Robert Swipe: an appreciation...

by Mardin Antlers...

Regular readers will be familiar with my occasional stints deputising on these pages. I'm the go-to-guy around Swipe Towers when his nibs is too emotionally racked out to make it to the typewriter; a kind of bleeperised Boswell, perpetually left to dangle at the other end of the line, primed and loaded and ready to step up in the unlikely event that His Master's Voice croaks out. It was me, you'll recall, who filled his britches when Swipe's old man pegged out. I've stepped up to the plate on several other occasions when the jags got too much or if the guvnor had his head too far down the glue bag to achieve what passes for coherence around here; like the time the Gunners lost it big time in the European Cup or when Kaplinsky hitched it out of BBC Breakfast news.

Oh sure, we go *way* back, old Bob and me. I first became aware of the Swipe presence when we both had a sock each in the rough old bad old end of Queensway. We kept ourselves pretty much to our selves - you did back then in the 70s; you didn't know where people had been back then. Or rather, you had a *pretty* *good* idea where people had been back then - and it didn't wipe off quite as easily in those days, no matter what Elton John might tell you. Besides, I had my career to carve and Bob; well, you know all about Bob by now. It wasn't until a bit later that the suspicious nods and winks across a smoke-filled saloon bar gave way to a mutual liking and respect. Our first real connection came much, much later, in the 80s, around the time of the fatwah, when Bob and I were taking it in turns to hide Salman Rushdie. It was in those charged and feverish days that we first really got to know one another, at the hand over time when whichever of us had been concealing Salman in the specially enlarged, state-sponsored brown mackintosh we used for the purpose back in those early days of exile would carefully slip each arm out whilst the other simultaneously slid theirs in, all the while attempting to keep the large, balding, bearded man in glasses crouched between our legs out of public view; not easy to do in the middle of Notting Hill High Street, I can tell you...

Our friendship became formalised when Bob sang at my second wedding - at least, I *think* he was singing. This was about the time that Bob had sacrificed the patiently cultivated pop following he'd been building up since the late 1960s and was beginning to inhabit a far more provocative and outre space. Increasingly, the traditional certainties of the performer's identity were being dissolved; was that *singing*, or did he just have a poodle up his skirt? Was he even a man? And if he wasn't, how far would he let you go on a first date before you had to get the handcuffs out? Strange times.

But now we're both of an age where, no matter what we do, our work will always be overshadowed by that awesome initial promise we both showed. I believe that's what has sustained Bob and my friendship all these years. We both know how it feels to live in the shadow of our former greatness. And now, as we arrow towards that ever-dimishing singularity; that universe-consuming point, it behoves me to say one final thing; take care dear, gentle brother; take care...

Mardin Antlers extract the third

Cut to Rio de Janeiro.

Behind the wall is a fan. In front of the fan is a block of ice. In front of the block of ice is a man. A shrewd and manipulative man who wears his white linen jacket with its slug-slime pits the way some men wear a frown. His socks are worn similarly, although he is relatively light trousered and has a nice tie. His face, if that inadequate word could be stretched to encompass the sagging corsetery of the varied jowls and bags that drip down over his skull cheeks, is full of menace and made slack jawed by too much bad hooch and a bad dentist.

Mardin Antlers novel extract 2

Candace Lipsalve-Bagwallader has just earned the easiest roll of monkeys she will ever retrieve from her cleavage. A top Tory minister has just paid her a sackload of reeking moolah to get her all nude and buttery in the sack. But what the Rt. Hon member for Shipton-by-the-Leem-Wold doesn't realise is that he may just have, by jumping into this particular sack with this particular sylph-like khazi stalker from the Betty Ford escort agency of hand relief, got himself tangled up in a whole other sack. And a far less stimulating and fragrant one it is too. This is the kind of sack they heave you out of office in saying p. off dolt breath and shaft your poll tax you burgling bugger, dumping you in the cruddy grime of the Embankment without even a lame duck Fourth assistant junior minister to the Secretary of State for Meadows and Fields portfolio to snuggle up with. It's cold, dank and abject down among the dossers and bag ladies and gentlemen, the other failed supremos spewed out by the careless Whitehall rubbish shute into the scary bristles of the Londinium evening. Ms. Lipsalve-B may have taken him halfway to paradise and back home the slow way in a fur-lined rickshaw , but Archie Krugerpistol never counted on washing up in this particular postcode of Wandsworth, tied up with cellotape and reeking of bisto in a home fit for cowards on a sunk estate with a head like a bashed weasel's gonad for his trouble. And light of a few thousand bob to boot, "the scheming udder pinching bint bag" he curses with miffed disdain all over his gistening chops.

