Starting Over Again

She has been spotted just over the border. Next to a bus stop. The dutiful observers have marked her condition as no higher than "foetal". This marks the culmination of a series of events that started with the street being in a state of disturbance because she had decided upon a dirty protest: lying in the gutter all night had been the final straw – the final straw in question being the one that had been inserted into the last cider bottle of the intended journey home.

She was a card-carrying dipsomaniac. She needed to be. It was not possible to be a dipsomaniac without displaying a dipsomaniac card. Service would be refused. This was just one example of the social engineering endeavours put into place by the new ecumenical government. The card details were electronically tattooed to her forehead. In accordance with the brotherhood junta edict, the expiry date was her expiry date, and would jolt her braincells to extinction and release her soul to its destination at that particular time on that particular date if the alcohol hadn't done the job first.

Fortunately, the obligation to possess what would hitherto have been regarded as an infringement of civil liberties in such a conspicuous fashion was slightly obviated by the removal of any need to carry a bus pass – for, indeed, she was of that age. Dipsomaniac-card carriers were simply breathalysed on their stumbling attempts to board the bus and evicted if their blood contained insufficient alcohol.

This is where our story truly commences. She had drunk mightily the previous day, but had consumed such a huge and unselective quantity of food that her system had delayed the induction of alcohol and for the very first time she had failed the breathalyser test on the last bus back home across the border. Hence the sleeping in the gutter, and hence the blurred decision the next day to undertake the dirty protest.

She had bought up all the supplies of cocoa from all the supermarkets in town and had smeared herself in it. A light drizzle had fallen. It had creamed her chocolate-based purchases to a spiked but wobbly second skin. She walked down the street with this second skin pulsing like an Ivory Coast glacier. Whenever she stopped, it was several seconds before her coating came to a halt, so she gradually built up a huge pectoral fin of semi-liquid, semi-solid chocolate which eventually hardened in the newly emerged sun and meant that every time she subsequently turned around to scream her protests at passers-by, a ridge of pure plain minimum 70% cocoa solids smacked those closest to her to the ground. She didn't care. She was sober, but out-of-control and inconsolable. "Fair transport policies for drunks," she screamed. "Respect for the teetotal and temporary sober! But no half-measures for the half-cut! Equal rights! End this discrimination now! No more picking on the confusion of this nation's alcoholically-affected semi-coherent senior citizens!"

Pedestrians slalomed away to avoid her. Youths videoed her harangues on their mobile phones. Fat boys ran up to her and licked her. Fat girls broke bits off her fin and ate them until her stomach was as smooth as the head on the finest stout. She stared at herself in a shop window and carefully inscribed the single word "SHAME!" into her false front in mirror-writing.

But by now she was frozen into her giant Humpty Dumpty Easter Egg of Protest. The sun was hot enough to bake her into imprisonment, but not hot enough to melt her free. She could do with a drink, but had smeared her face too enthusiastically, so she could now neither partake of anything potable nor continue to shout her protests. Her mouth was cemented shut. Only her nostrils were clear, so she could at least breathe.

She staggered down to the public stage area outside the town hall. Four men dressed in the cowls and robes of the newly set up monks' militia appeared. They stared at her. They powered their lasered eye-beams at her. She started to melt, but her chocolate coating did not. She liquefied and slithered to the curved base of the egg, like an embryo, occupying a mere one eighth of its capacity. She had no control over her movements: she had become merely the swithering swoosh of churned-up body-matter and mangled brain-matter that she had aspired to all her life.

She became aware of monkish hands reaching for her elliptical shell and then she was rolling down the street, asymmetrically and erratically gaining speed, her liquidised remains slopping against the constraining walls of her peripatetic prison.

She picked up speed, her memory telling her that she was skedaddling over a narrow bridge, and she felt her momentum carry her up a hill, around a bend, then up and onto the level, rolling all the way until she became aware of the crossing of the border, because, instantly, it started raining. Her dirty protest Easter egg shell started to thaw.

And now she crawls out of her chocolate cocoon, a slither of primeval sludge fudge. She has been strewn on the earth, and is without form. Her life will have to begin to evolve again. She will need to build up her structure, atom-by-atom, slowly allowing her limbs to emerge and strengthen and gradually, again atom-by-atom, willing her internal organs to regrow. The task will be long and hard, but she will take on board lessons learnt, and the process will culminate in a new body, a new resolve, a new inner purity.

But in the meantime, she could murder a drink.

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