A Live Show

Published 'Grotesque' 1993

A maroon-party is a picnic over several days, rather than the more usual single occasion spanning, say, a single afternoon. 



Old Dick had arranged this particular shindig for no obvious purpose: with several stellified ladies, buckets of sloshing trash-ice, slubberdegullions of the village performing pirouettes in pierrot costume, nigh birthless kids with their vanishing-fractions and shilling-dreadfuls, old men with fatty livers or waxy kidneys, geldable steeds, boning-sticks, cantilena-boxes, night-fossickers, lopping-shears, caged horny-winks, whirring orreries, two-seeded slowbacks, makeshift horse-hitching hooks and simple tablecloths.  Of course, unlike an ordinary picnic, a maroon-party needed a focussed purpose.  And settled weather.  Old Dick had been watching the skies for several days now and, also, scrying a deer's grallock and testing the warmth of tree-coffins near the village.  The young maidens who were an important ingredient of the party's festivities were prevented from bringing their umbrellas which would have tempted feckless fate - until one particularly comely wench winsomely suggested that they could pretend their parapluies were parasols. 

          So, in short, one optimum day, when the dirt-beds were low and the dog-teeth retracted in the gums, the whole village, except Chuck Will's widow, set off under a blazing star, past the brick-nogging works, through the frost-smoke of the eggery and, in drowsy-flighted ailerons of fancy, stuck their noses high in the air to avoid the foot-level cess-pipe clysters.  They spent cherysshed days in water-bewitched jollity.  Only one silly pierrot suffered a greenstick-fracture of his funny-bone and, yes, I nearly forgot, I fell into a donkey-drome rescuing a bespangled lady's currish lopping-shears from a natural cess-pipe.  They all laughed and pointed, called me cockle-brained.  They claimed it served me right for crack-trysting little Ruth all those years ago, before she became Chuck Will's wife.  Old Dick then reeled off by rote a series of my vanishing-fraction liaisons with the fair sex and, it was then, I screeched NONE OF YER BIZNIZ!  But I soon realised that the whole maroon-party was for my benefit or, rather, for my stringing up from horse-hitching hooks, for my dunking in the trash-ice, for my prodding by sunshades, for the ripping out of all my wires, for my stuffing with the loamy livers, for my being terror-smitten by the birthless childer, for my being cess-piped and clystered in grallock.  And, oh, yes, lopped by the lady's shears which I'd rescued from the donkey-drome (and then gelded by night-fossickers as belt-and-braces).  I wish I'd stayed home in bed with a shilling-dreadful.  Or, even, with Chuck Will's widow. 



This is Radio Two-Wires and you have just been listening to book at bedtime.  Now, we shall devote the rest of the evening to a decidedly interesting live show...



Scrumptious evening, folks, it's simply great to be on this fine wireless station in this fine little old town. If that Book at Bedtime about picnickers and poopypants was a trifle over your heads, well this’ll bring you crashing straight back to the good old sweet earth. The phones are live, my tongue is a-quiver and the mike literally aching for my words and wisdom.  None of you will have heard me before, so Cut the Crackle, let's get on with the world's greatest phone-in.  As a special treat, on my first show, I'll let the choice of talking-point be all your very own, dear listeners.  But don't be too cutting for poor old me on his first night.  And remember, Nothing Felonious, Nothing Feeble and, above all, Nothing Foul.  That's my maxim.  WHO IS THE FIRST CALLER?  It says Sam on my trusty monitor...

Sam:  Is that the Talkback Show?

No, of course it isn't Sam.  (Other listeners, don't you worry your heads, I'm only joking poor old Sam).  Sam, don't you trouble that little mind of yours about my even littler jokes.  Go ahead, Sam...

Sam: Well, I rang in to say that your predecessor was a beautiful lady and if you're half as nice, you won't be doing too badly.  That's all.

Sam seems to have hung up without even a bye or leave.  Blimey, it's like a sweat oven in this tiny studio.  Anyway, no disrespect to my predecessor (as you call her, Sam) I'm not half as tasty as her, I'm triple that, eh?  Not so pretty, perhaps, but who cares about that on steam wireless?  Not you, Missus.  And not you, I'll be bound, Dora...

Dora:  Hello ... hello ...

Hello, Dora, sorry to keep you hanging about listening to that half-baked last caller.  But is 'hello' all you want to say on the enormously popular Talkback Show on Radio Two-Wires?  Or have you got something a little more important on your mind?  I certainly hope so.

