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A butcher where I worked once was a whistler—you know the type: aggressive, soulless. I’d stand around being useless somewhere planning his death.
Days at his block and bacon slicer rending the air, making his shrill statement. Clocking on to clocking off— Colonel Bogey or The Sheik of Araby.
And you could tell he worked at it— thought he was good. I’d think of his family, how they coped. Thought about sympathy cards.
And the other butchers? Surely he was pushing his luck next to all those knives and meat-hooks. Not forgetting, of course, the mincer.
You wouldn’t be surprised if you heard the clanking of metal when he took off.
Perhaps you’ve wandered into Jurassic Park? Ridiculous, this gangling oddball.
But not that skewer of a beak you imagine a fish seeing
through the shattering glass, the whirl of water.
Cracking some gag about tomato juice outside ‘Drac’s Diner’, I’m Harry Houdini escaping from the family rucksack. Shouting “I’ll catch you up by the Zebras!” I collapse
on a bench. A woman’s yelling “Ro-ry!” as grown-ups go skipping by with their kids till superego’s wagging finger puts them sharply back in step.
A wrist-slashing jingle repeats itself so that I see the attendant losing it, ramming the throttle on full pelt and running screaming into the Lion pit.
Those cockatoos seem happy enough, and a red-arsed monkey’s attempting to brain another with a stick while a third looks on masturbating.
All things considered, it’s quite heroic really, families making a stab at it under an August thunderscape—though Rory’s mother’s at it again (what could he be up to?).
Then at ‘Thunder Mountain’, I pass a man dressed as a pterodactyl, and a strapping young lass in t-shirt and shorts with an ad across her chest which I try not to read.
Alone in a fallow field as though he can’t be seen. (And you amazed, again, at just how big they are.)
Not the brightest of course: like jay-walking pheasants or partridges, losing it, just when the gun’s being cocked.
But you really like him. Just know he’d be a riot if he could talk— how well you’d get on. And those semaphore ears!
Now he’s off again: going like the clappers over the furrows, doing that buckled bicycle wheel number
as though just for the hell of it. As though, even through those clenched gnashers,
he just can’t keep it all in.
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