Damien Exton – Fiction

Lorenzo Huff had been up and walking for a large portion of his life. He had taken quite naturally to it in fact, once he’d gotten onto his feet and stumbled around to see what they were capable of.

He had two legs (which was nice), and he had found them to be quite adequate for the task. Each leg ended with a foot, and these too proved themselves to be of a decent enough quality. Their functionality was appreciated, but if truth be told, a design a little easier on the eye wouldn’t have gone amiss. Ugly as they may be however, they got the job done, had the optimal number of toes and were made up of the appropriate moving parts. And that was the main thing.

Lorenzo found it quite advisable to cover his two feet with shoes and socks most days; not all the time, but when out and about he found it better to have them and not need them than to need them and be shoeless. He would never make that mistake again, no siree!

On his latest venture “out and about” however – using his preferred bipedalism method of locomotion – his feet and their encasing shoes let him down in a most embarrassing and inconvenient way. He fell prey to the fateful mishap that most people (at some point in their lives) have to tackle: the tripping over of one’s feet while walking in public. Well, he surmised, perhaps not tripping over his feet exactly, that would surely involve his feet being separate from his legs and laying in his path, whereupon he would fail to see said feet laying there in the high street, and whoops! Over them he would go…

No. He knew he hadn’t tripped over his own feet. He was certain they were still attached to his legs and carrying him when the mishap occurred.

The incident which led to Lorenzo’s trip (he was utterly convinced) involved the sudden appearance of a lip of pavement that had been hidden the previous moment, and did smugly disappear again once he was on his way in an embarrassing demi-fall. The event must have involved an ingenious piece of pavement engineering; a self-raising platform installation which could activate effortlessly at the precise moment Lorenzo proceeded to step over it. It must be all hydraulics, goddamn them, he supposed; begrudgingly impressed by the ingenuity of the highway gadgetry.

Now, how do I deal with this most embarrassing incident? Lorenzo pondered for a few moments…

The battle for his dignity raged red-hot both within him and without him. His face gave him away as it became ever more motley: not dissimilar to the colour of a ripened Brandywine tomato.

The day was a busy one, with plenty of fellow pedestrians going about their duties, and everybody saw his trip, he knew. His gaff was out there in the public domain, plain as day. It would be the talking point of the afternoon up and down the high street. It would be commented upon, laughed at, impersonated, filmed, Youtubed, Tik-Toked, go viral, become legend. His whole existence would be distilled into this one unscripted, vile moment. And all thanks to that hydraulic lip of paving that had provisionally materialised for one fleeting, hateful moment.

Dr Smahlt would probably advise Lorenzo in his next session, it was his condition kicking in, his mind playing silly buggers… But that was just tosh, Lorenzo thought. What did he know, really? And besides, Lorenzo only had to endure two more meetings with the good Dr, and then his dues were paid, once and for all. Hallelujah!

But for now, how best to deal with the predicament…

Should he go all in, see it through and fall “head over heels”? No, that isn’t sound logic, he realised; he was head over heels still – being upright and all, his head much higher than his heels and with his heels still technically beneath him. Also, he wasn’t in love, which would also qualify a person being in a “head over heels” state.

Should he let himself go (as his octogenarian grandmother Cora Huff would say) arse over tit? He decided against it. He didn’t want to show the high street his backside. And being male, he didn’t feel adequately endowed with the prerequisite breasts to carry out such a move convincingly.

The most prudent and face-saving way to proceed now was to make the trip a part of his forward motion. His mid-walk spill was in fact intentional. Yes, that’s it, he decided. It was a radical new move he was trying out. A rephrasing of his hackneyed method of getting from A to B.

