LOST IN A LOST WORLD By Touch the Light I woke up today, I was crying Lost in a lost world For Drea

LOST IN A LOST WORLD

The music wasn’t particularly loud, but you still had you raise your voice to be heard.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I reckon they sometimes go too far. What was the name of that series on a few years ago, the one where the lass had her face pushed into a pan of boiling fat before they shot her? What I don’t understand is how the fuck the script editor allowed that to pass. I tell a lie there, what I really don’t get is how the writer came up with the idea in the first place. Killing off your female characters is bad enough, ‘cause without exception your show doesn’t have enough of them, but doing it like that…?”

The guy on the other side of the table slurped his beer.

“It does sound a bit sick,” he agreed, his eyes wandering to the scantily dressed girl ordering a Bacardi Breezer at the bar. I guessed that he was about ten years younger than me, his eyes relatively untarnished by the bitterness of rejection. He wasn’t a fanny magnet — neither of us were — but experience hadn’t yet overcome the genetic programming that conditioned him to believe anything was possible when you entered the mating game.

I lit a cigarette. I was feeling mellow, happy to have slidden into a conversation with a complete stranger who seemed to share so many of my views.

“Sick doesn’t begin to describe it,” I went on. “I’ve done a bit of writing myself, and–“

“You’re a writer?”

“Just for the Internet.”

“What sort of stuff d’you…no, hang on, looking at you I’d say it’s Science Fiction.” He held up his hands. “I didn’t mean to put you down as a nerd or anything.”

“Don’t worry,” I laughed. “I’m used to that. Well, it’s a kind of SF. I like to call it ‘alternative’ fiction. You take an ordinary situation and slowly turn it surreal. Trouble is, I’m not very good at it. Always descends into soft porn.”

“You write porn?”

“It doesn’t start out that way. Last thing I wrote was about a bloke who lands his spaceship on a planet where there used to be a human colony but they’ve lost all touch with earth. What he finds is a society consisting solely of women. Turns out the computers they used to create the nanobots that were supposed to terraform the environment didn’t see a reason to keep the Y chromosome so they eradicated it. The thing this bloke doesn’t realise is that the little buggers are still active, and they’re working on him now. He’s about to become a woman, just like the rest of them.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Are you a poof?”

The first three pints I’d guzzled would have said ‘tell him to mind his own business’. The fourth regarded the question as an insult to my manhood.

“No, I’m bloody not!” I exclaimed.

“But you can happily write about a bloke who grows a pair of tits?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“You’ve got this problem with a bird who gets boiling hot fat in her face, but you don’t see anything wrong with…” He stood up, shaking his head. “I’ve heard some shit in my time…”

I watched him walk over to the table beside the front window. There were people there he evidently knew. The music stopped long enough for me to hear one phrase.

“That fuckin’ arsehole over there…”

I finished my drink and left. Outside, it was beginning to rain. The last bus had gone, and the taxi rank on the other side of the street was empty.

I looked at the pub doorway. The world was lost, but that didn’t mean I’d forfeited the right to hack my own way through the jungle of existence. And I’d need a shot or two of something warm and invigorating before I was ready to face the long walk home.

I went back in.