How it began
An excerpt from the elusively named K K Nobbler’s upcoming bestseller The World Was Perfect, Until We Goosed It.
MOONLOOMING
The newsone turned to face the camera, or to phrase it more egocentrically, or at least more specifically to my own point of view, turned to look out of the television at the room. They shuffled the papers in their hands a little bit and had a serious, mildly grim sort of look about them. They weren’t reading from any notes on the papers but using the teleprompter: “ministers are in debate this evening as a landmark courtcase has ended with a ruling in favour of a cyclist who was assaulted by a taxidriver in a fracas following evasive manoeuvres, deemed by the court to be unnecessary, resulting in damage to the taxi. Our correspondent Big Nev is on the scene; Nev, could you give a quick summary of events?”
The screen transmuted to a picture-in-picture format with a faint swishing sound effect. Big Nev was standing outside the courthouse in a grey, faux-woolen overcoat, his nose reddening in the autumn cold. His Cockney accent rang crisply in the November air, followed by the steam of his breath.
“Certainly! The whole affair began with a cyclist going down Oxford Road at midday on the thirteenth of July this year. Being a practised road cyclist, the boy was going at some pace indeed, almost fifty kilometres per hour in fact, matching the speed limit, and controversially enough, was positioned in the centre of the lane on this two-lane road. The taxidriver approached from the rear and, as motorists are wont to do, tried their hardest to overtake the cyclist. Their efforts were overzealous, however, as Oxford Road is littered with narrowings, or chicanes as some refer to them, which are points of impasse involving an obstacle in the centre of the road, between the two lanes, and the taxidriver happened to attempt to overtake in such a way that caused the taxi to collide with one such obstacle. The cyclist stopped and dismounted, apparently to see if the taxidriver was hurt or unhurt, and the taxidriver responded to this apparent altruism with an attempt to wallop the geezer in the chops, like Butterbean used to. Unsuccessful, the driver patted the taxicab just right, popping the boot open, and reached in to clamour for a weapon, in this case a truncheon or blackjack, a kind of club anyway, all the while mouthing off at the cyclist, who saw his young life flashing and saw fit to think, rather appropriately for a man of such velocipedic leanings, on his feet. Now, it’s no secret that taxidrivers spend extended periods sat on their backsides, especially in this Boschian hellscape we call a worklife, and this fact doesn’t bode well for competitions of brawn, so the cyclist saw fit to give the taxidriver a clean kick to the stomach, like Ronaldo on the volley, or like Jean Claude Van Dam in the films. The taxidriver was felled at once, and a passing rozzer came in to break up the barney, although of course it was practically over at that point. The policeone took a statement from either party, took note of their own version of events, and the proceedings went on from there.”
The newsone paused for a moment. “Okay. Well, more of a regalement than a quick summary but whatever. Do you have any details of what happened in the courtroom?”
“Of course,” Big Nev cheerfully replied, rubbing his hands together either in glee or in an attempt to keep them warm. He spread his hands apart to gesticulate. “The nature of events put the taxidriver strictly in the defendant camp. However, their representative was unhappy with this categorisation, as they felt that the cyclist should not have been cycling midlane. The law disagrees with this reservation, of course, as there is no strict duty under the Traffic Acts to cycle with any particular horizontality along a given lane, especially on a road with narrowings, which are there expressly to prevent overtaking, and overtaking requires moving into the next available lane regardless of what or who is being overtaken. The objection had no chance of standing. With the event effectively not taking place until the taxidriver approached, the overtaking is seen as the instigation of the fracas, and the cyclist’s intention of aid, crucial to his defence, as a mitigation. As the policeone and the cyclist agreed that no words were exchanged before the taxidriver swung arm, there was no reasonable doubt that could be gone beyond that the cyclist’s intentions were true: that he had indeed stopped to see if the driver was hurt or unhurt, and not to berate them any further. With this established, it was easy to conclude that the physical attack on the cyclist was not reasonably provoked, and that the kick was reasonable selfdefence. The rest, as they say, is history.”
The newsone shuffled the papers again. “A bit much, again, but fine – but Nev, I’m sure the viewer is wondering: how come this has made it to the televisual newsroom? What’s so important about the story?”
