Another time Kelly’s witty charms, pretty smile and fortunately acquired Spanish saved me from a night in some other cells for drunkenly urinating in the streets of Barcelona: “Soy perdón oficial. Por favor perdona a mi novio por ser estúpido.”
And then there was also the time we were stood gawping at a live fish in a bucket, outside a restaurant in Hong Kong when it suddenly leapt out, landing at our very feet on the pavement. Kelly screamed, I jumped back onto the road in shock and stopped traffic; and everyone gave us evils.
If looks could kill, we’d both be in heaven now. Oh yes, we actually are.
Kelly looks exquisite. Death truly does become her. But she isn’t really dead. And we aren’t really in heaven. We can be anywhere we want to be. Everywhere we have been before, we can revisit. Everywhere we never went, we can go. Everything we ever wanted to do, we can. Any time we want.
Life doesn’t have to end with death. Death has merely opened up a new portal of a life I never knew existed. There’s a whole new world out there!
“Let’s go home,” I suggested.
An executive suite at The New York Palace Towers? The Ritz Hotel in sunny gay Paris? The luxury of the Burj Al Arab in Dubai?
No.
Of all the places in the entire world we could be in right now, I couldn’t believe I was yearning for our cosy 2-bedroomed flat in cosmopolitan Gateshead.
Chapter 9.
Back to life, back to (un)reality.
The dreams were no longer fantastical, nor did they need to be. Having Kelly back alone was super-dream enough. Back in our front lounge, back in front of the cheap electrical fire that was probably costing me an arm and leg to heat per hour. But I could care less. It was a dream I didn’t ever want to end.
I stacked a few records on the record changer of the stereogram I’d refurbished for myself. The one I couldn’t bear to part with, much like Kelly.
I loved my classic 45’s.
Unbeknownst to me (at the time, anyway) they stopped making the ‘record changer’ by the dawn of ‘my decade’. They suspected them of scratching the record - being piled on top of each other - so some 1980’s records weren’t made quite so flat and had a tendency to slide around on top of each other. This annoyed me, particularly now when ‘Train of Thought’ started to dance around on top of ‘Eyes without a Face’ and I had to get up off the couch to change the record.
“Maybe you should upgrade?” Kelly projected with just the slightest hint of sarcasm.
She knew I despised the CD. A dead format, living beyond it’s time, I surmised after the fluctuation of the digital download. Purely for 30 something collect-a-geeks, I chastised, as I checked eBay again for another vinyl record I was bidding on: POT. KETTLE. BLACK.
Kelly knew me well. The question now was how well did I know Kelly? We’d had a three-year whirlwind romance that transpired from a fleeting holiday romance into fully fledged couple-dom.
We’d seen some of the world together, feeding a travel bug that just kept on biting: The Americas. Australasia. A bit of random Europia.
And we’d become known as Zelly. Or was it Kac?
We’d also been through quite a bit in the (seemingly) short time we’d been together: Kelly’s dalliances with (and my own avoidances of) her religion (and gin) fuelled mother; her lights are on, but no-one’s home father; and her asylum seeking (from his own mother) brother.
I knew quite a lot about her family, sure enough. But who was Kelly herself?
I had no idea why I was questioning this just now, given that she had been dead a good few months. I guess it sounds a certain degree of bat shit crazy but the Kelly in my dreamscape didn’t seem quite as all-encapsulating as the Kelly I had known and loved to death (in my case, literally.)
She seemed to be holding back on me. It was like… she was there. She was with me again. But she wasn’t really there, if you know what I mean? I decided to address the situation.
“Is everything okay?” I abruptly blurted out in the middle of a cosy tête-à-tête.
“Of course it is,” was her only-half convincing, almost robotic response.
It was probably my fault, again. I was probably placing too much emphasis on it and over questioning things, as usual. But I asked the question anyway: “Are you sure?”
She looked away, somewhat forlorn and I could only grimace.
“I am worried about you Zac,” she eventually returned. “You are spending too much time here.”
I wasn’t sure if this was Kelly or my own subconscious trying to tell me something I already knew. I could feel my obsession of being with Kelly in the dreamscape was spiralling out of control. I wanted to be with her 24-7, which of course was humanely impossible.
