Hide and Sleek
A collaboration with Stuart Hughes



The werewolf was not a werewolf at all. Or as far as a swarthy man with huge jaws, large teeth, shaggy chest and hirsute loose-sandalled toes can be not-a-werewolf. And who brought up the subject of werewolves in the first place? Certainly not me. I encountered Lestat Argent at a Job Centre in Surrey. Being both unemployed, he long term, me hopefully not, and each of us recognising the other from a Sixties schoolday Saturday job in Essex (which, for those who do not know, is quite a long way from Surrey), we struck up small talk. I could tell his 'thing' was labouring, sweat and guts, and all that: lugging bricks for more skilled, if less hairy, brutes to lay as walls: straining, stretching, cracking muscles, flexing bones, chewing on four-letter words as if they were dead mens' knuckles and, in short, wielding limbs rather than fingers ... well, Lestat Argent was not an ideal companion for someone like me: a wimp, admittedly, and a mind with very little body, but with such an intellect I thought I could write about life in a clever way so that other people wanted to read what I wrote. Even my abodes were cerebral...



I've come to have a butchers at your house since you seem to have a FOR SALE board leaning outside. What you say? I've got to come back another day! Blimey, mate, you say I must make an appointment through the Estate Agent, first? Well, blow me down with a feather duster, what's all this ABOUT? Don't you WANT to flog the house? I don't suppose you've had too many punters for this posh joint, any way. Too toffee-nosed by half, if you ask me. You ain't asking me? Well, whether you ask or not, I'll tell you a thing or three. AND I'll try to keep my lingo up to scratch, to suit your old high-faluting school tie. You see, where I grew up, houses had ripe mould swelling between the roof slates, like unto the very gum disease I suffer from these days. See, if I smile - and I don't smile often - you can see it hanging there like it fell from the insides of my nose. Come off it, dear sir, don't stare so. You want me to buy this house, don't you? So, it's up to you to SELL it. My criteria, you ask? Well, I want somewhere a bit lower down the hill from here, a house with a bit more wearing in its chassis, a bit further along the road of ENTROPY, if you get my drift, with fermenting stains across the blistered ceilings, wattles dangling from the gutters and designer crap across the windows instead of curtains. I could do with a different part of town from here, altogether, come to think of it. This area's too far from the market AND too snooty for my nose. Well, IS there a case of chronic slippage in the works? Or, even better, an insidious super-sidence of the roof systems? Well, can you fulfil my basic CRITERIA?



So Lestat Argent was not an ideal companion, but one I thought I could work on, scrutinise from behind my eyes, dissect each metaphorical sinew of his make-up and trawl for out-of-my-own-body titbits of experience: subsequently to distil into the neatest possible words for you to read - and enjoy. But he didn't exactly pan out on paper as he did in physical reality. He became an unbelievable figment of my heated imagination. Nobody believed that a werewolf could exist in a sane non-fictional world as transpired next to the skin of common folk. Not that I called him a werewolf. That would have been asking for trouble. Werwolves are fantastical creatures dreamed up by people who should know better: monsters of the night to scare obstreperous children: fiends of fur and fang who yowl and howk below deep-pan moons. I supposed it all stemmed from him telling me that he was driven by forces which he didn't fully understand. I cautiously looked around us in the Job Centre to see if anyone was earwigging. I didn't want to be tarred with the same brushful of benighted red paint.

"Do you remember those awful Colchester dusks when the fields were flatter than ever and the sky emptier?" he asked, with a deep-seated snarl that was in no way connected with the tongue or, even, throat. This was a mite larger than small talk !

"No, not really. I mean, yes, Essex is interminably featureless, but to my mind - I don't, didn't really mind." I had never stuttered before in my whole life, but today felt as if my teeth, as well as mind, were getting in the way of the words. I floundered, too, in a swampy creek of meaninglessness - which, in many ways, is a vital ingredient of true small talk. Hang about! I was meant to be the educated one, wasn't I? This thick-cut fellow Lestat Argent was quickly becoming ill-defined and unconvincing.

"I don't get the same problems in Surrey, somehow," he said.

"What problems?" I had indeed heard rumours of the Surrey Badlands and the neighbouring Southern Mysteries near Dorking. But these were from sources which might have better remained untapped. "You mean the hills, like Box Hill, Leith Hill, Clockhouse Estate...?" Well, I knew what I meant.

"In a way. With the lie of the land, the contours, the compensating ley-lines, the moon loses its power. It's always concealed by wayward trees. Whilst in Essex, everything was in the open, flayed to the bone, cut to soil level. There I could not shake off my rear-sprouting mane..."



