Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (33 page)

UTHERTON'S SEEDLING

Formerly the preserve of the Brown Snout, Uthertons were better croppers. Fruit small, flushed, eye russetted as in the Brown Snout. Biennial, flowers early to mid-season, triploid.

UXE, PATIENCE

Patience Uxe (1689—1780) was arguably the world's finest stumpwork embroiderer. Her masterpiece counterpane, Medlars Rampant, was bought by the National Trust, but is too fragile for it to be displayed.

WILLIAM TELL WEAPONS MEET

The colloquial name for an irregularly scheduled airwar game called, at its launch in 1954, the US Air Force World Wide Weapons Meet, a name inspired by the World Series baseball championship. The competitors in this World contest were: the (USAF) Air Defense Command and the (USAF) Air Training Command. There were five more meets till, in 1979, a non-US competitor took part (a Canadian Forces CF-101 unit). According to Patrick J. McGee (SMSgt, USAF (Ret), "During the 1988 meet a total of twelve teams from TAC, ANG, PACAF, USAFE, Alaskan Air Command and Canada participated in on of the most competitive meets ever." In 1996, the games were advertised as the William Tell Weapons Meet, after the USA* marksman famed in (*ed circles) for shooting holes in cheese, W. T. Weapons.
*classified

Wwillmne A. A. A. -
see
Johnson, Steve; Iowa, Wri

"The Onuspedia (some ripped-out excerpts)" copyright  © Anna Tambour, is original to this collection.

The Purloined Tome

Simon's curiosities

Simon Bunche clacked happily with his number 12s. An hour ago he had clicked, and his latest pattern and pic (
Badger Love: Front: Two badgers, one holding a bouquet of roses at the door of an English thatched cottage with country garden. Back: The badgers from behind in a valentine of roses. A dolman-shouldered cardigan with full-length sleeves. Poly/mohair Sizes 12-44
) winged its electronic way to Cindy Claymore at the Knitting Shack, Kansas City, Missouri. 'Luv this!' Cindy wung back, though it must have been two o'clock in her morning.

'Winnie, stop that!'

Winnie pulled another stitch from his needles.

'I'll drown you!'

She turned on her motor. He laid aside his knitting and either he picked her up or she climbed into his arms. She nibbled an ear as he carried her to his kitchen.

'Tea?'

He filled the electric kettle and took the milk out of the fridge and just as he was washing her milk bowl,

Brrr, went the telephone.

Both the part of Simon who was Simon Bunche, the uncelebrated and poorly paid International-Conflict-Resolution-Museum-Archives curator, and the part of Simon who was 'Winsome Layne', the becoming-quite-known-internationally (and beginning to make real money) British knitwear designer, found it impossible to let a
brrr
ing telephone ring. Neither, however, liked phones enough to use them properly so as to know who rings without committing oneself.

Simon dropped the bowl in the sink, its milk moustache needing further scrub, grabbed a dishcloth and rushed to the lounge, to Winnie's disgust.

'Mm?' He cradled the heavy antique handset against his neck whilst he dried his hands.

'Simon?'

'Mm.'

'Simon? ... Simon, it's Giles ... Simon? Giles Moneyfeather.'

'Sorry.' He rubbed the back of his neck. 'So many Gileses.'

'Wanna down a few jars?'

'On a Wednesday night?'

'What should that matter?'

A horse looking out the half-door of a cottage? Or chipmunks sharing a pie on the ledge?

'You there?'

'It's raining.'

The phone emitted a sharp
hech hech
. Giles, laughing?

'I rather don't think tonight's—'

'I've got something for
you
.' Giles was persistent, if not perceptive. 'Can't talk about it here.'

The part of Simon that was the curator, the bored putrid curator who worked stiff with cold all winter and stinking of naphthalene all year, and who had, in times past, spouted the most ludicrous crap to anyone naïve enough to be an audience, suddenly remembered that audience: Giles Moneyfeather. Simon remembered Giles like he remembered the time when he was ten and explored the family toaster with a fork. And the next toaster ...

Must've been a cat once.
'The Gout?'

'The Pig and Pepper?'

'Aye.'

Winnie heard Simon perform his silly pre-exit rituals, but she didn't go to the door to say goodbye.

He left, entirely forgetting her, but she thought about him as she cleaned herself. That was his only carton of milk she'd swiped. Unfortunately, half its contents slid under the fridge.

Simon turned up his collar. This was no weather for an umbrella. The rain had become a gale.

~

In the Pig and Pepper

Even if Simon hadn't remembered Giles Moneyfeather's face, he would have been able to guess. Moneyfeather stood out from the genial fug in the Pig and Pepper, like a burr on a custard tart.

