Pistache Returns Read online

  ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ I said, ‘I don’t think in Hen-lee they ever seed a ******.’

  PHILIP LARKIN

  prepares lines in celebration of the Queen Mother’s 115th Birthday

  They mucked you up, your Mum- and Dad-in-law;

  And then the lisping brother and his Yankee bitch:

  For them the plane trees and the parties by the Seine;

  For you the chores, the kiddies and the Blitz,

  Snagging your slightly-outmoded shoes on the rubble

  Of Mrs Snotweed’s privy in what’s left of Bethnal Green.

  In the back seat of the hearse-like Daimler going home,

  You scan the Evening News to see the outcome

  Of your five-bob treble in the last at Haydock Park.

  Another Railway Arms slides past, its table d’hôte a pie,

  Stewed pears, pale ale and something final in the dark.

  In castle corridors the draught disturbs dead forebears,

  Balmoral princes in their lifeless gilt.

  You cut the ribbon at the local ‘media studies’ centre;

  A dozen sycophants grow flushed on Tesco’s Riesling;

  Your mincing courtiers make jokes about the kilt.

  But Christmas time: your daughter mumming on

  the idiot box,

  ‘My husband and I . . .’ – a phrase long lost to you . . .

  Loneliness revives: the slice of lemon,

  Three good goes of gin – and somewhere, beyond

  the battlement,

  A white moon glows; and you almost immortal, mortal too.

  H. G. WELLS

  made many predictions, few of which came truefn1

  In 1979 a female politician stood for the office of prime minister of the United Kingdom, but was soundly defeated at the polls. In the following years women withdrew from the work place altogether and by 1992 had decided to devote themselves entirely to pleasuring small men from Bromley.

  In 1982 a dispute over the ownership of some islands in the South Pacific was peacefully resolved in a Buenos Aires steakhouse with neither side pressing its claim on the grounds that the islands would shortly be rendered uninhabitable by the rapid advance of global freezing.

  In 2008 an initiative from the much-loved ‘investment’ banks saw them volunteer to stop all their tax avoidance schemes, to put a firm and low ceiling on their own pay and bonuses, not to seek taxpayer refunds for their own failed bets and to agree a charter of their ethical obligations. This they signed in the blood of a unicorn, now once again the most populous equine on the planet.

  In 1998 Martin McGuinness, former leader of the terrorist Provisional IRA, was appointed minister in charge of children’s education in Northern Ireland.

  In 2017 The Islamic Society for the Tolerance of Other Points of View decided by a large majority that other religions had a lot to be said for them. A spokesman for the Wahhabi Congress in Riyadh said he and his colleagues had ‘laid it on a bit thick’ lately and were now happy to welcome other religions, their female adherents in particular, to join them in paradise.

  In 2012 a law was passed by the World Government that legalised polygamy. However, its criteria were so strict that it transpired that the only man legally entitled to sixteen wives was found to be a 145-year-old moustachioed ex-draper’s assistant born in a Bromley china shop.

  JEROME K. JEROME

  still can’t get to the point, even on an 18-30 holiday

  When Mrs Drudge brought in the chops and porter and gooseberry tart for supper, she came across a lively debate while we were packing. Harris declared that he should be shaving off his moustaches.

  ‘It’s a crying shame,’ he said, ‘but I fear to give the “wrong signal”.’

  ‘Well,’ George returned, ‘I for one intend to wear the colours of my livery company in the ribbon of my boater.’

  Harris said that his great uncle Wilberforce in his younger day had gone on a bicycling tour of the Crimea with a couple of other fellows and one night the three were compelled to share a single bunk in the attic of the local harbour master . . .

  However, the presence of Mrs Drudge enforced a rare discretion upon Harris and spared us the remainder of this reminiscence.

  Then we flew to Dubrovnik, transferred to our villa, unpacked and went to a club. A man clad only in a loincloth acted as the gatekeeper.

