MADELAINE

by Milton C Sidegrinder.
December 1994

Episode 23.1-

I ran out of time at the shrine by the road.

I wanted to stay and see what the Virgin Mother would do next, because so far I hadn't been able to work out what she was up to. She was either dying or looking for a lost item, wringing her hands and looking all around in an orbit more moving than simple clockwork. I suppose I was waiting for her to either to fall over or to give up looking and read some of the notes that people had left for her. For nearly thirty hours, while the rain sank my boots deeper and deeper into the mud, she hadn't done either which stank of indecision.

Babelface would be out of prison in less than three hours and as soon as he got back his great-fucking-grandfather's-gut-shrapnel- necklace and they shut the gates behind him, was going to be after me like God's own vengeful exocet. This thought had been sitting in my head during the last day and a half of thunderstorm, soaking up rainwater and swelling until there was nothing else to think about and my eyes bulged forward in their rims. I could see them in the dripping glass of the shrine and if I looked very hard I could also see the tiny flecks of fear which Babelface had put there.

I think I ought to confess right away that Madelaine, at one time Babelface's travelling companion through the trickier trails of the tantra, was now my lover, and that I had engineered the switch through subterfuge and that if there was a funny side to the situation it was that none of the parties involved had yet seen it. Things rarely turn out the way you think they will. It is a measure of my cluelessness in that distant time that, unable even to put a few vegetables together into a viable lunch, I yet believed myself to be capable of cooking up an emotional hurricane and keeping dry in its eye.

What took place happened several months before my strung-out vigil at the roadside. Madelaine and Babelface were giving me a lift in their van, away from a free party that had been dispersed by ariel bombing. I was trying to tell Babeface that black was no colour to paint a van if you wanted to go unnoticed. Madelaine was giving it some on the accelerator trying to lose the farmer who was chasing us, Babelface was navigating her through twisted roads. There were a few others in the van, and one of them had taken a direct hit. He'd stopped screaming now he was dead and bleeding, so we tipped him in front of the farmer who wiped out trying to miss him. Madelaine pulled the van up into some woods, where we lit a fire and ordered pizzas on guy's mobile phone.

The pizzas took a long time to arrive, so all there was to do was to talk. And later by the fire, I did get talking to a wood spirit. At least, that's what Madelaine and I later agreed he probably was, because he had no manners and a small ampoule of something he called "telepathine". In point of fact, I found the telepathine before I found the wood spirit, and didn't meet him until after I'd taken some, but he told me he'd left it there for me in the first place.

"That was nice of you. "I said (realising yet again that, whilst nothing was as it seemed, yet everything was as it should be).

"Not at all," said the wood spirit, and until a little while later I thought he was just being modest.

He told me that I had just accidentally SWALLOWED THE GENIE from the bottle.

This meant that, for the meanwhile, I had acquired SPECIAL POWERS.

This brought a certain responsibility.

Which I had neglected.

And so as surely as laugh follows joke, I was certain that Madelaine ought to have SPECIAL POWERS too. While she momentarily diverted her lips to kiss babelface's bable face in the stuttering shadows of the fire, I tipped the rest of the ampoule through the hole in the top of her beercan. if I had paused for a moment to consider that I might one day have to excuse this behaviour to Babelface, I probably wouldn't have done it, because a layman's explanation would be that I had just spiked his girlfriend with drugs.

Which is inexcusable.

I waited until the point where Bableface, alumnus of the occult old school, vector of voodoo, and having-it party person had crashed out in the van, and got chatting to Madelaine by the fire. In fact it was more than just a chat. To be honest I used my new SPECIAL POWERS OF SEDUCTION, and everything went beautifully until the cold dawn. At this point, Babelface must have woken up and seen us curled together under a blanket, because it was then that he spoke to me inside my head and calmly informed me that my nights free from constant attack by malevolent African vampires were over. And he could do it. Time to use my SPECIAL POWERS I thought. Babelface got out of the van and walked over to me, barefoot across the embers of the fire. I wondered whether to make a CARTOON SAFE land on his head, or whether to freeze him into an ice cube with ARTIC BREATH.

I didn't get the chance to do either. suddenly, babelface climbed behind the wheel of the van drove down to the nearest police station and turned himself in on the grounds of attending a party liable to engender a serious breach of the peace, and asked for a string of other offences to be taken into account. SPECTACULAR : Victory was mine and the way forward was clear. Madelaine had evidently used one of her SPECIAL POWERS to possess him. A gift which I myself did not possess.

