The events immediately preceding the death of Mr. Tandy

Mr. Tandy was dead. This was not, all things given, particularly surprising to Mr. Tandy, who had rather expected this to happen eventually, although not, perhaps, in the way in which it did. Before becoming deceased Mr. Tandy was known by his few friends and work colleagues as a thoroughly boring man who spent his days seated at a desk with an old-fashioned computer and a vaguely humorous Dilbert cartoon pasted to the cubicle wall. Mr. Tandy was the sort of man who wore a tie on casual Friday, ate rice crackers for lunch and who had such an easy nature that if his neighbours were told about the seventeen women he'd killed over the past fifteen years they would look shocked, then tell the tv camera that they secretly suspected something was wrong about him all along. It was his hair that gave them suspicions.

Mr. Tandy didn't know why he killed the women, although he imagined himself someday giving an interview where he blamed it all on his mother never having bought him a motorbike, and indeed this was Mr. Tandy's secret dream. The glistening chrome and rubber combined to make the machine that invaded his thoughts. Mr. Tandy wanted a motorbike so badly it gave him erections.

It was on the day he died that Mr. Tandy set out to buy a motorbike, he'd seen the one he wanted in the paper and excitedly showed it to Sarah who responded by missing the point completely and spitting in his eye, something he fully intended to punish her for later, but not today. Nothing could spoil today, the momentous day that he would be finally complete. Before completion, a bus ride into Brighton. An interminable wait for the man who wished only to realise his life's dream, forced to endure the sloth of senility, the exuberance of youth and the drudgery that is public transport. Soon, he repeated to himself, soon he would be free of it all.

Then he was there, in front of the house and there! THERE! The MotorBike. Reality dropped away, the music of the spheres blazed triumphantly, so loud that he barely registered the report of his Colt firing, lead bullet ending the life of the person who dared to claim ownership of His Harley, nor did he register the screams of passersby, or the frantic 999 calls. It didn't take long for an armed response unit to arrive, the police generally take this kind of thing rather seriously, and it took even less time for them to realise that Mr. Tandy was going to keep firing until he ran out of bullets, or people to shoot. So it was that Mr. Tandy, legs astride his beast machine, glorious and erect, received three bullets to the chest and passed away.