By the time he replied, “Nah, son, I don’t believe I ’ave,” my moment had passed. “Why? ’Ave you?”
“Yes. But don’t worry about it,” I replied sulkily.
Dextrose butted in. “Good. Cos I were gonna tell yer…”
“No, ’old on, ’Arry, let the lad speak,” said Quench.
That appeased my pride. Alright, I would tell my tale, after all. But where to begin? With the salty skipper, ‘Mad Dog’ Mahaffey, who was supposed to have taken me from England to Emo Island aboard his patchwork vessel, the Unsmoked Haddock, but who had let his dog steer the boat one night and, amazingly, we had ended up miles off course?
Or with my journey through the Unknown Tunnel, from Frartsi to Emo Island, by pony and cart, at the end of which I had stumbled upon Borhed and the dwarf, Detritos?
Which tale captured best my bravado and derring-do?
“Give me a second, I can’t decide where to start,” I told my audience.
They were becoming restless. Quench was drumming his gold-laden fingers on the table, while Dextrose was attaching crown caps to his forehead using saliva, and had begun to resemble some sort of homeless Roy Wood.
Remembering Detritos had started the pangs of guilt. I had tried to put him out of my mind since his untimely death, concerning which I felt – wrongly, I hoped to convince myself – at least some degree of culpability.
The frustrating, lascivious, daring, delusional, fiercely loyal little fellow had popped up at the beginning of my adventures and, whether I had encouraged his company or not, he was there at the end. He had saved my bacon on more than one occasion. Indeed, had Detritos not appeared from nowhere – or rather, from inside a hobby horse – toting an Uzi at the end of the Insect Race to Death, I might not have survived long enough to perform the coup de grâce with that deceased penguin.
That’s where I would start my tale, I decided: just after Detritos and his Uzi, grab a little limelight for myself.
“Right, mink this!” declared Dextrose, the instant I opened my mouth. “Here’s the one about I and Paloma Slaver!”
Quench actually had to stop himself from clapping like a delighted child.
“I thought I…” I began.
But no one was listening.
“…then I turned her over and the minking smell disappeared!”
Twin streams of frothed ale shot from Quench’s nostrils, his face the colour of a boil forming. He roared with laughter, clutching the table for support though he was seated. My stomach muscles ached, such had been the night’s hilarity, while my brain drained and the hours evaporated.
Dextrose, in his element, had come alive. Raconteur, adventurer, bon viveur, egotist, dirty, arrogant bastard.
Tale after tale, some I had known off by heart – though the author’s live intonations and new embellishments (gross exaggerations, some might have contended) added so much – others plucked from expeditions he was yet, probably ever, to bequeath to the history books. I prayed I would remember them all come daybreak. Or was it already daybreak?
Inside Gossips, time stumbled around in circles looking for the exit and odours thrived. Whenever one of us opened the back door to visit the outside loo, foul vapours visibly escaped the place, and we briefly breathed in deeply the sweetness of the jungle. One other potential customer had entered the bar, however Dextrose had instantly bellowed, “Mink off!” and he had done so.
As we three lost ourselves in communal alcoholic reverie, I learned to love the infamous lapsed explorer all over again. And I wondered how different my life would have been, had he and Mrs Dextrose raised me as nature had intended. One time I pushed my luck, referred to him as “Dad” – and he did not correct me.
Every one of his stories was a gem. The Flatulent Ghost of Framingham (actually Dextrose, somehow stuck inside his bedsheet, driven out of town by locals once his unintentional deceit was discovered); The Fetid Milkmaid of Nozvodrogost (the conclusion of which can be found above); The Repeated Defiling of Crewman Skink (Dextrose and crewman Shark, vastly inebriated, dressing a comatose Skink as the back end of a pantomime horse, at the Shah of Arovia’s stud farm)… nor was he yet finished.
“I’ve another!” he announced. “Me dubious relationship with the well-bottomed socialite Nadia of Bujina!”
I chanced pointing out the obvious. “Weren’t you married to Mrs D…”
He thrust his face towards mine, bloated and blinking. “What? Were you gonna tell her?” Then he calmed down and continued. “She were a lusty minker, that Nadia, décolletage on display and a goer’s gait. Little did I know how it would end… Ah, maybe I shouldn’t say. No sense making meself look foolish.”
