Good afternoon friends,
It’s time to say goodbye to 2021.
At the start of the year I made a resolution to get at least monthly fiction out to you on this little email. I’m afraid I didn’t manage it. You can only put out that which doesn’t get published elsewhere, so to even have enough to put a monthly story out, I’d need to be on top of my submissions and rejections. Plus, not everything is fit for public consumption. And I confess, I’ve been busy with other things too.
Stand-up is going reasonably well, though I still have very few real achievements to my name. But I do have some goals, and in order to make them true, I thought I’d write them down here, and then, send you off into the new year with a silly little short story (it’s uplifting in a way, and it has a crocodile in it).
So here are my standup goals:
+ Get paid work at the following comedy clubs: Up The Creek, Vauxhall Comedy Club and Top Secret Comedy Club
+ Put on a barnstormer of an Edinburgh show this summer
+ Beat the gong at King Gong and secure an open spot at Comedy Store
+ Travel more for comedy, perform in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh at the very least.
+ Develop my character comedy piece “Sir”
And here are my writing goals:
+ Get further than Chapter 3 in the book I’m writing
+ Put out more silly sketches on the internet - that’s an awful lot of fun.
Anyway, without further ado, here is a story with no title. Let’s just call it “Craig”.
___
When the news reached Alexander Hope that an enormous and potentially man-eating crocodile had escaped captivity and was now on the loose in London, he knew his chips were up.
He spotted the news the same way he learned about everything else in the world: scrolling listlessly up and down the BBC News website in front of a discarded tuna and sweetcorn sandwich wrapper and thin plastic fruit pot. Crumbs from the sandwich were smudged across his desk, crushed into place by the movements of the mouse like Polyfilla into the gap between tiles. His eye skipped across the latest in Westminster scandal and dull economic forecast, before settling on the headline.
A notification on his desktop pinged.
“Alex mate, I know you’re supposed to be on lunch, but could you make sure you circle back with the minutes from the KPI meeting before 1?”
Alex ignored it and scanned the article. A crocodile, not even a Nile crocodile but a huge salt water animal, a big Ozzie bunce (nicknamed Craig of all things) had burst out of its enclosure when being fed and somehow, despite its size managed to evade capture all the way out of the zoo before settling itself, presumably, somewhere in the Thames. Londoners were, the article warned, not to approach the beast which authorities reassured would be caught soon.
The desktop pinged again. “Alex? Did you get my message.”
He flipped through social media. The crocodile was trending on social media. Rumours flew as to its whereabouts with several unconfirmed sightings and grainy photos, (they were always grainy weren’t they? So sad that any alien and creepy crawly never managed to find itself in golden hour or good photo light), including an overhead of it frolicking its way across Hyde park. It really was huge…
Ping. “Alex, I see you at your monitor.”
… He scrolled up. Nearly ten metres long, the article had said. As long as a double decker bus. Briefly he wondered, what if double decker busses had never been invented? How would anyone have any context for the size of the world’s mega-fauna.
“Alex. It really is imperative that you respond.”
Alex got up from his text. His colleague, Saul, who’d been sending over the messages despite sitting less than a few metres away, clicked his tongue.
“Alex, could I have a word.”
“Piss off,” Alex whispered to himself, but he didn’t say anything more. He walked straight from the creche of open plan desks and monitors, skipped the lifts entirely and took the stairs two at a time. Saul muttered something passive aggressive at him. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew the tone. It didn’t matter. He was elated. Nothing mattered really, because he was about to be eaten by a crocodile.
He wondered why he was in such a good mood, despite the violent death he knew he was about to face. Despite his vibe he found the stairs a challenge. The tumour that grew deep in his lungs didn’t let them expand or contract as they’d used to and by the bottom he was coughing and wheezing as a dusty organ. He put a tissue to his mouth. When he removed it its whiteness was stained with a few fresh flecks of blood.
It was not that Alex wanted to die at the hands of Craig, the big saltie. But given the alternative, he felt quite content. He had, ever since he was a little boy harboured a secret phobia of crocodiles. Which was a useful phobia for someone who grew up in England, where the most dangerous animal was a particularly annoyed badger. Even so, he’d pictured the attack hundreds of times. He imagined himself strolling slowly past a great lagoon, perhaps taking shade under a mango grove, where the long grass hid what lurked under the riverside from the unsuspecting strollers above. The attack happened quickly in his mind. First would come the sound, a great splash and snarling and hissing as the beast emerged. The guttural snarl would be the last thing he heard, and the last thing that millions of beasts had heard since the days of the dinosaurs. Sometimes Alex thought that was the source of his phobia. There must be something there, so deep and primal about the crocodile. Then would be the strike. The beast’s great jaws, like a mousetrap would clamp down on his leg and pull him to down into the swamp. The death roll would follow, but Alex had, after plenty of deliberation decided that he would rather like to have passed out by then. Either way, it would be violent but swift. Darkness at the end of snarling. A deep inky blackness, where in the moment his last thought would go to the understanding that there was no higher power in this world, or great guiding light, just muscle and power and liquids and the will to live and consume everything else to keep doing so, and for him, the time was over. As he said, it wasn’t that he wanted that death, but he had always known, deep down, despite the odds, that it was inevitable.