Dora: Well, in the past, this particular hour was devoted to listeners' emotional problems.  Your predecessor had a live counsellor with her...

Dora, Dora, you are an angel, but who do you think I am?  I don't need no Agony Aunt to accompany the likes of me on the sky deck (that's my way of saying ether, folks, by the way).  I, on my little ownsome, can answer any problems under the searing sun that you lot of pop picnickers could possibly ask.

Dora:  I don't really like your tone.

Well, twiddle my knob, Madam, do!  But your sweet little old town will soon get used to me.  You'll really end up simply loving me, just wait and see.  ...Oh, it looks as if Dora has hung up.  My first conquest on this dear radio station.  If you'd left your address, Dora, I'd've sent you a T-shirt with my mugshot.  Biggest size going.  I hope it'd've fitted.  And my next caller is...

Dick: Dick.

Any old Dick is very welcome here.  What can we do for you, Dick?

Dick: Excuse me, I'm nervous.  I'm a first-time caller.

Imagine that, isn't it cosy?  I should be even more nervous, since I'm a first-time phone-in host.  But you don't find my voice shaking.  And remember what I said up front:  NOTHING FEEBLE!  Get on with it, Dickie, and CUT THE CRACKLE!

Dick: I'm sick with worry over my wife's arms, Doctor.

Excuse me, do, but I'm no doctor, I'm just a geezer they've dragged in from the unlit streets of this your darling town, or good as...

Dick: Sorry, I misunderstood.  In this slot, they usually have a doctor once a week and a sex specialist the next.

Well, I bet they usually gave you the willies!  But, rest assured, all's fair game on my show, as long as there's  -  altogether now  -  Nothing Felonious, Nothing Foul and, above all, Nothing Feeble.  Anyway, what is up with your wife's arse?

Dick: Arms.  I said arms.

What's an arse or arms between friends?

Dick: Anyway, it's the amount of hair on them.  She looks like an out of work docker!

And the hair's still growing?

Dick: Yes, she's sitting beside me now.  It's beginning to be quite a pelt.

Hides the tattoos, though, I bet.  Put Mrs Dick on the blower and I'll sort her out.  Come on, come on, Mrs Dick, don't be all shy and bashful, they can't see your hairy arms on wireless.  What's all those fumbling noises?

Mrs Dick: Hello ... hello ...

That's a very pretty voice for someone with hairy arms.

Mrs Dick: It makes me so self-conscious.  I don't think it is very attractive to men.

Well, there's always King Kong.  Seriously, though, by men, lady, are you pointing the finger at the likes of your Dick, now probably sitting beside you and sucking his thumb, eh?

Mrs Dick:  Well, all men, really.  You see, me and my Dick (and he is quite a handful), we've not had real intimacy for donkey's years.  And he don't seem to mind me looking for it elsewhere.  Nor me him ... if he had the urge.

Blimey, what stone have we up-turned, here, folks?  And what is your address.  No, tell me later, off air.  This is a dinky town, after all.  But, no, seriously again, I do have a soft spot for hirsute ladies and a heart big enough for love.  So, folks at home, what can we do for Mrs Dick?  Fling you suggestions into the ring.  Hang on in there, Mrs Dick, and you may get a hot tip or two.  ...Phew, it's getting to be a microwave in here.  The next caller is...  Blinking heck, is this town full of dames called Dora?

Dora:  Hello, I don't think I'm the same Dora as the one before.  As I was holding a fir cone in the air  -  oops, sorry, as I was holding on to come on the air, I was listening to the previous caller.  My late husband, before he died, had a sex change operation on his body and he too was left with hairy arms and hairy cheeks which didn't seem to fit in with his new found feminine charms.  I took him (oops, sorry, her) to the Barber Shop where, by luck, they had newly stropped their blades fit for any part of one's body...

 Did your husband have to go regularly to the Barber?

Dora: No, the new hormones gradually got to work.  I called them his 'little shavers'.  And, in time, I could have licked the hairs off him!

Lawks-a-mercy, this is a real human story, folks.  It sure is.  All life can be found on the good old Talkback Show.  So, Mrs Dick, if you're still earwigging, give the Barber a go and make sure his cut-throat blade don't take the skin off at the same time.  ...Now, it's overdue for putting some lead in our pencil, in other words, putting some loot in the bank of this cosy dinkum of a radio station.  Got to pay for the jump-leads somehow, eh?  And time for a well-earned break for little old me, too.  I've got a mint of trouble with my sweat glands.  BACK IN A MO!