I had gone against Stefan’s guidance, ignoring his instruction. Once I discovered the trick of waking up in the dream, of controlling the dream, of bringing Kelly into the dream, I was enveloping a desire to be in more of the dream, more often myself.
I’d even resorted to taking sleeping pills in a desperate bid to spend more time with Kelly. The dreamscape was more alluring than reality and I found myself wanting to spend more time in the former than the latter.
It was wrong. I knew it was wrong. It was unhealthy. And I wasn’t getting my 5 a day.
Perhaps this was why Kelly was seemingly distancing herself from me? Or perhaps it was something else that was occurring while I was away, in a reality I could hardly bear to be in?
I woke up, depressed, agitated and feeling urgent. It was 9.45am, but I needed to get straight back to sleep - and back to Kelly – post-haste.
I took some sleeping pills but they didn’t work so I took a couple more. By noon I was practically a madman personified. I was driving myself insaner, if that is even a word. You could have put me in a round room and told me to find the corners and I’d have been still there looking.
So I took some more sleeping pills… a handful, this time, just to make sure.
I lay down, burrowed myself deep in the duvet and slowly… finally… drifted off.
Chapter 10.
It was February and -27 degrees.
The weather was bleak beyond belief. Stone grey skies and air that was biting cold. I was afraid if my nose ran it would form an icicle.
The wind howled like an American werewolf in London. Except I was in Tallinn, Estonia. I was English. And not a werewolf last time I checked. Though in the dream world anything is possible I guess!
In a desperate attempt to rekindle our seemingly lost spark, I’d decided a bit of spontaneity was the key. So I’d done what we’d joked about doing for years. It wasn’t as much a case of pin the tail on the country as just turning up at the airport and taking the next available flight out.
Estonia also ticked the box of ‘random place we have never been’. And I had always had a bit of a thing about random Europe. It was my own biggest passion after Kelly and stereogram record players.
Montpellier, France. Bruges, Belgium. Bratislava, Slovakia. I’d done a few randomly chosen cities during my more adventurous youth. Before real life, a mortgage and utility bills hit.
I’d googled “Tallinn, Estonia” at the gate and read it was a charming old medieval town with a castle. It was also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the European Capital of Culture for 2011.
Kelly was more excited to learn that her favourite antipodean pop princess was in town as part of her worldwide concert tour. A leopard skin cat suit and dancing water fountains interspersed by scantily clad unisex trapeze artists had us both buzzing like bumble bees in an orgy of honey nectar and pollen.
Afterwards, we may have left the concert arena hot and bothered, but that good old Estonian cut-throat air soon brought us terrifyingly back down to earth with a hefty thud. Like an elephant slipping on a banana skin.
Quite literally when I skidded on ice as black as the midnight sky, landed on my frozen derriere and earned myself a mighty bruise there of the same shade.
Needl
ess to say we also missed the last bus back into Tallinn by literally seconds. We hadn’t known the arena was a few miles outside of the old town when we bought the tickets or that it would run on so late.
It began to snow and the frost began to bite some more. Kelly’s cheeks looked rosy raw and I could feel my nostril icicles beginning to reform. We hunted high and low for a taxi but to no avail, then out of nowhere Ursula suddenly appeared.
Ursula was stunningly attractive and European exotica, with her shiny scarlet flamed red hair neatly tied in a ponytail, sparkling emerald green eyes and porcelain like facial features only enhanced by juicy, full, permanently pouting lips and cheekbones chiselled to perfection.
She also seemed acclimatised to the cold.
Her (I’m assuming) fake golden tan was unflawed. And she was wearing next to nothing. Well compared to me with a pair of tracksuit bottoms tucked into two pairs of socks under my jeans, and a hat and a scarf wrapped around up to practically my eyeballs.
She looked like a supermodel that had just stepped out of a glamour trendy commercial for the latest designer perfume. But hey, she was no Kelly. However she did offer to help us get back into town.
“Follow me,” she said. “I will show you the way to a taxi terminal.”
