The Ten Planet Finger Theory
by John McGroarty
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: A few mild ones.
Description: Wee Rab’s theories might be bizarre, but after all he does know the location of the Perfect Cat.
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Wee Rab Flynn was on his third vodka and lime. They had only stopped for coffee and to carry out the necessary functions but wee Rab could sure knock back the voddies. Years of dedication and practice make perfect. For Derrick and Moira wee Rab had been an unknown until the ill-starred ten-day big campervan tour of the north of France. Before he had just been Isabel’s husband. Him indoors. Isabel had never breathed a cross word about the wee man at work (nursing in the Royal). And she, inexplicably with hindsight, hadn’t talked it over with wee Rab’s psychiatrist beforehand. He would have known. Would have pooh-poohed the whole idea as an exquisite, perverse even, piece of madness. Isabel thought the wee man had been making progress. She shook her head ruefully, sucked the insides of her cheeks. Wee Rab was in full flow, back arched, legs crossed, ranting.
“Okay, it’s a little far-fetched, man, but just think about it, ” he took a big swig of vodka and lime cordial, swished it round his teeth, held out his nicotine stained hands, “how many fingers have I got? Eh? Come on, Derrick, it’s not difficult.” Wee Rab waited patiently. “Ten, right? That means that there must be ten planets out there; stands to reason, it’s a base ten universe, man, it’s synchronicity; it all makes sense, eh? Extrapolate, Derrick, extrapolate. Our galaxy must have ten planets as we have ten fingers, ten toes, ten times tables, ergo, there is a planet still to be discovered; and that wee planet,” Rab thought for a second, “Pluto, will have to be reinstated. Aye, and that’s where the Real Cat is, you know, man, the Perfect Cat.”
Wee Rab snorted at his own absurdity. Some green vodka spray shot out his gob and splattered onto the table. Onto the half-chewed croissants and empty café au lait cups.
Derrick’s fat face wore a slightly amused/bemused expression. Moira had had enough already. She sat glowering at wee Rab, thinking painfully how her ideas of a nice child-free (little Rhiannon was with her granny) bourgeois couple holiday in France had turned into a nightmare madcap episode of Prison Break. Ten days of chasing after the ghost of wee Rab trying to foil his plans for binge drinking his way through Normandy. More like some sick unfunny episode of Scooby Doo. A nurseman’s holiday. The only relaxed moment had come after wee Rab had tried to jump out of the caravan in the Ille-et- Velaine as they pulled out of a service station. Derrick had had to physically restrain the wee man. They skidded to a halt on la bande d’arret d’urgence and Rab tried to leg it. With Derrick embracing him in a bear hug, Isabel spent forty minutes on the phone to Rab’s psychiatrist trying to have him sectioned. Sadly, this was beyond the mustachioed shrink’s power. A psychopathic refusal to continue with a holiday touring Norman castles and playing scrabble at night with a nice cup of tea (and wishing to spend it on the bevvy instead) was not a sectionable offence. Wee Rab was, as he loudly and vociferously declared in English and in slapstick French, a free man. Isabel slipped her mobile into her pocket and signalled to Derrick. Derrick set the wee man free.
“Sorry, Rab,” he said in an ill-conceived tone of baronial solidarity.
“Thank you, Derrick, I shall not file charges for kidnapping,” said wee Rab, dusting himself down.
He then rolled a fag and sauntered off as if he were going down for the paper and some rolls on a Sunday morning (he was on holiday after all) and was last seen getting into a taxi and heading at top speed back to Saint Malo. A voice in the air was heard as the taxi whizzed past, going to get rat-arsed, suckers. No more was heard of him for three days and the events that ensued in the life of wee Rab Flynn during that period are best left in the oblivion into which they have fallen, even in the mind of wee Rab himself. Later the wee man would have vague backflashes of wildly gesticulating gendarmerie, old knitting hags, sexy French maids in black uniform, and a huge spotted Great Dane. All of this tickled wee Rab’s post-postmodern sense of life narrative (another one of his favourites) and he would often fall to pondering over a Martini or five what was the signifier and what the signified in these broken images of his three days on the randan in la France (wee Rab was always under the delusion that he spoke French). The holiday was curtailed financially for Isabel in these three days when she discovered that Rab had made off with most of their kitty. Despite now being skint, Isabel enjoyed her Rab-free days and had many heartfelt conversations with Moira and Derrick about her motivation in trying, as she put it, “to save” the wee man. Moira was beyond pity (for wee Rab always ultimately evoked pity) but she listened sympathetically out of concern for her best pal. Any chance of pity had gone into the sea when they had had to carry a miraculous wee Rab back to his cabin on the ferry and he had stuck his hand up her skirt and, despite his advanced state of drunkenness, had even managed to wiggle a finger up her bumhole. In twenty years of nursing Moira had never experienced the like. Just looking for that lost planet, wee Rab had slurred. Derrick didn’t take macho offence. He secretly liked the wee man, and he was a psychiatric nurse. He had seen this type of reaction before in men on the way to the padded cell. He even took it as a sort of compliment that another man had wanted to stick his finger up his podgy wife’s arse. Po-faced Moira would never forgive. This was beyond her studied small bourgeois pale. She had fought her way out of Easterhouse through the power of self control in the service of self-betterment under the moral guidance of the Reverend Sandy Swan and the Easterhouse Baptist Church. Something deep inside her wouldn’t allow this degrading experience to pass unavenged. He deserved a good chibbing, she thought atavistically. Moira wanted a tough hard man cave-his-head-in response to her humiliation. Derrick thought she was overreacting and should take it in her stride (a textbook clash of opposing animas and animuses the wee man’s shrink would have seen at a glance).
