A Smack Of Fate

Once upon a time, in Leicester, flat 32c, there lived a beautiful supermodel called Chantelle.  Every day she would wake up and cross the dual carriageway to get to her job at Maybelline.  After posing and pouting and demanding endless Red Bulls, she would retire to the hypodermic needle-filled alleyway outback to shoot up a few grams of the finest heroin her riches could afford.  One day, when getting her daily fix, she miscalculated her measurements.  With one hundred grams of smack circulating her veins, the cross across the dual carriageway became a little more complicated.  In her drug induced haze, she did not see the oncoming orange convertible Mini, and was thrown into the air so she could have seen through her bedroom window on the top floor if she had been conscious.

An ambulance was called by the Mini driver, and she was rushed to hospital, pronounced comatose, and tucked up in a clean bed on the intensive care ward, stomach pumped and tubes inserted.

Far, far away in Morocco, a scientist sat in his lab, lighting the candles in a shrine dedicated to Chantelle, complete with discarded underwear and used needles.  His name was Derek, and he was mourning the hideous accident suffered by the love he added on Facebook.  He may have been rejected, but that was only because her feelings were clearly so strong that she could not put it across in words.

He vowed then that he would invent a cure to save her.  If it took five months, a year, even ten years!!

Ten years later, the now 60 year old scientist was leaning over his test tubes, tinkering and still hoping that soon the eureka moment would happen.  He was depressed, his beard was long and he’d gotten awfully skinny and wrinkled. 

Suddenly from behind him came the sweet sounds of a familiar pop song.  “I’m a survivor,  I'm gonna make it, I will survive, Keep on survivin'” An aura of pink mist surfaced from the darkness of the musty lab, filling it with the scent of Beyonce’s Heat perfume.  Derek spun in his tattered wheely chair, and was confronted with a vision of the Destiny’s Child of yester-year. 

“Derek,” the Kelly Rowland spirit said, “You WILL find a cure!  Do not give up hope!”

“But Kelly!” Derek exclaimed, “I have been sat here for ten years, formulating and becoming thoroughly discombobulated!  I am a shadow of the man I used to be!  Even if I do come up with the cure, Chantelle could never love me.”

Michelle Williams’ ethereal voice piped in.  “Derek, Chantelle will not need to love you for your physique or your organisation or even your charisma!  She will love you because you saved her from a terrible and pointless existence.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes Derek,” proclaimed Beyonce Knowles, “She will love you!”

“But I can’t find the cure!”

Kelly Rowland sighed deeply.  “You see the purple stuff?”

“Yes?”

“Mix it with the pink.”

Derek did as instructed.  As the mixture bubbled and fizzed, Derek did not notice the pink glittery puffs of smoke as the voluptuous visions dissipated.  As it calmed, he grabbed a syringe, filled it with the wonder-drug and injected it into his comatose test mouse.  Immediately, the mouse jumped up and looked suspiciously at Derek and his needle.  Derek also jumped, but with rather more joy and jubilation that he could finally dash to Leicester to save the addict he was so desperately infatuated with. 

On the flight from Morocco’s main airport, Marrakesh, Derek stared nervously into the plane’s small mirror, oblivious to the angered knocking of fellow passengers busting for it.  He combed and re-combed his straggly hair, straightened his tie and even experimented with clear mascara and concealer purchased from the airport shop with the little savings left from his large jackpot win that he had been surviving off for the last three decades.  When he finally felt that he was the best presented he could possibly be, he sauntered back to his seat, buckled up for the final descent and as the plane shuddered to a halt, he felt he had finally reached the pinnacle of his existence.

He made a headlong dash straight for the Leicester Royal Infirmary.  He sprinted past reception, brandishing the needle in his hand.  As he rounded the corner for intensive care, he screeched to a halt as he saw the name of his beloved written on the door.  Apprehensively, he pulled open the door, frail hand shaking in anticipation.  He had finally laid eyes on the woman he was destined to love.  He lurched forward, screamed her name, “Chantelle!  Now we can be together forever and always!” and stabbed her right in the forearm.

Her azure eyes fluttered into consciousness, widening at the sight of the world she had been blocked from for so many years.  In her head were the words “Who is this old bloke stabbing me with such a large needle?  I can take my own heroin, thank you!”

He was of a rather different attitude.  He had broken down sobbing.

“Ten years I have worked to save you, my beloved.  And now we can be together!”

He got to his knees, and pulled out  his grandmother’s ring.

“Chantelle, darling, will you do me the incomparable honour of being my lawfully wedded wife?”

Chantelle was shocked and appalled that such a wrinkly old fellow could possibly think that she would marry someone like him.

She opened her mouth to decline rather impolitely, when a doctor burst into the room.

“Good God!” he exclaimed. “How on Earth is this woman awake?  She just last week was declared brain dead, and we were going to shut off her life support later this afternoon!  If you have cured her, you’re going to be a very rich man!!”

Registering this in her vegetative state, Chantelle finally understood the true meaning of love; money.  Grinning to herself, she shuffled her left hand forwards and slipped the rather minute diamond onto her ring finger. “Of course I’ll marry you!”

Once more, Derek’s eyes filled with tears as he grasped her hand tightly. He pulled her into his aged arms and embraced her.

And in one ear he heard a delicate whisper.

“So, uhm, what was your name?”