The Garden of Unearthly Delights (12 page)

After a
week of thin feeding, gorse-bush visiting and troubled nights, Maxwell’s
substantial footwear carried him to a low range of hills, beyond which rose a
mighty forest. Without the aid of a map to guide him, or a destination for it
to guide him to, Maxwell left the moorland track, which probably wasn’t even on
a map, and entered the forest, which probably was, but not in any great detail.

It is
said that travel broadens the mind. But not whether it lengthens it also.

Somewhere in the forest
Maxwell lodged for several days at the hut of a charcoal burner. Here he earned
his keep by chopping wood. And, through the exercise of almost super-human
self-control, resisted the temptation to advise the humble forest dweller how,
by means which sprang immediately to Maxwell’s mind, he might increase his
scope of operation and branch out into other fields of enterprise, that would,
in due time, see him at the head of a major nationwide logging industry.

Maxwell
kept his mouth shut and his chopper sharp and when his hair had risen to a
My-Boy-Flat-Top, he bid the charcoal burner goodbye, accepted a satchel of food
and the generous gift of a fine woollen cloak and set out once more on whichever
was his way.

A day
later, or it may have been two, but it doesn’t really matter, Maxwell left the
forest and joined a rugged road that led towards a village.

As he
approached its outskirts he passed between two stone columns, each surmounted
by a metal  sphere. These evidently marked a boundary, because there were
others at regular intervals leading off in either direction encircling the rich
cultivated fields that surrounded the village. The folk here evidently took
great pride in their horticulture, as the fields were impeccably kept and
flourished with exotic fruit and vegetables, many varieties of which were
completely foreign to Maxwell. There wasn’t a parsnip in sight.

The
village itself presented an equally respectable face. The high street, cobbled
over, led between shops, houses and inns, almost twentieth century in
appearance. To Maxwell’s amazement there was even a Budgen’s supermarket. The
plastic sign had been weathered down to blurry indistinction but it was still
recognizable as the shopper’s paradise it had once been.

As
Maxwell drew near he spied through the plate-glass window that the supermarket
had been stripped of its once proud shelving and now housed booths and stalls.
Which seemed reasonable enough.

As
Maxwell gazed in, the door to this emporium swung open and a young man, wearing
a cloak not dissimilar to Maxwell’s, issued into the street. He was a handsome
fellow, spare framed, brown eyed, with drapes of yellow hair swinging to his
shoulders.

He
carried a pair of shopping bags and offered Maxwell a toothy grin as he passed
him by. He had not gone two steps further, however, when a small animal,
appearing as if from nowhere, darted between his legs, causing him to sprawl
headlong into the road.

Maxwell
hastened to assist the young man to his feet and help rescue the shopping, that
was now liberally distributed about the cobbles.

‘My
thanks,’ said the young man, dusting himself down.

‘You’re
not injured?’

‘No.
I’ll survive. I always do.’

‘Can
you tell me the name of this village?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Of
course I can, I live here.’

‘So
what is it?’

‘Oh, I
see. It’s MacGuffin.’

‘Ah,’
said Maxwell. ‘Then perhaps I am in
Scotland
?’

‘No,’
said the young man. ‘You are in MacGuffin.’

‘Yes,
but
where
is MacGuffin?’

‘You
have me puzzled now,’ said the young man. ‘I always thought it was
here.’

‘Then
you’re probably right.’

The
young man weighed this up. ‘Have you ever seen me before?’ he asked.

‘No,’
said Maxwell.

‘Then
how do you know it’s me?’

‘I
think I should be going now,’ said Maxwell.

‘Are
you looking for work?’

‘Yes, I
am actually.’

‘Then
come with me while I drop my shopping off.’

‘Wonderful,’
said Maxwell.

‘Oh,
it’s not all that. I drop my shopping off every day.’

The
young man, who, after much prompting with specific questions, revealed that his
name was Dave, led Maxwell to a cottage which huddled at the rear of the bygone
Budgen’s. They arrived by a somewhat circuitous route, but Maxwell made a point
of not asking why.