Thank you.  This is Radio Two-Wires on the Medium Wave Band.  Well, while our live host for the evening has a well needed rest, we present, at short notice, another reading from our archives.



They would have been together twenty odd years. 

          Ruth's husband maintained that couples like them grew alike, physically as well as mentally.  They debated the subject like a pair of screeching puppets.  But, eventually, in the long drawn-out nights, when neither could sleep, she accepted his point: that the rising of the same words, the same mutually confessed thoughts masquerading as the most odd coincidences between them, were merely ingredients in the inevitably bland stew of existence.  That said, she manufactured squabbles for seasoning such a stew.  She refused to believe that their faces and bodies were also, bit by bit, coming together in full-blown skin to skin, socket to socket contact like grafted plants; this she could not countenance, let alone the remote possibility that they could be taken as siblings: husband and wife twins.  Her mind's inevitable crumbling away, however, fetched flinching spasms to parts of the very carcass wherein Ruth lived and which she had tried to defend against all marauders, summoning the appalling visions of a single tiny peppercorn lost in the coldly insipid slime of Hell. 

          In a quiet corner of the city, to which she fled in a fruitless attempt to escape herself, Ruth, felt the street lights were dimmer now than they were when she was a house-bound child.  Hunters of the small hours, with no more than the dark slots of summer to tour the up-market estates of the city's outcrops, the shadow-shaped dossers hoped against hope for imperfections in the suburban mansions where Ruth used to live: a catflap or pigeon hole or rabbit hutch ... but returned with worthless swag.  Ruth couldn't make ends meet, if the cull was just a darts trophy or a clapped out video machine that nobody even bothered to clean out come morning or a toaster with a plug that didn't fit the sockets in the city pavements or an astrologer's almanac that contained the wrong positions of the planets for the inner city or a gold-framed wedding photograph showing the drunken faces of two rival families beaming on either side of a bride and groom.

          She shrugged.  It was about time she had a go - no point in dossing round here much longer, beneath the houselights that flickered on and off from the high-rise windows.  One day, she thought, the families would leave this forest of towers, their queer belongings like growths on their backs, for the relative safety of the tube station platforms: like a reenactment of an era of joy and privation that a war had once brought. 

          Ruth and her adopted kind lived off the scum slowly sliding along the gutters of the street or off the more sluggish birds having inadvertently spiked themselves on park railings: and, when the towers were abandoned, the older dossers would be able to uproot their feet and bottoms from between the gently hissing office heat-vents and enter, en masse, the tall buildings that even now were busy disguising their brick and mortar as mocking scrawled abstractions of art.

          As she thought over the various repercussions of evolution without selection, Ruth wandered into the outer suburbs where trees still grew, nourished crap and root; but they did not conceal, even from her blurred eyes, the detachments ranged like armoured troops with wide bedroom eyes.  Their front doors were raised like drawbridges and, sure, she felt, their owners were literally trapped inside, like costly characters in an organic soap opera that still had an eternity and a half to unhatch its multiple Chinese-box dreams.

          She later told the story to the creeping, mumbling shadows on her return from the outer parts.  Her education had been nurtured by a lore more articulate, if shallower, than that that of the streets, so she found the words:-

          "There was an ancient air-raid shelter in one garden, with a secret cubby, a nun's-hole, where the bones still stuck out of the ground like spring saplings.  I followed the smuggler's route, at first, but no whiff of seaweed nor tang of salt surf, only the sound of TV channels, filtering along these underground inlets, like babblings of water along pipes to the boxes they fed - a twittering aviary in my head.  I made entry shortly and stared at them through a tightly hatched square grill.  In real colour they were - evidently a married couple, with hands joined.  They stared glassily at me, and I was amazed to see that their two hearts pumped as one, outside their chests, in unison with the love-making which went on behind their backs, in a stretched sausage sort of way.  They soon grew bored with me making ludicrous faces through the hatch, which I had done to scare them off to other parts of the house - to allow my itchy fingers to scuttle like spiders among their keepsakes.  But they got up, as one, and without even a glance of communication between them, prodded one finger downwards in the most obscene gesture imaginable and pressed something just below the hatch.  And all went blank..."

