The fat woman with the haggard look and the stinking clothes was given a wide berth by newsboys and dogs alike as she made her way home.
THREE: CENSORED SCENES
It wasn’t the end.
The police went to the Movie Palace just after nine-thirty. Birdy went with them. The search revealed the mutilated bodies of Dean and Ricky, as well as the remains of ‘Sonny ‘ Barberio. Upstairs, in the corner of the corridor, they found a cerise shoe.
Birdy said nothing, but she knew. Lindi Lee had never left.
She was put on trial for a double murder nobody really thought she’d committed, and acquitted for lack of evidence. It was the order of the court that she be put under psychiatric observation for a period of not less than two years. The woman might not have committed murder, but it was clear she was a raving lunatic. Tales of walking cancers do nobody’s reputation much good.
In the early summer of the following year Birdy gave up eating for a week. Most of the weight-loss in that time was water, but it was sufficient to encourage her friends that she was at last going-to tackle the Big Problem.
That weekend, she went missing for twenty-four hours.
Birdy found Lindi Lee in a deserted house in Seattle. She hadn’t been so difficult to trace: it was hard for poor Lindi to keep
control of herself these days, never mind avoid would-be pursuers. As it happened her parents had given up on her several months previous. Only Birdy had continued to look, paying for an investigator to trace the girl, and finally her patience was rewarded with the sight of the frail beauty, frailer than ever but still beautiful sitting in this bare room. Flies roamed the air. A turd, perhaps human, sat in the middle of the floor.
Birdy had a gun out before she opened the door. Lindi Lee looked up from her thoughts, or maybe its thoughts, and smiled at her. The greeting lasted a moment only before the parasite in Lindi Lee recognised Birdy’s face, saw the gun in her hand and knew exactly what she’d come to do.
‘Well,’ it said, getting up to meet its visitor.
Lindi Lee’s eyes burst, her mouth burst, her cunt and ass, her ears and nose all burst, and the tumour poured out of her in shocking pink rivers. It came worming out of her milkless breasts, out of a cut in her thumb, from an abrasion on her thigh. Wherever Lindi Lee was open, it came.
Birdy raised the gun and fired three times. The cancer stretched once towards her, fell back, staggered and collapsed. Once it was still, Birdy calmly took the acid-bottle out of her pocket, unscrewed the top and emptied the scalding contents on human limb and tumour alike. It made no shout as it dissolved, and she left it there, in a patch of sun, a pungent smoke rising from the confusion.
She stepped out into the street, her duty done, and went her way, confidently planning to live long after the credits for this particular comedy had rolled.
Rawhead Rex
Of all the conquering armies that had tramped the streets of Zeal down the centuries, it was finally the mild tread of the Sunday tripper that brought the village to its knees. It had suffered Roman legions, and the Norman conquest, it had survived the agonies of Civil War, all without losing its identity to the occupying forces. But after centuries of boot and blade it was to be the tourists – the new barbarians – that bested Zeal, their weapons courtesy and hard cash.
It was ideally suited for the invasion. Forty miles south-east of London, amongst the orchards and hop-fields of the Kentish Weald, it was far enough from the city to make the trip an adventure, yet close enough to beat a quick retreat if the weather turned foul. Every weekend between May and October Zeal was a watering-hole for parched Londoners. They would swarm through the village on each Saturday that promised sun, bringing their dogs, their plastic balls, their litters of children, and their children’s litter, disgorging them in bawling hordes on to the village green, then returning to ‘The Tall Man’ to compare traffic stories over glasses of warm beer.