More Chuckles

With Criminal record only four days away I'm busily designing the cover and doing final corrections. 

In the meantime, sit back and enjoy a chuckle or two from one of my favourite ever scenes of my novel, Lynch Heinouson... 

Jake and the Vegetarian Food

Jake Gutt hadn’t worried too much about what his conscience was telling him in quite a long time, but that changed the minute he saw the condemnation in Pandora’s eyes as she saw what he had (up until that minute) thought was a perfectly reasonable maiming.

If he had an angel on one shoulder telling him what to do and a devil on the other then he did not have the conventional sort. His devil threw wild parties, invited other devils round for drinking binges and enjoyed reading long passages out from ammunition catalogues – maybe occasionally from the Satanic Bible for a bit of variation. His angel was a deeply neurotic alcoholic who lay in a semi-comatose drunk most of the time, mumbling things like “What’s the point in doing good? The world’s all going to shit anyway,” and “Those bastards deserve to die. Every motherfucking last one of them.”

Pandora clearly thought that Jake’s violent ways were in the wrong and he loved her so much... Maybe the only way forward was to clean up his act!

Was that conceivable? Could he really do that now that so much time had passed?

Obviously going cold turkey wasn’t the best way to maintain his sanity – he was going to have to keep killing criminals every day or so – but he needed to seriously clamp down on his attitude.

But that left him with a problem. Did he even know what constituted the proper way to act?

He had seen enough in his life to appreciate that just possibly the way his mother and father (Emma) had brought him up wasn’t perhaps the most normal way it could have been done. And his subsequent revenge-fuelled killing spree (he’d slaughtered a few more people after Hell Hag for good measure) hadn’t done much for the balance of his psyche either. The rest of his life so far had mostly involved duffing people up and slaughtering criminals using his tried and tested rule for establishing guilt: a person is innocent until proven guilty by torturing them.

Certainly, his adulthood had not given him much of a grounding in the way that normal people lived.

He decided that the best thing to do to get his life back in order was to start at home.

Jake went back to his flat and stood in the doorway surveying what needed to be done. He had decided to clear out everything in there that could be construed as psychologically unhealthy.

He made some calls then spent the rest of the day clearing things out. By the end of the day he was glad he’d ordered the fourth skip. And that was just for the living room. He’d need even more when he moved on to the other rooms as the week went on.

He cleared out everything that could, in any way, have a negative effect on him: empty beer bottles, old junk food containers (he found a pizza that was only a couple of weeks old and polished it off – no point wasting good food), full beer bottles (he kept a few of those just in case), ammunition crates, spare guns he didn’t need anymore, a couple of dead bodies he’d forgotten about because they were covered over in a blanket.

At the end of the process he felt cleansed: like he was finally letting go of things in his mind that had kept him trapped all these years... since the brutal murder of all his family. And friends. And his pet poodles.

Next he met Pandora at the supermarket. Jake had told her his plan and she was determined to give him all the support he needed. She’d knitted him a purple sweater with a big smiley face on the front and even though it made him look like a twat he put it on and gave her a big smile.

They searched round the supermarket together. He didn’t want to eat any more of that nasty junk food. It was time he thought about his health.

They bought a wide selection of herbs and pulses and other stuff that sounded like the ingredients of chicken faeces and went to the checkout.

Jake hadn’t been a vegetarian for some time, in fact not since he’d been a camp little queenie boy. It wasn’t that he had anything against animals but after an incident in his youth when he’d panicked a little while trapped in a lift for an afternoon it just didn’t seem logical not to eat them. After all, if you’d eaten human flesh, how could you justify not eating animal meat?

After their trolley was full, Pandora took Jake back to her place and cooked him a big vegetarian meal.

As expected, it really did taste like shit (literally, like shit), but Jake did his best to smile at his lovely Pandora. This was quite challenging.

You try it now. Put this book down and go and find some shit. Dog shit is alright. Maybe from a cow pat, after it’s gone all crusty on top. You can use your own shit if you want but it’s probably healthier to use someone else’s (in the same way as shagging your sister is bad – especially if you get caught).

Right; you have the shit? Good. Now place a piece of the faeces on your tongue and close your mouth.

That’s good.

Now imagine the love of your life is asking you if it tastes nice.

Now say, “I love it! Can I have some more?”

And then smile.

See? It’s not quite as easy as it sounds.