Armadillo and a Bushel of Other Stories E-Book

Alan C. Martin

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Original Tank Girl writer, Alan C. Martin, pitches his foul-mouthed, beer-swilling, chain-smoking, kangaroo-shagging anti-heroine - star of bevy of best-selling graphic novels - into her debut novel! Witness Tank Girl, Booga, Jet Girl and Barney as they launch an unhinged all-out assault on the unsuspecting town of Chankers, in retribution for crimes to be revealed... Then revel in a bonus selection of short stories, unpublished comic scripts, poems and wanton mayhem! Littered, like a particularly filthy Tristam Shandy, with ridiculous digressions, and destined to become a literary classic in its own right, this is Tank Girl as you've never experienced her before!

Leseprobe

TANK GIRL

ARMADILLO!

AND A BUSHEL OFOTHER STORIES

ALAN C. MARTIN

TITAN BOOKS

TANK GIRL: ARMADILLO!

AND A BUSHEL OF OTHER STORIES

ISBN 9780857689528

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

Tank Girl: Armadillo! And a Bushel of Other Stories © 2008 Alan C. Martin. All rights reserved. Tank Girl and all related characters © 2008 Alan C. Martin and Jamie Hewlett.

Cover illustration by Jamie Hewlett.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First edition March 2008

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Also available from Titan Books:

Tank Girl (ISBN-13: 9781840234350)

Tank Girl 2 (ISBN-13: 9781840234923)

Tank Girl 3 (ISBN-13: 9781840234930)

Tank Girl: The Odyssey (ISBN-13: 9781840234947)

Tank Girl: Apocalypse (ISBN-13: 9781840237252)

Tank Girl: The Gifting (UK only) (ISBN-13: 9781845761707)

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“Unreviewable.” –

The Wednesday Morning Review

“Martin repeatedly smashes your head into a brick wall of moronic humour... Vital.” –

Skinhead Monthly

“An encyclopaedia of rubbish.” –

Recycling Today

“Cutting hedge.” –

Gardening Yesterday

“Changed my life. But then, so did Easi-Grip denture cream.” –

The San Francisco Dental Journal

“I’m sorry... what is it supposed to be again?” –

The Amnesia Almanac

“A directory of dogshit.” –

canineviews.com

Other, less favourable reviews:

“The author is a pixilated, bovine pamphleteer and should not be encouraged to expel any further cerebral excrement.”

“Same crap joke – different wrapper.”

“14 million stupid ideas squashed into a cheap matchbox.”

“Starts off stupid, turns pseudo-intellectual, and ends up all stupid again.”

“If life really is a box of chocolates, then Mr. Martin has just sat on it.”

“A compendium of cobblers.”

“I realise that mindless violence and gratuitous swearing can be used as metaphor for revealing the heartlessness of our society, but this cunt has taken it too far and I’m going to have to smash his face in.”

“A bit tricky in places.”

“Self-indulgent art-school fandango.”

“A treasury of toffee.”

“A bum-bag of bright ideas.”

“Meaningless obscenities, countless innocent deaths, no discernible plot and a complete absence of any real point. Rounded of with a shit joke... classic Tank Girl.”

“A jamboree-bag of juvenilia.”

“...a low-brow reinvention of the format...”

“An anthology of arse.”

“Where do all of these crazy ideas come from? And do they give refunds?”

“A crock of shite.”

For my best friend Lou

A girl in no need of a tank

X

“We’ve got bastards to kill and shit to blow up...”

CONTENTS

PART ONE: ARMADILLO!

A personal message from Tank Girl

Preface to the Preface to the English Edition by Alan C. Martin

Preface to the English Edition by Alan C. Martin

One. Is This the Way to Armadillo?

