Ethelbert's Sunday Morning
Page 3
lurked in the hallway, or that evil possibly lurked in the hallway, or that possibly lurking in the hallway was some evil, but there's a limit to how long you can play 'count the kitchen chairs' and Colin had reached that limit after three hours.
He didn't have any kitchen chairs. He ate breakfast standing up to avoid the onset of piles. He also ate breakfast by pouring alternate mouthfuls of cornflakes and milk into his mouth to avoid wear and tear on crockery and save on washing up liquid. Colin saved up all the money he would otherwise have spent on washing up liquid in a special jar. Once a month he used the money to treat himself to a new ball bearing.
Colin had lots of special jars. In fact he had a special room in which to keep all his special jars in. One of the jars contained two hundred and twenty eight ball bearings. Another contained the wrapping from a pork pie he'd particularly enjoyed in Buddleigh Salterton in March 1992. Another contained the condom which had aided him in losing his virginity in 1983, along with a variety of as yet unidentified lifeforms and a primitive prototype for some sort of farming implement. Next to this jar was one containing his mothers ashes and the spleen of an old school friend, which Colin arranged next to each other to illustrate the juxtaposition between life, death and having your spleen removed with a spatula by a defrocked archdeacon.
Passing by his special room Colin couldn't help noting with satisfaction that the hand-engraved sign reading 'Colin's special room, no trespassers, hawkers or anthropologists' was glinting nicely in the sun. It had definitely been worth the effort in moving his kitchen three feet to the left in order to allow the sun to properly penetrate the hallway.
Colin settled in front of the television and took out his Snooker Audience Bingo card. There was no prize because it was a game of his own devizing that only one other person in the world was allowed to play.
As this was a World Championship quarter-final it should be plain sailing, although he and his competitor had each chosen one of the days matches to watch on the red button by rolling a dice so a full house was highly unlikely.
Over the next half an hour Colin enthusiastically ticked off many familiar faces. The dice had been kind to him today. There was the bloke who looks a bit like the bloke who used to be Nigel in 'Eastenders'; the woman who dresses like a mayor; the woman who sits next to the woman who dresses like a mayor; the bloke who looks like Ritchie Benaud would have looked in 1978 if he'd been a pub landlord in Caerphilly; the bloke who looks like he's wearing a wig from an 'Absolutely' sketch; the bloke who looks like Darren Gough but confusingly wears football shirts; the nice looking woman with the glasses; the bloke with Kenneth Kendal's nose, Peter Wyngard's eyebrows, William Woolard's teeth, Brian Cant's elbows, Terry Scott's knees, Jenny Agutter's toes and Felicity Kendall's handerkchief; the bloke with the tie who looks as if he's about to spontaneously combust; the bloke who looks like the actor Nicholas Grace; the bloke who looks like Stuart Hall; the bloke who doesn't look like Tony Wilson.
During the mid-session interval Colin made himself an extra strong cup of tea to celebrate his success. It was only then that he noticed an opal fruit pile up in his kitchen cupboard. This required immediate attention.
Colin had formed the habit of going for an afternoon walk every day since July 1991. However, he did not take any water with him due to the total lack of public toilets within a five mile radius of his house. It was therefore his penchent to partake of opal fruits to quench his thirst during these perambulations.
He removed the five packets of 'starburst' from the cupboard, crossing himself as he did so, conducted the ceremonial burning and flushing of the wrappers and set to work replacing them with his own facsimile of the original wrapping emblazoned with the correct noumenclature. He also did this with Marathons and Jif.
After the daily ritual of a video episode of 'Murder She Wrote' Ethelbert went out to the garden. It was a generous plot of land with an enormous bordering hedge that obscured all but the roof of the house from view from the road. This was probably a good thing considering some of the things that had happened in the garden over the years.
Ethelbert ensured that this was the exact spot requiring weeding before kneeling down. Although very sprightly for ninety one it would nevertheless take a while to get down and then back up again so precision was the order of the day. Okay, it wasn't exactly weeding per se, just digging, but it involved the same cranking up of motor-cortex and knee joints. The garden didn't really need weeding but Leslie had been looking a bit peaky over breakfast so preparations had to be made.
