Pistache Returns Page 6

  Through Nevada, living on Wild Turkey bourbon and grits. He wasn’t

  There again today when we made love by the light of the Nickelodeon in Reno.

  America, America, one day you’ll put a cow over the fucking moon.

  America, America, one day you’ll put a cow over the moon.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  writes a speech for Basil Fawlty

  Good morrow, Major, what news of battles past,

  Reunions, oft-told tales and regimental ties?

  (aside) The man’s a fool and deaf as Lethe’s soundless

  Waters sunk in sempiternal tacitude.

  Ah, Ladies, must you be gone so soon upon

  Your trysts and messages? Haply the charabanc

  Awaits without. Sirrah, good morrow, the room

  Is not to taste? The prospect circumscrib’d,

  The lodging cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d? Pray tell

  Me, sir, exactly what your fancy had envisag’d.

  A wood near Athens, the bright Illyrian shore,

  Or Arden’s forest dense, pack’d e’en unto

  Its utmost bound with prancing unicorns?

  Manuel, philosopher and sage of the Iberian

  Coast, pray take in charge our noble friend,

  Explain – as best thy tongue may serve –

  The virtues of our hostelry, its charms—

  But hark! What ghastly shrieking rends the morning

  Air? ‘Basil! Basil!’ My poisoned posset, verucca

  Of my heart, she-witch of wither’d dugs and venom

  For her mother’s milk. I come, I come, my bride!

  May Aphrodite’s chariot speed me to thy side.

  HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

  tells a modern fairy tale

  A little boy called Hans lived in a tiny crooked house in a crowded city. The landlord was the King’s cruel nephew. Hans worked as a cobbler making shoes for all the rich people. One day an old witch came in and said, ‘Would you like to own your tiny crooked house and not pay horrid rent to the King’s cruel nephew?’ Little Hans was thrilled. He clapped his hands and danced. The Old Witch lent him sixty crowns to buy his house and he promised to repay two crowns each year and signed his name on a piece of paper.

  And that piece of paper was stolen by a Jackdaw, who gathered lots of other paper promises and made them all into a nest in the hawthorn. Then the Eagle came and said, ‘I will buy your paper promises and sell them sight unseen to a Goose who cannot read.’

  And the Eagle told the Goose, ‘There is no risk because the Wise Owl says so. Look, he’s rated them A*.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Goose and sold the promises to birds all over the world. And some birds wrote insurances that the promises would not fail and sold the insurance policies as well.

  Meanwhile, back in the crowded city, the Old Witch rapped on Hans’s door one morning. ‘From now on,’ she said, ‘you must pay back not two crowns a year but ten crowns.’

  And little Hans worked night and day but couldn’t make enough shoes. He went blind and his hands fell off and the Old Witch said he must leave his house at once. And Hans became a beggar and wandered the world for a year in rags.

  And when one day he came back to his crowded city he saw that everyone was out of work and no one had a house or a job.

  Except the Old Witch and the Jackdaw and the Eagle and the Goose and the Wise Owl, who now owned the whole street, tax free.

  STEPHENIE MEYER

  has a Twilight rethink and sets her school in England

  When my mom left my dad in Phoenix, Arizona, he couldn’t manage so he sent me to this school in Europe which is in England someplace. It’s called Greyfriars and at the end of class none of the kids go home but they stay in a like, dorm. I’m not allowed to keep my Chevy here; can you believe the kids don’t have cars? We don’t do Math or Trig or Government class, we do Latin which is like what people spoke a zillion years ago in Greece or somewhere. The teacher, Mr Quelch, he’s always on about some poet guy called Horace, I don’t know if that’s his first name or what.

  There’s a group of kids here who keep themselves apart, they’re kind of creepy. There’s Bob Cherry, who has like the biggest feet in class. There’s Huree Jamset Ram Singh who’s like this ethnic guy who speaks weird, I think it may be Latin, though not as weird as this kid out of Chinatown called Wun Lung.

  But the one who really freaks me out is this guy called Bunter. I am like so totally in awe of him. He can like do voices, ventriloquism, shit like that. He has these thick glasses and his eyes change colour behind them. I think he reads my mind.

  I think maybe he’s a little shy around women, but he told me last night he loves the . . . smell of me. He said I smell of like . . . shepherd’s pie and jam roly poly.

  About three things I am like totally positive. First, Billy Bunter will eat anything. Second, I am unconditionally and totally in love with him. Thirdly, there’s a part of him – and I don’t yet know how potent it is – that wants to put me in his tuck box for what he calls a ‘midnight feast’.

  SYLVIA PLATH

  tells the story of Goldilocks

  I am the doctor who takes

  The temperature of each bowl.

  Daddy Bear, your gruel,

  Grey as the Feldgrau,

  Pungent as a jackboot,

  Rises under an ailing moon.

  I have been sleeping

  In your bed, Daddy.

  Mother’s oats are blebbed

  With ruby stains of fruit preserve

  Beside the glass fire

  Of her blood-orange juice.

  The baby’s porridge bubbles

  With a foetus eye.

  I swallow the sins it is not

  His to shrive. I devour

  The cancerous pallor

  With spoons of handled bone.

