"Please, mate, don't deny me this experience," said Jack.
"Isn't one sex-crazed girl enough for you?" said Kevin.
"What've you got to lose?"
"My dignity."
"I know what you're saying. I thought there was something...unmanly and puffy about it at first. But it's no big deal, it's just a laugh, the embarrassment'll wear off and you'll get into it. Besides, only us two'll know about it."
"It's just not me. I'm too uptight."
"Come on, one night in your life, take a chance, I bet you'll enjoy it."
"Jesus, Jack, I dunno...I mean you've told me how hot and sweaty you get."
"No, bud, I only used to sweat a lot because I used to leave me vest on. If you just do it in your shorts it's fine."
"You mean I'd have to take my clothes off?"
"Of course you take your fucking clothes off."
"But you leave your shoes on?"
"No, just your socks."
"I'm sorry, I really don't think I could do it."
"I'd have thought you'd have leapt at the chance to get inside a pussy."
"It'd be all sticky. It'd smell of you and everyone else who's been in it recently."
"It gets aired out. And I give it a bloody good clean-out regularly. You can clean it out tonight if you like."
"I wouldn't be able to breathe. Doesn't it get claustrophobic?"
"Not at all. You can't see much and your hearing's a bit muffled, but you can breathe in there easily. You'd be surprised how much room there is inside."
"It's just not my kind of role. It comes natural to you, you've got that...animal streak. I haven't got your...I just don't have what it takes to be Garfield."
It was two days later and Kevin and Jack were in the Chuck Wagon getting themselves tea and coffee before going off for their break. Jack was endeavouring to persuade Kevin to take over his duties as Garfield that evening so he could sneak off and shag a girl he'd just met while Veronica believed him to be walking around in the costume.
"Come on, mate, it's the only chance I've got to get away from her for a couple of hours. Ohh, if you could see this little darling..." Jack began to wax lyrical about his potential new conquest's topography.
"Apart from everything else it's dangerous. The last two Garfields quit because they kept getting beaten up by the bigger kids. One of them had a rib broken."
"That's just one or two incidents. You don't see me getting beaten up, do you? You just have to take the fight to them. Kick 'em in the balls as soon as they start acting up. Heavy weighted feet on that thing."
"I really don't..."
"You can't deny me this experience. She's going home tomorrow, it's me last chance. Think of the money. A tenner for two hours and I'll swap you all me busboy shifts for next week."
"I could use the money," Kevin admitted.
"So you'll do it?"
"All right, all right."
"That's my boy. I owe you one."
"You certainly do." Kevin frowned. "What are you doing with that coffee?"
It was perfectly evident what Jack was doing with the second cup of coffee he had got. Glancing around to be sure he was unobserved, he was immersing a couple of tabs of LSD in it.
"Present for Desmond," he grinned.
"Christ, Jack, you can't-"
But Jack could and was. Dumbstruck, Kevin trailed after him into the staff room. Desmond was sitting at the table reading his paper. Jack put the spiked coffee down in front of him.
"Eh?" said Desmond. "What's this?"
"Brought you a coffee, Desmond," said Jack. "I think you and me got off on the wrong foot. Maybe we should sit down and try and thrash it out like men."
Desmond scowled suspiciously at the coffee and pushed it away from him.
"Well that's as maybe," he said gruffly. "Soft soap won't wash with me, lad. You're riding for a fall, sunshine. Mend your ways, or I'll come down on you like a ton of bricks."
Just then Mr. Palmer came in.
"Those idiot suppliers have brought the wrong bloody meat again," he said. "I must have told them a hundred times."
"I'll fucking tell 'em," growled Desmond, rising and storming from the room.
Palmer sat down and took Desmond's coffee and slurped it gratefully.
"I wouldn't drink that if I was you," said Kevin.
"Why not?"
"It hasn't got any sugar in."
"Fuck it." Palmer drained the cup in two gulps.
Kevin and Jack exchanged glances.
"Whoops," said Jack.
"Mr. Palmer," said Kevin slowly, "why don't you take the rest of the day off? You look a bit peaky."
"Nonsense," said Palmer. "I'm right as rain, er, er...Wang. Wang?" Palmer frowned as a thought seemed to strike him. "I've been meaning to have a word with you about your self-assessment form, Wang. What was all that about a knife?"
"I don't remember."
"Don't you? You wrote something quite disturbing about a knife. I'd hate for anyone to think I was getting at them. If anyone has any problems with anything I'd like them to tell me straight out. The self-assessment forms were intended to facilitate that. I got some most unusual responses. That reminds me, if you see Kevin around, would you tell him I'd like a word with him? And...I know this must sound quite an unusual request, but if you ever see that boy hanging round near the cream pastries, would you let me know at once?"
