

 “I’ll have you, you thieving little bastard!” yelled the fat shopkeeper as he laboured for breath, “so help me I will. I’ll see you in the workhouse, you larcenous little reprobate! If I see you in my shop again I’ll beat the living daylights out of you, d’you hear me? Come back here, you little hooligan!” But he stopped when he reached Art, and bent over with his hands on his knees as he struggled to get his breath back.

“They’re a bunch of conniving little scumbags round here,” he said to Art when he’d managed to swallow a lungful of air;  “it’s got to where an honest fella can’t go out in the street without being robbed or molested by one of the little bastards. The mothers aren’t much better. Bunch of gin drinkers, the lot of them. Fishwives and harpies. Sluts and trollops... sluts… and trollops.” He took a long deep breath and stood upright once more; Art deduced that though he was still hyperventilating, it was probably a return to his normal respiratory condition, rather than extreme hyperventilation brought on by a modicum of effort. 

 “Munce is the name,” the fat man declared, offering Art a meaty hand, “Edward Munce. Munce the Butcher. Ed, to my friends.”

 “How do you do, Mr Munce,” replied Art, shaking the proffered hand, “I’m Art. Art Simpson.”

 “Please, call me Ed.”

 “Ed.”

 “Right. I can’t say I’ve seen you around these parts before, Art. You’re not… well… from here, are you?”

 “I can’t claim that pleasure, no. I live in the States, in New York City. I’m vacationing here with my wife. She grew up here, lived here for most of her life. She came to New York quite recently, after the death of a friend. Perhaps you know her. Her father is high up in the church here; the Archbishop, actually. Morganna is her name. We live at Dwarf House, over on Milton Street.”

 The butcher’s face split into a wide and knowing grin. 

 “Morganna,” he exclaimed, fondly, “little Morganna. Yes indeed, I know her. Know her indeed, I do. Oh yes, I know Morganna, known her most of her life, as it happens. That’s one of the great benefits to being the local butcher; you get to know everyone, and everyone knows you. Everybody needs meat, after all. Everyone needs meat.”

 His face took on a dreamy, reminiscent expression.

“She used to come into my shop every morning, on her way to school,” said Munce, “Our Lady of the Perpetual Govinda it was, that was the school she went to, up on St. Catherine’s Hill. It’s still there, that school. Although God only knows the kind of pilfering little toe rags they’re overrun with now. I shudder to think.  She liked my pies, you see. She was mad for my meat pies. Sometimes she’d bunk off school in the afternoon to hang around outside the front of the shop. I’m a soft touch, really, I always have been, and she always knew how to wheedle a free meat pie out of me. I make the finest pies in the kingdom, if I do say so myself, and it’s all down to my special ingredient.”

“Really?” Art was hearing things about his wife that he’d never have credited in this conversation, and if he was brutally honest with himself, Morganna having a miscreant meat pie proclivity was something he had not seen coming. He tried to imagine her fat. Fat, and sweating. Fat and sweating and naked. Fat and sweating and naked and stuffing her face full of meat pie. And then belching, loudly and wantonly in full public view, tiny morsels of meat spraying from her mouth all over everywhere, like some pox riddled tramp from the slums. He found the thought unsettling and repulsive; although he also felt the vague stirrings of an erection. What the hell is the matter with me, he wondered.

“Oh yes, really,” continued Munce, who hadn’t missed a beat, and was blissfully unaware that anything was amiss. “In fact come to think of it, it was around the time she was hanging around for meat pies that I invented my special ingredient…”

“Special ingredient?”

“Muncemeat, yes. Muncemeat, my special and secret ingredient. There’s no meat like Muncemeat, no sir, and no meat pie like a Muncemeat pie. Munce’s Marvellous Muncemeat pies. They’ve changed the face of meat eating, as sure as eggs are eggs, you can take that to the bank, yes indeed.”

 Art was beginning to think that he’d unwittingly stumbled into some kind of off colour shlick flick for meat fetishists. He was beginning to feel quite unwell, and wanted nothing more than to walk somewhere leafy and quiet and throw up into the bushes, yet in spite of an earnest desire to embroil himself no further in conversation with this unrelenting meat worrier, and the common sense and willpower that was normally his to command, he found himself entirely unable to refrain from asking the apparently innocuous question:

 “And what, exactly is Muncemeat, Ed?”

