Sunday, January 23, 2011

Kong of the Picts

(Another story from Virtual Scotland: just as 'Horse Island' should have concluded the collection, this somewhat lewd fable was intended as its opening piece.)

Insemination had been spectacular enough: Fay McWray bobbing on an unending spurt of giant gorilla semen like a ball at a fair, clutching her outflung ankles and screaming “WHEEEE!”

But pregnancy was the real nightmare; Fay literally ballooned, her belly expanding to a pink sphere twenty feet in circumference, her head and limbs dangling from it like the fingers of a rubber glove. She was only comfortable floating in the Tay, and a great plastic sac had to be created to contain her, so that the water could be heated. Meanwhile Kong amused himself hopping from multistory to multistory and squatting on the Law Hill, playing with bits of broken jets. (He’d been more sensible this time round, stomping on Leuchars before he arrived in Dundee, taking the RAF totally by surprise. The government had been sensible too, treating the whole incident as a money-saving exercise.)

When Fay’s breasts suddenly started growing too, rivalling her enormous belly, teams of divers had to be organised, to keep her now submerged head supplied with oxygen and sandwiches. She had a terrible craving for grilled banana and gouda cheese.

Delivery was a logistical nightmare, as it was by this time impossible to move her. Ultrasound had established there were at least forty children to be accounted for, and as the birth took place at night, the scene was a chaos of small boats equipped with searchlights and midwives in wetsuits. “Eh felt like the wreck o the bloody Braer,” as Fay commented later.

When her waters broke, so too did the protective sac, and the river level rose by six inches, slapping the Discovery Quay with a false tide that was greeted by a crowd of well-wishers with cheers and applause. By this time Kong, having imbibed freely in most of Dundee’s pubs, lay on his back, filling the Murraygate, while teams of male friends scrambled up ladders to empty can after can of export down his gaping throat.

“Eh wis that pished Eh trehd tae pit oan twa buses fur the Ferry, thinkin they werr meh baffies,” as he bemoaned the following afternoon (after a year in Dundee, his command of his first language was impeccable).

When the babies started appearing no-one quite knew what was happening; suddenly the waves were full of seals and black shapes like large dogfish sacs. It transpired the seals were catching the birth-pouches as they appeared, and nudging them towards the nearest boats. Fifty one in all were recovered by this method, but reports were received by Broughty Ferry police that crying voices had been heard floating past the Castle Rock. “Ye canna mak an omelette withoot braakin eggs, as ma mammy yaised tae sey,” Fay commented stoically. Kong had to be restrained from attempting to dredge the Firth after drunkenly putting a foot through the Earl Grey Hotel.

By the time the birth-pouches were brought ashore the rubbery material had already started to split at the restless kickings and scratchings of its contents, and doctors quickly removed the babies from their purse-like prisons. There were thirty two males and nineteen females. The children were humanoid, if slightly large, and the only abnormality appeared to be that they already had a full head of curling blue-black hair and, in the case of the boys, the beginnings of a stubble. Their eyes were extremely large, and a pale watery blue: “Jist like thir da!” exclaimed the proud mother, after being hoisted from the water.

In the next few months all was busy industry, as Kong set about repairing the various buildings damaged or obliterated by his sozzled perambulations. “See if Eh’d been wan o you wee fellas,” he commented philosophically, “Eh’d be makin thae model boats and sailin them oan the Swannie Ponds wi the best o ye!” Fay’s body began the extraordinary process of reabsorbing the extra lengths of skin generated by her pregnancy. Her breasts remained something of a burden, and together with her offspring she took up two wards at the DRI.

“But,” as she triumphantly announced, “Eh fed every wan o thae bairns wi ma ain twa breists: Eh felt like Christ wi the fehv thoosand, ken, him wi a pan loaf and a tin o pilchards.”

The children themselves grew at an incredible rate, as befitted the gene carriers of the mighty Kong. After six months they had gained the size and appearance of adolescents. As their first birthday approached they were complete, if speechless, adults. Their average height was seven feet, and it had become apparent that their eyes were twice the normal human size, with a corresponding variation in the proportions of their skulls. This made them especially sensitive to light. “Cost us a bloody fortune in designer sunglessis,” Fay complained, not without a touch of pride. The oversized sunglasses became, briefly, a fashion item amongst Dundee youth.

From an early age the children of Fay and Kong displayed a remarkable capacity for creativity: plasticene was seized upon, paints and pencils eagerly manipulated, and their manual dexterity more than made up for their continued silence. “See, they’re tellin me and thir daddy things wi thir haunds that ye widnae expect a bairn tae be able tae sey wi its mooth,” Fay said, staunchly defending her offspring as the psychiatrists’ diagnosis of autism became more and more likely.

It was from about this time, as school age approached, and it seemed increasingly unlikely that the McWray children would fit in, that public opinion began to turn against Fay and Kong.

“See when they’re aa oot waulkin through the toon in a big lang line,” said one woman, who declined to be named, “Eh dinna ken whaur tae pit masel. Thae bairns arena natural, starin at aabody wi een the sehz o ashets.”

