We Stupid Apes

Entry by: Miss Babs

26th August 2016
Between the two of them they made a wall impenetrable to the skinny, chewing lads and the curvy, goose-fleshed girls. They kept their faces blank. Sometimes they stood with their arms folded or crossed at the wrists, their fingers curved protectively around their balls. Occasionally, their arms hung at their sides, curved like those of ballet dancers in first position. Every now and then they would have to kick someone’s head in and no, neither of them liked doing it, but sometimes you had to make an example of a person or just put an end to a tiresome exchange of views.
On this particular evening they had noticed a bespectacled and cherubic-looking lad – a student, probably – dropping pills into a girl’s drink. Shane had beckoned him over with a smile, as though he had a funny joke to tell him. The lad came over, nervous but smiling, with a ‘what’s up?’ expression on his face. Dane (not his real name) had joined Shane after pouring the spiked drink into the sink behind the bar and, each taking an elbow, they lifted him off his feet. The lad had looked a bit like a cartoon character as his feet pedalled uselessly and his head twisted this way and that. When they dropped him onto the cobbles in the ginnel next to the bar he landed on his arse and they waited for him to get up. When he did, Shane landed him a soft solar plexus tap which knocked him on his arse again. The lad looked like he was going to cry, his glasses askew. Dane gestured encouragingly at the lad to stand up, which he did with difficulty, the sole of his trainers slipping on a discarded kebab as he rose. When he was upright once more, Dane head-butted him. It wasn’t his best shot because the kid was a short-arse but there was a satisfying crack and a surprised cough from the lad. Dane and Shane jumped nimbly aside so that the blood that flew out of his nose and mouth didn’t land on them.
‘Fractured nasal bone?’ Dane asked Shane, who had a good understanding of facial anatomy from studying for his degree in dentistry.
‘Yeah,’ said Shane. ‘They’ll need to straighten that at A and E. Painful as fuck. They’ll probably give him a benzodiazepine for the pain, maybe Rohypnol. Ironic.’
The kid was whimpering and holding both hands over his nose in case either of these Neanderthals attacked it again. He needn’t have worried. Shane delivered a sharp and accurate kick to the bollocks as he shouted, ‘Trop belle pour toi!’ which was one of his favourite films. As far as Gérard Depardieu went, he actually preferred Jean de Florette but you couldn’t shout that out when you were hurting someone. Dane grunted. He wasn’t an enthusiast of French cinema. Literature was his passion, especially the works of J.G. Ballard. He was currently reading Ian Parkinson’s debut novel ‘The Beginning of the End’ and had found it eerily Ballardian, in a most pleasing way. He must remember to talk to Maxine about it.
The lad was now crying and cowering and repeating over and over the words, ‘oh fuck’. He buckled as Shane and Dane pulled him to standing and dragged him back to the main street. Shane called an ambulance while Dane explained to the lad why you should never, ever spike a person’s drink. They left him propped against a ‘No Parking’ sign on the corner of the street so that the ambulance driver would see him. Shane noticed that the lad had pissed himself, which he must have done before he kicked him in the balls. It was difficult to urinate with a testicular haematoma.
Dane and Shane walked back to the bar where Maxine - a beautiful, twenty-stone woman with skin the colour of Caramac - was standing with her arms across her splendid chest, reading ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.
‘Any good?’ asked Dane, with one eyebrow raised. He liked Maxine, rather a lot. He’d often thought how sweet it would be to have a little tumble with her.
‘It’s shit,’ she replied. ‘I found it in the bogs. It’s almost unreadable, but because it’s written in the first person narrative…’ Maxine shrugged and Dane nodded sympathetically. Maxine was completing her PhD thesis on Gender and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction. Dane remembered that he wanted to talk to her about Death of Affect in Parkinson’s novel and he offered to buy her a brandy. The bar manager always allowed a staff lock-in at weekends. He offered to buy one for Shane too, who said he wanted to get back and crack on with his Buñuel boxset.
As they chatted in the doorway of the bar, a shambling group of men and women eyed them as they passed and once they were at a safe distance made monkey noises and banana-eating gestures. Maxine, Dane and Shane looked on, pityingly. ‘Dickheads,’ they said in unison.