Edward Munce puffed out his chest and took a deep breath. He looked like a man poised to deliver information so powerful that it had the potential to either transport humanity through a huge evolutionary leap, ushering in a golden age of enlightenment, in which all wars had ceased because mankind had finally realised that they were one single consciousness appearing as many; or send it hurtling back into the dark ages, where humankind would spend the next billion years learning how to dig ants out of their hills with pointy sticks.

 “Muncemeat,” declared the butcher, in tones of the utmost gravity, “is a mixture of the finest meats, carefully blended to provide the optimum masticatory experience. I take the choicest, rarest and most potent parts of your pig or your chicken or your cow or your beaver or whatever; the hooves, the sphincter, the testicles, the foreskin and so on, and mash it all up in an industrial blender. It goes in as recognisable bits of a carcass, but comes out as a wonderfully attractive and nutritious looking soft pink putty, which can be shaped into sausages and burgers, grill steaks and even boneless joints. In fact, Muncemeat has a consistency and texture both elastic and rubbery, making it the perfect shape shifter. You could make a perfectly serviceable hat stand out of it, if you so desired. Hell, you could build a shed out of it. In fact I see a time in the not too distant future, when there will be whole communities of living, breathing people made entirely out of Muncemeat. Very little people, quite probably, given the amount of bone needed to keep a body upright, but people, nonetheless. Muncemeat men, if you will. Or Mini Muncemeat men, if you want to be pedantic about it.”

He looked thrilled with himself. 

By now it  was radiantly clear to Art that Edward Munce was stark raving mad, and very likely a danger to himself and others. He supposed that spending all your days fiddling with the rubbery nether parts of dead animals would do that to you. It brought to mind this weird guy that had been in the same biology class at college, who liked to call himself “The Fist”; a fair indication of his proclivities, you might think; then again you might just take him for an asshole.  He ended up getting a night job at the county morgue. It was a solitary position; it wasn’t like your charges were going to wander off. Well, as time went by and the weeks stretched into months and he searched for some diversion to alleviate the mind numbing boredom of those slow and lonely hours, he became quietly, but profoundly unhinged. He started to take the corpses out of the drawers and dress them up, and sit them around the room in chairs and imagine they were talking together. Then he brought in a bone china tea service, and a tin full of fairy cakes, scones, custard tarts and what have you. He would throw his dead companions a tea party, and then amuse himself by arranging them in sexually suggestive positions with each other, like dolls. He got a particular kick from placing the cadaver of a baby to its dead mother’s breast, as if it were feeding on her shrivelled blue teat. He managed to avoid being discovered in the pursuit of these sordid necrophilic sex games for quite some time, but he was like a drug addict; one time was too many and a hundred times wasn’t enough. The more he did it, the more he was compelled to do it. On the night of his birthday he took several litres of vodka into work with him, with the intention of throwing a dolls’ tea party to end them all. By midnight the dead were piled on top of each other in a grim diorama of sexual debasement, their faces desecrated with cheap make-up, their bodies clad in latex fetish gear, and The Fist had drunk so much vodka that he was unable to stay completely conscious; what slim grip on reality he may have earlier that night was now irretrievably lost. Unbelievably, the alcoholic delirium that had sent him in and out of consciousness began to have a more sinister side effect; in the blink of an eye he became even more deranged; pathologically determined to sate the abhorrent obsessions that had rotted his mind and turned him into a monster.

At around 5 am the supervisor showed up to make a random inspection of the premises; the atrocities that met his eyes caused him to feel violated, right down to his very core. But the sight of the suckling infant at it's mother's breast reduced him to the condition of a blubbering vegetable, from which he would never return. The last thing he knew before the darkness stole his sanity was the author of all this evil, hunched like a beast over the wrinkled corpse of an old lady, desperately masturbating into her anus.

As these memories passed through Art's mind, some black and infernal power in the bowels of his soul began to awaken from its slumber; a primordial aspect of his being that until this moment, he hadn't known was there. It was boundless and endless, terrifying and unspeakable, and it covered him with its fury. He suddenly understood that he wanted to kill the fat man.