Why.

Aghast, I looked more carefully at the label in the ampoule, which I had abandoned in a pocket:

******************************
                   extract:                          
                                                      
              TELEPATHINE               
                                                       
                     3ml                              
                  contents :                        
                                                    
             1 (one) GENIE                   
             1 (one) DEMON                 
                                                                       
******************************

I looked Madeleine in the eye, enquiringly.

"Thank you for my special powers, Milton-A," she said innocently, "it was very thoughtful of you, and just what I've always wanted of course. Sadly, it's not my colour, black, and I think it'll suit Babelface much more, don't you ?"

I could only agree.

I noticed that I was standing in several inches of mud, and then the pizzas arrived. In the six months that followed, while Madeleine and I drove round the fenlands of East Anglia in stolen cars and Madeleine became quite depressed, nothing notable happened. We noticed the sound of fields of sugarbeet unfolding from their dry stupor when the rains came, and that it got louder the more you thought about it. We noticed the noise of river ice cracking in the morning, and that it got noisier when the sun cut through the mist. We noticed anything which had a chance of getting loud enough to blank out Babelface's voice, which, though it sounded in our heads from a great distance, was still clear enough for us to hear him tearing up calendar pages in the background.

"Black," he'd often say, "is a colour alright. It's the colour of night."

Or sometimes he'd just GRATE HIS TEETH ON THE BARS.

I could take it, because of course I still had my SPECIAL POWERS to protect me from voodoo magic. But Madeleine started to loose it badly. One February morning, she hired an architect to design her an underground bunker completely lined with white chocolate, which she was convinced would keep out Babelface's voice. I stole a lot of money and had the bunker built, and although there was a lot of chocolate left over after the builders were finished, which was a good thing, Babelface's voice only got louder underground. I tried to cheer Madeleine up by using my SPECIAL POWERS to end a variety of civil wars which were raging at the time in various parts of the world, but to no avail.

I loved her and told her so. I collected some of her tears in the ampoule, which I now wore around my neck. Just when things were at their lowest ebb, the day Madeleine tried to kill herself by jumping off Potter Higham bridge at low tide, we met a Company Man. He told us we should think of him as such. The Company he represented, apparently, embraced both ancient Catholic doctrine and modern neuropharmacological methods with equal fervour. More specifically, the Company he represented was called the Unseen Pipe Dream Technical Support Team, had been established in the year dot by unspecified entrepreneurs, and was the very stuff of Legend. The reason for this unrivalled brand equity, allegedly, was that the Company produced REAL RESULTS.

He summarised both our predicament and the medium-term weather forecast as follows: In three day's time it would start raining, and we would both begin to be chased by Babelface, who was possessed by a Demon and dispossessed (by myself, being possessed by a Genie) of Madeleine (who was possessed by Guilt). As the Company Man saw it, we all therefore had hidden agendas, so it wasn't sensible to speak of goodies and baddies and endings happy or sad. His superiors had simply asked him to bring to our situation REAL RESULTS.

As the Company Man saw it, this meant that he needed 1 (one) Genie, 1 (one) Demon, and an unspecified volume of Guilt, back in the bottle, neatly labelled, by Thursday week, no excuses.

The Company Man admitted that this was a tall order, and that was why he intended to help us. The problems, he explained, would be similar to those encountered when making pomegranate jelly. To illustrate the remarkable effect this explanation had on myself and Madeleine, a diversion...

Being well-brought-up in Europe as the third millennium approached, with everyone progressively more twisted on stronger and stronger neurological and technological drugs in order to deal with the hangover from the last lot, was like being apprenticed to a dying trade. Imagine that Michaelangelo had a disciple. Then it would be like Michaelangelo's disciple spending years fetching hammers and sharpening chisels, then eventually being allowed to practise chipping crude shapes into Michaelangelo's off-cuts, and slowly learning the principles of the hidden life that flowed from finger to rock until, aged thirty six, finally being told that he was ready and able to join God and Michaelangelo by breathing life into rock. And after this news, it was like this disciple, as he ran excitedly to fetch his own chisel and hammer, being told that there was no more marble in the world, that it had all been used for chess pieces and ear rings, every last iridescent chip of it.