Two. A Keen Interest in Local Landmarks

Three. No Jacket Potato Required

Four. Chicken Shit for the Soul

Five. Barney’s Army

Six. “I am not a Fucking Charity Shop”

Seven. Booga

Eight. Columbus was a Cunt

Nine. Blastin’ My Way Thru Hell

Ten. Taking out Tony THF115C

Eleven. Tony’s Hand

Twelve. Silver Sunshine

Thirteen. Breakfast at Stiffany’s

Fourteen. Let’s Build a Tank

Fifteen. The Profound Influence of Terence Hawkins

Sixteen. Nothing Farm

Seventeen. Fountain of Love

Eighteen. The Six Mill

Nineteen. A Pocketful of M16s

Twenty. The Savage Young Booga

Twenty-one. Getting Too Stoned with One Bird

Twenty-two. Guns Guns Guns

Twenty-three. Dobson’s at the Door

Twenty-four. Get Back Inside Me

Twenty-five. The Burger People

Twenty-six. Baby Let Your Mind Roll On

Twenty-seven. The Soft Centre

Twenty-eight. Cherry Island

Twenty-nine. Booga’s Masturbation Into Adulthood

Thirty. The Power of the Sausage Roll

Thirty-one. Some Cunt’s Brother

Thirty-two. Tank Girl vs. Even Stevens

Thirty-three. 1973

Thirty-four. Pub Quiz

Thirty-five. Slippin’ Away

Thirty-six. Zulu Dobson’s Amazing Sensory Saturation Tank

Thirty-seven. Dobson’s Automatic Giant Plastic Soldier Drinking Water Dirt and Ashes

Thirty-eight. Sally Forth

Thirty-nine. Nasty Thick Stew

Forty. The Nits of the Brown Table

Forty-one. I Dream of C86

Forty-two. The All-Day-Breakfast

Forty-three. In Tank

Forty-four. The Road to Chankers

Forty-five. The One Where the Complete Cunt Gets His Fucking Brains Blown Out

Forty-six. Skullbuster

Forty-seven. Some Ducks With Some Bombs On

Forty-eight. Brotherfucker

Forty-nine. “What the Fuck Happened?”

Fifty. Gone Gone Gone

Fifty-one. Splashdown!

Fifty-two. The Deadman’s Hand Again

Fifty-three. Mine Mine Mine

Fifty-four. Tanktrouble

Fifty-five. The Battle of Armadillo

Fifty-six. Smoke Fast, Look Cool, Leave a Short Butt

Fifty-seven. Righteous & True

Fifty-eight. Oh Yeah

Fifty-nine. The One Thing That Never Changes

Bibliography, soundtrack etc.

PART TWO: THE BUSHEL:

A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES AND TITTY-BITS

The Bushel. An Introduction

The Handlebars of My Racing Bike. A Booga Poem

‘The Organ Grinder’

Worthing

One. Marine Parade Looking East

Two. The Denton Gardens

Three. Marine Parade West

Four. The Beach

Tank Girl. Stinkhelmet (unfinished)

Tank Girl vs. The Priests of Destruction

Peter Pan

Peter Craven

Black Tarot

Tank Girl in The Magic of Tank Girl

Resistence is Fertile

In the Wendy Room

The New Fuckers

Dig it Out With A Penknife

This is a Raid

Tank Girl in Dickyback Mountain

The End

PART ONE

TANK GIRL

ARMADILLO!

My Friend

(a personal message from Tank Girl...)

A left-footed, Tai Chi, back-flip, Kung-fu, knock-out, Samurai, round-house kick in the ball-bag is what I’ve got in store for you my friend.

PREFACE TO THE PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

This novel was written a few years ago, so I just want to take this opportunity to point out that, because of the time that has passed, some of the jokes may appear a bit flat.

F’rinstance – the first chapter, entitled ‘Is This the Way to Armadillo?’ (clearly a rather dumb play on the Tony Christie UK number one hit from the early ’70s ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo?’), was written two years before the Christie single was brought out of retirement for use by Comic Relief (thus shooting it back to the top of the charts). I thought I was being wilfully obscure by using such a long-forgotten piece of pulpy pop history, prematurely congratulating myself on the hidden depths of my eclectic musical memory; but no, it was not to be, and now I don’t look quite so clever.

This is but one example; I won’t bore you by going into every little detail, but there have been many other similar twists of time that have served to blunt my razor-edged witticisms.

