Muggles Bereaved Read online

  Jim was now gripped by a desire to flee and he did so, easily ducking away from the great man Carnegie’s arms and darting through the entourage of Mayors, Mace-holders, Lieutenant Generals and Superintendents of Police. It seemed that every big-wig had crowded into the library in attendance on Andrew Carnegie. Being small like Jim had advantages. For one thing, it made even his mother’s small mini seem spacious and when it came to avoiding rugby tackles, there was nothing better. And the grandees thronging the library were all gripping their noses or reaching for handkerchiefs. It left no hands free for tackling small teenagers on the run. The less refined members of the entourage were also screwing up their eyes with their noses and exclaiming loudly that, “It wasn’t me!”. These were the very people to avoid sharing a lift with because, customarily, it was them. Their unsophisticated sphincters did not care to hold in a fart and you could also suspect them of never washing their hands after taking a dump; of scratching their sweaty junk while out jogging; of picking their noses and flicking the proceeds. In short, ‘men’, and it was always the men, who verbally disclaimed ownership of a fart that could reasonably be suspected of, and convicted for, any breach of propriety.

  Jim did not realise that in leaving all his body grease behind, his hair and skin were dry as dust. His red curls now rustled like old papyrus from an ancient tomb and his eyes scratched with every blink of eyelid. The folds in his limbs puffed out skin flakes with the very friction of movement and these particles appeared as a golden halo in the sunshine outside. He left a golden trace illuminated by the sun like the tail of a comet. It was a very uncomfortable situation. As he fled, his sebaceous glands went into overdrive in an attempt to replace necessary body oils. He was soon as uncomfortably greasy as he had ever been. For once in his life he felt a deep need to bathe and wash his hair using every one of his sisters bath oils and unguents. Yes, he would defy her wrath and her snitching just to feel smooth again.

  Some Superpower, this greasiness. Like Lim, he could obviously manifest the power only when a trigger, like being startled or frightened, was operated. Perhaps if he had stayed to confront the tiger with Lim, he could have drenched it in greasy body oils. But it seemed likely that a tiger would lap that up as some sort of mise en bouche, a pre-starter to an excellent meal of ginger biped. He knew that ‘mise en bouche’ meant a dinner pre-starter because his dad had answered a mastermind question on the dishes of that aged Chef, old Gordon, freaking, Ramsay. Jim doubted that tigers distinguished between their lunchtime “courses” anyway. Most of his family didn’t. Cornflakes were often a suppertime dessert munched in alternation with a corned beef sandwich. This was the early training that produced a Jim who would require re-training when Tracy finally captivated, captured and reined him under control. A willing and delightsome subservience.

  Jim reached home with a grim visage and dashed straight upstairs to the bathroom. At the sound of running water, his mother, heavily engaged in preparing purple beetroot and purple carrots in the kitchen sighed in disbelief.

  “Wonders will never cease,” she said.

  She hoped her son Jim would not use all the hot water. She would need a bath herself in the hope of removing the purple beetroot stains. Anthocyanins were undoubtedly good at boosting the family immune systems, but they were both loathed and disfiguring as far as her son Jim was concerned. When he got dragged into beetroot peeling, he managed to get purple stains on his face that resembled birthmarks. Coupled with his brown freckles, the stains gave him the air of an exotic chameleon. Or a victim of some unknown plague.

  The sound of water was soon eclipsed by a mighty hammering on the bathroom door as Jim’s sister, she of the rampant pony tail, smelled her bath oils. That little rat must have got himself a date with some hapless girl and he was now preparing for a snog with that person under a sweet-smelling camouflage. She knew that this was a figment of her own overheated imagination, for Jim was still of an age when girls were boring and inferior. She would know when that situation changed just as soon as Jim gave one of his raspberry ruffles to a girl, depleting his hidden, but sister-monitored, stocks. She did not know that Tracy had already had a raspberry ruffle from Jim’s stock. She would be shocked to discover it and would have said;

  “Fat Tracy Emmendale? Ugh!”

