Wednesday 18 June
Coal is now more expensive that steak but it doesn't taste as good, especially when you like the finer things in life medium-rare. With a wage cut pending at work I decide to deep fry some of my surplus and sell the off-cuts as delicious crunchy snacks to distracted Portuguese and Germans fans at the Pub What's Sign Fell Off And Can't be Replaced 'Cos Times is 'Ard. Before long I'm meat eating while wondering whether ladies from Lisbon or Leipzig will look more appealing in tears come final whistle. The Portuguese lose beautifully but having had my shoulder to cry on twice bitten I'm left with no choice but to return to my seat, light my pipe and revisit the unsettling world of Bateman.
What was strange about his flat? The mirror skew-shiff in rare chastisement? The steaming clodhoppers creating their own microclimate in the hallway?
A faint witness calls down the gusty corridors of my labyrinthine mind. Who's there? Why, it's Mr Badezimmer, the imaginary toilet helper so often utilized as a child when nanny state was preoccupied with the colonies. He took a lot of flack, a lot of unpleasant splashes, this charming but somewhat smelly little man. But why would Mr BZ return now, after all this time, with all that water (all those turds) under the bridge, so to speak? He taps his head and smiles. A bluebottle escapes from between his gappy teeth.
A remembrance is so close now, it's practically constipation. For old time's sake I implore Mr Badezimmer for his assistance and, just as when I was a toddler, he reluctantly demonstrates a series of special exercises to help me push it through: Bateman's. Bateman's bathroom. Bateman's bathroom cabinet. A bottle. A bottle of purple. A bottle of purple liquid. A bottle of purple liquid in Bateman's bathroom cabinet! The whole pub turns round to see what's happening. Soon fans of all nations are united in grief.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query purple liquid. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query purple liquid. Sort by date Show all posts
seventeen-past-seven
Nervously nibbling pickled garlic, comfort food of the foolhardy, Bateman repeatedly repeats while telling me for the first time the supposed truth about this, that and (especially) the other. Like myself he went to an all-boys school, something difficult to wish on one’s own worst enemy, a part that Bateman has been flirting with in recent days, but while the A-grade hang-up I achieved was a freakish fear of ruggerball (and thereafter of such perfectly usual preoccupations as caning corrosive curries, waggling genitalia in all-male environments and biting the ears off your inferiors in confined public spaces) with him it was hair. Born with a Charles II perm, Bateman’s hirsute appearance made him the envy of master and servant alike; his status as a pin-up boy, advertising everything from school plays to garden fêtes, eventually provoking an attack of jealous rage from his numerous betters and worsts. Hiding up the nearest tree wearing impractical beige pantaloons, I can only imagine young Bateman’s fear of the mob as they bent back that mighty willow before catapulting him head-first into Blackburn’s deepest hole.
‘Since then,’ he looks out the hair-obsessed town; at the fashionable centre-partings of a thousand thatched rooftops – dwellings where every man, woman and child would kill for a moustache as lavish as mine, for ‘pit hair of such softness, ‘I have relied upon certain products to keep the follicles frolicking, so to speak’
And once again appears the vial of purple liquid, brandished a touch more modestly this time.
‘I’ve been developing this with a couple of underground sources,’ Bateman continues, ‘I’d already had an advance from McCurly and was on my way to see him with a sample when you suddenly and inexplicably…’
‘Hold on,’ I interject out of my seat, ‘first sample of what?’
‘Hair restoring potion. Top secret. But I should have told you BB, as a friend, and as someone likely to mess everything up if not fully briefed.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘We were in Poland,’ Bateman glances out at Hair Tower, the latest fully-woven skyscraper in an increasingly furry Greater Manchester, ‘I noticed your hair, like mine, was disappearing after a fall. I thought you might try to steal the recipe, out of mad desperation.’
‘Do I look vain?’ I ask.
‘It’s like looking in a bally mirror,’ Bateman replies before smearing a steaming purple blob into my forelocks, ‘Except I’m obviously a lot younger and hairier.’
So all is well between us and there is time for laughter and loose ends before the other guests arrive. What of Shifty and Scarface? Trained chemists I am told, moonlighting at the warehouse by day then developing the ‘product’ by night. I point out that many prominent evil doers have begun their working lives as chemists; would Shifty and Scarface also be expecting state funerals? Perhaps, but back in their native St Tropez, Bateman suggests, for their real names are Yves and Laurent. Stereotypes disguised as clichés I muse: ingenious!
