Serial Killer Part II: Chapter 24
Several gems from Kevin in this chapter. Wedding Belle was his idea, and British girls were regularly drawn by Spanish artists like they were an impossibly beautiful young Sophia Loren with Eli Wallach as their possessive dad!
The readers loved it. They did not want reality. Who does?!
Most of the Wedding Belle dialogue is Kevin’s.
There was also some incredibly boring ‘Amazing Facts’, IIRC in Valiant comic and this inspired Kevin to wax verbatim on the subject as follows:
Dave regaled him with ‘Amazing Facts’ from The Spanker, introduced by Toffee Nose.
‘ “Toffee Nose because you don’t.” The Vauxhall Velux has 38,000 moving parts. And Toffee Nose, and he wishes he didn’t. He’s slipping out for a drink and he may be gone for some time. Did you know the Great Pyramid is made from 50 million bricks? And Toffee Nose, and has counted every one of them. Twice. Don’t ask me anything that requires an intelligent answer. I was educated by Toffee Nose. It’s a miracle I can put my trousers on in the morning.’
Pat.
‘What’s wrong with the smell of my fanny?’ Joy asked, swigging another glass of wine.
‘Er … nothing,’ said Greg nervously. ‘As far I’m aware.’
‘What do you mean as far as you’re aware? You should be aware,’ she snapped at him. Dave spluttered inside his mask. Joy glared over at him. ‘Sorry. Fur ball,’ he explained. She rolled another joint and leaned drunkenly forward in her wheelchair.
‘There is nothing wrong with the smell of my fanny,’ she insisted.
Oh, God, thought Dave, she is losing it. He was terrified of mental illness, after his dad. Should they call a doctor? Could they get an ambulance out on Christmas Day? What was the best thing to do? Probably get her completely paralytic so she passed out. Then the ambulance men could quietly remove her without any fuss.
‘Would you agree, Dave?’
‘Well, I’m not familiar with it, Joy. As yet. Although I live in hope. Can I get you another drink?’
‘Take it from me. I smell good.’
‘I’m sure. And in my case, you may have noticed a not unpleasant whiff of Hai Karate.’
‘We’re not talking about body odour, we’re talking about my vagina, Dave. My cunt.’
If you’re new to Serial Killer, start here at Chapter 1.
Both Dave and Greg recoiled slightly. ‘Er … could we be a little more soft focus here, Joy?’ asked Dave. ‘I’m no longer a young man. I am in my late twenties, you know.’
‘Is the whole world mad? Is that it? Am I going mad?’ she asked. It certainly looked that way to Dave and Greg. ‘Do I seem like a simp?’ she persisted. ‘That’s what they want me to be. A simpering fool.’ She shouted up at the ceiling. ‘I will never, never, never be a simp!’
‘There’s really no danger of that, Joy,’ reassured Dave knowingly. Greg nodded in worried agreement.
‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘It’s a nightmare. It’s a fuckin’ nightmare,’ and buried her head in her hands.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ said the pink gorilla. ‘You need to rest. Let’s get back to your room.’ He started to wheel the slumped figure out of the lounge, advising his friend. ‘Greg, if you could just move Godzilla out of the way for me.’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Greg, totally out of his depth. He grasped hold of the giant reptilian foot.
‘No, no!’ she snapped. ‘I can’t rest. I can’t sleep. How can I sleep? How? Tell me how? Come on! Come on!’
‘Back to the dayroom,’ Dave whispered to Greg, and pushed Joy back into the lounge.
‘Vaginal deodorants,’ she explained to them. ‘Vaginal deodorants.’
‘Ah,’ said Dave. He was none the wiser.
‘Aye,’ she continued bitterly. ‘Vaginal fuckin’ deodorants. They have these ads for them, making lassies feel ashamed of the scent of their own bodies. And they’re harmful, too. But these bastards don’t care, they just want to make money. And they want me … me! … to be the editor of the new magazine they’re appearing in.’
‘Ah,’ said Greg, starting to wise up. ‘What magazine would that be?’
‘Everlasting Love. Can you imagine me, boys, as editor of Ever-fuckin’-lasting Love?’
‘Er … not really,’ said Greg.
‘That is a tough one,’ said Dave.
‘They want it to be all lovey-dovey, girly, hippy, drippy shit, to appeal to simps. So no advice to teenage girls about STDs, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, or vibrators, but ads for vaginal deodorants are okay, oh, yes.’
‘I see what you mean. Just kissing lessons. Like snogging an orange?’ suggested Greg.
‘You could use a few lessons yourself,’ she retorted.
She hauled herself out of her wheelchair and staggered over to a cupboard and took out several cans of deodorant. ‘Look. They even send free samples.’
‘For you to review?’ said Greg.
‘Ah. Like records?’ said Dave.
‘For me to try out on myself,’ she growled. ‘Fat chance.
‘They’re aimed at teenagers,’ Joy read the blurb on a can with an arrow shaped end. ‘ “Cupid’s Arrow, the gyno-cosmetic. Fresh strawberry flavour”.’ She scowled. ‘Well, of course I want my vagina to smell of strawberries.’ She read the accompanying blurb. ‘ “Your boyfriend will thank you.” ’
‘Sounds like they’re the douche bag,’ said Greg, sitting down on the sofa, relieved that Joy wasn’t going to kill herself after all, and determined to stay on her good side before he made his exit the next day.
