Looking for Mrs Dextrose

by Nick Griffiths

  My first surprise was that Dextrose was not present, draped over a table. My second was that there were no women in the bar at all, let alone Suzy Goodenough, elated and flying into my arms like a bird into a window. No, there was just one chap, looking tall even seated, returning my quizzical stare.

  He started getting up as I moved into the bar, and he kept on growing and growing. He must have been well over seven feet tall, with legs and arms as thin and long as his tanned face. Had he not ducked at full height, he would have put his head through the ceiling.

  “Senor Alexander?” he asked.

  I furrowed my brow. I had never seen him before, yet he knew of me. “Yes?”

  “My bruzzer, he say I must to come to find Senor Alexander here. He say I must to help Senor Alexander.”

  The stranger wore long, baggy shorts, satin white, and a matching vest top with the number 57 on his chest in blue with red trim. Above that was a black-lined illustration of a chap in a sombrero chewing a cigar and toting a pistol. Below the number was a name, ‘Los Desperados’. He was rather handsome in a chiselled, sporty way, if a bit tall.

  His ‘bruzzer’? I’d heard that pronunciation before, from the dwarf, Detritos. And hadn’t there also been vague talk of a sibling? A sibling who played basketball?

  As we met in the middle of Gossips, he held out his hand. “You are Senor Alexander?” His hair was very black, short, spiked and greased, and he wore unkempt, dusty stubble. His eyes were duck-pond green.

  “Yes, yes I am,” I said, shaking warily. “Are you Detritos’s brother?”

  He beamed, nodding. “Si! Is me! How is he, my bruzzer?”

  Christ. He was dead at the bottom of a volcano. “He’s…” – Think fast, you fool – “He’s fine. I think. I haven’t seen him for a while.” I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth. What if he took it badly? Or decided to blame me?

  He regarded me quizzically. “When he return?”

  Shit. “Well, you know what Detritos was… is like – there one minute, gone the next! Haha!”

  He began pumping my hand enthusiastically. He did know what his brother was like! “For sure! He is one, as you to say! My name Importos! I am your friend!”

  “Great!” I replied, feeling godawful.

  “Detritos, he will to turn up, zen we all be friend! Yes?”

  Well, no, actually.

  “Beer!” It was Dextrose arriving for hopefully his first drink of the day, and he couldn’t have timed the interruption better.

  I ushered Importos towards the table where the lapsed explorer had plonked himself. “Importos, this is my father, Harrison Dextrose. Harrison Dextrose, Importos.”

  Dextrose ignored the tall man’s outstretched hand. “Mink off!” he snapped.

  “He doesn’t mean it,” I cod-chuckled.

  “I minking do,” demurred Dextrose.

  The last thing I needed was a scene. Thinking on my feet, I called to the barkeep. “Livingstone, three beers please! And one for yourself – do come and join us! Haha!” I really would have to cease the false laughter.

  My hastily hatched plan was to maintain a mixture of inane small talk and boyish banter, avoiding any mention of the dead dwarf.

  Dextrose prattled on about himself as usual, which I only encouraged, and we filled the conversation with that sort of thing until Quench just had to go and ask Importos how he came to be in Gossips.

  “My bruzzer, he to call me,” Importos explained. “He to say, ‘You to come help Senor Alexander – he to go to Gossip, you to meet zere. Come now!’I ask him, ‘But where you to go?’ He will not to tell. I to worry…”

  “So you’re a basketball player?” I asked, before he could concern himself further.

  “For sure!” he said. “Basketball is family business – but Detritos, he too small! Yes!”

  I laughed far more heartily than was necessary, causing Quench to look at me strangely. “How’d you get ’ere, son?” he asked Importos. “Where you from?”

  “From Green Golan, you to know?”

  No one did.

  Importos added: “It many mile, but I to jog here, for to be fit. OK?”

  “You jogged ’ere? ’Ow far is it?” asked Quench.

  “Maybe 200 mile?”

  “You jogged 200 miles?” the barkeep spluttered.

  Neither of us could quite believe it (Dextrose had stopped listening).

  Importos shrugged. “When my bruzzer, he to call, I zink must to be import.”

