Chapter 16

SIXTEEN

I tried to run but my feet had sunk into the squelchy mud of what was now a rectangle of carnage. I waved my arms to warn them I was there and that I wasn’t a rugby ball (they were unlikely to be bright or they wouldn’t be playing rugby, they’d be in a library like I was at their age) but this didn’t deter them. I had just freed one foot from the quick-mud when I felt the vibrations of their charge dragging my other foot further down. Unless they split down the middle and ran round me (which never happens in my experience) I was done for. I closed my eyes – clichéd I know but sometimes even Dennis Brent is human – and waited for the inevitable trampling of bones, bumpy ambulance ride, double booked hospital bed, absence of visitors, food that tastes of bodily fluids and hugely painful and humiliating operations that it turns out later I didn’t strictly need.

But just before the pack engulfed me in a forest of arms, legs and muscular momentum I felt something move between us. One by one the players hit this mysterious object and it sounded as if they were bounced backwards into their own muddy domain. I opened a tentative eye and saw the enormous form of my colleague and paying house guest, Francois Devine.

“Hello, Dennis Brent” he said. “I noticed you had locked up the man cruiser and I thought you’d probably be out in the wilds silently pondering the futility of your existence. And here you are. I had no idea you played rugby football.”

“I don’t – I wandered on the pitch by accident and was nearly trampled to death when you intervened.”

“Ah – I do apologise – would you rather I left and let you get on with being trampled to death?”

“I would not – your arrival is extremely timely. These people – the scum at the car boot sale not the Neanderthals who play rugby football – are heathens who won’t pay a fair price for the least important items in my collection.”

“This is a terrible picture you paint, Dennis Brent. Does that mean we’ve not made any money?”

“We have not.”

“Bother. Still, no matter – Francois has been busy and has solved all our problems while you were wasting valuable time engaging with people it is unhygienic to engage with.”

I realised he was carrying one of my generic Tupperware-style airtight storage boxes without having signed a chit for it or paid a deposit.

“What have you got in there?” I demanded.

“Your sales techniques didn’t engage me sufficiently so I went back to the Towers and baked 168 cup cakes to sell and raise lots of money which the Philip Stiffit Foundation can quite happily waste while we enjoy our joint custody of The Memo.”

“They must be awfully small cupcakes to fit in MY generic Tupperware-style container” I said wittily.

“Ah yes – I may have sampled one or two of them” he confessed inaccurately.

“One or two?”

“Perhaps closer to one six two.”

“Meaning there are half a dozen left in my container?”

“Approximately.”

“How did you come to leave so many?” I asked cuttingly.

“I felt I needed something to show for my efforts. Much as you do when you secrete yourself in the shed by Gaylord Pool to write one of your dreadfully banal monographs. That you publish at the end of it and allow yourself to be ridiculed by your peers is at least justification in your mind for the time you unwisely invested in that little wooden outhouse, your temple to futile productivity.”

“Ridiculed?” I queried.

“Roundly mocked” he clarified.

“I may be disagreed with – robustly or passive aggressively depending on the peer – on some fascinating technical point or other but I am never roundly mocked.”

“To your face you may be disagreed with but behind your back you are roundly mocked” he said smugly.

“Well so are you” I said childishly. “Behind your back you’re both roundly mocked and mocked for being round.”

He didn’t take my witticism well. He opened the generic Tupperware-style container and ate the six remaining cupcakes.

“Now you’ve nothing to sell” he said tartly. He simultaneously invoked an almost mystical sixth sense to take a step to the left and let a burly man who worked at the sausage recycling plant collide with me and leave me oozing gently into the mud. I’ve always hated rugby football.

By the time I’d dragged myself back to the man cruiser, Melba and Francois Devine had put smiles on their faces which instantly put me on guard. I checked my zips before asking what had amused them.

“We’ve raised some money” said Melba.

“Credit where it is due – Melba has raised some money” added Francois Devine. I beamed at Melba.

“How and how much?” I asked.

“I sold a manky old comb from the bottom of your carrier bag for 50 pence” he smiled.

“There wasn’t a manky old comb in my carrier bag” I told him. “Unless you meant the extremely rare and valuable comb with a price tag of £500.”

“What?”

“That was no ordinary comb” I continued.

“That’s true, guv’nor, there were some old hairs on it and the chap who bought it asked whose comb it was. When I said it was Dennis Brent’s he cried something about finally having a sample of your DNA to use in constructing a virus that would wipe you out for good, gave me 50p and skipped off.”

“Well the joke is on him because those hairs belonged to Antony Ainley as it was his comb, acquired at enormous cost and effort, and any attempts to wipe him out with a specially created virus will be for naught as he’s no longer with us.”

“Still – 50p” said Melba, looking on the bright side in a way that will always get up my goat.

“You are a fool, Melba, and we were fools for listening to you. Come, Francois Devine, we should leave here before the proletarian germs infect us.”

“Hold on” called Melba as we boarded the man cruiser. “I’ve got another supremely good idea to raise funds.”

I looked at him.

“Does it involve parting with anything I love more dearly than any human being save myself?”

“Nope.”

“Does it place my life in danger?”

“Nope.”

“Is it going to raise more than 50 pence?”

“It will – at least a quid a time by my reckoning and with scope to earn over thirty squid an hour.”

“That sounds ok” I said cautiously.

“I think you should, Dennis Brent. We’re slipping ever further behind Miles Saragh-Jayne all the time. There was a feature about him on the local radio that I overheard while baking – he’s just bungee jumped off the telephone mast and raised a thousand pounds.”

“Very well – I agree. What is it you want me to do?”

“It’s a kissing booth – you sit in a little tent which I can borrow from the Punch and Judy man and people pay to kiss you. Nothing can go wrong.”

My heart sank ever so slightly but surely nothing bad could happen to me while being kissed in a tent by paying strangers, could it?

Chapter 16 - 8am