Mr Ian Corby would fain have passed the night in Dogging Woods, his departure thence being precipitated by nothing more than a very nice reluctance to offend the dignity of that pair of new acquaintances. Alas! Upon his return to town, an incident befell him, which greatly offended his dignity. —
Ian Corby, Dogging Wood
As he flapped over the louche quartier of Montpelier, a light breeze bore up to him the bruited din of posh slummers shouting and spitting and swearing in the garden of the Fruit & Nut Flake in Richmond Road. He bethought himself then that he might see if he could catch last orders, and swooped down, alighting rather clumsily in the children’s sandpit of that place. An elderly gentleman was just then adjusting his dress, having but a moment since delivered himself of the golden shower now draining away into the shifting dunes of that imponderable vastness. —
The Fruit & Nut Flake, Montpelier
History records the rogue who thus piddled on the sands as having been an utterly sociopathic and egregiously bibulous oenophile called Francis MacMahon, whose uncanny resemblance to Emperor Napoleon III was entirely of a piece with his tendency to nervous prostration in the back of the sedan garaged at the top of Snandrews Road, in which he had made his home. Mr Francis MacMahon scratched a living retailing certain choice Maghrebi gums and resins to, and generally taking advantage of, the schizophrenics, manic-depressives and paranoiacs lurking on the back terrace of the Old Disgrace, another establishment just down the road from the Fruit & Nut Flake. —
Snandrews Road, Francis MacMahon
Mr Ian Corby’s gaoler, being eventually bid to depart by his hosts, quit the purlieus of the Fruit & Nut Flake and staggered uphill. Mr Francis MacMahon was very much under the burden of his inebriation on his ascent, and was once or twice on this account put to the necessity of halting in order to perform oblations at the various shrines of the goddess Emesis, which her worshippers maintained about the place. Reaching, a short way before the summit of that sacred mount, the lock-up aforesaid, Mr Francis MacMahon heaved upwards the great aluminium shutter, which the bilious light of the street illuminations disclosed to have been adorned with sundry revolutionary proclamations. Within that grotto, a few sticks of wood effect formica in the semblance of furniture, for the most part blistering, clung like party gooseberries to the mouldy cement walls, to which they were in any case attached by filaments of cobweb, and ceded the centre ground to that very sedan or jalopy in which Mr Francis MacMahon was pleased to make his bed. This latter was up on bricks, and ever so dusty. —
Emesis, The sedan
“This be the creetur,” said Mr Francis MacMahon to the two persons who now presented themselves, “aber oy durstn’t let thee ’ave ’ee too cheap, hinasmuch has ’ee be a dorking bird that ’ath conned some wocabulary, withal hit be honely hin zum barbarous doyolek, vich no kristen gentleman zuch as thyzelves need trouble theyzelves to conn hin thy turn.” —
Doyolek
“Yeahyeahyeahyeah!” replied one of the two gentlemen with an access of enthusiasm, by this means disclosing himself as Dr Mark Wankstain. “Like what does he like want like?” he added, addressing his companion, who proved to be His Excellency, the truffle hound Mr Crass Cheseham. —
Dr Mark Wankstain, Mr Crass Cheseham
Having said which, he lifted a paw, and betwixt a surprisingly well-manicured thumb and forefinger very contemptuously rubbed an imaginary particle of something or other. Dr Mark Wankstain momentarily considered his colleague’s gesture. Evidently unable to resolve his perplexity by this means, he turned his attention once again to the genius of the place. —
Dr Mark Wankstain
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