The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(63)

Blucher came and put his arm around me and helped me to my feet and I fancy I probably started to scream a bit – for I thought it was Jock come back from his grave in the quagmire – so he took something out of his hip-pocket and, with a look of infinite compassion on his face, slugged me carefully behind the ear. This was much better.

‘Roger and out,’ I thought gratefully as the lovely blackness encompassed me.





3 Mortdecai regains consciousness, if you can properly call it that





All things are taken from us, and become

Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.





The Lotus-Eaters





To this day I still do not know where it was that I awoke nor, indeed, how long I had been separated from my cogitative faculties, bless them. But I think it must have been somewhere awful in the North-West of England, like Preston or Wigan or even Chorley, God forbid. The lapse of time must have been quite three or four weeks: I could tell by my toenails, which no one had thought to cut. They felt horrid. I felt cross.

‘I have had a Nervous Breakdown,’ I told myself crossly, ‘the sort of thing that one’s aunts have for Christmas.’ I lay motionless for what seemed a long time. This was to deceive them, you see, whoever they were, and to give me time to think about it all. I soon became aware that there were no them in the room and that what I wanted was a great, burly drink to help me think. I decided, too, that since they had kept me alive they must want something from me and that a drink would not be an unreasonable quid pro quo for whatever it was, if you follow me. (You will observe that the very recollection of that time interferes with my well-known lucidity.)

Another thinking-bout persuaded me that the way to get such a drink was to summon whatever chalk-faced, black-uniformed, Kafkaesque she-policewoman was standing guard over me. I could find no bell to ring so I heaved myself out of bed and sat down absurdly on the floor, weeping with puny rage.

My getting out of bed must have triggered some sort of alarum, for the swing-doors swung or swang and an apparition appeared. I examined it narrowly. It was clearly the photographic negative of a chalk-faced, black-uniformed police-woman.

‘You are clearly a photographic negative,’ I cried accusingly. ‘Be off with you!’ Her face, you see, was of the deepest black and her uniform of the brightest white: all wrong. She giggled, showing, paradoxically, about forty-eight large white teeth.

‘No, mahn,’ she retorted, ‘negative. Ah’m not under-developed, jest underprivileged.’ I looked again; she spoke truth. As she scooped me up and lifted me into bed (oh the shame of it) I was even more convinced, for my nose was flattened by one of her magnificent 100-Watt headlamps. Despite my effete condition (oh, all right, I know that’s not the right word but you know perfectly well what I mean) I felt the old Adam surging about freely in my loins – and I don’t mean the gardener. I desired more than anything else in the world to go out and slay a dragon or two for her: the thought was so beautiful that I began to weep again.

She brought me a drink; rather a thin one but undeniably alcoholic. Enoch Powell had lost my vote for good. I cried a little more, rather relishing it. The tears, I mean, not the drink, which tasted like milk from a dead sow. It was probably Bourbon or something of that sort.

Much later she came in again, smiling enormously, and stood with her back to the open door.

‘Now – here’s Doctor Farbstein to see you,’ she chortled richly, as though it was all a huge joke. A great, jolly, bearded chap brushed past her splendid bosom (I swear they twanged) and came and sat on my bed. He was full of fun.

‘Go away,’ I piped feebly, ‘I am an anti-Semite.’

‘You should have thought of that before they circumcised you,’ he roared merrily. A stray beam of sunshine (perhaps we weren’t in North-West England after all) struck splinters of gold from his brave Assyrian beard; Kingsley Amis would have recognized them instantly for beads of breakfast egg but I am a romantic, as you must have realized by now, even if you have still not read my previous adventures.

‘You have been quite ill, you know,’ he said, keeping his face straight and trying to sound grave and concerned.

‘I am still quite ill,’ I retorted with dignity, ‘and my toenails are a disgrace to the National Health Service. How long have I been in this pre-Lysol guet-apens, this quasi-medical Lubyanka?’

‘Oh, ages and ages it seems,’ he replied cheerily. ‘Every now and then they tell me you’re stirring and I pop in and shoot you full of paraldehyde to stop you chasing the nurses and then I forget you for days on end. “Letting Nature take its kindly course” is what we call it.’

‘And what have I been eating, pray?’

‘Well, nothing much, really, I fancy. Nurse Quickly tells me that the dust lies thick on your bed-pan.’

‘Faugh!’ I said. I realized then that I was indeed on the mend, for it takes a strong man to say ‘faugh’ properly and with the proper curl of the upper lip.

But I realized, too, that this was a man who was a match for me unless I could soon put him down. I summoned up my most aristocratic glare.

‘If you are indeed a doctor, as your ah sunburned accomplice claims,’ I grated, ‘perhaps you will have the goodness to tell me who your employers are.’