I had been hoping that things might calm down a bit after Jason’s departure, with him not being there to create a sensation out of every single thing that happened. I had reckoned without Xanthe. One morning she wanted to tell me all about her belief in angels. Now I’m an open-minded sort of chap (living round here you have to be), but I draw the line at angels. It seems to me to be nothing more than yet another money-making exercise to con cash out of the weak and the gullible. I had had a basinful of all this the previous Winter, when my one-time psychic advisor had tried to fool me that I had had the Archangel Gabriel watching over me since birth (the amount of jokes I could make about that one!). A statement I had found so completely ludicrous that I had parted company with her for good.
“If you find a white feather”, said Xanthe the barmpot “That’s a sign that your guardian angel is nearby. I found one in a swimming-pool once”.
“Your brain was leaking”, I said, and went out the front to get the bins in.
Outside I found the whole of Beach Lane basking in an absolutely repulsive smell. A stench like rotten eggs. My first thought was that the farmers were putting something foul on the fields. But it was surely the wrong time of the year for that? It was the end of August. There was harvesting going on all around us. (Jason had bemoaned all the crop circles being mown down just before he left).
What was even more bizarre about all this was that when I went round to the back of the house there was no sign of the stench at all. I even went and hovered near the drains, to see if it was our sewage system, but the smell was completely localised out the front.
Twenty minutes later, and I left the house to go to the mini-mart. The rotten smell had disappeared completely.
Before he departed on his travels Jason had offloaded some of his treasured possessions on us, presumably to ease the load in his wagon. These included a wind-up camping-torch, a pair of microwave able socks, and two paperback books, which had been self-published by a couple of friends of his. I know he gave me these to try and persuade me yet again to do the book collaboration with him. It backfired miserably.
The books were about the adventures of 2 overgrown jerks investigating paranormal phenomena in the West Country. A more smug, self-satisfied pair of cretins you couldn’t possibly hope to meet. Let’s face it, poking fun at some of the more extreme loony members of the paranormal world is a pretty soft-target. I know I’ve done it myself sometimes, but I haven’t tried to build a whole career out of it! And anyway, as exposes go, this was scarcely Watergate.
Even more unforgivable was the way they taunted and rubbished well-meaning people who had shared their ghostly experiences with them in good faith. This was in between anecdotes of their drugged-up sex sessions with any passing trollop they could lay their mitts on (perhaps I’m getting old, but I found this about as absorbing as listening to one of Gordon Brown’s speeches), and interspersed with infantile cartoons of themselves smoking joints and meeting prostitutes. Boy, am I making all this sound more interesting than it really is!!!
They came across as the paranormal world’s answer to Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. I am not going to mention their real names, as they’re the sort of jerks who would wear my censure like a badge of honour. All I know is that if Jason comes back and suggest we collaborate with them, he’s liable to get the bloody books chucked at him.
For the first time in a while I found myself really missing Al. He would have had a few choice words to say about it all. I realised that, in many ways, I had been using Jason as a substitute for him, but there’s no way Al would have had any time for a pair of self-obsessed wankers like these two. He was a journalist, he wanted a story. Sadly though, these days, there are too many like this pair who just want to talk about the turgid minutiae of themselves instead, and in reality really have nothing interesting to say at all.
In a few months time, they will probably be auditioning for ‘Big Brother’.
Checking my e-mails I found one from my sister Stella moaning that Arthur (now home from the States) wanted me to come up and stay. As this was just another pathetic attempt to get me to go up there and do all the housework and gardening, I ignored it. There was also some bonkers spam with the heading ‘IF YOUR PENIS REFUSES TO PERFORM ITS DIRECT FUNCTIONS, DON’T THROW UP YOUR HANDS’, and one from Jason - presumably sitting in some Scottish cyber-café somewhere. He was asking what I had thought of the books he had left behind (you’ve heard my views already on that one), as the “authors” (rather a grandiose way of describing 2 pissed overgrown students) had seen a preview of the 5-minute Shinglesea programme, and would like to do a longer one in our area. He enclosed a long e-mail from one of them, which was full of pompous bullshit like “possible collaboration”, “I would like to network with you”, and “do you have a Twitter page?” (oh pah-lease!).
“What are you going to do?” said Misty.
“What I normally do probably”, I said “Nothing”.
I had a feeling though that the Universe wasn’t going to let me off so lightly from now on.