LAYABOUT (A FRAGMENT)

Ever since Arthur was a young boy, his father, Merlin, had taught him all about the virtues of being a layabout. Now, he was the exact same age his dad had been when he first dispensed his “crazy wisdom” regarding his unique brand of layabout philosophy — but, having recently lost regular access to his own daughter, Guinevere, Arthur worried he’d have no one to pass the family tradition on to.

For Arthur’s father, being a layabout meant taking life as easily as possible, without letting the stresses and strains of reality take too fierce a grip — the kind that might make you forget how to groove and kill off the inner child with its propensity for wonder and curiosity.

The old man explained:

“The groove is a realm of existing — for at least a few hours or more — in the ultimate state of Layabout-ness: sipping coffee, tearing a croissant in half, leafing through a few pages of a book in a café and contemplating its content in a mellow but focused way, then later ambling through a few art galleries, record shops, and bookshops in search of further cultural sustenance, endlessly topping up on the joy front.”

Lately, however, thanks to several crises on the personal front — including a messy separation from his ex-partner — Arthur had switched from being a creature of the day groove to being one of the night groove, and it was changing him. He had become a vampire, one who struggled to sleep before the sun crept up like the unwelcome intruder it was.

Staying up all hours, blasting Harry Nilsson and Kinks records while drinking endless glasses of banana-powdered milkshake laced with rum, and eventually falling asleep to his favourite detective movies in a Valium-induced slumber, Arthur had the uneasy sense that somewhere along the way he had turned into a layabout gone wrong — a Frankenstein’s monster of his father’s creation.

With no one to keep him company except for the last of his daughter’s goldfish (a Veiltail to be precise) — which seemed either to be hiding or dead inside a plastic underwater Camelot castle at the back of her ever-bubbling fish tank — he sprinkled some more food in the vain hope it would appear before he was forced to dismantle the castle walls and find Nemo either flapping his silky fins or lying as deathly still as a pressed butterfly. For now, though, it was a sort of Schrödinger’s-goldfish situation.

Teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, Arthur really wasn’t sure he could handle a dead goldfish on top of everything else.

To be continued ...