 “I’m out of here,” he told Munce, sharply and out of the blue, “I’ve got to meet Morganna and I’m late. And I don’t like you. I don’t like you one little bit.” He started to walk away, towards the Southgate Road and the hospital of St. Cross. “You’re a fucking menace,” he added, turning back to look Munce squarely in his piggy little eyes as he addressed him, “and if I ever see you again, I’m going to be taking some of that marvellous Muncemeat of yours and ramming it down your throat until you choke.” He continued to walk away, but then turned once more. “And you’d better stay the fuck away from my wife, because if I ever suspect that you’ve been near her, I’m going to come to your shop and saw off those big fat titties of yours with a blunt knife.”

And with that, Art Simpson turned his back on the butcher, and went to meet his wife.

He finally caught up with her in the cemetery, where she had tended to Salome’s gravestone with the devotion of a worshipper, and found her there kneeling, her head bowed in prayer or contemplation, whispering words that he couldn’t hear, and baring to the gods those things she held in her heart that he couldn’t hope to share. She looked up as he came to her, her eyes stained with tears and mascara, her skin like porcelain. She was perfect and looked as if she could break. She smiled at him, and wiped away an errant tear.

 “And just where have you been?” she chided him playfully, “You’re awfully late, you know. I was tempted to run off with one of the gravediggers.”

 “I’m sorry honey, I lost track of time. And when I finally started making my way here I got caught up in the middle of a crime scene. Some juvenile delinquent from one of the estates had robbed the butcher, who then took it upon himself to give me a thorough grounding in the massive scientific leaps that have been made since the advent of reconstituted unspecified meat.”

 “Ah, you’ve met Munce then.”

 “Indeed, and he persuaded me that he was a very sick man. Did you know he intends to create men out of Muncemeat?”

 She sniggered mischievously. “Yes, I did know that, as it happens. Around here, everybody knows that. They know it in the same way that they knew Black Mariah was a killer and eater of children, they know it in the same way that they knew I was a filthy little strumpet who’d fuck you for money. People get a feel for these things. People’s eccentricities stick out like a sore thumb, their closet perversions twice as much. A small town like this needs its share of weirdoes and bogeymen. It keeps people’s lives interesting, and gives them something to talk about, to fantasise about, even. It’s not every town that has a budding Victor Frankenstein selling you your sausages. He’s spooky, alright.” She gave a theatrical shudder. “And his wife’s a hunchback.” And she burst into fits of giggles.

“He told me that you were so enamoured of his meat pies that you hung around his shop making an exhibition of yourself when you should have been at school.”

 “That’s not true!” she protested. When I was at school lots of the kids were going missing round here, and some of us thought that it was probably Munce, making Muncemeat out of them. I was curious, that’s all. And where were you, anyway?” she demanded, changing the subject completely, “I bet you were in the pub again, weren’t you?”

 “No.” It was out of his mouth before he was even aware that he was lying to her. I mean, well… maybe one or two.”

 “I don’t know what’s come over you since we came to England,” she said petulantly, pouting like a sulky teenager and poking out her tongue at him, “you never use to drink so much. I’m beginning to think you might be an alcoholic.”

 He laughed at that.

 “Well I’ve definitely developed a fondness for all the wonderful beer you can buy here,” he said. “I hardly ever drank at lunchtime before I came here.”

 “It’s a slippery slope, you know.”

 “So they say. At the rate I’m going I’ll be sat on a park bench in a dirty mac within a couple of weeks. Where I will scare the kids with my demented ranting and eye watering stench, and scare their mothers by leering at them and following them around asking them for spare change.”

 “You’d be a natural.”

 “And you, my girl,” he said, as he pulled her towards him, “are way too cheeky for your own good.”

 “I can live with the risk.”

Arm in arm they left the graveyard and headed home through the water meadows, stopping only briefly at the Dwarf’s Head, to partake of some richly deserved liquid refreshment, and to pick up a couple of carafes of wine. After all, it had been another warm day.

Art and Morganna were still resident at Dwarf House when autumn turned to winter, and the days grew bleak and dark. They certainly hadn’t planned on being in England for so long; their intention had been to get the house off their hands as quickly as possible, and return with the least possible delay to the Big Apple, which was, after all, where their lives were.  But although the house had been offered at auction several times over the preceding weeks, they had yet to come across a serious buyer, and the truth of the matter was that the longer they dallied in Dwarf House, the more settled they felt, in both home and country.  Art had persuaded a former school friend to enter his employ as manager of the bookstore in Greenwich Village, until such time as he was inclined to return, so he had no qualms at all about staying in England for as long as was necessary. He’d fallen quite willingly into a pleasant daily routine that consisted of doing nothing much at all, interspersed with frequent visits to the pub. That his drinking had increased was undeniable, but he accepted the fact with equanimity; after all, weren’t they on vacation? Morganna, for her part, was happier in the house than she’d ever been before; she felt warm and protected in the mighty circle of its arms, and the house was beginning to reveal to her, in rare and tiny flashes, the infinite depths of its soul.

