Still, buoyed by Quench’s forthrightness – or too timid too demur – when he returned with refills I decided to show willing. “Any idea where she is, Mr Quench?”
“I told you, son, call me Livingstone. You don’t fink I’ve asked before? ’Ere, watch…” He patted the table in front of him. “Oi, ’Arry, what ’appened to the missus? Where’d’you lose ’er?”
“Only ever minked her once!” Dextrose slurred, then tried to wink but managed more of a disturbed squint.
“Couldn’t she have just made her own way home?” I asked.
“You’d ’ave fort so. But no. ’Arry’s got some special explorer’s passport – gets ’im frew dodgy borders, stuff like that – an’ ’e put her on that. Mrs D don’t have no normal passport, son. So she can’t go nowhere wivaht ’im. She, as they say, is right royally stuffed.”
“Right. Oh dear.”
“Y’see what I’m sayin’.”
He then spoke to Dextrose, enunciating slowly, as if to a visiting foreigner. “Your boy ’ere is gonna ’elp you find your missus, ’Arry. So you need to ’elp ’im aht. One more time, for old time’s sake: Where. Did. You. Last. See. ’Er?”
Dextrose seemed suddenly to notice me. “Who’s this nod-cock?” he sneered.
We were getting nowhere.
From what I’d read, Quench had opened the ‘wine bar’ (I’d seen no sign of the grape) having done a runner from England some decades hence. Why Dextrose had returned here – and how long ago – I did not know.
“How long’s he been here?” I asked Quench.
The lapsed explorer had once again fallen asleep, mid-interrogation, and a slime-trail of drool was snaking its way down the bird’s nest that passed for his beard.
“You mean ’ow long’s ’e been sat there today, or ’ow long since ’e arrived ’ere in Gossips?”
“Since he arrived in Gossips.”
The barkeep looked around, as if that might jog his memory, and whistled. “Couple o’ weeks? Could be more. Time flies in a place like this, y’know?”
I could imagine. “But you haven’t seen anything of Mrs Dextrose?”
“Not a sausage.”
I asked him when Dextrose realised she was missing.
“When I said to ’im, ‘Where’s the missus?’ and ’e looks startled and goes, ‘Not a minking clue!’ and starts lookin’ under the tables.”
“And when was that?”
“Not long after ’e got ’ere.”
“So she could be absolutely anywhere!”
“Don’t give up so easy, son. Livingstone Quench ’as a cunning plan!”
He repaired behind his bar, clinked around among glass and reappeared clutching a bottle shaped into the form of a horned devil’s head, containing a liquid the colour of blood. Six inches high, it bore no labelling of any kind.
“I’ve ’ad this for years,” he said. “Never used it before.”
“What is it?”
The local shaman had given it to him, he said, in return for a favour (on which he declined to elaborate). “’E called it demon juice, told me it ’ad magic powers.” Quench leaned in close. “Told me it works like a troof serum, y’know, taps into the soul? Like good old-fashioned torture, but wivaht the pain! Might just ’elp old ’Arry ’ere to remember.”
He handed me the bottle. The liquid was viscous and clung to the insides of the horns. There was a small cork stopper in the top of the head. The devil leered.
“It looks toxic,” I pointed out.
“Shaman reckoned it might work if you jus’ blew the vapours over someone. ’E reckoned only the well stubborn’d need to actually drink some of the muck.”
We looked at each other pointedly.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
He took the demon juice off me and removed his dinner jacket. “We should at least try just blowin’ it over ’im first.”
I heard a quiet ‘sqnk’ as the bar owner eased the cork from the top of the bottle. A cloud of russet vapour rose instantly from the open neck, reminding me of bromine experiments in school chemistry lessons. It lingered, swirling, like a genie.
Quench held the bottle close to the slumbering Dextrose’s face and blew.
The effect was instantaneous. My biological father lurched upright in his seat, eyes filled with unseemly desire, and lunged at the brew.
“No-no-no!” went Quench, whipping the bottle outside of his reach.
Dextrose, too pissed to shift his bulk, sat with his arms flailing wildly towards the concoction, like an infant strapped into a pram. “Want it!” he drooled.
“Not till we’ve talked abaht the missus, ’Arry,” said Quench.
