SEVEN NEW ENDINGS TO THE PILLORY
by Jess
UKJess@Hotmail.com
Doyle is horribly injured but survives. After a couple of agonising months in hospital, they are about to transfer him back to the Scrubs for breaching his parole, when he is suddenly rescued in a commando-style raid by his mum, his gran, his Auntie Pauline and that nice Mrs. Thompson from the Post Office.
Whisked away to the Doyle family home in the suburbs, he is lovingly tended by his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, surrounded by his nephews and nieces, multiple cats, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig and a wolf who has wandered in from the fandom next door.
Meanwhile, Cowley has succumbed to leaping leg lurgy and, in a death bed repentance, Reveals All to a horrified Bodie. Bodie, utilising the skills born of his experiences in the jungle, tracks Doyle down, which the combined powers of the forces of law and order have singularly failed to do.
Doyle is understandably not pleased to see him but, after being horrible to him for about 20 pages, is finally made to feel so guilty about his own conduct that he agrees to take Bodie back. Doyle gets it up the bum, despite thinking that he shouldn't really like it, and they all live happily ever after.
Doyle survives and it turns out that Bodie is still listed as his next of kin, so he has to go to the hospital to sign for the treatment. There he sees Doyle, pale and wan after many nights wracked by nightmares in his hospital bed. He is struck by how frail Doyle looks, how vulnerable, how kittenish. (And why is Doyle drinking milk from a saucer?)
Abandoning Cowley without a backward glance (he's only got one gammy leg and Doyle's got two and a dodgy arm), he whisks Doyle away to a flat where they draw the curtains, turn up the gas fire and spend the next few months tending Doyle's wounds and discussing whether or not they're gay.
Doyle gets it up the bum quite a lot (but only when Bodie is convinced his poor battered body can bear the strain) and Bodie gets it up the bum a bit (not because it's his sort of thing but because he's a Generous Bloke).
Meanwhile, Cowley has been unmasked by friends of Manton whom Cowley murdered to stop him revealing that he (Cowley) was really the Twenty-Eighth Man.
Cowley finds out that Bodie is actually his second cousin twice removed. Revolted by this evidence of incest, his Wee Free conscience kicks in and he spurns Bodie brutally.
Bodie is crushed by this latest evidence of rejection, just one more in a long line, his Dad, Marrika, that girl in Africa (yes I know Krivas killed her but it's all sort of the same thing, isn't it?) not to mention his mum, his gran, his Auntie Pauline and that nice Mrs. Thompson at the Post Office. And now his second cousin twice removed!
Devastated, he stumbles into the night and, while standing under a streetlight, gets mistaken for a rather burly rentboy and is immediately picked up a nutter who assaults him horribly and leaves him a broken man. Meanwhile, Doyle in the prison hospital hears what has happened and escapes. He finds Bodie and forgives him, unable to resist the pain in the child-like blue eyes. This time Bodie is the one whose wounds are tended and who gets it up the bum, twice nightly and three times on Sunday.
Cowley dies when he is thrown out of his car at 70 mph by his chauffeurs, enraged by the fact that he can never remember her name and keeps calling her "CI5 girl".
The car swerves down an embankment and come to a rest with Doyle unhurt. Realising he's been given a second chance, he stumbles into the night and eventually ends up at the cottage of Mrs. Sue Rogate-Mother where he is taken in. He takes up art again to earn an honest crust and when Sue dies he inherits the cottage, which is in the picturesque village of Upper Codswallop.
Meanwhile Cowley has died (with a smile on his face and some very peculiar bruises) and Bodie has inherited a surprising amount of money. He decides to fulfil a childhood dream and buy a stud farm in the picturesque village of Nether Codswallop.
One day he is out riding on his notoriously bad-tempered stallion Macklin, he falls and hits his head and wakes up amnesiac. Luckily Doyle's cottage is within stumbling distance and when they meet again, it is love at first sight for Bodie.
50 pages of country-life later, somebody gets something up the somewhere, although the reader is never sure who gets what up the where.
The stud farm is not doing well; one of the things Bodie has forgotten is that you need some lady horses. He goes for a ride to mull over his problems, unfortunately another thing he's forgotten is what a rotten horse Macklin is. He falls off again and this time he regains his memory.
He tells Doyle he has to shop him to the fuzz (think Bogart and Mary Astor in the Maltese Falcon). Doyle stumbles into the night. Luckily he stumbles round in a circle and ends up back home.
Just then word comes from the newly re-united Germany that Cowley was really Colonel Georg Cowlstein of the East German Secret Police. Doyle is exonerated and they all live happily (and bucolically) ever after.
Doyle dies and his ghost traverses the astral plane to commune with Bodie's inner self though his dreams. Eventually, plagued by nightmares in which Doyle is pleading his innocence, Bodie searches their flat and finds Cowley's Secret Plan to Rule the World (and Get Rid of Doyle) hidden in Cowley's sock drawer.
Cowley is unmasked and carried off to Repton where he spends the rest of his days with an armful of sodium pentothal. Bodie lives the rest of his life a broken (and penitent) man, finally meeting Doyle when he joins him on the Other Side and they live happily (literally) ever after.
Either that or he gets there and finds out the Doyle is shacked up with the late Laura Thingy from Sandbaggers and now it's Too Late.
Doyle is lying in a drawer in the morgue. Then he wakes up.
The wall gets nearer and nearer and…
suddenly the car swerves, goes over an embankment and slides to a rest leaving Doyle with nothing more than a broken ankle. Bodie visits him in hospital and reveals that it's all been part of a plot to catch Cowley and unmask him as the Russian's top spy in Britain. He didn't dare visit Doyle in jail or show any sign that he believed him because he had to foil Cowley's Diabolical Cunning.
Cowley has been arrested, Doyle is out on bail pending a full pardon and they can go home and consummate their relationship because Doyle is the only man Bodie has ever loved.
Bodie sits on the bed, takes Doyle in his arms and…
SPLAT — the Porsche hits the wall and Doyle is killed. The entire story has been a hallucination in the moments before Doyle's death.
(With thanks to Pincher Martin, by William Golding and Incident at Owl Creek)
END