“It is an affront to Christian families everywhere,” commented a minister anonymously, “that this couple should continue to get state support, even whilst flaunting their marriageless condition. Not that a gorilla can get married in the Church of Scotland anyway,” he added, off the record. “Especially if he can’t get through the bluidy door.”

The police received complaints from mothers fearing for their infants’ safety, and it could not be denied that the fifty one children were an intimidating sight; all with waist-length curling black hair and massive black shades, the boys bearded and almost Hassidic, and everyone clad in dark blue jellabas donated by a childless Arab emir.

Not even the discovery of their exceptional facility as sculptors improved the light in which the McWray children were viewed. Kong had apprenticed the boys to a monumental sculptor in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. (A earlier plan to enrol the girls as nurses, in honour of the support given to the family by Dundee’s hospitals, had ended in ignominious failure when they refused to perform the simplest tasks of cleaning or cooking.) Unable to inscribe lettering, the boys had instead produced a phantasmagoria of animal and symbolic imagery which threatened to dissolve the stone beneath their chisels. When reunited with their sisters this frenzy ordered itself under the girls’ mute directives into a repetitive series of motifs that had both archaeologists and art critics reeling in disbelief.

“While it is impossible to establish a direct route of influence,” commented Dr Granolithic of Dundee University, “there is a strong link between the McWray Family’s work and that of Pictish stonemasons from the eighth and ninth centuries.”

Collectors gathered the ceaseless outpourings from the studio of the mystified but gratified monumental sculptor, who later made a lucrative career for himself producing copies of his erstwhile apprentices’ work. Kong and Fay’s financial security was assured. But, if anything, this new-found wealth only heightened the tension between them and the ordinary community.

“Eh’ve hud shite through meh letter box, ma waashin stole, and fowk huv pennted “Picts Out” oan ma waas,” Fay said tearfully. “Eh’m at the end o ma bluidy tether.”

“If Eh catch them Eh’m goanae pit them atween the crack o meh erse and squeeze,” growled Kong, in what his lawyer attempted to dismiss as a stress-related outburst.

But when a perfectly-flattened fifty one year old man with a aerosol in the remains of his pocket was found not a hundred yards from Fay’s block of flats the idyll was over. Kong was arrested and held in Dens Park, whilst Fay and the children vanished to relatives “up north”.

Blood samples recovered from the sole of Kong’s foot matched that of the two-dimensional victim, and, separated from his loved ones, the giant gorilla broke down and confessed, asking for eighty seven incidents of wilful damage to jet fighters to be taken into consideration. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on a small island in the Pacific already playing host to the notorious serial Tokyo-crusher and dinosaur impersonator, Godzilla.

Fay and her now six year old brood had quite literally disappeared from the public eye. The art market demanded yet more McWray Family sculptures, and agents and dealers descended on Scotland in droves, but were unable to uncover the least trace. Relatives maintained a wall of silence almost as formidable as that of the children themselves, and the commotion gradually died down.

Fay aged gracefully in a tiny port on the North-East coast. Her breasts, once the size of pilot whales, now had to be rolled and contained within an ingenious bra devised for her by Kong, far away on Monster Island. The children, still mute, confined themselves to reworking the sandstone cliffs and caves around their safe haven. The locals accepted them with a disdain for the world’s opinions entirely typical of the area, and a number of marriages were consummated, wordlessly and underagedly on one side at least. Fay’s grandchildren, to her immense relief, could speak. “When I hear them yammerin awa in thir mammies’ airms, Eh think Eh’m hearin aa the words Eh waanted ma ain bairns tae sey,” she confided to relatives. Then came the news of Kong’s escape, and, such was the focus of media attention that Fay’s location was soon discovered.

Confined to their homes while news-teams and arts programme-makers swarmed the streets and cliffs of their small town, the McWray family stolidly endured the ceaseless media speculation. Where was Kong? Would he come for his lover and their children, now a considerable tribe of over a hundred souls? The navy patrolled the entire coastline nervously. Fay was photographed again and again, seated at the window of her small shorefront cottage, staring wordlessly out to sea, ignoring the window-tapping of the journalists, and their endless questions, mouthed or scribbled in felt pen on sheets of paper and held up to the glass.

Then, one morning, shortly after dawn (she had not slept in her bed for weeks) she saw the longed-for, fondly-remembered sight. Breaching the chill waters of the bay like a great hump-back whale, Kong’s erect penis jutted abruptly from the waves and hung there for a moment, signalling to her in their old secret code. Grey-haired as she was, she rose like a young girl, her shawl falling from her shoulders as she left the house, unbuttoning her blouse and stepping out of her old tweed skirt, rolling off her pantihose on the shingle as the film-crews slept on in the cosy if over-crowded guest houses and hotel. Wading out towards the point where Kong’s member had appeared, she undid her bra and let her breasts unfold, trailing behind her in the swell as the enormous penis broke the surface once more, showering her in droplets of foam.
Onshore, behind the windows of their quiet houses, the offspring of the giant ape and the woman, together with their wives and husbands and children, watched as Fay McWray clambered back onto the genital organ of her beloved and, employing a lazy backstroke, their father swam out of sight.

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