Nervously nibbling pickled garlic, comfort food of the foolhardy, Bateman repeatedly repeats while telling me for the first time the supposed truth about this, that and (especially) the other. Like myself he went to an all-boys school, something difficult to wish on one’s own worst enemy, a part that Bateman has been flirting with in recent days, but while the A-grade hang-up I achieved was a freakish fear of ruggerball (and thereafter of such perfectly usual preoccupations as caning corrosive curries, waggling genitalia in all-male environments and biting the ears off your inferiors in confined public spaces) with him it was hair. Born with a Charles II perm, Bateman’s hirsute appearance made him the envy of master and servant alike; his status as a pin-up boy, advertising everything from school plays to garden fêtes, eventually provoking an attack of jealous rage from his numerous betters and worsts. Hiding up the nearest tree wearing impractical beige pantaloons, I can only imagine young Bateman’s fear of the mob as they bent back that mighty willow before catapulting him head-first into Blackburn’s deepest hole.
‘Since then,’ he looks out the hair-obsessed town; at the fashionable centre-partings of a thousand thatched rooftops – dwellings where every man, woman and child would kill for a moustache as lavish as mine, for ‘pit hair of such softness, ‘I have relied upon certain products to keep the follicles frolicking, so to speak’
And once again appears the vial of purple liquid, brandished a touch more modestly this time.
‘I’ve been developing this with a couple of underground sources,’ Bateman continues, ‘I’d already had an advance from McCurly and was on my way to see him with a sample when you suddenly and inexplicably…’
‘Hold on,’ I interject out of my seat, ‘first sample of what?’
‘Hair restoring potion. Top secret. But I should have told you BB, as a friend, and as someone likely to mess everything up if not fully briefed.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘We were in Poland,’ Bateman glances out at Hair Tower, the latest fully-woven skyscraper in an increasingly furry Greater Manchester, ‘I noticed your hair, like mine, was disappearing after a fall. I thought you might try to steal the recipe, out of mad desperation.’
‘Do I look vain?’ I ask.
‘It’s like looking in a bally mirror,’ Bateman replies before smearing a steaming purple blob into my forelocks, ‘Except I’m obviously a lot younger and hairier.’
So all is well between us and there is time for laughter and loose ends before the other guests arrive. What of Shifty and Scarface? Trained chemists I am told, moonlighting at the warehouse by day then developing the ‘product’ by night. I point out that many prominent evil doers have begun their working lives as chemists; would Shifty and Scarface also be expecting state funerals? Perhaps, but back in their native St Tropez, Bateman suggests, for their real names are Yves and Laurent. Stereotypes disguised as clichés I muse: ingenious!
Saturday 28 June
What do people do in Manchester? Skim-reading this mechanical journal may grant you the impression that we drink a bit too much and you would not be wrong but I hope the occasional entry may also convey the delight that drinking just the right amount with just the right amount of quality people can be; something I am not alone in searching for yet a situation I am happy to encounter with a serendipitous regularity. A Hatbox project meeting last night is a happy case in point. Or it would be if such an example d’esprit didn’t also illustrate the near-impossibility of encountering the mythical night sketched loosely above by leaving such a situation at its peak; that is before – in the hope of prolonging the evening – you find yourself having over-indulged yet again, a fact that looms as large as the impending day mid-way through your series of hoary impressionisms of Italian-American actors.
‘With every high there’s a low’, a lyric refrain in many a skinny Mancunian folk singer’s tattooed armoury. Never a truer word was spoken in a city with a climate uncannily adept at reflecting your mental condition. But the hardy city dweller cannot simply rue the loss of last night’s magic beneath trembling silk blankets like some Parisian garret-dweller. No, if he or she is to be depressed they must examine their malaise; sniff, taste, feel and explore it, for that is the spirit of industrial curiosity they have inherited from their forebears. As such this morning I stride out and into my town, deliberately selecting the streets and shops I find most gloomy and distasteful in search of perverted salvation. It seems my friends have inherited similar good sense, for there is Bateman, just ahead of me, breathing the same pasty-flavoured air that inhabits every nook and cranny of Market Street’s most notorious shop shanty town.
