Chapter One Alexander Fleuret woke up about six o' clock in the morning and found himself lying on the bed wearing only socks, Marks & Spencer navy underpants and brown PVC gloves. His head throbbed and his mouth felt oppressively dry. Sprawled over his bed, he stared at the ceiling. His frizzy black hair spilled across the white, overstuffed pillows. He opened his mouth, displaying only rotten stumps for teeth, put one hand to his fragile head while the other found the solid reassurance of the side of the bed. He craned forward groaning. He stumbled to the bathroom. Hearing to his dismay the cushioned but resolute footsteps of Carl on the stairs below, he made a dash for it. He mumbled a few words before scampering in and bolting the door, his hands clasped over his groin. Sober for over a year--and now this! Several embarrassing incidents had made him want to stop. He would drink between half and a full bottle of Bell's whisky a day on top of tranquillizers. One night he woke up in his best navy blue pin-striped suit, lying on his back halfway in the greenhouse doorway. The profound contemplation of the stars was the last thing he remembered. Halfway up the path there was a whisky bottle. Lately, morphine had been his main sedative, but he was still taking the odd Diazepam just out of habit. Regardless of whose company he was in, he would sit swigging from a bottle of Kaolin and Morphine mixture, up to three a day. When the kids were playing in the street outside, during the school holidays, they were a regular source of annoyance to him. When he was drunk, they enraged him. On one occasion he had been stewing all morning but when he plucked up the courage to say something to them, they were no longer to be seen. Eyes bloodshot and hair on end, an egg in one hand and a sword in the other, he planted himself outside their house Mammoth Obsequious and challenged them to come out. He was proud they hadn't, though he would have been slightly less so had he known that he had thrown down the gauntlet to a three-year-old, a four- year-old and their teenage baby-sitter. In the end he let fly with the egg at the window and stormed off. Every morning was cold turkey. He shook so violently that he couldn't pour water from a kettle without most of it ending up on the floor. He was at his most belligerent then, before he could straighten himself out with morphine. He relied on his friend Carl to buy it. His shaking would have given him away had he tried to buy any, and besides, chemists would only sell it to the same person in limited quantities: certainly no more than a couple of bottles per week. As Alexander's tolerance rose, he required bigger doses, sending Carl further afield when they refused to sell him it locally. Some of these trips involved hour-long bus journeys to towns up to twelve miles away where he would collect half a dozen at a time. Although Alexander could have bought a bottle up the road, he didn't want to spoil himself there in case he ever needed it urgently when Carl wasn't around. In any case, why should he when he had a mug like Carl? Back in his room, he tried to remember the events leading up to his present state. He took a swig of morphine and impatiently wiped away the white ring of kaolin left round his mouth. He remembered pouring some of it into Carl's whisky and afterwards Carl's grotesque dancing that would overshadow a shaman in ecstasy. The celebrations were in respect of a letter he had received from solicitors Tileshed and Tileshed. It had informed him that an uncle whom he had never seen, a French nobleman, had suffered a fatal accident involving a harpoon gun. His uncle had left instructions that Alexander should be made to complete a task and by 'drawing the sword from the stone' prove himself worthy before acceding to the estate. 2 Mammoth Obsequious There were four alternatives: he could either be entombed alive in his uncle's ancestral crypt for a week, or if that seemed too unpalatable, he could place a score of leeches at specified points around his body and allow each to take its fill, or he could eat a plateful of live slugs, but only if they were the big black shiny carnivorous ones. He decided to choose the fourth which he considered to be the least morbid and might at least prove exciting. This last alternative was a 'fairly-secret' mission to Egypt on a replica of a seventeenth-century warship. Work on it had already begun and Alexander was due to accompany the solicitors to meet the crew. He insisted that a friend should come along on the voyage to keep him company. Damien Creame was chosen. Creame was a solemn man in his late twenties. His hair was like copper wire on small transformer cores; it was of the same hue and bristly, squared off with a subtle parting. He was a time-served electrician, having worked for a couple of years in the trade before being made redundant. After that he went to college for a year. Then he spent a couple of years on the dole before escaping onto the Community Programme, as it was then. After that he became an 'alarm specialist' and has never looked back since. Not that he was a close friend of Alexander's, preferring to be named only as an 'associate', but he was responsible. Alexander wanted somebody not only as a friend, but as a kind of minder, which he knew Carl couldn't handle. Creame's official position was as Alexander's on-site orator, for legal reasons, but his real purpose lay in keeping him amused. He unlocked the bathroom door. He flushed the toilet to ensure he could not be heard hurrying back to his bedroom, where he dressed rapidly. 3 Mammoth Obsequious Carl often sat in his bedroom playing war games. Alexander tried to get him to come on the journey as well, but he was reluctant, saying he had a bad heart. When they played war games, Alexander's father, Tort, was allowed to shake the dice for Alexander, which was one of the few privileges left to him in his dotage. Until recently, Alexander's mother had waited patiently on Tort; before that the Navy had taken care of him and before that it was Tort's mother. Being waited on hand and foot all his life, he was now too old to change. When he tried his wife's patience so much that she had left him, Alexander was burdened with taking care of him, at a time when Alexander couldn't even take care of himself. Lately the old man had been intolerable to live with. Alexander found the soap, covered in fluff, stamped into the carpet and a crinkled toilet-roll would often appear floating in the bowl. Not content with being helped to reach the toilet, he would often make a horrible mess once in there and call out for help to Alexander, whose bedroom was next door. Carl had the task of mucking out and had to bath him on several occasions. It was something Alexander wouldn't do, despite getting an attendance allowance for allegedly taking care of his father, which meant he could laze about all day and not have to make himself available for work. Whenever there was a dirty job to do such as mucking out for Tort or the cat, Alexander would ask Carl, who would oblige with: 'Sure, I'm used to dirt'. Of course he was, and not just to other people's as a former nurse, but also to his own. Alexander found this out when he went to stay for a few days at Valium Lodge, a guest house near the Roman wall. He left Carl to take care of Tort and upon returning, discovered Carl had gone through most of the drinks' cabinet including his father's spiced rum, which had changed from its usual rich molasses' colour to that of weak tea, being now mostly diluted with water. Carl was sitting back in the armchair as merry as could be, tittering at everything in a high squeaky 4 Mammoth Obsequious voice. Alexander managed to get him up to the spare room where there was a mattress. He tried to take off his shoes but had to give up because of the stink. Then Carl had retched, leaving a yellow stain halfway up the white wallpaper as if someone had thrown a carton of curry sauce over it. He had also retched all over himself and other places in the room. His first task upon sobering up was to clean it up upon instruction. Later in the day he went home and the strain on his chest brought on a heart attack. As if this were not a lesson to him, he stole a drink from a whisky bottle which Alexander had filled with cold tea before leaving. When he got back he noticed that the level of the liquid had diminished and Carl was asking what was in the bottle. Alexander had questioned him as to why he should ask such a thing. Carl's halting reply was that it looked murky.