Both Madeleine and I had been well-brought-up, and so we both understood the rage and futility of things, and the way an entire planet can be like a buttered pea on a fork, apparently going somewhere but likely to fly off on a tangent, requiring a further pea to be cooked, perhaps according to a different recipe, mutatis mutandae. Even memories of events change, unless of course they are tied up in a culinary recipe (because diaries can be edited later, and authenticity is hard to check, but if you try to edit even a little more flour into the recipe for a VICTORIA SPONGE, the result will be as flat as a pancake ). Since both Madeleine and I had been well-brought-up, both of us had a few unchanged memories, and all of these were embedded in recipes. We cherished these recollections: warm, sepia-toned neurological traces recording smiles from mum and burning a finger on the oven, traces which could be verified simply by making the remembered recipe and seeing if it turned out.

A tentative alchemy of memory.

Since both Madeleine and I had been well-brought-up, and by a remarkable coincidence, we could both remember the recipe for pomegranate jelly and the problems inherent in its creation. The hazy images of times past floated in front of our eyes, and the emotion of remembering made us forget in the meantime not to trust the Company Man or his COMPLEX PLAN.

The PLAN went as follows: three persons had become possessed by different poorly-defined entities - the Company wanted these entities back, bottled, and preferably pasteurised. The difficulty would be the same as that encountered in making pomegranate jelly. More specifically, the Company Man darkly hinted, "the fruit embraces the seed". What he meant, evidently, was that the invading spirit cloaked the soul tightly, so that it was hard to remove one without the other. Either that, or the soul cloaked the spirit. He didn't say which, but claimed that it was unimportant anyhow. In making pomegranate jelly, first the fruit is softened by means of boiling. Then, the fruit can be separated from the seeds my mulching and draining. What he said was needed for us, therefore, was potent pharmaceutical help to soften our spirit, followed by religion to exorcise the spirit whilst saving the soul. Accordingly, he prescribed Ketamine and Catholicism. The Ketamine would be Uncut, the Catholicism was to be Orthodox, and both were to be administered at a place he called "the Hotel".

The rest of the PLAN was just details, and it was one of these which took me to the shrine by the road, where, as I mentioned before, the Virgin Mother was still procrastinating.

I really wasn't asking for a miracle. I just needed Mary to read Madeleine's note, which she and the Company Man had written.

"Take this to the Virgin Mother, " Mad had said, "and make sure she reads it. I'll meet you at the Hotel."

Which left me at the Shrine, where by now the mud was up to my knees, I doubted whether the car would start, and Babelface would be free in precisely eight minutes. That meant that if he used his SPECIAL POWERS to find out where I was, he could be at the shrine in thirty five minutes, by car, so I had to make good my escape before then. I tried everything I could remember from school assemblies concerning evoking deities, but it made no difference, except that it caused me to remember a cookery lesson where we made Simnel cake just before the Easter holidays. This was a good memory, and it took my mind off the rain for a while, but during that while the Virgin Mother still appeared disinclined to cast an eye over Madeleine's note, and this pained me. Because if she didn't read it soon, bearing in mind the obvious constraint on my time here, I knew that curiosity would make me read it, and I knew that this would be BAD because Mad's note was supposed to be SECRET.

Babelface would be out of prison now. I imagined him pausing only to spit as they closed the gates behind him and he went off to steal the nearest car. He could be here in less than half an hour.

I wondered whether to read the note.

Twenty five minutes.

I agonised over whether I should read the note. Lord forgive me my lack of faith in that past time, but back then I doubted whether the Virgin Mother had any intention of getting round to it.

Twenty minutes.

I decided to read the note. I heard the noise of a car as I reached out for it, but I discounted the sound. It wasn't him yet, because it was still TOO SOON.

The note was in my hand, unfolding.

Footsteps (TOO SOON).

The note was in front of my eyes, suddenly dampening in the rain. I noticed the paper fibres swelling under the ink. It said:

******************************
                            
              You're dead.   
                             
******************************

"You're dead."

said Babelface, and when I took the note away from my eyes to see him standing in front of me, I could only observe that he evidently considered this a likely outcome. I let the note fall from my hand. By the time it was halfway to the mud, I was very confused. I considered explaining to Babelface that he was TOO SOON, but I saw by the way his eyes glowed redly proud that he considered himself to be EARLY, which was different from TOO SOON because it was a VIRTUE. So I just blinked at him, dazed, and when the note hit the ground I asked him:

"What time Is this ?"

"Early," he grinned, which just goes to show.

