Too Weird for Ziggy Read Online Free Page A

seeing the things they want to keep hidden. Comes in handy for the job.” He lays the shirt back in the suitcase, softly singing—a pretty fair Elton John imitation, as it happens—“‘
Don’t let your son go down on me …
’”
    â€œI wasn’t a bad singer either, if I say so myself. Bloody sight better than you were anyway. I can’t believe your luck, really I can’t.
I
had a band for a while, you know? Of courseyou don’t know. Why would you? We played the pubs around North London for a couple of years, got quite a big following—only local, but there was talk at one point of making a record. ‘Greetings From Finsbury Park,’ we were going to call it—press up a few hundred copies and flog them around the hood. But it all took too much time—rehearsals, late nights, the wives and girlfriends giving us grief. When Dawn got pregnant I chucked it in. I’m still writing songs though. I’ll have to send you a tape of them, maybe you could do something with them—ha! I bet people say that to you all the time.”
    At the next table, a customs man is standing by an open suitcase—triumphantly, ridiculously, wielding a large salami. Its soon-to-be-ex-owner is red-faced, arguing loudly. The customs man throws his colleague a sympathetic glance.
    â€œFirst thing this morning I open this case and there, stuck in a bag of dirty underwear, is this huge hunk of meat wrapped in a cloth. And it’s
crawling
with maggots. And this woman nearly rips my eyes out when I say she can’t bring it into the country. The traveling public is so fucking stupid.
Stupid
. You wouldn’t believe what some of them try and smuggle through”—official face and matching voice—“‘I’m sorry, sir, this is a serious contravention of British law under section 45 paragraph 7a of the Importation Act, now if you’ll just hand it over.’ And you pick up your clipboard and you turn the page and you ask for their passport and you watch the sweat break out and freeze under their eyes and you wait a while and then slowly you turn the page back and you say, ‘Go on. I’ll let it go this time. But
next
time …,’ and they grab their case and fumble with the zip like a kid caught byhis mum with his willy out, and the British public is saved from the scourge of smuggling and the offending article goes into your locker, perk of the job. Like all jobs—
normal
jobs, I mean, present company excepted. You do it for forty-odd years and at the end you’ve got a small house and a big wife and enough in the bank for the annual jaunt to the Costa Del Sol.
You’ve
got a nice house. Saw it in the wife’s
Hello
magazine—swimming pool, Jacuzzi.
Ja-cooooo-zee
. Big-boobed bimbos jiggling in the bubbles. Dawn keeps going on at me that she wants a Jacuzzi—one of those indoor jobs, you know, bathtubs with dog nipples all over. Gave her a fiver and told her to go get a vindaloo and fart in the bathwater, same difference.
    â€œYeah, I married Dawn Burchill—your old girlfriend Minerva’s mate. Small, big tits—you gave her one once, remember? She does. After a couple of drinks she tells
everyone
she’s had sex with the great and glorious Spike—her mouth on your mouth, her mouth on your prick—she says you went down on her. Did you? She says, ‘Why don’t you go down on me like Spike?’”
    A young woman has been led to the table opposite. She and the officer are both bent down over the open case, their hair almost touching. At the customs man’s raised voice, they turn simultaneously and look up at Spike like Siamese twins joined at the head.
    â€œYour parents, do they still live in Finsbury Park? Your dad, I mean—sorry about your mum, I read it in the papers. Over for the funeral I suppose. No, of course you’d have moved them to someplace more salubrious. Hah!