Wee Rab rolled a smoke and lick-spittled it watertight. Moira watched his lips and the thick saliva sticking between his gums. She couldn’t remember if this was a sign of an underlying serious illness. She smiled to herself. Her bum twanged. Wee Rab was now on his literary masterpiece. The work of great literature that he had been working on for the past five years.
“It’s called Calvino’s Joke Book,” he was saying to Derrick, “it’s a hyper-cyclical postmodern narrative search for God.”
He blew out a smog of filthy air through his nostrils. Coughed uncontrollably. Spat out a curl of weed.
“The hero is an expert on Kandinsky (one of the things wee Rab did seem to know something about) who has the urge to paint and realizes that all the abstract paintings, when he puts them in the form of a crucifix, spell out the name of God. Well, that comes at the end. I’ve started from the end and I’m thinking of rewriting the whole thing backwards, literally,” he puffed on his roll-up, picked a bit of tobacco from between his teeth, stuck it under the lip of the table, “or in Morse code or something, it doesn’t matter anyway, it doesn’t mean anything, nothing means anything, ultimately.”
Wee Rab was on the slippery slope again. Half normal. After his dishevelled and impoverished return, he had had a severe attack of repentance and had foresworn the bottle for a full two days. The head doctor’s advice had been to humour him and get him back home asap. Indulge his infantile wishes. Pander to his mother fixation. But get him to the surgery. Back on the couch. The therapy was a long and expensive one but they would one day arrive at the gates of normality. Isabel felt that she owed the wee man something (or owed somebody something). They had met when wee Rab had been a volunteer on a drug trial and Isabel one of the nurses (more like an all expenses paid holiday, almost as good as the week he spent at the tax payer’s expense in intensive care). Sometimes wee Rab tried to blame the trials for his lunacy but Isabel knew it was deeper. He had been a placebo patsy all the way. Isabel’s underinflated ego had fallen for the wee man’s dandiness from the word go. His madness was contagious. His two cat theory of the universe. How everyone has a cat in their head which corresponds to a cat in another mind and how the true purpose of life is to find your “other cat” (there is a Third Cat, of course, a Perfect Cat, but we don’t want to get too technical). It was a match made in a laboratory. Isabel had carbon-tested his urine and sperm with a sense of deep love in her heart and a spring in her step. Wee Rab had just started his great work and she was just back from a spinster holiday in Tunisia, where she had had an unpleasant experience with a camel. At first she had loved his wackiness and his bizarre take on everything and had not noticed the fact that he was half-pished all the time. In the clinic he was off the booze by strict necessity. His book went slowly. In fact she had never seen a single paragraph. One day the wee man announced that he was giving up the literary life temporarily and wanted to set up a roast chicken stall in an industrial estate in Motherwell. He needed to find inspiration, the thing in itself he said, pseudo-philosophically. Isabel financed it. The chickens lasted two months. Some of them even managed to escape. Not so Isabel. After this Rab received the gift of mana from the gods and moved into guru mode. He would, he announced grandly, set up a series of workshops in art and literature. Aspiring young artists and writers would flock to sit at his malodorous size ten feet. After this failed, wee Rab went into therapy. Still Isabel did not flinch, she had been happy in the lab among wee Rab’s juices, goddammit, and now lived in hope of bringing back those years of joy and had even, against, it must be said in fairness, her psychiatrist’s advice, converted her life into a mission to save the little piss-artist from himself. Moira was not for saving anyone. Not now. Not after the great guru’s finger up her bahoochie. The wee man was now on his feet miming out Calvino’s Joke Book in imaginary flag semaphore.
“God’s going to take off, vroooom,” he was screaming, arms flapping, “God’s going to land, bum, bum, bum, bum…….” He looked at Moira and sniggered his despicable muttley snigger. Moira looked around for a sharp instrument to knife the wee man to death, managed to control herself and marshalled Derrick (the wee man’s ear) out of the bar instead.
“Okay,” she growled in her best senior nurse voice, “let’s get going.” She kicked out at a barstool as she waddled past.
They started to file out of the café. Derrick was staring at Moira with a shocked look in his big carthorse frame. Rab was a sick man. They were nurses. Aggression was not nurserly. Not professional. He had never seen Moira like this before. Had she not been Intensive Care Nurse of the Year just a couple of years back? An inspiration on the ward to all fledgling carers?
“Come on, Rab,” said Isabel, “you’re giving us all a real showing up.”
Rab was suddenly repentant again and even, momentarily, looked embarrassed. He downed the dregs of his voddy and followed Isabel outside meekly. Moira’s violent turn had unnerved him. He realized that some line had been crossed and that mummy would be really angry this time. And, somewhere deep down in his subconscious, a little voice warned him to watch out for his mad half-pickled hide.
Moira approached the caravan searching savagely in her bag for the keys. Her wrath was mounting with every step. In truth it wasn’t just about wee Rab anymore. Not just about fingers up fannies. It was Derrick. What a mistake. It was her whole life. Nursing. Caring for everybody. Loving the world. It was her parents to blame. Always making her turn the other cheek. Understand the other. Hug the other. Swallow her anger. Good girl, Moira, good girl. In the playground. Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Whatever thou doest unto the least of my brethren, thou doest unto me. And it had turned out like this. Married to a big girl’s blouse. A big woose. Just like her father, minus the Baptist church love-thy-neighbour bullshit. Well, that was it; Moira had had her own revelation. A long overdue wake-up call. A rebirth. Where the hell were the keys? She tipped everything from her bag out onto the pavement. The yellow leather bag that Derrick had bought her for Christmas. The one like the first scene in Marnie, Derrick’s favourite film. We have to understand all the Marnies, Moira. It’s our duty as nurses. Well, she was bloody Marnie now. The keys were not to be found. Isabel and Derrick watched her warily.
