Once again defying his bank manager, MR MILLINGTON's third book continues to be nothing to do with Things. "He is broadening his style," said the thwarted official, "unaware of his fiscal responsibility to my bungalow."
Now read this unenlightening extract. Could Keith be a major character in the story? Are the habits of his mouth foreshadowingly pertinent? MR MILLINGTON simply will not tell us.
Keith was eating a tangerine. Before he popped a segment into his mouth he teased off each flaccid white vein of pith - grabbing one end between his thumb and index finger, and then slowly tearing it away. To someone who didn't know him, it might have looked fussy. I did know Keith, so I knew that really it wasn't finickiness at all: he was torturing the fruit.
Central FM had introduced a no-smoking policy about ten months ago. This had hit Keith - who'd become a radio producer in the first place specifically so that he could sit around smoking all night - very hard indeed. In theory, he could pop out into the car park for a quick cigarette if he was desperate, but it was two floors down and, as we were in Birmingham, when he got there it would almost certainly be raining. At first he'd used sweets as surrogate cigarettes. Every evening he'd munched his way through the show; plugging his nicotine receptors with sugar. A few months and 14 lbs of fresh stomach fat later, he'd bitterly switched from sweets to fruit as a way to occupy his mouth from midnight until 3 a.m. He hadn't lost the weight he'd put on, but at least he wasn't gaining any more - though at the cost of now having near-constant diarrhoea. And he didn't even like fruit very much. Thus, each night, he tormented his edible victims as much as possible before putting torn parts of them in his mouth. Grinning with malice, he'd skin apples using a penknife; he'd rip at a cherry with his incisors until the flesh hung gory from the stone, and then suck it clean; I've seen him do things to a peach that would drain the blood right out of your face. Keith was the Dr Mengele of pulpy reproductive-seed plants.
