Okay, here it is, the final part of the story. After all these months and months of setting aside an evening or a Sunday afternoon here and there, I’ve completed a first draft. This part’s much longer than usual, as it couldn’t really be in two parts.
Note: Bea, Abraham’s actress wife, appears under another name earlier in the story. I’ve changed it for reasons I don’t care to explain, but she’s now called Bea. Sorry for any confusion.
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PART 19
Everyone was staring at the Tiddley Om Pom Pom. Gert looked delighted.
“It’s a rubber duck!”
“A red rubber duck,” Sherman added, as if that made all the difference. Our heroes were aghast. They had seen many rubber ducks in their time, but never a red one.
“Yes, it’s a red rubber duck. To the matter at hand. We demand your unconditional surrender.”
“Can I have a look at the duck?”
“No.”
“We might surrender if you let us take a look at the duck.”
Maximilian, who had been shifting nervously from foot to foot, started to consider, but his companion wasn’t having any of it.
“We demand your unconditional surrender.”
She was not joking, Lester thought. Lester had seen her before, somewhere, one of those faces you remember from your childhood, from a Sunday afternoon. They said that she, Abraham’s former wife, used to be an actress. Maybe she had been in a film he’d watched as a kid. She had the kind of face for a film, Lester thought. The grand old sort of film, the kind they never made any more, and probably should never have made. The old-school epic, where five thousand extras were dressed in togas, on a marbled set the size of Gloucestershire. Yes, that’s where he had seen her before.
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Gert loved a lock-in.
There had been many in the Moon over the years. Gert and the turtles, after a jazz night, maybe a Kurt Cobain too. Lifting ales off the tables, spoiling the latest movies, listening to old journeys on the road. The bar staff would staff – at least, one or two of them would – and maybe they would sing an old song or two until the sun came up.
Perhaps, this time, the sun would never come up.
“We want your surrender. Your unconditional surrender,” the woman said again.
“What are your conditions?” Maximilian asked, meaning well. His companion looked at him menacingly.
“Unconditional surrender.”
Gert was feeling brave. “What happens if we don’t surrender? Yeah? Bet you didn’t think about that.”
“We kill you.”
Janey, warily, weighed up the options. “So, Bea, what happens if we do surrender? Without any strings? No pulleys.”
“Those that can play an instrument will join the band, as humble players.”
“And those that can’t?”
“We will kill them.”
Gert, too, considered his options. “So that’s… death or death.”
“Right.”
“No euphemisms? No evil mincing of words? You’re not going to take care of us, or feed us to the fishes, or help us fall off the bow?”
“No, we will kill you.”
“Oh.” Bea was not being helpful. You always had a chance, Gert reckoned, if the bad guys wanted you to deal with you, or take dispose of you. There was usually an out then. Not so much of an escape if they were prepared to say it up front. Nonetheless, he admired her honesty.
“Here’s what we will do. Maximilian, stop playing with that.” Maximilian stopped tweaking the duck’s beak, and went back to nervously twitching his feet. “You guys are going to surrender, and then we’ll get back to taking over the world. Everybody alright with that?”
“Not really. How about we don’t surrender?”
“Yeah. You haven’t even told us what happened to Abraham.”
“We need closure.”
Bea was clearly impatient to rule the world. “Closure? You’ll get closure when you’re dead.”
“No, we won’t,” Lester pointed out, cleverly, “We won’t exist, so we won’t get anything, because…”
“Lester.”
“Sorry.”
Bea thought for a second. “You know what, I’ll tell you.”
Maximilian looked horrified. “Bea, we agreed not to do any triumphant storytelling, remember? That’s how bad guys lose. They tell their story, giving the good guys time to-”
“Are you saying we’re the bad guys?”
“No, I’m just-”
“Because we’re not the bad guys. We’re the good guys.”
“Ok, sure-”
“And another thing – there ain’t such a thing as bad guys. No-one really wakes up in the morning and says ‘Gee, I’m gonna do bad things today!’ They always think they’re on the goody-goody team. Fighting for what’s right. And what’s right is music hall, not jazz. Remember that.”
“Ok, if you say so-”
“And another thing – if we have to tell the story, you can do it. I’ll go about redecorating. This place needs a lick of paint before we can make it into a music hall.”
