Patient Blue
Scuttlers and shufflers

’Anyway, back to me and my strange ways, says George.‘I’ve written loads of short stories essays and poems.’

‘Have any been published?’

‘No I’ve never even sent them off to anyone. I just write them then put them away but I know they exist and that’s enough for me.’

‘An undiscovered talent eh, tell us some of them, tell us one of your poems and then some stories I bet they’re at least interesting if nothing else.’

‘A poem, a poem, there’s one I wrote recently, about death.’

‘Of course it is I wouldn’t have expected anything else.’

’It’s called, “The Hour.”

′It’s a bleak place the future

when you live it in your head.

Maybe this or maybe that

but certain you’ll be dead.

It’s not the death but dying

Ugly, painful sour.

With all the things you’ve ever been

reduced to that one hour.′

‘That’s quite powerful actually George, saved by the last line. Now please tell us some of your stories.’

’Ok Barbi I could tell you about “Aboriginals verses The Grey’s.” Humans are an experiment created by a cosmic scientist, but the experiment went wrong, too many flaws and so the scientist decided to store them away somewhere until he could get around to either improving them or disposing of them.

‘Isn’t that what that black racist nut job Louis Farrakhan said, that Caucasian, white people, us,were experiments created in a lab and it all went horribly wrong?’

‘Something like that but this isn’t just us white folks it’s all people.’

‘Except the Abo’s?’

‘Yes Michael, except the Aborigines. So they, modern humans, the experiment, escaped and made it to Earth, but as the title suggests the earth already had an indigenous biped species, Aborigines or Abo’s as Michael so delicately put it. The invaders soon take over and the Aborigines are forced to live in ever more remote places to avoid being wiped out completely. Eventually the last few hundred of them end up in a fortified compound on Ayers Rock-’

’Uluru, said Rosslynne.

‘Wasn’t she that black bird in Star Trek with that thing in her ear,’

‘Captain Kirk’s dick you mean,’ says Barbi, looking at me with a glint in her eye. Something to do with the first inter-racial kiss on television, some tight lipped white boy kiss,which she looked like she wasn’t enjoying, suffering for her art. I didn’t know she was an Aborigine though. They’re a blighted bunch, they blame us for that of course, dominating and oppressing them with our alien culture, technology and fine wines.′

’Anyway said George, my analogy is that the Aborigines are just like the native Red squirrels here in England and the invasion of alien grey’s has almost wiped them out.

’Ayers Rock is red,

‘Uluru.’

‘No she’s black.’

‘Interesting thoughts there George and clever to link grey’s with aliens and the Aborigine’s last stand on something red, but I don’t think it’s going to make a novel,’ said Barbi.

‘I told you it’s just an idea a theory and not a novel.’ George seems slightly put out that there is not a more positive less ribald response to his story, but adds ‘On reflection and after saying it out loud it does sound like bollocks even to me.’

’Another short story, thought, I have developed is called, “Reincarnation and the Anthill.” Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Bin laden, just to name a few mega bastards, once they died are reborn as ants, each in an anthill somewhere in the world, but close to a school playground.They each emerge warily from the hill, fully aware of who they really are out into the sunshine and there waiting for them are a group of schoolboys with a magnifying glass,-

‘Would Mao and Stalin be red ants, them being Commies in life?’

’Sorry Michael, but I don’t know the answer to that, but let’s assume yes. So the boys adjust the magnifying glass to focus a pinpoint of sunlight as hot as a laser beam and slowly burn them till they pop and shrivel up. Let’s face it we’ve all done it, gives you a kind of God complex, which will live, which will die, will it be quick or slow, maybe just a maiming, you have the power.

‘Trying to drown them is fun kills loads of them but some always survive, even if the water has been boiled, clinging to twigs like an ark, tenacious little fuckers, you have to give them that.’

’So each time they get blasted by the beam,shrivel, pop and die, they are immediately reborn as another ant ready to emerge from the hill into the sunlight and the waiting schoolboy with the magnifying glass. Now in the case of Hitler Stalin and Mao, it’s reckoned they were responsible for killing about a hundred million people between them, so this means they have to go through their birth in the hill, emergence, laser sun beam and pop a hundred million times before they have atoned for their crimes. In fact it’s quite possible that any one of us here might have killed them with that magnifying glass on more than one occasion.

‘Jesus George, that’s totally mind blowing,’ I say, and the others murmur consent and George seems happier with the reactions.

’I’ll tell you one more, “We gave you technology now give us your souls.” So the first manned flight by the Wright Brothers in 1903 was noted by a race of interstellar travelers and they took some notice and interest in us. And as an experiment, planted members of their species on Earth. They look exactly like us, but strangely all of them have bright ginger hair, it’s how they recognize each other.′

‘So all ginger people are aliens then?’

‘No Michael, but it narrows it down for them and they ask a couple of questions make a special sign and can tell.’

‘So that rules out Florence from The Machine and Bianca from Eastenders then?’

‘Possibly. So when the aliens arrived they introduced awesome new technology. I mean, just think, the Wright Brother’s box kite with a one stroke petrol engine, to Concorde in less than sixty years. Throw in fibre optic technology, the internet, and the space shuttle and you have to say how the fuck did humans come up with all that in about eighty years? Especially if you consider that it took the previous hundred thousand years to leave the cave, invent the Spinning Jenny, whatever that is and a box kite with an engine that didn’t quite make it to the end of the beach.’

