Geoff Clams and the Intimidation Game

By PRSD, on Friday, July 3, 2009

The weekly column from the world of Geoff Clams continues with his investigation into alleged voter intimidation in Preston, Paignton

Last week’s instalment, The Patriarch comes to call

Outlook: Overcast, but hot and humid. A slight chance of some heavy summer downpours.

Lots of moisture in the air.

The morning of our local and European elections on June the 4 was, for this voter at least, one of deep spiritual malaise and forbidding dread.

As Judith drifted in and out of an all-consuming drowsiness on the futon, I homed in on each terrifying black fleck that had settled on her naked skin. Using a special tick remover I had just bought from the vets and acting upon the advice of a telephone nurse with a broad Devon burr, I removed every single deer tick successfully, bar four.

To remove a tick, one must take care to extract the whole of its body and head in one fluid, twisting motion. Leaving a tick’s head and probe buried in the skin will allow it to continue to pass whatever infections it may carry into the bloodstream of its host. Once I had cremated each and every malignant parasite over the gas stove, in groups of two on a slowly-heated tablespoon, I returned to the living room where Judith had again passed into a deep, troubling sleep.

Within just one hour, the poor mite was drenched in her own sweat, oblivious to the world in some feverish mini-coma of murmured protestations and high-pitched sighs. I peeled off the wet duvet and pressed a cool flannel to her searing forehead. Immediately, the crystal clock that her mother had given us for Christmas two years ago, flew off the mantelpiece unaided and landed near my right knee. The moment of existential terror in the stark quietness that followed, soon gave way to worldlier concerns. After waking her up to take some aspirin and paracetamol, I called the NHS helpline and relayed the latest developments; that these were flu-like symptoms which had come on very suddenly and that earlier the same morning, she was running a temperature of 39°C which had since fallen slightly.

In close, lipstick whispers, the nurse cited a possible tick-borne infection that would require a course of Doxycycline antibiotics. She assured me that reactions like this were quite common and easily treatable, adding that she would contact Judith’s GP to arrange for me to pick up a prescription in no more than an hour. I was also sternly reminded to monitor Judith’s temperature closely and to take her to Paignton Hospital immediately should she exceed 40°C, for that would be a sure-fire sign of some serious allergic reaction. I declined to mention the nature of this bizarre infestation. I declined to mention the angry poltergeist.

On my way to the town and while pulling out of the driveway in anxious increments, I caught rear-view-mirror-sight of Mrs Frattelli; ample arms aloft, flailing and flagging me down from her adjacent front garden. I knocked off the engine with a furtive sigh and went to console her about the dead and dismembered seagull that someone had left on her lawn overnight. It was still there. The perpetrator had clearly gone above and beyond the call of warped duty; belying a sense of theatrical nastiness in his/her handiwork. His?

The speckled gull’s head had been mashed in, its wings splayed and nailed in sacrificial grandeur and its chest cavity crudely scissored agape. As we stood above the poor thing, wringing our hands and bemoaning the state of it all, I saw The Patriarch in a fleeting, surly daydream. He was demolishing a blood-filled apple pie at an outdoor eating competition with his face and sabre-teeth, while an adoring crowd cheered him on from all corners of a generic village green.

The punters were dressed in hazy whites that shimmered and shimmied in the acrid, grassy heat. Like a congregation of disorganised bowlers, they encircled the budding, bibbed gluttons and administered triumphal punches to the air, in rapturous slow-motion. And there he was, in the eye of the maelstrom, this unfathomable Malcolm… or, perhaps George; hunched on a small wooden perch, nose-down in his spoils like a sunset-dwelling vulture. Weird eyes occasionally glanced up from underneath a crazy mask of Bramley mucus and bloodied worms. In my head, his omnipotent rasp chimed like the familiar, discordant church bells of recent waking dreams: ‘I’ll eat her soul for you Clams.’

I agreed to return to old Mrs Frattelli’s lawn with a trowel and a bin-liner once I had completed the prescription pick-up. I ushered her inside, quickly made her a cup of tea and headed back to the car. The Drone was out on lunchtime patrol just two roads down from me, stalking a group of truants with its high-end frequency emitters in the broad apocalypse of daylight. I drove right past it as if it had never even occurred to me and then focused promptly on the latest radio chatter, dominated as it was by the Hazel Blears resignation. That’s true voter apathy there. Anyhow, Blears was apparently rocking a boat. The good ship New Labour. Powered exclusively by serfs and slaves and underdogs, one capacious, groaning heft of exhausted rowers with heart diseases and personality disorders; rolling out the required motions in the dank belly of a creaking galley. The long-demented captain of ceremonies is burning his last sea chart on a Poundland disposable barbeque while listening to his old Tina Turner tapes. Lo, there’s talk of a dysentery outbreak too.

