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March 25, 2024

A Modern Narrative [3]

By M.J. Nicholls

I was called for an interview at Postmodern Belch HQ [italics], which at the time of writing was a shed with three sinks and a laptop. Inside this shed with three sinks and a laptop was a desk which, although positioned behind the three sinks and a laptop, offset the ligneous décor rather well. Positioned in a chair behind the desk, the three sinks and the laptop, was the owner of this HQ, whose name was, for better and for worse, Lucy Biatch.

"Sit down, you trollop," she began. I expressed a response in doublethink, but for some reason it failed to register.

"Yeah, because some flanballs is stealing all the punctuation and formatting," she added. I had permed the fourteen thousand hairs sitting atop my head, topiarized the arrangement into a rather impressive swan motif and dyed it purple. I sat down uninvited on a chair which had been positioned between the second of the three sinks and the laptop, which was gathering dust on the floor and flashing the message 'ink in hell' in neon pink.

The interview began. I had no skills apart from knowing about the books I had written named A Postmodern Belch [italics]. I once bumped into Fay Fife from new wave radiants the Rezillos and had spent some time distributing fliers for someone or something to some people somewhere.

"See, the problem is you young squirts think you can come in here with your MA degrees in Belch Studies and snap up jobs like ocelots. What can you actually do, Nigel? What crucial contribution do you make to the jutting hambone of civilisation?"

"Well, can we really answer that question? What is the value of a man? Is his importance judged on his technical skill or his passion, understanding and empathy towards others?"

"The first one. What the fuck do you have to offer A Postmodern Belch [italics]?"

"I can make coffee," I said, assuming 'coffee' referred to someone on the receiving end of a cough.

"Fine. I'll have a latte."

I spent the next five months pouring Lucy Biatch coffees whenever she wanted to spit them in my face. After that, I was promoted to the second Postmodern Belch HQ [italics] where another Lucy Biatch sat behind another desk surrounded by eight sinks and two laptops, each one connected to a shaven temp named George the Gimp. It was during this second job that I was given a task so incredible that future generations would look at my CV and think to themselves 'hey ... he's not entirely useless.'

[insert inverted comma: left] Someone is stealing all the punctuation Nigel [insert inverted comma: right], she said.

I was unable to understand her message since it was not presented in the appropriate typographical form. However, when she wrote it down on a sheet of A1 I understood all right, oh yes. I had to stop this notorious Postmodern Belch [italics] punctuation thief before it was too late. For six months, he had been hoarding the italics, and now he was nabbing the inverted commas, ellipses and was working on full stops [insert full stop]

Too late! He already had them! He also, at the time of writing this had nicked the exclamation marks [insert exclamation mark] See [insert exclamation mark]

So I went out there to snap up this villain [insert full stop] A reliable source informed me he was hanging out by the Bridge of Bombay which at the time was a takeaway restaurant and not an actual bridge [insert full stop] [capital] when [capital] i arrived there he had taken the capital letters and had also started auctioning off the alphabet [insert full stop] [capital] i cornered him in an all-yw-y [insert full stop]

"You think you can stop me, do you? Look at the beauty of this sentence compared to the grammatical atrocities in your previous paragraph. A Postmodern Belch is soon to become a subsidiary of Thomson's Experimental Literature Inc. It is only a matter of time before Lucy Biatch, George the Gimp and yourself will all be working for Thomas Thomson!"

~~~~

In fact, at the end of this part, the narrative became the official property of Thomson's Experimental Literature Inc. What followed next was zany, wacky and crazy!

ADVERT

Do you have a haemorrhoid?

Consumer: "Yes."

Have you considered using Nigel's Electro-Plunger 2XC?

Consumer: "NO!"

Well, why not? Conventional surgical techniques have been known to cause chafing around the anus. With Nigel's Electro-Plunger 2XC, simply attach the plunger to the rectum, invite a loved one to hold on tight to the device as the suction pumps remove those painful twisted veins, then go about your day!

Consumer: "Wow! Where can I buy one?"

Online NOW at bumplunger.net. The link activates the pay page, where you are invited to try our Plunger absolutely free, after a trial sum of only $39 UK pounds!

So, don't suffer that haemorrhoid in shrieking agony. Go Nigel today!

NARRATIVE #2a

Various humorous happenings are coming up.1 These happenings will include the characters Nigel (isn't he such a geek?), George (he's such a prude) and Lucy (she's so outrageous!) in a series of scenarios conducive to conventional amusement.

NARRATIVE

George walked into the room in lederhosen.

Reader: Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha!

Lucy, whose face had been replaced with that of Kate Hudson for commercial reasons, uttered a hilarious line that angered Nigel, to which the reader reacted 'ha-ha-ha-aww-aww.'

George reached for the Nigel's Electro-Plunger 2XC and bent over. "Unblock me, baby!" he said.

Reader: Aaah-ha-ha! Haaaaa-haaa! Oh God... aaaaaaaahhhh-ha-haaaaa!

There followed a lewd scene where Lucy removed George's haemorrhoid and then compared it to a burnt potato, a tiny meteor and Nigel's face.

END OF CONTRACTED SEGMENT

WRITER: Thomson Agent #101

CONTENT CHECKERS: Korean Experimental Fiction Wing, Indonesian Humour Board.

NARRATIVE #2

The following narrative will include amusing turns of phrase from the zanykook Lucy Biatch.1 Also present will be wackygeek Nigel and crazybore George the Gimp. You'll be surprised how amusing you find the forthcoming antics!!!

NOT VERY AMUSING, I WOULD IMAGINE.

> Is that Lucy Biatch?

THE VERY FUCKING SAME. AND WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

> This is Thomson's Narrative Security. We would kindly ask you to vacate our narrative and find another, otherwise we will be forced to prosecute.

HOW ABOUT I PROSECUTE YOUR COMPANY ARSES FOR ILLEGALLY INVADING MY NARRATIVE?

> We took over your narrative through proper legal means. Now, I will ask you again to please leave the area, or a security officer will have to remove you through force.

COME GET ME, THOMPRICKS.

> Come along now, ma'am. No, put down that dildo. What do you think you are doing with... aaaaaaahhhh! No, please stop! Have mercy on a fictitious security guard! Get it out, get it out!

YOU DON'T HAVE TO SEE THIS, READER.

