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About John Peel
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I Dance on Your Face
Cert 18 (Very menacing music…)THEY’RE coming. Soon, they will be flying again. And there’s not a damn thing you or Ali Sparkes can do about it… (Horror stabs)...
It’s September. I know they’re coming again as soon as I step outside and get that crisp pre-bonfire night tang in the air. That back to school smell.
That’s when the voice, dark and sinister, inside my head, reminds me. ‘They will be flying again Alison. And you know, at night, they will come for you…’
NOOOOOOOOOOOOH!
My first brush with my autumnal nemesis must’ve been way back in the pram-days of my life. I don’t remember it. It’s entirely possible that I just ate it.
But later, in my early 20s, I took on the biggest and the meanest.
I was living in a flat-share at the time and settling down for the night in my single room. I switched off the lamp and maybe a minute of silence reigned before I heard it. Tick. Tickety. Tick. Ck ck ck tick. Big Daddy was here. And I was alone…
Adjusting my eyes to the light, I reckoned could make him out, over at the window. Wildly, flailingly scaling up and down the pane behind the thin curtain like an abseiler on speed.
Now I’m not, strictly speaking, phobic about Daddy Longlegs, or Crane Flies if you want to be grown up, or Tipulidae if you want to be clever. No – I save that for hawk moths – but Daddy Longlegs comes pretty close. Prickles of sweat were already forming in the knowledge that I and I alone would have to get rid of this thing, because it certainly wouldn’t get rid of itself.
Although, to be fair, Daddy Longlegs does go a long way towards helping, in its own way. Whenever you try to catch it, it likes to assist by removing its own legs. ‘Oh – sorry – am I bothering you? Oh – I do beg your pardon, how can I ever forgive – here – have a leg!’
Well, that’s what I used to think. These days I’m more of the opinion that Daddy Longlegs is just a maniacal lout. They don’t call the young ones Leatherjackets for nothing. They hang around in gangs, bopping about on damp shop windows, and if you dare look at them they’re right in your face, going ‘Come on then – reckon your ‘ard do you? Well look at this – I can snap my own leg off I can! Here – catch – here have two! Hah!’
So there I was – and there it was. Easing back the curtains I found… NOTHING. I froze. And then TICK TICK TICK! I spun around in terror and there it was, sliding down my bedside lamp, laughing.
Grimly I took a glass vase from the shelf in my sweaty hand, and approached, hoping to scoop him up. No such luck – every time I got near it’d shoot up at my face so I had to leap back in horror.
No – it was going to have to be the rolled up magazine.
Shaking, in a cold sweat, I charged around the room and eventually pinned it down to one corner. It tried to faze me by throwing two or three legs at my head, but eventually the magazine thwacked against the wall and its body crumpled and fell down behind the bookshelf.
I crawled back into bed and switched off the lamp with a trembling hand. Sleep, I commanded. You can deal with the corpse in the morning.
It took me a long time to relax and drift off again. Just long enough.
Look, in case you didn’t know it, this is a HORROR FILM script. I’ve called it I DANCE ON YOUR FACE. And you know what no self-respecting horror film ever does without?
Oh yes.
Tick. Ticktick Ck-ti—tick – tick –
BACK FROM THE DEAD, DADDY LONGLEGS, THIS TIME IT’S ENTEMOLOGICAL.
I snapped on the light and spun around, the rolled magazine cocked and ready on pump action bash mode.
Tick tick tick….
Unsteadily it rose up from behind the bookcase. I swear it had only one leg left, and it meant that leg for ME… When we finally met only one of us would come out alive.
It ended horribly. Frenziedly. With pulped Tipuladae all over my pillow.
And so yes, I would say I’ve been scarred. Certainly not as much as it was, but you know, these things stay with you.
It doesn’t help to tell myself that the humble crane fly lives literally for a few days and doesn’t even eat in this time.
Its pleasures are few. Sex is about it, and even that comes at a price. The female’s abdomen tapers to a stylus-like ovipositor, apparently and the male genitalia (sorry about the insect porn here, but stick with me) the male genitalia has to clasp this firmly in its special – claspers – and then twist its own abdomen 180 degrees. Literally getting its end away.
I dunno. Maybe we shouldn’t begrudge it that leg chucking business…
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