Sodom MacPurity has placed a picket on the bookshop. He’s upset because I barred him for desecrating books in the store. So now he’s marching up and down outside with a placard shouting about blasphemy in literature and communist bookshop owners.
Yesterday I caught Sodom, our local anti imperialist, anti capitalist and anti refugee activist, tipexing out whole sentences in one of my books at the front of the shop.
“What the feck are you at?” I had asked him, brandishing a hardback edition of War and Peace menacingly in my hand.
“I’m removing pro British propaganda from this book,” he had replied. “Before it influences the children in the village and turns them into little West Brits Thatcherites. Not on my watch boy!”
“Ah Jaysus, you’re after destroying that lovely edition of the Jungle book, ya great galoot.”
“Everyone knows Rudyard Kipling was the Goebbels of British colonialism,” Sodom screamed. “And the Jungle Book is a modern day work of Islamic fundamentalist allegory.”
“How can it be a modern day work when it was wrote in the 1890s?”
“If you have any bit of decency in you, you’ll turn a blind eye while I finish amending all of your Kipling’s and Conrad’s.”
“Conrad?” I yelped, pulling a copy of Lord Jim off the shelf. It was covered in tipex marks. Whole sentences eradicated by Sodom MacPurity’s unhinged sense of reality.
“And the others,” he went on. “Rider Haggard, London, Golding, Orwell…”
“Orwell? You can’t tell me you think George Orwell was an imperialist?”
“He was a communist! And a founding member of the New World Order and it’s attempts to wipe out freedom through a combination of feminism, socialism, veganism and Justin Bieber.”
“Oh god,” I muttered. “Any other enduring literary legacies you want to smear in Tipex?”
“AA Milne.”
“The creator of Winnie the Pooh?”
“Absolutely. That bear represents everything that’s decadent in western society. Pooh is a cuckold to the obviously African American Tigger. It’s the blueprint for the great replacement!”
Nobody talks trash about Pooh Bear. That’s when I barred Sodom MacPurity, inadvertently triggering the first boycott in the village since Stout Trout had stopped eating After Eights for ethical reasons.
Now he’s outside, with a handwritten placard which reads; ‘Books can seriously damage your health’. He’s been joined by another young lad with a ponytail, bad acne and a purple turtle neck sweater, who’s harassing passers-by with climate change denial mantras and information about the true nature of the flat earth.
The Legion of Mary, the Anti Austerity Alliance and the Yellow Vests are on the far side of the road, trying to decide whether or not to join the protest. I can hear them growling as they shoulder each other. “Are you joining the protest? If you are, we're not. I’m not protesting with the likes of you.”
“Franz Kafka had carnal relations with a stolen plastic doll,” Sodom is roaring. “James Joyce was a British agent in the second world war. Philip Roth promoted masturbation because he was a member of the elders of Zion.”
Mannie the transgendered feminist arrives in the middle of the protest, dressed in her domantrix costume, leading a frail guy in a black PVC gimp suit on a dog leash. “Don’t worry,” she says when she catches sight of my mouth hanging open. “I’ve come to help you by mounting a counter protest, even though you are a misogynist pig with no understanding of the trials and tribulations faced by discriminated minorities like myself.”
The gimp pulls his mouth zip open. “Hello Bookman,” comes the unmistakable voice of honest Abe.
“Abe, what are ya doing in that gimp suit?”
“It’s not a gimp suit,” Abe sighs. “This a fire retardation suit. I used to wear it when I was fighting forest fires in Australia. The airforce would drop me in front of the flames with nothing but me fire retardation suit, a fire extinguisher and an axe. Many a time I saved thousands of lives with this suit.”
“Quiet slave,” Mannie the transgendered feminist screams, pulling hard on his leash.
“Look it, how exactly are you going to improve this situation?” I ask.
“By mounting a counter protest, you ungrateful prick,” Mannie the transgendered feminist says. “I abhor the censorship of books, except when we’re censoring misogynists and toxic masculinity nuts like Hemingway, Mailer, Bukowski and Kerouac.”
“I like all those writers!”
“My point exactly,” Mannie the transgendered feminist pouts. “But I’ll still save your old fashioned arse because you’re cheaper than Easons.”
Outside Sodom has climbed up onto one of our outdoor bookcases and is roaring at passing cyclists. “Books pervert the human mind! Look at de Sade and DH Lawrence. Look at Nabokov and that witch lover Satanist JK Rowling! Look at Hitler and his final solution.”
“Jaysus, is he blaming the bookshop for the holocaust?” I whisper.
Mannie the transgendered feminist sighs. “Don’t be such an egotist Bookman. He’s not blaming your little shop for the deaths of six million Jews. He’s just blaming it on books in general.”
“I would say being accused of being anti Semitic might damage business Bookman,” Honest Abe grins. “But you’ve already got no customers.” He sniggers harshly until his leash is pulled hard again.
Mannie the transgendered feminist drags Honest Abe outside and, setting up a few feet away from Sodom MacPurity, begins to sing ‘Say it loud – I’m black and I’m proud’. She’s completely out of tune and murdering James Brown’s classic, while Honest Abe flosses behind her, like an elderly gimp version of Baz from the Happy Mondays.
An eerie silence as fallen over Sodom, the Legion of Mary, the AAA and the Yellow Vests as the atrociously mangled words of Brown’s civil liberty track drones out across the village. The only other noises are the grind of Abe’s PVC pants as he gyrates and the unmistakable sound of yellow vests getting sick.
Sodom looks shell-shocked. He quickly approaches Mannie when she finally finishes and attempts to break into an encore with No Doubts ‘Just a girl’ and catches her hand. “Your voice,” he stutters. “It’s like an angels. You’re gorgeous.”
“I know,” Mannie the transgendered feminist says, flicking her hair and tugging hard on Abe’s chain.
“Will we go for a drink?”
“You’re buying though,” she says, letting him lead her down the road to the pub hand in hand, her other hand dragging Abe along behind them.
After awhile the others disperse, clearly distraught that there was no protest. The young lad with the pony tail and bad acne comes into the shop and buys a Nelson Mandela biography.
He’s pleasant enough until I ask for the money. “I can get it cheaper in the charity shop,” he curses.
"There’s no entertainment like this in a charity shop.”
He thinks about this and grudgingly hands over the two euro. “Bloody smut peddler,” he hisses under his breath as he leaves the shop.
The picket ends and I’ve made two euro. I go outside and clean up the Yellow vest vomit.
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