9. THE TWO CHAINS

And the end...

You must have heard of times when everything seems to be happening at once and wondered if that is actually possible.

Well take it from me if it isn’t it ought to be because everything gave every appearance of happening at once the moment that Kenny proclaimed that the toilet chain had broken.

See chaos and confusion all around.

My coffin, the one I was beginning to look forward to spending long enough in to really get to know Jiminy Pandora and his tale of woe, crashed downwards and landed with a resonance that even the dead could hear on top of the first coffin in which my spirit or ghost or whatever it might be called was struggling to get out and reunite with me in order to start a new career haunting all those who deserved a good haunting.

Don’t ask me how that works because I don't believe a word of it. There are no ghosts, not even mine, and I could see it pushing an ethereal finger through the half-rotten timbers of my coffin. It must have been some kind of dream even though I knew that I was entombed in a funeral casket. You see how my mind works? To hell with the evidence of eyes and ears and senses, I’m always prepared to stick rigidly to any prejudice or irrational belief that comes my way if it tickles my fancy.

See a long line of popes in their finery and big hats, stretching back two thousand years.

So my coffin crashed down and landed with one hell of a crash on my first coffin, and that sent a shock wave through the ground, and it was in that ground that pipes had been rusting since Jiminy Pandora had been alive. A long time, in other words. A long time to rust.

It started with a subterranean leak, but water has a will of its own and once a tiny bit of it has found its freedom as much as can will follow. A flood is almost always guaranteed.

But rather than learn to swim we were interrupted by a horrified shout.

“What the turdington is that?” squawked ex-wife Philomena, pointing at a disgusting crust of noxious faeces riding the crest of a wave out of the public convenience, chasing Kenny who had his trousers barely up to his knees so that my two exes were treated to a display of male genitalia rarely witnessed in a graveyard.

“Put that away!” screeched Marianne.

“Don’t!” ordered Philomena, “what phishing fun!”

“Help!” yelped Kenny, and he was off down the road as if pursued by all the hounds from hell, which maybe he was.

But that wasn’t all.

For the first time since my sojourn on the Pathologist’s cold marble slab I found myself being reunited with my own spirit without knowing how or why or believing in any of it.

Like a muddy phoenix rising from the ashes I found myself lurching out of my coffin, or rather Jimini Pandora’s Victorian box. Something impossible must have happened to that continuum that deals with time and space, but particularly space. Or time.

I was light headed. Instead of doing absolutely nothing my head started aching. Bone started growing, stitching together the crude cut made by the Pathologist during my post mortem. Nerves reconnected, cold nerves that suddenly started feeling the flush of living warmth running through them.

“Christ, he’s risen from the dead...” wept Marianne, “my saviour!”

“I knew he was futtocking special...” gasped Philomena, “oh Lord and Master of mine, take me once more to your heart and we will make babies together like we never did before...”

But what was happening now in this single moment was bigger than a mere physical entanglement in which bodily fluids might be exchanged if we were lucky.

The toilet chain had been broken.

And for no more obscure reason that because I love myself more than I love being dead I was reversing the decay, the maggots and the horrible stench of recent hours. And by saying I was doing it I meant some force, some power, was.

A power, you understand, that I have never believed existed.

In that moment, believe me or believe me not (and I wouldn’t if I were you) I was riding my bicycle to work.

The wind was in my face. Behind me, and roaring and throbbing like a wild beast, a motorcyclist was hurtling along.

And I remembered my bicycle chain.

“Sod it,” I muttered to myself, and pulled up on to the grass verge as the motor bike with its twin exhausts and a rider clad like a spaceman roared past in a cloud of toxic smoke and oily fumes.

See environmental decay.

Not knowing what I was doing I leant down and checked the chain of my bicycle as if I was a normal human being who had detected something surprising in bicycle technology. I checked very carefully, and being careful I spotted the joining link and that it was almost completely undone. Another turn of the pedals and I would have been a goner, I was sure of it.

Was it a dream or a memory?

And on the other side of the road, running like an athlete in the Olympic Games, Kenny was charging along pursued by two familiar women, his trousers still only half way up and desperation in his eyes. He was still carrying the broken toilet chain.

“We need you,” my exes were shrieking, and they didn’t notice me, which was the second best thing that happened that day.

The best thing, dear reader, was the way Jiminy Pandora whispered “this is a crazy world” in my ears, “and you’ll have to teach me all about it… is that a field of sheep over there? And some lambs?” and he giggled to himself as he pointed at our future.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 30.08.19