As I stepped off the bus, I noticed a strange odour in the air; a nitrous sort of smell, with a tinge of lemon. Perhaps a recent thunderstorm had unleashed a volley of lightning bolts upon the very pavement I was standing on but a short time earlier.
Of course, there was not rain, and there was no perceptible damage, and although the air was light and seemed to carry one by the armpits, there was no sign of bad weather. Indeed, the skies were blue, and only a faint milky trace of cloud tainted the purity of colour.
“Can you smell that?” I asked a passer-by. She was an old woman of around thirty, and she looked at me with a curious doubt.
“The sort of lightning smell,” I explained. She sniffed the air a little, still walking by me, and shook her head a little before thrusting her attention upon the pavement immediately before her. I ceased to exist.
What a bad mannered old woman! I thought to myself. It seemed most unfair to me sometimes that the youthful generation were thought to be without manners. I held open doors, I gave up my seat on buses for those older, or more pregnant than I. Yet what thanks do I get in return? The mumbled grunt of distracted gratitude is fine, but I would at least hope that my accusers could at least practice what they so vehemently preach.
I stopped mere inches from a lampost. “Sod the Frogs” proclaimed the writing before me. Images of slimy reptiles inside my boxer shorts swam before me, to be replaced by the audible realisation that two youths, a few years my senior, were sniggering with an obvious manner to me left. I turned my attention from the concrete pillar to the duet of grins.
“Dreaming, were you mate?”
The other whispered something into his ear, and they sang a few verses of laughter without harmony.
“No,” I replied. “I was not having a wet dream.” My face had already decided that any upward muscular movement would be wasted, so it stayed in limbo.
They laughed again, the delight of being found out in such a magical mystical manner too much to prevent them from doing anything but this.
At the time I noticed something very strange that I had not noticed before. Infact, I had the distinct feeling that I had seen this all the time since my abrupt meeting with the lamp-post, and possibly even before, but had infact been ignoring it.
“You have a flower,” I started slowly, “growing on top of your head.” I finished at the same speed.
They looked at me curiously, no humour now.
“What?” said the first identical twin.
“You have a flower,” I repeated, with the same (almost lethargic) pace, “growing on top of your head.”
It is amazing how much somebody can blink when they are unable to think. They were blinking so much, that by the time they had stopped blinking, their eyelids were visibly twitching, and some of their eyelashes had fallen onto their cheeks.
“You’re mad,” came the inevitable excuse.
“No, i’m not. You feel it - go on, put your hand above your head, and feel the flower.”
They looked at each other, the same though shared.
“I am not looking a prick just for you, madman.”
I tutted, and examined the pavement, which I now realised was a mass of weeds separated by lines of concrete. It occurred to me that infact the reason why people of all nations were destroying vegetation was so that we could have a more natural world. You can’t fool the sub-conscious now, can you?
When I looked up again, one of the two was feeling around the top of his head, just to make sure. As he felt around, he brushed his hands against the thorny stems of the flower, causing his flesh to rip and blood to pour from the wounds. Yet he didn’t even flinch.
Eventually, when he’d felt around enough, leaving the flower in quite a sorry-looking state, he put his hands back down to his side, grinning.
“There!” he proclaimed, a little too loudly for the comfort of passing strangers.
The other twin looked at him, a grin that belied the though within. As he turned to me, he didn’t need to say, ‘I told you so,’ but he did anyway.
“I told you so, " he said, grinning.
I couldn’t believe my ears. The youth had just destroyed the beautiful flower upon his head, lacerated his hands in the process of this meaningless self-torture, and now proudly, the two were proclaiming my insanity.
“But, but! " I spluttered to get the words out. “Look at your hands!”
He looked at his hands, quizzically, prodded at them, massaged them a bit, but failed to notice his wounds.
“What’s the matter with them?” he asked, as they poured blood down his clothes.
“And your clothes! It’ll never come out, I don’t care what the adverts say!”
They both examined his clothes, but could find nothing amiss.
“His clothes are fine; they’re clean on today. What’s the matter with you?”
By now, the boy with the wounds was getting rather pale, and you could tell he was beginning to notice this general effect, if not the cause.
“You look pale,” I said.
He looked unhappy, and kept rubbing his hands against his trousers, to try and take away the nagging doubt. “I don’t feel well.”
At this, the other exploded into an untempered fury. Evidently, he blamed me for the boy’s misfortunes. “It’s you, " he spat at me as I felt myself raised by the scruff of the collar up the lamp-post. “You’re one of those hypnotist blokes, aren’t you. Tell him to wake up now.”
What with the impending breakage of my collar bone the only alternative, I agreed by a sort of garge of affirmation. He let me down, but didn’t relinquish his grip. “Do it now, " he warned.
At a loss as to what I could do, I did precisely what he asked. “You will now,” I said, closing my eyes to mock contemplation, “wake up and understand the truth of everything.”
He screamed, his eyes almost popping out of his head, before he fell to the pavement, as if beings of the underworld were trying to claim his body, having taken his soul. I felt the boys grip loosen around my neck as his concern for his brother overwhelmed the ‘kill’ instinct he felt for me.
Footsteps approached rapidly from behind.
“Fer fucks sake, what’s happening here, then?”
I felt my legs buckle, and the flowers seemed to disappear. My spectacles fell to the floor, as if the underworld were myopic. “Oh no!” I thought, the police are going to get me.
“It’s him!” screamed the boy. “He did this to my brother!”
The policeman looked at my crumpled form somewhat skeptically. “You did this?” he doubted, as he prodded my fallen spectacles with his booted foot.
I whimpered, stopped, then looked at him with a touch of madness in my eyes.
“Do you wanna buy some dope?”
He rolled his eyes to the sky, knowing it was going to be one of those days.
- Simon Huggins, Aprox 1989/90