“Well, one of you must have them!” she roared.
They searched everywhere for ten minutes but the keys were nowhere to be found.
“Maybe they’re in the caravan,” said wee Rab, trying to suck up.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” screamed Moira, and let out a kick at one of the front wheels.
“I speak French,” said wee Rab without any hint of irony in his voice, “I’ll get a mechanic.”
“Jesus wept,” sighed Moira, and sank down onto the kerb, her whole life (conscious and unconscious) falling apart.
Wee Rab shot off for the mechanic. He managed to neck two beers in the café they had just come out of and a double voddy in the bar next to the mechanic’s before arriving back with Jean-Pierre, a blue-boiler-suited French mechanic with mad staring eyes, dragon tattoos and a military crew cut. The wee man had downed the double vodka with him, as the French loon had taken an instant liking to him.
None of Jean-Pierre’s keys worked on the campervan, he couldn’t get it open with force either. He worked in a sweat for twenty minutes. He hammered, he twisted, he banged and blasted. He cursed in French. A screwdriver slipped and he tore the flesh from his knuckles. Merde. Wee Rab paced up and down for the first ten minutes “translating” and encouraging his new French pal, and then, suddenly, he sneakily withdrew. Moira had by now raised her head and come out of her existential crisis slightly. Her venomous hatred of wee Rab was, however, still raging unabated. She watched him closely. He was up to something. Maybe just plotting another escape to the bar in search of vodka, but there was something else. Something stirring in that cunning little empty head of his. The wee man had felt elated at first. This was all that fat cow Moira’s fault. Her fault for losing the keys. Stupid bitch. Ah, superiority, my old friend, welcome back. Wee Rab started to think that it was she who was unhinged. He would never speak to her again. That was it. Yessiree. He would keep silent all the way home and make a point of never being in her company again. Erase her from his memory. Let her fat spotty face fall into the amnesiac pit with all the others. All the non-persons who had fallen foul of wee Rab over the years. He slipped his hand into his pocket for his tobacco, time for a rollie; and, Jesus, there they were. The keys. Wee Rab started to sweat. He stepped away from Jean-Pierre, dropped his ungrammatical utterance in mid-sentence. He looked around. It appeared that nobody had seen; but Moira was an old hand at catching patients with booze and fags hidden under the sheets. She knew guilt when she saw it. She dropped her eyes to wee Rab’s hand holding something in his pocket. Pretended not to have seen. The wee man tip-toed backwards. Isabel turned, realizing that he wasn’t there.
“Rab? Where are you going now?” she said, exasperated.
“I need to go to the toilet, you know, my guts and that,” said the wee man. He needed time to think of a plan to announce the discovery of the keys to his advantage. If there was one thing that wee Rab could not take it was appearing to be an idiot (a constant battle against an indefatigable foe). His guts and that indeed; the little pipsqueak, thought Moira. She watched the wee man mince his way towards the café.
“I’m going to the toilet too,” she announced, and set off in pursuit. She crossed the car park, weaved stealthily through the wicker chairs and tables and French families finishing lunch on the terrace, and snuck behind the main door. From there she could see wee Rab at the bar. He was downing a double vodka and looking at the keys mystically, his head moving from the vodka to the keys, seemingly waiting for a Zen revelation about what to do next. He then asked for the toilet key and disappeared into the little boy’s room. Moira was at a loss for a moment. She looked at the toilet door. This was her chance to corner wee Rab. To wreak her revenge. For the finger up the bum, for his withering patronizing dismissal of her love for Fleetwood Mac and Andrew Lloyd Webber, for his ridiculing of Dan Brown and Ken Follett, for ruining her bloody holiday! But how? How? The radio was playing Tom Jones and the barman was singing along in bad, overly rhotic, English. She stood there laughing, I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more, my, my, my Delilah. Moira’s brain sped through a chain of associations to a quick solution. Yes. The Voice. Delilah. The Easterhouse Baptist Hall. Sandy Swan. The Green Grass of Home. Samson. The hairy chest. The silver crucifix. It was as if some other part of her mind had taken over and was leading Moira at lightning speed to the solution to the conundrum of wee Rab, to the riddle of her own personality, to her true self. Judges. Sandy Swan’s voice. Delilah therefore took new ropes, and bound him therewith, and said unto him, the philistines be upon thee, Samson. She looked out across the car park and the terrace. Out beyond the children’s carousel, the swing park, and the hotdog stand to a row of shops. The bread shop, the butcher’s, the mechanic’s, Quicaillerie Barthes. That was it. How sweet. How appropriate. How post postmodern. Moira shot across the car park and into the Barthes hardware store.
Isabel and Derrick watched her whizz past. They were tending to Jean-Pierre’s bloody knuckles. The doors of the campervan would not open. No amount of banging and twisting and cursing would open them. They were stranded in little France. And no combination of renal and psychiatric nursing could do anything about it. They saw Moira speed past again with a brown packet under her arm. She skidded across the terrace and swerved into the café. The barman was now murdering Sex Bomb.
