Lumbering, as if about to shoulder the burden of Atlas, David simultaneously shuffled and stamped towards the only protection lying betwixt you and a world suddenly twenty-five times larger than it seemed, scant minutes before your recent piano-dust run-in anomaly.
With the oncoming titan arrived a potpourri of stink, David being a paragon of soap saving, exacerbated by monstrous scale and, completely incidentally but not without narrative relevance, a homosexual male. Not that the former, let alone the latter was any great concern. The pressing question of your terror lay in the not inconsiderable matter of size.
Bending, David lifted the box. Turning at the wrong moment, Derek missed out on the cliffhanger reveal. In a state of surprisingly mild surprise, David, still holding the box, asked, in a low, unflustered fashion, without anybody near enough to overhear, ‘is that you?’
Cowering, you croaked an inarticulate confirmation.
‘Hmmm,’ the giant man very simply replied, with no hint of undue drama, as if pondering something as mundane as the choice between a leading brand air freshener at a slightly inflated price or the supermarket brand equivalent at a lower cost but likely lesser effectiveness. Enormously, he stared at you a little longer before heading off to stow the box, scraping his feet terrifyingly at the same time as lifting them too high and crashing them down with seismic spectacle. This massive misery thundered slowly away to wherever a manager had previously asked for the box to be stowed, some time before.
You watched David effortlessly carry the heavy weight around a corner to a storage cupboard, out of fire and trip hazards’ reach. ‘I’ll catch you up,’ you heard David, offstage call, presumably to Derek who was as busy as the stipulations of a community service judgement dictated.
Waiting, you remained in a foetal position as if this might somehow hold a world of giant inequality at bay. The unpleasant odour of David persisted where his presence briefly delegated his ominous substance to the insubstantial but noisome vapours he left in his wake.
One side or the other of fifty or maybe forty, it was said David had succumbed to a disinterest in all matters sartorial following of an unfortunate legal battle which keelhauled him on the barnacles of intimacy and quite alienated him to any suggestion of hygiene. Not that the man wasn’t above vanity and ego. A towering, pompous man whose elocution suggested an education greater than any he’d clearly undertaken, he stood a head above you, even before the calamity of your current, compromised stature. Clean shaven but little else, David, for a makeover and fumigation might even pass as outwardly handsome. However, a personality transplant and, for good measure, a vow of silence might prove prerequisite if planning full readmittance to love, life and society.
At the end of the corridor, returning, David turned towards you and paused. ‘What am I expected to do, that’s what I’d like to know,’ he tutted to himself before striding purposefully in your direction. ‘Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan,’ he muttered, mainly to himself. ‘You are in a mess, you silly boy.’ Enormous, self absorbed and smelling worse than you dared remember, he positioned a foot either side of your quaking vulnerability and looked down on you, shaking his head, as if personally inconvenienced by somebody else’s latest trick.
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