What’s he carrying? My heart skips a beat (something it can ill-afford to do in this condition). Poking out of a brown paper bag is the unmistakable snout of a bottle brim-full of that infernal, and inflammable, purple liquid. Where’s he heading? Straight for McCurly’s Hair Design & Sculpting to the Stars. Revenge? Surely no bad quiff is worth that, yet Bateman strides purposefully on. I summon up all of my remaining energy, cursing that last pint of Starjuice. I scatter deep-thinking and zombified shoppers alike in my quest to catch up with my nemesis, then I shout in my basest American:
‘Look out McCurly, he has a bomb!’
Panicked, Bateman holds the bottle high above his head, sending it sliding across the arcade only as I rugby-tackle him to the ground. As he threatens to protest I stuff my half-eaten pasty into his anarchy-ridden gob. Ironically, given past exploits, it is Jemima who stops the spinning bottle via a size-seven hobnail, picking up the damning evidence with a triumphant smile.
What do people do in Manchester? Skim-reading this mechanical journal may grant you the impression that we drink a bit too much and you would not be wrong but I hope the occasional entry may also convey the delight that drinking just the right amount with just the right amount of quality people can be; something I am not alone in searching for yet a situation I am happy to encounter with a serendipitous regularity. A Hatbox project meeting last night is a happy case in point. Or it would be if such an example d’esprit didn’t also illustrate the near-impossibility of encountering the mythical night sketched loosely above by leaving such a situation at its peak; that is before – in the hope of prolonging the evening – you find yourself having over-indulged yet again, a fact that looms as large as the impending day mid-way through your series of hoary impressionisms of Italian-American actors.
‘With every high there’s a low’, a lyric refrain in many a skinny Mancunian folk singer’s tattooed armoury. Never a truer word was spoken in a city with a climate uncannily adept at reflecting your mental condition. But the hardy city dweller cannot simply rue the loss of last night’s magic beneath trembling silk blankets like some Parisian garret-dweller. No, if he or she is to be depressed they must examine their malaise; sniff, taste, feel and explore it, for that is the spirit of industrial curiosity they have inherited from their forebears. As such this morning I stride out and into my town, deliberately selecting the streets and shops I find most gloomy and distasteful in search of perverted salvation. It seems my friends have inherited similar good sense, for there is Bateman, just ahead of me, breathing the same pasty-flavoured air that inhabits every nook and cranny of Market Street’s most notorious shop shanty town.
What’s he carrying? My heart skips a beat (something it can ill-afford to do in this condition). Poking out of a brown paper bag is the unmistakable snout of a bottle brim-full of that infernal, and inflammable, purple liquid. Where’s he heading? Straight for McCurly’s Hair Design & Sculpting to the Stars. Revenge? Surely no bad quiff is worth that, yet Bateman strides purposefully on. I summon up all of my remaining energy, cursing that last pint of Starjuice. I scatter deep-thinking and zombified shoppers alike in my quest to catch up with my nemesis, then I shout in my basest American:
‘Look out McCurly, he has a bomb!’
Panicked, Bateman holds the bottle high above his head, sending it sliding across the arcade only as I rugby-tackle him to the ground. As he threatens to protest I stuff my half-eaten pasty into his anarchy-ridden gob. Ironically, given past exploits, it is Jemima who stops the spinning bottle via a size-seven hobnail, picking up the damning evidence with a triumphant smile.
Wednesday 26 March
I place my shell-like against the condemned space that was flat 13 (Dave is convinced that the landlord is on his way from Whitby, and ‘whether man or mortal be within’, will be charging them precisely the same ungodly rent of ‘five hun’red shillin’ a month plus bills’). Today there is no noise, a lack of noise; a vacuum within, just not the type Miss Jordan clunks up and down the stairs, startling, strangulating and occasionally funk-sucking up my precious carriers. A stickiness in the pink cove selected for the task. Investigating in the downstairs WC, the nature of my find - a steaming purple liquid - is less surprising that the seven extra ear hairs that seem to have hopped off the hair express since yesterday (such is the fate of the man over 30). Returning to collect a greater sample of the gloop I use a quota to burn off the offending dreadlocks while retaining the remainder for a Doctor or Policeman to examine. Do I trust the former Mrs Batson to undertake such work on my behalf? Of course I do - far further than she could throw me while evoking old idioms and arching those sarcastic eyebrows that were once my own personal guardians before becoming the property, the ruthless defenders, of the state.
