Isambard De Silva

 

Isambard De Silva surveyed the tawdry neon sign that hung above the palace of broken dreams, or The Arches as it was still known. The club's owner had changed many times but the name had somehow clung on, like an ageing relative whose family felt too guilty to put them in a nursing home. Long gone were the glorious days when the laughter of Glasgow's glitterati echoed round its cavernous interiors.

Isambard closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, his nostrils flaring at first, then twitching in olfactory disapproval. 'Chips'... 'Chips!' he bellowed. That smell brought his world crashing down. Born the illegitimate offspring from an encounter between a chip shop manager and his employee - the beguiling hunchback Druella, whose crooked spine, he was told, curved in perfect symmetry with the golden arch of a perfectly cooked chip. She had bewitched his father with her virtuosic potato-peeling technique, her gnarled hands moving with the grace of a concert pianist across the tubers. It was said she could peel fifty potatoes in under three minutes, all while humming Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in perfect pitch through her three remaining teeth, it was chips that brought them together; but it was the dashing fish salesman Montague P. Fishwick who tore them apart. One fateful morning, Druella abandoned her post at the potato peeler, leaving only a note written in chip grease that read "Gone to pursue my true destiny in fish. Your potatoes mean nothing to me now." She was never seen again, though rumors persisted of a hunchbacked figure selling kippers in Grimsby, still humming Beethoven. It was this betrayal that forever tainted his relationship with chips. To him chips represented not merely the taking of a humble innocent potato and smashing it to pieces, but the very manifestation of mankind's brutality against nature's pure offerings. Each golden stick a reminder of his fractured lineage, each crispy edge a knife in his already perforated soul. The very sound of oil bubbling was like the whispers of his ancestors judging him from their greasy graves.

Addressing himself in the third person, he was firmly told to pull his socks up, that people were depending on him, and that he could not shirk his responsibilities. His inner voice, which he had named Sir Reginald Fortitude III (no relation to the first two), began its daily ritual of self-motivation. Three deep breaths and erecting himself into the perfect angle befitting his pompous demeanour (back arched at precisely 10 degrees, head thrown back at 15.7 degrees, and nose pulled up in an expression of permanent disgust that he had practiced for exactly 47 minutes each morning since the age of seven). 'That's more like it', he said in his reassuring Sergeant Major tone. He then thanked himself for always giving such sound advice while bowing deeply and removing his hat in a theatrical sweep. He cleared his throat with the theatrical flourish of a Victorian tenor preparing for his debut at Covent Garden - "ahem" (baritone), "AH-HEM" (tenor), "ah-HEM!" (falsetto) - before finally barking 'FORWARD!' at himself from the corner of his mouth. Dutifully, his browbeaten spindly legs propelled his plump torso toward the entrance before stopping abruptly in front of the two doormen that now barred his way. 'Sorry, not tonight son' said the first doorman. Isambard's face began to swell in fury like a ripe berry. 'Son...SON!..What are you insinuating?' scoffed Isambard in spluttering indignation, 'You impertinent buffoon!' he continued. Fortunately before the doorman could respond in his rustic vocabulary of violence, Isambard's legs had received orders to retreat.

In the confusion, the confident leg (whom he had christened Wellington in a moment of patriotic fervor) made a valiant rush between the doormen, while the frightened nervous leg (Bartholomew, named after a particularly cowardly uncle) panicked and tried to flee. The ensuing civil war between his lower extremities caused his torso to hover momentarily in mid-air, like a particularly pompous blimp at a garden party, before gravity remembered its duties and sent him plummeting earthward. His disbelief turned to astonishment as he writhed in all his undignified glory in front of a throng of laughing spectators. When it seemed all was lost, fortune smiled, as his pomposity swooped from the heavens to save his greatness from the clutches of humiliation. Springing up onto his impossibly dainty legs he met the gaze of those that watched with a barely contained venom. 'Shame on you! I fought in a war so that you ungrateful flotilla of mutton daggers could keep French Fancies Brit...' His words were caught short as he found his own hands clutching his own thick neck. A titanic struggle ensued as civil war erupted within his own body, wrestling himself to the ground and emitting a series of accusations and apologies, peppered with a barrage of insults. The assault on himself came to an abrupt halt when a piercing howl came from the shadow of a nearby arch. 'Isambard!' Petrified under threat from a foe even more formidable than himself, he quickly leapt on his now trembling legs and his purple complexion draining to a pallid green. His tongue dried to a stick and he felt the warm delta of urine spread across his velvet knee-breeches. Father had returned.