"And you're a muddy motherfucker," he said, and aimed a shotgun at my head, "what kind of a state is that to be praying in?"

We looked each other in the eyes, and I waited for him to do something.

"Well, " I asked, "are you going to shoot me, or recommend a brand of washing powder ?"

He shot me, in the gut, and I would have bled to death right there in the mud where the colour of my life might have slipped like a chameleon into the shelter of the earth, If there hadn't been a phone in the base of the shrine. I'd noticed it earlier: the shrine had to double up because it was sponsored by a breakdown rescue company. So when Babelface drove off, grinning twistedly to himself, I managed to use the phone to order an ambulance for me and a set of jump leads for the car.

As I lay unconscious by the roadside, I had the following transcendent experience of the Virgin Mother:

Mother Mary (still moving her head in that stuttering clockwork arc of vision):

"Look, Milton, I'm dead. A daughter of mine has taken over my duties."

Milton A. Sidegrinder: "So that means..."

MoM: "Yes, it means Madeleine didn't set you up Her note really was addressed to me. I died the moment you left it with me, and of course I didn't read it then, because I was dead."

MAS: "And Babelface?"

MoM: "He was talking to me, too."

MAS: "But.."

MoM: "He was definitely trying to kill you."

MAS: "So what should I do now ?"

MoM: "Get better and check in to a hotel, no one'd blame you."

(Choirs of angels singing in celestial harmony, sights of indescribable beauty, fade)

When they let me out of hospital and I met Madeleine at the Hotel, she was a little shorter than I'd remembered. Nothing you'd notice if you didn't know her well, but I did, so she was, and it bothered me. She'd already got to grips with the routine of the place. It was very simple, she explained. You started in a room on the first floor. Everything you needed was all there for you. All you had to remember was to go down to Reception every morning, on the ground floor, and pick up your post. Mad said the post came from the Company, and was normally a parcel of various drugs. The Receptionist, apparently, was not a Company Man, and disapproved of the packages, but then again what business was it of his ? Once in a while, maybe five or six times a year, there would also be a little note in the parcel telling you to move up a floor. When you arrived on the twelfth floor, Madeleine had been told, there were prayer books and rosaries as well as drugs in the parcels. When you got to the twenty third floor, which is where the exorcists lived, you would be cured. In the meantime there were only three rules: you were not at liberty to leave, you should try not to use your SPECIAL POWERS, and you were not allowed to cook in the rooms. All meals were therefore taken in the restaurant, which was free if you were a guest of the Company.

I joined Madeleine on the second floor. I remember her being pleased to see me, then I remember picking up my post the next morning, and then nothing until the eighth floor, where there was definitely a day when the post didn't arrive because of heavy snow.

On this day, I clearly remember walking with Mad along an empty corridor, where beautiful blue-white light with the quality of having been shone through arctic sea water struck her face and made it resonate with the sound of seagulls flying with the wind. I decided that Madeleine was very beautiful, because she could make her face make that memory just by walking it through a patch of sunlight from a window.

I also noticed how tiny she had become. She used to be taller than me. Now, inexplicably, she only came up to my knees. This was unusual, so I asked her what was wrong.

"I only hope," she said, "I live long enough to finish finding out what's wrong with me."

The next full day I remember began this morning. The room service trolley ran over my toes and woke me, so I sent the dog after it to catch breakfast. I can't remember why I woke up on the floor of a corridor with a dog. I suppose that ever since Madeleine disappeared, there's been no one to remember our room number, so that's why I wasn't in a room. As for the dog, well, I believe Madeleine and I used to have a few mutual friends, but no dog. Perhaps, a few months back, those friends came to visit and left the dog far safe keeping, never to return. But where did Madeleine disappear to ? That is the question about which I have had time to think today, because the post was late. I have hazy memories of Mad getting smaller by the day after the eighth floor. There is even one image of her, having become too small even for baby clothes, resorting to wearing one of Marys' outfits from a nativity set she found in the storage room. Over the months, she eventually became as small as a pea, and continued to shrink.

The big question is what happened next. I don't remember any last words, so I'm sure she can't have simply died. Why did she shrink so ? Something must have been going on, something I was unaware of, while for years we continued to be lovers, and a combination of the Company's inexhaustible finances and our mutual addiction to unspecified psychotomimetics kept us holed up in this Hotel, watching the seasons morph into each other on the far side of double glazing. I believe there is a simple explanation, one which I worked out shortly after breakfast.