“A WHAT!?”
“A music hall, Pete. We’re turning this into a music hall.”
“The Moon On The Hill, a music hall? This ain’t ever gonna be no music hall, Bea. Jazz running through the plumbing and the pipelines. Could no more be no music hall than the Albert Hall could be a jungle safari park.”
“We’ll see about that. Once I’ve got the old-timey piano in here, one or two Cockneys serving eels, place will be more vaudeville than olden day Bethnal Green.”
“Damn vaudeville!”
It was Bea’s turn to look shocked. “Yeah, well… Paul. Pixar Paul. They no longer call you that, do they? Pixar Paul, the man who has never seen a Pixar movie. Now he’s seen a Pixar movie and he’s just plain old Pete.”
Pixar Paul, to everyone’s surprise, smiled, but said nothing. Bea continued.
“You know how I got here, right?”
The group shook their heads.
“Ugh. Aren’t you meant to be investigating? Which of you is the lead investigator anyway? I lost track. Was it you, Gert?”
Gert nodded, but Sherman cut across him.
“No ma’am, the lead investigator is me, Bradley Alan Sherman.”
“Right. Stop grinning. That suit doesn’t suit you. Actually, it does, because it’s terrible.”
Sherman’s smile frayed at the edges.
“I guess you can’t be any worse than this drunk here,” she waved disdainfully at Sherman. “I’m glad they didn’t get a real detective in. Made life a whole lot easier.”
Gert and Sherman suddenly found themselves on the same side.
“Anyway, where was I? Oh right, I’ll tell you how I got here, then Maximilian here can confess to everything. All goes back to our escape from the U.S. Of A. I’d got Communist fever. I wanted to give up my property, get to Cuba, live my life in a Socialist utopia. Set up me and Abe in our own little house – well, the State’s own little house – and live a quiet life away from the capitalist menace. Abraham was a sweet guy. An ultra-capitalist, but goes over to the other side, just for me.
“So we find ourselves a boat in Miami. We get in, Abe’s dressed as President Kennedy – long story-”
“We’ve heard it,” Gert said.
“Sure. Anyway, we get in this boat. Rickety wooden thing, rocked a lot. The motor got us halfway to Cuba before the Feds found us. CIA, FBI, every 3-letter acronym you’ve ever heard, all chasing JFK and the actress. There’s a joke in that somewhere. But we’re there in the little wooden boat. In front of us, parked in the way, is the big US Navy air carrier. A sailor’s shouting through a megaphone at us to give up. Not as if we had any choice really, bit like you guys now. To the right there’s the FBI frigate, guns pointed up in the air in a big formal salute, warning us to hand ourselves over or else. To the left the CIA in its patrol boat, telling us to give in. And behind is the coastguard. They’re not telling us to give in, but that’s because they thought we were lost. They want to take us back to Miami and are wondering why all the big ships followed.
“So I was all ready to give up, hand us over, go to capitalist jail forever. But Abe, well he had other ideas. At that time he wasn’t a quitter. And he reaches into his bag, a little fisherman’s bag-”
“Fisherman’s bag?”
“Fishermen have bags. To keep their fish in.”
“Oh.”
“And from his fisherman’s bag he pulled out this little red rubber duck. I thought he was mad, as you’d guess. He’s gonna fight the US Navy, the CIA and the FBI with a rubber duck. Definitely chose the wrong guy, I was thinking.
“but then, this red rubber duck, he blows on it, and it grows. It grows and grows and grows. It swells like a balloon, and suddenly we were on this giant red rubber duck, bigger than all the US military ships together. It moves too. We turned round, went past the openmouthed coastguard – he didn’t know what was going on – and glided away. Didn’t make it to Cuba in the end, but who needs Cuba when you’ve got a giant rubber duck?
“The duck took us round the globe. Big cities, major ports. There’s a photo of the duck sailing past the Sydney Opera House, there’s another of it in Hong Kong harbour. You can make out two little specks on the back. That’s me and Abe. Our honeymoon, our guess. We had our honeymoon on the top of a giant red rubber duck. I didn’t think of Cuba any more. I asked Abe about the duck, what it could do, and he told me all about music hall, about the Irish sea, about the fall of vaudeville. I was hooked. Transfixed. It became my obsession: to rule the world, become the master vaudevillain of them all. And so I have.