Dextrose actually shook his fist. “I told yer – I don’t minking remember!”
“Think, Dad, think!” I urged him, daring to use such familiarity.
He glared at me as if I were rodent-shit that had found its way into his bar snacks.
No, mere vapours were not going to suffice.
Neither Quench nor I had the heart to administer the potentially damaging dose and so we spent valuable time debating our justification, while Dextrose tried repeatedly to shift his butt from his chair to reach the bottle.
It was during our quandary that he finally managed the feat, much to our surprise. With a stupor-defying lurch, he swiped it from Quench’s hand.
“GOTCHER!” he exclaimed, clasping one glass devil-horn and tipping, a fabulous red goo flopping glutinously onto his extended, dishcloth-textured tongue. Only the viscosity of the liquid prevented the fool from downing the entire volume before Quench could wrest it from his grip.
“’E’ll overdose!” cried the barkeep. But there was nothing we could do.
We watched, alarmed but rapt, as his body launched into convulsions. Dextrose gurgled, twisted, writhed, his hands pulling the shapes of a demented shadow-puppeteer, jaws furiously masticating.
“Quick! Ask ’im nah!” cried Quench.
Why me? “Mr Dextrose, where is Mrs Dextrose? Where did you leave her?”
He regarded me like a wounded animal, his eyes bloodshot and fearful. “Nggggddgggnnngggddddggggg,” he moaned, tongue lolling out. “Hhhhhlllllllmmmmmmnnn.”
“What’s ’e say?” demanded Quench.
How would I know? “It’s just a noise. He can’t talk properly on that stuff!” An apparent flaw in the Shaman’s plan.
“So what do we do?”
I had no idea.
Dextrose’s face had become the colour of an exquisite bruise and he was clawing at his gums, seemingly scraping away at the toxins.
As we watched helplessly, Quench clicked his fingers. “Got it!”
He snatched a beermat off the table and scrabbled around in his jacket on the floor, muttering, before retrieving a pencil. “If ’e can’t speak it, ’e can write it! Right!”
Brilliant!
Dextrose had now become quite still but was breathing heavily, chest heaving, clinging to the arms of his chair, neck stiff, eyes focused at infinity. Quench put the pencil in Dextrose’s right hand and closed his fingers around it, then put the beermat in the other.
“Ask ’im again,” he told me.
I spoke clearly. “Mr Dextrose. Where is Mrs Dextrose?”
No reaction.
Quench leaned in. “Where is she, ’Arry? Tell us!”
“Nggggddgggnnngggddddg…”
“Nah, mate! Write it dahn!”
The mouldering old buffer only obeyed. Without once looking at what he was writing, Dextrose brought the pencil and beermat together and scribbled.
Moments later, he stopped abruptly and dropped both. The pencil rolled with a dampened buzz from the table to the floor. Pink foam, bloodied bubbling bile, started oozing from his mouth. He felt for it, rolled it in his fingers. Then he threw his head back and groaned, a groan that I pray I never hear again.
It was Jacob Marley times ten, it was deepest despair and purest purgatory, and it rolled like fog around a graveya
rd.
“Quick! Get him some water!” I yelped.
Quench hurtled away and dashed back with a glass, tipping its contents over Dextrose’s upturned face. The water cascaded around his mouth as the orifice hissed and bubbled, coming across all Charybdis. He juddered and shook, until finally he was still. Too still. Lifeless.
We waited, mouths open, eyes trained, everything rigid.
“’Ave we killed ’im?” whispered Quench.
Then suddenly Dextrose shuddered. Spluttered. Wretched. Projectile-vomited a mess I will not, could not, describe.
He evil-eyed Quench. “Poison us with minking water, would yer, yer brownbagger?” he spat, showering him with dastardly germs in suspension.
It was some time before we could calm him down and return to the task in hand.
What had Harrison Dextrose written? Would it solve the Mystery of the Missing Mrs Dextrose?
I sought the fateful beermat, which was obscured rather within a puddle of the most unpleasant consistency. Clutching it gingerly between fingernail and thumbnail, I turned it upside-down, rotated it one way then the other, attempting to identify Dextrose’s scribblings from another dimension.
“It’s not writing. It’s a drawing,” I concluded.
“What of?” asked Quench.