  George said the fellow reminded him of something that once happened to his aunt in the Italian Alps. It was this lady’s practice when travelling to take a supply of cambric handkerchiefs for distribution among the poor. On one occasion, suffering from hay fever, she was accosted in the street by . . .

  Sadly the volume of the music that now assailed us prevented us from hearing the conclusion of this amusing tale. We appeared to be in a species of repository, though instead of storing furniture it seemed to be the half-clad human form that it was warehousing. Harris said it reminded him of the Whitsun weekend mannequin display in the window of Marshal and Snelgrove.

  Some hours later we found ourselves watching a display of lubricious excess. The fellow behind George asked him to remove his boater as it was in his line of sight. George said the show brought to mind the experience of an old school friend who had once worked as a lifeguard in a nudist colony near Frinton-on-Sea. We got back to our digs in Dubrovnik at eight the next morning.

  We did this every day for a week, then flew back to London and took a taxi to our lodgings. There was a welcome rattle on the stairs as Mrs Drudge staggered in with a shepherd’s pie, a jug of ale and a rhubarb turnover.

  ‘What was it like?’ enquired the good lady.

  ‘Well,’ replied Harris. ‘It reminded me of a holiday my uncle once took . . .’

  HENRY FIELDING

  made Tom Jones spend weeks in taverns – but not a modern one

  Mr Jones having been absent from our tale yet awhile, the reader may wonder what befell the young gentleman when we left him upon the threshold of a Greenspring Health restaurant beside the thoroughfare of Lincoln’s Inn. Let us then rejoin our young hero as he hungers for his midday victualling . . .

  Jones threw down his tricorn and sword upon the nearest table and addressed a wench whose uniform concealed the twin joys of womanhood beneath an apron of the coarsest fustian.

  ‘Don’t bother me with bills of fare, woman, bring me of the landlord’s plenty,’ Jones commanded her. ‘And a hogshead of ale to wash it down.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ said the wench. ‘One dish of the day.’

  As he waited, Jones propped his boots, muddied from six days in the saddle, upon a convenient table and lit his pipe. He smiled as he envisaged a leg of mutton, roasted fowl – and kidney pudding with a gross of oysters to begin.

  In her due hour, the serving wench returned with a paper plate. Its contents were green, exiguous and unfamiliar to our hero, who nevertheless contained his disappointment with the largeness of humour that enabled his acquaintance – and perchance, we dare to hope, the reader also – to overlook his giddiness, his flatulence and his satyriasis.

  ‘Zounds, but this is a monumental jest,’ said he, slapping his breeches. ‘You bring the garnish, but retain the dish. Like dear Sophia when she shows a glimpse of petticoat but conceals the joys beyond.’

  ‘It’s called a quinoa salad,’ said the wench.

  ‘Quinoa? What Popish nonsense is that?’ said Jones. ‘You force my hand, you impudent girl.’

  So saying, he took her by the waist, bent her over his knee and administered a spanking such as old Thwackum had once imprinted on his own youthful person.

  ‘Now then,’ he roared. ‘Bring me a basin of hot tripe with caper sauce, if you please. And tell the pretty maiden in the corner to come and join me this instant. I shall give her money enough to buy a skirt that’s long enough to cover the limbs that she displays for my delight.’

  But at that moment Jones’s ardour and his outer clothing were doused by a downpour of water from a source
concealed above his head.

  ‘It’s your pipe,’ said a sickly-looking man with a beard. ‘It’s set off the sprinklers.’

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  turns travel agent, with one song of

  Innocence and one of Experience

  At the Villa Soleil

  You’ll be happy all day.

  It’s just by the sea

  And there’s biscuits for tea.

  It’s perfect for Gran,

  You can all get a tan.

  And the food is delish,

  Local salads and fish.

  It’s perfect for tots,

  It can offer them lots.

  There’s tennis nearby,

  Not a cloud in the sky.