Within,
a cosy sitting-room showed a fire in its hearth, a comfy box ottoman, a carpet
bare of thread, but with a nice pattern, a few sticks of furniture and a few
extra sticks for the fire. Maxwell hung his  cloak upon a cloakhook and sat
down in a rocking-chair.

‘Be
careful on that,’ Dave advised. ‘It has a tendency to move back and forwards in
an arc.’

‘Thanks,’
said Maxwell, shaking his head.

Dave
tossed both bags of shopping straight into a cupboard, then turned to Maxwell.
‘I have trouble with my trousers,’ he said. ‘Every time I shake them, something
flies out.’

‘What,
moths, do you mean?’

‘No,
sea fowl, curlew, birds of the air.’

‘That
sounds somewhat unlikely,’ said Maxwell.

‘But
nevertheless it’s so.’ Dave gave his left trouser turn-up a shake. ‘There you
go,’ he cried. ‘That’s a sparrow hawk, if ever.’

Maxwell
stared up at the bird, now flapping about the ceiling. ‘Looks more like a
kestrel to me,’ he ventured. ‘By the plumage.’

‘But
you see what I mean?’

Maxwell
nodded dubiously. ‘They are without doubt most unusual trousers.’

Dave
pulled gingerly upon the knees of his trews and sat down on the box ottoman.
‘It is the curse of the Wilkinsons,’ he explained. ‘Some say that one of my forefathers
fell out with whichever god was then in fashion. Some say.’

Maxwell
asked, ‘Why don’t you just get rid of the trousers?’

Dave laughed
a hollow laugh. ‘If only it was that easy. You didn’t come to my wedding, did
you, Maxwell?’

‘I’ve
only just met you, I thought we’d established that.

‘Well,
it was a grim day for the Wilkinsons, I can tell you.

‘Really?’
said Maxwell, wishing he hadn’t. Dave now sighed a sigh. ‘I had postponed
putting on my wedding suit until the very last moment. Then, feeling it was
safe to do so, foolish foolish me, I togged up and set off to the church. All
went well for a while. I stood at the altar, my fragrant Mary at my side. The
sky pilot read the service. The choir sang, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful”.’

‘It was
a Christmas wedding then?’

‘Christmas?
What’s Christmas?’

‘Never
mind,’ said Maxwell. ‘You’ve started, so you might as well finish.’

‘Yes,
well, the choir sang. The sun beamed rouge rays through the old aeon
stained-glass windows, lit upon the gilded ornamentation of the rood screen,
brought forth mellow hues of—’

‘And?’
Maxwell asked.

‘And I
was about to slip the ceremonial wedding sprout into the head band of my fair
one’s bonnet—’

‘When?’

‘When
okapi!’

‘Okapi?’

‘Okapi!
Dirty great okapi came roaring out of my
waistcoat.’

‘Okapi
don’t roar,’ said Maxwell. ‘But otherwise it was not a bad yarn.’

Dave
looked defeated (but he wasn’t). ‘No yarn, my friend. No yarn. Here, take a
look at the wedding photo.’

‘Photo?’
Maxwell leaned forward in his rocker. A smile appeared on his face. ‘There is
still photography?’

Dave
tugged a well-thumbed item from his trouser pocket and thrust it into Maxwell’s
hand.

Maxwell’s
face fell. ‘This’, he said, ‘is a photograph of the March of the Wildebeest.
Cut, if I’m not mistaken, from a now ancient copy of
The National
Geographic.’

‘So how
do you explain that?’ Dave indicated the top of a church spire, clearly visible
in the background. ‘That’s St Wilko of Feelgood’s in the high street, you must
have seen it when you entered the village.’

Maxwell
parted with the photo. ‘They used to do that sort of stuff with things called
computers. You have my admiration none the less.’

‘And the
sparrow hawk?’ Dave pointed to the bird, now quietly roosting on the
mantelpiece.