In les toilettes wee Rab was sweating and praying to the gods of postmodernism for some guidance. Oh come Roland Barthes, come Jacques Derrida, come Foucault, oh come Wassily Kandinsky! He had to think of a way to get back on top. To outsmart Moira. To get back to the UK. To keep Isabel, she with the job and the purse strings. How he loved her at that moment. Tried and tested and twisted and turned her, but love her he did. Okay, Rab, think, say you found them on the table, no, the barman had them, no, under the seat where Moira’s fat arse had been, they were in your pocket all the time, no, not that, wait, aye, that’s it, take them out and drop them down your trousers right where Moira had emptied her stuff onto the pavement. Eureka. Incriminate the mad nurse. Yes, yes, yes. Wee Rab looked down into the pan. The keys were at the bottom of the little bog pool, glimmering up at him. Thank Christ they hadn’t been sucked down the cludgie pipe. He rolled up his sleeve, and was about to fish them out, when Moira burst in. She pulled out a flick knife from the brown paper bag and waved it at him.
“What’s the signifier and the signified in this scene, Rab, eh?” she said madly.
Wee Rab froze. The postmodern gods had played a filthy trick on him. They had put the idea of escape into his head, given him a way out, only to slam the cage doors in his face and laugh a long Homeric laugh at his pitiful worm existence. Had it not always ended thus? The hero finds his way out of the labyrinth only to be faced with the ultimate pointlessness of all existence. The abyss. The grave. Death. Face to face with a mad fat religious intensive care nurse with a bad taste in music and a flick knife. There is no way out. Nothing means anything, ultimately.
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” said wee Rab, trying to sound calm, “you are the return of the absolute and I am nothing. I am to be slain and return to the nothingness of the nothing. There is no signifier or signified for the hero now.”
“I’m going to give you a chance,” said Moira coyly, “first, where are the keys?”
Wee Rab motioned to the toilet bowl.
“Up your arse, were they? Well, it makes a change from you being there yourself, get them out.”
Rab plunged his hand into the toilet and recovered the keys. Moira dried them roughly on Rab’s jumper and put them in her pocket.
“Kneel down,” she said, “next to the wash hand basin. One move and I’ll slit your scrawny throat.”
She then pulled out some rope and tied him to the sink. “Okay, wee Rab, this is how it works, if you want to live to down another double vodka, you will now listen to me singing a Fleetwood Mac song; without laughing, or screwing up your face, or even curling your little supercilious lip! One snigger and it’s over.”
Wee Rab looked down into the toilet pan. He thought he was going to be sick. The wave of nauseousness passed. He looked at Moira and his lip began to curl.
Moira stepped forward and administered a boot in the shins.
“I’m serious, Rab,” she screamed.
The wee man swallowed and managed to say, “Which song? Go your own Way? Don’t Stop?”
Moira smiled fiendishly, “Sara or Songbird,” she said, “your choice.”
Wee Rab tried not to look at her. He hesitated. “Sara,” he finally said, without looking up.
Moira raised herself up to her full height and started drowning the wee man in a sea of love, oh, Sara, you are the poet in my heart, never change, never stop, never stop, NEVER STOP. She bounced around the toilet giving her favourite song full throat. Once. Twice. Three times. She approached wee Rab and stuck the knife under his trachea.
“Now,” she said, “I want you to say that Fleetwood Mac are the best band in the history of music, and that Ken Follett and Dan Brown are good writers. Excellent writers! The best!”
The wee man was slipping into deep culture shock. He resisted, felt the steel under his chin and spluttered out what Moira wanted to hear.
Moira removed the knife, stepped back, her nostrils flaring and her eyeballs dilating. She thought for a minute, stepped forward again and stuck the knife back at wee Rab’s throat.
“One more thing,” she said, her eyes huge and glazed with triumph, “say that Andrew Lloyd Webber is a genius!”
Wee Rab was beyond hope now. All his ideals gone. Completely abandoned by the postmoderns. And then he had the thought, the postmodernists had not abandoned him after all. Had this not happened to Beckett himself in France? A knifing, a brush with the absolute before going on to meet his genius full on? Should he not even forgive?
“No,” he said coldly, “I won’t say that, go on, stab me, slash me, mash my head in, but that I will never say! And fear not, Moira, I forgive you.”
“Shut it for once,” said Moira and taped up his mouth with some masking tape from the Barthes hardware store. She backed out of the toilet and locked the door. She left the café and walked across the car park to where Derrick and Isabel and Jean-Pierre were still trying to figure out how to get the campervan’s doors open.
She swung the keys from side to side in her big meaty mitt.
“Got the keys,” she called, “they were up wee Rab’s arse the whole time.”
She opened the driver’s door and hopped in. She started up the engine and rolled the window down.
“Let’s go?” she said.
“Where’s wee Rab?” said Isabel, with a look towards the café.
“Said he was going to Paris to starve and do some really serious writing, might even take up painting.”
Derrick got in. Isabel looked sceptical.
“Where is he really, Moira?” she said.
Moira sighed, “Ah, there’s no cure for you, is there? He’s in the toilet. And you’ll need this.” She handed Isabel the flick knife. Moira and Derrick shot off. Moira leant over and pushed Tusk into the CD player. As she pulled out of the car park, she ran over and splattered a cat that had been sleeping peacefully in the sun for the last two hours. Sara, you are the poet in my heart, she sang lustily and winked at Derrick.
Isabel went into the toilet and found the wee man tied to the sink.
“Awe, for God’s sake, Rab,” she said, and pulled the masking tape off his mouth.
“Moira’s just run over a cat,” said wee Rab breathlessly, “he was in my head at the time, and out on the road, I tried to warn him. Cats should learn to be in just one place at a time. ”
This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, or even with a whimper, but with a squashed cat in every head and a poet in every heart.
