lets do something constructive

"Momus - do you like Hitler?"

It was a dark and stormy night...

for sex tourism.

suddenly, the door opened.

Mrs Kropotkin, the year seven bluestocking, chewed thoughfully on her biro, worrying at a speck of spinach lodged next to her gold incisor. One more title for the little dears creative writing assignment and she'd curl up with a bottle of gin.

"It was a dark and stormy night" was okay. The one about Sex Tourism might stimulate some of the darker imaginations among her charges...

for potential sex tourists with the new relaxed legislation on sex tourism.

There was a boy once who loved the english .

(GAAAAAAAAAAH.)

Yes. She would use the creative witing assignment to stimulate discussions about the dangers of Anglophilia. GOd how she hated the English. Her little ducklings would be taught this hatred as if it were as certain as maths.

The bottle of Vim stood leaking over an electric bar-heater like a candle upon the altar of bedsit neurosis.

From the alley below her garret on Half-moon street the unmistakeable tang of Tom-cat urine found her aquiline nose. The smell took her misty eyed back to Paris in 45, just after the liberation, and a young anarchist, blissfully naive in bed but solid and thick where it counted. Ah, she was a teacher even then.. Three weeks they'd spent together, drunk on cheap red and revolutionary politics, and by the time he'd left her he was as skilled a lover as you could ever hope to meet.

Ah, Piotr. Whaat happened to you.

Another mouthful of gin.

Ah,

that bitch kills me," he said, finging the small imitation silver plated derringer in his pocket and taking another sip of whisky. "I'll kill if it is the last thing I do. Kill her dead."

Of course that would be the sort of thing someone would say in some trashing paper novel from the 30s or 40s. Not her cup of tea at all. Maybe she should take up stenciling instead of creative writing. Suddenly from across the room. . .

one of his socks fell down

Piotr had been stood there for the last half hour;

"Agnes... I haff found you"

Agnes Kropotkin mused to herself that in the fifty six years since they had last seen each other he had obviously not lost that ridiculous habit of pronouncing v's as if they were f's. ANd odd vocal mannerism for one who hailed form Darlington, but ther you go.

Then she remembered he spent a lot of time reading ILE and the mystery resolved itself.

In the distance, the whales sang sadly.

Causing Agnes to start just as Piotr pointed to two other people standing behind him, one a boy of about ten wearing a velvet jumpsuit and the other a woman in her mid-fifties with the haggard look only gained from years of drinking too much gin and juice at Harvard dinner parties.

"I haff brought vrends. This is Glen," he said pointing at the boy whose moplike brown hair tumble across his face shyly, "and this is Wendy," who shuffled forward and shook Mrs. Kropotkin's pale hand.

"Pleased to meet you," exclaimed a stunned Agnes.

"I have much to tell you," said Piotr, "but first we must play some Pictionary."

"How do I draw 'hein?'" he mused.

Stripped of its Darlington brogue, Piotr's voice rang unfamiliarly in the silence. She started back. Then her brow cleared and her oval mouth twisted in recognition of the old ritual of password and countersign.
"No Pictionary, Generalissimo. When the war is won and the land is free - perhaps then."
There was a long pause. Then Piotr dropped his bloodhound puppy on the floor and stepped towards her. "Oh, Pasha."
And his mouth was on hers.

It was the longest kiss perhaps ever. Never had a woman and a bloodhound puppy exchanged saliva for such a long period of time. There had been some kisses in history that had lasted an age, but this. . . this was truly something special, something which might have gone on for eternity had not. . .

a single shot rung out, hard in the quiet evening like fate clearing her throat. A single red flower bloomed on Piotr's chest, where a corsage might have been in happier times. The pictionary set tumbled to the ground.

Agnes stooped and felt Piotr's last weak breaths against her cheek. "Promse me agnes, you will win this fight for me..." "Piotr, I will hunt down those who did this and suck their bones for flutes. I will play a revolutianary mambo on drums made from their skin."

Somewhere outside in the gloom on Half Moon Street a man with a cuban heel clack-clacked a speedy retreat.

Two anthromorphized pigeons watched with disdain.

"Terrible shoes," said one, yawning. "Too much noise."

"Aye," said the other.

The silence continued like a pause.

a pause which yawned on and on with nothing to punctuate it, save the bored observations of the two pigeons.

"So who do you fancy for the cup then?" asked the younger of the two.

"Dunno." Said the older. "Don't really follow football."

Miles away now, the assassin with the cuban heel fingered the worn rosary around his neck and mumbled the Paternoster. It was no good. Johnny Truelove knew that, but he did it anyway. He just liked the latin.

Back in the old town square, a wringled old man played the glockenspeil whilst the girls from the bakery danced.

The old man started singing. "Something is happening but you don't know what it is...dooo ya?"

Agnes pushed her chair back from the desk and sighed, pushing her glasses out of the way so she could rub her weary eyes. "This is the last time I drink absinthe before attempting to write," she thought to herself as she leaned towards the DELETE key. "Where the hell did the talking pigeons come from, anyway?" Chuckling, she began her novel again.

The pigeons, now realizing they were the new centerpiece of the novel as rewritten, proceeded to engage in a Socratic dialog on the verisimilitude of memory as they lazily wafted on the breeze. Unfortunately, their conversation sounded like Harold Pinter on downers.

"Good, yeh?"

"Yeh."

The old man packed up his glockenspeil and made his lonely way home. The girls from the bakery made their seperate ways. Hiedi threw the crumbs from the day out onto the cobbled streets. The sun set behind the clock tower, a coldness entered the town square, the joy of the day slowly drifted of to sleep. The pigeons pecked at the bread before flying off into their clock tower nests.

Somewhere in the distance, streets away, a duck quacked.

Ralph the Rat idly looked up from where he had rested and realized now was the time to attack.

The Rats and The Ducks faced off across the open gym.

"MAMBO!" cried The Rats.

"MAMBO!" answered The Ducks.

"GO!" The dancing began in earnest.

"Oh my" exclaimed Hiedi who had returned to the bakery to collect her grandmother's medicine which she had absent-mindedly left in a baking tray.

"Quack! The games up guys and dolls!" said Chesterton the leader of the ducks.

"Just when we had the mambo cup in the bag" grumbled Frederic the leader of the rats

"why are you dancing in our bakery? Don't you realise health and safety will have us closed down if they find out?" gasped Hiedi

"Look, lady cut us some slack...the ducks vs. rats mambo challenge has been taking place here since before you were a twinkle in your poppas eye" replied Frederic.

"we'll make you a deal...you keep your trap shut about us dancing and having a little fun...and we'll keep quiet about you poisoning the bread with that medicine!" Chesterton was a cunning duck!

"I was doing no such thing!"

What a dilemma, things did look bad for Hiedi...and the rodents and the fowls were keeping up a tradition. What could Hiedi do, the Health and Safety Commission was most fearsome.