  Jim had rather overdone the bath oil and shampoo and was disappearing under a mountain of bubbles. Never mind. The damage was being repaired and he felt almost human again. Yes, he would have to face the wrath of she of the pony tail, but he didn’t care. In fact he would stir her up further by complimenting her on her rapidly growing tits. If he timed it right he could really get her into his dad’s bad books. His father did not look lightly on violent assaults and his daughter would be grounded for a week at least. That, thought Jim, would teach any big sister. He did feel a bit guilty about wasting her toiletries, but he could make her an early birthday present by way of apology. For the future, if the Superpower was to be deployed, he would have to acquire some male skin lotion and bath oil. He knew that would make his mother broody and she would quiz him about the new girlfriend that he did not have, but that was just the way families communicated. Suspicion, innuendo and interrogation followed by distrust and grounding. Generations of Beans had lived by these rules.

  As soon as he towelled off and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt he rang Lim on his cellphone. They had agreed a code to announce business of the Order and he deployed it now. It was the one word, ‘Spectacles’. Lim was in the toilet which doubled as his thinkatorium though being mostly a stinkatorium. It was a place entirely suitable to the receiving of messages about Jim’s Superpower. Lim could not manage a fanfare of farts by way of greeting for his diet was a macrobiotic Chinese diet that did not produce the least flatulence. In a Chinese, you understand. In a Caucasian the same diet produced explosive farts embroidered with a shrapnel of undigested brown rice. Lim listened patiently to Jim’s account, only half believing in a Superpower which might just be an extraordinary bout of Jim’s natural excrescences and odours. A further reason why Lim shied away from Jim’s effusive ‘huggeryness’.

  “Jim, if that was a Superpower, there must be some way of recovering from it, a way of drawing back into yourself all those expressed oils and smells. A bit like reeling in a Spiderman net.”

  “I am not sure I want those smells back inside me,” sorrowed Jim, “they darned near suffocated that Andrew Carnegie fellow. And I think he realised that I was researching stealth systems. I’m sorry about that. And I told him my name.” Miserable as it made him, Jim knew that you had to be brutally honest with your leader. Lim, struggling with the concept of farts so vicious that they could disrupt a civic ceremony, was less sure. Perhaps certain things should be kept to oneself.

  They agreed that the next time the Superpower manifested, Jim should pause and try to suck the emanations back into himself by simultaneous sucking air into his lungs while imagining the slime sliding back into his fingers. Not only did that prove to be the solution, but it produced a remarkable, sparkling cleanness on the previously slimed surfaces and left a pleasant citrous smell in the air. The smell of citrous would become like a calling card left to those who had been slimed and stealthed. A lingering statement not unlike the flowery gifts of the Scarlet Pimpernel. That man of literary myth would have you throwing away your pomander and reaching for his dropped kerchief with some delight. “Sir Percy,” you would say, giving away the identity of Napoleon’s most doughty enemy, “charmed, I’m sure!”

  Jim would still feel cheated and disappointed, but he was to discover that he had an even greater Superpower that was entirely and eminently admirable. But that came much later. Long after Mr Andrew Carnegie’s period of research into the pseudo-esoteric science of paralymphatology. The research which failed to uncover why a small boy could produce such effects. But, such was Mr Carnegie’s curiosity that he induced Sir Isaac Newton to accept a second Professorship, the Chair of Paralymphatology which he endowed at Oxford University. T
his left the mighty Newton straddling two universities, Cambridge and Oxford. It also left him straddling several sciences and at least one pseudo-science. But the Colossus that was Sir Isaac did have a Colossal ego and happily managed the balancing act required to bridge the 100 mile gap between universities. In this he was much assisted by the lure of the pot of Carnegie gold attached to the Chair at Oxford. He even used his affluence and influence to undermine and disable critics like the dying Hooke whose opposition to one professor occupying two Chairs was the real cause of their enmity. Nothing to do with electro-optics or gravitational light-bending apparatuses.