So, dear reader, please rest assured, this book was funny when I wrote it.

Alan C. Martin

Windmill Bastion

Berwick upon Tweed

Spring 2007

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

Here in Britain during the 1970s we had a half-hour TV comedy show called The Goodies. It starred a hairy scientist, a royalist and a hairy birdspotter, acting silly in a series of disjointed and barely-linear stories.

In one particular episode that I think was called (and I may well be wrong here) “Kitten Kong”, Graham, the hairy scientist one, had set up something resembling a kennel for rare and exotic species of pets. During a demonstration of why the animals needed special care and attention, he exposed the vulnerability of an armadillo. The insect-eating mammal (actually a rubber replica) was stood on a tabletop. “And what are you left with if you take away its armour?” asked Graham, grabbing a hold of the animal’s scaly shell and lifting it up in a sharp motion, revealing what looked like a long, pale, emaciated rat: “An illo.”

We live in an age of psychic bombardment; our beings are immersed in a constant flood of sensual stimulation. We are drowning. Our waking hours are filled with a ceaseless manipulative attack from televisions, computers, billboards, magazines and branded T-shirts. To combat this abuse we raise defensive barriers and develop methods of turning off sensory receptors; this in turn depletes our natural selves and blocks the flow of creativity, communication and positive energy. In this way the modern world refuses our right to be who we really are as it relentlessly plugs away at us with meaningless, throwaway ideologies and life-style choices.

We are all “illos”. Every one of us, without exception, has an Achilles heel, a soft centre, a moment of weakness, an “inner child”, all of that crap. Nobody is as hard as nails. We have all grown chunky armour to cover our little “illos” and, unfortunately, the make-up of that armour has been dictated by the quantity and quality of influence exerted upon us by the manmade world and its occupants.

Our armour is all that stands between us and the insanity that would prevail if we were all to actually believe every advert, every politician, every newspaper and every national conglomerate sponsored infomercial that is thrown at us.

We must take control of our armour if we are to survive. We cannot let it form solely as a reactive response to a fool’s ill-informed and greedy judgement.

This is where Tank Girl came in. Her armour is in plain view and woe betide any dopey salesman that tries to sell her a miracle carpet cleaner.

Illo is also an abbreviation for illustration, a word often used in graphic design circles. In this context, if you take the “illo” (or “illustration”) away from armadillo you are left with arma (or “armour”), which is also what you get when you take the illustrations away from comic strips.

This book is meant as new armour for the illos, as an extra layer of skin for the noncombatant boys, and as a tank for the girls.

Let’s fuckin’ ’ave some.

Alan C. Martin

Barrels Alehouse

Berwick upon Tweed

Summer 2003

ONE

IS THIS THE WAY TO ARMADILLO?

My tank is small, sleek, smooth and low – about the same size and shape as the re-modelled Mini Cooper. Two super-grip tank tracks mean that I can drive up a near vertical wall if I get a good run up. A short, stumpy cannon protrudes just beyond the front of the bonnet and its loading hatch sits obstructively between me and my shotgun partner. A range of tiny halogen, neon and L.E.D. lights on the overhead display help me to keep a tight check on the engine and brake systems.

I’m wearing an all-in-one brown buckskin jumpsuit. No underwear. My zipper is open down past the bottom of my knockers. Cleavage is good in fights with blokes – good for distraction. I have a cream crash helmet with a dark red visor and black and white check trim. Check trim is good for giving the impression that you are going faster when you are actually moving at the same speed.

My name is Tank Girl.

Booga, my co-pilot, is wearing a stylish camouflage jacket, brown corduroy trousers, old trainers and hi-tech cyclist’s sunglasses. He has a boy-racer moustache and a well-groomed side parting. He looks the nuts.

Booga is a kangaroo.

We have both given up smoking as a New Year’s resolution. It is now 1.30pm, January 1st.

Nerves are fraying, adrenaline is pumping and Booga is fidgeting. I seem to have chewed away the entire inside of my left cheek.

The scenery outside is grey and nondescript; we could be anywhere. The fact is we are nowhere.