The dog likes to hunt: it's in his blood. In the nights between dog days, he howls at Sirius. This morning I watched as he waited, hunkered down, for the room service trolleys walking legs to detach so they could go and smoke a cigarette out of the window. Then the dog made his move, leaving a chromium carnage of lids which was more like the aftermath of a road crash than the feather-blooded forest Wolves of his ancestors. That's progress, and breakfast was bacon, toast, and chocolate flavour crazy milk drink. I wiped off the dog's saliva on the carpet and ate as we were making our getaway in the lift.

It was the most eventful elevator journey of my life so far. We started on the twenty second floor, heading down. By the seventeenth floor, I had finished the bacon and toast and opened the crazy milk drink. So far, so nothing out of the ordinary, until the lift became stuck between floors eleven and twelve. I don't know how long we were there. The dog fell asleep straight away, and his paws started twitching as he dreamed of chasing whole stampeding herds of room service trolleys across the open-skied plains ol' North America.

As for me, I worked out what happened to Madeleine. It wasn't so complicated, once I got my head around it. I don't know why I didn't realise before. Anyhow, it was a good job I worked it out when I did, because otherwise I might have become very upset when Babelface lied to me, a few floors down.

I don't remember the lift starting to move downwards again. I recall only seeing the doors open on the third floor, to reveal a pair of sharp toed boots, which weren't very clean. Allowing my gaze to rise, I saw that the boots were joined to a pair of voodoo trousers, which could only mean that Babelface had finally tracked me down. Every night for years now I had lain awake, writhing in watercolour washes of sweaty insomnia, imagining what Babelface would do to me when he found me. I painted for myself horrors of all hues. I variously imagined voodoo talismans of the darkest indigo staining my life from the heart, or the minutest scarlet pebbles that might blend innocuously enough with the bean soup until, arriving in my stomach, they began to work their agonising mischief. In all of my imaginings, though, I had studiously avoided black. But now Babelface was here, and night had come with him. Even the electric light in the elevator fizzled and died.

"How crazy," he asked (and I noticed that his voice had become slightly higher pitched and breathy over the years), "is your crazy milk drink ?"

"Oh, crazy enough," I replied non-committally.

"Cool, me too, " he grinned (what was so funny ?), "Enough to kill you good this time."

"Oh," I managed, somewhat nonplused, "are you going to shoot me again ?"

"Nah, doesn't seem to do any good, what with your SPECIAL POWERS and all. Anyway, I've got cleverer as I've got badder. I'm going to kill you by telling you what happened to Madeleine, love of our mutual lives, but your ongoing flavour of the month, if you'll pardon the expression."

"I already know, " I said, "I just worked it out."

"Then you worked it out wrong, or else you'd be dead of grief by now."

"Go on then," I said, "what's your version ?"

"My version is this. You recall perhaps how Madeleine became very small during her stay with you ?"

"Uh-huh."

"Any idea why that was ?" he asked, encouragingly.

"Go on," I said," tell me."

"Power of African voodoo, motherfucker."

"That's your story," I said smugly.

"Well anyway," said Babelface, "you recall how towards the end she became so very, very small ? Smaller than a pea. Smaller than a microdot, even ?"

"Uh-huh."

"And you must bear in mind," said Babelface, "your own habit of leaving a few capsules of pharmaceuticals on your person, to be consumed at leisure when the fancy takes you."

"Consider it borne in mind, " I said.

"And finally," said Babelface, and here he stopped grinning for a moment, "you must remember that there was a time when you spiked my girlfriend with your drugs."

"I remember that."

"Good. Then, bearing in mind my vengeful nature and heightened sense of irony since my possession by the demon, and the fact that I still considered Madeleine to be my girlfriend during all the time she was living with you, it will surely come as no surprise that I have turned the tables."

"How do you mean ?" I asked.

"I mean, my friend, that Madeleine is dead, and that she died a very slow and agonising death inside your very own stomach. The Receptionist, you will recall, is not a Company Man, and it was easy to obtain from him your room keys. While you were in the shower, I contrived to slip little Madeleine inside one of those unlabelled capsules in the pocket of your jeans, pausing only to kiss her goodbye. When you came out of the shower, my friend, you swallowed your little dove. In short, motherfucker, I spiked your drugs with my girlfriend."

I was speechless for a moment, which was all it took for Babelface to give me one last winning smile, press the button for the ground floor, and step out of the lift, leaving me and the dog travelling downwards alone.

