Short stories

PLETHORA OF ONION MEN

Detective Chief Superintendent Windscale stepped out of the Overweight Policemen's Clinic three pounds lighter, with freshly hosed bowels, pink organs, and a craving for fig biscuits. At 53 stone he was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the heaviest policeman of all time. His deep breaths were full of the smells of distant restaurants, some merely imagined. Having grazed briefly in Tesco's he took his bumper box of fig biscuits to an empty policehorse stall and lay on his back to eat. The heads of peckish policehorses hummered above him, slobbersomely. After 81 packets, or 1,944 fig biscuits, Windscale still refused to share a biscuit with them. They ran out of slobber and whinnied sourly. "I thought I'd find you in here," said Commissioner Claeverlock, a sudden ginger presence who summoned Windscale slowly from a figgy dream about a planet made of flesh, a pudgy planet, nipples and cracks featuring on its landscape, gophers snug in its folds. A brief burst on the bagpipes woke up Windscale properly. He blew his nose into his hand and wiped it on straw already viscous with horse slobber. "There's someone gadding aboot a-murdering French onion men," said the Commissioner, his bagpipes providing a sad whining soundtrack to this dourly spoken information. Windscale sat up, feeling a mush of fig biscuits slop into his freshly cleaned lower bowel. A splendid feeling! His small mouth smiled. How well he felt, and best of all - now, at last, a proper juicy case to solve! He gave one horse a biscuit, but not the others. It was more cruel that way. French onion men had been familiar figures on the British scene for 50 years, bicycling Frenchly in gallic garb along zillions of miles of British lanes and highways, their favourite vegetable dangling from their handlebars. Now, in one week, 12 French onion men had been found bludgeoned to death. A single hard blow to the forehead in every case. "A Zulu knobkerrie is the likeliest murder weapon," muttered Windscale to Sergeant Pwllheli as he read the reports by the window light of his office in Scotland Yard. Then he rummaged in his drawer to find a knobkerrie, found one, and hit the Sergeant on the forehead with it with all the sudden violence a 53 stone policeman can muster when thinking himself into the mind of an psychotic killer of onion men. "Sergeant Pwllheli has had an accident," he told W.P.C. Ibbiterly, who humphed - she'd written letters of condolence to the families of 6 of Windscale's sergeants in this year alone. Windscale and Ibbiterly loomed over the dead body, studying its wound. "Looks like a mark left by a Zulu knobkerrie to me, Chief." Windscale stepped back to the window with an air of innocence which, if he'd seen in in anyone else, would have caused him to arrest, if not execute on the spot. "Oh, Chief!" sighed W.P.C. Ibbiterly, all flattersomely fluttering. It was the knobkerrie flattering her: Windscale had hidden it down his trousers. It wagged as he coughed. "Ehem....." blushed Windscale, "Get down to the Mr Big shop and fetch me a French onion man's outfit.... Oh, and a bicycle." "Yes, Chief!" And she left the room in sexified mood, dragging the late Sergeant Pwllheli behind her towards the Welsh hillside where he would eventually rest. Usually incurious dairy cows raised their eyes for once at a sight which played havoc in their milky consciousness. Windscale, dressed as a French onion man, was bicycling down an English lane singing Parisian boulevadier songs puffingly at the top of his gravelsome voice, a less musical sound, it must be admitted, than the creaks of the overloaded bicycle, the tyres of which were already oval, with loose spokes busier than a fencing academy. No onions were in evidence - Windscale had eaten all 20 strings, popped the onions like Smarties. Finally, halfway down a hill, a particular cow's curiosity was rewarded by the sight of the bicycle disintegrating completely, and Windscale connecting with the ground like a meteorite made of soft cheese hitting the north face of the Eiger. He used up all but three of his thesaurus of swearwords as he rolled down the hill, but landed with policeman's good luck at a crossroads at the foot of the very war memorial where the last French onion man's body had been found. Windscale sat going "Haw, haw, haw!" in a lewd French manner in the hope of attracting the murderer into his trap. But his onion breath merely caused three villagers to faint. Then it began to rain. Looking across the fields from the war memorial he saw a modest stately home. Just the sort of place where, amid the suits of armour and generalized snoot, a Zulu knobkerrie might hang beside the portrait of some ancestor who'd limped home alone from Isandhlwana. Windscale kicked down several stone walls as he ambled a tripsome French saunter across the cowpatted fields. "Excusey-mois, madame - vulez vous ein onion?" and he held up a dripping one he'd just coughed up. The old lady in the Edwardian dress who answered the door smiled warmly. "Please come in, Mr French onion man," she said. "Il pleut mucho terrible." "Not bleeding arf," said Windscale. But as he stepped in, shaking the raindrips from his hooped shirt, he was hit hard on the forehead by a Zulu knobkerrie, and awoke 11 hours later, nude, on a snooker table. For a while he was not fully sensible, confused that his groans were being replied to by the clack-clacking beaks of strange alien birds. Then he realized the clack-clacks were snooker balls, kept on the move by the twitching of his spare tyres. He sat up and scratched a gut drenched in moonlight. While standing at the window, devouring the contents of a fruitbowl, he watched the old lady in the Edwardian dress busy in her garden. She was well on in the task of digging a hole enormous enough to take the gigantic undercover policehog. Windscale donned a Conquistador's helmet he found hanging on the wall, and carried the pistol he always kept hidden between the cheeks of his buttocks. He went outside. His unhealthy white rolling flesh was whiter than ever in the moonlight, his moles like a raddle of machine-gun bulletholes. The old lady screamed as he loomed, screamed again as Windscale shot the raised spade out of her hands, and for a third time as the big toe of the huge nude man nudged her into the depths of the hole she'd just dug. Lights went on in the house. Servants ran in their dressing-gowns across the lawn. But Windscale shot them all before they got far. "I am the police," he said into his own grave. "I arrest you on a charge of murdering 12 French onion men." A sweet old voice: "You mean you,re not French?" Windscale was so insulted he put extra bullets into a winged butler. "Not an onion man?" "I am Detective Chief Superintendent Windscale of Scotland Yard. And you,re nicked, you old witch!" "But I had to do it, for the sake of the country. For mankind! Had to! I,ve never broken the law in my life! Whureeeeeeeeeeeee! Whureeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" Windscale frog-marched his wrinkled-up octogenarian prisoner into her extensive kitchens and ordered her to make a full confession while he, dressed in 3 tea-towels, consumed the contents of her refrigerator. "It was my son Dennis's fault," she sobbed. "He started a religion based on the conviction that the nose of the late French leader General de Gaulle was, in itself and without regard to the personage it was attached to, the Second Coming." Windscale wiped mayonnaise from his vexed lips and gave her a sceptical policeman's eye. His belch obscured the commencement of her continuing blither. "....and somehow Dennis's altogether lewd occult ceremonies conjured up not De Gaulle's nose, but these French onion men instead." "Murhf hurhf ffffff," said Windscale, mouth jammed with a bolus of chickenmeat. "They keep coming through from OEthe other side,. More and more of them. Whureeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" Windscale was throwing melonballs at her now, irritated by her piffling psychotic ramblings. But suddenly what was unmistakably the shape of a French onion man, avec bicyclette, passed across the kitchen window. The old lady was out of her chair in a doddering flash. Windscale followed after without haste, hoping to catch her in the act. And there she was! Knobkerrie in hand, triumphant, standing over a sprawled French onion man, his shocked eyes staring into a rosemary bush, his bicycle wheels spinning to a dead halt. "If you,ll only come to the hide, Chief Superintendent, I can prove everything to you. Please come! PLEASE!" Windscale acquiesced with a slow blink of his sceptical policemen's