The Removers. (Part Six)
If Reggie could just go back in time and unsee the patch he would. Emmeline a Remover? He couldn’t believe it. She didn’t seem the type, I mean it wasn’t like she was setting her bra on fire or carrying her mattress round as penance. She wasn’t one of those girls. So if Emmeline was a Remover that meant that just about anyone could be a cloaked madman who was holding the country to ransom by the gonads they threatened to hack off. America needed its bright young things to be successful, important and then go forth and multiply with other bright young things to keep the chain alive. This was upsetting the whole infrastructure and long established ecosystem; they were stirring the pond with a wooden spoon and eating all the algae. He’d always assumed The Removers were more lizard than human, with scaly skin, swishing tails and black beady eyes that ate your soul, but this? Well this was much more frightening.
He had thought he might marry Emmeline. They could have bought a house by the sea, raised children and beach cattle by the ounce, whilst sitting on the porch listening to the yowl of the waves. They’d be relatively happy and she’d buy him beer crates each year for his birthday with biro-scratched messages to remember the heady night of their courtship. Then aged forty one of them, his money was on Emmeline, would take a stroll out into the ocean with steel-lined boots and fail to return to the shore. It was her nerves you see, she thought the water was calling to her, it mewled like a pounce of kittens; eyes still crusted shut with innocence; fur still waiting to be excreted; they needed her more beneath the blue, the world was not her home. And Reggie would lay a single white rose on the surf each anniversary of her Deathday, hoping it would float down to her, just letting her know that it was ok to come back, but she never did. Things were simpler in places with no oxygen; men didn’t stand like soldiers on television, blowing untruths and hot air.
Reggie hadn’t the foggiest idea what the best course of action should be. Should he look for further evidence to prove that Emmeline was a Remover or should he just ignore everything and pray that he didn’t upset her enough to be suggested? This is exactly the situation his mother had warned him against, she had said that casual relations led to incurable diseases and trouble. He decided to get up from his lust nest, which had soured like a lemon in the cold light of day, and started to rifle through Emmeline’s chattels in the sparsely furnished dorm room. Her bookcase contained Zola, Rousseau and a dog-eared copy of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Her wardrobe housed clothes that aired on the side of caution but with a sassy edge; it was if she was provokingly covering herself up by reminding everyone that she was naked underneath. He didn’t want to but he knew that he needed to check her underwear grotto, because that’s where everyone kept their secrets; next to their lace, cotton and finery. He stuck his hand in and came up with a golden pike first time. He looked at the concealed item and let out a high pitched squeak. It was a copy of Judith’s Butler’s Gender Trouble that had been kept away from the black flames of censorship. He carefully opened the front cover and on the first page in pencil there were scrawled commandants of a most insalubrious disposition.
Thalt shall investigate all suggestions for legitimacy and certainty before extraction.
Thalt shall not take pleasure in the pain of The Removed.
Thalt shall seek to uphold the law for all those that have been wronged by it.
He wanted to read more but the door slammed. He looked up. It was Emmeline, she had forgotten her phone. Emmeline stared at the forbidden text in his hands and smiled a little.
“I wouldn’t have thought you were a man interested in Butler, Reggie?”
The Commissioner was having a lovely mid-morning massage, Bai’s hands were as soft as butter nan dipped in ghee, he was so glad she’d come over to the Land of the Free to make a better life for herself and her three children. And what he most enjoyed was the anticipation. When would the massage leave the realm of the decent and then descend onto the banquet of his penis? She always kept him guessing, always kept the spark alive; something his own wife had failed to do since the first six months of their marriage. Now Rhonda was rotund and hideous from all the gravy and biscuits she shoved into her fat mouth; most of the time it was like sleeping next to an angry water buffalo; huffing, wheezing and smelling like wet, stinking grass and mud. I mean don’t get him wrong; the Commissioner was pretty gargantuan himself, but it wasn’t his job to remain ornamental. He was sure people at the force laughed at him for having a colossal monumental of a wife so he never invited her to the Christmas dos if he could help it. He’d say about budget cuts and the racist undertones of his minions and Rhonda usually bought it. She wasn’t the sharpest stick in the bloated corpse.
Bai had got her hands round his nether regions and was performing a manoeuvre on him that suggested that she was trying to put him into third gear. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about the recent eight percent increase in crime for the last quarter. Those blasted druggies had found another new-fangled synthesized flower extract to inject into their collapsed veins and they kept mugging people for spare change. They were messing with his spreadsheets and they knew it, the junked up trouts. Just before he was about to give Bai a glorious white embrace the door opened and his assistant ran in.
“God damn it Janine, I told you never to interrupt my weekly massage appointments,” he grumbled, reaching for a towel to preserve his modesty.
“I’m sorry sir, but it’s urgent,” she said, panting and trying to not peek at her boss’s phallus that was so slimy with massage oil it looked as if it could be winking at her. “The President’s son is dead.”
“He’s not dead Janine; he’s just got no balls…”
“No, he jumped off a building this morning. His head’s in four or five pieces, they don’t think they can put him back together again,” said Janine, glad that The Commissioner had managed to wrap the cloth round his bulbous waist.
“Well have they actually tried?” He tried to shoo Bai out of the room just in case she was a Communist spy: you could never be too careful.
“Everyone’s tried, including all the King’s horses and all the King’s men. Nothing. It’s an unsolvable jigsaw and a broken egg. Also, he left a note. It said: ‘To my Jessica. Please forgive me, for I have sinned.’”
