An Early Childhood: Chapter World War 3

Springing ahead from the 1920s (found elsewhere on this blog), here is an excerpt from An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan set in the Second World War. Continued from here.

“You are CornJulio,” Bern-ard shot back in a cod Native American accent. “You need tepee for my bungee spongiform encephalitis! Welcome to die."

Everyone roared laughing except for Cornjulio, who didn’t take to the word-theft of tepee for purposes of cultural misappropriation as a kind of joke. The Good Doctor withdrew a surgical glove from the breast pocket of his laboratory coat. It slowly emerged, fingers first, before the whole thing jettisoned itself across Barrel-Chested Bern-ard’s face with a snap. A red mark on the cheek flared into existence with the blink of an eye and another eye, both of them Bernie’s, and a veritable shocked silence filled the entire ward, in part because many of the patients were too unwell to say anything at all at all in the first place.

You could still cross swords in neutral Spain according to the Geneva Convention, and a duel was declared. In one corner of the yard, CornJulio took his fencing sword out of its scabbard.

Barrel-Chested Bern-ard managed to quickly affix a bit of barbed wiring atop a plank in a kind of gruesome homage to Motown’s famous Jackson 5, had he been some thirty years later, his anger mounting to accommodate his height. There he stood, staring at the far lighter and more agile CornJulio, as he squeezed more than a fistful of high-grade tin meshing, squished into the size of a bitter lemon, onto the stick. We watched it spring into a fine orb-like shape before our eyes, it being akin to the stored energy atop a wizard’s staff.

And so the two men circled each other, CornJulio in a kind of terpsichorean mince, Bernie of the more definitive stance, and quite stompy.

CornJulio thrust his sword at the bigger man’s head with a scalpel-like precision, and the American weaved his head out of the way, his body remaining motionless. Next, Bernie stepped forward, launching the staff he’d constructed at the smaller’s man’s torso. CornJulio sprang back but, mid-somersault, his shoelace caught the mesh head of Bernie’s pole. And then, via a static charge, the shoelace connected to his foot nerves (like in the song about an atomy connection between electrons and associated particles) and the doctor – a qualified trauma surgeon among other specialisms, in a variety of fields – started to shriek. Bern-ard grabbed the pole’s other end, and held it at length from CornJulio who now writhed in pain on the ground.

“Say the line,” Bern-ard boomed.

“The line.” The doctor nodded his head.

“No. Tell me you’re Cornjulio and how you’re going to satisfy my brain injury.”

“I am CornJulio,” the doctor agreed, aggrieved. “I need tepee for your bungee spongiform encephalitis!”

“Welcome to die." Bern-ard nodded, egging him on in acknowledgement. Tugging the pole, he dragged the doctor, flailing at the pain, back into the ward. Big Bern-ard grabbed a pillow off his bed.

In the time it took Bern-ard to grab the head-supporting sleep accessory in order to start the process of a smothering, CornJulio employed the dance skills he had trained all his life with, flipping his limbs evasively such that first, the shoe causing his pain came away from his foot, and secondly he was standing tall – albeit small against Big Bern-ard, whose only response was to stare at him, pillow in hands.

“I am CornJulio.” The doctor smiled. “I need tepee for your bungee spongiform encephalitis! Welcome to die.”

WHUMP!

CornJulio punched the bigger man straight in the shnozz and Big Bern-ard’s head moved a quarter-inch backwards with the shock. The doctor-dancer spent a good ten minutes partaking of a jig around the bigger man, and the hostiple unit more general, always returning to the big fella to deliver either a slap in the conker, a kick in the gruan, or a bum-rub to the bum – pandering to a kind of wink at the hormonal tendencies of certain animals, while continuing to deliver the line:

“I am CornJulio. I need tepee for your bungee spongiform encephalitis! Welcome to die!”

Big Bern-ard, meanwhile, would try to snatch after the doctor, but the more agile trauma-surgeon was too quick for him. Not only that, but Bern-ard had been constapitic for more than a week, and he was feeling more lumbersome than usual.

“What’s taking you so long, merd-a head-a?” CornJulio asked at one point, prancing from one foot to the other. “Is my medical treatment failing you?”

“No!” roared Barrel-chested Bern-ard, as though barking away a request that seemed to confound him rather than answer the specific question. “I mean…Yes!”

“And why so?” CornJulio drew back his head and roared with laughter himself, before Bern-ard – almost within arm’s reach as it was, barrelled forward and grabbed the yogically-framed dance master by the shoulders, hurling him to the floor, and grabbing his head.

“Because you are CornJulio.” Bern-ard fell atop the smaller man, pressing thumbs into his eyes. “You need tepee for MY bungee spongiform encephalitis!” He collapsed the surgeon’s skull with a fruit-crusher’s propensity for squishing a melon. “Welcome…to…die.”

The rest of the patients – all of us to a man, and one person who’d had his genitals lost in the trenches – lurched forward in our beds and regurgitated the day’s breakfast.

“Who the hell’s gonna remove my brackets now?” {[(Frank O’Connor)] demanded to know once he’d wiped the tears of outrage at Bern-ard’s fury from his face.

“He started it!” Bern-ard insisted, wiping brain matter from his hands and he got to his feet again. “Might is right!”

Might is wrong, I said, only to myself in my own internal monologue.