eyes. A sandwich in each hand, he followed his suspect down the garden, his toes slimed with dew. The old lady, introducing herself as Lady Damrymple-Ffoots of the Hertfordshire Damrymples and the Rutland Ffoots, shoehorned Windscale into her tiny wooden hide-hut with a rusty rake. He plopped in swearsomely, she following, wiggling in with an old girl's cackle, taking up a position between his legs, her bustle jammed tightly against his private parts, a sensation which brought back teenage memories for Windscale. Lady Damrymple-Ffoots pushed open the hide's flap and gave them a starry view of a slice of the garden, with the swimming pool, full of an alternative night, lying stagnantly close by. Like an elephant in a cigar box, Windscale scraped plaque from between his teeth with a trowel and waited with bored policemanishness. How many sleeps had he wasted on similar surveillances! "Wait, you,ll see!" said his elderly companion. 37 minutes later, with dawn brightening beyond the trees, something emerged dripping from the swimming pool pushing a bicycle. Lady Damrymple-Ffoots nipped out and knobkerrie-coshed whatever it was. She brought back a beret as trophy of her kill. "There,ll be another in a little while," she said, lips a-quiver just as they a-quivered on her honeymoon morning, July 3rd 1928. By 8.30 some 18 French onion men had emerged from the swimming pool, only to be done in by the sprightly aristo. Windscale then broke out of the hide, nigh-on convinced, wobbling his jowls in disbelief at the hooped-shirted carnage sprawled inelegantly in the tweeting daylight on the emeraldness of that close-clipped English lawn. "Some nights there's as many as 50," said the expert. "If I don,t bash them all, I have to go out into the world looking for them, sometimes as far as Basingstoke. You understand, Chief Superintendent. I mean, this sort of thing, it could undermine the entire British way of life. The onions, you know, if you eat any you turn French." Panicked, Windscale leant over the mysterious swimming pool and coughed vigorously. Two onions came up, but no more. "I,ve eaten five!" he cried. "Haw, haw, haw!" This was a genuine haw-haw-haw. Lady Damrymple-Ffoots knobkerried him and he awoke at noon, strapped to the snooker table, talking about his emotional life with a French intensity in raffish Provencal brogue. Lady Damrymple-Ffoots was gently coming his pubic hair. "I did this for Dennis," she explained. "You can be my new Dennis when you get over your Frenchness. He was too French for his own good. I had to kill him, didn,t I, Chief Superintendent? Tell me I did the right thing! And his Druid friends. They,re all in the pool, weighted down with saucepans. Whureeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee." When Windscale returned to full Englishness he arrested the dear old lady, handcuffed her to a chandelier, where her wrinkles were greatly multiplied reflectionsomely, and phoned for the local constables to attend to the dangling miscreant. He then, though it was a nippy May day, dived into the pool and pulled its plug. As the green be-frogged water sucked away down his hippopotamic body, other bodies came to light. Dennis, a saucepan around his fleshless neck, and similarly saucepan-strung green-bearded Druids, eyeless in algaed robes, slopped hideously onto the grubby floor of the emptied pool. And there, shimmering in one corner, was the unholy portal to OEthe other side,, opened by the misguided religiosity of a mind-bent youth, from whence French onion men came on an occult mission. Windscale gave orders that two special constables armed with knobkerries were to be stationed outside the portal every night for the rest of time, and to brain anyone who came through. Then, swathed in a policehorse's blanket and an onion man's beret askance on his brutal fat head, Windscale plode away from the scene. Finding a colossal statue of General De Gaulle in the grounds, he threw pebbles at its nose until he was too exhausted to continue. He confiscated the food of some nearby picknickers, but in trying to explain to them about the case of Lady Damrymple-Ffoots and the French onion men, he gave himself a sceptical policeman's eye and scratched under the policehorse blanket with a grimace so monstrously English that it would,ve tingled Cromwell's penis at its root.