Party

Rhinoceros Song

Don’t need an invitation cos I’m really massive

Rhinoceros, Rhinoceros

Ruinin’ your sofas cos I’m too big for them

Rhinoceros, Rhinoceros

Stampin’ on your CDs with my big round feet

Rhinoceros, Rhinoceros

Gonna gore your mum -  what’s she doin at the party?

Rhinoceros, Rhinoceros

Better wash the kitchen cos I’ve had a big shit

Rhinoceros, Rhinoceros

Squashin’ all your friends with my fat leathery backside

Rhinoceros, Rhinoceros

This is how you enter the data

This is how you slip a pencil up your friend’s nose

This is how you enter the data

This is how you bully a friend

This is how you tailor your trousers

This is how you clean shit off the floor

This is how you wipe sick off the walls

Success

Breakfast in Bed

About a week after he moved into the basement flat he knocked on my door. “Hi, I’m Marcus,” he said, pushing a tray of still hot biscuits through the door before him. The warm sweet, buttery peanut scent flooded in. He was still wearing an oven glove. “I got the recipe when I was travelling through the States last year.” he said, and I let him sit on my sofa, his legs loosely crossed and his long arms draped over the back. “I bought this old banger, you know?” He went into great detail. They were pale with slightly golden ridges. My teeth sunk through the soft, barely-cooked dough and I fell into a peanut reverie.

“These are the best cookies I’ve ever eaten,” I said, wiping a crumb from my lips. He listed desolate breakdowns and frozen waterfalls. When they were gone he continued to talk and I noticed his eyes were slightly too close together.

He came round a few times in the next couple of weeks. I savoured the papaya salad, the fennel pasta, the honey cakes and endured the wheezing laugh, the uncut nails and incessant ‘you know?’s. Then he brought these incredible spherical shells of crispy fried bread. He showed me how to crack holes in them and spoon in a spicy chickpea relish followed by mint water. I had to put the whole thing in my mouth at once. “They’re called poori,” he said, and barely gave me a chance to finish swallowing before he slid his hand across my cheek and tried to kiss me. I panicked and he saw it. He half-smiled, curling his lips into his mouth and clamping them between his crooked teeth, then picked up another poori. He didn’t come for a whole we week after that but then he was back with pavlova. “I’ve used ginger and rhubarb instead of raspberry – I had it in a restaurant recently and I just thought ‘Yes! This is amazing!’ and I thought I’d try some lime zest on top – you know?” I nodded, thinking how much I had missed his cooking, licking the cream from my lips. The next day he turned up with a simple beetroot soup that had me speechless and he told me he loved me: “I think I love you Sophie – you know?” I was honest with him from the start.

Man reading

Nonsense

He was tiny and not the kind of man you’d invite to a conference, largely due to his incontinence but perhaps more poignantly due to his onion. He always had an onion tucked under his left arm and also a spatula to pat it with. It was not the kind of thing you could ignore and it attracted endless verbal abuse at high volume and not infrequent physical attacks. He had suffered many a bruised shin, one chipped kneecap and a humongous bruise on his back, a purple bloom with yellow-green edges, and that’s just within the records kept for this report. It was a large onion, speculated as being of Spanish origin, and entirely peeled. While it is impossible that it could always have been the same onion, considering its healthy yellow-white colouration, firm appearance (no one has ever been able to touch it) and the general lack of evidence of any decomposition, it has been noted that it did not seem to change in any discernable sense. He kept his spatula in his trouser pocket – which one did not seem to be a matter of concern – and when wearing a jacket would conceal it. However, as on warm – or simply sunny as it often is in this part of the world – days when the temperature was sufficient for him to deem an extra layer unnecessary, he did not seek to hide the top half of the spatula which poked out of his pocket at a jaunty angle, we can only assume that he never actively sought to deceive the world that he did not have a spatula on his person. It has been noted as rather odd, for a man of such compulsion, that no pattern or trigger could be ascertained as to when he might or might not draw the spatula from his tweed pocket and pat the onion.

I Will Never Mix Again