Her English was only slightly accented and in fact more decipherable than most regional British accents.
We seemed to walk for miles. Many things went through my head, most of which I kept to myself as I didn’t want to scare Kelly. Our beautiful tour guide and Good Samaritan appeared too good to be true. As did her bottom, which I scolded myself for admiring as Kelly’s teeth started to chatter in the brisk night air.
I wondered if Ursula might be a vampire. No her tan was far too good. Was she leading us to her secret sex dungeon slash torture chamber, or was I just fantasising?
I could see the headline: 2 Lost Pop Princess Fans Lead Astray by an Evil Temptress.
I’d pretty much written the script to the latest horror film sequel, by the time we reached a taxi parked by the roadside and fled into the night.
Moral of the story I think is to not be so instantaneously suspicious or wary… of stunning beauties in random countries…
…and of Kelly in dreamscapes I’d created.
We got back into the old town in less than five minutes. Could probably just have walked and saved 12 Euros, I thought as I burrowed through my pockets trying to find some loose change. The taxi driver wasn’t getting a tip because I was sure he was overcharging and that he’d lied about the meter being broken.
Kelly stayed in the cab to keep warm, while I had to also delve into the tracksuit bottom pockets underneath my jeans to find the correct currency. I was feeling a bit awkward, undoing my belt on a street corner in the middle of the night in such icy temperatures, when suddenly the taxi engine roared and the cab sped off, Kelly still inside.
My heart dropped almost as much as my loose pants had. I pulled them up and gave desperate chase but it was no use.
Kelly had been taken.
Chapter 1. (The Lion Wakes Up)
The man on TV smiles and his teeth sparkle. They are a lighter shade of white so brilliant, you feel the need to grab for your shades. His face is lobster red perma-tanned, his jaw chiselled to perfection. He looks plastic fantastic. And he introduces himself:
“Hello and welcome to ‘I’m a Has Been, Please Don’t Feed Me to the Lions’. I am your host Dexter Anton and tonight we see former 80s heart throb Felix from pop band Tequila Sun face off against sex siren Jade Astley, the sultry one from Pink Champagne and one of the Ants from Adam And. But first, here are the highlights from yesterday’s live feed.”
The VT plays and we see Felix and Jade sitting in a cage in the jungle. Felix is wearing a loin cloth, Jade is wearing a coconut bra and a Hawaiian hula skirt. Both are covered in war paint.
“Where is the Ant?” Felix asks.
“He’s still upset over losing Harry from Spandex Belly in the crocodile swamp yesterday,” Jade replies.
The camera cuts to the Ant sat huddled in a corner by himself, rocking backwards and forwards and humming, then mixes back to Dexter in front of a live studio audience. His look of put upon sorrow soon turns into a delighted smirk and he reads his next line right off of the tele-prompter:
“Who will be next to sashay his or her has been little tushie out of the limelight tonight? Find out now in a round we like to call ‘Pass the Bomb’.
Felix, Jade and the Ant are sat in a semi-circle on a giant inflatable banana. Felix is holding a parcel which looks to be a gift wrapped cartoon-style bomb, complete with a lit dynamite fuse sticking out of the top. He looks tentative but not half as freaky outy as the Ant, while cold-as-ice Jade is as cool as a cucumber.
When 80s pop classic ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ starts playing, he passes the parcel of dynamite to Jade who then in turn passes it to the Ant and so on and so forth.
After a few rounds the music suddenly stops and the Ant is left holding the parcel, which then explodes into smithereens, the Ant along with it.
The feed cuts back to the studio, where a proportion of the audience are jeering and heckling.
“Not enough blood that time, eh?” asks Dexter. “Vultures the lot of us, I mean you, heh heh.” The baying crowd chuckles.
“So we are now down to the final 2 survivors and it’s a straight face off between Felix and Jade. Who will be crowned the winner of ‘I’m a Has Been, Please Don’t Feed Me to the Lions’? Find out now in ‘The Bridge of Doooooooom’…
Felix and Jade now stand either side of a rope suspension bridge, above a hundred foot steep drop into a fiery gushing lava.
