To all members of the Eclectic Foundation: Important update.
The last time I saw Tattooed Teresa was on the day of that ill fated 60 Reasons Conference: Just before I passed out from the shock of seeing Tiny Bonnett’s bare body I vaguely remember seeing her running after him. She didn’t visit me in hospital, and I had presumed she was vacationing somewhere at her majesty’s pleasure as is her annual habit.
This morning there was a desperate pounding on my front door. Mr Eclectic went into panic mode and started flushing things down the toilet. I gingerly opened the door only to find a frantic Tattooed Teresa screaming for me to let her in. She rushed past me, knocking me into the wall with such force that I ended up through the wall and into next door’s hallway. On entering the living room she ran around in circles like a dog chasing it’s tail, and howling like a coyote.
Mr Eclectic emerged from the bathroom, and used a dining chair and leather whip to manoevure the rabid Teresa safely onto the sofa, whilst I made shushing noises and threw her raw steaks in an attempt to calm her down. Finally exhausted and spent she told me the horrific story of what happened to her after the conference:
After being knocked out by the explosion Teresa eventually came round to see the naked Tiny Bonnett running through the debris, being chased by a very amorous and grinning goat. The goat was being chased by the very jealous Doris of Knutsford, who was threatening it with castration if it harmed the single hair on Bonnett’s head. Teresa said she became transfixed at the surreal scene unfolding before her eyes and wanted to see if the goat or Doris would win Tiny’s affections, so she decided to follow them.
As the sound of distant police sirens filtered through the air, Tiny Bonnett and his bizarre procession of goat, Doris and Teresa, ran out of the conference hall driveway and down the normally quiet Nutters Lane. The mainly elderly residents were in their front gardens with their beloved pets having heard the initial explosion. In a Pavlovian response to what they believed was the bombing of the conference hall some of them were frantically building Anderson shelters; some were sewing blackout curtains; and some had spontaneously formed a choir and were singing songs from the Blitz.
The choir was in the middle of their rendition of ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’ when they caught sight of the exposed sweating, Bonnett and his swinging undercarriage, racing past. They stopped mid note, their mouths agape in perfect unison. A few of the poor ladies fainted. One man shouted ‘eh lad, you better put some cream on that, it looks right nasty.’ Many of them unfortuneately let go of their dog’s leads and a pack of ravenous, yapping Yorkshire Terriers, miniature Schnausers, and Pugs joined the chase of the hapless Bonnett.
The Bonnett procession snaked down Nutters Lane and now included; a lovesick goat, a lovelorn Doris, Tattooed Teresa, a pack of hungry minature pooches, and their angry, distressed owners. The addition of the dogs seemed to terrify Tiny even more; he became demented and started screaming for someone to throw them Snickers Bars. The dogs’ horrified owners became enraged at him threatening to poison their canines with chocolate and offered him eye watering suggestions about where to shove his bars.
Doris was by now frantic with worry about her beloved’s safety and pleaded with him to find a way to protect himself:
‘Tinykins! Tinykins!’, she cried, ‘Find a woman to hide behind, please, my sweet!’
Tinykins fruitlessly scanned the horizon for a woman to hide behind and silently cursed himself for not dragging his poor old mother to the conference. Such was his distress that when he passed a road sign that warned of ‘humps for 50 metres’ he didn’t feel the usual obsessive complulsion to tear it down- due to metric being the’ tool of the devil’. He had his own tool to take care of, but he made a mental note to return later to remove the metric blasphemy, should he survive the day’s events.
A despairing Doris once again screamed out to Bonnett;
‘Tinykins, that goat ain’t got no right to persecute your magnificence like this!’
Tiny, now red-faced and visibly flagging struggled to make himself heard over the din of the excited, bleating goat and baying dogs as he responded to Doris;
‘For goodness sake woman,’ he bellowed, ‘how can we expect to have any kind of relationship if you continue to insist on using double negatives?”
Doris blushed and slapped herself for her grammatical faux pas. The goat smiled smugly.
Tiny was now running out of energy and options. He could almost feel the horny goat’s warm breath on his naked, hairy behind, and the idea of Doris getting her amorous claws into him filled him with as much dread as the goat did; he needed a place of sanctuary and fast.
Bonnett spotted an old, run down, derelict chapel towards the end of the lane. It was boarded up but vandals had prised open one of the wooden boards, just enough for him to possibly squeeze through. Tiny made a beeline for the hole. On reaching it, he found the gap was smaller than he had anticipated, and he had to really struggle to get his aching, naked body through it, but the goat’s close proximity to Tiny’s behind was all the incentive he needed to force himself through the small space.
His victory came at a price however; he managed to impale himself on splinters the size of matchsticks,with his forehead and palms taking the biggest hit. As he sat on the cold wooden floor of the dilapidated chapel, listening to the sound of the frustrated goat wrestling with desperate Doris outside, he pulled the splinters out one by one, wincing as the blood oozed from his wounds and trickled down his bare body. Feeling very sorry for himself he hobbled towards the redundant lectern at the back of the chapel, wondering where it all went so wrong. The chapel was damp and cold, with missing floorboards, bare exposed electrical wires and missing roof tiles. It was all so fitting, somehow.
