Clovenhoof 02 Pigeonwings Read online

  "We haven’t got a sofa!"

  "Don’t argue with me! I’m dying here."

  "I think we’re making quite a mess," said Darren, taking in the range of cubs now spattered with fruit juice.

  "I’m bleeding to death and you’re moaning about how tidy the place is," spat Clovenhoof. "Typical. You want me to die, don’t you?"

  "Got it!" yelled a drenched cub, waving the phone.

  "Too late," croaked Clovenhoof and went limp and lifeless.

  Clovenhoof thought that the arrival of an actual ambulance (summoned by a cub who had dialled 999 on Clovenhoof’s phone but couldn’t make it stop) was simply the crowning moment of what had been a very entertaining evening. Michael was less convinced about the success of the evening although admitted it had gone better than the cubs of the previous week.

  Back at home, Clovenhoof cooked himself three Findus crispy pancakes. They were the same pancakes that he had previously used to cool his machine-mangled manhood and the occasional pubic hair in his tea added a novel texture to the meal.

  Settling down with a very self-congratulatory glass of Lambrini, he phoned the Skin Deep shop off the Birmingham Road and, as he hoped, went straight through to an answering machine.

  "Mistress Verthandi. I believe a friend of mine is coming to see you on Friday morning. Now I know you don’t need my help to see beyond the veil, but I thought I’d share some details with you so you could give your reading some added realism. First up, Michael’s toilet is an evil space machine that tried to eat my knob…"

  ~ooOOOoo~

  Michael entered the Skin Deep shop and briefly wondered if he had come into the wrong place. This seemed to be a tattoo parlour rather than any gateway to spiritual truth, the walls hung almost exclusively with tattoo samples: arrow-pierced hearts, oriental ideograms, Disney characters and screaming skulls. But then he spied a revolving bookcase with titles such as Healthier Bowels with Crystal Healing and A Guide to Identifying your Guardian Angel and, behind that, a shelf of joss sticks, gemstones, CDs of whale song and a basket of what appeared to be Guatemalan worry dolls.

  "Anything take your fancy?" said the woman, standing up from her table counter at the side of the shop. "Is it your first tattoo?"

  Michael looked at the woman. She was thin, perhaps too old for the T-shirt and jeans outfit she wore, had a lined face that spoke of a tough life and a black patch over one eye that simply shouted it.

  "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoos on yourself. I am the Lord," said Michael.

  "Leviticus 19:28," said the woman with a smile.

  "You know your Bible."

  "I’ve tattooed it on more than one person," she replied. "Irony, I guess. You’d be Mr Michaels."

  "Mistress Verthandi?"

  She nodded and gestured for him to sit at the table.

  "I had a phone call from a neighbour of yours earlier this week. I think he wanted to give me some insider information or maybe just twist any reading I did for you. Do you want to know what he said or do you want to know what I learned?"

  Michael thought on it.

  "What did you learn?"

  Mistress Verthandi opened a pack of tarot cards and shuffled.

  "You have fallen from a great height recently and your neighbour is delighted by this. However, he is frightened."

  "Frightened?"

  "Because you are picking yourself up again and climbing once more. He doesn’t want you to succeed."

  "Of course, he doesn’t."

  "But it’s not because he hates you. In truth, your neighbour doesn’t hate anyone. He’s too self-centred to put that kind of effort in. He wants you to fail because he’s jealous."

  "Oh, I don’t believe that’s true."

  "Your neighbour is also fallen but he wallows in his failure. He can’t let go of the past. He wants you to wallow in failure too."

  "I didn’t fail."

  "Sure you did, Michael," she smiled. "Oh, and you have some anal retention issues that even a tarot reading isn’t going to sort out. Now, do you know anything about tarot?"

  Michael shook his head.

  "This is a Rider-Waite deck with major and minor arcane. I’m going to deal them out in the Celtic cross pattern."

  "Why?"

  "I find it’s ideal for first readings and specific questions of which I guess you have a lot."

