Aromabingo

by David Gaffney

Overview

Aromabingo builds on the critical success of David Gaffney's 2006 collection Sawn-off Tales, offering yet more of Gaffney's weird and edgy ultra-shorts, plus several longer works, so you can spend even more time inside the baffling, hilarious and sometimes moving world of a David Gaffney story. Think Magnus Mills mashed with the League of Gentlemen with a jolt of Mark E. Smithery for grit, and you're nearly there. Though many of his stories are shorter than a Napalm Death snarl, these precision-engineered slivers of fiction leave you with the dying chords of a symphony. They are about the small people, the tiny Tardis folk with cathedrals inside them, creeping by unnoticed. These tales will have you laughing like at a Tommy Cooper video though there's something hideous gnawing at the door to get in. Be careful, a spoonful weighs a ton.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844718931
Publisher:	Salt
Publication date:	07/05/2011
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	393 KB

About the Author

David Gaffney lives in Manchester. He is the author of several books including Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), Never Never (2008), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). He has written articles for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect, and his new novel, All The Places I’ve Ever Lived, is due out in spring 2017. See www.davidgaffney.org.

Read an Excerpt

Art Movement

Howard had no talent for painting. He joined the class to meet attractive women and had a vague idea that if he developed a few basic skills they would pose naked for him. For this reason he had set up his easel next to Yvonne. Yvonne had remarkable hair – a neat black bob with the sheen of sump oil, and an unusual solidity, like a plastic hat. She also had an attractive way of nipping her lower lip between her teeth while she concentrated on her painting, which was a picture of a bird standing on an apple. Howard was about to mention that a bird probably wouldn’t stand on an apple as the apple would roll away, when she leaned over and asked him, in a low whisper, if he had noticed that every colour of paint had its own little name written on the tube. Her voice was pleasantly croaky, as if she smoked a lot, and her bob of black hair brushed Howard’s cheek as she spoke.

He looked at the tube he was holding. ‘Yes,’ he whispered, with one eye on the tutor who could be rather strict about chatter. ‘The yellow’s called Buttercup Meadow.’

‘Have you seen the name of the colour black? It is positively offensive,’

Howard looked at the tube she had thrust into his face. Written on it were the words THE SILENCE OF DEATH.

He laughed. ‘Creepy.’

‘It’s just not acceptable,’ she said. ‘For many, many, many reasons.’

Howard didn’t know what she meant, but he liked the way her bob of black hair brushed his face and, because this sensation had suddenly become very important to him, he decided to agree with everything she said.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Why would death be silent?’ Yvonne continued. ‘When we meet up with our loved ones in heaven it will most certainly not be silent. It will be riotous! Chatting, singing, dancing. For example, my grandmother died last year and she hated silence – telly on full blast all day long.’ She turned back to her canvas and angrily squeezed a curl of the offending colour onto her canvas. ‘And another thing.’ She swivelled violently, making her solid bob of hair swing. ‘Why reserve this particular name for the colour black? If anything, death should be should be a colour that celebrates, it should be,’ she clawed at the air for words, ‘gold. The celebration of a new beginning. You know what this paint tube says to me?’ She tossed it across the room, where it bounced off an easel and landed on the floor, spinning for a few seconds on the polished wood. ‘It says that when you are dead there’s nothing, and that is offensive to Jesus, and if it offends Jesus it offends me.’

***

Howard and Yvonne entered the classroom by forcing a window with a screwdriver and used a torch to find their way about.

Squeezing all the black paint into one bowl and the gold into another was easy, but it was another matter entirely to put the black paint into the gold paint tubes and the gold paint into the black tubes.

‘I’m getting it everywhere,’ Yvonne said. ‘I need to take my shirt off.’

‘Me too.’

They stood there for a time, Yvonne in her bra, Howard’s pale hairless chest shining in the amber light from the street lamp outside. Then he dipped his hand into the bowl of black and daubed a thick streak across her tummy. ‘For Jesus,’ he said.

‘Keep going,’ said Yvonne, and he did.

By the end of the night Howard’s hands were caked and everything was gold and black. Yvonne was smothered in it. Even her immaculately clipped bobbed hair was clumped up in gluey golden peaks. The only parts of her that weren’t gold and black were the palms of her hands where they’d been held together in prayer.

Table of Contents

1. 45 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE:

Art Movement

The Kids from Film Noir

Pretty, Ain't It?

All Mod Cons

Sniffin' Glue

Still in Box

Speaking in Pantone

Die like a Rock

Great Inventions # 1

Lucky Winner

A Good Deal

Through the Medium of Modern Dance

Great Inventions # 2

Smaller than One Eightieth the Diameter of a Human Hair

Blurred Girls

The Secret Pictures of David Cameron

The Newt Lady's Dead Now

The Life of Riley

You've Chosen to be Excited

Great Inventions # 3

Are We Romping Now?

Clown-Time is Over

The Accused Made Spider Furniture

Container Driver

Using the Facilities

When Chairs Attack

Shooting Lulu

A Feel for Format

Grockel Bashing

Cleaning up New York

Aromabingo

2. TWELVE-INCH SINGLES:

The Happiness Well

Last Chance to Turn Around

You and You Alone

Only the Stones Remain

In the Days Before Trickery

The Nineteen Seventy-Six Trouser Famine

Who reads this story will not sin

What Would Bill Hicks Do?

Mean Picking

The Last Northerner

3. LONG PLAYERS:

This is About Dixie

Finding Skerryvore

Does Anyone Care for You on a Regular Basis?

Special Pudding

Guided by Voices

Gossamer

4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS