What Time is it, Mr Wolf?

No one likes a winner. It has always been, and always will be about the underdog. That and the happy ending. They all lived happily ever after! Cut! That’s a wrap! Well done everyone! 

Ever wonder what happens after that?

No, of course you haven’t. Nobody ever does. Why? Because we just don’t care. We settle for less. We stop when the music stops. Sad statues of lost meaning with no prospect of the music ever starting again. In the end, which is not even our end, we settle for nothing and we walk away with the illusion of happiness and fulfilment. Besides the story has reached a convenient point, the underdog is a winner now and no one wants to hear the story of the winner. That story is not of interest. Envy of the elusive top spot jaundices all. We’d rather turn away from that horizon and live in a darkness of our own downturned perceptions.

Then there’s the story before the tale we all know, recite and love. If we followed the entire story arc, things might just look a little different. They don’t want you to see that though. Everything is carefully edited. That’s not the truth of it. It’s all about the headlines. The sob story and supposed good prevailing over evil. Arbitrary value judgements that up the ante and incite the baying for the blood of the innocents.

Take those three pigs for instance.

The way those bastards twisted the narrative to their own ends. My narrative at that! Made me out to be the bad guy, when all along, they were the criminals. Always were. They had form. In and out of high security sties from an early age. Suckled from the teat of an anarchic sow from the very off.  So when they turned up on my land, I knew they were trouble. Big trouble contained in flaccid bacon flavoured carcasses. 

Even in the face of such disruption, I was reasonable. Of course I was. I didn’t want trouble. I run a respectable business. Or rather, I ran a respectable business. My reputation now lies in tatters. They stole everything from me. Even my good name. Ice Wolf lollies were the bestselling ice lollies in Toy Town! Now it’s all Pigsicles this and Pigsicles that. Thieves, the three of them!

Yes three!

I didn’t kill any of those pigs. Neither did I threaten to. I was legit and I did things the proper way. When I saw the lewd appendage of that wattle and daub house rising up from my land, I went straight down to the Toy Town Town Hall and I raised the issue with the planning officer. But you know what? They fined me! Fined me for raising a structure without planning permissions. 

My land.

My problem.

The gnarled and grasping hand of bureaucracy, wielding the executioner’s noose of red tape.

And when I got home from my unwarranted punishment, there was the second pig driving blithely onto my land with a lorry over ladened with timber, the intent of his dwelling construction lazily telegraphed right under my sensitive nose. 

Well, what was I to do? In my distraught state, there was only one thing I could think to do as I paced the Ice Wolf lolly factory. My eyes fell upon the fork lift and before I knew it, I was trundling across the field towards that illegal straw pig house. You’ve likely never seen what a fork lift can do to a house. With a little determination and time. Well, let’s just say, I performed a very satisfactory demolition that evening. I’d recommend it, if you ever get the opportunity to take a house down with two sturdy forks and a vehicle with deceptive power and tenacity. It may lack puff and have very little in the way of huff, but still, my trusty forklift took that pesky house down.

What I wouldn’t recommend is crossing a porcine career criminal. You wouldn’t think it to look at their chubby, pink, bacon flavoured faces, but behind that pork snout lurks distilled evil. And they are the worst bearers of grudges going. 

That night, I didn’t just cross one pig. I crossed his brother too. Pig number two had unloaded the logs for his intended cabin construction and they were all piled up, ready to be assembled. Well, I saw what that swine was about, and I saw red. Almost saw red. I don’t actually see red. Mostly I see shades of grey. About fifty of them at the last count. Which is a bit embarrassing really.

Anyway, I went back to my factory, poured myself a generous helping of fuel and lit myself a bonfire. I would also recommend bonfires, but you’d already get the joys of bonfires. Nevertheless, there is something deeply satisfying about the dance of flames that you have summoned into the world. I warmed my soul by that fire right up until the lights went out.

At the cost of repeating myself, I really wouldn’t recommend crossing The Pig Triplets. How was I to know these three were the most notorious criminals to snort their way through Toy Town’s East End? No one told me. No one warned me that the most brutal criminal scourge of the past two decades had chosen my land to start the next chapter of their lives. Their plan was to opt for the easy life. Put behind them the violence and debauchery of gang life. Maybe even go legit.

They espied my land and saw it as their future. They had no regard for whose land it was. Theirs was a life devoid of fear. They’d ridden a bow wave of violent intimidation and obstacles has fallen readily to their cruel trotters. Then our paths crossed and I did not bow to their reign of terror. I confronted them at the fork in the road and they barely paused for thought as they reverted to type and took everything they regarded with those greedy piggy eyes of theirs.

Late on in the morning following my forklift and fire lighting antics, I awoke to unusual environs. Green institutional walls enclosed my confusion and as I tried to work out what had befallen me, my noggin sent morse code pulses of pain out into the ether. Three letters repeated over and over. P. I. G..

The swines!

They’d blindsided me and knocked me out. And as I lay helplessly in that hospital bed, a dread certainty lay upon me. A lead weighted blanket of poisonous narrative. My place in the world had been hacked. My identity stolen. The choices we all have in life had been appropriated and I was left in a tight spot. The very tightest of spots. The most notorious of villains had left me with no option other than to be a villain myself. I had been robbed of the prospect of a happy ending.

The problem with narratives is that they are horrendously compelling and nowhere more so than in Toy Town. Bucking the trend of the fairy tale story is high treason and the punishment is exile. Exile from the narrative is a fate worse than death.

I was also stubborn, curious and indignant with a strange rage that fizzed along my tail. I’ve never had that tail oriented sensation either before or since and I could not help but see it as an omen. I never once questioned what that omen was, but then, that’s feelings for you.

