‘Armadillo,’ Armadillo thinks. ‘I am. Armadillo.’ He stares at himself in the bank of mirrors. ‘I am Armadillo.’ Aficionado. Pepperoni. Eugenic. His mood is as feathery as an exploding pillow. He’d finished in the hotel swimming pool around 1 a.m. and is now stepping out with an admirer and an uncomfortable grandfather. He thought his legs were airtight but there’s a terrible hiss coming from one of them. He takes from his pocket the inner tube of a penny-farthing, implores it, bungles it, and taps it nervously. ‘That should do it,’ thinks Armadillo. It’s Friday, all the shops are anxious, the bumpers rapturous, and the Virgin Mary’s pretty little ankles chimped and flooded. Shoulders slumped and mouldy bits, he walks into the casino, picks up the hammer and drives tent pegs through the smooth flesh of the television screen. ‘Error and caresses,’ he says, ‘Error and caresses.’
Who was next? It’s vague. It was a long time ago. Nearly forty years. Faces come and go, some stored, most forgotten, along with the names, the histories. He thinks her name may have been Jackie Shepherd. She, too, lived by a green with swings – big swings, and little swings, swings made from car tyres, and swings made from plastic – red, yellow, and blue. Jackie Shepherd was a year older. She was 11. He was 10. She went to senior school. He, still in junior school, still in short trousers, wondered why she liked to hang around with him. He asked. She said it was because he made her laugh and she liked the stories he made up – the stories about tiny dinosaurs living in stones. He hadn’t made that up, he told her. He was sure of that.
Breakfast, dragged from the clutches of sunbeams and unspent shells, is black pyjamas and clumsy statistics. Armadillo licks his plate, his lips, studies the layers of children that are used in place of bricks and winks at himself in the shiny lid of a grand piano, scaled and stifling. He asks for a glass of buttermilk but when it comes to the table, it is all modern and beginning. ‘Yeuch,’ thinks Armadillo. Jealousy slaps the plants about, inveigles itself in the dizzy lanterns, lords it over headaches and test tubes. The infinite kippers below his ribcage start to spatter and hump and he calms them with a little hole through which he nickers. A few moments at the museum and he’s off. The airy dormitory’s anomalous clock quaking in his wake. He’s not feeling well but the dismal fog and the pink boots.
It was, clichéd as it sounds, behind the bike sheds where he first saw a vagina. Karen Higginbotham’s vagina to be precise. He didn’t know that that was what everybody called it – vagina – and, to be further precise, that isn’t the correct anatomical term at all – so, we’ll start again. It was, clichéd as it sounds, behind the bike sheds where he first saw Karen Higginbotham’s vulva. Her thingy. She had lifted her skirt, pulled down her blue and white striped knickers, and opened her legs. He looked. He rubbed his glasses. Cleaned them. Got down on his hands and knees and looked closer. He took a six-inch wooden ruler from his satchel and he prodded it. It gave. It sprung back. He prodded it again. Karen Higginbotham’s vulva was hairless and pink and it made him feel dizzy and slightly sick.
Armadillo is looking at his fingernails, unmistakably silver and baritone. His scutes are itching big time and, not two feet away, a greasy lemon and a salt-pork tallboy are gossiping about beriberi and duck foam. ‘Leave it to me,’ Armadillo says. His eyes, the blue of cupcakes, trauma-white, scan for paper bags and cardboard kisses. ‘Nothing doing,’ Armadillo thinks. His snout, under scrutiny, looks rather like Bolivia, and he covers it with hot needles, with goddamn compunction. A blizzard winds out of Wisconsin cadging cigarettes on its way. The chandeliers are ready; all he needs now are saltines and the enormous bowl of bullfighter soup. He wraps his chin with a disturbing sadness and turns his back on the room – admirable and kidnapped to perfection. Isn’t it? Nor is there the wadded horror in his throat. No, there isn’t.
She would lie naked on her parents’ bed and he would lie next to her fully clothed and stroke her skin. It was soft. She had dark brown shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, a small nose, sharp teeth, and a pointy tongue. To this day, these are what he looks for in a woman, if he has a preference, and he often doesn’t. One day, when her parents were at work and he and the girl had spent the morning sunbathing and he could see the sweat glistening on her skinny body, she said, ‘You can do things to me if you want,’ and he didn’t know what things to do and so got up from the bed and went home confused and sad. She never asked him again. After the summer holidays were over she stopped calling him and before a football match on a Saturday morning, Ian Mitchell gathered the team about him and told them all the things he had done that week to Karen Higginbotham.
