Chapter Three: Concerning the Magical Properties of Numbers

Chapter Four: Lurking Thoughts of a Seal

Chapter Seven: Murderous Hobbies of the Rich and Indolent

Chapter Fourteen: Unreliable Steve’s Erotic Masquerade

Prologue: The Tale of Curmudgeonly Bert and Milksop Trevor

‘Quite like old times, eh?’

Manky Hank pulled on his moustache and overcoat, and sighed.  ‘Nothing much changes,’ he agreed.

Berg the Slop stretched.  (This was why he was called Berg the Slop.)  ‘Everything stays pretty much the same,’ he concurred, ‘as it had previously been, taking as our reference point,’ he added, ‘the moment in question from which our perspective on priority is constructed,’ he concluded.

Twang!  He had reached the limit of his elasticity.

Does that hurt?’ asked Manky Hank curiously.

‘Yeah,’ said Berg the Slop.  ‘Bloody hurts, actually.  I don’t know why I keep doing it.’

‘I do,’ said Alf Several-Places-At-Once mysteriously.  Alf didn’t say much, but when he did, he opened his mouth and employed the combined resources of his larynx, his tongue, his lips and his brain to form words and then enunciate them.  It was such a complicated business that he rarely bothered, especially as everyone consistently ignored him.

‘Perhaps it’s because of the intolerable pressure of circumstance,’ suggested Manky Hank generously.  He laced up his sturdy walking boots and was irritated to find that he couldn’t get his feet into them like that.  He let them wander off on their own.

‘Could be,’ said Berg the Slop lugubriously, because he couldn’t think of another adverb, apart from ‘insatiably’, which hardly seemed appropriate under the circumstances.  ‘Though I doubt it,’ he added insatiably.

The ensuing silence was broken only by sounds, notably those of Manky Hank winding up his watch with some snide remarks, and the restless thumping of his walking boots, and the creak, creak of Berg the Slop’s rocking chair as he stretched and contracted, stretched and contracted. Just another Sunday afternoon; nothing much changes.

‘Storm brewing,’ observed Manky Hank’s walking boots from the verandah.

‘Tea?’ asked Manky Hank.

Berg the Slop craned his neck across the room and peered out over the desert.

‘That’s no storm,’ he said.  ‘That’s Fast Rosie.’

‘Not Fast Rosie the fastest individual in the locality?’ exclaimed Manky Hank incredulously.  ‘Doesn’t surprise me one bit.’

The great dust storm whirled ever closer.  ‘Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...’ came the great cry out of the old west, ‘haaaaaaaaaaaaa—llo,’ said Fast Rosie.  ‘How’re you then?’

‘Fine, fine,’ said Manky Hank.

‘Mustn’t grumble,’ agreed Berg the Slop.

‘Everything’s hunky dunky,’ said Manky Hank’s talking walking boots.

But Manky Hank’s wristwatch was sobbing in the corner.

‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Fast Rosie.  ‘Still, mustn’t hang around here gossiping.’  And she was gone.

My,’ said Manky Hank in admiration.  ‘That’s one fast Rosie.’

Yep,’ agreed Berg the Slop.  ‘Sure is that.’

But I don’t suppose you’d be interested,’ continued Alf Several-Places-At-Once.  And, as ever, he was right.

Nobody knew why Lungs-On-A-Plate was called Lungs-On-A-Plate, since he wore them on a chain around his neck.  But then, Manky Hank reflected, names could be such a poor guide to things.  Not in his own case of course.  Or, for that matter, in the case of Fast Rosie.  Or Berg the Slop.  Or He Had Cartloads Of Manure In His Mouth, Officer.  Or anyone else of his acquaintance, in fact, apart from Lungs-On-A-Plate.

Then, of course, there was Hateful Spoodie.  But Hateful Spoodie wasn’t a person, it was a speciality of Lungs-On-A-Plate’s motorway café.  No one knew whether Hateful Spoodie was hateful or not, because no one had ever dared to try it.

