The story continues, as told by the Herring affected, but often brilliant scribe David 'Teh Rage' Cohen, author of Rottobloggo: To make sense of the many non-sensical references - of the non literary variety that is - you'll need to visit The Worst of Perth... for herein doth the secret lie...It was a dark and stormy evening; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in Fremantle that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the scented candles that struggled against the darkness.
Through one of the obscurest quarters of the beautiful port city, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen and women of the police, a man, evidently from the distant suburb of Floreat, was wending his solitary way. He stopped twice or thrice at different bong shops and houses of a description correspondent with the appearance of the quartier in which they were situated,--and tended inquiry for some article or another which did not seem easily to be met with. All the answers he received were couched in the negative ("F#@k off", were the plain'tive cries); and as he turned from each door he muttered to himself, in no very elegant phraseology, his disappointment and discontent: "C#*ts".
At length, at one house, the landlord, a sturdy sniper, after rendering the same reply the inquirer had hitherto received, added,--"But if this vill do as vell, Cookie, it is quite at your sarvice!" Pausing reflectively for a moment, Cookie responded, that he thought the thing proffered might do as well; and thrusting it into his ample pocket he strode away with as rapid a motion as the wind and rain would allow. He soon came to a nest of low and dingy buildings, at the entrance to which, in half-effaced characters was written "Fremantle Markets." Having at the most conspicuous of these buildings, a boutique brewery or fusion-food restaurant through the half-closed windows of which blazed out in ruddy comfort the beams of the hospitable hearth, he knocked hastily at the door. He was admitted by a lady of a certain age, and endowed with a comely rotundity of face and person.
"Hast got it, Cookie?" said she quickly, as she closed the door on the guest.
"Noa, noa! not exactly--but as I thinks as ow . . ."
"Pish off, you fool!" cried the woman interrupting him, peevishly. "Vy, it is no use desaving me. You knows you has only stepped from my boosing ken to another, and you has not been arter the book at all. So there's the poor cretur a-raving and a-dying, and you . . ."
"Let I speak!" interrupted Cookie in his turn. "I tells you I vent first to Poor Lisa’s, who, I knows, chops the whiners morning and evening to the young ladies, and I axes there for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and she says, says she, 'I 'as only nunchuks but you'll get a RPG, I thinks, as Bedford Crackpot’s,--the deranged, as we knows.' So I goes to Bedford’s, and he says, says he, 'I 'as no call for weapons--'cause vy?--I 'as a call vithout; but mayhap you'll be a-getting it at the bong shop hover the vay,--'cause vy?--the bong seller’ll be damned!" So I goes hover the vay, and the bong retailer says, says he, 'I 'as not a RPG: but I 'as a dirty bomb laced with canola, and mayhap the poor creturs mayn't see the difference.' So I takes the dirty bomb, Mrs. Poor Lisa, and here they be surely!--and how's poor Lazy Aussie?"
"Fearsomo! Men are beasts! He'll not be over the night, I'm a-athinking."
"Vell, I'll track up the ammo!"
So saying, Cookie ascended a doorless staircase, across the entrance of which a chunk of corflute, stretched angularly from the wall to the chimney, afforded a kind of screen; and presently he stood within a chamber, which the dark and painful genius of the bloke who painted the pic of the kneeling woman and the Alsation might have delighted to portray. The walls were white-washed, and at sundry places strange figures and grotesque characters had been traced in burnt orange by some mirthful inmate, in such sable outline as the end of a smoked herring stick or the edge of a piece of charcoal is wont to produce. The wan and flickering light afforded by a farting candle gave a sort of grimness and menace to these achievements of pictorial art, especially as they more than once received embellishment from portraits of Brendon Grylls, such as he is accustomed to be drawn. A low fire burned gloomily in a sooty grate; and on the hob hissed "the still small voice" of a kick-arse pan of mandrax. On a round deal-table were two vials, a cracked cup, a broken spoon of some dull metal, and upon two or three mutilated chairs were scattered various articles of female attire. On another table, placed below a high, narrow, shutterless casement (athwart which, instead of a curtain, bloodied mayoral chains had been loosely hung, and now waved fitfully to and fro in the gusts of wind that made easy ingress through many a chink and cranny), were a looking glass, sundry appliances of the toilet, a box of cricketers’ boxes, a few ornaments of more show than value; and a watch, the regular and calm click of which produced that indescribably painful feeling which, we fear, many of our readers who have heard the ravings of the Daylight Savings Murder Posse can easily recall.
To be continued...