“Anyway, I’m bored of stories. Maximilian, tell them the rest. Good detectives would solve it themselves, but that’s not who we’re dealing with. I’ll go and make a few final touches to the place.”
And with that Bea scuttled off to the corner, where she started taking down the jazz night posters.
“Ah, the victory speech! I love winning, don’t you?” Maximilian asked no-one in particular. “let me tell you how we won.
“Maximilian, how could you-”
“Silence, Gert. You are a fine drinking companion, of course, but I have no qualms for you. You never appreciated the power of ghosts, and that’s your downfall. There isn’t much to tell, really. Abraham and Bea drank with me one night at the Lady Luck, found out I could talk to the dead. They asked me whether I could talk to the not-dead but also not-undead, and of course I could.
“We got Sadie there on board too. She was a bit bored, I think, ready for an adventure. Paul – Pete – turned us down. Shame, really. Eventually, Abe changed his mind, he wasn’t interested any more. His life’s work was done.
“What you want to know is who killed him, yes?” The others nodded. “Oh, we hired someone else to do it. A malcontent. He’s a writer – tries to write great literature about dreams, but secretly composes horror stories to make money-”
“I’ve got it!” Gert leaped to his feet, “I’ve solved the mystery!”
“Who is it?” Lester asked.
“It was that writer, the one we met in the Cockatoo.”
“Are you sure?”
“He fits the description!”
Maximilian frowned. “Did this man tell you all about dream flamingoes?”
“Yes.”
“In that case you’re right. It was him.”
“Success! Solved everything! The criminal is found out. All criminals get found out in the end. No rest for the wicked, lad,” he was addressing Lester, “for they will always get found out in the end.”
Sadie was less impressed. “Gert, shouldn’t you have solved this earlier, maybe before we were all going to be killed?”
“Actually, we were pretty worried he would be caught,” Maximilian agreed. “Right after killing Abraham he stopped in the Grey Hart for a couple of hours covered in blood. Talked incessantly about life, death and the mortal condition. The pub was nearly full, too. If anyone had asked the bar staff, or the clients, or the two police support officers who were sitting at the back, our plan would have been foiled straight away Thanks, Gert.”
Sherman groaned. Janey’s hands were on her hips.
“I did my best.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“ I held interviews, I listened to Maxi’s ghost stories-”
Bea shouted from the other end of the pub. “Maximilian, get on with it.”
Maxi looked slightly offended at her rebuke. “I am getting on with it! That’s pretty much it. We should never have hired that writer. No-one knew him, so he was the obvious suspect. He went round talking about chalk outlines and body counts. He insisted on meeting the lead detective personally. He turned up to every festival or social event, whether invited or not. And when he kidnapped Pixar Paul he failed to do the job. Showed him the movie, as we asked, but then left Paul in the cinema and hoped he would starve. Not what we were looking for in a killer at all. He’s dead now, of course. Sacrificed him to appease the ghosts of music hall.”
“So that’s how I hopped out,” Paul realised, “I’ve been wondering ever since.”
“Except you didn’t really escape, did you?” Bea answered, walking closer. “You lost your identity. No longer Pixar Paul, no longer powerful.”
“That’s what you think, Bea. Just as powerful as I was, make no mistake.”
“No longer Pixar Paul,” she repeated.
“Oh, but I am.” He smiled gleefully. “I’m still Pixar Paul!”
There was a gasp from the audience.
“but Pete – Pual – Pixar Paul,” Janey asked in wonderment, “How can you still be Pixar Paul. You were Pixar because you ain’t watched Pixar. Now you’ve watched one, so you ain’t Pixar.”
“Hey, I’m Pixar Paul. I’m the guy who watched his first Pixar movie after being kidnapped, manhandled and tied to a chair. Ain’t no better story than that now, is there?”
Bea and Maximilian looked horrified.
“Pixar Paul, you’ve reinvented yourself!” Sadie ran to him and hugged him.
“That’s right, old turtle, I’m still the same Pixar Paul, but for a whole new generation. We lived together, we fight together, we die together. All’s forgiven with you.”