  You just ring for a maid

  And find your bed’s made

  We all shout hooray

  For the Villa Soleil.

  **

  Villa, villa, in the night,

  Tacked on to a building site.

  What bacterial grill or fry

  Did cause that awful dysentery?

  What mendacious hack or fool

  Photoshopped a swimming pool?

  What has caused the smell of feet

  To overpower the master suite?

  Who the plumber? Who the cook?

  Who designed this squalid nook?

  And did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made Toxteth make thee?

  Villa, villa in the night

  Deprived of any natural light

  How could you have failed to say

  You backed on to a motorway?

  DANIEL DEFOE

  cast Robinson Crusoe away on Ibiza, it turns out

  In my twenty-sixth year of solitude it happen’d one day about noon as I was procuring small fishes from my boat that an unseen Providence caus’d a mighty squall that drove my craft to the southernmost point of the island that in all my years I had feared to visit; where it founder’d upon some sharp rocks and I was wash’d upon the foreshore. I contriv’d to take with me only a fowling piece wrapp’d in cloth, some gunpowder and gold coins. It was now the middle of the night, yet a violent throbbing sound affrighted my imagination till I was terrify’d to the last degree. Nearing the pandemonium I took my spyglass; and from my point of lowly vantage in the sand I saw such a sight as surely neither God nor Providence had yet vouchsaf’d to human eye.

  Thousand upon thousand of half-naked savages were leaping up and down in a ritual of frenzy that I conjectur’d was but a preparation for the killing and eating of some poor wretch among them. I had thought a Scotch man known to the savages by the name McKay had been their victim as he was push’d uncloth’d upon a wooden scaffold; though here he was not eat as I had thought but performed an act of conjugal lewdness upon his wife while the throng clapp’d hands about them.

  One savage then crept off in search of water from a spring whereon I surprised the fellow with a blow to the head from my fowling piece. On his recovering his wits I took him with me to where my boat, some what battered but still seaworthy, now lay upon the sand. At dawn with a following wind we made landfall at my palisade upon the north side of the island where I instructed the savage in the holy scriptures and in the making of goat broth. Four years passed in this way and I may say that never had a master a more faithful and devoted servant than this pagan that I rescu’d from the mouth of damnation.

  A SHOT RANG OUT

  MARCEL PROUST

  has a crack at starting off a thriller

  A shot – or rather memory of the sound made by the tapping of a hammer on the iron wheel of a locomotive of the seaside train as it stopped for a moment among the hawthorn hedges and the lilacs of a village in Normandy – was embodied in the hand-held automatic as the striker was released from tension by the action of the trigger and driven into the rear end of the cartridge, causing the ejection of the bullet from the barrel and the empty casing from the breech, while a trace of cordite lingered like the smell of my grandmother’s fresh baked bread on Sunday morning before Mass, and the sensation of the trembling recoil on my skin recalled my mother’s transient goodnight kiss; so that what had started as an act of violence, offered in the shallow flux of present time, devoid of memory and its handmaid, the imagination, became with the reverberation of the sound about the station concourse an unexpected gateway into permanence, where, like the church bells that signalled the approach of old Françoise with a pail of fresh milk from the village dairy, the echo of the brief explosion reverberated in the gulf of time past, and, sedulously manipulated by the violent hands of the present as the termination of a human life, became in the patient clasp of involuntary memory, the means by which the moment was neither lost nor permanent, but memorialised as that in which a shot rang, with whatsoever repercussions, out.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  does a murder mystery to the metre of The Raven

  I met her at a drunken ceilidh where the fiddlers fiddled gaily

  And I’d drunk a fairish skinful of a curious forgotten brew.

  I was dancing, madly bopping, suddenly there came a hissing

  As of someone loudly kissing, kissing till her lips went blue –

  Just a slapper, nothing new.

  This was all in deep December, maybe it was in November;

  Anyway I can’t remember how I got off with Lenore.

