"At home he feels like a tourist/he fills his head with culture/ he gives himself an ulcer." The planet is on fire. Corporate lawyers argue over a Kit Kat. There are no coffee tables or children implicated. As we face down Ecogedden, plastification, indoctrination and monumental media hyperbole, Mother Nature's backside is ablaze, and the finest legal minds known to capitalist patriarchy devote head space to a piece of confection. Just to clarify. The Northern Hemisphere is alight, the South Pole is highly flammable, it is a chilling 52 degrees in Death Valley and serious adult attention is concentrated on a heated debate across a courtroom on the relevant merits and demerits of a four-fingered chocolate biscuit in the name of justice and social order. Kvikk Lunsj versus Kit Kat. A question of a mere $2,632,000 on political lobbying. Not sure a Norwegian would spend so much on a quick lunch. Double digit growth awaits the winner.
As Trolley cuts off the privately-educated business journalist, who passes as wide boy at 5am every morning, Melon makes a double-fingered salute to the weather Gods. This heat is killing their lie-ins.
Trolley is taking stock. The dead centre of their fictive existence is the perfect anodyne in days like these. Getting up at the crack of daybreak to scream Fuck Abba! at the top of your voice is all very well, but where does it get you?
Trumpington Park & Strive as it happens. As good as anywhere else, when you're washed up and fed up. Why bother with Love Island? When you can schlopp out into the street in your jim jams and slippers for various litres of cider-space. Never to go back. As the rest of us figure out where to put the deck chairs, the central core burns as darkly as a psychopath's ego. The non-story of the marginalized is a welcome distraction, if you can't stretch to a TV licence.
The keep-calm-and-carry-on-ness of the suburbanites and the tourists absorbs Melon's psychic juices and consumes him. Cider anaesthetises. Trolley enjoys a light ale, and quiet contemplation enhanced by the finest of Moroccan inspiration.
- You're a fucker for your couscous, Troll. Melon enjoys a joke and smokes from a tin of continental lager crafted into a can pipe. Smoking aluminium is safer than most of his pastimes.
An enfeebled, self-obsessed, mewling, emasculated wreck of a man, Melon is proud of the progress made. His levels of self-knowledge are sky high. He can show workings out in the margins and everything. But self-awareness seems about as relevant as clippings from a 1903 edition of the Warminster & Westbury Journal and Wilts County Advertiser. Melon's masculinity seethes.
He is not one of life's clothes pegs. No matter the weather, Melon has on what Melon has on. He changes what he wears so infrequently that Trolley can't recall a time when he has seen Melon in anything other than his military combat smock, check shirt, black t-shirt, baggy bottoms and supermarket trainers. His jacket is occasionally taken off, in a force nine gale for instance, but it is hardly ever removed in summer and never ever fastened up.
Like a rogue penis around a camp fire along the Devon coastline during a field trip in a geography teacher's inappropriately short shorts, a narrative keeps popping its head out. Trolley is peaked. There is far too much going on for anyone to be bothered with his paltry tale, his personal history. He likes to keep it tucked away in a golf bag in a garage somewhere. But there is burning pine everywhere and the flames. They chase him all the way down to the river. Burned-out cars and charred bodies. There is a woman looking for her cat.
Instinctively, seeing the end nearing, Trolley embraces Melon.
- Whoa. Steady Troll, you'll have the ale over.
Trolley grabs a beach towel, soaks it in cider and runs towards the riverside. Gas canisters explode. Pine cones fly past. There is little time to lose. Trolley huddles into Melon, yards from the safety of the river. The biblical disaster of the planetary fire that broke out at lunchtime has ripped Kit Kats from out of the hands of toddlers as they take cover from the heat.
It is too hot to transport cattle. Passengers pay to use tube trains to pack them off to work to have their dripping tits sucked dry by a mechanical beast with the heart of a metronome.
Meanwhile, a couple from Middlesex ponder over gold wedding rings and dream of spending a summer together imagining names for imaginary children that have yet to be conceived. Very soon, this town will exist no more.
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