The turtles put their jazz hands together in a group high-five. Bea looked on, unimpressed.
“Sure, that’s great. Congratulations for having your power back. I guess that’s how you made it past Mister Porter. I was wondering about that. But it doesn’t matter much now, does it?”
“Pixar Paul’s got the power, we can fight.”
“You won’t surrender?”
“We won’t surrender.”
“Well, we’d better bring our boys in.” Bea held her hand out towards the door, and curled her fingers upwards, slowly, impressively. The door, the creaky, flimsy door, swung open, and the room grew colder and colder.
First came the sailors, still holding tar in their shimmering white caps, red eyes leering in hatred. The men with the pane of glass shuffled through the door, clumsily getting in everyone’s way. The whole crew followed. Minstrels, clowns, dames in wide dresses, the balancing elephants, Cockneys with their rhyming slang.
Lester stared at the mean crowd and they stared back, eyes as hard as hard can be. He was curiously reminded of a pack of cards, if cards could kill.
“I think you’ve met Mister Porter before, haven’t you?” Bea played the host.
The jazz hands nodded. Mister Porter doffed his cap in respect. “Pleasure to meet you again. This shall be the last time.”
“Oh, but I’ve don’t think you’ve met Harry the Champion.”
“Blimey, guv’nors, we’ve got some right ones here, aintcha?”
Harry the Champion crushed a few beer glasses with his bare hands. “Might have to get out the old cock linnet on you lot, aintcha? Lord love a duck!” He curtseyed respectfully to the Tiddley Om Pom Pom, which curtseyed back. Gert had never seen a duck curtsey before and, despite himself, was a bit enthralled.
Bea introduced a few more vaudevillains, but their faces blurred to one for the group. They had enough trouble fighting Mister Porter: they didn’t really want to face his chums too.
“So, that’s our merry crew,” Bea ended, brightly, “Maybe we can discuss your terms of surrender.”
Pixar Paul smiled again, the smile of a man with a trick up his sleeve. “I don’t think so, Bea.”
“But you’re bound to lose! Why fight it?”
“Oh, we’ve got an army of our own, you see.”
“What, this little group of you? You call that an army?” She pointed to her own battalion of ghoulish warriors.
“No, but you’re forgetting something. In all your grand fiendish plans you’ve forgotten the British spirit.”
“What British spirit? Nonsense.”
“The British spirit of – alcohol. The lure of alcohol.”
“The lure of alcohol. What on earth are you talking about?”
“Oh, I know what he’s talking about,” said Duncan from behind the bar, where he had been polishing beer tankards and setting them in rows ever since Bea and Maximilian arrived.
“What I’m talking about, Bea,” added Pixar Paul triumphantly, “it’s opening time.”
The back door of the pub crashed open.
“Here come the regulars!” yelled Gert victoriously. “They want their afternoon pint!”
Customers poured through the back door. The town’s answer to Stevie Nicks led the way, microphone at the ready, hair blowing in the wind of the door. Three Kurt Cobains stood tall, air guitars in hand, mounted on hoarse vocal stylings. Elvis quavered defiantly behind his quiff. Twenty six Beatles haircuts mopped and warbled. A shaky Bez pranced a war dance.
Gert cheered, his heroes remembered. Janey punched the air, stopping to high-five some of the Ramones. Even the town’s policeman was there: he had changed his look to a James Taylor and was now calmly surveying the scene, preparing his banjo for trouble.
“Thing is, Bea, Maximilian,” Janey explained, “The cats of this town, well, they don’t want no music hall. They want jazz. Cool smooth jazz. They want to be free again, free to be who they choose to be, and they ain’t choosing to be vaudevillains. They want to be rock stars.”
The regulars whooped at the mention of rock.
“You think you can make them all be music hall? Make them all stand in line when the creepy piano crosses the Styx? Nah, didn’t think so. We march to our own tunes in this town. When the dictators of this world come a singing they find us with earphones plugged in, drowning out all the background radiation.”
“Is that so?” enquired Bea.
“Yeah. That’s so.” She turned to Sherman. “Bralan, you’re the expert. Lead the fight.”
“Thanks, Janey. My name’s Commander Sherman, leader of the anti-vaudeville movement, and I’m here to end you.”
