THE ETERNAL COD

Be careful what you eat!

This saga is about Sammy Lovett senior rather than Sammy Lovett junior, who had been weaned on fish and chips.

That ill-informed introduction of solid food to the tiny baby was really down to his father, who owned the worst fish and chip shop in all of Brumpton, despite the regular banners he stretched over the window that proclaimed that it had been voted the best fish and chip shop in Brumpton by this or that vaguely notable authority. But that father (the aforementioned Sammy Lovett Senior) really believed that nothing can nourish a growing baby better than fish and chips in all its wondrous array of forms. He’d started the whelp on fish fingers and batter bits and over the years progressed to haddock loins in thick batter with mushy peas and, of course, chips.

It came as no surprise when the baby did flourish. He grew from being an ideal little fellow with a cheeky grin to a chubby grease-ball of a human being. A grease-ball, that is, that had an addiction to fish and chips, and that addiction went down the years of his childhood until he reached his teens and failed completely and utterly to attract a girlfriend to his charming self despite the constant aroma of cooked cod that emanated from every pore of his body.

So he wretchedly sought out his caring father, Sammy Lovett Senior, in his shop as he magnificently stroked a paddle through sizzling oil and dragged out two or three spectacularly unhealthy portions of slightly overcooked cod.

“Dad,” he implored when gorgeous Betty Armstrong had turned him down by calling him a loathsome stinky fatty, “why don’t the pretty girls like me?”

“I’ve always had the same problem,” his father replied to him, “it’s something in the genes.”

“I’ve got a willy in my jeans, but Betty don’t know that,” replied Sammy, “do you think I should show her?”

“Goodness no!” retorted his father who had never got his head round the way that two identically sounding words can have quite different meanings, “they’ll lock you up if you do that, and then who’ll take over from me and run my chip shop? The doctor says I might need to take a break soon, or I’ll get myself a heart attack, and then it’ll be down to you to cook the produce, but not if you’re behind bars.”

“A heart attack?” questioned Sammy Junior, “I thought your diet of cod and Maris Piper chips was guaranteed to give you a long and trouble free life, dad, until you reach jolly old age and go around in a wheel chair!”

“It’s in my genes,” repeated his father woefully, and proceeded, there and then, to have the afore-mentioned heart attack. His face swelled up until Junior thought he might actually explode, and then the noise he made as his breath departed permanently from his lungs stopped the traffic on Four Ways Roundabout for at least two minutes.

Sammy Senior, though, actually died without actually knowing that was what he was doing. He’d lived a relatively short life gorging himself on left overs at the end of the working day, and sometimes the leftovers were giant-sized fillets of fish in the thickest, greasiest batter known to man. But throughout his shortish life he had loved that fish. Cod was his favourite, closely followed by haddock, and he had even been known to tolerate the fillets of plaice he sold when cod was in short supply.

Buy he lay, twitching at first, on the floor of the chip shop with Junior looking on, not quite sure what to do. At school in so-called health lessons he’d been shown how to deal in emergencies with people who were suffering something potentially fatal, but had never really understood the lessons and now, when understanding might have helped he just stared in horror as his father drifted, invisibly, out of the gross body he’d inhabited for thirty seven years and through the greasy atmosphere of the shop.

“He’s dead,” exclaimed Betty Armstrong who was there to buy a pickled egg, which for some reason Sammy Senior had thought would sell well, “isn’t it exciting?” she enthused as, invisible to one and all the very essence of the deceased drifted through the greasy air and out of the door into the relatively fresh air of the world beyond its borders.

And that was when Sammy Lovett Senior left his paradise on Earth and started a slow and rather mournful climb to a paradise somewhere else.

And it was when he reached the top of something or other, maybe a staircase, maybe a spiral of smoke, maybe nothing at all, that he emerged, a fat and rather loathsome ghost, before his maker.

“Who are you?” he asked of the giant fish sitting on a golden throne surrounded by buxom beauties dressed in just about nothing.

His maker smiled benevolently at him.

“Dear boy,” he said in an altogether ungodly voice, “surely you recognise me? After all, you who’ve consumed my bairns your whole life long! And bless me, your son is, as we speak. showing the gorgeous Betty Armstrong something really disgusting in his jeans? I’m your Cod.”

And with a really beautiful smile he wiggled his gills.

© Peter Rogerson 30.03.22

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