Chapter Ten “The Whisper of Tiny Claws” Pretty soon, TP Enterprises had the daily feed down to a fine art. The gates opened at exactly 10am and the last bird fancier was out, bang on 11, clutching their souvenir exact replica mini-model of TP Manor, priced at a competitive £73,000,000,000. Last to leave was often the owner of the depressed person – prize mini-model in one hand, swinging a person-lead in the other. This whole business may seem like harsh treatment for being fed-up and suicidal, but, we must bear in mind that these folk are simply being good citizens by complying with the recent government statement that depressed people were now re-classified into their own special organism category with the same value as wheat. Thus, aside from being profitable, TP Enterprises was providing a valuable social service AS WELL!! This meant that they were in with a good chance of winning a Gold “Most Inspired New Enterprise” award. WELL DONE TP, old bean! TP was fond of having a quick chat with the competition winners: ‘Thanks for coming…did you have a fun time?’ ‘Oh, yeees, yeeees…Cortenpio was SO dashing in his Eagle-friendly suit and wearing his carpet slippers, he quite put all the rest to SHAME!’ ‘Yes, and the way he stretched out his neck at exactly the right moment showed impeccable timing!’ ‘He’s been practising in the garden with his pet crow, Peeswell, who he’s had since he was a baby. Peeswell’s always been ready with advice and I really don’t see how I could possibly even BE here if it weren’t for him!’ ‘So THAT’s where he got to…what sort of advice did he give, then?’ ‘Everything, really…mentioned bridges, strychnine and…you know, all the important things in life.’ Chick had laid 12 eggs, TP was delighted to note, and he stopped to have a word…although Chick could no longer speak, she could still think and communicated by tapping on the glass using “tap-on-glass language”: ‘Congratulations, Chick! 12 little ones on the way, eh?’ Chick tap, tap, tap-tapped a response which, loosely translated, meant: ‘Sod off, you evil bastard.’ ‘Yes, I agree, it does look a LOT like rain. Also, we’d better keep an eye on your diet…I’ll try and get the licence extended to twice a day feeding once the eggs hatch.’ The daily race was now Chick’s only source of food as the dead chickens on the dead chicken plants had all come alive and flown away to a special “come to life chicken” convention. Everhard, though he was seemingly none the worse for his psychotic episode, was still intent on winning Frapwelda’s favour. She continued acting coolly towards him so he decided it was time to come up with a telling scheme to warm things up a bit. He persuaded her that there was an unusual species of beer-mat growing in the centre of the front lawn and he now lay concealed behind a hedge, watching as she limped to the spot excitedly, magnifying glass at the ready. Just as she leant down to inspect the beer-mat, Evvy switched on the sprinkler system. Frappy screamed and stood rooted to the spot with her arms raised helplessly in the deluge: ‘Hold on, Frapwelda! I’ll save you!’ shouted Evvy, in his deepest voice. Scooting over to the shed, he hopped on the hover verge-trimmer and raced across the lawn: ‘QUICK! JUMP ON!’ he shouted, drawing near. Evvy watched in horror as the blades of the trimmy things neatly sliced Frapwelda’s legs off just above the ankle, rendering her instantly unconscious. With TP’s surgically skilful help, Frapwelda was soon up and about, wheeling around proudly on her jet-propelled rollerblade-feet. Everything worked out fine…Oblivious to the fact that Evvy’d been responsible, Frap was convinced that the fabled magical properties of the wild-growing beer-mat had engineered a miracle. Touched by his constant attention, Frap soon thawed towards Evvy and their relationship blossomed. The one drawback they found was when they partook of an evening stroll – Evvy just could NOT keep up. Love will always find a way, and, in no time at all, Frap had a hover-shopping caddy attached to her belt for her to merrily tow Evvy along on. Meanwhile, back at the Manor, QT was waiting in the study for TP to return from his stroll-about. TP knew this very well since the click of QT’s nails as they rapped the desk impatiently was being deafeningly broadcast around the Manor grounds via the PA system: ‘Bings! Must be important,’ said TP to himself. ‘Did I forget to forget to forget to do something I should’ve?’ He hot-footed his way to the study, raced to his desk and sat in the swivel-chair: ‘Morning QT. Did you make an appointment or is this one of those random, frequently dangerous visits?’ ‘I’ve got a bun in the oven.’ ‘Great. What time’s it ready.’ ‘There’s a bat in the cave.’ ‘Good, good. It’s ALL food.’ ‘The rabbit died.’ ‘Pop it in the pot, too.’ ‘I’m in the pudding club.’ ‘I’ll have the plum duff.’ ‘I’m pregnant.’ ‘WHAT?! How did THAT happen? You’ve been using the “roll the dice” method every day haven’t you?’ ‘I know. Would it be SO bad if we had a kittenoid?’ QT smiled weakly, head to one side, fluttering her eyelids. ‘Well it COULD bring about the destruction of the whole Manor. There was a case on the news the other day of a baby exploding in a shopping centre with the force of 67.4345668 tons of TNT.’ ‘Noooo…that was due to a genetic trait unique to the Bomb Family blood-line – very rare.’ ‘Then there’s the babies who sneak up and slit your throat when no-one’s looking.’ ‘Don’t be absurd! There were only a few hundred isolated cases, all traceable to 2 rare blood-lines…the Killer and the Serial families.’ ‘Right. We’ll just have to risk it, then. Got any ideas for names?’ ‘Quasimodo if it’s a boy, Esmeralda, a girl, Notre Dame, a thing…you?’ ‘Best to try the baby out on a few names once it’s born – the one which makes it scream the most is, according to Dr J. Goebbels’s classic, The Reich Way to Raise Children, the correct choice.’ TP was in a panic. He’d laid a paw-hand on QT’s daily swelling belly and felt some sharp edges poking out. That could only mean ONE thing, he thought…it wasn’t HIS progeny in the tum, it was pizza delivery guy’s…inside the cavern, there was a little team of mini-pizza deliverers waiting to leap out with their boxes at the ready. He KNEW it! There was only one way to be certain, he was going to have to go in and take a look. Tip-toeing up to the bedroom where QT was dozing, he popped his head in the cave and peered around. Bings! He was back in the Wind-up shuttle…once AGAIN the crafty dimension portal had tricked him…He thought he’d got the better of sneaky space door by placing sensors in the en-suite to alert him to any changes in atmospheric composition – when that hadn’t worked, he’d avoided the en-suite completely, whizzing out the bedroom window at night, instead. Such matters aside, the Wind-up shuttle had drifted around, found some dodgy planet and crash-landed. TP walked around, grumpily, not best pleased at being whiskered away from his investigating ways, to see what delights festered on the planet. Everywhere, there were large dug up mountains of earth. Peering down a hole, he could see machines busily mining. Following the tracks made by the surface machines, he followed them back to a central mother machine which let down an elevating platform next to him…so he got on. He zipped up to the machine’s head. . . .Nothing happened so he climbed off the platform and walked into the machine’s eye-socket where he found a control desk with no-one around. After a brief flick through an abandoned issue of “How to figure out what the bingo’s going on,” he surmised that the machine was a planet-seed, sent out by the Pea people from the planet Pod. The Pea people needed lots of soil for their pea-gardens and were notorious for chewing up stray planets to get hold of it. TP considered for a moment, then re-wrote the machine’s software to force it to reverse the earth-removal process and put it all back. He jetted off the planet, quite forgetting space portal issues, pleased and smug with his environmentally friendly ways…a few miles out, he turned to see the planet explode – by and by, one of the machines whizzed up, blown there by the blast, and carefully explained that TP’s tinkering with the software had instructed the mother machine to instantly convert every atom on the planet into a miniature neutron bomb then set them all off. Waving goodbye to the knowledgeable machine as it finally disintegrated, TP winced at the thought that he’d got the software all wrong and finally pin-pointed where he’d gone awry…the crucial letter of the last crucial word of his textbook in Astrophysics, Year 4, had a squashed house-fly obscuring it, thus preventing TP from learning how not to convert molecules into bombs. Ah, so it wasn’t really his fault, after ALL! The person who’d had the textbook before him, Hydro Foil, had been munching a marshmallow, dropped a crumb, the fly stuck to it, the bell went, Hydro slammed the book. Q.E.D. the person truly responsible, was the supplier of the marshmallow who TP knew to have been a certain Mr Corner Shop – well VERY GOOD, Mr Shop…NOW see what your marshmallow-spreading ways have led to!? Well, that was THAT problem solved, It just remained to work out what to do about finding another portal to hop through.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 17:50:41 +0000
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