He stood tall, straightening his tie, and his army saluted.
“Sir!”
“Now, first thing is-”
Bea interrupted him. “I don’t want to spoil the party, Commander Sherman. I love parties as much as the rest of you. But there’s something we need to check first. That policeman over there-” she pointed to the James Taylor lookalike – “come here.”
“Ok.”
“So Mister Policeman, to buy alcohol in this country, what do people require?”
He looked slightly puzzled. “Of course, they need to be over eighteen…”
Lester was disappointed to notice that James Taylor spoke with a slight Manchester accent.
“Right,” Bea continued, “They need to be over eighteen. How do you check people are over eighteen?”
“I suppose they have to supply some sort of identification-”
“Identification. ID. You need ID to come to a bar and drink. So, regulars, valued customers, how many of you have ID?”
Suddenly there was silence. Complete and total silence. The kind of silence you might get down a mine, or at the bottom of the sea, or down a very big hole.
“I don’t have any ID.”
“I have my driving- oh no, that’s a loyalty card.”
“I’ve only got my Nandos tokens, do they count?”
One by one the regulars searched their pockets, and it turned out, one by one, that not a single one of the Moon’s army had recognised legal identification on their person.
“So, Policeman,” Bea continued, “What are you required by law to do.”
James Taylor looked first at the jazz hands, then mournfully at the floor.
“We have to ask them to vacate the premises.”
Sherman, Gert and the rest stared, horrified, as their great redeeming force trudged its way back out the back door, rejoining the late November afternoon. The policeman followed wearily, leaving Gert, Lester, Duncan, Sherman and the jazz hands to contemplate their fate.
“We’re done for,” Sadie whispered to Janey.
“Not just yet, Sadie.” She raised her voice. “Bea, Maximilian, what about your army? If our troops ain’t got ID, yours sure as hell haven’t. Mister Porter, show us your ID.”
“Oh, but of course, Ma’am.” He showed her his id.
“That’s not an ID,” Janey replied, perplexed.
“No, Ma’am, it’s an id.”
“You see,” Maximilian said, in that tone of voice people use when they are about to be terribly clever, “The Writer may not have been much use as a murderer or kidnapper, but he certainly had some use as a psychologist. He may have been known for his ego, but before we sacrificed him, we made him give us all ids. Or rather, show each ghoul its own id.”
“You swine!” Sherman roared, his composure lost in the face of impending doom.
Maximilian chuckled a bit. “We planned for this. Gert, of course, likes to spend his time in pubs, so we planned to eliminate him in a pub-”
“Was it you who created that collage?” Gert asked.
“Oh yes, that was just a bit of fun. And it allowed The Writer to do his bit about chalk outlines all over again. Anyway, we expected to find you drinking in the afternoon, so we thought we would come prepared. Simple, really, but deeply, deeply ingenious.”
For once, our heroes had to agree. They had not only been out-powered, but out-witted too.
“Duncan, do something!” Gert urged. “You’re the master of escape.”
“I’m sorry, laddie,” he replied, “That customer business was the last trick up my sleeve. I could make another denim key, but it wouldn’t be too much use now. No doors to unlock, see.”
“Do your escapes mainly involve making keys out of unsuitable material?”
“Aye.”
Bea stood smiling. “Ready to surrender?” Harry the Champion was gnawing at the tables.
Janey looked round her desperately, turning from one person to another, searching for some final chance. “Gert! Anything you can do? Any tricks or treats?”
“Not really. If I can’t solve a problem with rum, I can’t solve it with reason, neither.”
Janey turned to her old friends, the turtles, the jazz hands. “Anything left, jazz jivers?”
They shook their heads. This was over. This was it. It had been a long life, but this was it.
“Sherman?” Shake of the head.
She turned, finally, almost doubtfully, to Lester. “Lester. Lester Young. Young Lester. The kid who wanted to soar like a seagull. The kid who practises flute in his room, dreaming one day of making a sound. You got anything?”
Lester shook his head too. He had nothing. His adventure had been shorter-lived than the others, exciting but all too brief.
“I’ve got nothing, Janey. I am nothing. I’ve never been anyone.”