The day they diagnosed him was, in many ways the most disappointing of his life.
“Would you like to sit down?”
The doctor was sympathetic, and he seemed genuinely so. He had his trained, bedside voice of course - soft but crystal clear. You couldn’t leave any confusion when passing a death sentence after all. The hospital room was sterile but off-white. Just worn looking enough to remind you of the drab failure of the place. Next to the bed was a small side-table festooned with leaflets. Cancer Support. What To Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next?. There wasn’t one for What To Do When You’re A Pathetic Little Tosser Who’s Going To Die But Still Doesn’t Have The Get Up And Go To Do Any Living. Pity. That would’ve been a popular one, but he supposed, it was just too long for the leaflet.
“I’ve done very little else.”
There were tears, yes from Julie and whispered conversations about how they’d explain this all to little Georgie. As far as Alexander was concerned that was the least of it. He would slip away, slowly and probably painfully, doing much the same as he always had done: sloping his way to work, doing what he could and then loafing about at home until the overactive living thing within him consumed enough of his lungs that he just couldn’t breathe anymore. That was life. You lived, you slowly exited and whether his son missed him or not meant very little.
The park that ran alongside Embankment was mercifully empty. There were the usual lunchtime millers and perhaps even more converging on the river, perhaps hoping to see the fabled crocodile. Idiots, he thought, if they wanted a bit of action all they needed to do was give him a follow.
The crock, Craig, was where he expected it to be. Its long body was camouflaged amongst the well manicured hedges and flower rows, just a few feet from the edge of the Thames, though so fat that its ridged back stuck up above the colourful hodge-podge of petals. Its head was stocky and square, poking from the a bush with yellow eyes scanning the footpath as it basked in the unusually balmy afternoon. This was, dramatically, a challenge. He’d imagined reeds and murky water, perhaps a raft made of bamboo and the calls of jungle macaques in the background to his dramatic demise, but he supposed on the Embankment park, he would have to make do. Craig could have at least picked a dark alley, with a great open sewer cover. He did not know if crocodiles understood the concept of phoning it in, but he felt there was at least some level at which Craig was doing that right now.
His legs tensed, and he prepared himself to run. It wouldn’t do to just walk into the beasts mouth. There had to be some cat and mouse. But the crocodile moved much faster than he’d imagined. It pounced from the bush with a great stamping and snorting. Its mouth opened with that guttural, feral hiss that he had feared since first hearing it issuing from a tiny boxy television as a child. He wondered if anybody else had died from crocodile attack in the UK before. Perhaps he’d be in the Guiness World Records. That’d be something his son could be proud of.
He heard other people screaming, like a television playing through the wall of the next house, long before the jaws of the beast clamped down onto his leg. He fell on the first bite, and the second, which slammed hard into the meat of his thigh was the first he actually felt. The movement of it had twisted him slightly, so that he landed face up, and he could look up to see the eyes of the creature dragging him, cold and slanted, with nothing behind them but the simple mechanics of grasping food and filling its belly. He could have been anything to Craig, a buck, a monitor lizard, anything warm and meaty with enough nutrients to sustain the beast for just a little longer.
And it was looking into Craig’s eyes that finally awoke him. Because he didn’t want to be just matter, at least for a little bit. The beast was dragging him easily, and he hoped it was not too late. His back and butt were scraping across the asphalt as it pulled him further towards the river, but he’d seen something before, an old Steve Irwin show that popped into his head. He was facing up and could leverage himself slightly against the bush and did so with all his might. Craig was stronger than him of course and he immediately shrieked, feeling his ankle pop. That was something that he could deal with later. The Crocodile paused for a moment to take tense itself for a further step and that was his moment. He let go, pinging himself towards it lashing out with his other foot which connected with the beast’s eye. It snarled and released the leg, before turning and retreating from the running feet and yells of the approaching onlookers.
When he awoke in hospital many hours later, the first thing he did was take a quick call to his doctor to ensure that he begun chemotherapy. Why not take the next step, he decided. Then he phoned work and told them to shove their job. Then he called home to tell them that he was OK and that he’d be about for a little more time. His son wouldn’t mind him being around for a little longer he figured. After all, his daddy had fought off a crocodile.