Swearwords: A few mild ones.
Description: Wee Rab’s theories might be bizarre, but after all he does know the location of the Perfect Cat.
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Wee Rab Flynn was on his third vodka and lime. They had only stopped for coffee and to carry out the necessary functions but wee Rab could sure knock back the voddies. Years of dedication and practice make perfect. For Derrick and Moira wee Rab had been an unknown until the ill-starred ten-day big campervan tour of the north of France. Before he had just been Isabel’s husband. Him indoors. Isabel had never breathed a cross word about the wee man at work (nursing in the Royal). And she, inexplicably with hindsight, hadn’t talked it over with wee Rab’s psychiatrist beforehand. He would have known. Would have pooh-poohed the whole idea as an exquisite, perverse even, piece of madness. Isabel thought the wee man had been making progress. She shook her head ruefully, sucked the insides of her cheeks. Wee Rab was in full flow, back arched, legs crossed, ranting.
“Okay, it’s a little far-fetched, man, but just think about it, ” he took a big swig of vodka and lime cordial, swished it round his teeth, held out his nicotine stained hands, “how many fingers have I got? Eh? Come on, Derrick, it’s not difficult.” Wee Rab waited patiently. “Ten, right? That means that there must be ten planets out there; stands to reason, it’s a base ten universe, man, it’s synchronicity; it all makes sense, eh? Extrapolate, Derrick, extrapolate. Our galaxy must have ten planets as we have ten fingers, ten toes, ten times tables, ergo, there is a planet still to be discovered; and that wee planet,” Rab thought for a second, “Pluto, will have to be reinstated. Aye, and that’s where the Real Cat is, you know, man, the Perfect Cat.”
Wee Rab snorted at his own absurdity. Some green vodka spray shot out his gob and splattered onto the table. Onto the half-chewed croissants and empty café au lait cups.
Derrick’s fat face wore a slightly amused/bemused expression. Moira had had enough already. She sat glowering at wee Rab, thinking painfully how her ideas of a nice child-free (little Rhiannon was with her granny) bourgeois couple holiday in France had turned into a nightmare madcap episode of Prison Break. Ten days of chasing after the ghost of wee Rab trying to foil his plans for binge drinking his way through Normandy. More like some sick unfunny episode of Scooby Doo. A nurseman’s holiday. The only relaxed moment had come after wee Rab had tried to jump out of the caravan in the Ille-et- Velaine as they pulled out of a service station. Derrick had had to physically restrain the wee man. They skidded to a halt on la bande d’arret d’urgence and Rab tried to leg it. With Derrick embracing him in a bear hug, Isabel spent forty minutes on the phone to Rab’s psychiatrist trying to have him sectioned. Sadly, this was beyond the mustachioed shrink’s power. A psychopathic refusal to continue with a holiday touring Norman castles and playing scrabble at night with a nice cup of tea (and wishing to spend it on the bevvy instead) was not a sectionable offence. Wee Rab was, as he loudly and vociferously declared in English and in slapstick French, a free man. Isabel slipped her mobile into her pocket and signalled to Derrick. Derrick set the wee man free.
“Sorry, Rab,” he said in an ill-conceived tone of baronial solidarity.
“Thank you, Derrick, I shall not file charges for kidnapping,” said wee Rab, dusting himself down.
He then rolled a fag and sauntered off as if he were going down for the paper and some rolls on a Sunday morning (he was on holiday after all) and was last seen getting into a taxi and heading at top speed back to Saint Malo. A voice in the air was heard as the taxi whizzed past, going to get rat-arsed, suckers. No more was heard of him for three days and the events that ensued in the life of wee Rab Flynn during that period are best left in the oblivion into which they have fallen, even in the mind of wee Rab himself. Later the wee man would have vague backflashes of wildly gesticulating gendarmerie, old knitting hags, sexy French maids in black uniform, and a huge spotted Great Dane. All of this tickled wee Rab’s post-postmodern sense of life narrative (another one of his favourites) and he would often fall to pondering over a Martini or five what was the signifier and what the signified in these broken images of his three days on the randan in la France (wee Rab was always under the delusion that he spoke French). The holiday was curtailed financially for Isabel in these three days when she discovered that Rab had made off with most of their kitty. Despite now being skint, Isabel enjoyed her Rab-free days and had many heartfelt conversations with Moira and Derrick about her motivation in trying, as she put it, “to save” the wee man. Moira was beyond pity (for wee Rab always ultimately evoked pity) but she listened sympathetically out of concern for her best pal. Any chance of pity had gone into the sea when they had had to carry a miraculous wee Rab back to his cabin on the ferry and he had stuck his hand up her skirt and, despite his advanced state of drunkenness, had even managed to wiggle a finger up her bumhole. In twenty years of nursing Moira had never experienced the like. Just looking for that lost planet, wee Rab had slurred. Derrick didn’t take macho offence. He secretly liked the wee man, and he was a psychiatric nurse. He had seen this type of reaction before in men on the way to the padded cell. He even took it as a sort of compliment that another man had wanted to stick his finger up his podgy wife’s arse. Po-faced Moira would never forgive. This was beyond her studied small bourgeois pale. She had fought her way out of Easterhouse through the power of self control in the service of self-betterment under the moral guidance of the Reverend Sandy Swan and the Easterhouse Baptist Church. Something deep inside her wouldn’t allow this degrading experience to pass unavenged. He deserved a good chibbing, she thought atavistically. Moira wanted a tough hard man cave-his-head-in response to her humiliation. Derrick thought she was overreacting and should take it in her stride (a textbook clash of opposing animas and animuses the wee man’s shrink would have seen at a glance).
