Muggles Bereaved Read online

  “That word ‘said’ in item 3 is not obvious,” said Tracy. “It doesn’t fit because it has to refer back to some ‘powers’ aforementioned. And they haven’t been aforementioned. Not specifically aforementioned. Not only that, but referring to the ‘one’ Lim Gee Song is nonsense, since there is only one.”

  Tracy did not realise that there were in point of fact an infinite number of Lim Gee Songs in the multiverse and nor did Jim, missing the chance of an easy rebuttal. He was a bit surly but crossed out the offending ‘said’ in tacit acknowledgement of Tracy’s point. Tracy felt a certain empathy and abandoned her teasing. She also knew about and belatedly remembered theories of the multiverse. Feeling her certainty threatened, she said;

  “Works really well in item 4, it’s brilliant there.”

  These grave debates took place while more immediate concerns were developing at this microdot on the fabric of Space-Time. For ‘developing’ read ‘looming ominously’ as in The stealthy approach of a thunder cloud. The Bertram Mills animal trainer had taken a tiger on a leash into the heart of the town as a publicity stunt. This was in days when the Health and Safety Executive did not exist. Days when the police station autobot said with a smirk;

  “Take a tiger for a walk round town, Sir? Do be careful to feed it first.”

  It was probable that the autobot’s response was constructed from recorded phrases. It would probably have said;

  “Taking the toddler to the park, Sir? Do be careful to feed it first”

  or

  “Taking the goldfish to the park, Sir? Do be careful to feed it first!

  But it was unlikely that the circus had obtained any police permission for the stunt. And it was equally unlikely that the police, who had not cleaned the station’s Lee Enfield .303 rifle in 150 years, would have agreed. A .303 wasn’t up to a tiger hunt. And they were still waiting for their first Koch and Heckler MP5FS tiger-shredder in lip-biting, knicker-wetting, anxious anticipation. The image of the Keystone Cops has left every universe with a legacy of imagined Constabular incompetence that endures to this day. To this day, that day or any day at all on the Mobius loop of Time. A loop so infinite that it is only a loop in theory and can only be proved continuous by Wagram logic.

  Even now, our constabulary are still talking about “proceeding in a northerly direction” when mentioning a stroll down New Conduit Street. And they have also adopted solicitor’s words like “said” and “aforementioned”. Police speak, when spoken ‘at’ you is amusing and a patently clumsy attempt at precision. It echoes through time like a warp weld of sound. But such is the attitude to armed policemen equipped with tasers, masers, nusers and Deutsch-Wagram Glock pistols that “buttoning the lip” is à la mode. You do not even snigger at an armed cop ‘proceeding’ in any direction. Even though the Koch and Heckler MP5FS has not yet arrived, the police have those other ways of making you squawk. So don’t ask them for permission to walk the tiger. And give their tasers a wide berth if you have heart disease or a pacemaker.

  So, on the Day of the Tiger, no policeman with a Glock pistol was in the town centre and the Koch and Heckler was still packed in grease in a carton at the back of a courier’s warehouse and heading for the wrong address. Police attempts to track the consignment simply got the message, ‘we are experiencing unprecedented workloads, your purchase is out for delivery. Be patient’. My advice is never to use TurtleDroid Delivery Inc, even if you trust in the tale of the, er, Tortoise and the Hare.