Quench slapped my knee, well-oiled. “I know this one. Go on, ’Arry, tell it!”
I sensed he knew them all.
Dextrose wiped a hand across his mouth, inadvertently dragging with it a strand of phlegm and attaching its other end to his right ear. It sagged gradually as the story continued, the effect quite mesmerising.
“Ah, what the mink! Got us a few shags, dinnit!”
And so he began. “I’d settled for a while in Bujina, tired of wandering and abandoned by me crew, the spineless bunch of carrot promoters. At me usual hostelry – a wine bar, if yer will – I’d become something of an attraction, on account of the clientele hearing tell of me daring travels. Mainly because I kept shouting about them until some minker paid me some attention!” Dextrose chortled, a hacking creation with gurgles. “This were in me younger days, when I were deemed a catch… Not that I’s no catch now. But yes, young man, Mrs Dextrose were already on the scene. Many hundreds of miles away!
“A clutch of hangers-on develops, who buys us cocktails laced with precious stones so one’s plip-plops sparkle the following day, in exchange for stories. The boys is minks and their ladyfriends is minxes. One in particular – this were Nadia – has her eye on us. Fancies a bit of rough, I doesn’t doubt. Always brushing us with a buttock or two as she excuses herself fer the powder room.”
Quench nudged me and winked. I winked back.
Our pie-eyed narrator went on: “Course, we ends up minking and an infatuation develops – on young Dextrose’s side of the relations, the fool. I had me brain in me ball-bag and a strumpet on me pillow. I curse meself looking back. In the end I only ask her minking father – some lord or somesuch, a toad in tweed – for her hand in marriage! On bended knee, can yer believe? The whifflegig I were!
“‘No problem,’ says Lord Twot. Believe us, Dextrose should have smelled a rat. He worshipped that girl just as much as I, might have minked her too for all I know. So he disappears into his pile and returns. Nadia on one arm, box in the other, glint in his minking fat eye. ‘Here,’ he says, handing us the box. ‘Take it.’ Now, I thinks, what’s all this about?
“So I opens it and finds… This rotting grey claw, stinking like a bluebottle’s banquet. Turns out his daughter, the duplicitous little mink, has an artificial hand, result of a childhood disease, and that’s the one that got chopped off, boxed and stored by the family, being the sort of thing the aristocracy do. Minking perverts. ‘You wanted her hand – now yer got it!’ he bellows.”
Dextrose studied my expression, a mixture of disgust, distrust and bewilderment. “Well?” he concluded. “How was I to know she had a plastic hand? She’d always pulled us off with the other one!”
He and Quench embraced each other, such was their delirium. I was left uncertain whether the entire story had been an elaborate, fabricated springboard for that one punchline. The point, I supposed, was that it failed to matter. This must have been like the days of the Vikings, when the warriors sat around blazing fires, inebriated on grog, and told their tales. I felt privileged to be hearing them, if just a little disturbed by their content, though I dared not show it in such manly company.
So there we were, we three, belly-laughing until it burned, gasping for air and inhaling only pestilence. Dextrose beckoned me towards him and pressed me onto his pink-
tracksuited knee while Quench, the intermediary, looked on with pride. Dampness immediately seeped through my underwear, but I did not mind.
I studied him, at closer ranger than ever before. The nasal blackheads that had been such a feature of The Lost Incompetent’s cover seemed to have bred since that portrait was snapped, and his wrinkles were noticeably deeper. But that monochrome photograph had so failed to do justice to the fire in his eyes.
He slapped an arm around my shoulders and hugged me in, my face becoming enmeshed in his greasy, sodden whiskers.
“Y’know, I’ve decided I like you, young’un,” he said, and my heart skipped a beat. “What did yer say yer name were?”
My eyes flickered open. Individual rays of sunlight streamed through gaps in the walls of the dusky, windowless guest hut. I was aware that I was being watched. I lifted my head, which immediately turned cartwheels as my temples protested in the strongest terms. Then I yelped and propelled myself backwards.