Now, a story like that sounds convincing enough: it's hard not to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. But ask any fisherman, and they'll tell you that the best ones always get away.

I want to be one of those escapees. I happen to know something, which is that voodoo has to start in the head before it can finish with your soul. Of course Babelace's story wasn't true, which is why it is vital that I disbelieve it. Me swallowing Madeleine - that's preposterous ! If I let such ideas get a grip on me, there would only be the finest of margins between me and the edge of the page, as it were.

No, I'm sticking to the explanation that came to me between floors twelve and eleven. So after my encounter with Babelface, I ran that account over in my head one more time as the lift took me and the dog down to ground to pick up our post.

It goes like this: Firstly, The Virgin Mother is dead. She told me as much as I lay bleeding by the shrine by the road. Secondly, she promised a successor. Thirdly, I do not believe that the Company Man told us all the details of his COMPLEX PLAN, not that I would have believed him if he had. Bearing in mind these points, and the fact that the Company has a track record paved with REAL RESULTS, I believe the only possible conclusion is that the Company is grooming Madeleine to be the next Virgin Mary.

I would be the first to admit that this seems implausible, at least on a superficial level, bearing in mind that Mad had extensive sexual experience and was not called Mary. However, consider the evidence: Madeleine was shrinking. In my experience this only happens when people are getting very old, or are about to transcend the physical domain for a more spiritual theatre of operations. It happens to everyone who has a Message for humanity. I believe it may even have happened to Jesus in the tomb.

"Look ! Look over here !" I imagine him saying, "I'm not dead ! I've just become VERY, VERY, SMALL !"

But His voice was too small to carry, so the Apostles would have glanced all around the tomb, missed Him, and concluded that he had risen from the dead, which in my opinion didn't happen until later when He got a little taller. Incidentally, I believe this sort of shrinkage happens so that those chosen for spiritual leadership can go through the stage of being a kind of conceptual message-in-a- bottle: still buoyant enough to float, but not big enough to sink potentially rescuing readers. This is what happened to Madeleine, and I am just very privileged to have been instrumental in the birth of a new deity, especially one as beautiful as Mad.

I believe that once Madeleine had become VERY, VERY SMALL, she was taken away to be looked after by the Company for a while. I suspect that they may have spirited her away on the room service trolley while I was in the shower, possibly concealed under one of those bell-shaped plate covers. I imagine her scrabbling to keep her footing on a greasy floor, surrounded by a countryside of half-finished egg scrambles and tomato pips underneath the chromium cover sky. This mode of transcendence has no precedent, I believe, and that makes it doubly remarkable.

I assume that Madeleine is now working part-time for the Company, sending the parcels to the Hotel, whilst in the meantime receiving training in her forthcoming duties as parent and virgin.

In fact I told all this to the Receptionist just after I picked up my post. As usual, he handed the parcel over without a word. I opened it up there at the desk. Inside was a pill for the dog, which he swallowed, and ran off up the stairs to howl through the skylights at the stars. There was also a note for me, saying that tomorrow I would move up to the twenty third floor.

"Frightful show about your lady companion, sir," blurted the Receptionist, "I really am most terribly sorry."

"Hmmm ?'I mumbled (noticing that the Company had also sent me a wrap of Ketamine, which was nice of them. I imagined Mad packing it up for me and lovingly sending the parcel).

"About the lady Madeleine, sir - the shadowy voodoo gentleman told me all about it. Most unfortunate sir, to ingest your truelove in that fashion."

"Ah, I see that Babelface has been telling tales again," I smiled, and in conspiratorial fashion went on to explain to him what had REALLY happened to Madeleine. While I was talking, I racked up a healthy llne of the Ketamine on the counter next to the register, and rolled the note up into a tube.

Looking up when I'd finished speaking, I noticed that the Receptionist had become rather flushed and was shaking his head sadly. Obviously he did not actively prefer my version of events. But then again, I didn't expect him to. He was, after all, not a Company Man.

"Drugs have sent you mad, my friend," said the Receptionist.

I felt obliged to put him right on this point. Starting at the end furthest from the Receptionist, I hoovered up the line of Ketamine, and, finishing with a flourish, I addressed him, as my legs began to buckle, with the tube still dangling from my nostril.

"No no no no," I gently corrected him, "my friend, Mad, has sent me drugs."

[TRANSMISSION ENDS ]