  Unbeknown to the aforementioned Companions of the said Order of the Spectacles, sitting on their park bench, a momentous bruhaha had occurred in King’s Lynn town’s Tower Street. The circus tiger had been very well behaved after its hefty meal of horse meat and had waddled sedately down Tower Street, greeting alarmed passers-by with a truly imperial stare. It even suffered a young girl to pet its furry neck without pausing to eat her, though it did think about it before a saving burst of over-eater’s dyspepsia caused it to belch in the girl’s face. This was so nauseating that the girl ran shrieking from the scene while rubbing the tiger’s stinking spittle even deeper into her sweet cheeks. She was having a bad day, for she had discovered that tiger fur is not soft and fluffy like that of a cuddly toy, but more bristly altogether. Worse, tigers belch and spit most foully. Her day could have been much bleaker, given that tigers normally pounce on anything that runs away from them. Luckily, this beast happened to see a reflection of itself in the plate glass window of an electrical shop selling TVs. It concluded that this proved that there was another male tiger in this neck of its woods. Bāgha, for that was the tiger’s name in Bengali, thought in a flash about the local female tigers who might be seduced by this intruder. It just will not do, thought Bāgha. I have eaten well and have my full strength and I will see this fellow off, pronto. It did not give a second thought to ending that first ‘think’ with the preposition ‘off’, and it did not actually use the word ‘pronto’. ‘Quick’ in Bengali is ‘druta’, though Bāgha used only that coughing, choking grunt of tiger-speak which represents a ‘full stop’ or ‘period’. A sound which indicates the end of a sentence, though usually a death sentence.

  With a mighty roar the tiger, a great believer in pre-emptive strikes and show-off roaring, took on the challenge from the rogue male in the shop window. With 8 inch fangs bared, the once resident of Bengal had leapt forward, forelegs splayed and claws unsheathed. It dragged the flimsy lead from its trainer’s hand flinging the hapless man into the shop door frame, momentarily stunning him. A striped swirl of terror, the ten foot beast leapt into the shop, skidding across the polished floor. Ignoring the startled shopkeeper, it began shattering mini images of itself as seen in the screens of expensive TVs. Eventually, the tiger ran out of challenging images, peed on the thermoplastic tiled floor and sat down on a desk where it chewed the innards out of a telephone. The shopkeeper lay in a faint on the floor, where the tiger left him as a possible snack for its afternoon four-sies. The ghastly smell of the approaching puddle of tiger pee acted as smelling salts and stank the shopkeeper out of his temporary oblivion and back into the permanency of his nightmare. He decided to play dead, and his own bladder added to the pee on the floor, filtering it through his Calvin Kleins and his Gieves and Hawkes trousers. The tiger was still replete with the horsemeat from lunch and had a bad case of gas. It therefore decided that eating a shopkeeper would not improve matters. Shifting with a lop-sided snarl, it yawned with effort and farted noisily, splattering excrement on a sales chart behind the desk. Sales took not so much a dive, more of a dump.

  When the trainer, who had been dragged off his feet, regained consciousness, he was graciously allowed to take hold of the tiger’s lead. The trainer and tiger, pursued at a safe distance by a car-fattened policeman pretending he was running as fast as he could, fled back up Tower Street and headed for The Walks, the circus, home and horse meat for tea. To be more truthful, the policeman really had been trying to make an effective pursuit for he had never fired his Deutsch-Wagram Glock in anger. He was just too fat to outrun a tiger, even a tiger on a lead. He did loose off a single round from his pistol, but that whistled past tiger and trainer and lodged in the front door of the Emporium of the Mind, a shop selling every accoutrement needed by hippies and punks, including some under the counter ‘herbs’. By chance, the bullet pierced the very centre of a pentagram hung on the door to ward off any practitioner of the black arts, of which there were hundreds in North Lynn, mostly of Russian extraction.

  In The Walks, on the bench of the Companions of the Spectacles, Lim and Tracy sat quietly in reflection and Jim sat sucking the pencil and dripping saliva onto the Order’s book of minutes. In a film there would have been some musical indication of menace as the tiger appeared in the distance, coming from the direction of the library, and dragging its trainer in its wake. Usually this would have been a growing sound of ‘der, duh, der, duh, der duh’, a sound reminiscent of the Jaws movie. But there was little warning, not even one of the tiger’s migh
ty roars. As a tiger you do not roar when hunting. You keep low, flatten your ears back against your skull and stalk the prey with slow menace until you can get near enough. And when you have eaten overmuch you do get out of breath and cannot run. In this respect, it was very like a policeman. The prey it had in mind and well in focus, were three humans sitting on a park bench. It knew just how fast human beings could run. At a snail’s pace compared to antelopes like the gnu and the kudu. He might not be overly hungry and full of gas, but, oh boy, did that tiger enjoy the hunt, the chase, the biting out of throats and the disembowelment.