Two Guinnesses awaited at a cosy table for two. One glass sat in front of Giles, untouched. Giles waved at Simon and pointed to the other Guinness. Never did a glass of anything look so medicinal.

'Ahh,' said Simon as he sat on the edge of his chair and took his dose. 'What's up?'

'Open it.' Giles pushed over the sodden lump.

Simon sat back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. 'Please.'

Giles shoved his beer aside, reached across the table and untied the cords. The newspaper was pulp that he shovelled off with his palm, revealing the book.

Richly covered, broken-backed, redolent of wet sheep, it made Simon think of a cut-down king on a battlefield—dying but quite capable of getting others killed for the glory of his last moments. This book was as magnificent and sinister. 'Where'd you get this?'

'Open it.'

'You open it.'

Cautiously, Giles opened to a random page, and then another. The book was as wet as a seal, but not waterproof. Each page making a sucking sound upon separation from its neighbour. A drop of water fell from Giles's wrist upon a line of text, and words swirled into muddy obscurity.

He slammed it shut.

'On second thought,' Simon laughed, not a cheery sound. 'Put baby to bed.'

Giles whisked it into his lap.

Simon raised an eyebrow.

~

'And you thought,' Simon rumbled in a voice like rubber balls hitting a padded wall, 'since you didn't see the client's water bottle nor see him spill it all over what you claim is one of the most important pieces in your ruddy library's collection—a
cookbook
,' he sneered.

'And furthermore, since you didn't notice him pick it up to supposedly wipe on his jacket or something equally barmy, but you did raise your ears at the sound of it cracking its spine to eleven blighted Mondays on that priceless marble floor ...

'You
thought
that you, a state-of-the-art-as-original-sin librarian, a resource even easier to delete than to pulp ... Don't look at me like that. I can face reality! You thought that this transgression would simply be their excuse, hah hah. As if they need one. That you would simply be ...' Simon pitched his chair so forward on its two front legs, it tried to flip him out. 'You're dead right, of course. But you know that. Yet
you
thought you'd just steal this and live the good life? A life that
I, me, myself
have never had the pleasure of?'

He settled his chair back on all fours, too gently. 'You
thought
, did you ... that you'd horn in on my connections, and
escape
?'

The naked little place in the crown of Giles' head stared at Simon. 'I wouldn't call it "horn in".'

'Are you mad?'

'But you
said
.'

'I'm. No.' Simon plucked an ingrown hair out of the back of his left hand. 'Fence. I would
never
take something from a collection, whatever you might have understood to be true in your, you must admit,
delusional
mind.'

'But you said, that night at the party—'

'I'm a
curator
.'

'But—'

'Listen,' Simon grabbed Giles by the pea-coat's lapel. 'Four letters: CCTV.'

'Cameras?'

'We're only the most photographed people on the planet, and you don't think that you —'

'They've never—'

'They don't generally announce.'

'The ... library?'

Simon Bunche's upper eyelids stretched all the way down over his eyes.

Giles gasped. 'You're not leaving?'

Simon pulled some notes from his back pocket and dropped them on the table.

'Si
down
, man! You trying to make a scene?'

Giles subsided, though the crowd had no interest in them, and the only person close enough to hear was a woman of a certain age sitting with a glass of bitters.

'First, Moneyfeather, from the goodness of my heart, and because I have a weakness for fools, I'll help you.'

'Oh, Simon!'

'Take your hand off me.'

Giles recoiled and reached for his backpack.

'Stop that! and take that bloody cash before they think its for one all round.'

A half-sob escaped Giles as he pocketed the money without looking at it. 'I was just getting a pen and—'

'Wanna listen, or fartarse till they get you?'

~

'Nice jersey, Moneyfeather,' Simon said with a wrapping-up briskness. 'Make it yourself?'

Giles coloured. 'Certainly not.'

'Well?'

'I'm off then.'

But Simon was already busy nursing the other glass of Guinness.

~

As he walked, 'I'm a professional,' Giles repeated, along with the rest of the catechism that he had to remember 'alive or dead', as Simon had stressed.

The book nestled against his belly, like a cat come in from the rain.

As he came to the intersection before his block of flats, he realised that he was no longer repeating any words, but humming
The Internationale
. In the glare of streetlights, he raised his hand, waved, and said in a tone that he would like to be remembered as both brave and stoic: 'All for the best.'

But when he ran up the stairs, his two-at-a-time pace was distinctly un-stoic. In the privacy of his flat, he dumped his pack, and giggled.

~

Secrets of the Theta Alphans

Back in the crowded Pig and Pepper, Simon Bunche took a pen out of his pocket and wrote on a coaster: 'Hedgehog love?'