Berg the Slop, he noticed, seemed to have collapsed into a spreading heap of something.  Still, we all have our cross to bear.

Just then, Manky Hank’s walking boots were extradited to Mrs Knoxville’s next door (she always kept a spare) to face charges of buffalo.

‘Quick!’ cried Manky Hank.

Berg the Slop began to blink.

‘Too late!’ shouted Manky Hank, and hot-footed it across the burning desert sands, screaming and blackening and with his socks on fire and his hair streaking flame in sheets behind him. People do these careless things from time to time.  Admittedly, some people are more careless than others.  Berg the Slop had soaked into the carpet.

Mrs Knoxville Tennessee called the court to order, but it just cracked some feeble joke about Chinese takeaways, so she bashed it on the head with a large wooden mallet which she kept about her for just this purpose and far too many others. ‘All rise,’ she said, and everyone invented levitation and bruising your head on the ceiling.

‘Call the first witness!’ pronounced Mrs Knoxville Tennessee.  ‘Call her Mrs Knoxville Tennessee!’

For woe and alas, it was none other than that lady herself, who was officiating simultaneously as prosecution, witness, witness-box, local government office, microwave plus inbuilt grill, gooseberry, earwing and effects petal.

Manky Hank’s walking boots swallowed thickly.  They were in trouble.  Not as much trouble as thickly, of course, but then you probably saw that one coming.

Mrs Knoxville Tennessee Alabama Jersey Custard Sorbet put on her black hat and black pudding and emitted some curious ululations and steam through her nostrils (respectively).  She whirled her Gavin* round and round her lower thighs and screeched in tones so loud that you could hear them quite well enough:

‘LET THEM EAT BRAINPANIC!’

But hell, everyone has to have a hobby.

* (boyfriend)

Not everyone, however, has to have a turkey.  I don’t even like turkeys.  Nasty, sniffy creatures.

Mr Jerpland Frobholic’s hobby was battering rams.  He didn’t batter ewes because he was a gentleman.  He didn’t batter turkeys because there’s really no point – you’re not going to get a reaction.  You could shoot a turkey between the eyes with a ruddy great brick, and all it’d do is look stupid.  He didn’t batter eyelids.  Battered cod and chips for tea, oh woe is me, oh woe is me.

I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me there.

‘Stop that silly nonsense,’ snapped the ubiquitous Mrs Knoxville imperiously, insofar as you can be imperious when you’ve just broken in half.  ‘Prisoner, how do you plead?’

But Manky Hank’s walking boots knew a feed line when they saw one and refused to rise to it, partly because they didn’t want to get bruised again. ‘Not guillotine, your honour.’

‘I’m on a what?’ said Mrs K. T., who knew no shame.

‘Well, not on a guillotine for a start,’ said M. H.’s w.b.’s.

‘But the guillotining is the best bit,’ said Mr Knoxville Tennesse, who knever said aknything, but made the best guillotines you could get for a tenner, so long as you didn’t want them to actually behead things, rather than (for example) make inner-ear custard out of cement. ‘I enjoy the guillotining.’

‘That’s all very well, dear,’ said his wife, ‘but it’s so hard to get the custard out of the bloodstains. Does it have to be so very messy?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Knoxville Teknessee, who was a kindly old buffer at heart, but a homicidal maniac incompetent buffoon everywhere else. ‘That’s the best thing about it.’

At this there was a general murmur of enthusiasm.  ‘Oh Lord, it’s hard to be made of chocolate,’ sang an usher and a gentleman in perfect harmony and slippers, ‘when you’re not made of chocolate in any way.’

The court took due note of this opinion, as well it might.

‘And now I shall pass sentence,’ announced Mrs Knoxville, and retired to the smallest room in the room.

(And another thing: I don’t like turkeys.  I don’t much like birds generally, as a matter of fact.  Sarcastic little sods.)

Mrs K. T. returned to the fray I’m afraid, sentence having duly been passed.