  In the car park fiercely snogging, all at once I heard some jogging

  As of someone wildly dogging, dogging by my Escort door.

  I forced my bird down on the floor.

  She’s engaged to dimwit Eddy, he prevents us going steady;

  Says Lenore’s a right posh item, just the kind to make a wife.

  ‘Len,’ I says, ‘I move a motion. Brew me up a poison potion.

  Eddy won’t have any notion – notion of what took his life.

  If that fails, I’ll use a knife.’

  Wednesday night and Eddy bought it, spark out stiff, well who’d have thought it?

  Len and I were laughing madly as we buried him beneath the floor.

  She was chortling, nearly singing when there came a sudden dinging

  As of someone fiercely ringing, ringing on the old front door.

  Now who on earth can that be for?

  Four policemen slowly plodding, give the drains a good old rodding.

  Finding nothing, say they’re sorry and they really should have known.

  As they’re leaving, Lenny’s sleeping, from the floor there comes a beeping

  Like a Nokia fiercely bleeping, bleeping out the old ring tone.

  We’ve buried Eddy with his phone.

  ENID BLYTON

  moves on to crime turf

  Mr Plod had gathered the suspects together in the long room at Malory Towers.

  ‘What we have here,’ he said, ‘is a gang killing. For some weeks the Secret Seven have been crossing the Famous Five postcode. This morning I discovered Mr Milko the Milkman had been run over by the train driver, Mr Train Driver.’

  ‘Do you think that’s his real name?’ said Gobbo, the Goblin.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ nodded Noddy. He looked down at his feet where a dog, his friend Mr Bumpy Dog, had just bumped into him.

  ‘Golly,’ said Golly.

  Big Ears sat down in the wishing chair. ‘I wish I could lay my hands on the villain,’ he said.

  ‘Careful what you wish for,’ said the Naughtiest Girl in the School.

  ‘We need more evidence,’ said Julian, sensibly.

  ‘And what’s your name, sonny?’ said Mr Plod. ‘Mr Sensible?’

  ‘No. Julian.’

  ‘And what sort of a name is that?’ said Mr Plod.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Dick. ‘I vote we do a DNA test on Mr Milko.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just have a picnic?’ said Anne. ‘I’ll wash up.’

  At that moment a man with a beret came through the door of Malory Towers. ‘Bonjour,’ he said in a funny voice. ‘I have listened to what you say. And the mur
derer is clear. Mr Milko was pushed on to ze train track by a small animal. My friends, we are looking for a little dog who bump into people. Do you know such a person?’

  The Famous Five looked blankly at the Secret Seven then back at the man with the moustache.

  ‘And what do you think this Murderer might be called?’ said Julian.

  ‘You tell me,’ said the Foreigner.

  ‘Shut it, garlic breath,’ said Mr Plod. ‘You’re nicked. Come with me.’

  ‘What for?’ said the Foreigner.

  ‘For being foreign,’ said Mr Plod.

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Anne. ‘I hope he gets lashings of time inside.’

  GEORGE ELIOT

  wonders for once whodunnit

  The body of Sir Hector Transome had been laid out in the library for Gertrude’s inspection. The richest landowner in Warwickshire appeared to have been garrotted with the family jewels before being drowned in the mill race. The entire domestic staff was gathered in the twilight, their faces rapt.

  Gertrude, however, found herself engrossed by the collection of Unitarian tracts on the library shelves. There was a complete set of Wesleyan hymns and almost all of Hegel and Spinoza. But why did no one these days read Feuerbach’s seminal Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit?

  ‘Pardon, Miss.’

  Gertrude found her reverie interrupted by P. C. Bede from Nuneaton. ‘Was it Lady Transome who done it? They was unhappily married you see.’

  ‘Marriage is a state of higher duties,’ replied Gertrude. ‘I never thought of it as mere personal ease, when I wed a man fifty years my senior, incontinent, avaricious and incapable of the most perfunctory marital kindness.’