Dave nodded, his liquorice pipe projecting from between his simian lips. ‘We understand, Joy. We’re seventies men.’
‘Yes. We realise just how offensive this is to women,’ said Greg.
‘It’s not very “ideologically sound”, is it, Joy?’ said the gorilla.
She read another. ‘Modesty. “Don’t take risks with your natural fragrance. Be safe. Be modest. Write to Sister Brown for more information about the problems of intimate odour.” Problems,’ she repeated. ‘Guilt-tripping bastards.’
‘Just as long as it’s medicated,’ commented Dave.
‘Personally,’ said Greg, ‘I love the smell of pussy.’
‘Hah!’ said Joy. ‘You could have fooled me. I cannae remember the last time you went down on me.’ Greg winced.
She read the third, pink-flowered can. ‘Coquette for vaginal etiquette’.
‘Reaches the parts other deodorants can’t reach?’ suggested Dave.
‘I tell you, boys,’ said Joy prophetically, ‘this is just the start, they’ll be wanting us to shave our pubes next.’
‘Lose the fur?’ said Dave horrified. ‘Surely not?’
‘No. That’s never going to happen,’ said Greg.
‘It’s a turn-off,’ agreed Dave. ‘Particularly for someone with my preferences.’
‘It’s coming,’ she said darkly. ‘You mark my words. We’re all going to end up looking like plastic dolls. Like you,’ nodding at Dave’s pink, hairless body.
‘Meanwhile,’ she continued, ‘I’m working on a magazine selling this shame.’ She considered bitterly. ‘It should be called “Coy, for simps”.’
‘You could refuse?’ suggested Greg.
‘I’d have to resign and I’m not ready to. Yet. And …’ she pointed to the cupboard. ‘There is worse to come.’
She went back to it and produced some photocopies of comic artwork. ‘You think The Caning Commando is bad, Greg? Read this shit. Read it and fuckin’ weep.’
Dave and Greg looked curiously through the pages. They featured Wedding Belle, ‘ “a supermarket checkout girl who dreams of finding love.” ’ quoted Greg.
‘ “She yearns to go from supermarket aisle to wedding aisle.” ’ added Dave.
Romantic comics were drawn by Latin artists and, consequently, they depicted British teenagers as enchanting, exotic, passionate girls with film star looks. British boys were drawn as handsome, long-haired ‘dreamboat’ Latin lovers.
So Belle was portrayed as an impossibly glamorous, wide-eyed, busty version of Gina Lollobrigida with ‘big hair’ who ‘talked’ with her shoulders and gesticulated with her hands.
These exotic characters were combined with the artists’ rather limited visual knowledge of Britain. So Belle’s working-class, Cockney father was depicted as a swarthy, Chianti-quaffing Spaniard. Big Ben and other London landmarks frequently featured in the background as the only British items the artists seemed to be aware of, apart from the set of flying ducks hanging on the wall.
Fluttering her long, Latin eyelashes, Belle told the readers her story in ‘true confessions’ style. She wrapped the net curtains on the window around her, imagining she was a bride gliding down the aisle. But she was torn between a safe, respectable boyfriend, and a saxophone player. Which boy should she choose, she wondered, gesticulating with her hands like Sophia Loren. The saxophonist ‘Hot Lips’ or Steve the steady bank clerk?
The Latin-looking ‘Hot Lips’ had a shirt open to the navel, a medallion, and a furry chest that might have caused Dave some gender confusion. Belle watched him playing sax in a night club, with Nelson’s Column impossibly visible through a window.
The heroine’s father looked like Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He warned her about ‘Hot Lips’. ‘No good can come of it, my girl. No decent boy, who can put a roof over your head, will marry you after you’ve been out with a saxophone player.’ He looked at her clothes. ‘And you’ve changed since you met him. You look like one of those … West End girls.’
‘Oh, dad,’ said Belle. ‘You’re just not gear.’
Later, waving her hands, Belle tearfully admitted to her father that he was right: ‘I should have known one kiss would not be enough for him. He …he got fresh with me, dad. And I …I felt so cheap … But one day I’ll find love and it will be … kinda like a beautiful dream.’
‘Until then, keep your legs crossed,’ said Eli, rolling his eyes.
A second Wedding Belle story was in a similar style. Now she was going out with a guy who wanted to be a writer. ‘My heart turned to confetti every time I looked at him,’ she told her readers. To give him his big break, she bought him his first typewriter from a mail-order catalogue and he wrote an instant bestseller.
But Belle’s dad was rightly skeptical. Puffing on a dark cheroot, he observed: ‘He’s written one bestseller already. Flash in the pan. Can he write two? Can he fill that shelf?’
‘Oh, dad, you’re so ungear,’ pouted Belle with a Claudia Cardinale shrug of her shoulders.