I know, he thought, if I make my trip look deliberate… If I do a refined little two-step jog to flourish with at the end of the move it will disguise my blunder; it could look graceful and really quite desirable, and not at all like the godawful embarrassment it really was…

It would all be in the delivery, he knew. He had to sell it! And who knew, maybe everyone would try it out? The high street could be awash with pedestrians walking and bookending clumsy steps with a fashionable pas de bourrée. He would feel quite satisfied with that going viral, he thought, feeling extremely satisfied that he had come up with a viable and elegant way to exit the stage.

With plan of action set in his mind, he was ready to escape his bothersome horror with style. To “style it out” he thought. Yes, that sounds like pavement poetry. I’ll go with that, he decided. I’ll style it out.

But things did not quite go as planned…

Once he was at the apogee of his quick-step stumble, his downward motion to reunite with the pavement ceased right then and there. His feet, his whole person in fact, did not again lower to the ground as would usually happen in these moments. Damn, he thought, just my luck. First a horrendous trip, and then what? I don’t come back down again!

How could this be? Could this truly happen? Things cannot be as they seem. He couldn’t remember ever being elevated from the ground without the resulting fall back down to earth again. It can’t be possible. It just can’t. Cause and effect… Action. Reaction. An up. Then a down. But he looked at his feet as best he could, with their ten toes cuddling in their socks and shoes, and yes, sure enough, he was mid-air – hovering. Ever so slightly.

So, how to get out of this little pickle he pondered. Logic, Lorenzo, is your friend. Logic must be the starting point in any conundrum. I mustn’t get bogged down in the how’s or the why’s. Cold logic is what I need here. ‘That’s the spirit Lorenzo, you’re cured my boy!’ Dr Smahlt would encourage through his broom-like mustachioed mouth. Or so he guessed anyway.

Firstly, was he definitely hovering off the ground? It was hard for him to see properly from above when he couldn’t move his feet. And if he leant forward to see beneath himself, would he put out his back? That wouldn’t help. If only I had a full-length mirror. But the only full-length mirror he owned was still safely installed at home on the front of his wardrobe. ‘Cursed thing!’, he spat aloud, ‘what good is it to me there?’

So, if not the perspective of a mirror, he knew something else just as handy. A fellow tetrapod! They would, he guessed, have a much better vantage than he did of what was actually happening below him.

Lorenzo looked about the thoroughfare. A friendly looking lady approached. She may be just the ticket, he thought.

When eye contact was made, he lay his problem plainly before her.

‘Excuse me Miss, can I ask for your assistance please? I’m in a little bit of a bind!’

‘Of course, my love,’ she replied with such a heart-warming cadence that he could have kissed her.

‘What can I do to help? Oh, hold up… Hold up! What have we got here then? Well I never… How on earth did you get up there!?’

‘Well miss, I was implementing my newly invented stride, step, ballet-step, stride, jog, when all of a sudden…’

‘Hang on!’, she interjected and grinned, ‘Hannnng ON! You’re the bloke who tripped! I just saw it on Facebook! Oh my god that was so funny! I watched it twenty times, I kid you not. Ten in slow-motion. It is you, isn’t it? Funny? My god yes. Maybe the funniest thing I ever saw, really. It’s no wonder you got on the news’.

Wonderful, he thought. Why is there always a person with a mobile phone on the prowl these days?

‘No Miss, you don’t understand. It wasn’t a fall, per se. I got halfway through my new maneuver and was simply caught here mid-…’ he attempted.

‘Shirley! Oi, SHIRLEY! Over ‘ere!’, she shouted to who he guessed must be an acquaintance of – he didn’t know this lady’s name, but she was a friend of Shirley, and Shirley, a friend of hers.

‘Have a look at this then Shirl!’, the first lady not called Shirley exclaimed with unbridled excitement.

Shirley approached with a rampant finger point at the end of an outstretched arm. 

‘IT’S HIM! Oh my god! It’s YOU! Honestly, I’m your biggest fan. I’ve watched everything you’ve done; I really have. Can I get a selfie?’, she asked.

‘Well, or course Shirl’, he said back, ‘anything for a fan.