The Mock-Tale

The Love Story

My name is Frank. I’m on the beach.

I'm laid out on a teak wood sun lounger bathing in the rays of the yellow dwarf we're all swinging around.

Most people don't take the time to stop and soak in the electromagnetic-radiation-orangey-goodness. But I always do.

Life's a dance, even the stars know it.

My sunglasses keep my sinuses from hurting, but do more of a job quarantining my eyeballs from the sweat cascading down my forehead.

I grab my drink - its been sweating too. But its empty.

This is terrible.

A new one is required.

Next thing I know, I'm at the thatched tiki-bar with the rest of the tourists.

The Weeknd are playing over a speaker system. Something about being blinded by lights. Its groovy. I have sunglasses too, see. I groove.

I want a coke. I request a coke.

Bartender starts whipping something up. Something more complicated for the lady who forgot her sunscreen.

She's probably the type who takes her shoes off inside her own house, waits for broadcast telly to tell her what to watch instead of deciding for herself and eats with both a fork and a knife.

She wants a tequila sunrise.

I turn away. My eyes lock with two deep blue springs of a mountain lake looking back at me.

He bumps into me. He’s gorgeous.

He’s got brown and floppy hair and a grey, clinging stubble.

He says ‘sorry mate’. Mate. He’s so masculine.

His voice is deep and bleeds of artistic restraint, like Johnny Cash, but with the playful and endearing accent of Hugh Grant’s character from Four Weddings and a Funeral. He’s a dream.

I say ‘its fine’ and then tell him I love him.

Its a deep and powerful expression of my infatuation.

He walks away. His reaction is hard to read. He's at the bar ordering an alcohol-free passion fruit martini. He’s such a mystery.

Marty goes to pay for his drink.

I think that might be his subtle and brilliant way of telling me; he wants me.

I’ve named him Marty by the way.

He’s dressed to impress in cargo shorts and Adidas and screams of sophistication. He might actually have combed his hair.

A tin of alphabetti spaghetti tugs at his modesty while stuffed in his back pocket.

A bizarre thing to carry to around, but not out of place on a man looking to give me all the right signals.

I've got to say, I thought the front looked good but the back's even better.

His cheeks teasingly wag the samba while Marty stands stock-still.

And when I say still, I mean, frozen brick kind of still. I'm talking Rishi Sunak's cardboard cut-out being bitten by a black widow spider kind of still.

But those cheeks are partying likes it 99'. There might be an electrical current running through those things.

Good thing I'm not short on rubber.

Then, we’re stood together at the counter, side-by-side. This is almost exactly how I picture our wedding, except in my dreams I’m not wearing a speedo. Well, I am, but on top of that I'm in a tight red show-stopper of a dress and Marty is Peter Pan.

We wait for the priest. Not the priest. The bartender. The bartender comes.

Bartender wears a name-tag with Gary scribbled over the middle.

For a moment I'm exasperated by this revelation. Gary's not a very tropical name.

The song about being blind ends and Billie Eilish takes the stage. I don’t groove.

She's a portent of doom that I should have seen coming.

Gary signals me first. Marty doesn’t mind.

I picture Marty carrying me over the threshold of the house we buy. I picture the children we adopt. Or maybe we’ll have a surrogate. Or do we even want children? I don’t think I do. But what if Marty does? Maybe this is a conversation I should involve him in?

Maybe I should ask Marty?

Gary tells me a coke is 110 Jamaican dollars.

I open my wallet. I have a penny.

Not even a Jamaican penny. A British penny and a bus ticket back to the hotel.

This is a disaster. I cannot let Marty see me like this. What if he thinks I can’t give him a future? What if he thinks I’m too poor to buy a drink? Which is what I am, but it's too soon for true colours.

Something else I am - too ashamed to ask for help.

So I think of something else.

I side-eye my beloved. He’s looking right at me.

I ask him to look away. He turns around.

His cheeks shake, rattle and roll like they were shaped by the comets.

