Dear Octopus,
I dedicated last Friday night to the zealous pursuit of good times in the company of my best friends. Whilst falling unceremoniously around the pavement outside one of Carnaby Street's more secretive public houses, I was - for a time at least - held up on my feet long enough to hear a few funny, disgusting and thought-provoking anecdotes, but there was one in particular that I thought might interest your keen mind and strong analytical acumen. You'll like it all the more because it was told by that mysterious and handsome creature known colloquially as 'The Agent', for whom I believe you always had something of a soft spot. I digress.
For the benefit of your understanding and the protection of the very real identities involved, we shall call the heroine of this story Sally. I don't know why. But one day not too long ago, Sally was lugging an extremely heavy suitcase up the stairs of Vauxhall Tube Station. Commuters passed, as they do, without offering a sympathetic glance to her loathsome toil, let alone lending a passing hand. Imagine her relief then when a stranger miraculously offered to help. He was a decidedly rough but kindly-looking fellow, and his offer to carry her case up the remainder of the stairs could not be refused solely on account of his unsavoury appearance. She passed him it gratefully, and caught her breath.
'It's so heavy!' the man commented jovially, 'what have you got in here anyway?'
Sally casually replied, '....oh, nothing really, just work stuff....a couple of laptops and a projector.'
She should have been wiser really. At the top of the stairs, the man bolted like a hungry panther. Carrying her case. He ran like Forrest Gump in Forrest Gump, or Lola in Run Lola Run. From the entrance to the subway she surveyed his bony, bow-legged form disappear under the distant railway bridge, dragging the massive case behind him. His supposed kindness was nothing more than a duplicitous charade. He was a confidence trickster, a ruffian, a blaggard, a vile defrauder of distressed damsels with heavy luggage. And there was no way he would be caught.
Sally allowed herself time to think. The words 'stop thief!' remained trapped in her mouth, unuttered. She was calm, even. Because the case did not contain two laptops and a projector. It contained the corpse of her dead dog.
In her immediate defence (in case you might think her some sort of canine-serial killer carting the remains of her victims around our metropolitan transport network seemingly at random) Sally had adopted the dog from Battersea Dogs' Home a week earlier. It was old. It only had one eye. But it seemed sweet enough. Plus adopting an old dog is less of a commitment than getting a puppy. Forget 'life', 17-year old Romario was not even just for Christmas. He wasn't even for Hallowe'en. It died five days after she adopted it. Upon confronting the home on their extremely sketchy 'returns policy', Sally found that to have the remains collected and incinerated would cost £250. But if she brought it to the home herself, they'd incinerate it for just £50. Not much of a dilemma there. Not owning a car - and not being able to enrol a single friend into so macabre a Saturday venture - she ventured to take the tube alone. Lying to her eventual assailant was out of the understandable fear that he might not take the response, 'oh nothing really...it's just the corpse of a dead Alsatian...' too lightly.
Not a dignified end for the poor dog, clearly. But imagine the idiotically grinning visage of the opportunistic rogue as he sauntered into his dreary hovel, boasting ostentatiously to his Fagin's Gang of fellow criminals that he had successfully pilfered enough computer equipment to kit out a small (very small) office. Imagine his comrades' faces when he grandly opened said purloined artefact to reveal its grisly tenant. I hope he was ashamed.
(Sally, I might add, was secretly thrilled. She saved herself £50.)
The moral of this story? Crime doesn't pay. And if it does, sometimes it pays you in dead dogs. I thank The Agent for allowing me to repeat his story. It's lost a lot of his droll candour and effortlessly loquacious charm in my tedious retelling, but I hope I've at least partially done it justice. If not, I'm sure he can be persuaded to tell it again someday.
Your loving friend,
Action Squid
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