Outside, the crowd had now been swelled by the late arrival of the other members of the 60 Reasons group. Doris had the goat pinned down with a Half Nelson, and was begging Tattooed Teresa to help her get into the chapel so she could reunite with her Tinykins. Teresa finally agreed to help Doris when a crate of Newky Brown was offered as a reward.
Using her legendary strength Teresa ripped the board from the entrance as though it was made of tissue paper. Doris was the first one in (still holding the goat), followed by Teresa and the 60 Reasons groupies. The small congregation stood still whilst their eyes adjusted to the poor light in the chapel. Tiny was at the back of the chapel pacing up and down, mumbling to himself. It was at this point that a series of events coincided to produce a bizarre tableau:
A shaft of sunlight suddenly pierced the darkness via a missing roof tile. It illuminated the exact place at the back of the chapel where Tiny Bonnett had just stepped forward, arms outstretched, eyes to the heavens screaming ‘Why me? Why me?’. The group gasped in unison as they were now able to see the blood gently flowing from Bonnett’s forehead and palms. With his next step forward, a noise like a gunshot reverberated around the chapel and Bennett bizarrely began to shake uncontrollably; his single hair stood on end and he began to levitate.
Some of the onlookers began to scream and head for the exit. Doris dropped the goat and fell to her knees screaming,
He’s divine! He’s divine! Just as I always knew, my Tinykins is divine!’
As Tiny continued to shake and rise from the floor, other members of the 60 Reasons group joined Doris by falling to their knees in amazement and adopting the prayer position. Deluded Doris was now in her element and speaking in tongues. She stood up, turned to the prostrate ‘parishoners’ and announced in a husky voice;
‘I hereby ordain The Order of the Chipolata’ in the name of his diviness Tiny Bonnett.
Meanwhile, the goat had regained the blood flow to its legs and had spotted its hovering, beloved Bonnett. The grin returned to its face as it prepared to get its prey. Tattooed Teresa was now watching the goat and knew what was coming next. She headed for the back of the chapel in anticipation of the goat’s next move.
The goat had stealthily trotted down the side of the chapel and was about to approach Bonnett from behind. Teresa was now in position and saw what happened next: Whilst Doris and the Order of the Chipolata were worshipping Tiny at the front of the building, with their heads bowed and their eyes closed; the goat launched itself violently at Bonnett’s derriere. Tiny was knocked out of his orbit and landed hard on the floor some 30 metres away, in the darkness, beneath a wooden bench The goat was now shaking, his hairs standing on end and levitating in place of Tiny.
The members of the Order opened their eyes to find their divine one had transmogrified into a grinning goat. Doris was unperturbed by her Tiny’s transformation and declared him more handsome than ever.
Teresa was now intrigued; by the Order’s gullibility and by what was causing the goat to levitate, like Tiny had done before it. She approached the goat carefully, and noticed a bare electrical wire, surrounded by a puddle of water, beneath the hovering goat. Now it all made sense; Tiny was not divine – he’d simply stepped on a live wire in a puddle and had been electrocuted. When the goat made contact with Tiny’s butt, he had broken the circuit and taken Tiny’s place. Teresa sniggered and looked for something rubber to rescue the goat with. Tiny was still unconscious beneath the bench.
When Doris saw Teresa approaching her divine Tiny in goat form, she became incensed and ordered her acolytes to apprehend the tattooed one and save His Royal Goatness. The members of the Order obeyed the rabid one and it took twelve of the gullible ones to wrestle Teresa to the ground.
Teresa’s attempts to educate them about Tiny’s electrocution and his lying injured beneath a bench fell on deaf, ignorant ears. She was gagged, tied and bound, and promised her freedom only when she swore allegiance to the Order of the Chipolata and His Divine Goatness. Her adamant refusal meant that she had spent weeks and weeks in that cold, dark chapel, with the Order and the poor goat; who had only stopped levitating when the electricity meter ran out of credit the following week. The real Tiny Bonnett had awoken the next day and sneaked out whilst Doris was lovingly bathing the goat in a vat of milk.
Tattooed Teresa only managed to escape because after weeks of no Newky Brown she had rapidly lost weight and slipped from her loosened bindings when the Order and Doris were busy worshipping the poor goat during some black mass and praying for it to levitate again. She headed straight for my house, for sanctuary and for a Newkey Brown.
Teresa says she will never, ever, ever, ever be able to cleanse her mind of the dark, sinister things she witnessed in that chapel. She asked me if elctro-shock therapy was still available on the NHS or if I believed there was enough Newky Brown on the planet to get her drunk enough so that she could forget her disturbing mental images for even just one second.
‘No’ I said softly ‘I don’t believe there is’
Teresa then curled up into a ball and wept like a baby.
Somewhere in the distance I was sure I could hear a goat weeping…