I flick down my visor.

Booga coolly braces himself with one foot on the dashboard and an arm behind his headrest.

With a barely visible movement, I crank the tank up into turbo. The sports car behind me is hailed with ripped-up tarmac as my tracks fight for grip on the road surface.

Start shitting in your pants.

We are coming.

TWO

A KEEN INTEREST IN LOCAL LANDMARKS

The town ahead is called Chankers. We can’t see it yet, but the signs are letting us know: CHANKERS 10km.

The desert horizon is rippling in the heat of the midday sun. Slowly the spire of the town church rises into view as we steam closer. Now we can see a spread of one and two storey buildings. The poxy size of the town we are about to ransack is becoming laughably apparent.

“Booga, how is it?” I ask sweetly.

“Still sore.”

I throw him a cheeky little sideways glance. I know that he’s got a lot of bad memories from this place, but these issues must be dealt with if we are to move on in our lives. “Ready to vent your spleen?”

Booga fills the clip on his old revolver, staring obsessively at the bullets as he spins them around. “Yeah, I’m ready to vent my spleen.” He looks up and smiles for the first time in days. “Then I’m gonna vent all of their spleens... with a fuckin’ pickaxe.”

“I’m right with ya, baby. Anyone that screws with my favourite boy is setting themselves up for a lot of visits to the dentist... in big dark sunglasses... with their arm in splints... and their neck in a brace... riding in a wheelchair... with a puncture.”

Booga holsters his six-shooter and relaxes back into his seat, arms flopped limply by his sides. “Okay,” he says, letting out a long, hissy sigh, “let’s ’ave some.”

Nitrous oxide injection – it’s like pressing the forward scan button on a video recorder. The town may still be a mile away, but at this rate we’ll be there in ten seconds.

“Are they a religious bunch here?” I ask, hoping the answer will be in the positive.

“Fanatical,” says Booga grimacing, obviously recalling some horrific, anti-pagan memory.

“Church first, then?”

He smiles intently. “Yeah. Let’s fuck it up.”

I nudge the tank a couple of degrees to the left and we careen towards the church, caterpillar-tracks screaming with the force from the overworked engine. Booga takes a hold of the weapon controls and aims the cannon straight up.

We enter the town at full pelt, clipping the sign – WELCOME TO CHANKERS.

Down the main street, not bothering to stop for lunch at the Spud-O-Matic, across the town square, up a couple of steps and we blast in through the ol’ church door, its heavy wood cracking like a shotgun and spraying splinters across the scattering congregation.

Booga blows me a kiss as we head on up the aisle. He lets rip with round after round of mortar fire, straight up, ninety degrees, shattering and buckling the apex of the church roof like the spine of a crippled stunt cyclist.

I pull a nifty skid and do a U-turn in front of the chancel, smashing my rear-end into the altar and squashing a few choirboys. I look up through the brown tinted sunroof; we are right underneath the ancient spire. “Booga man, do ya wanna ding the bell?”

Booga is looking happier by the second. He arms a warhead and smirks sexily, “I do.” I floor the accelerator as he pushes his favourite red button and sends the nuke screaming skywards.

FUUUUCKOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM-A-DONGGGG!!!!

The wretched steeple explodes like a cheap ice-cream cone in the fist of an overweight child. The heavy, wrought iron weathervane cockerel that has been the spire’s crowning glory for over two hundred years is propelled towards heaven at a thousand miles an hour. Hot metal and ash shower down on the town like the fire and brimstone of archaic prophecy.

We have arrived.

Happy fuckin’ New Year, Chankers.

THREE

NO JACKET POTATO REQUIRED

I’m gonna take some time out here, to pause and reflect on the difficulties of life and the seemingly meaningless and incessant tirade of complications, conflicts and dilemmas that it throws up at us. You’re probably sitting there thinking, “Why is she smashing up that lovely little town and mashing up all of those innocent folk? Is she a complete tosser, or what?” But I have my reasons. And, by recounting to you here the tale of what’s been happening to us over the last month or so, taking care to zero in on the mundane minutiae of everyday life, I hope to explain the ferocity of my actions and to reveal just why those arseholes deserve to die.

