Boyling geyser of pork

From
http://www.detour.freeserve.co.uk/bj3-1trans.html


I had been in town for four days, on a roof. I hadn't meant to be there that long. I had just gone up to check a pigeon trap that I had set last year, and been cornered by a paper sack which kept blowing at me in a scary way. The roof was near the office of Stephen Vone. He edits a pullout section. I though he might lend me the money to get home. "Hey, Buzz, looking *beep* said Vone. He always calls me by the wrong name. He said he needed a piece on street sausage-vendors, and offered me two hundred quid if I sampled thirty sausages and filed by Friday. The angle was : "we don't know which one's make you sick." Suzie said that two hundred pounds was very low for two thousand words. "Not as low as twenty pounds," I said, "which is what you paid me for being sick in that documentary."
By three o'clock the next afternoon, I had drawn a sausage.

Two days passed in very similar fashion. I told Suzie I must be a writer, because I had writer's blank. She said that this was balls, and told me to get out and eat some sausages. "It's Thursday now, so you'll have to eat them all today." By ten am, I had scoffed fourteen. The more I ate, the less I felt like walking, so the last six had come from the same wagon. The vendor kept peering at me as I sat and wrote. When I went to but number fifteen, he said; "I'm telling Turkish Bob about you. He don't like people getting nosy on his meat."

Sixteen sausages later, I'd had an extra one to impress Vone, I was prodding at a shop demo laptop in Dixon's. I detailed my test method feeling bloated and toxic. The nausea thickened, as I realised that I had no way of telling which sausage was responsible for what level of sickness. "May I ask what you're doing?" It was a woman's voice. "Do I know you?" I said. "Not exactly," she laughed, "but you are no doubt experiencing that strange frisson of talking to someone who seems familiar because you know them so well from their photos, isn't it a weird feeling?"

"What photos?"

"Oh, come on, look." and rested her chin on the back of her hand, glanced to the left and sucked in her cheeks. "What's that?" I said. "O honestly, why do you think that everybody is looking at me?" "Well because you're making quite a noi-" My -se was cut off by the bec- of her because.

"Because I'm Ruby Fuss. I write on a Friday, and I couldn't help noticing that you are writing a story on that computer." I started to explain. "Hang on," she said, and dug a tape recorder out of her bag. "I haven't had a decent story since Bolan died." She told me Bolan was her terminally ill dog, and that she'd charted his death every week for four months, and that all London was weeping. "God, it's been pants getting stuff for the column. I was going to have to get myself drug-raped for this week." she said, brandishing a jar of tablets. She gave me one, and started asking questions. No one has been that interested in me since school, when I nailed my hand to my head. As we talked of salty meat and Turkish Bob, I began to sweat and dribble. The shop became a giddy plughole of plastic, price-cards and a father and child asking if I had finished with the laptop. I opened my mouth to answer, but words don't really form in a boiling geyser of pork. Ruby Fuss said, "Perfect."

In a phonebox twenty four hours later, pale and shaking, I told Vone I had my piece on a disk. "I've called it De Botulis Calides, and it takes it's form from a scientific paper. Shall I bring it round?" Vone explained that my piece had been reprioritised, since Ruby Fuss had come up with something similar, that not only mentioned sausages, but a guy writing about them on a shop computer, and then puking on a kid. Altogether a much better framing than mine.

"That was me." I said.

"Well, we don't want the same piece twice."

"But I was commissioned."

"Grow up," he said, "I'm ripping you off."

Then he asked me how I felt. Then he said he'd just decided to write a piece about the abuse of freelance writers, and could he use my story, since it would really illustrate the point. "But I was sick about ten times." I said. I could hear him already tapping on the keyboard. Then I could hear him ask me to send in my disk anyway, as a perfect verite example of the sort of work that was being ripped off. "I've got no money." I said. We agreed on a price of ten pounds.
The girl at reception had a message from Vone. Look up, it said. I looked up. A camera went flash. "He says your photo will add genuine pathos," said the photographer, "and I agree."

Both articles appeared the next day. Both stated that ninety-eight percent of street sausages contained lethal microbes and fly eggs, and mentioned in passing that Turkish Bob was a bastard. Four days later he found me, and pulped me with a griddle.