Ben Elton: Popcorn

‘That’s just being pedantic,’ said Errol.

‘Listen, man, if the stonecold truth is pedantic, then I guess that’s what I’m being, because I’ll bet if you was to ask every person within one hundred miles of where we’re standing if they’d ever seen a haystack, let alone left their works in one, they’d say, “Get the fuck outa here, motherfucker.” ’

Errol spotted the point of confusion. ‘It don’t mean no works,’ he said.

‘Say what?’

‘The needle which is referred to in the expression “a needle in a haystack” does not mean no drug paraphernalia. It means a needle for sewing.’

Mr Snuff seized upon the point like the practised debater he was. ‘It don’t matter what kind of needle we’re talking about here, you dumb motherfucker,’ he explained. ‘The point is that no one is going to lose it in no haystack. You need to bring your metaphors into the twentieth century, man.’

Bob, still hanging from the chain, groaned a little. The two gangsters ignored him.

‘How about if you was to say it’s like trying to find a line of coke in a snowdrift? Now there’s an image a person can understand.’

Now it was Errol’s turn to be contrary. ‘No, man, that’s bullshit,’ he said angrily. ‘The whole point about a needle and a haystack is that they are very different things, and although it would be difficult to locate the former within the latter, it would not be impossible. Cocaine and snow are basically identical. You could never tell one from the other. One concept is improbable, the other is impossible – which is an entirely different thing.’

‘Less you snorted up the entire motherfucker. You could sure tell them apart if you was to stick them up your nose.’

Errol laughed. It was a relief for both men. The discussion had been in danger of turning acrimonious, but now the tension was broken. For the two gangsters, that is; for Toni and Bob things remained stressful.

‘That’s right,’ Errol conceded with a grin. ‘If you snorted up the entire snowdrift, when you got to the stuff that made you talk bullshit at three o’clock in the morning, that would be the cocaine.’

Mr Snuff, having scored such an effective point, was in the mood to be generous. ‘I don’t want to make no Federal case out of this,’ he said kindly. ‘I just think that language ought to reflect the lives of the people who are speaking it. Not some rural bullshit like needles and haystacks or… or… the early bird catches the worm. I don’t want no fucking worm, man. What is more, if I had a horse, which I don’t, I wouldn’t waste no time taking the motherfucker to water when it wasn’t thirsty in the first place.’

Bob groaned again. ‘Let me go. I didn’t rip nothing off, man.’

He might as well have appealed to a couple of concrete gangsters for all the good this was going to do him.

‘Don’t insult me, Bob. You think I can’t count? You think me and Mr Snuff here are so dumb that we can’t count?’

Bob quickly assured Errol that he had intended no such slur.

‘In which case, how come I ain’t supposed to know the difference between one hundred kilos and ninetynine kilos, you sewerrat? A onehundredth part is a substantial differential. Suppose I was to cut off a onehundredth part of you? Do you think you wouldn’t notice?’

It would have taken a more stupid man than Bob to have misunderstood the meaning of Errol’s question, but nevertheless Errol rubbed that meaning in by grabbing at Bob’s crutch. It is said that men who practise the ancient Chinese art of kung fu are capable of retracting their testicles at the first sign of danger. They probably couldn’t do it if the testicles in question were held in the vicelike grip of a large gangster.

‘I gave you what Speedy gave me,’ Bob protested. ‘I didn’t steal nothing. I’m not a thief.’

Errol released Bob’s hundredth part and turned his attention to Toni. So far she had made no contribution to the conversation, and perhaps Errol felt some social pressure to include her. He and Mr Snuff were, after all, in a way the hosts.

‘Toni?’ he enquired. ‘Is your boyfriend a thief?’

‘Listen, Errol,’ Toni said, attempting to sound calm and considering – no easy task when one is lying prostrate and securely bound across a table – ‘we ain’t getting nowhere here.’

‘I know that.’

‘If Bob tells you what you want to hear, you’ll kill him.’

‘I’m going to kill him anyway.’

‘But you can’t kill him till he’s told you where your damn hundredth part is. So he won’t tell you. We’ll be here till Christmas.’

It was a valiant effort. That she could think at all, considering the horror of her situation, was a miracle, but to have put Errol’s problem so clearly was impressive indeed.

‘OK, Bob,’ Errol said, levelling his gun at Toni. ‘If you don’t tell me right now, I’ll shoot her.’

This was a hopeless ploy. Bob was, after all, a heartless drug dealer. The chances of his being moved by appeals to his chivalry were small. Toni knew this too, but before she had time to request that she be left out of it Errol shot her.

It was a powerful gesture: the smell of gunsmoke, the echoing report in such a confined space, the scream, the blood. All this might have moved a lesser – or indeed more honourable – man than Bob to speak up and save Toni further discomfort. But Bob was, of course, not a lesser man; nor was he a more honourable one. Nobody ever is.

‘I didn’t steal your drugs,’ Bob said.

Errol sat down at the table, oblivious of the dying woman who lay across it. He was at his wits’ end. He and Mr Snuff had searched Bob’s apartment, his car, his clothes. Where on earth could the missing drugs be?

‘Could a person get a kilo of heroin up their ass?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ said Mr Snuff. ‘People get all sorts of things up their asses.’

A pair of plastic gloves lay on the table next to a set of scales. Errol had been wearing them earlier on when weighing out the heroin. He picked up one glove, shook Toni’s blood from it and put it on.

‘I don’t have no heroin up my ass, man’ said Bob, hoping, perhaps, to save Errol the trouble of further investigation.

‘Well, I wish I could trust you, Bob,’ said Errol. ‘To tell you the truth, I am not relishing the prospect of probing your butt with my finger any more than I imagine you relish the prospect of having your butt probed. But I cannot trust you, Bob, which is what all of this unpleasantness is about.’

Errol stuck his hand down the back of Bob’s jockey shorts and executed his investigation. ‘No drugs up here,’ he said.

‘Maybe she’s got them,’ said Mr Snuff, peering up between Toni’s legs. ‘No drugs here, I think,’ he said from beneath her skirt, ‘but a very nice-’

Then suddenly a voice from nowhere said, ‘Thank you. Stop right there.’

And they stopped.

Errol froze. Mr Snuff froze. They all froze. There was not the slightest movement. Mr Snuff’s head remained under Toni’s skirt, Errol’s expression remained one of bored indifference, Bob’s grimace of pain seemed to have been painted on. Everything had stopped – not just stopped but really stopped. Nobody was doing anything. Toni was not bleeding any more. Nobody was even breathing.

The voice spoke again. ‘Go back, but slowly, nice and slowly.’

Mr Snuff removed his head from under Toni’s skirt and Errol put his finger back up Bob’s backside.

Toni’s body began to suck back into itself the blood it had lost. The red stain shrank across the table. She even appeared to revive slightly.

Errol removed his finger from Bob again and returned to sit by the table. He seemed to be in pain: he made sad, guttural noises. He took off the glove, got up again and, backing away from the table, addressed Bob in the same strange, incomprehensible sounds. He drew his gun and pointed it at Toni.