Jimmy, Ginger Tom, Prince Philip, and The Trilobites

Jimmy first became aware of Them while thinking alone, on a porcelain throne, while reading Viz.  As he flushed away the waste, pulled up his trousers,  feeling content that lumber,  having being chopped by sphincter, was floating to the sea, glorious revelations, of a kind once reserved for Pillar Hermits, rocked his world harder than the Shredded Wheat that had brought him to the temple.  But an anxiety, an urgency, slapped him in the face.   He simply had to write it down.  Running up the stairs to his office he realised he’d left his pen in the toilet.  His mind was on fire. Running down his thoughts were stuck in a loop; “that’s it:  It’s Them or They, or maybe Both”.  The Matrix of his reality broke down.

Things became clear to him.  It’s the Bloodline of The Trilobites.  What we think of as real is not real.  Them or They, or maybe Both, have hard backs, but soft fronts.  For instance, if you squint really hard at the television, Prince Philip is an Arthropod.  He’s the king of the Arthropods.  Jimmy scribbled out his rough draft. His opus.  And waited for everyone to go to bed.  That night, sitting with his cat, he wrote. He wrote harder than he’d ever written before, because people had to know.  The cat watched closely.  That is how I can narrate.  I am Ginger Tom.  I am an unreliable narrator, but this is not the rhetoric of fiction, everything I say is true.  Cats, after all, cannot lie.

I sat listening, and he typed, and typed, taps randomly spaced by the distinctive tap of his space bar, until it was light outside.  Being a cat, I got somewhat bored, and left the room, followed by the house. I thought my owner had gone mad.  It was about 6 in the morning.  I was scratching around in the back garden, looking for mice, because they’re crunchy, and this old guy, dressed in tweed, a navy man, scuttled towards me, much as a trilobite scuttled the sea floor, conifers kelp-like as he brushed them aside.   “Hello, puss-puss-puss, you’re a pretty cat aren’t you?”. I sat, staring for a while, before replying.  “I sir, may be a pretty cat, but you sir, are a prince, as such the positions are difficult to rectify.”

“Do you like sea food, little cat?”,  he barked, chitinous jaws clacking, all regal, a proposition that immediately got my attention, having found no mice, “here, take this”.  He dropped white meat, resembling the fat flesh of a coconut crab.  I sniffed at  it.  It smelt of heaven.  I licked it.  It was better than licking fish juice.  So I ate it.  It was the best tasting seafood I had ever eaten.  Really.  Better than prawns.  I sat purring.  The sun warmed the garden.   Philip scuttled a little closer.  “If you want more, you have to do me a little favour”, by now, even a cat could notice, things were becoming sinister, but all I could think of was the delicious meat, he persevered, “if you keep an eye on Jimmy, I will give you as much trilobite meat as you want”. 

“Why do you want to keep an eye on Jimmy?” I purred, still ecstatic from the meat, “we, Them, or They, or Both, want to keep an eye on Jimmy because he’s cracked the truth.  He’s the only person in the world ever, to realise we, The Trilobites, did not die out, we simply moved to another dimension”.  “Oh”.  By then I realised I wasn’t a cat, and began to wake up, violently pushing the other in-patients aside, “psychology is bullshit!  Where’s my fucking solicitor?  Section ME will you you cunts”, and brought to the floor by orderlies thrusting diazepam filled needles.