He pocketed the coaster and motioned for another beer. Though you would never know it (and Giles Moneyfeather wouldn't think it possible) cool, granite-chinned Simon Bunche was close to tears, awash with emotions.

If I hadn't found TA ...

~

The Simon Bunche who had braggadocio'd into Moneyfeather's naïve ear the evening of the futile librarians' revolt, and recklessly
again
, in the Gout over a year ago—that Simon Bunche made this Simon Bunche thirsty. As he drank, he half-pitied Giles, and half felt some other emotion that he identified as 'T'.

It is true that as long as he'd worked in the International Conflict Resolution Museum, he'd heard rumours and was sure that his predecessor, for instance, had engaged himself, on behalf of international persons of high standing and less than public-good intent. It is also true that Simon Bunche had been tempted, especially by what he heard of the Russians—mad history buffs, collecting fanatics, Anglophones. And they spend money like Caligula drank blood. They were buying up England as if Russia is the little island and they were forced offshore. Nothing they wanted could ever be traced to a curator because they'd always
send it home.

It is an indisputable fact that Simon Bunche began to dream of the life he could have—and that the week before the librarians' revolt, he was sure that he was approached. It was the Friends of the Museum pre-opening party for the new Crimean Conflict-Resolution Exhibit and he was 'invited' as the curator. He was standing in front of one of the cases when a large-breasted woman sidled up.

'Your eggz hebeshun, no?'

'In a manner of speaking.'

'Duh zyou zhing zhadz bluudh on zhad boogh?'

As the book had a bullet hole in the middle of it, the likelihood was rather enormous, but this sort of exhibit item always excited people, 'attracted custom'.

'Possibly,' he said.

He was just turning away when she touched his arm. 'Haah view ever zhoud ov vorging in zhih privad zhegtor?'

He fled, and cursed himself the next day as he froze and stunk in the dungeon of the Museum.

Giles Moneyfeather had been a blessed outlet, he had thought on the first occasion they had met. By the second time, in the Gout, Simon Bunche was in a bad way. He attended Friends functions willingly. He frequented the Russian Tearoom in Belgrave Square and sat with a cup of tea (despite the expense), flouting his Museum security badge. And the day of the evening at the Gout, he had taken his lunch hour outside the Russian consulate (wearing his identification), and brazenly stared at the upper windows whilst he slowly ate a Family-Size bar of Cadbury's Rum and Raisin chocolate. Nothing. It was as if the offer had never happened. Yet the stories he kept hearing! And Nigel Cramme, his predecessor, was no longer on the public service list—he was definitely working for connoisseurs.

Giles was on the point of dropping a note accidentally purposely in the foyer of the Russian consulate, when one day upon arriving home, he pulled a parcel from his postbox addressed to 'Cilla Hopgood, 1A Fimbley Mansions, Earls Court'. He knew Cilla. As she lived in the flat above him, her life was an open book—not the sort he read in public. He took the parcel down to his flat. It contained a hand-embroidered tablecloth. The accompanying brochure talked of the embroiderers: 'You can help rehabilitate ...'

That night Simon had two dreadfully vivid nightmares. In the first, he was bent over, knitting, on a foot-smelling blanket on a lower bunk. In the second nightmare, he was living in Australia.

The next day he joined Temptation Anonymous.

The Theta Alphan Society does not advertise, and the word of mouth that it spreads by is quite exclusive. Only public servants belong to it; only those in positions of trust. Pay has nothing to do with trust, so Simon Bunche was embraced, 'in the nick of time' as the TA joke goes. They, of course, don't call themselves Temptation Anonymous any more than they would do anything sordid like
admit
anything. Theta Alphans find all that Temperance Society hoodoo—pledges, confessions, holding damp hands, little red books—distasteful. And as for Plans and Promises, should anything about
them
need be said?

Theta Alphans re-channel their considerable talents to maximise avoidance of total-percentage-point risk whilst minimising subsequential (whether referential or differential) impactive imbalances. One Fellow is the builder of three model ships now in the Conflict-Resolution Museum. Another disciplines trees. Several hunt lepidopterae. Simon found knitting and never looked back.

Until tonight.

As he drank, he wondered how Moneyfeather would go.

How would I go? I'm fluent in Russian.
'Great travel language,' Simon sniggered. 'Kak Moneyfeather's fluency? Early English.'

If I had never found ...

He wobbled out with the closing-time crowd. The cold hit him like a fish to the face, and his nose instantly ran.

'Life is good,' he yelled. The night was brisk, his step lively, his handkerchief large. The more he thought about life, the better he felt.