Read by Dave Zezulka
All right then mates, I don't mind saying it was a bad situation. Fucking bad, actually. I couldn't believe they'd just left me like that, the others. Well I'm a big bloke, you know, I'm hardly inconspicuous, and yet there I was anyway, standing around like a prize fucking lemon in the arse-end of nowhere, with nothing but shit trees and desert in any direction, as far as I could see. There was no pool, there was no caff, there were no proper facilities, in fact there didn't seem to be any sort of infrastructure at all.
So I was feeling quite low, to be perfectly honest. If going abroad's really all about home, and how much you'd miss it if you couldn't go back there, if that's at least one of the points of a foreign holiday, then it was a point, by then, that had been well fucking taken.
I mean I'd only gone off for a couple of minutes, to see about getting a drink of something, or maybe an ice lolly, anything to cool off a bit after God knows how many hours on that sodding oven of a coach. No such luck, I hasten to add, and when I got back it was to the somewhat underwhelming sight of no guides, no Nigel and no fucking bus, as if the ground had just swallowed them, as if they'd all buggered off to the hotel without me, the cunts. Turn your back for five seconds in this gaff and you got done up the arse, it seemed. As a holiday situation, it was hardly ideal.
So I must have stumbled around for ages after that, trying to find the highway, like a big, sweaty bloke with a heart condition, like the proverbial Englishman, in the midday sun. Until I got to the edge of what looked like a settlement, from which point I could see, well, not all that much. There was a bus stop, a shed and a couple of soldiers, or possibly Old Bill. Whatever they were, they didn't seem friendly, necking warm beers in the afternoon heat, guns on their knees or slung over their shoulders, eyes looking heavy, like dirty fried eggs. And then a bit further on was just a handful of shacks and the trace of a dust road, the view untroubled by telly satellite dishes, or even any shops. God help me if I have to spend the night here, I thought, out here in the middle of fucking Noddyland. And it was starting to get dark
And I'd gone there in good faith, really I had.
'See the world' they'd said 'You should broaden your horizons. You're in a rut, mate.' And maybe I was. Maybe life, after all, had been a bit too predictable back at home. It was the same old faces most of the time, at least apart from the tourists, and you'd get a shag, it's true, about once in a blue moon. But if life wasn't exactly the great adventure some of the old blokes would talk about sometimes down at the watering hole, then at least it was comfortable. Not like this. Waiting around on the edge of the village, not too sure if it was safe to approach, it seemed clear enough that whatever you do you should never London, and especially not if you're relying on a bunch of clueless Green arseholes to get you back home again. All the way over they'd been on about the rain forests, about the WWF (and not the wrestling either) and, in particular, about our carbon footprints, this especially from Nigel, the leader of the group. And by this point, I don't mind saying that I'd happily have given the poncey Oxbridge tosser a size thirty eight directly in the bollocks.
So God only knew how the natives managed. Well they were out to lunch half of them, as far as I could make out, sitting around by oil can bonfires, chattering away to each other in some kind of weird, incomprehensible dialect, probably off it on ganja or something. Not that I could blame them. It seemed like a fairly hand-to-mouth existence to say the least, just a few goats and chickens to keep them going, the trees like fucking stick drawings by kids out of a special needs art class, looking stunted and scratchy in the twilight. And I was really suffering by now, the smell from the cooking pots like ambrosia, like nectar, even though as grub went, it didn't look that appealing. Under the circumstances then, I don't mind saying that my eyes were a bit damp.
Still, they, the wankers, were bound to come after me sooner or later, I supposed. They must have been combing the desert all day, it stood to reason they had been. And they would surely have stumbled on the village by morning however crap they were, however much they'd been driving around like headless bloody chickens for the whole afternoon. So in a couple of weeks I'd be back home, surely, having a good old laugh about my African holiday. And it was really cold by now, and I was knackered, and starving, and I could hear the wild dogs, or lions, or whatever they were, howling on up at the moon from somewhere not that far away. So I decided to see about approaching the settlement, in the vague hope that maybe they could sort me out.
Gingerly then, I moved away from the trees I'd been watching the village from, not exactly hidden or anything - as I said earlier, I'm a fairly big bloke. I knew I must be a sight, lumbering out of the darkness, a bit unsteady on my pins, so I was trying to make it clear that I wasn't a nutter, that I meant no harm, that I was really just after some grub and some water, and a place to lie down. Which, as you can no doubt see from my current condition, was a fucking big mistake. Because as I got closer, the village seemed to go into some kind of frenzy, to the point where one of the soldiers took a pot-shot at me, shrieking his head off like a mad chimpanzee.
