It was a time like no other, I'm sad to say. Myself
and Smythe used to frequent all of the most fashionable gentlemen's clubs in
those days. The war stopped all that of course because I had to pretend to be
bed ridden to avoid conscription. I'd swallow small shards of glass to cough up
blood and fool the doctor which worked wonders for me until I had to pass them
through the next day. I learned to sit down carefully back then, I can tell
you. I remember one day after lying to the officers, Smythe was being a sport
to one of the local urchins and gave him a playful clonk on the noggin with his
walking stick. It was most comely and charming but the boy just couldn't take a
joke, and rather childishly bled to death through a crack in his cranium. We
still laughed however, right up to the night we tossed his defiantly dour body
into the canal and spotted a tyre that some inconsiderate vagabond had
fly-tipped. That spoilt the evening something rotten as I'm sure you
understand.
We often had our evenings spoilt, Smythe and I. I
think it was something to do with the vast amounts of opium we used to consume
but one can never be sure. Not of anything once the opium kicked in. There was
one occasion when we had just won a sum of money betting on dogs and we
celebrated by letting loose some rounds from a hunting rifle into the masonry
of a greengrocers. Everyone around us was livid that we'd got brick dust in the
artichokes and we would have been arrested if Smythe hadn't had the quick wit
and diplomacy to shoot the arresting officer in the shins and make a run for
it.
There was a period of laying low after that. It
simply didn't do to embarrass the family by being party to discharging a
firearm into a man at so few paces so I elected to spend a few weeks in my
rooms, sulking and stamping around until everyone got over it. It was a bloody
good sulk too, you just don't see that quality of frowning any more. When I
eventually resurfaced into the public eye everyone was more concerned with the
coronation so I was able to resume my dealings un-harassed. Quite why a man who
was party to shooting an officer in the street was allowed to return to those
same streets when the monarch was passing through is something I chose not to
question. It would only arouse suspicion and my face was awfully sore from all
the previous grumpiness.
My doctor recommended that perhaps I should sulk more
often, since he suspected my facial soreness was simply muscle fatigue rather
than permanent damage and it seemed to have cleared up my bloody cough.
Thankfully the war was over by then and I was once again found in chairs up and
down the country. Smythe was less fortunate however, as he was held in the
grips of quite catastrophic haemorrhoids which threatened to rend his very life
in twain. We tried to comfort him by saying that standing suited the cut of his
suits but it was no use. He cheered up for a week when he discovered the lost
art of falling face first into the armchair and contorting his neck around to
greet his guests but it made it all the harder to have a glass of brandy and
laugh at the poor.
Eventually Smythe took to wailing over the wireless
at all times of night and we were forced to break his front door down and
slaughter his house staff. It was the wakeup call he needed in many ways,
especially when we pointed out that his house staff seemed to be the monkeys
which had been missing from the zoo for the better part of a year. You could
tell by the way they gripped the silver service and had the anatomies of
chimpanzees. He never did explain how they'd managed to come into his employ,
nor how their union had always managed to negotiate so masterfully with him but
life has its little mysteries and it's not our place to intrude on them.
It was, however, our place to intrude on the local
by-elections and have Smythe made MP for Prestwick. He was ever so proud of
himself and really made a difference to that community. It was almost
exclusively negative, his influence, but it was his pet project and he wasn't
doing harm to anyone that really mattered so we let him have his fun.
It all ended in tragedy of course, as with everything
one is trying to enjoy. Smythe decided to run for Prime Minister and we
couldn't very well let him do that. He'd already led Prestwick into a brief but
exceedingly bloody war against Sudan, claiming his divine right to
"reclaim the homeland" and if he tried it with the whole country it
would disrupt the cricket to no end. In light of this, we had him kidnapped and
stripped of all power. When he managed to escape our custody by opening the unlocked
door to his cell we let him go about his business uncontested, he couldn't do
any serious harm anymore. To this day I still read about small skirmishes in
the Sudanese capitol and smile, knowing he's out there and doing just fine.
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