          Her story tailed off, since she could not exactly recall her come-uppance, though she vaguely remembered meeting various other people along the tunnel systems, including those two-dimensional cut-outs masquerading as chat show and phone-in hosts. 

          She had returned to her confrères, with jagged shards of glass sticking out of the top of her head, like a prison wall.  All she had for her trouble was a flask of deodorant in one hand and a sauce bottle in the other ... both of which dissolved into wafted motes of thin air when she reached reality amid the towers.

          Her husband was there, listening to her story.  Having tracked down her down to this innermost pit of the city's soul, he kissed her.  They had grown closer by means of separation and, later that night, he lovingly prized out the splinters from her scalp, before they became embedded deeper towards the brain.  And then they prepared themselves for a eternal rest in a vertical punch-and-judy coffin.  The slots of darkness were thankfully lengthening.



This is Radio Two-Wires, your jingleless heaven.  That was an extra programme and now we can return to our live host...



Blimey!  I didn’t know Radio Two-Wires wasn’t a commercial station and that they had to fill up natural breaks with unadvertised twaddle such as that.  Doesn’t beat adverts any day, in my bleeding book at bedtime.   Anyhow, howdy, again, lords and ladies of Darktown, here we be, here we be, all champing at the shilling bit.  The next caller is...

Dick: Dick again...

Shucks-a-pony, have I only got such a tiny mite's handful of listeners in this godforsaken place?  They (whoever they are) told me that this mast had more mileage than a 2CV with a tankful of green.

Dick: Can I have some more advice, Doctor?

I told you at least once and I won't tell you again, or I'll send my little shavers down the line to geld your pretty parts...

Dick: It's just that my wife used to be a unisex hairdresser.  You know, one of those posh outfits that need dustbins just for the manicurists - and has put honest-to-goodness Barbers out of business.  She prided herself on how she bouffoned ... a dab hand at hot mud-packs, too ... well, she just said any sauce that's good for the gander is fine for the owl-goose, as the old proverb goes...

Never heard that one before, old son.  You have some strange sayings in your neck of the woods, you sure do!

Dick: Any event, in her heyday, she could have cut the Queen's hair.  Her only drawback was being heavy-handed with the tongs.  Anyway, Doctor, she jumped to her feet, on putting the phone back in its cradle, saying that the kitchen knife would do just as well as a Barber's cut-throat razor...

Go on, Dick, I dread the punch-line more than the ghost of my murdered wife!

Dick: The hair on her arms has all gone...

Don't tell me ... and the tattoos?

Dick: It just so happens, doctor, I had spent all afternoon sharpening it.  Very thereapeutic, honing blades, your listeners may be interested to know.

But Mrs Dick?

Dick: I'll put her on, so you can get the story straight from the horse's mouth.

Will: Hello ... hello ...

I think we've got a bleeding crosssed line.  The bane of all phone-in hosts when the lines double-bluff you.

Will: Is that the Talkback Show?  I rang to say that your predecessor was a sight more understanding and tender...

Will, can you tell me one thing, what's that scraping noise in the background?  Are you sharpening something on your brain?  Im gonna chuck you off the air, anyways,  Toodle-oo!

Mrs Dick: Hello ... hello ...

Why do people on crossed lines always say that?

Sam: How am I supposed to know?  Ask the Telephone Exchange.  I'm only here to say that if you want a following on this station, you've to pull up your socks and let down your drawbridge.  That's another quaint old saying you should learn!

Mrs Dick: Can I speak to the Doctor?  I want to know how to do the dressings and it's hard when it's your own armpits you want to bandage up.

Get Dick to do it.

Mrs Dick: How can he?  His arms were the first to go ... as well as the other little items I couldn't put up with.

Will: Hello ... hello ...

Dora: Hello ... hello ...

Mrs Dick: I've neutered Dick's tongue, too, so no more phone-calls from that quarter!

I'm closing down all the lines, until they can behave.  So time for  another commercial break.



This is Radio Two-Wires.  I apologise for the technical trouble we seem to be suffering on our live show.  Until we can rectify it, here is another reading...



The row of derelict chicken sheds had open hatches three-quarters of the way up to the ramshackle roofs.  These were ready to launch spluttering rockets in a war between squatter tribes who had soapcart boneshakers instead of metal tanks to use in their battles.