  If I couldn’t stop him talking about Detritos soon, the truth was bound to emerge, and then I’d be hard-pressed for an explanation. Why hadn’t I simply admitted everything to start with? The dwarf had killed himself in the interests of world peace… hmm, perhaps that was why.

  Suddenly I remembered the map I had stolen from the Shaman and whipped it out of my pocket. “We forgot all about this!” I announced.

  “What is it?” asked Quench.

  I was only too happy to explain.

  It was an A5 street-map, printed on both sides in black-and-white. A furry uneven edge suggested it had been ripped from a book and, judging from its condition, it was pretty old.

  The barkeep picked it up. “I recognise that design,” he said, and hurried back behind the bar. He emerged with a book titled, Pocket Map of Pretanike, and began riffling through its pages. “Gotcha!” he said as he took his seat. “Look!”

  A thin jagged line of paper nestling in the spine of the book indicated a page had been ripped out, exposing page numbers 146 and 149. He picked up our piece of the puzzle. On either side were printed the numbers 147 and 148.

  “Where did you get that book?” I asked.

  Quench shrugged. “Visitors leave ’em and I collect ’em, case they ever come in ’andy.”

  “So how the hell did the Shaman come to have this page?”

  “No idea,” he said. Then, wishfully, to Dextrose. “Any idea, ’Arry?”

  Dextrose said nothing.

  Importos only looked confused, which was ideal.

  More to the point, how did the double-sided map solve the puzzle of Dextrose’s crude sketch? I withdrew that from my pocket for reference. Between us, Quench and I pored over the map, seeking, hoping for something to fit. Its streets were densely packed, Gossips’ lighting was poor, and we were both losing heart when the bar owner snatched up the page, held it close to his face, and declared, “Got it!”

  He slammed it back down on the table and poked a fingertip at the bottom right-hand corner of page 147. “Look! See it?”

  No, frankly, I couldn’t.

  “Alright, give it a turn,” he said, twisting the page 90 degrees anticlockwise. “Nah put ’Arry’s sketch beside it…”

  “See it nah?” He traced an outline with his finger. “See the blob where that Statue of Charlie Partridge is on the map – imagine that’s ’Arry’s cow’s eye. See the shape the road system makes? On the map an’ the drawin’ – same shape!”

  Well, maybe. “What about the moon? Where’s that?”

  “It’s that rahndabaht fing at City ’All!” he cried excitedly, jabbing repeatedly at the map.

  The Shaman had kept this torn out page of map from me, which he had said held the key to Dextrose’s sketch. And the street patterns did look pretty much the same.

  “You could be right,” I said.

  “Course I’m right! It’s the same shape. Somewhere wivin this road system – that’s where you’ll find your muvver!”

  The more I compared the two, the more it seemed to fit. Livingstone Quench had only gone and cracked it.

  Importos interrupted our shared triumph. “And my bruzzer?”

  Quench slapped him on the back. “Sorry, son, I’ve clean forgot me manners in all this excitement. You must be knackered after runnin’ all that way. ’Ere, let me find you a guest room then I’ll sort you some nosh. Sound good, yeah?”

  “Absolutely,” I concurred.

  “What the ’ell’s this all abaht
wiv the lanky bugger?” demanded Quench, when he had returned from housing my new friend. “What you ’iding from ’im?”

  He’d even spotted it. Thanks heavens for language barriers, I thought.

  I told him as much as he needed to know. How Detritos had accompanied me for much of my journey in Dextrose’s footsteps and had more than once saved my life. How we had ended up on the crater of a volcano and the dwarf had thrown himself in, believing that in doing so he would be saving the world from destruction.

  At that point, he butted in. “Savin’ the world? Come again?”

  “Well, he was convinced he was.”

  “So why didn’t you jus’ tell his bruver that? That ’e killed ’isself, bein’ a bit loopy?”

  “I know,” I wailed. “I know. But he caught me unawares. And I might have been able to stop Detritos.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, probably not. He was pretty single-minded.”

  “So there you go!”

  “But I can never be 100 per cent certain, and there’s the guilt.”

  The back door of the bar opened and a figure stooped inside. “Where is food?” Importos called out gaily.