“You must have been someone. Ain’t you ever been the greatest footballer in the world? All alone in your room, kicking the winning penalty? You must have become lovers with the most beautiful woman in the world, or climbed the highest mountain, or swum in the biggest school in the sea.”
“Well, yeah, but-”
“But what? Be something now. You’re our last hope, kid. We’ve all had dreams, and we’ve lived dreams, and we’ve gone. Be what you pretend to be, Lester, and be that. That’s all you are, in the end.”
“But the bad guys, the vaudevillains, they didn’t win with dreams, they didn’t win by pretending. They’ve won by knowing a bit about the law!”
“And that’s why you can do it. Your dreams beat their law. That’s how dreams work, kid.”
“I don’t know whether my dreams can beat the law. Can’t beat rules…”
He stopped, as if time itself had stopped with him. His face started dancing.
“Lester?” Janey asked, puzzled. His face was now doing a jig of its own. Hastily, he straightened it, making as composed a line as he could.
“Janey, I’ve got it,” he whispered, and then strode towards Bea. He halted, and stood to his full height, and then some.
“The law, Bea, you talk of the law.”
“The law? Sure, kid. Have they sent you over to surrender?”
“No. We shall not surrender, Bea. And I am no child, Bea.” In his attempt to be pompous he felt he might be over-using her name, but he decided it was best to continue.
“Bea, I am a Very Important Person. I am a lawyer. A lawyer of the highest repute, Bea. So high, in fact, that I have been commissioned as a Law Enforcement Officer to the United Nations.”
Bea sighed. “Alright, Law Enforcement Officer to the United Nations. What are you here to enforce? We haven’t got all day. I’ve got a world to liquidise.”
“That is just the thing, Bea. You have no authorisation to liquidise this world. You have, in fact, violated United Nations rules and regulations!” He simpered importantly.
Bea started to look worried. If there was one thing which might damage her power bid, it was United Nations rules and regulations.
“What regulations?” she asked cautiously.
“You claim that your companions, these personages… Mister Porter, Harry the Champion, whatever these sailors are called, et cetera… You claim that these personages are not dead?”
“That’s right, Officer, they’re not dead.”
“And you also claim that these personages are not alive?”
“That’s right, Officer.”
“Say it.”
“That’s right, Officer, they’re not alive?”
“And these personages, are not undead either?”
“That’s right, Officer, they are not undead either.”
Everyone else in the room wondered where Lester’s argument was heading. Lester himself turned around, paced a few steps, the turned back and paced up to Bea.
“So these personages are not alive, they are not dead, and they are not undead, either.”
“That’s right, Officer.”
Lester smiled, in an official sort of way. He took a moment to mentally thank his lucky stars for meeting Mr Wiggs and Mr Wiggs that morning.
“In that case, I now pronounce you-” – no, that was marriage, he thought – “I now declare you, in keeping company with personages neither alive, dead, nor undead, to be in direct breach of the Law of Non-Contradiction, and thus in full and serious contradiction of the UN Convention of Logic!”
Of all the gasps that afternoon, this was the deepest.
“Lester, that’s brilliant!” Janey mouthed behind him. Gert started to clap and cheer.
Bea’s reaction, though, was the one Lester prized most. Her mouth opened wide and wide, her eyes following closely. She and Maximilian looked at one another, stunned. Bea tried to respond to Lester’s sentence, but failed to find anything to say. Mister Porter, for once, looked frightened. Maximilian was the first to speak.
“What, Mister Officer Sir… what is the penalty for contravening the UN Declaration of Logic?”
“The penalty, Maximilian, or rather the correction, is that any remaining contradictions must cease to be contradictions. That is, cease to exist.”
Lester, although strong on the outside, felt his soft centre run. Much as he opposed Mister Porter and his ilk, he wasn’t keen on extinguishing them. Mister Porter, however, was a stiff upper lip sort of ghoul.
“I suppose that settles it, Master Lester. I am a contradiction. My very existence contravenes the steadfast laws of the universe. In that case I – am friends of the music hall – shall have to depart.”
He, the sailors – whose red eyes had misted to a tearful blue – the dancing showmen: they all looked at one another in sadness. There was, however, a quiet dignity.
“Music hall is no more, friends. The world has turned and we have not turned with it. Or, rather, we have turned against it. We have moved in a logically inconsistent way and, for that, we cannot possibly exist.