And so, I headed home to the place where I already knew my home had ceased to exist. There was a terrible prescience to this. This ending had occurred in my absence and there was no going back. Equally, my going forward was never going to end well either. But what option did I have? I couldn’t stay in hospital and there was nowhere else for me to go, other than with the pig swill flow.

The third house? The one made of bricks?

Yeah, that was my house.

This left me in a pickle. Even if I had access to my forklift, which I did not, because the three piggy amigos had stolen that also, I wasn’t about to tear down my own house. That’s why that house stayed put. And via the intercom those curly tailed bastards taunted me.

“Let me in!” I bellowed through the speaker of the intercom.

“Not by the hair of our chinny, chin chins!”

What does that even mean? You’d think gangster pigs had a bit more about them, but these three certainly did not. 

Reluctantly, I pressed the intercom again. A surge of dizzying realisation rising up through me and threatening to burst my lungs, my heart and then my mind, “mother!” I cried, “mother!” I screamed this single word piteously into the intercom.

“Oh,” said a cold, pork chop voice, “was that the hairy crone in the bedroom?”

“No!” I gasped, “you didn’t!?” I threw myself against the front door in a frenzy of grief. Again and again I dashed myself against that door and the only thing that stopped me from battering myself against a solid and uncaring object that had the better of me was Piggy Number Three opening an upstairs window and shouting in something approximating a mocking plea, “don’t blame us, it was Red Riding Hood what done it!”

Those words stunned me into a paralysis of inaction. I lay there against the intransigent door of my grief and contemplated the remnants of my life. A sham of a life that was now devoid of home, hearth, mother and very successful ice lolly business.

Not only had I been set upon by the Crackling Brothers, now I had discovered that my mother had been despatched by the most notorious serial killer in Toy Town.

Red Riding Hood is as despicable as they come. She sports a bizarre apron that contrives a hood. The hood she wears to protect her hairdo from the worst of the blood and gore. She’d rather get her hood red than her perfectly fixed asymmetrical bob. She’s very particular about that. Don’t ask about the riding aspect of her moniker. That girl really is not right, and then some. She’s a walking sausage machine of a person.

However, as this is Toy Town and everyone is as shallow as a mid-Summer puddle, she still gets the main character roles. The rule is that pretty is as pretty does, so she’s the good character and she can do no wrong. This plays well with both casting and illustrations for the books that accompany the films. It’s all about the merch and hairy does not sell well. Hose Red down and have her smile to camera and that’s another hundred million in the bank. Pretty sells. Hairy smells.

And talking of smell. My nose is as good as any dog’s, and in the paroxysms of my grief stricken state, the only sense I had intact was my olfactory sense. Even as I wept and wailed for my dearly departed mama, my nose led me to the den of her slayer. Right to the very door of that red viper’s den.

The door was unlocked and ajar and before I understood where I was, I was face to face with Red’s grandma. Only, this is Toy Town and in the best traditions of this weird and wonderful place, I was confronted by a six foot four bloke called Sid. Sid is well known on the circuit. His most famous role being Widow Twanky.

Was.

Sydney wasn’t ever going to play Twanky again. There was surprise. There was confusion. Then a scuffle broke out and in no time at all, there was several scuffles and I did not know where Sid began and I ended. There was something almost sordid in how things degenerated. This man had spent far too much time with Red, and as I pinned him to the floor and sank my teeth into his throat I looked down into eyes gone stark raving mad. Eyes that gleefully reflected my vengefully snarling maw and welcomed this end as though it were the first prize in a beauty contest.

Turned out that Sid was as sinister as they came. I knew this even before I disentangled myself from his limbs and took a look around the house that he shared with Red. Two rooms of wandering in, and all this place could be referred to as was an abattoir. Honestly, I do wonder how some people live the way they do. Not that anyone lived for long in the confines of these four walls.

I should have left after I’d seen the state of the decorating in those first two rooms. One of those rooms should have been a living room, but it was as far from living as it was possible to get. The wood shavings, stuffing and guts that littered the floor was hellish. These two needed a cleaner, and had been in dire need of a cleaner for the best part of a decade.

I will blame the narrative for my foolhardy venturing upstairs. My self-congratulatory smile at having avoided the obvious pitfall of the basement was an act of hubris as I took a set of stairs that impeded any exit from this house of death. I was in the second bedroom, Sid’s bedroom, when the front door slammed shut with a fateful finality. I’ll never know whether it was time that froze or just me. All I know was that it was a bedwettingly terrifying moment and it was my fear that propelled me into the bed, clutching at Sid’s discarded clothing as I dived for cover. 

Dressing myself in his clothes as I tried to hide under the bed sheets added to the ridiculous illusion of my hiding in plain sight. I have heard of fight, flight or freeze. I froze from the neck up and nothing made sense at all. Nothing ever would.

Not ever.

*

And now I hear the creak of the wooden stairs as Red makes her way deliberately towards me. This is the final act of a story that I am on the wrong side of. There are winners and there are losers. By rights I should be the underdog. Afterall, I’m as near as dammit a dog. But that’s not the way it plays out. Not in the tinsel of this town. Toy Town is a town like no other and come what may, I’m the villain of this peace and I’m about to pay the price all villains must pay.

“My grandma, what big teeth you have!” Red is grinning as she brandishes the biggest and shiniest pliers I have ever seen.

Not the teeth, please not the teeth! Anything but the teeth! But as she looms over me and I see the sharp surgical instruments in the kit roll she’s holding in her other hand, I know my teeth are the least of my worries.