1. STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

A fat man with a gossipy alter-ego, and a very long marble staircase.

The fat man stood at the foot of the marble staircase and gazed up.

“It’s a long way up there,” he mused, “I somehow doubt I’ve got the strength.”

“Oh, you can do it,” chirruped his altar-ego, exploding into existence like a great red cloud with a face that hovered spookily next to his own, “I’ve seen you before, mighty of limb as well as gusset. You’ve been places where few other folks dared to go, and you’ve survived. Remember back in forty-seven?”

His alter-ego leapt off his head and stood cheerfully on the step next to him. Yes, he realised that he was on a step. The bottom one, but it was still a step and it was the first marble tread of what looked like impossibly many.

“Forty-seven?” he asked.

“That thatched cottage in the Cotswolds where you were perched on the roof and holding on to the chimney as if you would fall if the least breeze touched you! But you held on all right, even though the wind was blowing the best part of a gale. You were a brave man back then, braver than me because I hid behind your eyes and clenched my own fast shut!”

“That chimney was warm and my fingers were numb,” he replied. “It wasn’t bravery but an act of digit preservation! I never was so cold as I was that night.”

“Come on, chum, just take a step and you’ll be okay.”

The fat man peered up the marble staircase, and shuddered. It seemed to stretch on for ever, winding this way and that and gradually shrinking as distance dwarfed it until clouds swirled around it.

“Where does it go?” he asked his alter-ego as if one half of him knew something that the other half didn’t.

The other sniggered. “You must know that!” he told him, “a very important elf like yourself...”

“Don’t call me that!” snapped the fat man, “I have never been an elf and if I had been one I wouldn’t be here teetering on the first step of a thing that seems to go on for ever, but I’d be in the arms of the one I love in front of a blazing log fire, and smooching.”

“Sometimes you disgust me,” grumbled his alter-ego, “and isn’t smooching a very sixties word?”

“It was good in the sixties,” snarled the fat man who was certain he wasn’t an elf, “I enjoyed myself back then. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll were the order of the day and there was nothing the kids wanted more than a little plastic figure on Christmas day, soldiers for the boys, what did they call them? Action men? And dolls for the girls, with their fancy plastic houses and plastic Kens driving plastic cars!”

“That was the sex bit,” grinned his alter-ego.

“I don’t know where the drugs came in, and I was never into rock ‘n’ roll,” sighed the fat man, “and if sex was Barbie and Ken I feel deprived.”

“With your figure, I should hope not,” laughed the other, “big and fat, even back then, too big and fat to rock ‘n’ roll! But you had your moments, I recall. Good moments at that. What was the name of that sweet little thing who believed that you were some kind of deity? You know, the blonde with such a short skirt you could almost see her frillies? Anyway, whatever her name she went for you big time and you almost missed the 1963 delivery!”

“I never did, then!” snapped the fat man, and feeling somewhat chastened by memories he would prefer to forget he added: “I’m going up a step now. Just you watch me! This foot is raised just so, and resting on the second step, and now the other foot … take it easy, and there! There is is! We’re on the second step as if it were no trouble at all.”

“It wasn’t really,” muttered his alter ego.

“Wasn’t what?” he barked.

“Any trouble at all! The bother with you is you got so used to being looked on as someone special you began to believe it! But look at you! Old, too old really, all grey and wrinkled...”

“White and wrinkled!” protested the fat man, “and so what! I am old. Very old, too old for all the hurtling through the skies on a sleigh with a big hessian sack filled with rubbish just so the kids can think someone loves them. And nobody does, not really. I’ve heard them, the grown ups who order the plastic crap. It’s Christmas, they say to each other, and if it weren’t for the blasted kids we could get our heads round a few glasses of vino at Annie’s or Glenda’s or Tommy’s or Davey’s or some other cuckoo’s place, and get wrecked until half way to dawn, and then fall up to bed and enjoy good old fashioned nooky for the rest of the night… Yes, I’ve heard them!”

“There’s not many like that,” reproved his alter-ego, sticking his tongue out.

“Even if there’s only one it proves my point, and I know darned well there’s a lot more than one!” growled the fat man. “Now you just watch me! I’m going up another step, first this leg … and then this one! See, I’m no landlubbing coward but a climber!

“Nobody called you any kind of coward,” commented his alter ego, “though to tell the truth you can be a bit self-obsessed. And the way you’re climbing this stairway puts me in mind of the small boy who, ages and ages ago, didn’t want to go to school, so he went so slowly that by the time he got there it was time to go home!”

“That was me, and they thrashed me for it,” remembered the fat man.

“You had weals on your buttocks for a month of Sundays!” grinned his alter-ego, “and you deserved them! Kids these days don’t get weals on their buttocks, though quite a few deserve them! Anyway, that’s who you remind me of. You as a nipper. You as a snotty little nipper!”

“I couldn’t help catching colds and runny noses!” snapped the fat man. “the house I lived in was so cold that ice formed on the insides of the windows, and we scratched out names into it! Jack Frost, they called it.”

“I suppose that’s why you took on the role of the red-coated, bewhiskered gentleman in a sleigh,” sighed the other, “the generous distributors of gifts at Christmas time, the old man that little ones write to begging for this or that at Christmas, and you go out of your way to deliver them.”

“I don’t really, you know,” snapped the fat man, “I’m just a ghost. A figure meant to mean things like generosity and sharing, like giving and receiving. It’s the selfish parents who actually give the stuff. If it was down to me I’d ban plastic, ban batteries and ban toy soldiers, and leave them with an apple and a book, like if the good old days!”

“You kill-joy!”

“Bah! Humbug!” roared the fat man.

“Take another step, old man,” urged his alter ego, “look up the stairs there, at the top, there’s someone rather gorgeous waiting for you, a pretty filly with as much right to hope and generosity as you have. And she’s waiting for you. Only you, my fat and loathsome friend, only great big greasy you.”

© Peter Rogerson 05.11.18