Kevin said he would and Palmer nodded and started to read the paper.
Kevin and Jack lingered in the staff room for half an hour morbidly and silently staring at Palmer watching for signs of incipient psychedelia. Eventually he chased them back to work. He seemed perfectly normal.
"Maybe they were duds," speculated Jack as they left.
The first indication that this was not the case came half an hour later. Kevin, waiting on in the middle of a busy shift, caught sight of Palmer emerging from the staff room. He was moving with a very slow and careful tread, occasionally pausing with one leg lifted in mid-stride, as though he had almost forgotten how to walk. He looked altogether unusual and was staring at everything around him as though it was strange and new. By the time Kevin finished what he was doing and went over to him he was standing by the spare sauce bottles on the sideboard, staring fascinatedly at a bottle and running his hand slowly up and down it.
"Are you all right, Mr. Palmer?"
"Fine...fine..." said Palmer distractedly. "Very shiny, these sauce bottles. Ever felt how smooth they are?"
"Why don't you go to your chalet and have a lie down?"
Palmer suddenly gripped Kevin's arm. "Listen," he said urgently, cocking his head. Tell Laura I Love Her was playing over the sound system. "Isn't that the most beautiful song you've ever heard?"
Just then Kevin was called over by a customer and asked to fetch a cleaner knife. When he returned from the cutlery box Palmer was walking slowly through the middle of the dining area staring intently at the customers with an expression of alarm on his face. He stopped in front of a burly man who was tucking into sausage and chips and gazed fixedly at him for a long time, jaw hanging open. The man eventually looked up and glared at him.
"My God, your face," gasped Palmer, looking appalled.
He backed nervously away from the man and into Carlos, who was in the process of delivering a plate of chili con carne to the next table. When Palmer saw the food he gaped in disbelief.
"What the hell are you thinking of, Carlos?" he yelled. "Since when do we serve food with insects on it?" Carlos looked dumbfounded and stared at the plate in confusion.
"What's got into you?" cried Palmer in horror, cuffing Carlos around the head and snatching the plate from him. He started to frantically pick the kidney beans out of the chili and toss them on the floor. "They're all over it!" he shrieked. Carlos suddenly burst into tears and started to help him pick the beans out as he sobbed. Eventually Palmer was satisfied. "I'm sorry about that," he said as he put the plate down in front of the amazed diner.
By now everyone in the restaurant had stopped eating and turned to stare at Palmer. Now he was standing stock still in the middle of the dining hall waving a hand slowly back and forth in front of his face and frowning at it.
Kevin took his arm. "I think you should go and have some rest, Mr. Palmer."
Palmer whirled and goggled at him.
"Wang!" he shrieked in terror. "What are you doing with that knife?"
Too late, Kevin realized he still had the replacement knife in his hand.
"Keep away from me, Wang!" Wild-eyed and moaning, Palmer backed away from Kevin and then turned and fled outside.
"It's the stress, you see, Wang." It was now the evening shift and Kevin and Palmer were sitting in the staff room. Palmer had returned sheepishly an hour before after spending half the day AWOL. "I really don't know what came over me."
"You need a break, Mr. Palmer."
"Yes. Yes I do. It was the strangest feeling I've ever had. I started to, to see things, you know. Things that weren't there."
"But you're all right now?"
"Never been better, Wang."
"Well. I'd better get back to work, then."
"Yes, I suppose you had. I say, Wang, have you ever stopped to consider the interrelatedness of everything? The bond that exists between you and me and this table and this chair, for example?"
"Are you sure you're all right, Mr. Palmer?"
"Right as rain, Wang."
An hour later in the camp photographer's office, Kevin, already encased in the body of the Garfield costume, lowered the Garfield head over his own and found the stench of sweat within to be mephitic.
"Jesus, it's rank in here."
"You'll get used to it." Jack was visibly anxious to be off for his assignation. "I appreciate this. I owe you, bud."
A happy thought occurred to Kevin. "You owe me some buds, actually. I'm not doing this sober."
"Yeah, fair enough."
They went down an alley and Jack skinned up. In truth, Kevin was already not entirely sober, having knocked off work in time to catch the end of Happy Hour at the Tropicana Bar and down two of the obscenely eclectic but ravishingly potent cocktails for which the establishment was renowned. The skunky spliff coming on top of these served to push Kevin over the top into a golden world of divine content, and by the time he replaced Garfield's head and shuffled forth to begin his performance he was feeling that being Garfield was a very fine thing to be indeed.