There was a flash in the night, then a pain in my shoulder, bloody agony actually, and then a load more bullets flying over my ears as I turned tail and bolted, claret going everywhere. It's probably something you lot are used to, but I'd never known people to act like that. They might, where I'm from, try and slip you a beer or a moody hot dog on occasion, and their kids, the little bastards, might sometimes stretch to an apple or something with a razor blade in it, but nothing worse than that. Nothing like this.
And after that, anyway, things became strange. They were bad days actually, when I lost track of time, when for various stretches I was off my rocker, wandering around with no idea what to eat, or where to get a drink, or anything really. I suppose I had visions. I'd see, I don't know, palm trees, an oasis, stuff like that. I remembered the old blokes talking about it, back at home, about somewhere they'd refer to as the ancestral graveyard, which some of us see when we're on our last legs, even if it's bollocks, a final trick of the mind. I never quite knew what they were getting at actually, but out in the wilderness during that time I think I had glimpses of it, of green plains, rock pools and our lot everywhere, like everything must have been back in the old days, before it dried up.
And I spoke to the spirits, or with some of the blokes that live there now, who tried to set me straight on a couple of things. Such as, that I'd never been out there on holiday in the first place, and that the tour guides had left me on purpose, the cunts. That even though I know exactly fuck all about how to survive here, the plan was to release me back into the wild, like some sort of bell-end on a reality TV show. As I'm sure you can imagine, I was a bit gutted when I heard that. Well, they think we're just idiots, and everyone knows it, because we've got trunks and not thumbs, because we can't talk back to them, as if English is something we can't pick up on, even though our brains are about three times the size. But even so, to be confronted with the truth of the situation was a bit like catching one of the keepers stark bollock naked in the reptile house, flashing his knob at a basking crocodile. You do hear these stories, and you know they're all probably as mad as arseholes, but it still isn't good to have to look at the evidence, all the same
Still I eventually came across a pool with clean water, and some grub nearby I could just about eat, and where I could hose down the wound in my shoulder. But I don't know, really, I think it might have gone septic. I'm not feeling too clever now, certainly.
And so that's where I was when the film crew arrived, lying in the mud when the trucks pulled up like another mirage, the BBC logo bright in the sun. At last, I thought, although fairly delirious - they looked like angels in their damp, dusty t-shirts and holiday beards - I'll get some sense out of this lot, they'll maybe give me a shot, try and bandage my shoulder, even stretcher me out of here back to the zoo, but no. Instead they just filmed me stumbling about the place, as if I was some cunt on the lagers in Camden market, even though I was obviously in all sorts of trouble, and then they packed up their cameras and left me to get on with it. Believe it or not, I actually overheard a couple of them discussing the pathos of the situation. Which under the circumstances was a bit depressing, seeing as those pitiless, bleeding-heart BBC wankers were all that seemed to stand between me and extinction, personally. It just wasn't the sort of thing that would have happened in London - when one of us blokes is in a bad way back there, what they usually do is start a fucking appeal.
So I had a bad feeling, as the trucks pulled away.
And then you lot arrived, my African brothers. Although I dare say you can't understand a word of what I'm on about. And the ancient graveyard seems close, very close, to this terrible shitter in the middle of nowhere that my erstwhile attendants have seen fit to dump me in. It's a crime against nature, the way I've been treated. And lying here talking to you lot now, increasingly dazzled by what may or may not just be more strange visions, of bright, winged blokes coming out of the sky; pink ones, and white ones, like in that fucking cartoon, although with vultures replacing the crows at this point, it does seem clear that the game's about up.
So I sense a great ending, one I could have avoided if I'd just stayed at home. I was the friendliest elephant in the zoo, for christ's sake. I was destined for great things, perhaps even telly, and look at me now. Too banged-up to be on 'Life On Earth', and too urbane to make my way with the wildlife. And as the hallucinatory cameras are composing the credits, and the great birds are circling, high overhead, it doesn't take a genius to work out the following; that there aren't any guides for where I'm heading to next.
And so I die, Horatio. It's a fucking liberty, that's what it is.
--
Elephant's Graveyard by Quintin Forrest was read by Dave Zezulka at the Liars' League Home & Abroad event on Tuesday August 14, 2007.
Quintin Forrest’s four principal activities are writing stories, rewriting his novel, playing PS2 and wishing for a PS3.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.