Earthbound

Humans have an arrogance of sole existence.  Beyond our world, there is nothing.

We are bordered by our walls, by our frontiers, by our seas, by the clouds and, ultimately, by space.

After this, we all know, lie a few dead, inhospitable planets, dying stars, buggered satellites and bits of dead spacemen.

Possibly though, just possibly, we might condescend to Heaven; but we can't get a spaceship there or have a camera pointing to paradise, so we imagine it as we want; a world apart from ours, the desert island of our death, something to look forward to, that, for once, we can't screw up.

Imagine a white; a pure, soft, smooth, brilliant white.  Dotted among this explosion of daydream purity lie the ultimate shades of every colour; colours that the dull blind eye of the human doesn't see.  Red in the disguise of harlot scarlet, of lush crimson, sweet wine burgundy, and deepest bloody rose.  Blue, chameleon-minded, fading from the depths of the sea to the palest eyes of the new-born babe, each colour presented on the canvas to the dreamer's eye as it was in Van Gogh's mind.

Arnold Layne, if he was honest, was really a bit fed up with it.  Of course, it was nice, very nice, but that was it really, just nice.  All the colours were lovely, a gardener's fantasy.  And the parties, they were nice too.

Everything was really... nice.

But the colours were beginning to give him migraines, they were just too bright, and the parties were all the same, polite conversation around homemade, low-alcohol wine, about what you were before, what you would like to be and wasn't dying just the most exquisite experience and Genghis Khan wasn't as bad as they say, he was just confused.

Always interesting, but always the same.

Such was Heaven.

The sun, wherever it had been during the day, probably sulking behind some bank of grumpy grey cloud, refusing to move until somebody had noticed its obvious beauty, had gone, defeated into submission after a day of trying to continue its dreary work of brightening up the hum-drum lives of those depressed little creatures, scrabbling about their duties on that now grubby little planet Earth.

Sunset had fallen with a thump. No glorious light or myriad of colour spread across clear twilight skies, just a sort of totally pissed-off drop behind the musty, decaying buildings, to go on a search for a more responsive part of the world.

In one of those musty buildings, now covered by exhaust fumes and factory waste, was a man sitting in an armchair, can of bitter in hand, staring blankly at the television screen.

He might have been dead.

A not totally unreasonable assumption to anybody who didn't know this man, for he never moved, not even apparently to breathe, nor to blink.  The one giveaway was that occasionally his right arm would move mouthwards, pour the contents of a can down a seemingly bottomless gorge and pull another can from a thirty-two pack placed handily at the side of the chair.

Minimal movement, minimal effort, minimal brain.

He was wearing a vest that, struggle as it might, could not quite reach his trouser line and left for all to see a vastly adipose layer of flesh, thinly disguised by a beer-sodden carpet of hair, leading up to a dark, cavernous navel filled by loose stitching from said decaying vest and other less pleasing life forms.

The trail of beer scrambled its way up the vest to a loosely swinging chin, covered by three day stubble and then onto another chin and then finally another chin, sticky to the touch, if anyone would dare touch it, then onto a moist mouth shrouded in two soggy blankets of ruddy flesh, hiding a foul-smelling, furred tongue, dead to taste,  dead it was commonly thought, to movement, as between it, the vocal chords and the mouth, it rarely produced any more than a primitive grunt.

Past the squashed, previously broken nose, lay two piggy-like empty eyes, the whites of which were interspersed with streams of red, rather like a strawberry ripple.

The hair, what was left of it, lost, no doubt, through scratching when asked about the deep meaning of life, sat upon a sweaty forehead, totally unfurrowed by passing life, probably totally oblivious to passing life.

This was the landlord.

He is irrelevant, but worth mentioning for the fact that he was so extremely revolting.  A superb example of the most basic form of human life, a living specimen of post-amoebal existence, a step back down the evolutionary ladder.  A real ego boost to anybody with a bad self-image.

He was also Charlie's landlord.