  Quench stood up. “’Old on, son!” And he winked at me.

  I loved that guy. He made everything feel better.

  While Importos tucked rabidly into a hunk of cold meat and Harrison Dextrose fine-tuned his artless belligerence, Quench and I pored over maps from the bar’s collection and worked out a route from Gossips to Pretanike. It looked like a hell of a hike, through a vast area of land emptier than the high-slung half of Hitler’s scrotum sac. Indeed, the map showed but one road, the Nameless Highway, featuring only the odd, brief offshoot, and no more than half a dozen named landmarks in some 1,000 miles – among them Lonely Bush, Flattened Hat and Call-That-A-Hill?

  At the far end of the Nameless Highway, the sprawling city of Pretanike appeared, nestling on a jagged coastline. And somewhere within that ostentatious conurbation, hopefully, was my mother. More than once I sought out Sir Charles Partridge on the map cutting. I imagined a tiny speck lunching at the statue’s base, wearing a headscarf and sunglasses, the image lifted directly from her husband’s one treasured snap. In my mind she had bright red lipstick and a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were consciously waiting for someone. Waiting for me.

  Importos joined us, his hunger sated. “You are to look map, I see,” he said. “I to be your guide. In zis way I to help, for my bruzzer.”

  Well, if he were to join us – and I doubted he would be dissuaded, having jogged 200 miles to get here – then he might as well be of some use. I showed him our route along the Nameless Highway.

  “No. Have not to been zis place,” he said, then to Quench: “Is zere pudding?”

  With the others distracted elsewhere, I took the opportunity for a one-to-one with Dextrose. He had to come with me, no question. Only he would be able to recognise Mrs Dextrose, to grasp a sense of déjà vu as we hunted around Pretanike’s back-streets. He had to do the right thing.

  I chanced the direct approach. “We’re leaving soon,” I said, fixing him with my hardest stare.

  “Good!” he said, which surprised me, until I realised from his tone he hadn’t included himself in the ‘we’ bit.

  I tried again. “No, Dad. I meant you and I are leaving soon. To find Mum.”

  He forced a little finger into his right ear, wiggled it and inspected the tip on extraction. Then he harrumphed, looked away pointedly and swigged beer in profile. Side-on, his head resembled a frog’s in a hippie wig.

  “I mean it,” I persisted. “You have to come with me.”

  Another swig.

  “Does Mrs Dextrose mean nothing to you?”

  That got his attention. He actually stood up, as he did so hauling up the waistband of his pink velour tracksuit bottoms – in which the elastic had no doubt perished decades hence. Upright and yet to become completely arseholed, he cast a figure of some authority; for the first time since meeting him I felt that I could see past the grime and degradation to the explorer of yore, to the man I had once respected.

  “Son,” began Dextrose. “And I mean that in a patronising ‘young boy’ sense, not the minking family one. Son, what dear Mrs Dextrose means to me is between Mrs Dextrose and me-minking-self. The great Harrison Dextrose hasn’t spent 39 years wedded to the walking megaphone without knowing full well what she means to him, because she told him every minking day he was with her. So don’t you dare come the concern with me, you little mink.” He shook his head. “Don’t you minking dare.”

  The way he had spoken to me – the condescension, the spite – it reminded me of Father. Though I surely had every right to express my concern, my conviction had vanished. I sat there, mute, while Dextrose guzzled his remaining booze in one, hand shaking.

  Then he was off, on a drinker’s ramble. “Do you remember our wedding day? Cos I does. Eighteen, she were, eyes like emeralds, hair spun from gold and mammaries a gent could snorkel between. I weren’t Mrs Dextrose’s only suitor, mark me words, but she only ever had eyes for young Harrison. Twenty-third of October. I may have forgotten most other dates, but I shall never forget that one. The bride wore white, her mother wore black.” He clenched and unclenched his fists. “Don’t start me on that minking sow’s bedpan!”

  Dextrose caught himself, ceased his reminiscing. “Anyway, what’s all this to you?”

  “Mrs Dextrose is my mother. You’re my Dad,” I pointed out.

  He blinked furiously. “I thought that’s what yer said earlier, but imagined I’d misheard yer. So I’m yer Pa, yer say?” The spite had gone from his voice, the frustration and ire had seeped away. He sounded almost… vulnerable.