Being Garfield was easy once you got into it, he found. All you did was flail your arms about and caper around a bit and the little kids seemed to love it. No-one seemed to mind very much that he was a rather drunken Garfield, staggering around unsteadily and lurching into people and knocking the occasional kid over, at one point holding onto a lamppost for support for several minutes when he suddenly felt his head start to spin and the Tropicana's Fruit Fandangos threaten to escape. The public responded well to him, children trying to feed him pizza and adults cracking jokes, and no-one tried to beat him up. Jack's Garfield tended to aggressively discourage unofficial photographers and insist that holidaymakers come back to the office to have their picture taken with him, and had once seized the camera from a particularly persistent paparazzo and attempted to confiscate the film, but Kevin couldn't give a shit about that, and besides the one time he did try to take someone back to the photographer he got lost.
He soon became reconciled to the indignity of the situation. Once the ghost of a much younger, prouder and more ambitious Kevin Kilroy said very clearly, 'Oh, that it should come to this,' and started to recite a list of the personal heroes it was particularly hard to envisage in a Garfield costume, but before it could get beyond Albert Camus, Leonard Cohen and Douglas Bader the Fandangos told it to get stuffed. If truth be told he was rather enjoying himself.
After an hour he was bored and thoroughly pissed off and yearning to machine-gun the kids, and started to slack off and skulk around the less frequented byways of the camp trying to look as inconspicuous as it was possible to do while wearing a six-and-a-half-foot cat suit. That was when he ran into Veronica.
"Hello, Jack," she said smiling slyly.
Oh, shit. "A'right," said Kevin as close to Jack's voice as he could.
She stepped up close and ran a hand over his chest fur. "Missing your cock," she said.
"Oh, good," said Kevin. "Not be long now."
Veronica took Kevin's paw and ran it over her face and then her chest. "This is quite a horny costume, you know. Perhaps you could borrow it after work."
"You're a sick woman," said Kevin faintly.
"I know," she grinned. "Come with me for a minute."
"Can't. Got to get back to the photographers."
"I'll walk with you."
She took him by the paw and led him along an alleyway leading back towards the main drag.
"Pity we can't do anything with you in that costume," she said slyly. "Or can we?"
She suddenly stopped him in the middle of the alley and unzipped the fly of the Garfield costume.
"Stop it!" cried Kevin. "What are you doing?"
She was reaching inside the fly and inside his boxer shorts and she was kneeling down and, oh, God, she was...
God bless Elysian Fields, thought Kevin.
Just when Veronica was starting to make him a very happy cat indeed a small boy came running down the alley.
"Garfield, Garfield!" cried the small boy. "Oh, Garfield!"
"Fuck off, kid, I'm getting blown," said Garfield, and laughed hysterically.
If the small boy was surprised to see a cartoon cat being fellated, no less so was Mr. Palmer, who also came around the corner just then.
For a second Kevin thought they were going to get away with it. Palmer's initial reaction upon beholding Garfield being given head by a waitress was to stare in terror and scrunch his eyes shut, obviously believing his hallucinations had returned. It was not, Kevin supposed, something you saw every day of the week. But when Palmer opened his eyes again and the apparition was still there he knew it was for real. Pale and trembling, he marched over to Kevin and the wide-eyed but still kneeling Veronica.
"My office. Now."
"I'm very disappointed in you, Wang," said Palmer in his office. Veronica, for her part, had been very surprised to see Kevin rather than Jack emerge from the Garfield outfit. "You should both be very ashamed of yourselves. Such behaviour is completely unacceptable. God only knows the psychological traumas that child may now develop. What's more, the Garfield character is licensed to us under very strict provisos to avoid bringing it into disrepute. While your...actions were not specifically mentioned in the franchising contract, they were almost certainly contrary to the spirit of the agreement. Your act of fornication could have exposed us to lawsuits from several different directions and brought disgrace on the whole camp."
Kevin hung both his heads in shame.
"Pack your bags," said Palmer. "You're fired, both of you. You will leave the camp tomorrow."
So Kevin went back to his chalet and packed his suitcase.
But when he went to the Chuck Wagon the next morning to say goodbye to everyone he found that Palmer had told Desmond to terminate Wang and Desmond had sacked the real Wang. Desmond was surprised to see Kevin not in uniform and told him he was docked an hour's wages and to get changed and get to work. So Kevin got changed, ditched the Wang badge, and tentatively went back to work. He encountered Palmer in the afternoon and Palmer showed not only no surprise at seeing him still there but no sign of recognition whatsoever.
Chapter 9
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