Gary takes a query from another over-enthused outsider, an old woman in a one-piece asking where the toilets are on behalf of her big, hairy husband. His sunscreen has glued all the dark fuzz to his body and now he looks like a two-legged badger that's been forced through a pringles tube filled with mayonnaise.

I don’t know them but I despise them both. They have a kid with them. He looks stupid and shockingly woolly.

I realise I don’t want kids.

In a moment I’ll need to pay. In the moment I cannot.

Now is my chance.

My brain rushes to an answer and totally skips the part where logical thinking forms the framework of my actions. Sense becomes lost. The wrong answers become the right answers. 2 and 2 becomes 5.

I reach and I grab. I act.

The Crime Story

Gary beholds the payment I’ve offered for the coke; a tin of alphabetti spaghetti that doesn’t belong to me.

He doesn’t like it. He’s a capitalist pig about it.

Marty turns back around. He doesn’t like it either.

Marty chooses now as the time to reveal the true nature of his soul and accuses me of theft.

I can’t bare being denounced for something I blatantly did.

I ask him what’s wrong.

Turns out Marty's a fascist too.

My world falls apart at this horrifying discovery.

This is devastating news and my heart breaks.

Gary puts the tin in my hand and demands the full payment. Marty demands the return of his spaghetti.

Lil Nas X pops up for a radio rodeo. I groove. Marty does not.

Marty likes to play hard to get.

Marty attempts to snatch the tin from me, so I do the right thing to dissolve the situation.

I put it down my speedo.

This is a necessary, but deeply uncomfortable strategic manoeuvre.

At any moment I feel it might snap - and after getting an eyeful of Marty's terrific derriere I'm not talking about the speedo.

Marty is exasperated.

He shakes his head and I discover that I actually don’t really like Marty any more.

I’m over him.

He’s just some sexy, grunting villain. Like David Bowie in Labyrinth.

Having made that connection, I realise that I actually still quite like Marty.

I tell Marty that I forgive him, but he’s unable to move on from the past.

It pains me to see my beloved burdened with such grief, but before I can console him any further, Gary loses his patience.

He sees the old woman and her collection of bears towards the direction of a bathroom and pulls a rail around the bar. We're locked in, like a ride on a roller-coaster.

Open becomes closed.

Gary tells us there’s been a prolific shoplifter the last few weeks repeatedly hitting his bar for cocktail-making paraphernalia.

Marty and I become suspects.

I deduce that now is not the time to tell Gary about the miniature umbrella collection I started recently.

Marty loudly asserts that the spaghetti belongs to him.

I make the exact same claim about myself.

Deadlock.

Gary takes out a phone and dials just three numbers.

I suggest to Marty that if he really wants to sample the joy of combining key-stage literacy with the delights of easy-make Italian cuisine, then he can borrow my tin, but only if he pays for my coke.

The situation escalates like one of those moving stair thingies.

Our voices ride up with it.

There is a commotion. Marty has his hands on me. Gary leaps over the counter. Straws, chocolates and condiments decorate the floor.

After a scuffle, we are separated. I feel a stinging pain on my cheek and Marty has a bleeding lip.

I feel this is a bit of a first date red-flag.

Gary chastises us both.

We turn on Gary.

Gary becomes as confused as he is angry.

We bicker. We shout. We figure nothing out.

Fights continue to break out like we're on a Celebrity series of Big Brother.

We knock all the delicious chocolate treats from their spots on the front of the bar and the floor of the bar soon begins to resemble that of an oompa-loompa's staff room.

In a lull in activity, Marty explains that if I just return his tin of alphabetti spaghetti, that he’ll gladly pay for my coke because he’s just had enough of the whole situation and is thoroughly fed up.

But I’m too far down the road to take a detour anytime soon.

The tin in my speedos is giving me the grand-daddy of all self-imposed wedgies.

I’d look a fool if I removed it now.

I have my pride to think about.

I feign total ignorance of the tin tearing at my only fabric on the whole beach. This causes further animosity and a fresh ruckus breaks out.

I take a kick to the knee. Marty takes another hit on the mouth.