  So you can lap that one up, Lickipedia. Newton could be a total schmuck as well as a genius. He was not above forcing through his ideas with the aid of a media entourage that bested even that of the elderly singer and his some-time companion, Madonna. If Newton had his usual wardrobe malfunction, a dropped flap in his breeches, it would not have made the same headlines. He did make huge headlines by commuting between his universities in a chair hung from a huge four prop drone. Some sort of pod would have been more comfortable, especially in foul weather, but a hanging ‘chair’ made quite a point. The Sun newspaper thought so in one of its rare forays into scientific controversy. It ran the only headline it could think of; “Newton’s Chair Ups Hooke!” The Sun did not understand or care about science, but it loved a bitch-slapping spat of the verbals.

  Not one of the consequences of the Library sliming reached the ears of the Companions of the Spectacles. The scientific enquiry and media storm took place above the gorilla glass ceiling that separated ordinary mortals from the great and the good Free Masonry crowd. The muggle in the street could only look up to his or her heroes treading the glass above or watch their antics on cellphones. A glimpse of a graceful ankle or trouser leg or contrived, inter-VIP tweet was their sole reward.

  Chapter Four – Tracy Acquires a Different Kind of Power

  At about the time Tracy decided to pursue a weight loss regime, she received a text message inviting her to follow Facebook posts of the DiataKoinonia institute.

  “It is as if advertisers can read minds,” she opined inwardly.

  As lovers of Greek will know, “DiataKoinonia” simply means “Dieting Society”. But the link sent to Tracy directed her to a little known channel of the webosphere which was a backdoor from Facebook. It led, with much ‘shushing’ noises from an accompanying finger-glued-upright-to-lips avatar, directly into a wormhole bridge between several universes. Tracy could not avail herself of some of the dieting options on offer across the multiverse, however. For example, she could not get liver extract from a bagelworm since those creatures lived a thousand light years away from earth. No matter that this was only one bus stop to those with senior wormhole passes. No-one on earth was yet equipped for wormhole travel on account of Sir Isaac Newton being side-tracked into Paralymphatology in pursuit of Carnegie gold. Discovering wormhole travel would be even easier than being stunned by a ripe apple falling from a Russet or Cox’s Orange apple tree for someone with Newton’s genius. So it fell to the slower and less favoured Leibnitz to make that discovery 20 years later. Too late to influence Companions of the Spectacles or you the readers. But in time to assist Sir Isaac Newton to his death bed. The death certificate provided by a medical friend of the departed Hooke, read, “Death attributed to ego poisoning.” This became widely reported as ‘ergot poisoning’ or ‘egg poisoning’ and caused Newton’s local baker to go into bankruptcy. It also ‘did for’ quite a few free range chicken farmers. This did impinge somewhat on the 40 year-old Jim because, as his very elderly mother said;

  “Man might not live on bread alone, but we shall have to use the Co-op now, and I don’t like their bread at all. All humectants and emulsifiers and sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate and mono and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono and diglycerides of fatty acids.”

  This left Jim speechless and with a gaping mouth betraying a half chewed slab of bread and jam. The chewing of that slice was never completed. Jim had lost interest after the mention of stearoyl-2-lactylate. He was sure that was an ingredient of the paint he used on model aeroplanes. He still made the models in secret, even later in life. Tracy remained unaware of all this. She was not privy to the failures of Carnegie, Newton, Hooke, bread, Jim’s mum and the model building. Not having a mother-in-law who majored in food technology for her PhD was the main reason.

