Bonus Episode: The Jacket

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental (;















Content Warning:
Menace, disturbing scenes

Transcript

The Jacket

Pony Sun received his jacket potato gratefully and immediately began hollowing it out with his fork. He liked nothing at all on his jacket potato. His younger brother Was piled his high with chilli con carne and cheese; while Pony Sun took only a little bit of butter. He surgically halved his jacket potato into two irregular hemispheres and began avidly scooping out the warm fluff from both of them. The two small knobs of butter he placed on the top of each potato-half softly disintegrated and dropped liquidly down into the substance, infusing it tastily with buttery warmth. But the point to remember was that Pony Sun did not eat the skins. He loved jacket potato skins, the jacket itself, (though he thought of it more as a floppy eggshell than an item of clothing), and he had a collection of them in his room. He tried to find ways of preserving their brown, mottled beauty but had ended up with a drawerful of rotting jacket potato skins. Each time the family assembled to eat jacket potatoes, Pony Sun saved and added the skin to his collection. This time his intention was no different. The family only ate jacket potatoes to support Pony’s artistic enterprise. But Pony Sun’s father, Box Sun, had, at last, had enough of it. He found himself vexed by his son’s propensities.

            “Pony,” Box said.

            “Yes,” Pony answered, lifting his head from the carefully folded potato jacket upon which he had been intent.

            “Pony, I want you to stop collecting jackets. I know about the secret stash you keep in your room…”

            “It’s not a stash it’s a catalogue. It’s a display, a collection.”

            “Right. I want it to stop,” Box said, with finality.

            Pony was confused, confusion occupied his mind more than upset. He didn’t understand his father’s new aversion, his father’s animus towards this most private and obscure of projects.

            “Why don’t you get a job?” Box suggested.

            Pony pouted. His eyes hooded themselves in a kind of acrimony and shame. He hated that word: job. He hated hearing it, from his father’s lips especially, directed at him especially. 

            “It’s hard to get a job,” Pont grunted in answer. The reply lingered on the air like a dissonant chord. The family seated around the table considered the statement’s trueness, its deliberate open-ended-ness.

            “It is,” Box agreed. “But I’m only asking you to try to get a job. I don’t mind if you don’t succeed. Just try. Ask around, barter, persuade, grovel, search high and low, walk up the high-street and go into every business, every shop, store, café, restaurant, takeaway, and pub and just say Hello, I’m Pony Sun, I’d like a job, please…oh, you’ll need a CV, you’ll need a document with all your credentials on it. You’re getting big, you’re…how old is Pony Sun, dear?” Box asked his wife.

            “He’s thirty-eight,” Was helpfully volunteered.

            “Thirty-eight, Pony. Thirty-eight. That’s thirty as in three tens, three decades, 3, 0, plus eight more. Thirty-eight!” he kept reuttering the age with intoxicated amazement. “Thirty-eight! That’s one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four…”

            Pony drifted off as Box counted every successive integer on the number-line from one to thirty-eight. His father could certainly count, there was no doubt about that, Pony thought. Dazed by the mounting numbers, his mind jogged gleefully up the stairs and hurried, in one ebullient mental ferret, into the drawer where he kept all his potato jackets, his jacket-potato jackets.

            “…thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four…”

            The number-line cast its incantation over the table: Box’s wife, Card, and his youngest son Was, were lulled gently into catatonia by its drone. Was still had almost half his meal left to demolish. Card was a thin woman of very slight appetite and very weak constitution. She had only a boiled egg in an eggcup for her supper. The bottom quadrant of the egg, runny, soft and moist at first but no longer, was yet to be scooped out.    

            “…thirty six, thirty seven, thirty-eight. Thirty-eight! It is a very old age for a boy to be. Thirty-eight…” Box shook his head solemnly, quiet at last.

            The family were silent. They had been left with something significant to ponder by Box and Pony’s dialogue. Pony looked down at the floor, his feckless, underdeveloped, thirty-eight-year-old face sheepish and thoughtful.

            It was surprising to Pony that his father broke the silence with a concession, a peace offering.

            “Why don’t I buy you,” Box began. “a very special, very attractive, very sightly, very snazzy, very grown-up jacket.”

            Pony was initially sceptical. He doubted that a jacket, selected and purchased by his father, could boast very much appeal. But the more he thought about it, the more he warmed to the idea.

            “Okay,” he said.

Pony didn’t like going into coffee shops to ask about barista jobs: there was always, invariably, something frightening or detestable to contend with, whenever and wherever he did so. Plaque was the worst because of the gingerbread men. In their transparent packets, in the front of the crowded snack-rack, these gingerbread men sat, with blank features drawn onto their gingerbread faces and their gingerbread flesh in disturbing, abstract icing. Pony found them terrifying. He objected in principle. He found gingerbread too racially ambiguous a medium in which to work, too racially ambiguous a substance out of which to mould human forms, and he found icing, dainty ribbons of compacted cream, gumdrop confections for navels, eyes all too surreal a way of suggesting human features. He didn’t think he should have to deal with these horrors. 

