Weirdtongue (50)

Years in the past, the four friends (as recently uncovered by careful research at the Narrative Hospital) had an excursion downtown - or as they call such gatherings nowadays: a ‘Hen Party’ where women become drunker and more raucous than the usual standards of behaviour would allow for members of the gentle sex.

Their already known names were Seely, Chelly, Lettie and Maria. The last one didn’t like her name shortened – having recently arrived in the country from Spain where strict religious considerations disallowed names being tampered with. A beautiful bevy of long-legged lovelies celebrating one of their birthdays during an era of English life when it was still ostensibly monochrome (according to the newsreels) but where life was actually far more colourful than the dowdy impression passed down to observers such as the staff of the Narrative Hospital. That early era was, for example, full of dances like the Black Bottom, Jitterbug, Charleston and Jive. And promiscuous sex was rife yet covered up. The event in question here (of which we speak) was a real one. Not a concocted one as many of our researches here at the Hospital have since demonstrated other incidents to be. This ‘Hen Party’ – so-called – really happened. It was not and is not fiction. It has provenance undeniable by any method of trying to disprove it.

However, there is still some doubt relating to whether the four girls met up with four gentlemen during the course of the evening. The word ‘gentlemen’ is used for ironic purposes. They were undesirables, not to put too fine a point on it - but the girls’ perceptions and normal acuity of taste were blurred by drink and revel. One ‘gentleman’ was called Tongue. Sporting a silver stud in his namesake within the mouth. The second: Monger. The letters ‘PEST’ were tattooed on his forehead. In fact all the ‘gentlemen’ were tattooed with various words to a greater or lesser degree, both covered and uncovered. It was just that Monger’s ‘PEST’ was by far the most outrageously prominent. The third was called Dinnerman. He seemed to be eating away inside. The fourth: his name unclear, although, by the process of elimination, we have come up with the most likely possibility: Coco.

The group’s conversation, however, is clearer (at least in part):

“Where you girls from?”

“Not too far and not too near.”

Giggling laughter.

“Do you drink hard stuff?”

“If you’re paying!”

More giggles, followed by two of the girls (Maria and Lettie?) getting up to jitterbug together, just as the typical music of the London Blitz era took brassy sway … with, later, the odd crooning song from a second-rate vocalist..

We believe it was Monger who spoke next, his eyes upon each of the two remaining seated girls in turn:

“Well, you’ve heard of talking fire?” His voice was mellifluous and uncannily believable, even though this was before the period when he was due to perfect his art of producing words or weirds that were undeniable truths even if they weren’t.

“Talking fire?” the two girls asked in unrehearsed unison of echo. They were rather bemused, apparently, by the direction of Monger's chat-up line.

“Yes, well, fire that talks is as nothing when compared to talk itself catching fire.”

He looked meaningful as well as mean. We have failed to uncover further items of the conversations that night and the eventual repercussions of the meeting are still clouded as we have suffered a decided lack of the requisite funding here at the Narrative Hospital. Many stories have had to be abandoned through lack of assistance. We hope however that the partial stories we have managed to cover (and still intend to cover) will eventually form a configured pattern, i.e. an emerging gestalt worthy of any literary work that aspires to be a novel, as our overall experiment in ‘magic fiction’ surely does aspire to become, whatever the hindrance created by disinterest and by our periods of depleted confidence here at the Hospital.

'Weirdtongue' continues HERE.

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