‘I sense there’s an alien thread running through most of your work, but you do have a point there Guru.’

‘But there’s a price to pay. We, the humans, are now totally reliant on their introduced technology. Everything from the electricity in your house, flush toilets, TV, phones, airplanes, medical equipment, food and clean water production. If it was gone we would be well and truly screwed, wouldn’t have a clue. A Biblical apocalypse only not just in Africa but in the soft white man’s world too, especially there. So the aliens-’

‘The ginger mingers.’

‘Yeah them, though they actually call themselves The Russets. Broadcast to the world on all channels, that they brought us the technology and they will withdraw it all unless the human race submits to them and becomes their slaves. This way they will have taken over the world in a mere hundred years or so and not a shot would have been fired, and all of the infrastructure would remain intact. Once we submit of course, loads more Russets will arrive and we will be there compliant slave workforce and playthings. They love having sex with humans by the way, that’s why they bothered to stay so long. All that anal probing you hear about is actually just their version of foreplay.’

‘Isn’t all this a bit of a cross between Star Trek, First contact and the Day the Earth stood still, the original, with Gort the mighty enforcer, not the crap CGI Gort in the remake.’

‘I suppose a bit, now you come to mention it. But The Day the Earth stood still, was more about fucking up the world with wars and nukes and potentially threatening other galactic civilizations. My story is about us becoming slaves to technology and how weak that ultimately makes us, like now.’

‘So you think all this freak weather and stuff is them, the aliens?’

‘Naah, they’ve already left, this is something much worse.’

‘Hmm, still think you’ve been watching too much Star Trek and plagiarizing Gene Roddenberry. He’s in space by the way, had his ashes sent into orbit a few years back. Wonder if he’s still there?’

‘Guru, where do you get these amazing ideas and theories from?’

‘Well Barbi, I told you I once talked to a Stag Beetle and most of them came from him.’

There is silence, then George laughs, ‘no only kidding I just made them all up whenever I got stoned, which was most of the time, it’s all just bollocks really, though at the same time, vaguely plausible. I am working on something currently but the point I’m trying to make, rationalize if you like, keeps eluding me. I’ve now reached the point where I don’t know what I’m trying to say.’

‘Tell us so we can see what we think.’

‘The piece is untitled but is about the nature of time. This is more interactive. Barbi, here we are on your sixtieth birthday.’

‘OK don’t rub it in.’

‘Think back over your life, your whole life, all the significant events, everything the triumphs and tragedies, times you were happy, times you were sad or ill or on holiday, sex-’

‘Plenty of that.’

‘Go on really think about it all.’

‘There was silence in the room as Barbi reminisced in her own mind about her lengthy and very colourful life.’

‘So how long did it take, a minute? So effectively, now in this moment, your whole life has taken no more than a minute to recall, your sixty eventful years condensed into one minute.’

‘Hmm.’

‘They say that at the point of death, a traumatic one anyway, your whole life flashes before you in a millisecond.’

‘That’s what they say, the people who don’t actually die do anyway,’ I add.

‘Obviously, but the ones that do die and end up in the afterlife, if there is such a thing, well there, I think time will have no meaning, milenia will seem like seconds because you will always only live in the moment, time will have effectively stood still. If you wanted to revisit the past you would recall it all in a millisecond any part of it and then you would return once again to the moment.’

Barbi said, ‘I sort of see what you’re trying to say but I’m not sure you have fully said it the way you want to yet.’

’No I consider it a work in progress and I’m still waiting for that eureka moment when it all falls in to place, mayb eit never will.

‘I’ve got a bit of a theory,’ I say.

‘Really, what is it?’ asks Rosslynne.

‘It concerns old people, well women mainly, over the age of seventy five.’

‘Enlighten us,’ says George.

‘They fall into two distinct categories, shufflers and scuttlers.’

‘What?’

‘Shuffler’s and scuttler’s. Go down any high street, well you used to be able to go down any high street and there they are. Shufflers are slow moving hogging the centre of the pavement looking downcast and depressed dragging their feet and -’

‘Shuffling, ’ said Barbi helpfully.

‘That’s right, shuffling. Then there are the scuttlers, usually small and wiry, moving quickly getting under your feet and generally scuttling about. I used to play this game when I walked anywhere see how many of each type I could count and the scores were always pretty even though there were always borderline cases, on the cusp so to speak. I can assure you they are easy to categorize and definitely two very distinct species.’

‘So Michael,’ says George. ‘You have lived on this earth for more than thirty years and the great theory you have come up with is, that there are two separate yet distinct species of little old lady that have evolved, scuttlers and shufflers. Move over Charles Darwin, there’s a new kid on the block.’

The party continues into the early hours of the morning with copious amounts of Champagne imbibed, ingeniously chilled by placing the bottles in a net and suspending them in the cold freshwater well close to the house, and many larger and increasingly stronger joints smoked. The long case clock is striking three in the morning when Barbi and George both stand up and Barbi announces, ‘me and the Guru are going to bed, who knows if we’ll get any sleep, goodnight one and all. Rosslynne, I suggest that you and Michael might also like to head up the wooden hill, maybe get yourself properly reacquainted.’ Then hand in hand George and Barbi leave the room.