An investigation into the monstrous being that is 'Banter'.Try to enjoy.
The newspaper wrinkled out of shape as Arthur turned
over to the ‘Student Comment’ section. His restless friend Marty O’Keegan sat
next to him, gently vibrating with energy. He had met Marty at the Ultimate
Frisby taster session at the beginning of the term and hadn’t been able to
shake him since. Arthur reclined and clasped the paper with one hand, using the
other to prop up his head. The university pub was busy and the air was heavy. Marty
twitched and began to drum on the sticky pub table. His skeletal fingers pounded
to a marching tune, his eyes scanned the room and his tongue dangled loosely out
of his mouth scenting the air for stimuli and distraction.
They were positioned in the corner of the pub so as
to allow Arthur to cower from social communication, for Marty though it was an
opportune look-out post, a spot where he could gawp, stare and drool like a pubescent
gibbon dangling from a fruit tree and fiddling with his tail. Arthur thumbed
through the paper some more tutting with pompous dissent and occasionally
throwing a limp wrist in the air. Marty was oblivious however, overcome with
all smells and colour, his receptors gagging for something to fill his vacant
frontal lobes.‘Some of the stuff they write in here...’, mumbled
Arthur, ‘who cares what sexual antics the first years are up to?’ Marty’s
primeval receptors started to fire. ‘I mean, who really cares if two students
were caught...’Marty’s tongue stiffened and his palms began to moisten, Arthur
took a long gulp on his pint, Marty clenched his toes. Arthur drifted off.
‘Caught what?!’ shouted Marty. Arthur had forgotten
he was there.
‘What?’, replied Arthur.
‘You said: “two students were caught” something,
“sexual antics”. And then what? Caught doing what, where?!’ Marty eyes widened,
he was very attentive.
‘Oh right, erm...Caught’, he flicked back a page.
‘Erm, I can’t seem to...’, Arthur began to trail off again, ‘what a ridiculous
name...’
‘Don’t fuck with me Arthur!’ Marty belted, provoking
the interest of the two slender girls sharing a bottle of wine on the adjacent
table.
‘God, ok. Two students were caught...shagging in the
business school. Happy now you horny bugger?’Marty’s drumming stopped suddenly.
His muscles seized and his back stiffened. An intense euphoric stare washed
over his blue eyes, his left twitching quickly. He held his breath. Arthur
stretched out his arm with the paper in and continued to read, quite oblivious to
what he set in motion. Slowly, with languid and devious grace Marty’s body
began to take on its natural form. His tense limbs charged with purpose.
Slipping like a satanic eel cast from God’s common room he slid his head between
Arthur and his paper. Floating on an unwavering purity of purpose. Facing upwards,
he stared demonically at his friend.
‘Jesus, could you fuc...’, but before Arthur could
finish Marty breathed the fateful word, hysteria’s cue, humanity’s death knoll.
‘B-A-N-T-E-R’. The word oozed out of his mouth,
puffing into the air like a swarm of jellied flies. Marty held his stare for what
felt like a minute and then vaporised into the dank atmosphere of the student
pub, his duty fulfilled. The letters of the word ‘B-A-N-T-E-R’ hovered around
Arthur’s head. Each individual letter spoke to the other as they possessed a
level of sapience unbeknownst to any other. The ‘B’ started to twirl and spin,
ordering the ‘A’ as it did, ‘N’ also rose into the air and the rest followed.
The cyclone of inanity gathered speed and started to spin quietly towards the
ceiling, trawling through the crowd as it did so, gathering and destroying
interesting conversation on its way. With each rotation the word both grew in
strength and multiplied, each letter dividing and duplicating at an
incalculable rate, yet remaining intact and at one with the body of the swarm.
Each fresh string of ‘Banter’ groping the room, clawing for conversations to
ruin, it’s outer tentacles sweeping through tables and bags, sucking points of
interest and humour from the skulls of the crowd and flinging them inwards to
the spinning Banter core which duly crushed and decimated them beyond any
existence.
After this terrifying and eerie process was
complete, the Banter cloud hovered gently above the heads of the now vegetated
crowd, not resting but lying in wait. The room had fallen silent, devoid of
human noise, only the deathly hum of the cloud was audible. The hum started to
gather and stick, it was gaining real substance. It developed from a dull note
to a thicker, more ominous pulse of booms and thuds, like a pre-emptive requiem
mass. No more dreadful or fearful a sound can be imagined. The letters howled
and cackled as they warped from gas to thickened matter, mere utterance to
chaos, thought to devastating mass. The Banter bound itself together, becoming more
aware and single minded in the process, errant B’s and R’s now marched
obediently into the core sacrificing their gaseous individual for a unified
gloopy whole. This great organism began to drip onto the floor, as if panting
in anticipation it drooled onto tables, and spat into pints of lager.
The shell-shocked crowd started to break from their
induced slumber. The dripping gloop of idiocy felt alien yet also familiar as
it slipped down their faces. One by one they started to look towards the
ceiling, and one by one their hearts sank not only at their impending judgement
but in the knowledge that they always knew this day would come, indeed they
willed it forth.
The sticky mass began to slide down the far wall and
as it did so small globules were directed out, like capsule cast from the
mothership, toward their victims. Each letter pellet shot through the air and
ricocheted off the walls, the word cut through and pierced the lobes of this
dormant circus. ‘Banter, baaaaanter, banttter!’ This curse poisoned the air and
swivelled deep into the ears of the students, it sliced through their unguarded
canals like a fleet of barbaric Viking longboats, it tore through their
cerebral folds pillaging their conversation nodes and plundering their imagination
cortex. ‘Banter! banter! banterrrr! bbbannnnttteeeerrrr! ’. It swirled along
the ventilation and scythed along the chairs, it decimated Nobby’s Nuts and
dripped into the beer. A young Christian girl leaped over the seat partition,
rolled across a table of beer glassless and crisps and made a dash for the fire
escape. The bar jammed, she screamed and sunk to floor, flailing her arms
around in desperate defence, but the cloud of banter was too strong by now, and
her screams slid into inane chuckles. A stocky rugby player squared his
shoulders and pummelled the air repeatedly, but it just drove him back until he
was flush against the back wall of the pub. In a last gasp of effort he jerked
his head forward in a head butting motion; a comical gesture against such an
inexorable force and yelled the word again.
The crowd was encased now, having fully imbibed the
spirit of the Banter. Any shreds of civilisation had been shattered and covered
in this forceful moronic pool. None could escape. A usually sensitive Maths
student slammed his face into his bowl of coleslaw and proceeded to vigorously
wipe his head around it, snorting bits of cabbage and carrot as he went. A
huddle of thinly bearded angry young men were engulfed by the Banter, it
streamed into their blood fuelling an excess of gesticulation, their hand
gestures began to exceed bodily capacity, their wrists cracked as their hands
began to oscillate wildly, next their elbow joints rotated repeatedly beyond
360* snapping cartilage and bone and propelling them upwards into roof and then
uncontrollably around the room like startled blue bottles. A Psychology module
convenor dashed through the centre partition stark naked holding her flabby
arms bolt up into the air like two wobbly rudders, whilst the pigtailed bar
girl pulled aggressively on two beer pumps with her feet hoisted up beside them
as if she were attempting to haul back her sanity from a now distant realm.
In the darkest corner of the pub sat Arthur. He
wished he’s never said anything.
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