At the end of my bed was a glowing head with an evil stare, cheeks crudely, obscenely rouged, chiselled jaw like an ostentatious ironing board, its eyes too large to be real, alive yet dead, sporting a monocle… Hang on… It was that fucking dummy and the Shaman’s torch. Jesus. My bpm fluttered barely downwards.
“Time to go,” said the wooden boy, mouth clacking.
I was still pissed and well over the drink-driving limit, though I imagined the region was hardly troubled by wave upon wave of traffic cops. How dearly I wanted Dextrose to come with us following last night’s partially successful bonding exercise. I had even convinced myself that he would have remembered me at the end, had he not been so sozzled.
There would be room enough behind me on the bike, if he could cling on, with the Shaman and son in the sidecar. If I could somehow just persuade him to do so he would surely sober up during the journey, and then what might happen? Although I did not dare become carried away.
Pushing open the back door to Gossips, I heard snoring. Livingstone Quench, slumped over last night’s table, was fast asleep, his ponytail soaked in dregs. Dextrose was still conscious, if barely. He swayed in his seat, drawling drivel at a bottle he was holding up to his face.
As he heard the three of us enter, his head turned by increments. I imagined I could hear his mechanism attempting to focus.
“Whadz thish?” he slurred.
“This is the Shaman,” I said, as if to a toddler.
The village quack had painted a sinister skull shape over his face in white, and had donned a snazzy cloak of iridescent feathers.
“I knowoo e-is!” Dextrose replied, then began giggling uncontrollably.
I decided against completing the introductions, no sense the Shaman discovering we were related.
Quench woke up, toppled sideways off his seat, crawled across the floor and stopped at the Shaman’s feet, hiccoughing violently.
The Shaman – or rather his son – said nothing. A flicker of a smile suggested the human half of the outfit found the inebriation amusing.
“Hoi!” went Dextrose suddenly. “Let Harrishun Dextroshe buy zhaman a jrink. Eh? Liddle jrinkie? Whazhuafter zhaman?”
This was news: Dextrose offering to buy someone a drink. He must have been pissed! Or was there some ulterior motive?
The Shaman pretended to hear nothing. “Oo-ee go!” the boy said to me.
I faltered. I so badly wanted to take Dextrose with us – but in that state? Perhaps I could lash us together on the bike and…
“Oi! Zhayman! Wodjuafter? Eh? No, angon. Ledme guess…”
What was his game here?
“Goddle-o-geer! Eh? Zatride zhaman? Goddle-o-geer! Goddle-o-geer!”
The Shaman flounced towards the door, the dummy’s legs flailing, pursued by Dextrose’s mocking slur: “Goddle-o-geer! Goddle-o-geer!”
I surveyed his bedraggled form with disdain and muttered, “Idiot”.
He belched, a reverberating mouth-fart that occupied the room.
As I held my hands out to take the dummy from the Shaman, so he’d have both of his free to climb into the sidecar, he pulled the wooden boy away and hissed at me, spittle bubbling between the gaps in his horrible teeth. Instead, he clambered in by himself, squashing the boy’s chest against the hard steel of the sidecar in the process. I was on my own with the lunatic.
I stood astride the bike, an old warhorse of a machine painted gun-metal, wondering what I had got myself into. The Shaman had assured me that the lost tribe he was visiting were “not thar” away – but where exactly? How far was “not thar”? What sort of terrain would we encounter? Was there enough petrol in the tank? I really hadn’t thought this through. And what about the Shaman’s side of the bargain? I only had his word that he could solve Dextrose’s pictorial puzzler.
“Great Shaman,” I said. “As a token of trust between us, could you perhaps tell me the meaning of the drawing before we set off? I’ll still keep my side of the bargain, of course.” (Could I have sounded any more English?)
He glowered at me.
Discomforted, I added in a French accent: “Just a wafer-thin hint?”
The dummy’s head poked out from the cloak of iridescent feathers and stared at me. A silence descended.
Eventually the Shaman spoke to the boy, who translated: “Do not thorget klowerthul nagic.”
That old chestnut. “No. Of course not. But if I’m to drive you all the way to wherever it is, I do need some proof that you can explain the drawing.”
