Cut to size.



This was his favourite pub. With its brass, the brass, where there is muck there's brass; shiny, gaudy reflecting light and bold looks. Five real ales to choose from, to be pumped into your glass. Stools at the bar, drinkers tethered like beasts of burden to the rail, fags in hand, piles of ash at their feet.
He loved this pub. Its yeasty seclusion from time and light, for you see, in here, time thickens like old blood separating the punters from the outside with something akin to distance. The bodies in here have absorbed time, soaked it up like a rag, they are bloated with time. It would account for the thickness around his middle. Time accumulating on his gut, submitting to gravity and flopping over his belt. The chameleon quality of light, its infinite spectrum is narrowed in here. Everything is illuminated to the fattened drinker. The drinker is witness to the Divine or so he said.
The barmaid is young, no figure to speak of. Neither fat nor thin, no curves to her bottom, her face a withered fruit but artfully coloured to draw attention to the lips, that breathy orifice. She isn't attractive, but has hoisted her breasts under her chin about the right height for a drinker on a stool, to drool, slather into his glass of lager. Her boss, the landlady, Land Lady, what a word, this lady and she isn't a lady doesn't look like she knows the land, the soil, I mean, not with those nails, those shoes, that beak. A lady of the land, well you imagine a gentle, ruddy cheeked chubby girl with strong thighs and a saucy tendency. But this one, where there is muck there is brass. How did he get past the beak for a kiss I wonder?
So, his favourite pub, my vagabond poet, my flimsy Flaneur, a wandering Theseus –his words, not mine- trapped in this labyrinth constructed from liquor vapour. What Greek girls could he find in here? Lolling around his neck, lips like suckers on a sea creature, leaving their mark. Like Samson, bull necked, a big man, strong as an ox, but on Disability Benefit. Like Samson, but I cut off more than your hair, didn't I?
My old mum always said 'a man is for moulding, you take the raw material of the thing and with patience you make what you want of it, a trim here or there, its like sculpture or topiary'. Well, I cut you down to size, didn't I my love? Because really, I realized what I really didn't like about you wasn't your fat, tubby tub, tum tum. Or even your grabbing hands clutching at my titties, or and this is the bit that most surprised me, that stubby little protuberance you called a cock. No, what I hated were the thoughts you had, the tiny little brain that fuddled and muddled and told whopping lies. The head that thought I was stupid, too stupid to know your number. But I added you up, subtracted a bit and got the final sum. Frankly it paltry figure.
So I cut it off. Actually, it was more of a hacking, chopping, sawing – than a straight forward cutting off. Quite a performance it was too. Drugging your tea and waiting for you to pass out. Then rolling your big self on to the newspaper, the careful selection of tools, saw, kitchen knife, bread knife; your sagging mouth slopping about, floppy chops. A little groan as I stuck the knife in. What a funny thing a body is, all tubes and gristle, lumps and bumps, and an odd intimacy, to see the workings of someone you know, the lilacs and reds, the nodules and globules, the mystery gone. You are just meat, a dense carcass, all the romance gone.
A head is heavy thing and a cumbersome shape, quite difficult to fit into a bag. A weekend bag is too large and the head rolls around like a bearing in a wheel. A handbag is quite obviously too small. A plastic bag would do the trick but doesn't offer any discretion, you would quite clearly make out his thugs nose and boisterous hair. So I packed him into his old tool bag. What a face! When severed from the body, the head becomes quite a different thing. It really is the summation of all that they were. The body is nothing, just the transport for the sphere rotating and swerving on its fragile axis (too fragile to withstand a kitchen knife!!) the body looks almost fake, a mannequin but the head, you can't mistake that and its cerebral voltage.
So I packed him in his bag, wrapped in news paper of course to soak up any blood that might still be present, and brought him here. To his favourite pub, for a last natter, chatter, clatter of his teeth and a nuzzle at the Landed lady and sniff at the beer, a whifter, snifter at the whiskey, while I finish my hard-earned shandy. And when I have finished my shandy and my packet of dry roasted peanuts, you my love, my ball headed, round as a bomb, bulky luggage will be chucked open mouthed and dry eyed into the gape and swallow of the Thames.