  I plough the winding-sheets

  Of each bear bed with my

  Surgical breathing, as I die and rise

  Three times before dawn.

  My golden hair is electric

  With the light of

  Borrowed stars, spread out

  On my pillow of skulls.

  PHILIP ROTH

  turns his hand to a children’s story

  Molestein spent the morning spring cleaning his burrow in the old Jewish district of Woodland, New Jersey. Afterwards, he had lunch with his friend Whiskers Wasserat, who lived on the waterfront at Hoboken. He and Molestein had been at college after the War on the GI Bill. They ate at Salmon’s Deli. These days it was Salmon’s son who cooked, but he still made mushrooms with the red sauce like his father. Molestein himself knew how to make a proper burrow, like his great grandfather who had burrowed all the way from Lithuania.

  Molestein had an imaginary friend called Rutterman who was having an affair with Wasserat’s 21-year-old daughter, Miriam, a dental hygienist in Newark with a fancy tail on her. Her white tunic and tan pantyhose gave Rutterman a fantasy life so rich he’d had an octuple heart bypass the previous fall.

  That afternoon at Bellevue Hospital, Molestein went for a prostate exam. The geriatrician, a pop-eyed goy called Jimmy Toad, slipped on his rubber glove and probed the colo-rectal opening. Molestein could see the nurse, a little shikse ferret in a gingham pinafore, holding his discarded pants at arm’s length. Dr Toad at last withdrew his probing flipper.

  ‘Keep the news simple,’ said Molestein. ‘No fancy words for me or Rutterman, just the vernacular: its special force.’

  ‘You have three months to live,’ said Dr Toad, chucking his soiled glove in the trash.

  Molestein went out blind onto Second Avenue. He felt the fury of his ebbing life. He thought of his elder brother, Isaac, killed while flying short-sighted night missions in Korea. Then Molestein pictured the graves of his forefathers, forgotten molehills in the forests of the remote Carpathian shtetl. He swore he could put Rutterman through one last trial of strength and lust for life before they shut his burrow
to the light.

  Awkward with his new cellphone, Molestein stopped on the corner of 58th and called Wasserat’s daughter, Miriam, at the dental surgery. His voice cracked with rage and fear.

  ‘Can you see me one more time?’ said Molestein. ‘It’s not for me, it’s for my friend Rutterman.’

  ‘Sure, honey,’ said Miriam. Her voice reminded him of gravy trickling over kishkes. ‘There’s nothing half so much fun as messing about with old goats.’

  J. K. ROWLING

  tries a sequel with Harry Potter now grown up

  At the age of forty, Harry Potter’s divorce came through. After ten years his wife Ginny was revealed to be not Ron Weasley’s sister but the reincarnation of Princess Tangerina, high priestess of the Evil Mingers. Naturally, in the settlement Ginny got the kids and the house and Harry had no place to live so passed his day in the local café trying to write his memoirs till the owner kicked him out.

  Eventually, desperate for a bed, he went to the local estate agent, Malvolius Slime, who sounded like a good chap, he thought, oddly.

  ‘There’s no mortgages available,’ explained Malvolius, ‘and with your equity, you’re looking at a broom cupboard, tops. Actually this one’s just come in at Number 4 Privet Drive.’

  ‘Gazumper and gazunder!’ exclaimed Harry. ‘Quis circumambit circumvenit. What goes around comes—’

  ‘I know what it means,’ broke in Malvolius. ‘In fact, I know all about your true history, Harry. I look like an estate agent but actually I’m one seventh of Albus Dumbledore’s ghost.’

  ‘Really?’ said Harry.

  ‘Now for the truth,’ said Malvolius, promisingly. ‘Hermione Grainger’s pussy cat, Tarantella, is your godmother. Your parents are—’

  ‘I know who my parents are,’ replied Harry. ‘And I’m an only child.’

  ‘No,’ contradicted Malvolius, testily, ‘you are one of three brothers. The first is called Ant, the second is called Dec.’

  ‘Really? Which is older?’ said Harry, quizzically.

  ‘No one knows,’ said the old estate agent. ‘Not even Dec. Your father – your real father, I should say, was Saddam Hussein. And your mother—’

  ‘Who?’ asked Harry, interrogatively. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Your mother,’ disclosed Malvolius confidentially, ‘was Diana, Princess of Wales.’

  ‘Blimey!’ swore Harry, blasphemously. ‘That’s straining credulity a bit, isn’t it? You mean my parents were . . . were Muggles?’ he asked, incredulously.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ said Malvolius, at length.

  ‘How long?’ said Harry, curiously.

  ‘About seven volumes,’ said Malvolius Slime, ‘each one seemingly a little longer than the one before.’

  * Martin McGuinness was indeed appointed minister for education in Northern Ireland.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409099277

  Version 1.0

  Published by Hutchinson 2016

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  Copyright © Sebastian Faulks 2016

  Illustrations © Giorgos Papadakis 2016

  Sebastian Faulks has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hutchinson

  Hutchinson

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London, SW1V 2SA

  www.penguin.co.uk

  Hutchinson is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780091931070

  H. G. WELLS

  fn1 Readers may care to spot the only one that did. Answer here.