When retired TV producer Phone Millmus developed a tumour in his lungs, which grew into a malignant cancer eating out his throat, chest and heart, he signed up at once for the NoTV reality show Dupe the Dying Man. Within an hour of applying, a camera crew and three contestants arrived at his Basildon flat to begin the latest series. The theme this year was tripping and falling. The first contestant, Mike, a camp cabin assistant from Slough, began by sticking his foot out as Phone moved slowly...

Brazen, like a fireman’s will, though delicate, like a fireman’s soul, Salmonella Su slid down the pole at the Gernshire District Fire Depot, scandalously respectful towards the proper station etiquette. Although she had been hired to ‘distract’ the men from the death of their colleague, Big Mick the Inflammatory, by giving them twenty-four uniformly excellent blowjobs, something about the heroic environment stripped her of her contrived naughtiness. She could see that...

Now If you squint really hard, and I mean really hard, you can see it there on the horizon. There it is, look! Yeah… my indifference to you. Snarling like a dog with scabies beside the cardboard cut-out of the domestic gerbil I once was. Remember when I put your clothes in the dishwasher and your dishes in the washing machine? God, that was hilarious. I texted you the next day saying: ‘LOL! Dsh smshd up! Clths crmpled to sht!’ Something like that. Fuck. I can’t even r...

Sometimes, when Linda is strapped for cash, she ties a rope around her chest, walks into a toilet, inspects the stalls for loiterers, hurls a noose over the door and says: “Move it, worthless.” I met her in March when she lassoed Jericho, a former husband of mine, from the men’s room in the Dunstable multiplex during a matinee screening of In The Cut. We had been married for seven months, and in that time, he had developed a penchant for masturbating in public urinals whenev...

Whenever Donna Dram De Fauna, local sex receptacle and town doormat, walks through a room, whether a bedroom, the lavatory of a local beef restaurant or the vacant art museum at the stuffy end of town, one has the strongest urge to close one’s eyes at once and conceal one’s face from probable harm. A common phenomenon around here. Let me make clear the problems of her ghastly character and the strange eye-camouflage outburst that has developed. Born before the drug shortage of the late 1990s,...