An Early Childhood Chapter 26 Part 1

An Early Childhood Chapter 26 Part 1: A Visit to Middlesex

Continued from the end of Chapter 25.

An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan is a mock surreal autobiography, narrated by a fictional Irish war hero, champion bodhran player, and television presenter. Its first chapter is here. It parodies misery memoirs (such as Angela’s Ashes by the late great Frank McCourt), as well as time travel adventure, pop culture, and literature of various kinds.

Avid readers of this autobiography - of whom there are none, as obtuse and abstruse and cutting edge and avant garde as great literature is, and it being too painful to read - will recall in a previous chapter the death of Eaglekins, an English hostage whom we had taken from Colonel Edward "Gold Bollocks" Tiptoft and had been run over by a train. Eaglekins had pined over the photo of his sweetheart, but with Eaglekins now dead, it fell to me to deliver the news to this wonderful young jazz singing lass. Painfully so, I was now setting off on my journey.

                Well, back to the present. I was swimming at a rate of knots no sooner than the plane shtruck the water, having jumped out just a few metres before the plane hit the waves. Doing first the breast stroke, then butterflies, and finally the back stroke, I got to the beach and climbed the cliff up to a grassy area, and wasn’t I only met by a man wearing a brown leather jacket and a fedora. He had a bullwhip slung over his shoulder, and a gorgeous little man-purse, and a negligence of stubble on his chin.

                “Who are you?” says I to him.

                “You’re not Belloq?” he asks, in a Yankee accent.

                “No.”

                “Who are you then?”

                “I asked first. And who's Belloq?”
                He fixed his jaw into a grim position, and answered:
                "Not you," and then he stared into the middle distance of the sea.

                He reached for a pistol in his holster. Padding where the gun handle should’ve been, he glanced down, realising his gun was missing.

                I grabbed hold of and threw his man-bag into the air. With it still hanging from his neck, I punched it and the force of the punch sent the dark, mysterious figure off the cliff. He fell halfway down the face of the cliff and managed to grab hold of a jutting rut of an outcrop of rock.

                I hurried on my way, not wanting to arouse any further publicity about my arrival on English shores.

                I bunked on a train to Middlesex, where the gorgeous Dyll Oblong was based, according to the address and details which had been provided me by the late Eaglekins. I had walked a good distance from the train station, when I saw the glaring neon lighting of the jazz club - something of an aesthetic obscenity in the picturesque village. It was late evening, and I was feeling a little thirsty.

  

Continued in Chapter 26 Part 2.