‘That took a while,’ said the usher sagely and onion, with a song in his heart and a waffle in his trouser pocket. ‘Must have had lots of subordinate clauses.’

‘Random tulips,’ agreed the gentleman, who, as it happened, was another maniac and hadn’t had the foggiest idea what was going on since the day he was born.

‘Silence in court!’ observed Mrs K. incorrectly, since she was shouting at the top of her voice, because that was the only bit of it there was.  She advanced on Manky Hank’s walking boots, fixing her beady eyes on them with superglue.  ‘The sentence of this court is...’ she began dramatically.

Everybody held their breath, including, perhaps unwisely, Mrs K. herself, who turned purple and fainted, and had to be revived with a large wooden mallet that chanced to be lying around.

‘. . . ,’ she resumed, and the same thing happened all over again, more than once.

Eventually:

‘The sentence of this court is: “Stealthily, in the morning mist, Corporal Jones inched forward through the trenches, shells exploding all around him, until he was within firing range of the foe.”’

Everyone clapped and cheered, except for everyone except for Mrs K., but she clapped and cheered with such enthusiasm that all the doors and windows were smashed and the roof fell off and the walls fell down and the floor evaporated and a chair was slightly scratched.

‘The court will now rise,’ trilled the usher and the gentleman and their happy little woodland friends, Mr Bunny Rabbit and Mr Slavering Wildgoose.  And with no ceiling to bang its head on, the court carried on rising – up, up and away into the night sky – up beyond the circle of the moon, and up beyond the planetary spheres – and up, and up, beyond the farthest, dimmest star.

And for all I know, it’s going up still.

This was Manky Hank’s walking boots’ chance to escape.  But there no longer seemed to be any need, so they didn’t bother.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Manky Hank was performing emergency heart bypass surgery on a bunch of marigolds.  It wasn’t going especially well: eight hours into the operation and they still hadn’t gone to sleep, no matter how hard he punched them.

‘I don’t know, Nancy,’ he said to himself, ‘maybe this just isn’t the job I was cut out for.’

‘Were you cut out?’ asked Nancy.

‘Oh yes. With scissors,’ said Manky Hank proudly.  ‘From this large piece of surprised cardboard,’ he added, waving it about and surprising it even more.

‘Well, you could always become a trapeze artist,’ said Nancy.  So she did.

The Amazing Flying Nancy leapt through the air with breathtaking agility and finesse.  She swooped, she dived, she pirouetted, she fell off a lot, she dribbled, she mutated, she had bad breath, she sang a little song, she was rubbish.  She got recycled into tarmac.

Eventually the cardboard stopped being surprised and started sulking instead.  It was bored and miserable, and nobody loved it; but this doesn’t matter because it was only cardboard and cardboard doesn’t matter.  Unless possibly to other cardboard, and cardboard doesn’t matter (see above).  So I don’t propose to give the issue a moment’s more attention.  Really, if we wasted all our sympathy on every unworthy object, nothing would ever get done and the world would be a better place, which would be pointless.  Stop thinking about it.

One day, Nancy was lying about being driven on as usual—

Oh, all right.

‘I love you,’ said the bunch of marigolds to the cardboard.  ‘I’ll look after you and care for you and give you great big wet soppy kisses and everything.’

‘Sod that,’ said the cardboard, ‘you’re just a bunch of marigolds, who cares about you?’  And anyway, before he could even finish the sentence they had died of heart failure.

And the cardboard cried for weeks, because he’d been secretly in love with them all along.

One day, Sir More the Merrier was strolling along Nancy when he met his old friend and sparing partner (you’re not supposed to kill them when they’re down, remember?) Sir Proof of the Pudding.

‘Morning, Derek,’ said Sir More the Merrier.

‘Morning, Charlie,’ said Sir Proof of the Pudding.

‘Killed anyone lately?’

‘Yes.’

‘Many people?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unarmed?’

‘Yes.’

‘. . . All of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they have any legs, then?’

‘No.’

‘Before or afterwards?’

‘Both.’