I place my shell-like against the condemned space that was flat 13 (Dave is convinced that the landlord is on his way from Whitby, and ‘whether man or mortal be within’, will be charging them precisely the same ungodly rent of ‘five hun’red shillin’ a month plus bills’). Today there is no noise, a lack of noise; a vacuum within, just not the type Miss Jordan clunks up and down the stairs, startling, strangulating and occasionally funk-sucking up my precious carriers. A stickiness in the pink cove selected for the task. Investigating in the downstairs WC, the nature of my find - a steaming purple liquid - is less surprising that the seven extra ear hairs that seem to have hopped off the hair express since yesterday (such is the fate of the man over 30). Returning to collect a greater sample of the gloop I use a quota to burn off the offending dreadlocks while retaining the remainder for a Doctor or Policeman to examine. Do I trust the former Mrs Batson to undertake such work on my behalf? Of course I do - far further than she could throw me while evoking old idioms and arching those sarcastic eyebrows that were once my own personal guardians before becoming the property, the ruthless defenders, of the state.
Friday 8 February
Biff avoids telling Buster that my female, rather than male-impersonating friends are off to enjoy the newly re-opened Heavenly Grocers nightclub next weekend and that it is Swarthy Erick who is penciled in for speed tap and industrial ballroom tonight. A music venue on my own street is both a luxury and temptation and I must make the most of it while funds allow. DH tells me in Beech Bar that he has a feeling I will meet a young someone tonight so to give myself a chance I choose to wash. There is a dribble of hot water but I am drawn towards the public conveniences (and not for the usual reason) so I give the boiler a good thwack with my second best hammer and it soon gives up the ghost again. Having had four pints, and a Heavenly briefing, from beaming blonde Tam and recently-blonde Cam in the pub, I take the steps below Crinkle Street with just a half-hour to search for dirty linen and wash and iron my chest hairs. The baths are deserted, the dripping taps refusing to transmit so much as a hint of Morse code. An abandoned bottle of Starjuice is within reach once I’ve finished buffing my elbows. Grimps! It normally tastes like whale urine but this is something else. I spittle my mouth contents across the yellowing tiles, cursing my antisocial alcoholism. Soon after, once I’ve wire-brushed my eyeballs, noticing that the resulting liquid is purple, viscous and steaming like the molten pools of Pompeii. This vision witnessed before the clubbing, I hasten to add - before the madness that sees me checking up on Erick, as he grooves away in the attic area, before returning to check on Biff and Buster downstairs, and then retracing my footsteps to check once again on Erick, and so on; all the while squeezing through tightly-packed dance-floors, interrupting first kisses and life-affirming hugs (they’ll have other chances). Yet the mysterious substance stays with me, despite all the others - I have surely not imagined it. Or have I? At dawn, the lads having gone, I decide to sleep on it (alone, DH, alone).
Biff avoids telling Buster that my female, rather than male-impersonating friends are off to enjoy the newly re-opened Heavenly Grocers nightclub next weekend and that it is Swarthy Erick who is penciled in for speed tap and industrial ballroom tonight. A music venue on my own street is both a luxury and temptation and I must make the most of it while funds allow. DH tells me in Beech Bar that he has a feeling I will meet a young someone tonight so to give myself a chance I choose to wash. There is a dribble of hot water but I am drawn towards the public conveniences (and not for the usual reason) so I give the boiler a good thwack with my second best hammer and it soon gives up the ghost again. Having had four pints, and a Heavenly briefing, from beaming blonde Tam and recently-blonde Cam in the pub, I take the steps below Crinkle Street with just a half-hour to search for dirty linen and wash and iron my chest hairs. The baths are deserted, the dripping taps refusing to transmit so much as a hint of Morse code. An abandoned bottle of Starjuice is within reach once I’ve finished buffing my elbows. Grimps! It normally tastes like whale urine but this is something else. I spittle my mouth contents across the yellowing tiles, cursing my antisocial alcoholism. Soon after, once I’ve wire-brushed my eyeballs, noticing that the resulting liquid is purple, viscous and steaming like the molten pools of Pompeii. This vision witnessed before the clubbing, I hasten to add - before the madness that sees me checking up on Erick, as he grooves away in the attic area, before returning to check on Biff and Buster downstairs, and then retracing my footsteps to check once again on Erick, and so on; all the while squeezing through tightly-packed dance-floors, interrupting first kisses and life-affirming hugs (they’ll have other chances). Yet the mysterious substance stays with me, despite all the others - I have surely not imagined it. Or have I? At dawn, the lads having gone, I decide to sleep on it (alone, DH, alone).
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