Wee Rab rolled a smoke and lick-spittled it watertight. Moira watched his lips and the thick saliva sticking between his gums. She couldn’t remember if this was a sign of an underlying serious illness. She smiled to herself. Her bum twanged. Wee Rab was now on his literary masterpiece. The work of great literature that he had been working on for the past five years.
“It’s called Calvino’s Joke Book,” he was saying to Derrick, “it’s a hyper-cyclical postmodern narrative search for God.”
He blew out a smog of filthy air through his nostrils. Coughed uncontrollably. Spat out a curl of weed.
“The hero is an expert on Kandinsky (one of the things wee Rab did seem to know something about) who has the urge to paint and realizes that all the abstract paintings, when he puts them in the form of a crucifix, spell out the name of God. Well, that comes at the end. I’ve started from the end and I’m thinking of rewriting the whole thing backwards, literally,” he puffed on his roll-up, picked a bit of tobacco from between his teeth, stuck it under the lip of the table, “or in Morse code or something, it doesn’t matter anyway, it doesn’t mean anything, nothing means anything, ultimately.”
Wee Rab was on the slippery slope again. Half normal. After his dishevelled and impoverished return, he had had a severe attack of repentance and had foresworn the bottle for a full two days. The head doctor’s advice had been to humour him and get him back home asap. Indulge his infantile wishes. Pander to his mother fixation. But get him to the surgery. Back on the couch. The therapy was a long and expensive one but they would one day arrive at the gates of normality. Isabel felt that she owed the wee man something (or owed somebody something). They had met when wee Rab had been a volunteer on a drug trial and Isabel one of the nurses (more like an all expenses paid holiday, almost as good as the week he spent at the tax payer’s expense in intensive care). Sometimes wee Rab tried to blame the trials for his lunacy but Isabel knew it was deeper. He had been a placebo patsy all the way. Isabel’s underinflated ego had fallen for the wee man’s dandiness from the word go. His madness was contagious. His two cat theory of the universe. How everyone has a cat in their head which corresponds to a cat in another mind and how the true purpose of life is to find your “other cat” (there is a Third Cat, of course, a Perfect Cat, but we don’t want to get too technical). It was a match made in a laboratory. Isabel had carbon-tested his urine and sperm with a sense of deep love in her heart and a spring in her step. Wee Rab had just started his great work and she was just back from a spinster holiday in Tunisia, where she had had an unpleasant experience with a camel. At first she had loved his wackiness and his bizarre take on everything and had not noticed the fact that he was half-pished all the time. In the clinic he was off the booze by strict necessity. His book went slowly. In fact she had never seen a single paragraph. One day the wee man announced that he was giving up the literary life temporarily and wanted to set up a roast chicken stall in an industrial estate in Motherwell. He needed to find inspiration, the thing in itself he said, pseudo-philosophically. Isabel financed it. The chickens lasted two months. Some of them even managed to escape. Not so Isabel. After this Rab received the gift of mana from the gods and moved into guru mode. He would, he announced grandly, set up a series of workshops in art and literature. Aspiring young artists and writers would flock to sit at his malodorous size ten feet. After this failed, wee Rab went into therapy. Still Isabel did not flinch, she had been happy in the lab among wee Rab’s juices, goddammit, and now lived in hope of bringing back those years of joy and had even, against, it must be said in fairness, her psychiatrist’s advice, converted her life into a mission to save the little piss-artist from himself. Moira was not for saving anyone. Not now. Not after the great guru’s finger up her bahoochie. The wee man was now on his feet miming out Calvino’s Joke Book in imaginary flag semaphore.
“God’s going to take off, vroooom,” he was screaming, arms flapping, “God’s going to land, bum, bum, bum, bum…….” He looked at Moira and sniggered his despicable muttley snigger. Moira looked around for a sharp instrument to knife the wee man to death, managed to control herself and marshalled Derrick (the wee man’s ear) out of the bar instead.
“Okay,” she growled in her best senior nurse voice, “let’s get going.” She kicked out at a barstool as she waddled past.
They started to file out of the café. Derrick was staring at Moira with a shocked look in his big carthorse frame. Rab was a sick man. They were nurses. Aggression was not nurserly. Not professional. He had never seen Moira like this before. Had she not been Intensive Care Nurse of the Year just a couple of years back? An inspiration on the ward to all fledgling carers?
“Come on, Rab,” said Isabel, “you’re giving us all a real showing up.”
Rab was suddenly repentant again and even, momentarily, looked embarrassed. He downed the dregs of his voddy and followed Isabel outside meekly. Moira’s violent turn had unnerved him. He realized that some line had been crossed and that mummy would be really angry this time. And, somewhere deep down in his subconscious, a little voice warned him to watch out for his mad half-pickled hide.
Moira approached the caravan searching savagely in her bag for the keys. Her wrath was mounting with every step. In truth it wasn’t just about wee Rab anymore. Not just about fingers up fannies. It was Derrick. What a mistake. It was her whole life. Nursing. Caring for everybody. Loving the world. It was her parents to blame. Always making her turn the other cheek. Understand the other. Hug the other. Swallow her anger. Good girl, Moira, good girl. In the playground. Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Whatever thou doest unto the least of my brethren, thou doest unto me. And it had turned out like this. Married to a big girl’s blouse. A big woose. Just like her father, minus the Baptist church love-thy-neighbour bullshit. Well, that was it; Moira had had her own revelation. A long overdue wake-up call. A rebirth. Where the hell were the keys? She tipped everything from her bag out onto the pavement. The yellow leather bag that Derrick had bought her for Christmas. The one like the first scene in Marnie, Derrick’s favourite film. We have to understand all the Marnies, Moira. It’s our duty as nurses. Well, she was bloody Marnie now. The keys were not to be found. Isabel and Derrick watched her warily.