“Goodbye, Mister Sherman, Pixar Paul, Janey, Sadie. You have been worthy adversaries. May you have long lives of consistent peace.
“And goodbye, gert, Mister Sherman. You are true detectives, and well-matched foes. I wish you every success in whoever you choose to be.
“Farewell, Master Lester. You are the worthiest foe of all. I cannot bring to call you an enemy, for I admire you too much. I would shake your hand, if my hand logically existed.
“And, perhaps above all, Bea, Maximilian. Friends, compatriots, fighting for a common cause. Thank you for fighting for us, giving us another chance. Alas, it was not to be, but life’s greatest lessons are in failure. We would give Abraham and the rest your love, but I doubt we shall ever cross his path. We shall cease to be, you see, whereas Abraham must still exist, as we can still speak his name. Thank you for everything.
“Goodbye, farewell, so long, all. We fought a fight, but we lost. That is all.”
He turned and, beckoning his army of ghouls and ghosties, glided softly through the now-open front door. The ghosts of music hall followed and soon were gone from the pub and this world, never to be seen again.
A little tear ran from Maximilian’s eye as he and Bea stood, disconsolate, in the grand old Moon On The Hill. They were all that was left of the vaudevillain army. Just the two of them, awaiting their fate. It was Gert who decided on the proper course of action.
“Duncan, show the policeman back in.”
“Aye.”
“Tell him that Sherman, Lester and I have solved the Murder of Abraham. Tell him he’s got two arrests to make.”
“Aye.” Duncan went to fetch James Taylor, the Full Force Of The Law.
EPILOGUE
The town meeting was nearly over. Naturally, the floor of the Farmer’s Arms was covered in peas again, but no-one seemed to mind.
“Order, order, final item!” Sherman was relishing his new job as town crier. The town was relishing it too. He made a much better job of it than Maximilian had. No previous incumbent had built game shows into the mayoral election format before.
“Our final decision is,” he scrutinised the paper, “What to do with the Old Bull and Bush. Gert, the floor is yours. Not literally of course, because these fine folks will want their peas and asparagus back, but in the figurative sense you may have the floor.”
“Thank you, Bradley.” Gert cleared his throat. “As we all know, the Old Bull and Bush came into being with the music hall invasion” – the crowd booed – “and has been neglected since. I propose an idea.”
The crowd roared. They loved ideas.
“I reckon we should keep it as a music hall pub.”
There were confused hisses from the audience.
“Keep the pub of our invaders? Are you mad?”
The crowd speculated amongst themselves about Gert’s sanity.
“I am not mad. Let me explain. There are two reasons. One – vaudeville, music hall, they’re actually quite fun. The invasion wasn’t, but the music itself… I mean, it’s not jazz, but it’s quite jolly. I’d like to hear it every so often.”
The crowd murmured in thought.
“Two – we can’t just ban the things we don’t like. Some people like music hall, that’s because people are just naturally different. We’ve got to give them the chance to listen, right? If we don’t we might get another Abraham, looking for music hall under the sea and then trying to kill everyone and invade because no-one’s prepared to let him be who he wants to be. Respect, that’s what it is.”
“Hear, hear,” someone cried.
“Well, I though he was mad,” one farmer whispered to another, “but I’ve heard him out, and he talks some sense.
“Respect, that’s what it is,” another agreed.
“Respect!” Gert shouted. “Couldn’t agree more.”
Sherman got to his feet. “Okay, so who votes to keep the Old Bull and Bush?”
Everyone cheered.
“A show of hands please. We’ve been through this before. Cheering, hollering and throwing tins of asparagus aren’t legitimate voting systems, folks. Show of hands: who wants to keep the Old Bull and Bush?”
Every hand went up.
A voice from the crowd had something to add. “I think we should change its name though. Bit of a poor name, that.”
“Alright, change its name.” Another show of hands in agreement. “Any suggestions?”
“I’ve got a suggestion,” volunteered Gert, “Why don’t we name it after the saviour of our town? The boy who single-handedly stopped the invasion?”
Another cheer.
“Let’s call it… The Young Lester.”
And that, friend, is how The Young Lester came to be.
THE END
Jezknee 