~~~~

With those fascist dullards defeated, it's time to return to our original narrative. Oh, but hang on ... wasn't that a tedious pile of plodding poop from Nigel? Oh, that's right! It was! So instead of that unchallenging brain mulch, let's endeavour to be interesting (we can do it!) and commence with a second narrative. This is the tale of how I sensibilized breeding through Lucy's Newgenics. Let me explain in this short thesis.

In 1980, human goobag Tim Runnwither and his dead-head slinkbint of a wife bred in a Novotel in the nondescript nodunk town of Clackwawa. Nine months later, a blue-cheeked cretinous bag of slop emerged from the rotten folds of Lady Tim's snatch: they named him Tim II.

Tim II was obeisant to his idiocy: missing his mouth when eating, attending stag parties and grabbing loose titties, boogieing to acid house in yellow slacks on six grams of E. He wrote a screenplay in crayon, which was turned into an underground cult film, popular among self-proclaimed Dadaist twats in orthopaedic sandals with a Captain Beefheart complex. He married a stick-thin graduate from Somerset Art College who made muzak in her bedroom so boringly ambient Brian Eno fell asleep under its artless burr.

It occurred to me as I sat opposite them in a restaurant that these two people should under no circumstances spawn brats and poison the planet with another independent artist manqué. As this loudmouth dolt spat gazpacho in his wife's face, she wiped it off and reassured herself her husband was capable of quite incredible genius. She had recently undergone bankruptcy after participating in an online scam promising to make her five million in half a second. She had, in fact, lost five million in a half a second.

I kidnapped Tim II as he ambled off down the street, forgetting his betrothed. She had been distracted by a graffiti artist whose talent with the spraycan was so sensational, she forgot she was married and proposed to the artist dude, who spat a pea in her face. I stuffed Tim II in the back of a truck and forced him to listen to the live recordings of Rolf Harris. After the first five seconds, the anguish became so unendurable, he concussed himself against the jagged metal panels I had installed for this purpose.

While he was out, I inserted a tube into his testicles and drained his semen. To give his scrotum the required volume of liquid to evade suspicion, I pumped in 30ml of syrup. When he awoke, he assumed the last three hours had been spent in a postmodernist haze, what he referred to as a 'dreamcast' -- a psychic state between sleep and dream where the mind explodes into a variegated miasma of unfettered genius.

The process proved so popular that I kidnapped over a thousand performance artists, journalists, writers and experimental musicians, draining their spunk and restocking the sac with Tate 'n' Lyle's finest. When I attempted to drain the semen from Nigel, something biologically improbable occurred. Instead of the expected thick whitish spermatozoa oozing from his man maggot, I discovered parts of a cathedral.

The foundations of the building emerged at first (in a folded-up form) and unravelled in the crinkle of the noon. The noon was crinkly since this particular afternoon had in fact been drained from the scrotal sac of a man named Itinerant Joe, who had been housing the afternoon in his semen for safekeeping to prevent burglars from smuggling the afternoon out in satchels. The day was being stored in Martin Amis' sac.

Once the cathedral had formed itself, I dared to step inside. The décor was classically Nigelian -- pin-up pictures of the Rezillos sploshed with aftershave and drool -- and a selection of his novels strewn across the mock-Tudor floor tiles. The first excerpt was from a novel entitled Sawn-Off Swans about an intrepid octopus polisher whose Cousteauian underwater adventures -- cleaning the tentacles of octopi -- was a disappointing vehicle for puerile humour and formless surrealism. How very like Nigel.

In the basement, I unearthed a whole network of writers Nigel had contracted to produce novels in his scrotum. The first man, Juiz Amis, was a cousin of the famous writer Callum Duncan, and spoke to me in Esperanto about his eight million novels, all entitled Quench. As I strode through this endless expanse of desks and hacks, across a blue carpet sodden with tears and piss, I realised that the bunk end of literature was centred in Nigel's scrotum. Across the room, Luke Rhinehart was gabbing with Dan Brown about their latest plot: Michelangelo as a Wasp rapist.

The thought then occurred to me. If the bunk end of literature was centred in Nigel's semen, was I housing the best brains of literature in the quenches of my vaginal discharge? I had to know. Teasing slivers of mucus from my vagina, I allowed the discharge to effervesce before me, forming a hotel. Inside, Kingsley Amis in a bellhop outfit led me to the desks of Salman Rushdie, who shook my hand and praised my five billionth novel.

Who would have thought that within the tame folds of the Lydgina lurked this subterranean hotel filled with the greatest creative minds in the world? Well, frankly, I did. Since my forefathers are responsible for every book ever written, these contractors are the property of my DNA, and thus belong within the slurchy chunnel of my genius.

And that's that.

Article © M.J. Nicholls. All rights reserved.
Published on 2009-11-16
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