Free Snuff Fiction by Robert Rankin Page A

down.’
    Father Durante approached Brother Michael and whispered several words into his ear.
    ‘President who?’ said Brother Michael.
    Father Durante whispered some more.
    ‘Oh,’ said Brother Michael, ‘and was he a Catholic?’
    Further whispered words went on and then the Father left.
    ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Brother Michael, addressing the class. ‘Apparently President Kennedy, who is, before you ask, the President of the United States, has been assassinated. Normally this kind of thing would not concern us. But it appears that President Kennedy was a Roman Catholic and so we should all express our sorrow at his passing.’
    Chico stuck his hand up. ‘Holy sir,’ said he.
    ‘Yes, what is it, Chico?’
    ‘Holy sir, this gringo who got snuffed. Was he the leader of a gang?’
    ‘He was the leader of a mighty nation.’
    ‘Whoa!’ went Chico. ‘Kiss my ass.
    ‘Not here,’ said Brother Michael. ‘Was there anything specific you wished to know about the president?’
    ‘El presidente,
huh? How did the motherf—’
    But he didn’t get to finish his no doubt most pertinent question.
    ‘You can all take the rest of the day off,’ said Brother Michael.
    ‘Spend it in quiet contemplation. Pray for the soul of our departed brother and write me a five-hundred-word essay on the subject:
    What I would do I became the President of the United States.’
    ‘I’d get a better bodyguard,’ said Chico. ‘Go with God,’ said Brother Michael. So we did.
     
    I caught up with Chico at the school gates, next to the barbed-wire perimeter fence. He had learned to swagger whilst still young, but I was yet a shuffler.
    ‘Where are you off to now?’ I asked.
    Chico flipped a coin into the air and then he stooped to pick it up. ‘I think I’ll go and hang out at the Laundromat,’ he said. ‘I love to watch the socks go round and round together with the soap-suds. Don’t you get a kick outa that?’
    ‘Yeah,’ I said. Not really, I thought.
    ‘So, what you gonna do?’
    ‘Well,’ I said. ‘As I’ve just reached puberty this morning, I was hoping to have sex with a long-legged woman.
    Chico looked me up and down. ‘You want I introduce you to my mother?’
    ‘That’s very kind, but she is a bit old.’
    ‘You feelthy peeg, I cut your throat.’ Chico sought his flick knife, but he’d left it in his other shorts.
    ‘Don’t get upset,’ I said. ‘I’m sure your mother’s a very nice woman.
    Chico laughed. ‘You never met my mother then. But you get the wrong idea. It’s OK. I don’t mean you have my mother. I mean my mother get you a girl.’
    ‘Why would she do that for me?’
    ‘Because that’s what she do. She run the whorehouse.’
    ‘Chico,’ I said, ‘your mother is a
wholesaler.
She runs a warehouse.’
    ‘Curse this dyslexia,’ said Chico.
    The sun went behind a cloud and a dog howled in the distance. ‘I tell you what,’ said Chico, perking up. ‘I take you to my aunty’s place. She runs the House of Correction and don’t tell me that ain’t no whorehouse.
    The House of Correction was a proper whorehouse. Well kept and properly run. You had to take your shoes off when you went in and you weren’t allowed to jump on the furniture or tease the cat.
    The House of Correction was semi-detached in a leafy Brentford side street. Those who remember the final shaming of America’s last president would recognize it from the pictures posted on the internet at the time.
    Chico’s aunty, who ran it throughout the 1960s, was one of those big-bosomed Margaret Dumont kind of bodies, the like of which sadly we won’t see again.
    The front door was open and Chico took me in. His aunty was seated in what was appropriately named the sitting room. She was on the telephone.
    I thought I caught the words ‘President who?’ but given the law of diminishing returns this was probably not the case.
    I was greatly impressed by the scale of Chico’s aunty and by just how so much flesh could be