But it is assuredly Gary who loses the fight this time around. He takes a blow to the temple in the just the wrong place.

Gary crashes to the floor.

Gary is dead.

Marty and I look at each other. Neither of us can decipher who’s blow it was, in all the madness, that took him down.

There’s nothing else to it; we’re killers, both of us.

But at least now I have my coke.

We can't let the body just lay there waiting to be discovered. We have to act and fast.

2 and 2 becomes 638.

The Detective Story

We stash Gary back behind the counter. We put him under the piles of scattered chocolate bars.

And just like that Marty and I are lovers turned enemies turned accomplices.

I return the spaghetti tin to Marty.

Marty is happy again.

So is my rectal cavity.

Though I will say, if Marty is half as good at finding the prostate as his tin of spaghetti is, I will die a very happy man.

We throttle the iron bars blocking our escape.

Still locked.

I search for something to smash it open with, but most of the items are on top of Gary’s dead body and cannot be moved.

I see something that complicates matters.

Flashing lights.

Red and blue. Red and blue. Red and blue.

Suddenly I understand The Weeknd and how lights can be blinding. But this isn’t groovy.

It’s the police. The least groovy thing since train conductors invented rail fraud as a means to persecute the industrial proletariat.

The cop reaches our prison and unlocks it with her own key.

Marty and I step back.

We have no story, no plan and no time to prepare.

She mustn't discover the body. She mustn't discover the murder.

Piggy enters. She’s a she.

She asks us who called about the shoplifters.

Marty says he did.

She asks where the shoplifters are.

Marty points outside at the glaringly empty beach.

Piggy believes him.

Marty is so smart. I’ll call him Smarty.

Piggy asks how they got away.

Smarty explains that they murdered the bartender Gary in cold blood.

Marty is no longer Smarty.

I correct him and tell Piggy all about how the shoplifters were very kind, careful and attentive in their robbery, how nobody got hurt and how they even locked up the bar behind them on the way out.

Piggy asks what that corpse-shaped pile of chocolate is behind the counter.

I tell her that’s a staff area and therefore none of our business.

She disregards my words and steps behind the counter. With one swipe of her wrist, she brushes the chocolates from over Gary’s face and sees his bleeding skull.

Piggy says that this must be the man who called the police.

I tell her he isn’t.

She asks why.

Marty says because he’s been busy under his chocolate.

She doesn’t buy it.

We're losing her. I've got to come up with a believable reason as to why this man did not pick up a phone.

I tell her he definitely didn't do it, because he's clearly been murdered.

Shit. She squeezed it out of me. This cop’s too clever for us.

Piggy stands up straight and pulls out a gun.

She points it at me. Then Marty. Then me. Then Marty.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

I raise my hands.

Marty raises his right.

In his left, he holds his spaghetti tight.

DROP IT, Piggy yells.

Marty refuses.

Piggy yells again.

Marty refuses again.

This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets... Marty and his spaghetti.

She brings her chin to her shoulder and requests back-up.

The line is scratchy and she’s asked to repeat herself. She raises her hand to her transceiver and points it closer to her mouth.

As she reaches, her inner shirt is revealed to me. Then I see it.

Marty’s eyes widen. He sees it too.

Four paper-straws, two mini-bags of banana fritters and a twix shoved into her waist-band.

She has keys. She unlocked the metal bars. She’s had unprecedented access to the bar the whole time.

She’s the shoplifter Gary warned us about.

In Gary’s great honour, may he rest in peace, Marty and I pounce on the criminal.

Piggy is overwhelmed and is pinned to the ground.

Marty takes her gun and shoots her in the head.

Piggy dies.

With the door unlocked, the crime solved and the day saved, Marty and I go our separate ways.

I liked Marty, but we’ve been through too much together now. We’ve both changed and I’m not the man who fell in love with him anymore.

Besides, he’s kinda weird.

I say goodbye to Marty.

He says goodbye to me.

I sip my coke. It tastes good. Like victory.

Later, I get the bus back to the hotel.

The driver's name is Dymond.

He's gorgeous.