“Well, one of you must have them!” she roared.
They searched everywhere for ten minutes but the keys were nowhere to be found.
“Maybe they’re in the caravan,” said wee Rab, trying to suck up.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” screamed Moira, and let out a kick at one of the front wheels.
“I speak French,” said wee Rab without any hint of irony in his voice, “I’ll get a mechanic.”
“Jesus wept,” sighed Moira, and sank down onto the kerb, her whole life (conscious and unconscious) falling apart.
Wee Rab shot off for the mechanic. He managed to neck two beers in the café they had just come out of and a double voddy in the bar next to the mechanic’s before arriving back with Jean-Pierre, a blue-boiler-suited French mechanic with mad staring eyes, dragon tattoos and a military crew cut. The wee man had downed the double vodka with him, as the French loon had taken an instant liking to him.
None of Jean-Pierre’s keys worked on the campervan, he couldn’t get it open with force either. He worked in a sweat for twenty minutes. He hammered, he twisted, he banged and blasted. He cursed in French. A screwdriver slipped and he tore the flesh from his knuckles. Merde. Wee Rab paced up and down for the first ten minutes “translating” and encouraging his new French pal, and then, suddenly, he sneakily withdrew. Moira had by now raised her head and come out of her existential crisis slightly. Her venomous hatred of wee Rab was, however, still raging unabated. She watched him closely. He was up to something. Maybe just plotting another escape to the bar in search of vodka, but there was something else. Something stirring in that cunning little empty head of his. The wee man had felt elated at first. This was all that fat cow Moira’s fault. Her fault for losing the keys. Stupid bitch. Ah, superiority, my old friend, welcome back. Wee Rab started to think that it was she who was unhinged. He would never speak to her again. That was it. Yessiree. He would keep silent all the way home and make a point of never being in her company again. Erase her from his memory. Let her fat spotty face fall into the amnesiac pit with all the others. All the non-persons who had fallen foul of wee Rab over the years. He slipped his hand into his pocket for his tobacco, time for a rollie; and, Jesus, there they were. The keys. Wee Rab started to sweat. He stepped away from Jean-Pierre, dropped his ungrammatical utterance in mid-sentence. He looked around. It appeared that nobody had seen; but Moira was an old hand at catching patients with booze and fags hidden under the sheets. She knew guilt when she saw it. She dropped her eyes to wee Rab’s hand holding something in his pocket. Pretended not to have seen. The wee man tip-toed backwards. Isabel turned, realizing that he wasn’t there.
“Rab? Where are you going now?” she said, exasperated.
“I need to go to the toilet, you know, my guts and that,” said the wee man. He needed time to think of a plan to announce the discovery of the keys to his advantage. If there was one thing that wee Rab could not take it was appearing to be an idiot (a constant battle against an indefatigable foe). His guts and that indeed; the little pipsqueak, thought Moira. She watched the wee man mince his way towards the café.
“I’m going to the toilet too,” she announced, and set off in pursuit. She crossed the car park, weaved stealthily through the wicker chairs and tables and French families finishing lunch on the terrace, and snuck behind the main door. From there she could see wee Rab at the bar. He was downing a double vodka and looking at the keys mystically, his head moving from the vodka to the keys, seemingly waiting for a Zen revelation about what to do next. He then asked for the toilet key and disappeared into the little boy’s room. Moira was at a loss for a moment. She looked at the toilet door. This was her chance to corner wee Rab. To wreak her revenge. For the finger up the bum, for his withering patronizing dismissal of her love for Fleetwood Mac and Andrew Lloyd Webber, for his ridiculing of Dan Brown and Ken Follett, for ruining her bloody holiday! But how? How? The radio was playing Tom Jones and the barman was singing along in bad, overly rhotic, English. She stood there laughing, I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more, my, my, my Delilah. Moira’s brain sped through a chain of associations to a quick solution. Yes. The Voice. Delilah. The Easterhouse Baptist Hall. Sandy Swan. The Green Grass of Home. Samson. The hairy chest. The silver crucifix. It was as if some other part of her mind had taken over and was leading Moira at lightning speed to the solution to the conundrum of wee Rab, to the riddle of her own personality, to her true self. Judges. Sandy Swan’s voice. Delilah therefore took new ropes, and bound him therewith, and said unto him, the philistines be upon thee, Samson. She looked out across the car park and the terrace. Out beyond the children’s carousel, the swing park, and the hotdog stand to a row of shops. The bread shop, the butcher’s, the mechanic’s, Quicaillerie Barthes. That was it. How sweet. How appropriate. How post postmodern. Moira shot across the car park and into the Barthes hardware store.
Isabel and Derrick watched her whizz past. They were tending to Jean-Pierre’s bloody knuckles. The doors of the campervan would not open. No amount of banging and twisting and cursing would open them. They were stranded in little France. And no combination of renal and psychiatric nursing could do anything about it. They saw Moira speed past again with a brown packet under her arm. She skidded across the terrace and swerved into the café. The barman was now murdering Sex Bomb.