CLB hot heels it to the offices of the Daily Murk where, dealing out the saucy snaps like a crap game wizardess on borrowed time and mescalin, she teases a ruefully impressed smile from patrician editor and cat flogger, Piss McFlaphound-Brevity. He knows a funked up Tory arse quivering when he sees one - and this has all the hallmarks of a crisis-meltdown-vote purge, if ever there was one. The hootenanny might just have cooled down a calvin or two by the time they've tippexed the old scrote off the birthday honours. McFlaphound-Brevity chortles, squeezing a bug like a pussy bottom boil. He hates the lot of them and still hasn't forgiven the Tories for the penny in the ponce hike on tabloid gutter-blood-red ink that's sliced a cool several hundred beavers worth of loot off his personal estate. He'll bring the slimey slag dudes down if it kills him in the process. They don't call him the Brisbane bastard crunch for nothing. He cackles like a villain and drags Candace and her unfeasible double barrel down the Naughty Fleshgizard and Scampi to get very very drunk on strong beer.

Back on the banks of the wet trench of drizzle that trickles warmly down the leg of the boss town of England, Krugerpistol lies bound and augmented like a poove from a sexslave catalogue pointing pointlessly at another man's crutch to highlight item 44576/D. Gurning like a marmitey pleb, he hears a piglike snuffling emanating from the kitchen that makes him feel all blotchy like a sweatmonger. "Shitting sandballast", he scoffs and tugs up his lederhosen like a startled goatherd on a rutting splurge in the Ionians. In the dark, with only the light of his digital radio alarm anklet watch to go by, the soon to be dishonourable member sees the fragile glint of a Stanley blade scything through the darkly dawn. "Cobblers", he realises "they really mean it this time. "


To be continued......

New Mardin Antlers novel - Extract 1

Hi Swipettes!

Great news - world famous literary giant and avant-garde nose-saxophonist Mardin Antlers has signed up with the Swipe agency!! Wowarooni!!! That means your humble scribe will be representing the great man universally - in ALL territories, globally, planet wide. And Canada too. I can't tell you how much this means - not least financially. I mean, there are only so may things you can rustle up from a Farley's rusk.

So, the deal secured, last night, over a nice Chablis and one or two marmited kippers, I said to the great pensmith, "Hey, Mardee, why don't we give the loyal Swipe-ophiles of the world a sneak preview of die neue meisterwerk? How about it, you rummy old sleazebag?" As you can guess, no one, not even Mardee, can resist the old Swipe sweet talk schmoozola. So, for your delectation, I proudly present England's finest welder of words, the veri tale - or even veri table lion of the literary luminaries - the one and only Sir Mardin Antlers with the opening paragraphs of his block-bluster in waiting, City of Phlegm: A crime thing :

Chapter One


Stanley Scrape stared out over the grey cack of water that trickles down from Oxfordshire to blight the limestone basin of the lower lands of Angleterre. Clouds like weeping pustules blossomed against the snot green sunset, bilious as a hungover wino after a metholated slurping binge as stupid seagulls pestered the breeze, arguing over scraps and refuse like militant traffic cops rubbed up the wrong way by a 45 degree park. A strop of agile teenagers angled past him, their mutant, sexless bodies a heaving nest of mesh, bullets and psychedelic brain vom. One of them, her lemur eyes fixing Stanley in a cold, black-ringed, drug abandoned stare, gives what approximates a smile from her razed, lifeless lips. A noughties come hither look from a nipper not old enough to remember Boyzone, thinks Stanley, agitating his Coffee Republic hand cooler between his gnarled and frozen fingers. Nice looking tart mind, he calculates, fingering the criss cross handle of his stanley knife and feeling a slight twitch in the bubbling acid tub that is his guts - shame about the boat race, he ponders, rubbing his nuts and inexplicably picturing Malcolm Muggeridge and a bar of soap. Nothing that a year's free Pilates and a Max Factor focus group couldn't straighten out. A daft old bag with a highland terrier and fish and chip wrapper stuffed down her sagging breast front walks past muttering to herself about Sir Anthony Eden and how all would be well if she could only tell Marge Proops. Stanley scowls and gets back to his task. He is casing a joint and there will be nicking galore to come when the coast and his head have cleared. It's good to be back, he nods to himself like a pompous twat, Shit, it's good to be back.

A blousy bird all done up and dusted down for the working day clip clops down the path on her 14 inch elevator mocassins, legs as horny as a toad with a devil's tail. Looks like a drug house or broken house or a failed house, thinks Stanley eyeing the syringes and the rubber johnnys in the path way as the hooker in the tight fit clip clops down the path, refusing at the gate before eventually breaking out into the street like a borstal day trip. Or perhaps this is a house that never tried in the first place, he reconsiders, popping a soluble aspirin into his Irn-bru and swigging down a jawful of the jizzing potion. A house that didn't even have the balls to take a stab at having a go for fear of falling flat on its gables in abject, dismal, deadend defeat, thinks Stan, poncing up and down like a weeble on a spring in the cold November air. The blousy bird gone, Stan nipped round the back, rumbled the window and sprang into the slimy, damp interior of number 47. The caper was on.

...to be continued.....