It’s dirty, it’s triumphant, and it starts to swim away. In the parlour, cooing deeply, Armadillo crushes a conch shell on his drunken tongue. Perfect, separate, and during, like a porch; no, like a peach; no, like a pit. ‘Armadillo.’ Armadillo thinks. Craggy, blushing, surrendering and suspended, the pilots drop from the skies; their parachutes, made from endangered species, fail to open and devastate the highway with unused diaphragms and large black birds that look like crows but close up are nothing but the burned notebooks of high-classed hookers and souls both compromised and gelatine. ‘I gots to get out of this place,’ Armadillo says to no one in particular. Abducted in stages, he loses it sequence by glittery sequence.
Who was next? It’s vague. It was a long time ago. Nearly forty years. Faces come and go, some stored, most forgotten, along with the names, the histories. He thinks her name may have been Jackie Shepherd. She, too, lived by a green with swings – big swings, and little swings, swings made from car tyres, and swings made from plastic – red, yellow, and blue. Jackie Shepherd was a year older. She was 11. He was 10. She went to senior school. He, still in junior school, still in short trousers, wondered why she liked to hang around with him. He asked. She said it was because he made her laugh and she liked the stories he made up – the stories about tiny dinosaurs living in stones. He hadn’t made that up, he told her. He was sure of that.
Breakfast, dragged from the clutches of sunbeams and unspent shells, is black pyjamas and clumsy statistics. Armadillo licks his plate, his lips, studies the layers of children that are used in place of bricks and winks at himself in the shiny lid of a grand piano, scaled and stifling. He asks for a glass of buttermilk but when it comes to the table, it is all modern and beginning. ‘Yeuch,’ thinks Armadillo. Jealousy slaps the plants about, inveigles itself in the dizzy lanterns, lords it over headaches and test tubes. The infinite kippers below his ribcage start to spatter and hump and he calms them with a little hole through which he nickers. A few moments at the museum and he’s off. The airy dormitory’s anomalous clock quaking in his wake. He’s not feeling well but the dismal fog and the pink boots.
It was, clichéd as it sounds, behind the bike sheds where he first saw a vagina. Karen Higginbotham’s vagina to be precise. He didn’t know that that was what everybody called it – vagina – and, to be further precise, that isn’t the correct anatomical term at all – so, we’ll start again. It was, clichéd as it sounds, behind the bike sheds where he first saw Karen Higginbotham’s vulva. Her thingy. She had lifted her skirt, pulled down her blue and white striped knickers, and opened her legs. He looked. He rubbed his glasses. Cleaned them. Got down on his hands and knees and looked closer. He took a six-inch wooden ruler from his satchel and he prodded it. It gave. It sprung back. He prodded it again. Karen Higginbotham’s vulva was hairless and pink and it made him feel dizzy and slightly sick.
Armadillo is looking at his fingernails, unmistakably silver and baritone. His scutes are itching big time and, not two feet away, a greasy lemon and a salt-pork tallboy are gossiping about beriberi and duck foam. ‘Leave it to me,’ Armadillo says. His eyes, the blue of cupcakes, trauma-white, scan for paper bags and cardboard kisses. ‘Nothing doing,’ Armadillo thinks. His snout, under scrutiny, looks rather like Bolivia, and he covers it with hot needles, with goddamn compunction. A blizzard winds out of Wisconsin cadging cigarettes on its way. The chandeliers are ready; all he needs now are saltines and the enormous bowl of bullfighter soup. He wraps his chin with a disturbing sadness and turns his back on the room – admirable and kidnapped to perfection. Isn’t it? Nor is there the wadded horror in his throat. No, there isn’t.
She would lie naked on her parents’ bed and he would lie next to her fully clothed and stroke her skin. It was soft. She had dark brown shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, a small nose, sharp teeth, and a pointy tongue. To this day, these are what he looks for in a woman, if he has a preference, and he often doesn’t. One day, when her parents were at work and he and the girl had spent the morning sunbathing and he could see the sweat glistening on her skinny body, she said, ‘You can do things to me if you want,’ and he didn’t know what things to do and so got up from the bed and went home confused and sad. She never asked him again. After the summer holidays were over she stopped calling him and before a football match on a Saturday morning, Ian Mitchell gathered the team about him and told them all the things he had done that week to Karen Higginbotham.
It’s dirty, it’s triumphant, and it starts to swim away. In the parlour, cooing deeply, Armadillo crushes a conch shell on his drunken tongue. Perfect, separate, and during, like a porch; no, like a peach; no, like a pit. ‘Armadillo.’ Armadillo thinks. Craggy, blushing, surrendering and suspended, the pilots drop from the skies; their parachutes, made from endangered species, fail to open and devastate the highway with unused diaphragms and large black birds that look like crows but close up are nothing but the burned notebooks of high-classed hookers and souls both compromised and gelatine. ‘I gots to get out of this place,’ Armadillo says to no one in particular. Abducted in stages, he loses it sequence by glittery sequence.
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