  "No," said Michael, "I suppose I meant why deal them out in a certain way at all?"

  "Because that’s how it works."

  Michael pursed his lips.

  "No. You see, I do have questions."

  "Good."

  "But they’re not questions about me. I’m a little lost at the moment, spiritually speaking. I know God is out there."

  "I’m glad you know that."

  "Okay, I know there is truth out there. Real truth. You say you can access it through these cards."

  "I make no claims. People say it works. I’m an intermediary."

  "Fine, but it works, yes? From the random order of the cards, from the pattern you lay out, truth emerges."

  "Yes."

  "I got the bus here today."

  "Well done."

  "But I waited for half an hour for a bus to come along and then three came along at once."

  "We’ve all experienced that."

  "Right! It’s a cliché because it’s true. What should I divine from that?"

  "I don’t think there’s been much research into ‘busomancy’."

  "But people read signs in clouds and flights of birds and the movements of the heavens."

  "And you want to know how it works. All of it."

  "Yes, please," said Michael.

  Mistress Verthandi began to collect the cards up.

  "Some people think the whole fortune-telling thing is a scam, a confidence trick. It isn’t. But if I even pretended to be able to answer your question, I would be lying to you."

  "Please," said Michael. "Tell me what you know. Only that."

  Her one eye met his two. It flitted across his face, reading him.

  "What I know," she said. "Fair enough."

  ~ooOOOoo~

  Saturday came and, although the totally unofficial and yet mutually recognised man-pulling contest wasn’t until that evening, Jayne’s preparations began the moment she awoke. She ate a light breakfast, put on a face mask and watched six-episodes of the informative show Snog Marry Avoid on internet TV. If a make-under TV show could transform snoggable slappers into milder marriage material, Jayne reasoned that she could reverse the show’s messages to sex up her general frumpiness.

  She took her lessons in snoggability to the Boldmere Beauty salon on the high street and, despite the gentle protests of the woman there, had her hair coloured a brilliant blonde, her whole body coated with fake tan and had the woman fit her with bright pink nail extensions. Feeling more snoggable already, Jayne browsed the high street, hoping to see some little extras to add to the outfit she had bought for herself earlier that week.

  She nipped into Books ‘n’ Bobs to ask Ben which shade of body glitter he preferred. Ben’s suave but dull neighbour, Michael, was chatting to him at the counter.

  Ben stared at her.

  "I’m sorry, madam, I think you’ve come to the-" He blinked and did a double take. "Jayne? Is that you?"

  "Of course it’s me," she grinned.

  "I didn’t recognise you," he said in an oddly stilted voice. "You look… different."

  "Good different?"

  He nodded thoughtfully for a very long time.

  "Of course it’s good. I’m sure it is."

  "I’m dolling myself up for a night on the town with Nerys.

  "Ah!" said Ben.

  Michael nodded in understanding.

  "That’s why Nerys had the…" He mimed a pair of high breasts, massive eyelashes and then tottered around on some pretend high heels. "But I don’t think we needed to see her sequinned underpants, did we?"

  "Sequinned underpants," said Jayne
thoughtfully. "I think I’d better up my game."

  "Really?"

  "If I’m going to bag myself a man."

  "I think," said Ben with the hesitance of someone treading into unknown territory, "if you want to get yourself a man then you should really go for the natural look."

  "Natural look?"

  "You know, dress casual. Not too much, er, flesh. And men don’t like women who wear a lot of make-up."

  Jayne laughed.

  "Oh, you! You’re men. What do you know?"

  And she left the shop reinvigorated in her search for an extra push-up bra, fake eyelashes, and something sequinned to go with her skimpy pink dress. She wondered if a feather boa might also be required.

  ~ooOOOoo~

  "Right," said Ben, shaking his head as though dispelling a most unpleasant dream, "where was I?"

  "Cruelly comparing my spiritual theories with the ideology of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster," said Michael.

