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We Meet Five People in Basingstoke
By Joe Zorzi
____________________
I sign our name at the bottom, and the first
letter is done.
Dear Fat Fucker,
You may believe us to be impertinent but we have spotted you several times now
in the vicinity of the Town Centre, and your bulk, your sheer size, your
blubber, is beginning to give us nightmares.
It is not your face that offends us, oh no, but your shape. We are
dieters, you see, fitness fanatics you may describe us as, we eat very little,
very little do we eat.
How did you get quite so big?
Your stench—it also disgusts us, like putrefaction. You also sweat too
much, those stains always under your arms, sickly sweat no doubt dripping
endlessly from your pores.
It pains us to see a man like this. It truly pains us. But we are, of
course, ever reasonable.
You appear to spend a lot of time in the library but we doubt you are a student
or even particularly learned in any way. We’ve seen you reading the
Mail with that long wooden stick on it, dunking doughnuts down your fat throat
from a Tesco bag under the table.
Anyway, we shall get straight to the point now, we shall reason with you.
If we ever see you in Basingstoke Town Centre again, you shall meet us for the
first time, and the last time.
If we have to lay eyes on that fat fucking arse of yours, that blubbery belly,
you shall pay for how you have made us feel.
We do hope this is not too unreasonable…
Ours sincerely,
Jack and John
It is strange how we came to choose Basingstoke, Jack and I, but no stranger
than the other times. It had been breakfast time, I seem to remember,
and our Frosties were nearly finished, our toast already settling into our
belly, and we had the urge. The urge we always get when we lose our pills.
We had opened a random page in the A to Z, closed our eyes and stuck out our
middle finger. When we opened them, it was resting upon that little mecca
for middle class swine—Basingstoke.
Jack decided we must go there at once, and I replied in the affirmative.
I do feel sorry for Jack, and I have to entertain him when he feels the urge, we
feel the urge. He was born without his body form, you see, or at least his
body form was still born. But his great mind survived and we have shared
this beautiful body our whole lives.
We are very close, Jack and I.
Five, Jack had said to me, five in Basingstoke, and I entertained him, got the
car keys and we set off for the bourgeois slums.
The first we found that day was a young lady with an unfortunate birthmark on
the most part of her face. She was rather ugly in all departments and
she offended us within seconds of our initial observance. So we followed her
home, as we would do all the others, and copied her address into our notebooks.
Here the letter sits on the left hand side of our right arm.
Dear Ugly Birthmark Bitch,
It is with regret that we have to inform you that you are quite the ugliest
woman we have ever had the misfortune to set our eyes upon.
What is that disgusting slurge, that disease, that infects over half of your
face?
We have come across you several times, and upon each of these occasions, we have
found no alternative but to revert to the nearest gentleman’s toilet and empty
our stomachs.
Your face makes us positively sick. It pains us. But we
are of course reasonable men.
If we ever find your fuck ugly mug anywhere even remotely near the town centre
of Basingstoke, then you shall truly pay our price.
Our eyes are always upon you.
With ever true reasonableness,
Jack and John
There are of course three other letters on the table in front of us.
The third is for the homosexual we spotted near HMV. He had a tight
pink T-shirt upon his torso displaying the words, Queer and Proud. Fancy
flaunting that in our general direction—we are Christians you know, and good
ones at that. If God had intended us to do that to each other, he would
have gifted us a separate hole. It pained us to even look at him.
The fourth is for the Morris Dancer who harangued us for money by the Baked
Potato stand, his bells, sticks, ridiculous dress offending everything we stand
for. Well, there’s just no need is there. It perturbed us how this
ignoramus could sincerely feel that lolloping around in the street like some
medieval throwback could possibly be preferable to getting a proper job, putting
some graft in. Fool. In short, he pained us.
And the fifth. Well, we shall just have to keep that one to ourselves,
hadn’t we?
Have you ever been to Basingstoke?
____________________
Joe Zorzi lives in a ramshackle bedsit in
Peckham, London where he occasionally puts up members of his visiting fanbase. Judy
Garland, John Travolta and Desmond Tutu have been known to frequent, although
only exchange for burning up a black pudding breakfast. Joe was born on the
Isles of Scilly, where he practised chiropody and learned his hijinx as a circus
tumbler. He has three aadvarks and a dog called Mau-Mau.
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