Pulling onto the seaside stretch, I reached down with a jittery finger and tapped the auto-search button until I heard some music that stuck. Surprisingly, that turned out to be Robert Johnson. Demonic music (for a suitably demonic afternoon) tumbled from and rumbled on the tinny speakers; all see-saw string hacks and blue notes that jarred the skull like violent entry wounds, compressed behind the Dictaphone fuzz of a bad man’s bloodcurdling scream. Passing deserted beach huts and modest, hanging light bulbs, I followed the curve of the coast as the music coloured things in and some thoughts took hold. The polling booths had sprung up all over town. The streets were ignored and uncluttered by nearly everyone. Why visit on a murky, overcast day like this one? Why even visit? This is, after all, a dying place. It would have keeled under long ago if it weren’t for us pesky humans who also happen to live here, quietly hanging on with our smashed, frost-bitten hands. Drowning in the ancient blues.

“Early this mornin’, when you knocked upon my door
Early this mornin’, ooh, when you knocked upon my door
And I said, Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go”

The tick-carrier had surely been The Patriarch. I remembered clearly sighting the little, pinched black dots on the back of his fat neck as he left the day previous. How in the hell did this man end up carrying so many ticks? Surely these ticks are not able to migrate from one human to another in such numbers, if at all? Did he clamber onto her? Was his Labour job just a ruse to get close to Judith? Or, perhaps maybe they had never engaged romantically, at any point over the long years. Rather, she might relate to him as a misguided niece would to her favourite Uncle. Why then, did old Mr Gruff wake up (after an absence of months) to throw something at me? Did he seek to warn me?

Shortly after returning home, and after helping Judith with her medication, I finally went back over to Mrs Frattelli’s to remove the dead bird. I scooped it carefully into a bin bag and motioned to move its remains to the back garden, to bury them in the bare flowerbed at her request. She had gone inside to continue with her piano practise, but was probably struggling to differentiate her notes from those of the squealing Drone which was now audibly close by, honking at some pedestrians with a malfunctioning speaker. As I circled the corner of her bungalow, I discovered a short-but-ominous trail of navy-streaked blood and yellow guts, leading me to where I found the second bird.

The baby seagull lay headless and luminously blue by the back garden entrance. A discarded food colouring bottle lay smashed nearby and, across the panels of Mrs Frattelli’s gate, the words daubed in crass, red chalk: ‘I DYED BECAUSE OF YOU. 2009-2009.’

I decided not to reveal the details of the blued bird to Mrs Frattelli. Stealthily, I buried them both in the flowerbed while she set out a tea-tray in the conservatory and put her Vera Lynne CD on quietly. After tea, she thanked me tenderly and asked if I would mind escorting her up the hill to the polling booth. I offered to drive her but she said she needed the exercise and was now too unnerved to walk there on her own. I thought about Judith briefly, but I couldn’t say no to the old, white-headed lady. I agreed to come and get her in fifteen minutes, once I had checked Judith’s temperature.

Back over the road, Judith was barely on her feet in the bedroom, struggling to pull on some clothes. I went to her and asked, ‘what are you doing sweet?’

‘I’m going to vote, Geoff,’ she hissed, with as much assertion as she could muster. ‘It’s only a cold.’

‘No, Jude. You’re going back to bed darling. You have a tick-borne infection.’

‘No, Geoff, I’m going to get up and drink a Lemsip, check my emails and then call my mother. And then we’re going to drive up to the polling booth so I can do what I need to, okay? I can rest when I get home.’

‘I have an errand to run Jude; I need to be back over the road in five minutes.’

‘Oh Christ Geoff! What now?’ she snuffled as she sat emphatically down at the foot of the bed and threw her tights indignantly onto the carpet, ‘Wait, don’t tell me… Hugh, is it? Let me guess; he put some dishes in the sink and now he needs your help to get them out?’

‘Funny.’

‘I’m half-right though, aren’t I Geoff?’

‘Mrs Frattelli, she-‘

‘Oh well, if it’s not one it’s the bloody other!’ She barked, attempting to rise from the bed but falling frailly backwards onto it.

‘Honey-‘

‘Seriously Geoff, what the hell is it with you and these old people?’

‘Oh don’t start with this, not today Jude.’

I caged-up as The Patriarch picture-card flashed up once again, somewhere behind my eyes. This time, he was bothering seagulls to death and dumping yet more carcasses on local lawns; furthering his ferocious, audacious and insane assault on my life.

‘I looked out of the window earlier and you were sodding around on her lawn with a carrier bag!’ piped Judith as she picked up her tights and again struggled to put them on over her damp legs. ‘Last week you spent two days up there plastering her kitchen. It’s like you’re her concubine or something!’

‘Judith, you’re sick. You’ve got an infection and you should be lying down. You had thirty-three tick bites.’

‘I’m fine.’ She nodded profusely; ‘Absolutely fine, you understand? It was probably just an early… freak reaction. I feel good now.’

‘C’mon, rest up. Do it for me. I thought you were dying this morning, love. One vote isn’t going to tip the scales. New Labour is finished.’

‘Who said I’m voting for them?’ she asked with raised eyebrows as she moved to the dressing table dismissively. ‘And who gave you the right to stifle democracy?’

‘Just hold tight and I’ll drop you up later if you insist, when I’m done with Frattelli.’

‘Get You. She’ll need a new hip replacement soon Geoff. Go easy on her.’

‘Bye Jude,’ I offered resignedly, tapping the door frame and attempting to catch her gaze in the mirror as she started wet-wiping her face.

‘Sod off Geoff Clams.’

To be continued…