Normally, of course, Leslie would be embalmed and go in the trunk in the attic with all the previous Leslies but after thirty eight years the trunk was now packed to capacity. Indeed Ethelbert has been mildly perturbed upon closing the trunk on Leslie number 34 when, due to the unexpectedly springy nature of thirty three other embalmed cats, Leslie number 34 had half popped out of the trunk, causing two paws to be chopped off when the lid was closed.
As always on these occasions, Ethelbert fell to pondering his/her own mortality. Despite years of assiduous research it appeared that self-embalming was physically impossible – who could Ethelbert possibly trust to do the job properly? Cremation was not an option because Ethelbert's body contained so many steel pins and other paraphernalia that the casket would in all probability explode like a faulty firework.
After preparing a suitably feline-sized hole, the idea of Sunday lunch suddenly popped into Ethelbert's mind like an MP. popping into a bush on Hampstead Heath. A tedious leftwards shuffling motion eventually brought into proximity the cabbage patch. As the digging progressed, Ethelbert was momentarily startled to strike something hard. Just a stone probably but no, this object was far too big for that. As more earth was moved aside it revealed a thigh bone and three fingers. From the general size and condition of the bones Ethelbert estimated that they had lain there for about fifty years and belonged to a man of roughly six feet two inches with a penchant for cravats, pickled onions and snooker.
“Of course,” exclaimed Ethelbert, “it's Terry! I can't remember putting him there.”
With a shrug Ethelbert began to cover the bones and look for a better spot for Leslie number 36. It would be inconvenient for 36 to go before 35 because it spoiled the pattern but so be it. Patting down the earth Ethelbert experienced a few dislocated memories of Terry in a church with a top hat and a flower in his buttonhole, but their significance remained elusive.
An hour later and the cabbage was steaming away horribly. Nobody in the house liked cabbage at all but Ethelbert tried to eat something green at least once a week; it was a penance of a sort, but it would take several million cabbages to wipe out all the sins committed in the house and garden since 1943.
Elevenses meant homemade cake and Darjeeling for Ethelbert, Pepperami and milk for Leslie and Leslie.
The cats settled down by the fire and went to sleep, Ethelbert switched on 'Granada Men and Motors'.
Colin slid along the hallway like a hamster on boxing day, in other words with a sense of increasing terror and a small buzzing sound in his right knee.
He used his ninja training to approach the porch with the required stealthiness; when he was sure the coast was next to the sea, he quickly opened the door and retrieved the evil piece of small card from the special 'things that come in through the letter box collection device' mat he had knitted from the embalmed remains of a family dog.
“I thought so,” he grimaced as he read the words written in language on the card: you could save yourself money by switching your oxygen supply to us. He threw the card into his special 'disinfecting evil' wastebasket and went to wash his hands fourteen times.
Putting on his balaclava and blond wig, Colin went out to the back garden to feed his pet hedgehog Dinsdale. It was costing him rather a lot these days as Dinsdale was now 800 yards long. He'd struck it lucky this week though when he'd had the good fortune to accidentally run over 17 cows while test driving a steam roller. That would see Dinsdale through to the week
end and all it had cost Colin was the price of the sesame seed baps and gherkins, without which, for some reason, Dinsdale would refuse any meal and kick off big time, which was something Colin always tried to avoid when dealing with 800 yard long hedgehogs.
Going back inside the house Colin removed the balaclava and wig he always wore in the back garden to confuse the watching MI5 operatives into thinking that there were in fact 2 people living in the house. He had been conducting this charade for 17 years, ever since returning from Buddleigh Salterton though it was nothing to do with the pork pie. It was an exhausting charade to have kept up for 17 years but Colin was confident that it would soon pay dividends and give him precious seconds in which to destroy the evidence when MI5 finally raided the house. From tuning into their radio broadcasts he knew that it would be weeks rather than months so he was already planning his escape, indeed the tunnel was nearly finished.
Colin looked at his shopping list as he waited for the coast to become clear:
Pickle some skepticism
invalidate a biscuit
counteract a magnetic field with Lego
follow Nick Clegg around for a few days shaking my head and muttering quietly to myself until