Xenomorphosis

It all began one night when I was standing on my own in my garden over the festive holidays contemplating unemployment, my new vagina and the stars. I spend a lot of time gazing at the stars, I also spend a lot of time gazing at my new fanny but that doesn’t lead to quite as much contemplation. I have very little else to do these days having been binned by Magnus Linklater who not only sacked me but also had me shot although to be fair, I was pointing a gun of my own at him at the time. So there I was, loafing around outside my Ayrshire barn with no light pollution and a wonderful view of the night sky, wishing I were still in residence in my west end flat and writing for a newspaper so I could lay into Rangers and have plaudits heaped on me by deranged Celtic fans who have voted me Most Useful Idiot four years in a row. I was just considering how sane my life had become since I’d extricated myself from Peter Lawwell and his sinister machinations when I noticed something strange in the sky – my favourite winter constellation, Orion had an extra star in its belt; just between Alnitak and Alnilam something else was twinkling.

This was a very curious state of affairs so I called the Times news desk to ask if they knew anything about it but I got short shrift with the girl on the other end saying, ‘Fuck off Stinkerbell, you don’t work here anymore, we don’t have to pretend to be nice to you now,’ and then she hung up on me. I checked the internet, pausing only to update my Twitter page with some nonsense, but there was nothing there either so I went back outside and by golly, the fourth star was bigger now.

I put it to the back of my mind and set off for Radio Clyde where I still earn a few shillings for pandering to their audience with Celtic Minded platitudes and spent the evening with Hugh Keevins cutting off any Rangers fans who sneaked through the public callers vetting process, allowing the usual Celtic supporters’ flights of fancy to get full airing and worrying about Jim Delahunt as it was almost a full moon outside and he was beginning to look a little seedy with hair sprouting from his knuckles and ears.

It was while contemplating this full moon on the drive back to the wilds of Ayrshire that I remembered the star in Orion’s belt and trying to crane my neck out of the window to see, I nearly crashed the new soft top Mini I’d bought with my severance pay, a severance pay I’d greatly exaggerated on Twitter to salve some of my embarrassment at being bumped from my job by a cretin like Linklater. I’m glad I did look for the star at this point because it was much bigger by now and it definitely wasn’t a star because whatever it was, it was in our atmosphere, burning up and heading straight for us. All sorts of thoughts went through my mind as I raced to get home so that if it was a meteor come to kill us all, I might die in the warm embrace of my Martin O’Neil scrapbook.

The stones in the driveway scattered as I skidded up to my barn and I ran from the Mini, fumbling for my house keys, dropping them in my haste and just as I bent down I heard a noise so awful it sounded like the sky was cracking open. This is it, I thought and the night lit up and the sky turned blue in the glare of something falling to earth. It shot overhead and in the time it took me to think of a prayer, it landed with a crash into the holiday home of Joan McAlpine which was just a few fields over from me. The explosion sent a hot wave of air rushing over me and then the debris started falling all around and I breathed a sigh of relief that I was still alive and that whatever hit us hadn’t been as big since it had only obliterated Joan’s house. Joan, I wondered, was she home? I set off through the fields to find out, not through any concern for McAlpine of course but with the journalistic juices once again coursing through my body because who knows, maybe I could blame this on Rangers?