Boots

By Phillip Donnelly

From a rat’s eye view of the London blitz to a cadaver with a complaint about the size of her coffin, this collection of short stories brings us into a comically surreal world that will leave you questioning your ability to tell up from down.
What the characters in these stories have in common is their passage through a moment of crisis: the teacher who must face down an aggressive student in the award winning Interactive Classroom; Shep, the sheep-turned sheep dog, who wants to turn back the clock and become a sheep again; or the paranoid David Vincent, who is convinced the office he works in is being infiltrated by alien imposters who are now coming for him.
In terms of genre, the stories range from the post-modernist science fiction of 6 Hits from the Safe Zone, The Mission and Debt, Death and Deletion to the more macabre dark humour of Guest in the Attic and The Undertaker’s Complaint. Historical fiction is also included, with an alcoholic Churchill burping his way to greatness. Some works place comedy to the fore, such as The Interactive Sexual Attraction Device.
If we tire of fiction, travel writing brings us back to the real world, in which the author offers his unique perspective on China, India and Lebanon. The Boots anthology finishes with samples from the author’s novels, converted into short stories.
All the pieces in this collection have been published in various locations and are now brought together in one collection.
Take your psyche for a walk with Boots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phillip Donnelly
• Release date: May 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465775542

Phillip Donnelly

After completing a psychology degree, the author realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet. Unable to speak any foreign languages and almost incapable of holding a conversation in his own, he decided to teach English as a foreign language because this was the only job that would allow him to travel widely without any marketable skills or noticeable intelligence. He has unsuccessfully searched for life from outer space in classrooms in the following countries: Spain, China, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Beirut, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Lebanon France and Vietnam. In the future, he hopes to continue his search for alien life forms in different countries, and he would be most obliged if any aliens reading this work could spirit him off to an altogether more exotic planet in a more harmonious dimension. About two dozen of his pieces have appeared online -- mainly travel writing and short stories, and one of them, The Interactive Classroom, won a Bewildering Stories’ Mariner Award in 2010. His latest novel, Kev the Vampire, which will be released in early 2014 by Rebel ePublishers. He can be contacted at [e-mail]

Book preview

Blitzkrieg Revisited

You’ve never had it so good Grandpa Rat said to us, in the pile of rubble that was once Mrs Bleachdale’s house.

We gathered around him, the whole colony, ready as always for one of his bedtime yarns; and behind us, in the distance, the East End shimmered in a rosy incendiary glow; and from the sky, the Rat Gods dropped more exploding poisoned pellets of revenge on our human torturers, splintering their world and turning it into our world.

You remember what this place used to be like, don’t you? You remember Mrs B., don’t you?

He paused then for effect, and let the image of the ogre grow in our minds. Our eyes grew large and our whiskers trembled in remembering the giant of a woman, who was two dozen-rats-high and was said to grow a tail taller for every rat sent to heaven.

She was a terror of a woman, Mrs B., and I for one hope she lies howling down below. When it wasn’t traps she was laying, it was poison she was putting down for our young innocents.

He stood on his two back legs, lifted his right front leg and sniffed the air with his pink nose to drive home the point, like some sewer orator; and when all of us were looking at each other and nodding in agreement about how bad things used to be, he continued.

Time was when only one rat in ten would make it to adulthood in this house, I tell you. One in ten! And they’d be a scrawny, skantering, snivelling kind of animal: all bone and fear, they was. But now, well. Look at yourselves now, my fine furry friends. You’ve got meat on your bones and a twinkle in your eye. The future’s as bright as the search lights that light up the night sky; the lights that show the Rat Gods flying high above us!

We all looked up, and there they were, our buzzing vengeful Rat Gods, smoking out the humans, filling the air with strange new smells.

And look at this fine house of rubble we’ve got for ourselves now, with more hiding places than we know what to do with, and a cracked larder full of food, and all for ourselves. It’s getting a mite smelly now, but that only adds flavour, if you ask me. Good food is like a good rat — the older the better!

He chuckled at his own witticism, and we pretended to laugh, but in truth, we’d heard this joke a thousand times since Mrs B. died.

Another rat climbed up into the mouthpiece of the gramophone and continued.

And it’s like this all over the city, my comrades tell me, from Lewisham to Neasden. More and more rat communes are taking what’s rightfully theirs, and declaring Rat Rubble Republics. Decadent human civilization is collapsing and history demands that we seize this opportunity to establish the dictatorship of the rodent, in accordance with the laws of dialectic materialism.