  "Exactly. Just because your notions about self-ordering systems, pattern recognition and chaos theory have the air of science about them, it doesn’t make them any more credible than Pastafarianism."

  "You accuse me of pseudoscience?"

  "You did start going on about bibliomancy and Bible codes."

  "Kabbalah has been the subject of serious academic study for centuries."

  "It’s mysticism."

  "As is all science until rigorously tested. I’ve had Little G crunch terabytes of data as background information."

  "Little G?"

  "It’s what I call my computer."

  "Why?"

  Michael coughed and went a little pink.

  "I named it after my teddy bear."

  "That makes more sense than your theories."

  "Ben, all I’m asking you is to help me with my study."

  "Why would I want to do that?"

  "It involves camping out on the street, counting buses, noting down their registrations, recording them on a tablet app and watching the instant analysis. I thought we could take some flasks of hot chocolate and some biscuits. I just thought it was very… you."

  Ben, to his own annoyance, found a certain excitement stirring within him.

  "You had me at buses," he said.

  ~ooOOOoo~

  Birmingham was a big city. One of its few boasts was that it had more canals than Venice (although considerably fewer gondoliers). The city was home to a million people, over four hundred pubs and bars and more lap dancing clubs per capita than any other British city and, like African waterholes, the places where the canals converged were where the city’s nightlife came to drink and hunt.

  Nerys and Jayne started early, in a cocktail bar above Broad Street. By the time she had downed her third mojito, Nerys was convinced that any contest between her and her ingénue sister was already over. Jayne was starstruck by the city’s scale and variety and constantly gawped at the people. Nerys could also see that Jayne had made some fundamental errors of judgement in her choice of clothing.

  Jayne’s pink latex dress with the choker collar and heart-shaped peephole frankly looked like bondage gear whereas Nerys herself had gone for a far more classy hot pants and tube top combo. Nerys had used two bras to promote and elevate her natural assets but Jayne had used so much scaffolding she couldn’t get her drink to her mouth without the aid of a straw. Yes, they had both gone for the same high heels and false eyelashes but Jayne was already too tall for six inch heels and her eyes weren’t big enough to carry off the lashes, no matter how much black eyeliner she used. And there was a clear difference between going for a bronzed skin tone and slapping it on like creosote. The extras, the costume jewellery, the glitter, the boa were all good in principle but Jayne really hadn’t co-ordinated them in the way Nerys had.

  Emboldened by her superior looks, Nerys linked arms with Jayne and hauled her over to a bunch of young men in open collar shirts.

  "Evening gents."

  Her presence stunned them. She could see that.

  One of the lads had his mouth open in a huge grin.

  "Boys, you shouldn’t have," he said.

  "We didn’t," said his friend.

  "Shouldn’t have what?" said Nerys.

  "I know you’re only twenty-one once but getting me two…"

  "Two what?" said Nerys and then realised. "No, we’re not... You think we’re strippers?"

  The grinning birthday boy’s grin froze and then collapsed.

  "Strippers? No. Sorry. Did I say strippers?"

  "Why would you think we’re strippers?" said Jayne.

  "I don’t know," said a loud and lairy bloke next to the birthday boy. "I’m sure in that get up you were just on your way to visit your grandma."

  "Hey," said the birthday boy reproachfully. "I’m sure these, er, lovely ladies have just got separated from their hen party."

  "We’re not on a hen do," said Jayne.

  "Or their tarts and vicars party," said the lairy one.

  "Are you calling me a tart?" said Nerys.

  "Nah," he replied sarcastically. "You’re the epitome of class, darling."

  "Leave it, Karl," said his mate.

  "Leave it?" he said. "I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot barge pole."

  "Hey!" said Nerys.

  "Listen, love. Lots of men like a camel toe but I don’t want to spend the night lip-reading."

  "That’s gross," said Jayne.

  "I should say. Your skirt’s so short your STD’s showing."