          I slept in the house nearby.  I was one of those toffs whom the squatters so loathed and would really liked to have fought to rid their bloodlust of the salt in the wounds rather than between themselves in running skirmishes of hand-to-hand brawling to which they eventually resorted as the next best thing.  I preached peace from my open window, because I believed that was preferable, whatever the cause thrown away.

          Peace came too late, however.

          I recall that particular evening, with the sun low in the sky casting doubts as well as twirling girders of translucent gold.  First one gnarled head, then another, poked from the chicken hatches, tousled mops coiffured into coxcombs.  With jabbing glances to either side, I was soon to be treated with the sight of their knees for ears and scrawny thighs clambering out in piecemeal contortions.

          Eventually, they scuttled across the allotment, repeater guns like knobbled elbows ratchetting out in skewed angles, rehearsals of bullets rattling into my fence.  I waved a fist at them from my bedroom window, only to discover they were already doing likewise to me, in unison, wishfully thinking I would come out to play an enemy, a killable customer for their cutthroat war-mongering.  My principles did not, of course, extend to jeopardising my own preservation to provide a catharsis that would in turn prevent a bloodier battle.

          In any event, as I say, peace came too late.

          When things got a bit quieter, with the squatters off on their jousting jaunts, I did venture into my garden which was next door to that allotment with the now empty chicken sheds.  The wood of the leaning gap-toothed fences and of the tumbledown sheds themselves and of the nearby goose-run and of many of the makeshift trees had all been blackened by the recent climatic changes.  If I did not know better, I would think I was in a particularly bizarre dream.

          One of the squatters, previously concealed from my view by its own shadow, jumped out and started squawking so frantically, it was difficult for me to pick out the words.  Its knees and elbows were somehow conjoined like outlandish lips with its elongated neck and narrow head the tongue.

          "They've gone off for the last battle."

          "How do you know it's a last battle."

          "Because ... because there are no real enemies left to fight against."  The squatter surveyed me quizzically as if sizing me up for sacrifice in the very last campaign of all.

          Deciding to tack against the natural drift of the dialogue, I asked it for its name.

          "None of your business."

          "Nonefer Yerbizniz?  That's an interesting name."

          "Mama Yerbizniz, Dada Yerbizniz, Cousin Yerbiznizes, they've all gone off ... I'm just a sad critter compared to them, left here to guard nothing but ruins."

          "You're squawking again, Nonefer ... what's the point of speaking when he to whom you speak cannot make head nor tail of your gabble?"

          Whatever was said, there was indeed an argument for saying peace had come too early.  Nonefer was the real victim of the war, the only one left alive.

          In the distance, we heard the grumbling hills, much like the thunderheads bubbling up in the olden days before the climate changed, with clouds now clashing more in the mode of tongues clucking than lightning flashes sparking off Heavenly removal men's clumsy attempts at preventing the ricochet of angels' furniture in spur-of-the-moment elopements to Hell.  Phew!  It was a good job I wouldn't be called to write all this down.  That night, I heard Nonefer's squawking plaintive crooning about the way death was only sad for those left behind.  He envied the Cousin Yerbiznizes their corpses.   Nonefer had so dreaded being infiltrated with the human emotion of grief.  Corpses had it lucky, since they never had a duty to don widow's weeds for the customary length of mourning for themselves.  And it was morning by the time I truly fell into a sufficiently peaceful slumber, thus blotting out Nonefer's plangent wails. 



I hope I don't wake up till much later, or I won't be in a fit state for digging or putting a sad critter out of its misery.  What's that?  Crossed wires?  Dora or Ruth?  Which is Chuck Will’s Widow?  What?   We're off the air, anyway?  Under siege?  Marooned?  Is this squat of a town stark raving bonkers?  It must be the heat.  I feel roasted in my own sweat.  Better ring the police.  ...What's that, no shillings in the meter?  You must be off your bleeding rocker.  ...I can hear the clacking of knife-blades, the snicker-snacker of shears.  ...The clanging steps on the foldaway studio ladder.  Who is next?  None of my business, you say?  Come on, who is the next cutter?  Sorry, I mean crackler.  No, I mean, the next caller.  ...Oh, hell!  NOTHING FOUL!  NOTHING FOUL!  NOTHING FOUL!  NOTHING FOUL!  NOTHING FOUL!  NOTHING FOUL!.........

This is Radio Two-Wires.  I apologise.  The record seems to be stuck...

Dora: I thought you said this was a live show.

[But her party-line phone was dead.]