  Many years before acquiring a mother-in-law, Tracy, barely a teenager, signed into the DiataKoinonia web site. She used a provided password to bypass the two giant statues guarding the web site entrance like the helmeted, cliff-carved effigies from Lord of the Rings. Or was it The Hobbit? The guardians frowned at being forgotten and unsheathed their swords, then, when the password penetrated the limestone fissures in their brains, they dropped the swords and one hand on hip, waved her into the web site, “Pass sweetie,” said one of them. Tracy, who had gay friends with more piercings than a Thai paper-cut, was not impressed by this characterisation of the guardians of the diet. Nor was she impressed by the password “PASSWORD”. And she could see that the lip movements of the statues did not synchronise with the words being spoken. In fact the lips did not even move correctly with the word ‘pass’. They did not puther the ‘p’. Clearly inferior graphics and SFX. She would have been even more angry if she had realised that the statues’ algorithms, spying through her web cam, had assessed her to be male and gay because of her discreet refusal to abandon her Gothic black, a style unknown on any other planet in the Multiverse. This and the timbre of her voice had been enough to trigger the male-therefore-might-be-gay algorithm and all that hand-on-hippery stuff. Political correctness had yet to hit the distant galaxy hosting DiataKoinonia

  But Tracy was intrigued by the quality of the light emanating from her iPad and by the subliminal sounds of come hither-ing. She was asked to post a photo of herself entirely naked for obesity assessment, an invitation she declined, invoking her “report grooming” routine and logging the event with the King’s Lynn cyber-police. More specifically she logged it with the 0.2 cyber-policeman which was the total resource that funds would allow owing to the parsimony of the local Mayor. A recorded announcement told her that the police would get on to her report in between three days and three weeks. But the naked photo input clearly wasn’t essential and when she skipped the page using the ‘I-am-not-amused’ button she was shown an “oops, that was a joke, we would never ask for a photo contribution’ page. She was then shown a before and after diet photo of an avatar who actually wore her face. She had forgotten to cover her cam and the image had clearly been hacked. But the ‘after’ avatar looked extremely slim and sexy. She persevered and moved deeper into the web site. This was uncharacteristically risky behaviour by Tracy, but was brought about by her desperation and distress at being “that fat girl”.

  The error message was unusual.

  ‘Error 126 we are sorry, but this diet does not meet those requirements’

  What requirements? She had not made any kind of input. The next page was a redirect, landing her with a site owned by hypnotist Baldering Semapro. He was apparently three universes away from the one that the current Tracy inhabited. She knew that because there was a universe hop counter on this strange page. Suddenly the face of Baldering popped up and stared at her with a gaze that locked her attention. Then it vanished and the browser closed with it, allegedly falling casualty to the closing of the wormhole for maintenance. Tracy, who had not had breakfast, felt not the slightest bit hungry. When she called up images of her usual breakfast, she could examine them dispassionately and with clinical distance from sight and smell. No salivation, no desire. Just an awareness that a certain limited amount of eating would be necessary to keep body and soul together. Baldering Semapro might look like a descendent of a Diggle, but he clearly had something that could be delivered with a mere glance.

  After three meal refusals, it became clear that something would have to be done about Tracy’s mother. She was bec
oming over-assertive and hysterical at Tracy’s refusals to eat. Tracy thought it high time her mother’s trajectory crossed with that of Baldering Semapro. But when she entered the DiataKoinonia web site, the grim portal guardians refused to let her pass, pointing instead to a rabbit hole to one side of the mighty gate. It transpired that this was a particle accelerator and Tracy was the particle in point. She had no sooner stepped inside the rabbit hole, and yes, crawled would indeed have been a better description, than she swilled around the smooth walls and was flung out again. As she fell back to the ground, she noticed a set of weighing scales close by. Conditioned by a Baldering Semapro trigger she stood on the scales and goggled at the result. Her weight, which was something of a state secret had fallen by three kilograms. Two and two making a decided four, she stepped back into the rabbit hole, swilled around and lost a further three kilograms. It would be unchivalrous to record how many times Tracy had to step into the rabbit hole before reaching her target, weight, which was the weight of 0.9 Hermiones. No-one is sure what Hermione’s weight is and how Tracy could have obtained that information. In all probability, Tracy had set a virtual Hermione weight as her target.