  The birthday boy put a restraining hand on his friend’s chest but, in Nerys’s incensed opinion, he was about ten seconds too late. Nerys opened her mouth to give him a tirade of abuse but was cut off before she started when Jayne’s Bacardi Breezer bottle slammed into the lout’s face with considerable force.

  A rainbow of rum, fruit juice, snot and blood spattered the group. A shout of disgust and alarm went up. Nerys grabbed Jayne’s arm to drag her quickly away but the bar’s bouncers were already on them.

  Things were not going to plan.

  ~ooOOOoo~

  Clovenhoof, who had been enlivening the quiz night at the Boldmere Oak by shouting out random wrong answers before he was kicked out by Lennox the barman, staggered home, turning each merry stumble of his hooves into a tap dance worthy of Gene Kelly. He tottered up the high street, not yet decided if he was going to indulge in a goodnight kebab, curry or pizza, and saw two shady looking figures outside Books ‘n’ Bobs.

  "There’s nothing worth stealing in there," he called out.

  "It’s us," said Ben.

  And it was. Ben and Michael were sitting on folding garden chairs, wrapped in winter coats and blankets, Michael with a clipboard in his hands, Ben with a computer tablet in his.

  "We’re doing a scientific study," said Michael, a phrase that Clovenhoof typically understood to mean ‘spying on naked neighbours with a telescope’. As there were no neighbours, naked or otherwise, in sight, Clovenhoof was nonplussed.

  "We’re recording local bus traffic," said Ben, "and comparing it to relevant astrological data."

  "What?"

  "We log the bus and use its registration number to find its place and date of manufacture and draw up the corresponding horoscope."

  "You’re calculating the horoscopes of buses?" said Clovenhoof, who was quite sure he hadn’t drunk enough to be making this up himself.

  "Yes, Jeremy," said Michael. "We are studying the influence of the stars on the public transport system."

  "It’s bold thinking, I know," said Ben.

  "It’s insane," said Jeremy.

  "Not at all," said Michael. "We are already starting to see some fascinating patterns. The evening’s data points towards some kind of singularity, a critical event occurring within the next two hours."

  "One hour and fifty-seven minutes," said Ben, consulting his tablet.

  Clovenhoof shook his head.

  "I don’t know whether to call the men in white coats or just point and laugh."
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  "People laughed at Einstein’s theories," said Michael.

  "And his stupid hair," agreed Clovenhoof.

  "We’ll see who’s laughing in one hour and… fifty-six minutes time."

  Clovenhoof reckoned he could spin out a curry to last that long.

  "You’re on," he said and walked away, pointing and laughing at them for good measure.

  ~ooOOOoo~

  The bouncer who saw them to the door was the clichéd embodiment of bouncers everywhere: broader than he was tall with a shaved head and a face that only a mother could love. He was also, Nerys decided, a lovely man.

  "I totally understand," he said as he ushered them to the pavement and hailed them a cab. "Some people can be really cruel."

  "They were," said Jayne, who in her heels towered over the man.

  "And I’m guessing you two haven’t come out like this for a while."

  Nerys nodded.

  "We just wanted to have a good night out and meet some men."

  "Course you do. And you want to meet the right kind of men."

  "That’s exactly what we want to do," said Jayne.

  "After you’ve made all this effort with your…" He gestured to them, head to toe. "I bet it’s quite a transformation from your regular look."

  "It is," Nerys agreed. The bouncer’s words were so kind and the confrontation with the men so shocking that Nerys felt like having a little cry.

  "I know the right bar for two ladies such as yourselves," said the bouncer.

  The bouncer spoke to the taxi driver as Nerys and Jayne climbed into the back of the black cab. Five minutes later, the taxi pulled up outside a neon-festooned building on Hurst Street. Nerys paid the fare and led the way inside.

  She instantly saw that this was much more her kind of place. There was old school dance music playing, there were actually people dancing, unselfconsciously and flamboyantly, and, best of all, there was a two for one cocktail offer on.

  They grabbed stools at the bar and ordered a pair of margaritas.