  Jim saw the tiger first, opening his mouth in horror and letting the slimy pencil slip and fall into the leaf litter at his feet. His every red hair and every appendage wanted to shrink away and hide. It was the same effect as eating the sourest of sour lemons. You thought you had bodily orifices but they shrank away and disappeared altogether. The tiger had now shaken off the trainer and was heading their way at an easy lope. But it was increasing speed and its ears were flattened back. Jim was aware of the joke about running away from a charging predator. The running away didn’t matter, but running away faster than your companions was all important. He chivalrously managed to blurt a warning, which went;

  “ber-loody hell! A tiger!”

  He soon discovered that Lim, as befits the Head of the Order of the Companions of the Spectacles, could indeed run fastest of the three of them. But it was also apparent that Tracy could scarcely run at all, managing a sort of high speed waddle with her arms flailing from side to side in, it has to be said, girly fashion. She ran like a balloon with arms and legs poking out. A balloon or a space-hopper. Tigers know nothing about political correctness or feminism and when they see a tubby meal moving quite slowly they “lock on” with relish. Lim, looking back, could see that the tiger had fixed its eyes on the slowest of the running Companions, which had much more meat on her than the leg of horse which had been tiger lunch and was on the boring menu for dinner. It was now considering an afternoon snack.

  Aware of his duty as Head of the Order of the Companions of the Spectacles, Lim turned, heart in mouth, and ran back to Tracy. Then, grabbing the only female Companion in a very non-politically-correct grab, he tensed his muscles and prepared to throw Tracy aside and face the Bengal monster alone. Suddenly and unpredictably, his power became manifest. The clenching of his muscles seemed to switch on the ability to levitate and Lim, Tracy in his arms, lifted swiftly up into the tree branches overhanging the long walk. The tiger, used to the antics of chimpanzees and silly birds, stalked below them and essayed a mighty jump which almost let it reach Tracy’s dangling foot. It did catch her shoe and pulled it off, juggling the morsel with flailing paws as it fell back snarling. Then discovering the shoe to be inedible, it spat it out and clawed angrily at the tree trunk showering bark around it in a cloud. The tree afforded no proper grip or low branches and the tiger dropped back, stood still and looked about it, ears swivelling like tufty radars. It was trying to decide if the intended prey were ungulates like baby gaur or langurs or peafowl. Its internal lexicon had no creature remotely resembling a levitating couple and there were no other tigers to consult. It liked to play with birds and kill them but it seldom ate such creatures which had horrid feathers all over them. But gaurs and antelopes did not fly. It was a bit of a conundrum. Maybe the humans in the tree were not edible at all. Maybe they were just damned cheeky, like those Hanuman monkeys, back home. The tiger stood and looked up thoughtfully. Still like to try a bite of one of those, it seemed to say. Bāgha licked his lips and shook out a piece of telephone from his teeth. Turning serenely, he began to wander away without a backward glance. Tigers can turn their backs on you and still get you in a flash. Watch their ears, they twitch round and face backwards. This Bāgha took a circuitous route round the tree and paused on the far side where it was hidden from its intended prey. If you have ever sat high in a leafy tree with a tiger prowling backwards and forwards below you, you will appreciate how difficult it is to be sure where the tiger is. You may think the animal has left you alone, but it may just be lying quietly with its tongue lolling out, panting and waiting with the occasional blink of an eye.

  Up above, Lim unclutched from Tracy’s hefty bosom and settled them both on a convenient branch which snapped and threatened to drop them on the tiger’s tail. In a flash, Lim grabbed Tracy again and, tensing his muscles, lifted them higher up the tree, settling them in a fork in the branches which could easily bear their weight. Happily, he had discovered how to employ a Superpower in time of need. And he could switch it on and off at will. Victory. He supposed that he could also lop off the tiger’s head if he wished or if it had become necessary. In that he was dangerously in error. The tiger was animate, not malevolent and doing just what its Maker intended. The virtual scythe was unavailable.

