by Nick Patey

It must have something to do with having a hole in you. This constant need to be filled in. A heart on the sleeve right next to the snot. Puppy fat and training bras, stretch marks, wounds, and acne scars.

The punch line's a real knock out. People don't change, you just get to know them better. She was disfigured from childbirth and given to fat. It was love at first fight.

A 'rational feminist?' - The only logic she possessed was in her frigging finger. Her father was 'scientific' - an 'inventor'. She was one of his failed experiments. He went back to the drawing board / the machine? and sent her his condolences.

Too stupid for words. She convicted thoughts to prison when she sentenced them to speech.

She was a 'homosexual in a woman's body'. Modern love moves with a swiftness so fine / it'll cut you in two, if you have half a mind. My baby, my baby - a fraction too old maybe.

In the court of existential law / all men are pimps, all women whores. Hell hath no fury like a woman's penis envy.

She complained of four abortions. She was the best advertisement for abortion that I have ever met. A walking contraceptive. It's that time of the month ice box!

Her heart was a hotel that held many dances. Her love was a lodger with no fixed address.

The pen is in my hand - mightier than swords. WORDS!

We barely ever spoke when we were together, both parties preferring to endure a mutual, if paranoid, silence. Our conversations were killing. Deathly silences punctuated by/with? cryptic-crossword-like interrogations. Drugs and alcohol frequently cured /alleviated? our critical moments of emotional anaemia.

Watching pool sharks jaw with gaol bait. 'Shooting galleries'. Early openers full of late comers.

Our first fight. Love at . . . Cold snaps and bitter rain. A broken window waited impatiently to be mended.

She never abandoned her migraine story. Wasn't breaking down but through.

The punch line's a real knock out. People do change, you just get to know them less / worse?

The waiters in the cafe opposite smoked idly and exchanged bemused smirks of inattention in between customers. The public telephone that I had been attempting to call from had been admirably vandalised. At least some people still take a pride in their work.

The bar was at least six blocks away, so I made my way through stray streetwalkers and bought a paper. I fingered through the form guide and put a fiver on an outsider. Barstool pigeon would be able to tell me all that I needed to know.

I felt like I was being followed. My walk almost developed into a slow run. Every pair of eyes I passed seemed / appeared? to x-ray my paranoia. Their owners's skins were blotchy, white and pig-like. I was struck by the sharpness of human teeth whenever I caught someone smiling. My own hands resembled claws.

Blank, expressionless faces formed themselves into lines as shadows and echoes drowned my senses. Insanely unrelated memories swam to the surface of my brain, only to sink in / into? an oblivion of scattered attention.

Barstool pigeon was more slumped than seated in the back bar when I arrived.

"What are you having?"

"The usual. This little pig got up early then, didn't he?"

He pared his fingernails cryptically.

"Was there any blood?"

"It was too dark to see."

"Did she recognise you from the last time?"

"I was kind of out of it so it's hard to tell."

"Was she alone?"

"I think so, I mean I didn't see anyone else around."

"No one saw you leave did they?"

"Not that I noticed."

"But if you were off your face and it was dark, you wouldn't have, would you?"

"She had pictures of women all around her flat."

Back outside, a cold wind rashed my face. An inner queasiness oozed through cold veins, multiplying anxieties.

The waiters in the cafe opposite filed back and forth from table to table, absently taking orders. I bought another paper, my oscillating between page three and the test match report. A 'cold' / 'cool'? change' was expected in the late afternoon.

I returned to my flat and sat down at my writing desk. I stared blankly at the letters / manuscripts? lying before me. An unholy mass / mess? of aborted fragme(a)nts and still-born ideas glared back at their creator threateningly / disobediently / rebelliously?

I had a taste / shot / fix? It did the job quickly. It was admirably thorough. It took a pride in its work.

My publisher Lowe, a wealthy 'leftist' with a passion for ideological purity, street credibility, and a large family inheritance, had been on my back for months.

I stubbed a cigarette out awkwardly / nervously? and looked out the window absently. I was no Romantic, but the weather, like my moods, had been bloody miserable lately.

The phone rang. As I knew it would be Lowe complaining about my pregnant creative pause, I braced myself with stoical deliberation before answering.

"How's things?"

"Maybe I need to dry out for a while. I mean, I've been hitting it pretty hard for the last few months. It's nearly a year since I finished 'NameDropping' and 'The Moving Target', and I'd been off everything for six month before I started writing them."

Most of my literary efforts had been produced in detox units and psych centres in between increasingly serious drug and alcohol related breakdowns / nervous breakdowns?

"I'll be round in an hour", Lowe remarked hanging up.

I pulled the blinds down and scribbled an idea onto a scrap of paper beside the 'manuscripts' / letters? The words 'KILLING TIME IN THE LIVING ROOM' were studiously committed to print in my characteristic, illegible scrawl.

Beginning as an 'angry young poet', I had 'come of age' with a volume of short 'anti-stories' and an 'absurdist' play that 'simultaneously invited and rejected close critical scrutiny / attention / analysis?'

Ever the graffiti-scribe with a pen-knife heart, I enjoyed nothing more than exaggerating my spiritual and economic distress, whilst always artfully dodging a sticky end in the final analysis.

A fraudulent biography concocted by Lowe and myself when the pair of us were stoned out of our heads, prefaced each edition of my writings.

Sick / Tired / Weary? of the cliched 'from rags to riches', 'from log cabin to Whitehouse', or the standard 'gentry slumming it' scenarios, we decided upon an 'alternative' run up to 'our reader'. In the words of my 'literary biography', the "Author" was "too old for adolescent taste and too young for maure criticism / appraisal?, this enigmatic 'wordsmith' is (currently / busily?) engaged in writing a fictional postmortem on the postmodern condition. Somewhere between 25 and 35 _____, a self-styled resident alien, is still single, describing himself as a 'lesbian in a man's body'. He lives with two cats and a parrot."

In point of fact / Actually / If the truth be told / If the truth be tellable / In 'reality'?, I lived in a reasonably comfortable flat largely paid for by Lowe, and I had never owned / had? a pet in my life.

Thus far, my complete oeuvre consisted of nightmarish chronicles of contemporary gloom, doom and depravity. Existential angst, altered states and 'psychological curiosities' were my forte, as alienated voices competed vainly against the silence of their own self doubt. Usually / Invariably? set in bar rooms, 'shooting galleries', and bed sits, my 'stories', along with the characters they contained (contained therein?), were trapped by the squalor that surrounded and defined them.

Once upon a time, a productive afternoon in a sleazy hotel or a heroin haze could furnish / provide? me with research material for months of 'literary dissection'. But that had been when I had smelt with a younger man's nose. Now balding, stooped and bitter, I was a 'boring old fart', and if life is / was a filthy / dirty / bad / futile? joke, I was tired of writing the punch line(s) - writing punch lines -I was tired of being its punch line - I was tied of being the punch line!

The punch line's a real knock out. People don't change, you just get to know them better!

The punch line's a real knock out. People do change, you just get to know them less (worse?)!

WHORING IT UP WITH THE PROSE