MR PRESS-MY-NOSE

 You’re browsing through a charity shop in Liverpool, more to get out of the rain than anything else but always hopefully that you might turn up some rare vinyl that you could flip on Ebay for a hundred times the price you paid for it, when bright colours catch your eye at the bottom of a pile. You move a small pile of jigsaw boxes (Derwentwater, a kitten, the Haywain, some dogs playing cards), and some place mats, and underneath it all is a clown’s face, blue eyes, a big red nose, and a set of bright yellow buttons making up his smile. In a curve along his forehead he is named: Mr Press-My-Nose!

So of course, you press his nose, and it moves in but nothing happens. No batteries, of course, you think, but then you have another thought and press one of the yellow mouth buttons, and nothing happens. You press his red nose again, and Mr Press-My-Nose says, “I like!’ in a booming voice. You look around the shop but there’s no other customers who are in and the staff are either hard of hearing or are just used to people trying everything out.

You have an idea, and press the second yellow button, and then his nose again. “I like sauce on my!” Mr Press-My-Nose says, and now you’ve got it. You press the third yellow button, and then the nose, and he tells you and people who work in the shop that he likes sauce on his chips. You work out that each press of the buttons that makes up his smile builds part of a phrase, and his red nose makes him say it. The chunks of phrase are random on each press, so you have fun with it for a bit, half-hoping he’ll say something rude, but you get “I went to the beach on the train” and “I scored a goal with the ball” and “I ate jam at the picnic”

He only has a limited number of phrases, so if you keep pressing for long enough, eventually Mr Press-My-Nose will say something that sounds like a language you’ve never heard, and then something that sounds like the waves flowing back over shingle then a sound like a rusty gate and a small and very dark hole will open up exactly where you are standing, and you will fall down it, a long, long way down.

So long, in fact, that all you will do for the rest of forever is fall.