Chapter 7.

Seems to me that a few more things should have happened before it got to this point. But what the heck.


Chapter 7.

Eddie watches his toupee drift slowly out of sight and thinks about his predicament. He has a rope around his ankles. Ryan and Phile have hold of the other end. Eddie is dangling in space. He has never been this close to an active volcano before. The view is spectacular. Unfortunately it will soon be hurtling towards him at the rate of 32 feet per second per second (whatever that means) unless he is lucky enough to get one hand on a rocky projection. It could only be a precarious hold but just enough to turn this whole thing into a cliffhanger. It would also allow a bit of leeway for some flashbacks.

It is said that at such moments ones whole life flashes in front of one. Eddie’s mind was more selective. Carefully edited portions of his rich and varied past did in fact present themselves, but not for close scrutiny. Childhood days, playing in the long English summer grass, the distant clack of willow bats against cricket balls, watching ‘Tiswas’ with his brother Charlie, those were the bits he enjoyed most. Popping down to the Co-op, later Tesco’s, with Mum for some PG Tips and a packet of Jaffa Cakes, office pranks in the BBC accounts department and life in L.A. with Carmen were nice too of course. He can see Carmen now for instance, in his mind’s eye, relaxing with ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ after a hard day dispensing sexual services to total strangers. Had he shown her the understanding she deserved?

If one overlooks his immediate problem, going to Iceland had been a good move for Eddie. He hadn’t been there long before he fell in with a group of Nigerian entrepreneurs lead by an IT expert called Prince Rupert N’inebobnote. Somebody with Eddies experience in identity transformation was just what Prince Rupert was looking for. After a brief discussion, mostly involving salary and employee benefits, Eddie was soon part of a team on Prince Rupert’s cruise ship anchored in a remote fjord. There, Eddie was well rewarded for turning out badly written email letters, which were then sent to addresses gleaned from the internet by his co-workers. The idea was to raise much-needed funds for various worthy projects in West Africa. Things were going well. The projects were proceeding nicely. Until Ryan and Phile showed up and spoiled everything.

They’d tracked Eddie down, drugged him, trussed him up and stuffed him in the back of a 4x4. Then they’d driven to a remote part of rural Iceland and dangled him over an active volcano. Why? Good question. Do they have something personal against Eddie? Have they been hired by the BBC to track down missing funds? Even Ryan and Phile aren’t sure. Listen to them now as they decide whether to let him go or not. It has been some time since they heard from GreatSheElephant and they are trying hard to conceal their anxiety from each other.

‘Don’t you get fed up with all this post modernism?’ Ryan asks, apropos of something to say. ‘A bit of irony is fine but aren’t we flogging a dead horse?’
‘Oh it gets tedious,’ says Phile, ‘I admit it. But what can I do? We don’t have a plot. We don’t even have a proper narrator.’
‘What about GSE?’
‘She’s a protagonist. Don’t get me started on literary niceties.’
‘Sometimes I feel like I’m going mad.’ Says Ryan,
‘Well complaining won’t get us anywhere. We have to take the matter into our own hands.’
‘It was your idea to come to Iceland.’
‘No it wasn’t...’
‘You said you had the hots for Bjork.’
‘Don’t bring her into it. Would it be OK if we get back to the story? People will be wondering. Somebody has to make a decision.’
‘Be my guest.’ And so on. Nothing more than idle banter really while they wait for Eddie’s fate to be decided.