THE TWIN WORLDS OF IVORY PIGG

When dreams and reality merge....

Ivory Pigg was tired.

It was a long time since he'd felt quite so tired. Every muscle in his body seemed to ache, and when they weren't aching they were flopping. His legs were flopping and would barely take his weight. His arms and fingers were useless and when he tried to eat his dinner (fish and chips brought from the chip shop by a kindly neighbour who felt sorry for the state he was in and knowing that his wife was at the shops) he just couldn't manage a knife and fork and had to resort to lapping at his food as if he were some sort of hound.

He was, in fact, so exhausted that he couldn't manage the stairs to his bedroom for an afternoon nap. So he lay back in his reclining chair and tried to shut his eyes, but even that involved the kind of effort he just couldn't muster, so he lay back with his eyes open.

And when Justine Pigg, his long devoted wife, finally came home from the shops she found him like that, flopped out in his chair with both eyes fixed sightlessly on the ceiling and a dribble of something that looked like blood or tomato ketchup curling out of the corner of his motionless mouth.

“Cripes, he's dead!” she shrieked. “He's managed to get away at last! He's sought his maker when I wasn't looking and there he is, dead as a dodo!”

She sat in the chair, her chair, opposite him and stared.

How she hated that man! And now it looked very much as if he was dead. Why, hadn't she spent the greater part of her life cooking and washing and cleaning and dusting for him? Hadn't it been she who had done just about everything for the wretch? Almost as much (but not quite) as wiping his filthy bottom when he went to the toilet? Hadn't he been totally and utterly lazy and selfish in the way that only indolent men can be? And forver? Down all their bloody useless years together?

“You fat gibbon of a slob!” she said in a voice loud enough for the recently deceased, she hoped, to hear as they made their furtive way to the hereafter. “I've done just about everything for you down all these years and the least you could have done is wait for me to get back home before you cast off your mortal coil and visited the afterlife! But no, selfish as ever, you just had to slob around until I was out, me slaving away, buying tomorrow's dinner and you'll not be wanting that, not now, not with your dead face turning green and that blood trickling down your chin!”

Ivory Pigg didn't hear, though. He was in the middle of a dream that involved himself, a younger himself but himself none-the-less, and a nubile blonde with a bosom to die for and a whole lot of golden sand on an endless beach that might have been lapped by sparkling ocean waves but wasn't because it was endless. A desert, then. Yes, he was on a desert, a sandy stretch that went on for ever and the nubile wench with too much lipstick and a bikini that was several sizes wrong, either too large or too small, he couldn't tell which, dancing along besides him and asking him where the ice-cream van was because in all this heat she needed an ice-cream, couldn't he tell that she did?

But his sweet Justine hadn't done with telling him what she thought of him. Far from it: she was determined that the last echo of his being, the last sliver of his psyche as it drifted to wherever psyches drift to, should know exactly what she thought of him.

“And you're no good in bed!” she snarled, “I thought you might be once upon a time, but you're not! A woman needs a bit of love in her life, she needs to believe that she's wanted, that she's fancied even, but all you could do in bed was belch and fart and roll over so that your farts blasted into me like so much toxic gas! Shagged! That's what I wanted to be! I wanted to be shagged nice and sweetly and what did you do? Mumble and moan and go to snoring sleep straight away, groaning that you were worn out, you who hasn't done a stroke of work in your lazy life! And I had to turn to plastic for my pleasure, you thoughtless, mindless lump of shite!”

The desert became oppressive and the blonde grew older as they walked a,long together, sand flicking up and blowing at odd moments into his eyes. She grew haggard and ancient and lined and wrinkled before his eyes until the only emotion he could feel for her was hatred. But he did look around to see if there was an ice-cream van because, well, an ice-cream might revitalise her. A few licks of frozen deliciousness and she might revert to the youthful beauty she had been a moment ago and he might take her by the hand or the breast or any body part he fancied and withdraw to Paradise with her. And they might do wonderful things together, things of the mind and things of the flesh or even things of both together.

There was no ice-cream van.

There was only an old man under an umbrella with a sign that said he sold steak and kidney pies.

“And now I come to think of it you must have been dead for years!” crowed Justine Pigg, glaring at him. “Oh, you might have been able to walk a little bit and talk even less, the walking and talking dead I reckon you were, and gobble down the lovely dinners I cooked for you, the pies, the wonderful, wonderful tasty pies, you always said as you liked my pies and maybe it was too many of those that turned you to fat...”

“Have a pie,” he grunted at the blonde, but she had shrivelled and shrunk and her pretty bikini had shredded and blown away in a breeze and he'd never seen anything more ugly than the gargoyle walking across the desert with him.

“The man over there sells pies. Steak and kidney pies … with ketchup if you want it… put some flesh on those bones of yours.”

Justine stood up, still glaring at him.

“I don't know what I ever saw in you...” she rasped, “just a means of a woman wasting her life… well, I'd best get the undertaker in. That's what I'd better do: get you measured up for your box and carted off to the churchyard where you can sleep under the sods of Earth as thoroughly as you've slept in that chair!”

The blonde fixed him with geriatric beady eyes.

“Sod off,” she said, “Sod off to the graveyard, you filthy old man. And take your steak and kidneys with you.”

And she danced off, all petite and sweet, and he fell to his knees and became, in a slow minute or hour or day, one with the endless desert and its wretched sands.

“Pine,” thought Justine, “We'll have pine, it'll smell nice, though chipboard would be quite good enough.”

“You what?” groaned Ivory Pigg, stirring in his weariness. “Say that again...”