‘Kestrel,
you mean.’

‘The
kestrel then?’

‘It’s a
conjuring trick. You’re winding me up. An uncle of mine could poke a pencil up
his nose and make it come out of his ear. That was a conjuring trick also.’

‘We
have a woman in the village who can…’ But Dave left the sentence unfinished.
‘This kestrel business is no trick, I can assure you of that.’

Maxwell
shrugged. ‘I have heard of ferrets in the trousers. But of okapi in the
waistcoat, I remain unconvinced. Sorry.’

Dave
threw up his hands in despair. Two squirrels emerged from his left shirt cuff
and scrambled onto the curtain pelmet.

‘There,’
Dave cried. ‘Explain that, if you can.’

‘You
might perhaps open a zoo,’ said Maxwell, who still had his doubts.

‘What’s
a zoo?’

‘A
place where you keep a collection of interesting animals. People pay-to come
and view them and—’ Maxwell halted before he reached full flow. Zoos were
perhaps not the best idea in the old world.

‘Pay?’
Dave laughed. ‘Pay to see my animals? And what if some visitor steps up to bid
me good morning and a venomous cobra darts out of my buttonhole and sinks its
fangs into him?’

Maxwell
rocked backwards with such vigour that he nearly fell off his chair. ‘That sort
of thing doesn’t happen. Does it?’

‘No.
Not as such. It probably depends on the season and where I happen to be. It is
summer in MacGuffin, hence the squirrels and the sparrow hawk.’

‘Kestrel,’
said Maxwell.

‘Kestrel
then.’

‘So
what about the okapi?’

Dave
now shrugged. ‘The exception that proves the rule, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps.’
Maxwell rose and stretched. Enough was quite enough. ‘I think I’ll just take a
little stroll around the village,’ he said.

‘But
what about the job? You wanted a job.’

‘I’ll
get back to you on that.’

‘No,
really, please don’t go.’

‘Things
to do, people to see.’ Maxwell snatched his cloak from the cloakhook and made
hastily through the door and into the little lane beyond.

At
least he thought it was
his
cloak.

A
moment passed, the way some of them do. Then Dave heard a startled scream,
followed by a great trampling sound and the distinctive baritone snort of a
Tibetan yak.

‘There,’
said Dave to the squirrels. ‘Let’s hear him talk his way out of that.’

As he
spoke, a rabbit appeared from his right trouser cuff, twitched its nose
nervously and scurried away to take shelter beneath the box ottoman.

Where a
fox ate it.

8

Cocking a snook at the now
traditional, ‘Where am I?’ Maxwell awoke from unconsciousness with a cry
of,
‘Dave, you
BASTARD!’
This cried, he blinked his eyes and asked,
‘Where am I?’

He was
lying on a couch. It was an over-stuffed leather jobbie of the type once
favoured by psychiatrists, for putting patients at their ease, while they were
relieved of their cares and cash.. This stood in a pleasant enough room, about
as broad as it was long, and bathed in the red sunlight which washed through
two high arched casement windows.

This
room owned to a multitude of glass-fronted showcases containing many stuffed
beasts: rabbits, hares, minks, ducks, geese and others arranged in tableaux of
imaginative depravity.

Maxwell,
as a lad, had, as most lads have, pored breathlessly over a many-thumbed copy
of the
Karma Sutra.
And he might well have lingered long in appreciation
of the taxidermist’s skill at depicting such wonders as a ferret ‘splitting the
bamboo’ of a toad, or an otter ‘taking tea with the parson’ in the company of
not one but three French hens, had it not been for the mind-grinder of a
headache he now possessed and the all-over nature of his aches and pains.

Maxwell
ached in the manner that only one who has recently received a sound trampling
from a Tibetan yak can.

Or
possibly one run over by an articulated lorry.

Or
crushed beneath a fall of dumbbells, which had been carelessly stacked in a
high cupboard, usually reserved for the storage of books such as the
Karma
Sutra.