Green Twist


First published 'Shorts From Surrey' 1993

Hector spent most of his waking hours doing jigsaw puzzles. It never crossed his mind that he might be wasting his life, for he found the whole activity relaxing, absorbing, generally civilised and, yes, cathartic.

He became so expert, he speedily progressed from the large chunky pieces designed for the short-witted, towards those that numbered their pieces in thousands. Then there were the ones with bits bearing malformed joints and appendages. He even had puzzles which eventually formed pictures in scales of life to life and larger...

As the carriage clock on the mantelpiece kept the silence in rigorous shape and, with the heavy-duty curtains half-pulled across the net-choked window, he propped the huge purpose-built board upon his spreading middle-aged beer-belly of a lap, emptied the contents of a wickedly difficult jigsaw into the cracked china chamber-pot beside him and proceeded to fit the whole affair together... without recourse to the picture on the box-lid and working from the middle outwards. Years of experience had made him a dab hand, as wily as a snake.

He purchased spanking new boxes from the Dickensian toy shop nearby with the big bay window. There were always stacks of them on the shelves - in fact, the place seemed to sell little else. The toothbrush-moustached shopkeeper knew Hector’s little foibles very well and chose the next puzzle for him, so that Hector need not look at the box-lid. The shopkeeper was indeed one of those rare breeds who believed the customer was always right…even when he was wrong. He knew that the time was approaching when Hector would be entirely dissatisfied with straightforward jigsaws. One had to be cruel to be kind, even if it meant tempting Hector beyond the edge.

Back home, Hector excitedly stripped off the cellophane with blunt fingernails, whilst keeping his eyes tightly averted, and poured the contents with a sensuous jiggling noise into the freshened chamber-pot.

One day, he was particularly pleased, because the shopkeeper had told him that the new puzzle had a picture that was really awe-inspiring. Something about Eve and the Tree of Knowledge. Always pleased with religious themes, Hector was bound to be satisfied with the end result. And the box contained more pieces than any other that the shopkeeper had ever seen in his experience. No two pieces the same shape. More than life size, he wouldn’t mind betting.

As the innards of the clock gave out an uncharacteristic whirring, jarring noise, Hector began to pick out bits one by one from the chamber-pot. His ultimate knack was to be lucky with the first few samples. Then he built up the picture, detail by minute detail, gradually obtaining an overview of the subject-matter, colours blending, form from form, shapes born, evolving, extruding...

Today was a dark day. The sky lugubrious. The street lamps lit earlier than usual. At first, he couldn’t believe the outline which was emerging upon the lap board. Snake scales. Mottled hide. Winding coils of microscopically diamond-quartered skin. Hooked teeth, whiter than he could ever credit a jigsaw reproducing. As he headed out towards the straight bits, he felt sickness constricting his throat. He couldn’t account for his feelings. But, then, horror-struck, he realised there were no straight bits... and the chamber-pot was nearly empty.

He desperately searched for the box-lid in the gloom, finally discovering it in the coal scuttle. He barely discerned a rather picturesque view of St Paul’s Cathedral, a majestic landlocked square-rigger set against the bluest sky that could only be seen in picture-books.

The contents had obviously been stashed in the wrong box.

Hector rushed over to the chamber-pot to be violently sick.

There was merely a pause for tension.

As he began to sense the pulsing spirals of slime slide up his bare leg, he remembered he had forgotten to switch on the light in his puzzle-solving haste. However, he could see that his skin was a mosaic of green scales, wet to the eye, but dry to the forked flicker of his own tongue.

He fled to the mirror... but his by now could only reflect its own darkness. He thought he must have become a monster that had only managed to escape because there were no straight bits forming the jigsaw’s margins to keep it in. He spun back across the parlour on this one-leg tail and instinctively planted his fangs into his own belly, grateful that he was sufficiently double-jointed to recycle the venom.

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