            Things were changing though. It was a new season: a new wind seemed primed to blow through the household, rejuvenating and cleansing it. Pony was fiercely engaged in one of his odd preserving, knitting, blanching practices with the latest potato skin when there came an impatient knock at his bedroom door and a gruff call of his name.

            “Pony!”

            Pony cocked his head alertly up and rushed out onto the landing where his father was waiting for him with a hideously colourful jacket in his hands. It was light blue with auroral geysers of fire, and tiers of patterned suns, wide and agape like so many amphibian eyes.

            “Your new jacket, Pony,” Box said. “And I want you to wear it…I want you to wear it all the time.”

            Pony made himself cruciform. Onto each of Pony’s religiously spread arms, Box pulled the sleeves of the jacket. Then he had Pony lower his arms: he was in, undeniably in, the jacket.

            “There. It solves everything.”

            It solves everything, the notion lingered doubtfully in the air. Pony stood there before the approving gaze of his father, more bound than attired, tightly and adultly swaddled in the jacket’s luridness. The array of colours and pictorial designs on the clothing-item’s back, sides, lapels were so noxious as to seem unlucky: it was as though Pony were death-marked, earmarked for disaster.

            “Thank you, father,” he said.

            Box nodded. 

            Despite the damnation that the jacket seemed to signify, Pony became very pleasant. He walked around the house, went to the toilet, showed Card and Was who both applauded, wearing the jacket all the while. He made dinner for the family, in the jacket. Box could not account for the positive change this jacket seemed able to effect, nor the swiftness with which it was able to do so. He felt as chuffed as could be. If only Pony hadn’t overcooked the garlic in the meal he had made.

            “Garlic’s overcooked,” Box said. “Burnt”. 

The next day was job application day. Pony went into Plaque, the coffee shop with the scary gingerbread men, proudly wearing the jacket. He felt sedate, calm, shielded from the full impact of the gingerbread men. The staff took one look at the jacket Box had placed upon his son and they wanted to hire him, they wanted Pony to be one of them. They said to him that they might even grant him a uniform-exemption so at all times he could sport the hilariously hideous embroidery of that jacket. They commented on how fantastically awful it looked. It made them like him, it made them respect him. Its allure was potent and it trapped them in its spell.

            Pony didn’t feel himself in the jacket. He sensed that people were different around him, more approving, more complimentary, more tolerant, but he didn’t really like the way he felt. An aura, an orbit, a colourful forcefield of strength followed him everywhere. This strength, as though he were being lifted and ever guided by a giant palm, by his father’s palm, supported him, helpfully. But he felt… looked at. That was the only way he could describe it: seen, looked at, seen to an unhealthy degree. Notwithstanding, he went home and related to his family the good news: he had a job. 

            The jacket was a kind of sedation, a kind of disembodiment. He hadn’t felt himself and nor had he felt any aversion towards the new job-shaped direction and purpose to his life that the jacket had ensured. But when he took off the jacket to sleep, hanging it on a door hook, he felt miserable, depressed by everything, horrified at the thought of the potato jackets being disposed of during the day while he would be at work, horrified by the thought of being at work.

            Box roused his son early. Instead of shouting him into the shower, his very first action of the day was to take the new jacket from the peg and gruffly bundle his son’s nude upper body into it. Once he was inside it, Box added the press of his two palms to his son’s binding, in a passionate embrace. Wellness, confidence, unenquiring straightforwardness cocooned Pony and readied him for the day ahead.

            “Keep it on, Pony!” Box hollered from the upstairs window as Pony set off up the cul-de-sac drive, looking perfectly ridiculous. Pony sent back a timid thumb’s up, not turning around. Then he disappeared around the bend of the street. 

The next night, Box stapled the jacket to Pony’s flesh. This way it couldn’t come off without taking a good deal of Pony’s flesh with it.

Pony remained in the jacket, throughout all the years that followed. Sometimes he’d try to pick the staples that bound the jacket to his body. He’d have the inkling to de-robe himself, to deglove his body of this second lurid skin. But he could never get very far. His father kept close watch over him, all the family chipped in with friendly, constant surveillance. Was and Card, even the neighbours, even Box’s mother Sack, and Card’s father Lick kept watch over Pony, verified whenever they saw him, whenever they came round, whenever they were left alone with him so Box and his wife could have a date-night, that he was always, always, always wearing the jacket. 

Box would soon sew Pony into the jacket, with thick thread, and big, big-eyed needles. If Pony’s stitching ever got unpicked or came undone, if the seam ever began to open like a scream, they’d mend it as a family. Then, when their deft work was done, they’d enjoy a family meal in front of the television, their quadragenarian son right where they could see him, his face green and empty; his affect forlorn, rigid, and catatonic; and his jacket as eternal, lurid and comforting as it had ever been.