‘Derek,’ said Sir More, ‘when it comes down to it, you’re not actually a very nice person, are you?’

‘Not really,’ said Sir Proof, and proved it.

‘I always suspected as much,’ gurgled Sir More, and expired.

Curmudgeonly Bert and Milksop Trevor were the best of friends, in the sense that Curmudgeonly Bert detested Milksop Trevor, and Milksop Trevor wasn’t especially observant. They lived in a big cardboard box up in the rafters of Marylebone Station, and nobody knew they were there except for their landlady, Suspicious Elsie, who was a criminal. One fine morning, Curmudgeonly Bert was delousing the underside of his in-eyeball windscreen wipers, when he heard a piercing shriek from the platform below.

‘Shut that bloody noise up!’ said Curmudgeonly Bert. ‘Is that you, Trevor?’

‘Err, no, err, aaaaaaaaargh! ... err, yes, err, arrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!’ said Milksop Trevor. ‘Err, but, err ... err ... nothing.’

‘Right,’ said Bert. ‘So shut the bloody hell up.’

‘Sorry,’ said Trevor, and continued being sucked into another dimension by the evil parasitic multi-tentacled Gibloid of Doom. Curmudgeonly Bert ate a live meringue, just to be that way, and went off to work, and didn’t give Milksop Trevor another thought all morning, or that afternoon, or ever again.

Bert worked for the local council; they just didn’t know it. Every morning he would empty people’s dustbins into other people’s dustbins, shovel any spillages into a big heap and divide it up between further people’s dustbins, then empty those dustbins into additional dustbins and vice versa, until everyone’s trash was comprehensively redistributed. He delivered milk by post and newspapers by Caesarian section. He unpainted double yellow lines and reoriented exactly one eighth of all the signposts in London NW1.

After a quick lunch at the orphanage, he would spend the afternoon rewriting epitaphs on the gravestones at Highgate Cemetery (sample: ERIC ‘HALFWIT’ COOPER, MY HUSBAND, THE SON OF A BITCH, DEPARTED THIS LIFE JUNE 28 1984 AND NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON; or ALICE SMITH, THE DECREPIT OLD SPONGER, SHE’S DEAD AND NO-ONE MISSES HER). Then he’d slip back along the back streets to Marylebone, and climb unnoticed into his box in the roof.

On Platform 6 he happened to notice the tattered remains of a note, heavily trodden-upon and slightly singed. It read:

‘Fine,’ said Bert, and went to the pub to have a beer with his friend Mr Huckleberry Transvestite. Well, when I say ‘friend’, I mean that the death threats that passed between them on a daily basis (if one-way-traffic can be called ‘between’) were as yet only threats, for the most part.

‘Evening, Curmudgeonly Bert,’ said Mr Huckleberry Transvestite.

‘Sod off,’ said Bert, ‘before I blow your bloody brains out through a straw.’

‘Beer?’

‘Yeah.’

Milksop Trevor had carried on screaming most of the morning. Then he stopped, because he was in another dimension and they don’t allow screaming there, it’s in the rules, and also because he didn’t want to. It turned out to be quite a nice place, with lots of second-hand book shops, so he decided to settle down and raise a family, from seed. He and the Evil Gibloid of Doom played golf together at the local country club, and became business partners, manufacturing spare limbs for people who liked to plan ahead. Trevor became a prosperous and respected pillar of the local community, adored by his wife and four children, all of whom he’d grown in his own allotment.

But sometimes, just now and then, he would become quiet and melancholy, and then he would go out into the back garden where there was an old oak tree, and sit in one half of a cardboard box, gazing reflectively at the empty half. And he’d look down on the grass and flowerbeds, and say to himself, ‘The 8.07 from Leamington Spa’s late this morning,’ or ‘That gentleman’s dropped his glove, I wonder if I should call down to him.’ After a while, as the evening drew in and the air cooled, he’d go back into the house, and play with the children, and if his wife asked him whether anything was the matter, he’d say, ‘Nothing at all’.