Well, what ABOUT my criteria. Are they manageable? You can't. Well that's no BLOODY good to me is it. Still, while I'm here, I might as well take a butchers anyway. So are you going to let me in or not? You're NOT. Why the FUCKING HELL not? If you let me in I might like the place, despite the fact it doesn't meet my criteria. I might fall in love with it and get a real BONER just walking round the place from room to room. I might want to make you an offer right here and now - and then you might get a sale. But you have to deal with me, mate. Just me. I don?t believe in white-collar bureau-fucking-crats like estate agents and solicitors. Fucking criminals the lot of them. Don?t let my looks deceive you, guv, I've got money see. Plenty of it. I could buy this house cash if I wanted to. IF I like it, that is. IF it gives me a rock hard BONER. So are you going to let me in or not? You're NOT. Well, we'll have to see about that then, won't we. What have I got in my pockets? Sound like Gollum, don't I? Mind you, I bet a toffee-nosed posh like you never read THE HOBBIT or LORD OF THE RINGS did you? What have I got in my pocketses, I wonder? Where's my precious? Aaah, here it is. Here's my precious knife. NOW will you let me in? Yep, OK OK, it's only a penknife for wolf cubs. But some do say one's house and home needs to fit one's body, like the body fits the soul or neither will feel at home. You can't help me, you say? Still got to see the Estate Agent? What's HE know about houses? Nothing, I be bound. I don't suppose he even knows where it is. And location IS quite vital when you want to sell a house. Getting down to brass ticktocks, can I bring my surveyor round tonight? He'll bring his sledge-hammer AND lashings of woodworm curry. We'll have a good time, I expect. I'll bring a half-pint bottle of pale ale and perhaps we can get drunk on it and have a wild party. Blimey, here I go again. Do you know what, I've got a NEED coming on, a deep worrying NEED to have a look at your loft. Can I? Can I? Please! Let me. I believe that's where I'll establish my living quarters. I've got a feeling it'll be ideal. Can it be shuttered up? I can then pretend I'm a character in one of those weird horror stories, fast going to seed, like a Lurking Thing... What you say? What you say? Make an appointment through the Estate Agent. Will HE know about the loft? Has he colour photos of it? Measurements of all the strange angles of its interior? OK, you win, Mr Geezer, I'll see your bleeding Estate Agent and give him several unwanted pieces of my mind. I bet the loft's been converted into a squash court anyway! And I reckon the bog's just dripping in bleach! Or the whole place is a would-be hobbit's coffin, I'd say, one with all mod cons. Whatever, I hope you gazzumph yourself and choke on your lavatory chain.



I looked askance. I could see from Lestat Argent's loosely buttoned shirt that his chest was a seething mass of wiry black cilia. Imagining his back thus swathed was a feat of belief suspension beyond even a self-styled writer such as I. Yet I saw his loins and buttocks swaddled in fire-streaked swags of fur - in my mind's eye, I hasten to add. Heterosexuals, such as yours truly, do not go about looking at men's backsides, do they?

"...but here," he continued, " I merely have to sit out the moon's optimum hours, with my mother's silver brooch pinned to my pyjamas, and, it's morning before you can say Knife."

"Your mother's silver brooch?"

"Yes, I left her body buried in Essex."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Ummm - any sign of, of a job?"

"There was one in an abattoir - just been taken, though."

But I had already gone, since his statement had been shot around with a four-letter word, a flesh-corrupted "Grrr!" Yet I hope my meaningful, if short-lived, encounter with one of those members of the so-called underclass in Great Britain these days (and the silver-tongued prose I'm about to redraft) can illuminate the shadowy areas of life and helps you, the prosperous reading public, decide, inter alia, where to move house.



Yeah, GAZZUMPH yourself, Mr GEEZER, Mr BASTARD GEEZER. Gazzumph, or is it Gazump, or Garrotte ... one or the other I'll be bound, and some stupid Spanish word to boot. OK, OK, I?ll go see your Estate Agent, but first I'm going to top up my skin cancer in this fine English summer weather. Don?t mind me hanging around to top up my tumour tan, do you. You do? Well tough titty, mate. TOUGH TITTY! Im claiming squatter's rights AND tanning rights in your front yard. Can't call it a garden can you, mate, nothing but concrete this. I'd expected better from a high-faluting old school tie snob like you. So go ring your toffee-nosed Estate Agent and get him to evict me. If you DARE. I bet you DAREN'T though. DARE YOU, DARE YOU, DOUBLE DOUBLE DARE YOU! And while you're at it I'll just get myself ready for some ultra violets. Off with me shirt. Now me vest. Not fogetting me trouser-zip and me... Hey! Don't go. DON?T YOU WANT TO SEE ME HIDE?



I'd never met my Estate Agent face to face. Everything done over the phone. I'd never have guessed he'd've had the gall bladder to come round disguised as a lofty punter ... to test whether I might have squeezed him out by dealing with punters direct, no doubt. But when the bleeding hobbit opened his trousers, I saw what he really was: THE LORD OF THE FLIES...

Things like THAT never happened in Surrey.

Blimey, what an ultra daisy! And yet another chance meeting with the one with moonshine-cancer.

Gizzus a job, Gazza! SHIT, I'm getting as bad as him!

A mite larger than small talk, when all was said and done.