Out with the lads, Friday night, Jake all lairy and Tom all leery and all of them pretty beery, darts, pool, lager, perving over women, playful shoulder punches and heterosexual hugs, rhythmic belching on a hot summers night. And Jake says, ‘Here’s Pete’.
And you know past midnight the bars still open and the goodness the dwells within every soul, open minded and ready to accommodate this new friend, Pete.
‘Alright, Pete?’
Bloody hell!
Pete is a fifty six tonne sperm whale.
‘Pete’s famous’, Jake says, ‘Cos he can drink like a fish. Can’t you, Pete?’
Pete grins.
His polo shirt only just fits.
‘I’ve just been playing pool’, he says. ‘But I leaned on the table and the legs broke. Completely collapsed! But I won the game anyway because all of the balls just happened to go down the holes in the exact right order. We had to leg it’.
I want to ask him how he can leg it when he has not got legs.
‘Up till then’, he says, ‘It was going swimmingly’.
I also want to ask him how he can hold the cue with his flappy little fins but I’m afraid he might give me a slapping.
‘Let’s go out and get a curry’, Jake suggests.
‘Or a kebab’, says Tom.
‘I don’t know about you guys’, says Pete, ‘But I’d love some krill. I think there’s an all night plankton place near here’.
At this moment we hear some loud mouthed skinhead at the bar tell a joke in which the punchline denigrates certain sea-based large mammals.
‘Just what did you say?’, Pete asks.
The skinhead looks somewhat taken aback.
‘Sorry mate, I didn’t realise you were a whale. I couldn’t tell from the accent’.
But now we’re beginning to warm to Pete and plans are made to get a taxi back to our place. Helpfully, Jake suggests we might need a six seater, without drawing attention to Pete’s bulk, the elephant in the room.
‘We could watch a dvd’, Pete says. ‘But not something sad. I always start to blubber’.
‘You could stay over’, Tom says. ‘I could make up some beds’.
‘That’s fine, I can always sleep in the bath’.
At that moment a fight broke out at the pool table. One of the combatants lobs the cue ball, it sails through the air and goes straight into Pete’s blowhole, where it lodges, and he dies.
Robert Garnham 