The men all stood in line waiting for their chow. Granny served a mean cobbler with chitterings and stringy pig blood sausage. It was David's very favourite. But fuck me if it didn't give him the runs. Like a dog, he felt.

Stuck in the chair as the models paraded in front with nothing but a pair of flanges between the lot of them. The dogs round the back of Garmer's yelped as Daisy netuered them all. One, two, three.

The girls tickled the soles of my feet with fish and chip wrappers soggy with oil and vinegar. It was some sort of heaven. Ringpiece walked in the room with a checkerboard jacket and a polythene rib-bib. He said,‘If I ain’t the luckiest motherfucker on the planet then fucking roast me now.' The man just dripped it.

He held a matchstick to the moon and declared his love for the juice Johnny served out the back of his truck that had become a bar since the Mayor had decided that, 'Drink ain't got no more place in this here settlement, now that we is pure.' Johnny's truck bar soon became the haunt for all sorts of folk, particularly prostitutes, who fucked men under the engine and round the tail-pipe, a tablet of booze tucked behind their gold teeth.

‘Pull yourself away,’ she called in that bitter chicory tongue. More annoying than taking a trip to the moon only to spin around the car park in an old panda, whizzing round on a perpetual handbrake turn while the dirty blokes dog in the steaming cars set in a circle, the panda at its centre, interminably spinning, headlights flashing, catching the odd globe of flesh, lighting up hunks of sexual butchery.

Before the turn of the last century I became embroiled in a mammoth game of rounders up on the top field. We played over six months, one half of the village against the other; the council estate versus the scoffing homeowners. And when we finished, the dogs stood and applauded, waving their dirty piss-stinks like a bunch of rubber rats caught in the zip of bulging denim jeans that hug the flesh.

The maudlin losers danced around my pizza box grave that night I rose from the dead. Drinking their coloured liquids and poncing fags off that one walker. Nobody knew about the trick before I did it, but when I did, good golly, they fucking shat bricks like a machine heavy on the rag.

Before I played the spoons there was a man in a green dress who felt me up like a dog does a lamp post and there was nothing I could do about it but take his ten shillings and grease up the wound after his hurried departure to anywhere but by my putrid side.

And then began the torturous misanthropy of the middle years when I saw every living thing as some kind of hollow trick with nothing but a yabble and a matzo ball for a soul. Each night I walked the canal in search of that man with the powders who, for a nominal fee, would free me for just two candy floss minutes, while the girls in the panto rang the old man's bell as the flecked coats in the abattoir scorched hair off swine.

The 'lemon hulas' were a promiscuous band of pre-teens with a fixation on flik-flak watches. 'Flick-fack is water resistant,' they would sing to a carny tune while Jebodiah, the fire-eating coconut with ears for eyes, and teeth for toes, blew one out of his shell.

I stood with a glass to the bathroom wall. ‘The name is Hutchinson.’ He spelled it out for the operative. ‘I was promised delivery to the hotel by today.’ His voice cracked. After five minutes of silence he ran a bath. I listened for another ten. He didn’t seem to be masturbating.
I had come to the hotel to finish my novel. The follow-up to my runaway success widely acclaimed as a triumph. My agent had resorted to sending one word texts. Finished? Done? There? Completed? Ready? I had responded, No, Nope, Nah, Nein, Non.
The phone buzzed. A new message from ‘agent’, ‘Tosser’.

It yawned on me
That perhaps the
Resolution
Had passed me by
But
Before I could do anything
I fell asleep

The dogs left by the light of the silvery moon when Josh opened the warehouse door. The delivery truck sat replete with goods and Fat Johnny up front puffing on a blunt. The homies tracked round the truck, armed with pepper spray and a backpack of gaffer tape. Fat Johnny was down to get ripped. His cab fat with smoke, he accepted his fate and turned up the music loud.

The patisserie was open. The cakes were stuffed with the usual charms. But Jennifer was different. Something about her hair made her look new. I asked for my standard cake in that low register she liked. It was then that the bell rang. In walked Francis carrying a whale cake with an extended frangipane penis. ‘Oh my,’ I said.

Before the wand swung he felt a stirring in his bibble. The clock said nothing. Rocking in the chair before the TV screen, a bird flew in and gently flapped its wings to his eyes, caressing his sucky pockets. The sunshine streamed in a brazen fashion, all loud. Days like this were just the antidote.

John Aldo Falanthropo caught the train from Bermondsey to Dubrovnik amid much controversy. An agent was on his tail and a woman on his mind. It had been five minutes since his last sandwich and he was already planning his next meal. When he got there he would feast. It sounded like the place you would. Let’s feast, he thought, hungry.

Jonathon felt a buzz like a rickshaw ride up his bottom. He opened his eyes to discover a room with blood walls and a Matisse on the ceiling. His fingers had been cut off and stuck in a vase on the windowsill. There was a smell like his mother in the air.

The cold hearted biscuit felt a little left out on Rome day. Nobody had bought him a costume. Still, he beat his chest and launched forward into the day. It was sunny so he didn’t wear a coat, or a suit. As he walked the street, others pointed and stared. When he reached the bins, his friend, Gerald, winked and asked, ‘getting much?’

He said that it was clinical, the way that man with the branch beat her. He wrote that she had been asking for it with an outstretched palm. Nobody saw it. There was only her testimony. Nobody denied that it was true. There was no doubt in that. And so began the song. Whisky Jon started up his parp parp band, tapping out the beat on the floor and launched into a trumping version of ‘the whore’s drawers’. The bar was awash.

At my own little itty bitty titty bar there’s a girl who serves drinks out of her own cup. The customers, they’re never quenched. Except for one. He never looks. Sits in a booth on his own with a newspaper. One of the older girls brings him a shepherd’s pie and then salts and peppers his plate. He picks at it, rolls the mince around his cavities and smiles wildly at the always black barman. You could call it a party. Why don’t you join us? We want you in the room, gyrating to bounce, taking part and living.