Hold my hand and let me take you back...

The story really started long ago when Booga was a young teenager, staying in Chankers with family friends for his summer vacation. He’d gotten himself a job working as a Bin Emptier in the Spud-O-Matic selfservice hot potato bar, hoping to save enough dough to put a down payment on a car. The sunny days began to pass him by as he spent his holiday picking up empty spud skins (which, by the way, you should always eat, ’coz that’s where they keep the goodness), thrown on the floor by brainless, overweight, hick families. He became very downhearted and started to lose interest in his job and the chance of promotion to Bin Supervisor. His bosses soon became aware of his slack attitude and slovenly appearance. They took him into the back office for a verbal warning.

The manager said to him, “Now listen to us young Booga, we’ve been keeping a close eye on you and we can’t help thinking that you are letting the side down. We want our staff to look keen, sharp and above all happy.” Their manner was as pious and condescending as ever.

Booga said, “Yeah, but I don’t feel personally fulfilled by this job.”

They said, “Booga, there is no ‘I’ in ‘team’.”

To which Booga apparently replied, “No, but ‘U’ is in ‘cunts’.”

So there he was – young, braindead and job-free in Chankers.

Delinquency will always find its way to a bored kid wandering about the streets of a town like Chankers. Booga fell in with a gang of no-goodniks from the rotten side of the tracks, calling themselves the De Niros after the Bananarama hit single, ‘Robert De Niro’s Waving’.

Soon he found himself acting as lookout on several aborted latenight attempts to steal doughnuts from the local bakery, one of which ended in the arrest and detainment of the De Niros’ gang leader, Pinky Punky Pearson.

Pearson, a youth know for aggravating the cops, had been caught with his pants around down and was duly sent off with a smacked bottom to a reformatory for under-aged offenders and naughty people. Booga hadn’t found it easy making friends in Chankers and Pearson was the only lad that he had managed to form any kind of bond with, so his sudden disappearance sent Booga into a lonely depression.

The gang needed a new direction and Booga was reluctantly pushed forward to fill the boots of the absentee leader. That was a big mistake – Booga has never been able to tell the difference between what’s cool and what’s shit. To him Sunday School is as much fun as throwing bricks through a police station window and legging it. Before long Booga had the gang cleaning and tidying their club den, escorting little old ladies across busy streets, holding charity events, listening to Cliff Richard “discs” and playing ping pong for kicks.

It didn’t take much time for the gang to suss that Booga sucked. He was knocked off his high horse in a rebellious uprising. A hirsute kid with big turn-ups and curly golden hair calling himself Huckleberry took over as leader of the gang. They nicknamed him Fuckleberry, or Fuck for short, because he was a short fuck.

The coup d’état placed Booga in a vulnerable position. His standing in the group had moved sharply from new boy to leader to deposed loser. Fuckleberry took a mean disliking to him, pushing him around and punching him for a laugh.

Booga found himself shunned by the rest of the gang – much in the same way that badgers push the old guys out of the set when a young upstart shows his superior strength – and he was bullied and mocked in a jolly unsporting manner.

One time Booga got himself into a scrap with Fuckleberry and was getting his arse kicked. He made his escape by pulling a clump of Fuck’s hair out and left the kid screaming in agony. Booga kept the tuft and used it as the crowning glory of a voodoo doll he was making. The two boys never met up again; Booga made damn sure of that.

Bad vibes travel fast in small communities and soon the whole town was down on poor Booga. He became the scapegoat for every little misdemeanour and found himself harassed, blamed and persecuted from one end of the town to the other.

He was forced to go underground for the rest of his vacation.

FOUR

CHICKEN SHIT FOR THE SOUL

One of my first boyfriends had the names of all the girls he had ever shagged tattooed along the length of his cock. Unfortunately for him the first three girls’ names were Chrissy, Olivia and Desiree, and, seeing as the names started at the sharp end and scrolled down towards his pubic patch, their initials spelt out the word COD in black letters around the bell-end of his circumcised choad.

