The Intimidation

*LesMTS* · 6th March 2009, 3:33pm

Three years ago today, not long after I’d celebrated my thirtieth birthday, I found myself the focus of a singularly distressing happening. It was a Saturday afternoon, I’d spent the morning in the shed on my allotment, excitedly attaching objects to one another with nails, and I’d returned to my small flat with a bag of groceries, with which I had the intent of busying myself in the making of many puddings. A wholesome and productive day. Or so I’d hoped.

As I was crouching down by the fridge sorting the perishables from the preserves I was struck by the most hideous pain in my abdomen, such as one might feel in the small hours after anarchically gorging on roughage at bedtime. Immediately, I sprang to my feet and the springing was accompanied by the most disconcerting sensation of some mass sliding down my leg and out of the bottom of my trousers. I was near frozen with uncontrollable trepidation but I knew I had to look, and look I did.

There, on the floor of the kitchen were three baby newts, mucid and mewling in a most disconcerting manner. They blindly clambered over one another, their stubby amphibious legs moving clumsily and awkwardly. I need almost not tell you that I was wide-eyed with a strange mixture of fear and curiosity. Newts? How on Earth had it come to pass that I had excreted baby newts from my person? No doubt the searching for answers would have continued there and then if it weren’t for a second bout of near unbearable cramps.

I started out of the kitchen in the direction of the bathroom, unbuckling my belt as I went, but the second litter of newts was upon me before I’d made it halfway across my sitting room. I managed this time to remove my trousers before they came and with good fortune too, because this time it was an eruption. What must have been ten thousand or more baby newts shot from my person like the water from a loose firehose. They bounced from the windows and walls, formed undulating piles in corners of the room, some even clung to the lampshade. Many hundreds must have died, but I had no concern for the creatures. With shame I tell you that I could not extend my love of animals this far and as I struggled, panting and wheezing to my feet, even though I had mothered them, I wished the most hideous of deaths on every last one of the little beasts.

I was now standing, trousers and pants at my ankles, in the middle of a barely recognisable room. The floor and furniture were covered with a squirming mass of these strange amphibians and I was a perplexed, sweating shambles. I shuffled over to the wall mirror, and brushed a few pulverised newts from its surface. I’m a pale man at the best of times, but my complexion at that moment staggered even me. I was white as a freshly washed polar bear.

This would not do, I thought. It would not do to be giving birth to baby newts all over the apartment I’d invested so much money and time in. Some of the most glorious objects that I’d attached to one another in my allotment lay upon the floor, blasted from their stands by the stream of newts. It was a disaster. I resolved there and then that I would first phone for an ambulance and once assessed by a healthcare professional, I would return to the apartment with the police and fire brigade, who’d assess the damage and help me clean up the newts.

No sooner than I had began dialling the emergency service than the agony was upon me again and this time it was an order of magnitude more severe than before. The phone fell from my hand, I bent over and bellowed with pain…..then the newts came. They came with such force this time that I was propelled into the air and thrown around the room like an unknotted balloon. The noise was that of a thousand hippos exploding one after the other in rapid succession, one might imagine. And I was battered from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, like a drunken bird, by the relentless jet of young amphibians machine-gunning out from between my legs. One of the many impacts must have been powerful enough to render me unconscious, because the next thing I remember it was dusk and I, a crumpled mess of a being in the corner, was coming-to to the sound of a ringing telephone.

The room was now waist deep in mewling, squeaking, squirming baby newts and I had to dig around blindly in the ocean of the tiny, slimy, black things to find the ringing phone.
I gathered my composure, and answered it.
“Hello.”
“Hello, it’s Barbara.”
It was my neighbour.
“Oh hi, Barbara, what can I do for you?”
“Have you newts?” she asked,
“Hundreds.” I replied.
“Any idea where they came from?”
“No idea,” I lied, trying to hide my exhaustion. “I just got home from the dog racing and they were here.”
“Well, the council shall certainly be hearing about this.”
She hung up the phone.

The newts must have been spilling into her flat through the little hole in the floor of my water cupboard. I’d been aware of the hole for sometime, and now realised that it must be patched up immediately, lest she become suspicious that I was the source of the newts.

I waded through newts into the kitchen and located a large ball of dough with which I’d intended to make several puddings and, using an old coal scuttle as a spade, I managed to dig through the newts in the water cupboard and clog up the hole with dough.
That was a weight off my mind, and with this problem resolved the concern over my birthing of millions of amphibians once again took precedence in my consciousness.
It occurred to me that it now must have been some hours since I’d had my last, explosive, litter and I tentatively came to the opinion that perhaps the ordeal was over. I resolved, however, not to follow through on my plan to contact the emergency services. The situation was now far too preposterous. Instead, I’d try to stay awake and vigilant, paying attention to any changes in my physiology, until morning and, if no more newts came, I’d make my plans then.

Morning came without incident and I was satisfied that whatever affliction had befallen me had passed. I was pale and emaciated, and generally sickly looking, but I knew I had no time to rest.

It took me the best part of the next three days but I managed to secure all of the newts inside a number of black bin bags. Forty were filled in all. I couldn’t risk a neighbours suspicions being raised should they catch sight of an undulating black bag in the communal bin area, so each newt that was still alive and conscious had to be stunned with a flick of the finger to the underside of the chin. Near three days of solid toil and something like normality resumed. The binmen collected the bags on the fourth day and, it seems, never suspected a thing.

Until this day, I had never told anyone about the newts.