“It can’t be this. All I can see is a cow jumping over the moon, which doesn’t make much sense.”
“You sure?” said Quench, grabbing it off me. “Hmm,” he hummed after some deliberation. “Might be a very big dog lyin’ beside a plate?”
He handed it back.
Here is what Dextrose had drawn:
“It’s meaningless,” I sighed.
But Quench wasn’t so easily defeated. “Can’t be,” he said. “’Cordin’ to the Shaman, the demon juice never fails. No bugger’s immune.”
“Well, you explain it, Mr Quench… Livingstone. How can a cow – or very big dog – jumping over the moon – or lying beside a plate – in any way relate to the whereabouts of Mrs Dextrose?”
“’Ere, let’s ’ave anuver look.”
“I do see your point,” he said eventually. “What if we try it upside dahn?”
So we did:
After some deliberation Quench began thinking aloud. “If that is a cow – an’ I’m not sayin’ it is – maybe that’s not the moon? Maybe we’re assumin’ it’s the moon ’cos of the nursery rhyme? In fact, if that is the moon, where’s the craters? So if it ain’t, what else is rahnd? What if it’s a ball? A cow jumpin’ over a ball makes more sense…”
“Than a cow jumping over the moon, yes. But…”
He ignored me. “You ever ’eard of cows playin’ football?”
I couldn’t tell whether he was serious. “A bovine XI, you mean?”
“Mmm,” he muttered, at least sceptical if not dismissing the idea out of hand.
While Quench might have been a model of alcoholic restraint given his profession, there were many years when he had been Harrison Dextrose’s closest drinking buddy – which must have taken its toll.
“Perhaps we should ask Mr Dextrose?” I suggested.
Mr Dextrose had been staring glassily-eyed into space while mumbling to himself.
Quench thrust the beermat drawing in front of his face. “’Ere, ’Arry,” he said. “What’s this you’ve drawn?”
However, being asked a question was too much for Harry’s system, which promptly packed up for the night and all his lights went out.
“P’rhaps we’d better ask ’im tomorrer. Come on, Pilsbury, you’ve ’ad a long journey. You can sleep in one of me guest huts aht back.”
“What about him?” I asked.
“Don’t you worry abaht ’im. I’ll take care of ’im,” said Quench, and winked. “Not for the first time.”
As I settled down to sleep inside a bamboo-walled hut with dried palm fronds for its roof, wrapped in a sheet against the jungle’s night-time chill, I tried to get my head around this new family I had stumbled upon, wondering whether I had missed any glaring signs to my adoption. The ales I had drunk did not help.
I had been raised by Father and Mother – being what I called them and how they referred to each other within my earshot – in the event-lite, chintz-heavy town of Glibley in Surrey.
Father had been a teacher and a strict disciplinarian; Mother pandered to his whims and was often flustered. Everything was at arm’s length and there hadn’t been many laughs. Fun had been practically frowned upon. Was that the action of proper parents?
At Christmas we’d make our own crackers, Father being always ‘careful’ with his money, and he would traditionally write the motto/joke. So, at the festive dinner table, we’d pull on these silent novelties – Mother being scared of loud bangs – and Father would gleefully hand me the emergent slip of paper.
Instead of the usual, ‘What’s yellow and black and goes ‘Zzub-zzub?’’ I’d get, ‘What’s yellow and black, of the order Hymenoptera and genus Vespula?’
Yes, fun had been low on their agenda.
When they had perished together in the same gardening accident during my final term at school, I had felt sadness though no enduring grief. My sizeable inheritance had arrived, bankrolling the lethargic existence in which I had indulged for the previous 15 years, and I had put them out of my mind. It had been all too easy.
But how could I not have realised that I was adopted, that Father and Mother weren’t my real parents? I guessed there was a clue in the names. Who else was obliged to call their parents Mother and Father in the late 20th century?
I had always felt it, deep down inside: that distance between myself and them. Yet I had glossed over it, put it down to their being old-fashioned. Now the truth was dawning.
And, of course, they had called me ‘Alexander’. Never ‘Alex’.
“Come here, Alexander.”
“Do this, Alexander.”
“Do that, Alexander.”
Alexander. Not even my real name.
Mind you, which idiot calls their son Pilsbury?
