#95b

“She's probably being raped right now by a fat hairy lesbian with a huge black strap-on!” was John's response when I told him poor Verity had received the judges hammer. Even if in jest, it's an awful thing to say. You'd think he'd be a little more sensitive than that. Verity was after all the only person who visited him in the psycho home, and up until recently was his confidant in everything concerning me. I think he is still smarting from the other week when between bites of tomato and garlic pizza she drilled him over his behaviour and clearly stated her position on the paralysis issue. Voting with her famous flat soled Red Lesboes, she deferred across to the non-believers. John is a person who doesn't forget things like that too easily. Where I soak up humiliation like a sea sponge and let it piss out through my pores, John kinda stores it up like body fat, planning revenge for even the smallest slight. In that way he is a very frightening man, easily capable of murder (or worse).

But forgetting Verity for one moment, another bizarre event has occurred. Not bizarre as in wheelchairs on steeples bizarre, but bizarre in the sense of how does a man, numb from the waist down, manage to sneak three cigarettes out a packet which is 10ft high up on top of a kitchen unit! Well I'll tell you how, because there is only one way. He gets out of his wheelchair, climbs up on the sideboard and takes them.

“Well Spiderman, what d'you know about these?” I asked, slamming a golden pack of B&H down in front of John.
“Cigarettes, nicotine, ammonia, acetone, carbon monoxide, DDT, methane...”
“No, not the bloody ingredients, the three missing fags!”
“Ah, that old chestnut, the thieving bastards. And I thought it was only those pub vending machines that sold packs of seventeen, Christ Lord, what next!” he said, bringing his fist down like some lousy B-movie actor.
I looked at the ashtray and counted. One, two, three.
“John, cut the bullshit and give me the truth. There's three cigarettes missing from that pack and three dog-ends in the ashtray. This morning when you woke, you lit up – breaking rule no.4 – and sent the scrunched up empty packet bouncing off the dresser. Now I wake up from my afternoon nap, the kitchen's full of smoke and you're not shaking from nicotine withdrawals, now where did you get the fucking cigarettes from?”
“Ok, OK! So I hid them! I hid them so I wasn't a slave to you and your barbed tyrannical games. I hid them so I didn't have to belittle myself everytime, having to ask “Please Tristy? Where are the cigarettes, Tristy? May I smoke, Tristy? I need to drop a shit Tristy!””
“Oh stop it! You know full well why I put them up there, and it's nothing to do with the length of your arms or me being a meanie! It's to preserve your health, try not to have you end up with a permanent bronchial wheeze like my father, that's all. It was a gesture of love, EL-OH-VEE-E: love! But that's getting away from things. Even if you did hide some cigarettes, where are the three which are missing from the pack? And it was full when I put it up there.”
“What you checked? Ha! You opened the packet, counted the cigarettes and then resealed them?”
“Er, well, yes, YES I DID, that's exactly what I done!”
“Well then,” screamed John “you are even more pathetic than I ever dared imagine!” and with that he powered up his electric chair and whizzed off down the hall. But not in the manner of a man who had just sent another into the flames of hell, oh no, he was making an escape. This was John's version of climbing out the window and down the drainpipe in just his socks. If I was keeping score I would scream “Yeeeessss, 2 – 1 Tristram fucking Spencer!”