DON’T DEFY THE FATES, OLD MAN

Is it fate or can we live beyond what might appear to be our allotted spell? Old Tony wasn't sure....

“I do believe,” muttered Old Tony of Harmony Isle, standing all alone on the edge of an exciting precipice that seemed to fall to a bottomless something, and staring into the woman’s eyes, “I do believe that today, of all the days in all of time, is the one day when I’m due to die. I feel it in my water. It is permeating my bones. I’m truly looking forward to it in much the same way as I used to look forward to the conker season coming around when I was knee-high to a grasshopper!”

Old Matilda raised both of her eyebrows almost simultaneously, which is itself was odd because she’d always taken a pride in raising them one at the time ever since she’d taught herself how to when she’d spent untold hours in front of her bedroom mirror, aged not very much indeed and practising like tiny people do.

“You want to die?” she asked.

He shook his head, a shade pensively. “No " not die. That’s the very last thing that I want to do. Certainly not die. No, I want this very day to be the one I’m destined to die on, that’s all. It makes it a very special day indeed. It makes it into the kind of day a man could say he’d been born for!”

“That means you want to die, then,” protested Old Matilda. “To draw any finer points from your words is to be silly to the extreme. You want to die today " you just said so, and your words are as plain as the nose on your face.”

“I said today it the day I’m due to die on. That’s very different: very different indeed!” exclaimed Old Tony. “Dying is something I want to do at the very end of time, long after all the days when I otherwise might die have passed me by. I want to go on and on for ever. There’s no Heaven and no Hell, I’m sure of that, as sure as I’m sure of anything, so there’s nowhere to go to in order to play harps or breathe sulphur for ever and ever. So if I’m going to poke a fist at Eternity I want to survive this very day. Therefore I want to survive the day I’m due to die on and maybe the fates will be confused and I’ll become immortal. That way it’s cocking a snoot at the void, and I love cocking my snoot!”

“I’ve heard so,” muttered Old Matilda darkly. “They say you do anything you want whilst you’re playing with your snoot, and cocking it seems highly likely!”

“So if I’m alive and breathing and playing the piano this time tomorrow I’ve won a great victory,” grinned Old Tony. “If I’m regaling you with rhapsodies by the score all knocked out by me on the ivories it’ll mean plain as plain that I’ve gone past the day I’m due to die, and consequently into borrowed time, and time is the one thing a bloke can borrow and never be asked to pay it back!”

“How do you know all this anyway?” asked Matilda, consumed with curiosity. “How can you be so sure that today is the very day that you will die?”

“I asked a fortune teller in a tent,” smirked Old Tony. “I asked her, a fat bird with a crystal ball, she was, and I asked her when the day I was due to die would come and she told me. She was most clear and unambiguous. And today’s the day she told, sure as sure. I’d never forget that, or get confused about it!”

“And she said that tomorrow you’d be dead, you daft old fart?” asked Old Matilda with a senile grin.

“She as good as said it. That she did, and I’ll prove the fates and old bats with crystal balls and stuff like that so wrong they’ll want to jump in the river and drown!” cackled Old Tony.

“If you do all that you’ll deserve a reward,” suggested his elderly female friend, staring unseeing into the precipice and wondering why it was there. “If you do all that I’ll bet you’ll be begging me for own very special prize for overcoming the fates and predictions and stuff like that!”

“A prize?” asked Old Tony, his eyes open wide. “And what prize would you think of giving me, my pretty old temptress? What prize could one like you, with too many years written on your face and in the lines of your scrawny neck offer an elderly gentleman like myself?”

“I’d offer you my body?” she suggested, her eyes twinkling all of a sudden.

“You mean, as a fine meal for a hungry man, cooked on an open fire with the dripping caught in a pan and with toast as a side-dish?” he asked, dribbling.

“Not like that, you moron!” she squawked. “Not like that at all! What would I be doing letting you carve rashers off my old flesh? Why, it’d hurt me something rotten and though it might be a prize for you it’d mean absolutely nothing but pain to me! And think of all the blood: bright red and running like so many little rivers!”

“Then what could you possibly mean by offering me your body?” he asked, knowing full well, but teasing her.

Old Matilda grinned suddenly and her face lit up. “You could shag me,” she said, rudely and quite unnecessarily. “You could take my feeble old flesh to your bed and lie me on it and pull my Bridget Joneses right off me scrawny bum and have your pleasure of me! You could snog my tempting lips and shove your tongue so far down me throat you could lick me tonsils!”

Old Tony looked suddenly horrified. She had been just too graphic for his sensibilities He looked so horrified that his face went white as a sheet. He looked so scared that his heart, deep inside his chest, started pulsating and he thought he might pass away any moment as a consequence of the old woman’s horrible and very carnal suggestion.

“Don’t say that!” he gasped. “Don’t even start thinking of such a foul and reprehensible thing! You might be a good friend, Old Matilda, but the very notion of you and I … in a bed … rolling around together … doing unmentionable things … it’s dreadful!”

“You scallywag!” she shouted, suddenly loud. “What’s wrong with me and my knickers, then? Why can’t I offer you a timely reward for defeating the fates and surviving past today? Why am I to be cast aside by your blabbering words and treated like a wrinkled old hag?”

He closed his eyes with a look of something approaching totally disbelief and started backing off. Her words were so loud, her voice, so scary, that he needed to get away, anywhere away, from the woman who had been his friend until that very moment and who he now saw as being little more than a hag.

Which was, I suppose, a shame, for he backed right over the precipice just behind him and plunged, there and then, to a dreadful and ultimately final death on that one day out of so many, when it has been foretold.

Old Matilda rubbed her hands together and muttered to herself about the folly of foolish men and their odd egos before returning to her tent and crystal ball and other special stuff and vanishing from Harmony in a puff of nothing.