New ties. Abandonment. Lies, deceit, years wasted. The journey I had made. Loss and gain. The memories flitted past and the sounds of the rainforest – caws, hoots, cackles, howls – swirled around my eardrums. I was exhausted.
I entered Gossips via the back door. Quench was in there, finding stuff to do behind his bar. There was no sign of Dextrose and no customers. How on earth the business constituted a living, I had no idea.
“’Ere ’e comes, the man of the moment! What time d’you call this?” he quipped. “’Ow you feelin’?”
“Confused.”
“Well, never mind,” he replied, hardly Samaritan-standard.
Quench produced a mug of coffee and a plate of exotic fruit, and sat beside me while I scoffed in fast-forward.
“I’ve ’ad an idea,” he said.
“Really?” I wished I hadn’t sounded so surprised.
“We’ll go an’ consult the Shaman,” he said. “If anyone can tell us what ’Arry’s drawing means, it’s ’im.”
I wasn’t so sure; it felt like compounding an error. “Really? You think that’s a good idea?”
“Course it is!”
I smiled half-heartedly.
“Come on then! No time like the present!”
We were going now? “What about your bar?”
“What about it?”
“What about Mr Dex… Dad?” That would take time.
“’E’ll be sleeping off that ’angover for a while now. Come on! Chop-chop! You can trust me, y’know, Pilsbury.”
“Yes. Yes, I know I can. Thanks, Mr Quench.”
“Livingstone, son. I’ve already told you. Call me Livingstone.”
The humidity outside enveloped me like a sodden duvet. Within seconds, my happy-tortoise tanktop was drenched with sweat.
“Woof!” I went, as we began walking.
“You get used to it,” said Quench. “When I first came ’ere I ’ad to buy a mangle an’ wring aht me c
lothes, lit’rally. But your body adjusts. No idea where the sweat goes to, mind. Don’t really bear finkin’ abaht.”
It didn’t, so I moved the subject on. “Why did you come here, to Mlwlw, Livingstone? There’s a story in The Lost Incompetent…”
He chuckled. “That old cobblers. Wilson Niff an’ the Sodastream wee, yeah? I’m s’posed to ’ave been so upset that Niff don’t notice his beer’s my carbonated pee, I take off to anuver continent? Cam on, son! God love old ’Arry – I can never tell if ’e believes ’is own stories. No. I’ll tell you why I came ’ere. It was supposed to be an ’oliday. ‘See the Jungle – Cheap’. ’Arry’d arranged it. I turn up at the docks, ’e ain’t there. Should I go wivaht ’im? Seemed daft not to. Long story short, I end up ’ere.”
“So the Niff story isn’t true?”
Quench roared with laughter. “What do you fink nah you’ve seen ’Arry? ’Is ’ole system’s shot to shit. I don’t even remember a Wilson Niff.”
“Then his book…”
He stopped walking. “Look. I don’t mean to do ’im dahn, Pilsbury. Put it this way: I’d be prahd if old ’Arry was my Dad. Well, maybe not prahd. Not the way ’e is nah. ’Ang on, let me start again, this ain’t comin’ aht right. Look. I’ve known ’Arry longer than I care to remember. And we’re mates. Always ’ave been, always will be. An’ that says it all. Right? There’s more to ’im than ’e lets on. I swear to you. That man’s been arahnd the block a few times, ’e’s got stories. An’ if they ain’t all funny stories, or interestin’, ’e spins ’em, y’know? So ’is book, it’s true in parts. Uver bits ’e exaggerates and uver bits is complete bollocks. ’S fair enough, ain’t it? Like, if you wrote down your life story – ’ow dull would that be?”
“Cheers.”
He slapped his forehead. “I’m sorry, son, I didn’t mean it like that! I’m sure you’ve ’ad a really interestin’ life.”
“Not really.” There was no escaping it.
“No? Oh.” He started walking again. “Better get a move on, eh?”
Mlwlw’s main drag in daylight was like nothing I had ever experienced. Individual buildings concocted from wood with palm fronds as roof material, raised up off the ground a couple of feet on stilts, I imagined as protection against the torrential rains when they finally came. Boy, could I have killed for a cool drenching.
Looking for Mrs Dextrose Page 2