  It was now or never. “Yes, I’m your son, Pilsbury. Remember the photos?”

  As I scrabbled in my pockets for my snapshot, I caught Quench and Importos in my peripheral vision, arriving with fresh beers.

  While Dextrose was muttering to himself – “Yer know, that does ring a minking bell” – a fresh glint inhabiting his eyes, and I was pleading, “Don’t give him more beer”, in slow motion the bar owner plonked down four green bottles, frothing at their tops. My father reached for his as I tried to swipe it away, but it was out of reach, and he lifted the bottle to his lips, he glugged and he glugged, and that glint in his eyes flickered and was extinguished.

  Dextrose shook himself, glared at me and growled, “As I were saying, what the mink is it to you?”

  Shortly before 4pm, while Importos was showering, Dextrose passed out.

  “That should do it!” chirped Quench, slapping his hands together.

  I was non-plussed. No way had my father reached his alcoholic capacity. I prodded his head, prone on the table, thumb in his mouth, as he gurgled away in la-la-land. No reaction.

  “’E was never gonna come wiv you, Pilsbury,” said Quench. “So I knocked ’im aht wiv some shaman-quality sleeping drops. ’E’ll sleep like a baby for hours.”

  It sounded a bit dodgy. A bit like kidnap. “But…”

  “Don’t you worry. Jus’ tell ’im I did it, for ’is own good. Right? Nah all you gotta to do is load ’im into the sidecar.”

  “Sidecar?”

  “Aht the front. Benzani wheeled the bike in just nah.” He grinned, pleased with himself. “You were out of petrol, that’s all. Well, that and wrapped arahnd a tree. But ’e’s knocked the dents aht as best he could an’filled her up wiv gas – by my reckoning you’re good to go!”

  “How much do I owe you?” It was all I could think of, though I owed Livingstone Quench far more than mere cash.

  He held up a finger. “’Old on,” he said. “I’ll get your bar bill.”

  This was going to be painful. I couldn’t recall Dextrose handing over money for a single drink, and particularly on that second night, when we had become tangled up in the lapsed explorer’s deftly spun yarns, there were many times when I, the willing gimp, had cried all too blithely, “My round
!”

  Quench returned with a till receipt. “£231.82!” he declared.

  “Ah,” I went, knowing full well that my wallet contained just £175 in traveller’s cheques.

  “Well?” demanded Quench, his usually benign features narrowing to something more schoolmasterly. But he could not hold it for long and burst into raucous laughter, patting me on the cheek like a well-rouged aunt. “As if I could charge you, young Pilsbury! Any son of ’Arry’s is a son of mine – an’ jus’ you remember that! ’Ere, ’old on a minute,” he said, and left by the back door.

  When he returned he was lugging a battered tan leather suitcase in one hand and had a khaki suit draped over the opposite forearm. “’Ere’” he said, thrusting the suited arm towards me. “This’ll make you look the part, if you’re gonna be accompanying a world-renowned explorer.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a safari suit,” he said. “Left behind by some tourist. Reckon it’ll fit you jus’ fine.” He smiled. “An’ this is ’Arry’s stuff. We’ll ’ave to strap in on the back.” As he heaved the suitcase upright, it tinkled like an early-morning milk float.

  If we hurried, I thought, we could sneak off before Importos realised we had gone.

  Dextrose – quite some dead weight, requiring the strength of myself and Quench to shift – had been stuffed into the sidecar. His arms were lolling out of the sides, his gut had become caught on the tiny windscreen and his head was tipped backwards so that his mouth gaped open, snoring at the sky.

  I had quickly donned the safari suit, having dumped my stinking casuals in a bag and thrust that into the recesses of a half-empty rucksack. So few possessions – but I didn’t care.

  “’Ere,” said Quench, pushing a roll of banknotes into my hand and closing my fingers around it. “You’ll need this. Long way to where you’re goin’.”

  “I can’t…” I faltered.

  “Course you can.”

  I wondered out loud: “How can you afford all this?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” Then he chuckled. “Ah, what’s the ’arm in tellin’ you? Bank job, ’72.”