Mr Lush S4E3P3 - Lusho lushini Lupus

In the bible, we are told that the sins of the father are visited upon the son. In that sense, Lush is father to himself this morning. He committed the sins and they are visited on him now in the form of post-alcoholic depression. Lush drags himself to the mirror:

‘O, Father, why have you forsaken me?’, he asks himself.

He is greeted by an odd sight. His eyelids are black as crow feathers, his hair resembles the back of a hedgehog, and his skin is as white as an Arctic fox. Thomas Lush, esq. you are a mess. He is further surprised to notice that he is still wearing half of his tuxedo from the night before. But only the top half. Lush ponders that age-old question:

‘Do I go back to bed and, quite possibly, never get up ever again? Or do I start my day with a shower, a shave, and a healthy breakfast?’

After an hour-long nap, Lush sits up in bed and wonders what time it is. Recollections start to come flooding in. Lush can’t help but feel he may have gone overboard last night.

The club he and Mafalda went to was, of course, on the opposite side of the city. As such, Lush had to place his life in the hands of the clearly malevolent taxi driver once again and sit through another harrowing journey. Mafalda, cool as always, hardly seemed to notice the F1 speeds and calmly puffed on a cigarette the whole way there. She did have the decency to open the window, so that the smoke wouldn’t irritate Lush. As a trade-off, the sub-zero temperatures made Lush lose all sensation in his face. The cold did, however, seem to focus his mind and it struck him that he had already smoked two whole packs of cigarettes and he decided (for the first time in living memory) not to smoke any more.

Lush was awakened from his cigarette-themed reveries by the information that they had arrived at their destination: the legendary Grizzly Bearghain. Not that Lush could actually see the entrance from where they came to a stop behind the thronging masses of leather-clad pangolins, capybaras, kiwi birds, Komodo dragons, and naked mole rates. He could, however, hear the dull droning of electronic music emanating from what looked like a massive power plant off in the distance.

‘This is looks…fun?’

‘Don’t worry, Thomas. We’re on the guest list.’

Hurrying past the menagerie to the front of the queue, Lush and Mafalda soon arrived in front of a number of particularly suave, tattooed and moustachioed penguins. Lush could not help but notice that one of them had the phrase no sneakers tattooed across his forehead. 

‘Why anyone would stand in the cold for hours just to be refused entry is a mystery to me’, Lush stage-whispered to Mafalda, so loudly that one of the penguins was able to respond immediately that Ms Mondi is the wrong person to ask about such things, as she’d never be denied entry anywhere.

‘It is lovely to meet your father, Mafalda’, another of the penguins quipped innocently as he held open the door for the two of them.

As soon as he entered the building, Lush was hit by another wave of absurdity. Every single person seemed to be dead behind the eyes, including the Pomeranian who patted Lush down to check him for illicit narcotics without even suggesting that he should empty his pockets or that perhaps Mafalda’s bag should be checked. However, after passing through another door, Lush was suddenly assailed by strobe lights and Brutalist architecture that hit him like a bolt of electricity.

‘No one in London will believe this’, he screamed to no one in particular.

Almost running now, he threw his coat at the coat check koala and leapt up the chrome steps to the dance floors, holding Mafalda’s hand all the while. There was pandemonium on the first floor but Lush barely took note of anything and stormed up another staircase. Surrounded by this writhing mass of animals attempting to dance, Lush’s place in the world suddenly became clear to him.

‘In my dinner jacket, I am a wolf and these are the leather-clad sheep’, he cried dramatically.

After quickly offering sincere apologies to a nearby sheep who seemed quite offended, he bounded up even more stairs to a third dance floor and immediately his eyes were drawn to an unexpected sight: The zebraffes Kiki and Kuku dancing arm-in-arm with the Harry P. Otter.

‘That otter has rizz’, Lush thought to himself, not even questioning how he now knew that word. ‘I am one with the world!’

Waving to his old acquaintances, he danced to the nearest bar. Predictably, the good mood of our man in black was considered gauche by the famously morose Grizzly Bearghain hummingbird wait staff who promptly ignored Lush for fifteen minutes before taking his order. Drink in hand, Lush was suddenly struck by a realisation.

‘Where did I leave Mafalda?’

Feeling her absence, he came crashing down to Earth. Once again forlorn, the wolf pulled the proverbial sheep’s wool over his head and joined the rest of the crowd, mindlessly moving to the thuds that filled the room. Indeed, he blended in so well that he pretended not to see Kiki and Kuku turn away in shame at Harry P.’s innocent:

‘Isn’t that your stepdad?’

After innumerable rotations, Lush felt the pain of this rejection subside, only to be replaced by the sharp pain of someone pulling on his ear. That someone turned out to be a drunken Mafalda, who had seemingly finally given up her pretence of disinterest in our wolf in sheep’s clothing. Thankfully, Lush didn’t have time to reflect on the odd erotic thrill he got from a beautiful woman ignoring him, although a short flash of his mother’s face did appear to his mind’s eye. This metaphysical flash of face was replaced by the very real feeling of Mafalda’s lips on his. Although the sensation of a beautiful woman kissing him was certainly a novel experience to Lush, he found comfort in the fact that he maintained his lifelong inability to fully process his emotions. Eventually though, this cognitive dissonance proved too strong for even the master himself and Lush found himself slowly collapsing to the floor. The final image that Lush registered before oblivion was that of hooves, trotters, and feet stomping up and down behind the illuminated face of his would-be lover.

Lush shakes himself back to reality at the foot of the bed in his hotel room. In spite of having filled in some of the blanks in his lost evening, he is left with more questions than answers.

‘Did I complete my mission? Who knows?’

‘Did Mafalda ever even give me the key? Who knows?’

‘How did I get home? Who knows?’

‘Will I ever be a normal, productive member of society?’

Lush has a sense that he could at least answer this final question if he truly wanted to. After a moment’s consideration, he chooses the well-trodden path of closing the door on that conversation. Instead, he resorts to man’s last refuge from self-reflection: he springs to action. MM/DC