In late November, Morganna discovered that she was pregnant, an event which caused them the most delirious joy, and they agreed – with a palpable sense of relief – that they should remain in England, and keep the house, at least until the child was born.  So for the moment at least, all that remained for the happy couple was to dive into the spirit of the season; easily done in a close knit neighbourly community of the sort that existed between the regulars at the Dwarf’s Head, which had rapidly become a home away from home. The tail end of the year also saw Morganna reconciled with her father, when they came together for the first time in almost a decade on Christmas Day. It was an emotional reunion, filled with tears of sorrow for the years that had been lost, and tears of joy for those that had been regained. Morganna accompanied her father to the Christmas services in Winchester Cathedral, which affected her deeply and religiously; she was moving inexorably towards realisation of the infinite love of God. She also went with him to the orphanage at St. Cross, the very orphanage that she and Salome had targeted all those years ago, with the sole intention of recruiting vulnerable young girls into a life of prostitution. But this time she was there with a heart full of love, to distribute gifts of food and clothing to those that needed them most. 

The year of 1900 became the year of 1901, and as the months leading up to the birth of their child dwindled rapidly away to nothing, Art and Morganna were as happy as any young couple could conceivably hope to be, and deeply, deliciously in love. There was the occasional spat, most commonly when Art came home drunk and contrary, but they laid their grievances to rest quickly, and got on with the far more important business of loving each other. Art’s drinking had got steadily worse over the preceding six months; he had gone from occasionally drinking at lunchtime to drinking every lunchtime without fail, and by the time February rolled around, he was an entrenched morning drinker. Morganna saw no reason to nag him about it. He had never judged or condemned her, not even once; he had only ever shown her love and understanding, and she believed she owed him the same. Besides, he wasn’t an obnoxious or aggressive drunk, not on the whole. Most of the time he wandered around in a state of happy befuddlement, and remained his charming and affectionate self. 

Morganna gave birth on July 1st, 1901; to a beautiful baby girl. They named her Bunny, which horrified the neighbours, who opined that naming a baby Bunny was tantamount to laying a curse on the poor little mite, but Morganna would not be dissuaded; in her heart she harboured the unassailable conviction that a name like Bunny would bring nothing but benefit to this girl who was divinity made flesh, and destined to be the most dazzling light of the roaring twenties.

In this particular matter, she showed incredible foresight.

The Horse's New Penis

Some years ago I wrote a blog post, imaginatively entitled “The Horse's Penis”. The story wasn't really about a horse's penis, although it had a horse's penis in it.

It was about childhood, and the early signs of alcoholism.

It wasn't even a very good bit of writing, if the truth be told. The dialogue was awful, and the storyline was abysmal, even though it happened to be true. True stories are often like that; they don't go anywhere, really. They don't really start and they don't really end. Because life is like that. It's like trying to cram a bunch of random and unconnected happenings into a tiny box that isn't even there.

Well, stone me if it didn't turn out to be the most popular blog post I've ever written. I mean, this thing gets more hits than a heroin addict's collapsed groin. Every day, twenty or thirty people from dark places all over the world land on it, mostly by searching on Google for “horse penis”.

They don't stay long.

After a while I began to wonder... is the equine member some sort of delicacy that I haven't heard about? Something in the way of an appetiser in foreign hotels? Maybe it has an esoteric use in various religious rituals with which I am unfamiliar, or is a vital ingredient in certain exotic hairstyles or making bitumen.

So this morning I decided I'd find out, and put my mind at rest once and for all. I typed the magic words into the Google search bar and guess what came up?

Well, a whole lot of pictures of horse penises. I mean, loads of them. I admit, I'm no expert, but they all looked pretty much the same to me. Outlandishly big and, well, penisy.

So really, I'm just writing this to the people who accidentally land on my blog in their obsessive quest for the ultimate picture of an equestrian penis. We've all got our quirks, but hey.

What the hell is wrong with you?