  “So that’s levitation,” said Tracy, impressed and quite recovered from the onslaught of the tiger. Narrow escapes were escapes nonetheless. Time to move on. Bruised bosom, torn tights and all. Not that she dared move around in the high branches.

  Suddenly, to their horror, Jim burst into view below them carrying a long scaffolding pole in the style of a pole vaulter. He did not know that his companions had escaped up into the tree and was not in a position to withdraw again. He stabbed the pole towards the tiger which was indeed lying in wait beneath the tree and on the blind side of the trunk. The tiger turned towards the ginger morsel with some interest. You could imagine it uttering an aside like Jungle Book’s Shere Khan and in the same creaking-posh voice of George Sanders;

  “Now what have we here... is it marmalade, on a lollipop stick?”

  High above, Lim, now aware of Jim’s precarious situation and brave rescue attempt, prepared to slip from the tree and perform another rescue by levitation. Or a tiger decapitation by scythe.

  Luckily the tiger trainer and circus staff arrived in time to save a shivering Jim from inevitable harm. They shoved him somewhat ungraciously to one side and then corralled the tiger which snarled as if it really cared when, in fact, it didn’t. They bustled the animal into a wheeled cage and away to the circus trailers. It sat down quite regally and allowed the humans to tow its royal bulk in the wheeled chariot. Jim collapsed with a clattering of scaffolding pole but Lim discovered that he could not use his power of levitation to descend and comfort his friend. Bloody annoying.

  One of the roustabouts returned with a long ladder and extended it high into the tree whence Lim and Tracy descended. As their feet hit the ground, Jim sat before them, toying with the scaffolding pole which he had purloined from a building site in Tennyson Avenue. He was relieved that the Order of the Companions of the Spectacles still had three members complete with arms legs and heads. He was even more relieved that he did not have to face a charging a tiger with a lance made out of a scaffolding pole. A pole dancing Lancelot whose knees now trembled and whose bladder threatened a flood.

  “Blimey!” said the roustabout, who had run away from public school but adopted the persona of a cockney in the style of Dick Van Dyke;

  “Would you Adam’n Eve it. You shinned up that tree a treat. Not a ‘andhold in sight. Not bad for a slender little Chink and a big fat twist and twirl. And, you Sir Prance-a-lot, you are awesome.”

  The roustabout had also run away from the Public School style of polite awareness and political rectitude. ‘Little Chink’ and ‘fat twist and twirl’. Lim barely suppressed the phantom scythe’s threatened appearance;

  “You try being chased by a tiger, you silly Elephant and Castle!” he said.

  It was necessary to keep the power of levitation secret for the present. He was surprised that his voice still worked and sounded reasonably steady. He supposed being called a ‘Chink” was marginally better than being called a ‘Gook’.

  Jim had no such luck. He tried to say, ‘you try fending off a tiger with a heavy scaffolding pole,’ but could only manage a, “y-y-y-yewww...”

  In these latter days, in this unive
rse, a teenager, chased by a tiger but reinforced by a legal high, might have said to a representative of the circus;

  “You will be hearing from my solicitor, here is his card.”

  But the lawyers of the 20th century in universe B25Z had yet to activate and enervate the desires of ordinary folk who might willingly cash in on adversity and earn their lawyer his fat fees. And legal highs in this dominion were regarded as old hat and very non-wicked, not ace and not the least brill. Everybody used them and suffered the consequent bus crashes and train derailments with equanimity.

  “Levitation.” Said Jim in a pale, somewhat recovered voice, and ignoring his Leader’s frown, “They did not climb, they levitated.”

  He spoke to no-one in particular, but was reliving his companions escape while he had been rushing to place himself in jeopardy. It bordered on a reproach but was fuelled by a gasp of relief.

  “Whatever it was, you’d better have free tickets for the circus said the roustabout,” unaware that when he spoke with soft consideration, his cockney accent evaporated like icing sugar blown from a crushed meringue. That was Tracy’s assessment and her metaphor. Crushed meringue. A food metaphor. But first she had to thank the hero of the day who she assessed as being Jim. Her smothering hug was too much, and Lim was glad that she did not acknowledge his premier contribution in like fashion. But then she turned and hugged him too.