On Channeling Fred West

It’s turned out I’ve had to tell Kimba I love her as a month ago she told me she were up the duff. As she won’t get rid of it (“What you wanna do?” I asked her – as per what Chris Rock said you should say when your girl tells you she’s expecting your sperm mutant (i.e. that is defo not ask her IF she’s going to do this thing/that thing: i.e. get rid of it)) and as I can’t do a runner as I live in a Housing Executive gaff and have nowhere else to go, I have had to do all the things an expectant father should do/say to the swelly bellied mother of his imminent child, by doing everything and all up to and including: telling her I love her when she is boking her ring up and I stand there by the bathroom door when she is down on all fours, her head stuck right down in the bowl like a fat thing that can’t get through a hole, flinching with each dry heave that wobbles out of her bloated frame. One night a week ago she turned to me and said:
“I feel so shitey I’m gonna take that as you being genuine for once in your rotten, smelly life, Danny Pongo. It’s all I can hold onto. I’m starving, cos you have no job and the brew’s fuckin me about on my benefits and we’ve hardly enough money to feed ourselves never mind the wee life that’s growing inside me –“
“Tumour,” I corrected. “Just like a tumour it feeds off you in utero. Just like a tumour is a parasite so is the ‘little miracle’ growing inside you. But unlike a tumour it will continue to siphon your resources: your monetary, physical, spiritual and kinetic energy well after it leaves your body and for 18 years into the future at least. And don’t think it will expand your horizons in any way, shape or form. Socially you might think it will, but the only other people you will ever meet for the foreseeable are other parents who are freaks, who are slavish disciples in the cult of their one and only lil baby. That is the class of people you will meet: People with their own portable shrine, their little gathering of immutable matter, amazing putty flesh, a plastersine avatar – a thing they’d kill, steal or suicide for.....and you’ll be one of them.”

She began to cry, bokey snatters hanging from her nose in big bandy drools long and thick as shoe laces. She were swaying on all fours and groaning and I poked her in the shoulder and nudged her a little and she cooped sideward leftwards and fell onto the tiled floor of the bathroom and lay still, her arms and legs all folded in and gathered in at her middle. She put me in mind of a comatose/stunned/dead animal. I felt bad and put the seat down on the toilet. I sat down on it, folded my legs and had rolled a smoke. I tilted my head back and blew the smoke out languorously and decided these sorts of moments I'd call my Hamlet Cigar Moments only to then feel sorry for myself when I realised a roll-up was a poor substitute for a Hamlet Cigar and, with this hard luck impasse (in the shape of a little baby) it would be ages before I could afford even one of them...