“Well, dear viewer,” replied Nev, adjusting the cuffs and collar of his shirt, bristling, “it’s actually set a precedent; almost a philosophical point has been made, for the first thing we might notice is that the taxidriver is in a big, metal motorvehicle, and the cyclist is atop a small, metal nonmotorvehicle. The taxi is effectively a position of power over the bicycle. After all, if I may quote the Highway Code, “The most vulnerable roadusers are pedestrians, particularly children, older or disabled people, cyclists, motorcyclists, and robotriders.” From a sociojurisdictional standpoint, motorists are the effective majority, in the sense that they hold the majority of power. Using a motorvehicle, therefore, entails privilege in some sense. While this doesn’t mean that cyclists can go about duffing up motorists unprovoked, it makes it a lot more likely that violence committed on a motorist by a cyclist is retaliatory, what with the necessity of violence in the mode of movement of motor vehicles – the vast majority, after all, of vehicular assault is perpetrated using the same functions of the vehicle as simply perpetrating locomotion in it – and concessions must be made in favour of cyclists. Will there be a push for a larger portion of road users to be cyclists? Who knows?”
Nev shrugged and smiled in such a way that basically made him look smug, though we knew he was reporting in good faith. The newsone turned again to the camera, having been looking away for a while, and persevered: “I’m hearing that Daddy Da Costa, spokesone for the Party for Animal Protection, Promotion and Yesoneship has come out in favour of this precedent.”
“Yes,” nodded Nev, “Daddy has come out and demonstrated that our government-in-waiting is one happy PAPPY. I spoke to Daddy earlier today.”
The camera cut to a room with a Che Guevara-looking one with a houseplant in the otherwise empty background. The two greeted each other a good evening and Nev put forth the question about PAPPY’s support.
“Of course!” answered Daddy, “this is tremendous news, if it does indeed decrease motorvehicleusage on our roads. The top priority nowadays is staving off the point of no return vis à vis climatechange, and as vegans, we’re very much in favour of anyth–”
My mum, staunch conservative that she was, started next to me and pulled a face. “Vegans? Not on my telly.” She forcefully blinked twice to intimate to the machine that she wanted it muted, and it became so.
“Oh, come on, Mum,” I protested. I was still watching the people on screen as they silently mouthed politics. “They’re right. We’re nearly at the point where there’s nothing we can do about climatechange, and stopping animalfarming is an effective way to at least stave that point off. Even the government’s vegan now; it’s important.”
My mum jutted her bottom lip and looked around but not into my eyes. She’d already told me about the canine teeth, the caveones who ate meat, how hard it is to change a lifelong habit, and so on. “Even so,” she said, “I think that taxidriver was right to hit the cyclist. He shouldn’t’ve been in the lane.”
“But they said, just then,” I replied, stopping for breath, “cyclists are allowed to be in the middle of the lane. You can’t just attack someone like that.”
“He was a problemsolver,” replied my mum. “He had a problem, and he did something about it.”
“The cyclist?”
“The taxidriver. That’s what our generation does. We get the problem, and we do something about it without dillydallying. That cyclist was wrong to kick the driver.”
“Wha–” I began, but I was distracted by the television. It became unmuted, popped, and buzzed. It made white noise and it was awful. Then an unknown figure appeared on the screen, in a similar sort of setup to the newsroom.
“Good evening, citizens.” It was a man in a pleather military uniform and cape. It was a look that stank of villainy. Neither I nor my mum said any more, but we watched with total interest. The moment was so shocking that it dragged out. It was like a freezeframe in a cartoon. The character seemed aware of this but psuedoeventually continued. “I come to your screens not to bring you news of mundane ongoings, but of a life-or-death – well, just death – predicament. You see, I intend to take the moon and make it crash into the Earth.”
I looked at my mum in disbelief and I think her look betrayed likewise. I looked back at the villain. It was as though he had waited for us to look at each other and back:
“There is nothing you can do to stop me. I am currently building a device that will grab onto the moon like an amusement arcade crane and pull it into the Earth, obliterating everything, yes, even me. There is nothing you can do!” The villain broke off to throw his hands up and laugh. It was a genuine laugh. This villain was serious, or as serious as one could be while laughing. I was overcome with dread. “You have one year to say goodbye to this silly planet!” Then the screen went blank.
I turned straight to my mum. “My god, mum, what do we do? We have to round up the community, or get in touch with our MP, or something!”
My mum jutted her lip once more and shrugged, blinking in time with her shoulders reaching their apex. “Ah, I don’t know. I’ve got work in the morning.”
I: “What? But he wants to make the moon crash into the world! He’ll kill us all!”
She: “Well, if he wants to make the moon crash into the world, that’s his opinion.”
I: “What? You can’t just handwave it away by saying it’s his opinion!”
She: “Oh, so people aren’t allowed to have opinions now?”
I: “What? That’s not what I’m saying.”
She: “He even said there’s nothing we can do. Are you calling him a liar?”
I: “I can’t believe you’re defending a man who wants to crash the moon into the bloody world!”
She: “I don’t like your tone.”
Nobbler’s previous works include the ever popular Isn’t It Ironic How So Much Has Changed Yet So Little and the not-so-popular Anglish: A Compromise.