Thus spoke Rarathusa, a political rat who often went on forays into the wider world. He was developing quite a following among some of the younger more bookish rodents.

There was an awkward silence after he spoke and we could hear the wind whistling through the rubble. Grandpa Rat and the rodent elders twitched their whiskers.

Tell us about the cat, Grandpa Rat! one of the young ‘uns demanded, never having seen the fearsome beast herself.

Ay, well might you shout the word ‘cat’ out loud now, safe in the Ratopia of the blitz world, when men hide in shelters and rats rule the roost. But t’was a time, young ratty, when you only had to say the word ‘cat’ and the mean ole moggy’d appear. Teeth sharp as kitchen knives; claws longer than your paws; and yellow eyes bigger than your head. A pox on the mangy rogue, for she slaughtered me own flesh and blood, a dozen times over, and I was never such a happy rat as when I saw her, dead on the dusty floor, skull smashed in twain, fallen masonry all round and a shard of glass straight through her evil feline heart.

Say what you like about Killer Kat, Grandpa, but she did make fulsome good eating in the end! Grandma Rat said.

Ay, she did that, I’ll grant you … even if the screamin’ and hollarin’ and wailin’ of old Mrs B. wasn’t exactly appetizing; lying there, trapped under her precious mahogany table, bleeding from more holes than she had orifices.

Ay, but she was fairly tasty herself, I thought, considering her advanced years Grandma Rat said. She kept us going for weeks, the old witch, and sixty kilos ain’t nothing to be sniffed at, even if she did get a bit whiffy near the end.

Better whiffy food than no food, I tell you. You’ve never had it so good! Grandpa said.

But we’ll have it even better, come the Union of the Rat Rubble Republics! Rarathusa exclaimed.

Grandpa’s nose twitched at that and scraped the ground three times. The rat elders did likewise before disappearing into the rubble. They soon reappeared, and they now surrounded Rarathusa, but he was so wrapped up in his oratory that he didn’t take heed of their movements.

From each rat according to his abilities; and to each rat according to his needs. Rodent brothers —

The attack came so quickly that Rarathusa didn’t even have time to give the final death squeak, so his poor soul will never make it to Ratheaven.

You’ve never had it so good! Grandpa Rat said again, but this time with menace.

If Walls Had Ears

The kitchen and the living room were the oldest of friends.

Neither could remember a world without the other and both their memories stopped at the inception of construction. To the rubble time their memory would not stretch. They had been and always would be: one flat indivisible, in and of itself.

Even their earliest memory was the same: the naked pain of their birth, their protracted partum, when their form was glued and hammered together, brick by brick. In the beginning was the brick and the brick was made flat and dwelt among us.

They remembered the creatures they mistook for Gods: those grunting sweaty Irish bricklayers, who had no sooner brought them into the world than abandoned them, leaving them with the suffocating clothing of plaster and the slapdash make-up of paint.

As they turned from warbling infants to rancorous adults, they stored the bitter memories of every indignity forced upon them by the flesh creatures who followed the builders. They hated the hominids who moved within them; the vile squatter lice who arrived, aged and died, only to be replaced by others from beyond the Building. They remembered all and forgave nothing.

The living room was by far the larger of the two friends and was almost four times the size of his companion, and although the kitchen was jealous of his friend’s size and stature, this did not impede their friendship. One could have been ten times the size of the other, but they would still have regarded each other as equals.

Toward the other rooms, however, they shared an animosity bordering on contempt. All rooms were equal, the Building’s Charter proclaimed, but some, the two friends thought, were more equal than others. They were separated by the tiny but truculent toilet and the eternally confused hall. They rarely saw each other room-to-room and instead communicated through the conduit of the water pipes.

One dry June day, the kitchen creaked the pipes a little to let the living room know it wanted to converse.

What did you make of them this morning? He seemed very distracted, I thought. He spilled the milk and dropped an egg on me, you know, Kitch said.

Clod! We should drop a brick on him one day, see how he likes it! I suppose he’s worried by the news from the front.

The front of the building?

No, the war front! You really should try to keep abreast of current affairs, Kitch.

What care I for maggot men news? And even if I did listen, what could I find out? You’re the one who gets all the gaff. All day and night I hear them in there with you, gabbing about who knows what. And I’m out here, lone and lonesome, a kitchen without a friend in the world.