In les toilettes wee Rab was sweating and praying to the gods of postmodernism for some guidance. Oh come Roland Barthes, come Jacques Derrida, come Foucault, oh come Wassily Kandinsky! He had to think of a way to get back on top. To outsmart Moira. To get back to the UK. To keep Isabel, she with the job and the purse strings. How he loved her at that moment. Tried and tested and twisted and turned her, but love her he did. Okay, Rab, think, say you found them on the table, no, the barman had them, no, under the seat where Moira’s fat arse had been, they were in your pocket all the time, no, not that, wait, aye, that’s it, take them out and drop them down your trousers right where Moira had emptied her stuff onto the pavement. Eureka. Incriminate the mad nurse. Yes, yes, yes. Wee Rab looked down into the pan. The keys were at the bottom of the little bog pool, glimmering up at him. Thank Christ they hadn’t been sucked down the cludgie pipe. He rolled up his sleeve, and was about to fish them out, when Moira burst in. She pulled out a flick knife from the brown paper bag and waved it at him.
“What’s the signifier and the signified in this scene, Rab, eh?” she said madly.
Wee Rab froze. The postmodern gods had played a filthy trick on him. They had put the idea of escape into his head, given him a way out, only to slam the cage doors in his face and laugh a long Homeric laugh at his pitiful worm existence. Had it not always ended thus? The hero finds his way out of the labyrinth only to be faced with the ultimate pointlessness of all existence. The abyss. The grave. Death. Face to face with a mad fat religious intensive care nurse with a bad taste in music and a flick knife. There is no way out. Nothing means anything, ultimately.
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” said wee Rab, trying to sound calm, “you are the return of the absolute and I am nothing. I am to be slain and return to the nothingness of the nothing. There is no signifier or signified for the hero now.”
“I’m going to give you a chance,” said Moira coyly, “first, where are the keys?”
Wee Rab motioned to the toilet bowl.
“Up your arse, were they? Well, it makes a change from you being there yourself, get them out.”
Rab plunged his hand into the toilet and recovered the keys. Moira dried them roughly on Rab’s jumper and put them in her pocket.
“Kneel down,” she said, “next to the wash hand basin. One move and I’ll slit your scrawny throat.”
She then pulled out some rope and tied him to the sink. “Okay, wee Rab, this is how it works, if you want to live to down another double vodka, you will now listen to me singing a Fleetwood Mac song; without laughing, or screwing up your face, or even curling your little supercilious lip! One snigger and it’s over.”
Wee Rab looked down into the toilet pan. He thought he was going to be sick. The wave of nauseousness passed. He looked at Moira and his lip began to curl.
Moira stepped forward and administered a boot in the shins.
“I’m serious, Rab,” she screamed.
The wee man swallowed and managed to say, “Which song? Go your own Way? Don’t Stop?”
Moira smiled fiendishly, “Sara or Songbird,” she said, “your choice.”
Wee Rab tried not to look at her. He hesitated. “Sara,” he finally said, without looking up.
Moira raised herself up to her full height and started drowning the wee man in a sea of love, oh, Sara, you are the poet in my heart, never change, never stop, never stop, NEVER STOP. She bounced around the toilet giving her favourite song full throat. Once. Twice. Three times. She approached wee Rab and stuck the knife under his trachea.
“Now,” she said, “I want you to say that Fleetwood Mac are the best band in the history of music, and that Ken Follett and Dan Brown are good writers. Excellent writers! The best!”
The wee man was slipping into deep culture shock. He resisted, felt the steel under his chin and spluttered out what Moira wanted to hear.
Moira removed the knife, stepped back, her nostrils flaring and her eyeballs dilating. She thought for a minute, stepped forward again and stuck the knife back at wee Rab’s throat.
“One more thing,” she said, her eyes huge and glazed with triumph, “say that Andrew Lloyd Webber is a genius!”
Wee Rab was beyond hope now. All his ideals gone. Completely abandoned by the postmoderns. And then he had the thought, the postmodernists had not abandoned him after all. Had this not happened to Beckett himself in France? A knifing, a brush with the absolute before going on to meet his genius full on? Should he not even forgive?
“No,” he said coldly, “I won’t say that, go on, stab me, slash me, mash my head in, but that I will never say! And fear not, Moira, I forgive you.”
“Shut it for once,” said Moira and taped up his mouth with some masking tape from the Barthes hardware store. She backed out of the toilet and locked the door. She left the café and walked across the car park to where Derrick and Isabel and Jean-Pierre were still trying to figure out how to get the campervan’s doors open.
She swung the keys from side to side in her big meaty mitt.
“Got the keys,” she called, “they were up wee Rab’s arse the whole time.”
She opened the driver’s door and hopped in. She started up the engine and rolled the window down.
“Let’s go?” she said.
“Where’s wee Rab?” said Isabel, with a look towards the café.
“Said he was going to Paris to starve and do some really serious writing, might even take up painting.”
Derrick got in. Isabel looked sceptical.
“Where is he really, Moira?” she said.
Moira sighed, “Ah, there’s no cure for you, is there? He’s in the toilet. And you’ll need this.” She handed Isabel the flick knife. Moira and Derrick shot off. Moira leant over and pushed Tusk into the CD player. As she pulled out of the car park, she ran over and splattered a cat that had been sleeping peacefully in the sun for the last two hours. Sara, you are the poet in my heart, she sang lustily and winked at Derrick.
Isabel went into the toilet and found the wee man tied to the sink.
“Awe, for God’s sake, Rab,” she said, and pulled the masking tape off his mouth.
“Moira’s just run over a cat,” said wee Rab breathlessly, “he was in my head at the time, and out on the road, I tried to warn him. Cats should learn to be in just one place at a time. ”
This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, or even with a whimper, but with a squashed cat in every head and a poet in every heart.