Dexter fires off himself, again from the tele-prompter: “In this game each contestant has to answer questions from their former 80s heyday. Get a question right and you can move five steps over the bridge. The object is to reach the middle first. However get one wrong and face dire consequences.”
Felix and Jade gasp while Dexter raises an eyebrow with a wicked glint.
“Felix you’re up first. What year did Tequila Sun have their first and last hit singles?”
Felix bites his nails. He knows the first answer is 1984, but not the second. There was just too much vodka and cocaine. Through a haze of sex, drugs and sausage rolls, he throws out a wild guess: “1984 and… 1988?”
The crowd cheers enthusiastically as Dexter announces he is correct and tells him to move forward five spaces onto and over the bridge of certain death.
Felix breathes a sigh of relief as he does so, and mops some sweat from his brow.
“Over to you, Jade.” Dexter laments.
Jade would be shitting her panties, had she been wearing any. But she wasn’t, as usual. And her ankles were getting a tad cold because of it.
“If you can’t stand the cold, what should you do?”
Seems this is an easy one for Jade: “…keep out of the fridge freezer!” she sings, almost in key. And joins Felix in the same position on the opposite side of the bridge.
Bubbling blood red lava spits below them and a gust of wind almost knocks Felix off his feet, giving him the heebie jeebies.
“Felix, who had the biggest penis in Tequila Sun? Yourself, Rhino Zagreb or Cherry Fontaine?”
Is this a trick question? Felix knows full well he was the biggest penis in the band, but did he have it? He decides to throw caution - and his ego - to the wind and go with Cherry instead, and earns himself another rapturous cheer and a further 5 space move into the centre of the bridge.
“Jade, who was the biggest biatch in Pink Champagne?”
Dexter’s eyebrows are dancing like a snake at a school disco. Jade seems stumped and befuzzled.
“Well I would say Rita Barker, but it was probably me.”
Dexter rolls his eyes in cheap disdain.
“I’m sorry Jade. The correct answer is Mick Nelson. Adios my little has been.”
Suddenly the bridge panel Jade is standing on gives way a
nd she falls screaming into a fiery death below her.
Production mixes back to the TV studio and Dexter announces on set: “Please welcome our winner of ‘I’m a Has Been, Please Don’t Feed me to the Lions’, star of 80s pop tarts Tequila Sun… its Felix.
The audience reaction is mixed as Felix joins Dexter on stage, looking both terrified and thrilled. Confetti cannons and fireworks go off and the credits begin to roll.
Chapter 2. (Just Felix)
Felix wakes up with a jolt. He gets out of bed and goes to the shower. As he opens the shower door, a woman is showering with her back to him. She turns around and it is Jade Astley of Pink Champagne back from the dead Dallas-style!
“Good morning,” she says, as she yanks him in the shower to join her, clasping him between her heaving bosom and succubus love loins.
As the water hits him he wakes up again, this time for real as his mobile telephone rings by the side of his bed. He feels around for it blindly, still half asleep, burrowed in the pillow and knocks it from the bedside cabinet onto the floor.
He leans over the side of the bed to retrieve it and answer. It’s his agent Max Jacks.
“Felix this is your wake up call,” he says with a hype too fervent – according to Felix - for this time of the morning, even though it’s almost 12 noon.
“Oh Max, thank God it’s you,” Felix stifles through a yawn. “I thought the whole first chapter of the book had just been a dream.”
Max suspects Felix was up partying hard till probably dawn. Usually literally, with a revolving door of blatant floozies.
“Where are we meeting today?” asks Felix. “The Ivy? Have you sent a limo to pick me up?”
It’s the morning after the wrap party for ‘I’m a Has Been, Please Don’t Feed Me to the Lions’ and Felix is hopeful that having won the show, his career is now finally back on track.
He hasn’t really been in the public eye since 1988 when his band Tequila Sun broke up under somewhat acrimonious circumstances. And his crestfallen attempt at a solo career went somewhat tits up in the early 90s.
“I couldn’t get a table,” Max replies. “But I’ll see you in Wetherspoons at 1 o’clock, so get a move on or you’ll miss the number 27 bus.”