We had been expecting him but no one had told us that he had arrived. We needed to break some bad news to him. We had been told that he was easily upset. How would we do this? Better just to tell him what we needed to. There was no way of hiding this information from him, and we would not even try. Open disclosure was the way to go, tell him exactly what had happened in as calm a way as possible.

I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They stood out as dark shapes in a sea of pink and white. They didn’t seem to fit in with the image before me. I could not take my eyes away from them. What did he use to make them so black? His hair was as white as snow and was wispy. His face looked to have been affected by a first-degree sunburn, a shocking shade of pink. What I couldn’t stop staring at were what resembled two dark smears of greeny-black poo which were above his eyes. Was he going through an Art Deco phase of his life? His eyebrows had become bas-relief images highlighting the contours of his face. Was he a cartoon character who had escaped from the movie Where’s Roger Rabbit? I tried to look away but my gaze was magnetically drawn back to the poles of his Northern facing eyebrows. I could not stop looking at them, and out of the corner of my vision, I saw the rubbish bin. “No, I can’t take the bag out of the bin and put it over his head. That would not be very professional.” I closed my eyes and seared into my retinae were two burning hot white eyebrows. “Hello, Exxon-Valdez, I’ve think I’ve found the remaining oil that you lost.” “Hello is that Groucho Marx’s grandson? Son, I’ve found two of your grandfather’s missing moustaches.”

I found my right index finger reaching upwards towards his eyebrows, for a taste test. My colleague had to restrain my hand with a Kimora grip for extra resilience. The substance covering his eyebrows looked a lot like Vegemite or Marmite, those (in)famous yeast-based spreads. Nutritious but not particularly good-looking. Spreadable tar. A passing resemblance to every human baby’s first bowel movement – Meconium. I remained entranced, mesmerised, hypnotised by his eyebrows of power. The world started spinning around me…as if dark black eyebrow shapes were swirling around like a gigantic black hole, drawing me closer to their event horizon, taking my very breath away, the curtains started being drawn on the stage of my mind as I became lost in the inky blackness…”the next thing I remember officer was waking up in the hospital bed.”