Now I didn’t get to see this until after the fact, and call me a prude if you like, but when he’d unloaded himself and whipped it out – and I’d gotten a good look at it in all its glistening, black on pink, Technicolor glory – I couldn’t stop myself from screaming, pulling out my switchblade, taking a slice at it, almost missing, but nicking it, and adding a small, bloody crossbar to the bottom curve of the letter C.

So if you ever come across a guy with a bit of a funny walk and the word GOD tattooed on his helmet, say hello from me.

FIVE

BARNEY’S ARMY

One sunny, run-of-the-mill Tuesday afternoon, about four and a half weeks ago, I was sitting in the kitchen of Jet Girl’s house, attempting to cut my toenails with a blade that I had unscrewed from an old Battle of the Planets pencil sharpener.

Although Jet Girl’s house is an antiquated late Victorian mansion in the puritan style (left to her by an eccentric aunt, who was so eccentric she was actually somebody else’s aunt, and it was also somebody else’s house), the place looks like it could’ve been built out of packing cases by Brian from The Breakfast Club. The rooms are littered with a lot of cool and interesting crap, including a stuffed antelope, a signed Cannon ‘n’ Ball LP and a cabinet collection of over four hundred gravy boats. Rock on fucking Tommy.

The kitchen is a spacious, clutter-free area with a giant, shit-brown round table as its centrepiece. I was there alone, waiting for Jet Girl to return from the local store with a packet of Custard Creams and some teabags.

Suddenly Barney burst in, all sweaty and ruddy, her beautiful, thick dark hair mussed-up and matted like she’d just shagged an entire football team. “Quick! Do you know where Booga is?” she asked in a deep and shaky tone.

“Sure,” I replied, looking up slowly, not wanting to give away the fact that I had always suspected her of fancying him, “he’s down at the police station, trying to buy an ice-cream.”

“Fuck,” she mumbled to herself, looking madly at the floor as she executed a sharp about-face and a swift exit, “titty-bollocks.”

Barney has been having problems coping with reality ever since her criminally insane parents managed to get her Christened with a boy’s name – that was just before they got banged up for three life-terms apiece. These days her lack of mental balance manifests itself mainly as streams of unwarranted swear words, long conversations with inanimate objects, a general lack of respect for herself and others, and an uncanny ability to stare blankly into the middle distance for hours on end. She’s a difficult friend to manage, but a powerful ally to have blocking for you.

Anyway, after Barney’s flying visit to Jet Girl’s house, I didn’t see her or Booga for another forty-eight hours. I spent the time playing chess and drinking with Jet Girl on her porch. Then I got a call on the blower. I was fast asleep on the sofa; it was Barney, sounding almost hysterical with happiness. “Tank Girl, is that you? Come to the window at the front of the house and take a look at what’s in the garden.”

So I did.

“You fucking loony,” I must’ve muttered a dozen times, as I scanned the outrageous spectacle before me, “what the hell are you playing at?”

There on the lawn was a regimental block – some twenty men wide by ten deep – of the most motley, crooked, ill-shaped and malnourished criminals ever assembled in one front garden, each one holding up a kitchen utensil or farm implement as a weapon and a bin lid as a shield. Not one of these “soldiers” was over four foot high.

I rolled myself up in a blanket and stepped out into the night, halfblinded by Jet Girl’s security lights. The smell of cabbage-farts reached me almost immediately.

Barney straightened her spine and shouted her command in true drill sergeant style, “Tennn huuuut!”

A wave of activity rippled through the ranks as the men shuffled their cheap shoes and held their weapons a couple of millimetres higher. The result of them coming to attention didn’t look much different from them being at ease, but Barney looked chuffed to bits anyway.

“Why are they all so fuckin’ short?” I asked, half yawning.

Barney looked sideways at her army without turning her head. “Are they?” she whispered nervously. “I didn’t notice.”

“And who the fuck are they anyway?”

Barney stiffened with pride. “This is my army.”

“So where is my boyfriend?”