But, once again, dad turned out to be so right to warn her. Belle looked sadly out the window at London Bridge and explained. ‘He’s a famous writer now, leaving me to pay for his typewriter by instalments. But one day I’ll find love and it will be … kinda like a beautiful dream.’
Belle never seemed to have any luck. The family moved to the seaside and she met a handsome young millionaire on his yacht when she was out swimming. A romance ensued. He was going to take her away from the fish factory where she worked, and marry her. Big Ben could be seen just beyond the factory.
A dewy-eyed Belle revealed her heart-wrenching story to the readers. ‘We had a gear time together until that terrible day, a week before we were going to be married … He was racing along in his speed boat to meet me as I finished my shift at the fish factory and didn’t see the rock until it was too late.’
Belle would never forget him. Dad reassured her as he reached for the Chianti. ‘One day you’ll find love, Belle, and it will be … kinda like a beautiful dream.’
‘That is so fucking bad,’ agreed Greg sympathetically.
‘The readers love this kind of slush, apparently,’ said Joy. ‘It’s Up the Junction or Coronation Street reality they hate. They prefer to escape into fantasy.’
‘Same as science fiction,’ said Dave. ‘It’s pure escapism. “Beam me up, Scottie. There’s no intelligent life down here.” ’
‘No, Dave,’ said Joy coldly. ‘It’s not the same at all. Science fiction is the genre of speculative fiction. It is the literature of ideas.’
‘I stand corrected,’ said Dave hastily.
‘Sometimes I despair of our readers,’ said Joy.
‘Yes. Always the readers,’ sighed Dave.
‘I don’t want to be associated with something this bad,’ said Joy.
‘It certainly needs a little updating,’ agreed Dave. ‘How about: “My trousseau, my terror. I caught the bouquet … he caught something else.’
He took his mask off again, now he had warmed up.
‘Definitely a wrist-slitter,’ confirmed Greg.
‘It feels to me like the work of the Major,’ pondered Dave. ‘I can detect his speech pattern.’
‘The Major?’ asked Joy.
‘His attitude to women,’ said Dave. ‘It could easily inspire Germaine Greer to write a sequel to The Female Eunuch. Any idea who wrote it?’
‘No, but he was paid in cash, apparently.’
‘The Major.’
‘I’m glad we’ve got all that sorted out, Joy,’ said Greg.
‘Yes. Wedding Belle was the gorilla in the other corner to me,’ agreed Dave.
‘I’m pleased in a way, though,’ continued Greg. ‘Because I thought you were taking, you know, us … breaking up … rather … rather badly. I was very worried about you, Joy.’
‘Oh, you thought it was about us, did you?’ Joy laughed a dreadful laugh. ‘Dinnae flatter yourself, Greg. If we’re not having sex, you’re no use to me. Oh, no … you can fuck off back to Colchester on the milk train.’
Greg winced, and even Dave winced in sympathy for him.
She was cheering up now that the truth was out. ‘I don’t want fuckin’ stupid love stories. I like science fiction. I like horror.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘I particularly like violence.’
‘We know, we know,’ chorused Dave and Greg.
‘I like chain saws. I like big guns.’ Her Glasgow accent gave her words a special resonance. ‘Robots having their arms and legs and heads blown off, and all the cables in their guts being ripped out.’
‘Yes,’ said Dave. ‘That’s science fiction. The genre of speculative fiction. The literature of ideas.’
‘And I can’t have them. Because I’m a woman.’ She looked contemptuously at the Belle artwork again. ‘Girls with legs bent back like Sindy dolls. No kneecaps and little pointy feet. Why don’t they do some Chinese foot-binding on us, while they’re at it?’
It was time for bed, but as Greg headed towards Godzilla, she called after him. ‘Wait a minute. Just where do you think you’re going?
‘The bedroom.’
‘Come back here.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘You don’t think you’re sleeping in my bed tonight?’
‘But there’s only one other bed.’
Well, you’ll just have to share it with Dave, won’t you?’
‘It’s your chance to prove you’re not bent,’ smiled Dave. ‘I’ll report back to you in the morning, Joy.’
She supervised them as they made up the sofa bed. ‘Hospital corners, Dave. What did I tell you? What did I tell you?’
‘I don’t know. Never do my zip up quickly? Never look a gift horse up the arse?’
‘No.’ She smiled a kindly teacher smile. ‘Hospital corners. Now. Both of you go to the bathroom first. And dinnae flush it twice. We don’t want to waste water, do we? Soap in the blue dish. Not the soap in the white dish. And not the best towels.’
Dave kept his suit on to stay warm, while Greg was freezing even with his clothes on. He thought sleep would be difficult, but then Dave regaled him with ‘Amazing Facts’ from The Spanker, introduced by Toffee Nose.
‘ “Toffee Nose because you don’t.” The Vauxhall Velux has 38,000 moving parts. And Toffee Nose, and he wishes he didn’t. He’s slipping out for a drink and he may be gone for some time. Did you know the Great Pyramid is made from 50 million bricks? And Toffee Nose, and has counted every one of them. Twice. Don’t ask me anything that requires an intelligent answer. I was educated by Toffee Nose. It’s a miracle I can put my trousers on in the morning.’
Serial Killer by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.