Now don’t get all maudlin on me, Kitch. Sometimes they talk out there, don’t they?

Sure they do! Mostly they talk about how two grown people can’t both fit in a three-metre squared kitchen. If they’re not ignoring me, they’re insulting me. Or else they’re stinking me out; boiling and frying up the flesh of dead monsters from land, sea and air. Bloody squatters!

We are born to suffer, and our world is but a veil of tears, injected Toilet.

Ah shut up ya shitehawk! Your world is but a world of turds, dropping one after another into the fetid blackness of the Sewerworld. Why don’t you butt out of our conversion and go chew on a colon sausage! Kitch suggested.

We cannot help what we are. Function is destiny, Toilet said, and then he signalled his displeasure by flushing himself loudly.

Oh, so you’re off again, are you? Huffing and flushing and trying to swish the house down. You want them to get the plumber out again, do you? You want a rubber plunger rammed down your privates, do you? You want a hairy hand to wiggle about with your ballcock?

Ah just ignore ole Privy Pervert, Liv said dismissively.

I will sing no more songs for rooms which care nothing for me.

Good! Shite shouldn’t sing.

There was silence for a while and Toilet sulked and stewed in the bitter moodiness that marked his bile and bilious being. Soon the two friends resumed their conversation.

These last lot of tenants are alright, as far as blood pumps go. At least they don’t have any cats, not like that old bat before them. Remember that moggy of hers, the fat old grey thing, always scratching her nails on my walls and leaving little brown mementos in every corner. Dirty animal!

Well, she got what was coming to her, old Pussface. I saw to that.

Hum … felinicide. Yes, I remember. You’ve got a terrible wicked side to you sometimes, Kitch.

Well, who could resist it?! There she was, sitting on my ledge at the height of summer, staring down at all and sundry in the courtyard below, meowing like she owned the place, cleaning her oh-so-delicate paws like the jumped-up little Bagpuss she was. All I did was … give her a little nudge.

And it was curtains for pussy!

She had it coming! Anyway, what’s all this about ‘The Front’?

It’s the war, isn’t it?

Haven’t they only just finished the war?

That was twenty years ago, Kitch. You’re in a world of your own out there, aren’t you? This is the Second War.

Well they must have liked the first one if they’re having another. So who are they fighting this time?

The Germans, of course.

Wasn’t it the Germans last time?

That’s right, but you can’t expect originality from flesh bags, can you? All that movement stops them from thinking. They just mill about doing the same things over and over: get up, have breakfast, wash the sweat off themselves and then go to work. No sooner are we nice and comfy than they come back again. They eat, yak a bit, go to bed and snore the night away. We’ve seen a half-century of it and no doubt we’ll see another half.

It must be terrible strange though, to be moving about all the time, Kitch mused.

They’re a strange lot, make no mistake. And now they’re set to start shooting each other again.

What’s this shooting business anyway? Kitch asked.

I’m not really sure, but whatever it is, it stops them from moving.

So, it’s gotta be a good thing, hasn’t it?

Not for the flesh heads it isn’t. As soon as they stop moving, they die. We’ve seen it before with our own eyes. Remember the old wrinkly one who died mid splutter in the toilet; half a plop inside her and half outside. She stopped moving and then got all bloated and purple. And then she gave birth to those wriggly wormy things, Liv remembered.

The pipes shook a little at the memory of it.

Didn’t she stink up the place something awful? I was almost glad to see those scurrying rats come in to clean that mess up.

But it’s always the same story. Just when we think we’ve got the place to ourselves, more rubbery things come a knocking. More arms and legs and torsos. Why do we have to suffer them?

We are born to suffer and – Toilet intoned, adding echo for effect.

Shut up! they both shouted in unison.

Toilet did not have time to respond. All three rooms, like every room in the apartment block, was silenced by a new sound. The siren wailed and rose and fell and seemed to be the very embodiment of pain, causing all rooms great and small to shiver with a fear they could not identify.

The man and the woman returned shortly after the siren stopped, breathing heavily and with panic in their wide eyes. Much to Kitchen’s chagrin, they immediately went to the living room and sat on the sofa. He tried to eavesdrop but they spoke in hushed tones and even Living Room had to strain his ears to make out the conversation. The man spoke first, sweating and trembling.

"They’ve broken through. The lines are collapsing. The government’s fled to Bordeaux. There are rumours they’ll