Moist Chin Investigates

Some time ago I mentioned that my housemate, Seth had disappeared for a couple weeks without as much as a phone call. Where had he gone? Why hadn’t he called? It was a mystery. When Seth returned from his bizarre absence he began acting very strangely. He was quieter, his hair was fluffier and I couldn’t be sure but I thought his eyes were closer together. Also he absolutely refused to tell us where he had been. The closest we got to an explanation came when Seth said he’d been ‘busy’ at home and that he was back now, so it didn’t matter. As a huge fan of The Sopranos my immediate assumption was that Seth had killed someone, either that or he was working for the FBI, but I couldn’t be sure. There wasn’t very much on the television that week and I couldn’t be bothered with the gym so I decided to play Sherlock.

My investigation techniques were varied and extremely complex but mostly involved nagging at Seth to tell me what had happened.

“What happened? What happened? What happened?” I would repeatedly enquire politely.

“Like I said, I was busy! Nothing happened.” He would reply, exasperated

“You killed a man didn’t you?!”

Nobody else seemed to care where Seth had been which made several of the classic interrogation methods that I wanted to employ difficult. For example, ‘good cop, bad cop,’ wasn’t an option. Instead I went for the ‘really fucking repetitive to the point where it’s unbearable cop’. It didn’t work and after running out of ideas I was forced to give up on my enquiry and just start pretending I knew what happened.

We first started making up lies about Seth on a particularly miserable hangover morning. The night before I had managed to stay fairly sober and guide an absolutely wrecked Seth back home to bed. B-dawg, Pete and I went to KFC and realized over a bargain bucket, that if Seth didn’t remember the night before, we could tell him he had done things he hadn’t and he would believe us. It was perfect (and a little confusing to write down). If you can make someone believe that they did something they didn’t then it might as well be true. So when we got home from KFC we told Seth that he had kicked a young girl in the back and ordered her to “get out of the way.”

After a little convincing he believed us and a fantastic new hobby was born.

‘memory filling’

You should try it!

Since that original lie, our friends and neighbours have all believed that Seth is some kind of sociopath capable of kicking babies off motorway bridges. So a couple of months (and a few lies) later, when I said that the reason Seth was missing was that he had shunted an old woman over with his car and he had to stay at home in order for the police to interview him, nobody even batted an eyelid. The truth was far more exciting, or at least exactly as exciting.

A week or two after his return, Seth sauntered up to the house with a new car...

He was greeted with filthy looks from those who thought he had rammed an old lady, while the rest of us all wondered why he had a new car. He couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.

I was getting a lift in his new Peugeot and he finally admitted it. Apparently he was driving like a wanker and flipped his old car down a hill, writing it off in the process.

Mystery solved.

I’m not sure though. I still think he killed a drug dealer, put the body in the boot of his car and dumped the whole thing in a river.