“Hnn,” went the dummy, pondering. (I noticed that the Shaman sometimes couldn’t be bothered with the charade of ‘translation’.) “Thery oo-ell. There is a nak. That is the key.”
I didn’t get it. “A knack? A nifty way of doing something?”
“No, a nak.”
“A knack?”
“No! A nak! Like an atlas gut snaller.”
“Like an atlas gut snaller?”
“That is oo-ot I said.”
“Like an atlas gut snaller? …Like an atlas but smaller!”
“Yeah! A nak!”
“A map!”
“Gingo!”
So there was a map and that was the key. It was enough to be going on with.
“Which way?”
The Shaman pointed straight ahead, the same route Quench and I had followed the previous day to the Shaman’s hut. I turned the key in the ignition, kicked the starter, gunned the throttle and the engine thrummed into life first time. Surely a good omen!
We followed the dirt track out of Mlwlw as the sort of birds I’d previously have seen only in pet shops flew up and away from our motorik din, and dark shapes beat hasty retreats among the canopy. Our movement through the air offered a welcome breeze and the engine noise thankfully negated the option of conversation. Whenever we needed to make a turn, the Shaman elbowed me in the thigh and gesticulated. Thus was my mind left largely to its own devices.
It could not help but wonder what on earth I thought I was I doing. My own journey was over: I had followed in Dextrose’s footsteps to his own conclusion, at Gossips. Job done, mission accomplished. Really, I should have been returning home. To what, though? No job, no girlfriend, my stylus stuck in suburbia’s lame groove?
If I were to remain abroad, there would have to be some point. And that had to involve my new family. This discovery of my real genealogy had to be a sign.
So that was it, the plan: I would sober up Dad, make him see sense, and together we would find my mother. Thus reunited, the Dextrose family could fly back to England, to an idyllic life of hugs, home baking and affectionate mirth. Yes, that would do it.
A blur appeared in front of my eyes, replaced swiftly by the arrogant gaze of some form of irate primate – baboon? gibbon? – now sitting on my handlebars, having dropped in from an overhanging branch. I slammed on the brakes and stared back, frozen in fear. I was sure I had heard that monkeys can rip one’s head off. This one’s pink nostrils looked like a strange new human sex-part and its opened gob revealed fangs
, top and bottom, like something off a vampire.
“Oo-oo aa-aa!” it went, performing that aggressive bobbing/loping-arms dance familiar from nature documentaries.
Cries from above echoed its agitation and I looked up to see various of its kin, glaring at us like morons glued to a soap.
“Hoi!” went the dummy.
The Shaman pushed out a red plastic rose attached to his feathery cloak. The primate on the handlebars bent in to look and the Shaman hit it with a long squirt of water. In shock it somersaulted backwards into a heap among dense shrubs, howling as it sailed.
I lofted a thumb at the Shaman. “Powerful magic!”
I swear he smirked back.
“Go!” hollered the wooden boy.
I’d been riding for quite a while, my inner thighs noticeably chafing and my bottom indelibly numb, when the Shaman signalled for me to stop the bike. My stomach rumbled. Though the route had become increasingly bumpy, over creeping vegetation and barely formed trackway, we were yet to encounter anything previously untouched by human progress.
“Get oth gike!” snapped the boy.
I did so without question, no doubt a result of my Englishness.
“Are we nearly there yet?” I enquired.
The Shaman pushed the boy’s head towards me and the top hat fell off. He retrieved it with a harrumph. “Yes!” barked the boy. “No nore koo-estions!”
I’d only asked one!
The Shaman then took my place on the motorbike, arranging his son in his lap, and motioned for me to get into the sidecar. For several minutes he sat there looking rather proud of himself, occasionally urging it forwards with a thrust of his thighs, but of course we did not move.
Eventually the boy asked: “How nachine oo-erk?”
We stalled more than a dozen times in as many yards before the Shaman got the hang of puttering gradually forwards in bottom gear. Such was his trepidation, his arms and neck were rod-stiff; even the dummy somehow looked more horrified than usual.
Looking for Mrs Dextrose Page 4