Raindrops squeezed out from an overcast sky. Autumn leaves stuck to the path, limpid gold stars on wet cement. A domestic crisis (involving an entire soccer team’s sweaty shirts and a broken washing machine) and a rainy-day desire to hire “Angel” forced Sir Giles and I to wander the streets of Peter’s Ham to locate the local coin-op launderette. The streets were quiet, except for the occasional roar of planes overhead and the bleat of traffic from cretinous Crystal Street. My red Chinese-style slippers (adorned with Adidas Romesque stripes) were smudged from the damp ground. I fidgeted the umbrella and whenever I got distracted by a cat or a pretty house, Sir Giles grumbled irritably when I biffed him in the back of the head with the umbrella’s metal claws. The launderette was moist, steamy, its air laced with Omo and the smell of soggy powder-grounds. I remembered an old tactic of persuading a stubborn washing machine to do its job, courtesy of Vyv from the Young Ones: “Oh, la-di-dah, look what I have here … a bag of Felicity Kendall’s underwear that needs a good wash.” Fortunately, this approach wasn’t necessary.
Next door is an antique toyshop. In its window are mementoes of familiar childhoods: ET dolls (with luminous fingertip), Muppets, Beetlejuice figures and Star Wars fighters. Situated near the Oxford Tavern – home to topless waitresses and the Golden G-String Awards – and facing a road that constantly reverberates with the hubbub of 4WD tanks and blingmobiles, the toyshop is the perfect setting for (a) a Stephen King novel, (b) a “League of Gentlemen” episode or (c) a good place for a mass murderer to work in an effort to look inconspicuous and feign a normal life. Inside, a tiny hallway of glass cabinets leads the patron to a hole-in-the-wall counter, from which a deep voice knelled “Can I help you at all?”
No face appeared.
The voice continued, “Looking for anything in particular?”
“No thanks,” we said to the hole, with some timidity. “Just browsing.”
The ceiling is literally covered with boxes of classic board games, a peculiar fresco of Monopoly and Tiddly-Winks and Hungry-Hungry Hippo. Displayed in their museum cabinets of shiny glass - that sprout into a series of short corridors and “dead-ends” - are a timeline of toys. From gollywogs and grotesque doll-puppets, sinister clowns and tin wind-up toys, to train-sets with honeysuckled miniature villages and an array of toys from cult TV shows and movies – the A-Team, Popeye, Star Wars, Asterix, Betty Boop and the most bizarre find: a talking Kylie Mole doll (“der, so I go, I go ‘I’m a talking girl, you know’”).
Which makes me think: do today’s kiddies even play boardgames? Is there a Big Brother board game where you have to remove an article of clothing when you get the wrong answer?
What if someone bought the Kylie Mole doll, and its speech mysteriously transformed from the “she goes she goes” refrain to a more, polished, more modern Austrayan suburban dialect a la Kath & Kim: “After deep refraction of my inner fluids, I think that Amanda is arktually roolly noice, especially since the li-po. And Dino isn’t a spunkrat at all. He’s an absolute hornbag now that he’s changed his name to Jaxson. Pass me a Dippety-Bix, ploise.”
Or perhaps the Kylie Mole doll will come alive in Chucky-fashion, massacring little kiddies as they press their wee noses against the Robot Hall of Fame. And the man in the hole will make gourmet chilll-dren sausages to sell on the black-market (or the black-pudding market. Or the meat-market). He’ll wash their clothes in the coin-op next door, and use the very same Pumpkin Patch garments to dress the next delivery of sinister clowns.
And so the nightmares begin ...
