Short stories

STEVE WALKER's
WINDSCALE, THE FAT DETECTIVE

SHAVING GRACE

Detective Chief Superintendent Windscale detests cricket in the way he detests other men's penises, which is very much indeed. Cricket is, to the 58-stone double-helping-of-policeman, a pastime of idlers whose time would be better spent training policedogs. So when the England cricket captain was found scalped and senseless in the trophy-room of Lord's cricket ground, with the trophies all missing, the turf around the wickets dug up, and everyone for one mile around mysteriously knocked out, he didn't give much of a monkey's toss. But it was a boring Sunday, and no other overtly heinous crimes had been committed all week, so he hurried over, burping up the smell of his overeaten breakfast. The last mile's traffic was clogged with half-conscious pedestrians, crashed taxis and a slumped crocodile of nuns swearing in their half-sleep. So Windscale flopped out of his van and tripped bulkily from lamppost to lamppost. By the time he got to Lord's, the knocked-outers were rising. To a man they followed him into the cricket ground. Even the ones he flicked away came back and huddled close, like hard-of-hearing disciples wanting to hear every word of the Sermon on the Mount. Len Stoves, the England cricket captain, was propped up in an ante-room room once full of signed bats. Windscale's followers tumbled in for a gawp. Then, in order for fat copper Windscale to get into the room, they all had to leave it. Waiting while they filed out, Windscale flicked through a tiny tome detailing the statistics of the career of W.G. Grace he'd found on a windowledge and tetchily tapped the glass of the empty display cases with his truncheon. One smashed. The sound made dogs lift their ears all over London that Sunday morning. The assembled cricket-loving-riff-raffs were generally wearing cricketing outfits or club blazers, some wore only mackintoshes with nothing underneath - Windscale mumbled to each man that he was a pervert, handing out application forms for becoming special constables. This policeifyingevangelicization done, he squeezed through the ante-room door with hardly any help at all. Stoves sat uncomfortably on the bench which stretched right around the small room. He was stark naked and gibbering. His hair had been scraped off his head. His pubic hair was missing also. "This is what comes from playing cricket instead of doing summink worthwhile," said Windscale, eating raw hotdogs from a trolley he'd dragged in with him. Stoves met his gaze, looking for sympathy. He found none. "So, lad. Youse gonna confess or wot?" Windscale slapped Stoves, bloodied pate with a hotdog, then ate the hotdog. Stoves whinnied and wept. He was a ruined man. Windscale saw ruined men every day. It meant nothing to him. But if this man was an innocent member of the public, ruined by a criminal act, then the perpetrators of that criminal act had, in Windscale, their greatest opponent. "A woman?" questioned Windscale. This oblique question often had, he had learned, a powerful effect upon ruined men. But none on Stoves. His eyes just rolled around the room, looking at the missing bats, while his fingers played lewdly with the single pubic hair he had left. "Their suits were as silver as the cups they carried away," he chuntered, monkeyish but poetic. Windscale had his notebook out..... "Who's this then?" "Them! THEM!" "Them? Yer mean yous didn't steal all them sodding trophies yourself lad to compensate for a failing cricketing career and then mutilate yerhself cos wimmin dossent find cricketers cor-look-at-the-bum-on-that attractive?" "Wasn't me, officer!" boomed Stoves - then hands up as if asking for an umpiring decision: "THEY did it. Them did. THEM! They came from the future. They were so nice. Asked me about my batting averages. Then one suddenly did this!" He showed his bloody baldness. Windscale didn't like his explanation. So he kicked Stoves off the bench and stood on his chest. "Awlrighy, little lad - no more of yer drivelling crappings, right! Wot I'll have is a veritable diarrhoea of gospel truths outa yerh gob, if yous doesn't mind." Stoves' recent clarities departed. He gibbered again. Windscale put more of his overweight on the man's chest, till his gibber was an airless gasp. Meanwhile, at the small window with a view of the deserted green cricketing carpet of Lord's, absentee wickets and all, a weasely photographer was waiting for the perfect moment to snap. When Windscale yawned like a basking shark, the weasel snapped. Irritated by the camera's eye-smarting flash, Windscale berated the man and the press in general, stamping his policeman's feet - smallish, in fact, compared to the rest of him - in remembrance of 10 thousand misrepresentations of his policing exploits going back to his days plodding the beat in Reading when England swang with 60s pop. In his passion he forgot about the cricketer under his feet and when the great detective recovered his temper he ooo-eered, cos the English cricket captain, a hero to a million small boys, was dead under his feet. A buggeration to explain to the Commissioner, thissun! "The victim was deceased when I arrived, yer honour. Photographs? Of me stamping the bloke to squishy death? Fabrication of the leftist press, sir. Obvious, innit. Nope, as the victim told me himself.....erm - or would,ve, had he been alive when I plodded in, sir - it twas men in silver suits from the future wot did it." "Um?" "From the future, sir. Silver suited gents." "You,ve been overdoing things, Windscale. Too much strain. Take the afternoon off." Windscale opened the tiny tome on W.G. Grace and placed it in front of his boss. The Commissioner put in his monocle. The page was reflected small and bright with the whole room around it, a big tomato dominating the scene, which was Windscale's nose. The page of statistics and a minuscule footnote meant nothing to the Commissioner. To Windscale it meant everything. "The bastards, them from the future, them's done this before. To W.G. Grace on August 23rd, 1899. Like wot it records in yon footnote......he batted in a balaclava, though it were 97° in the shade that day, and rumour was at the time that he'd shaved his beard off in a state of intoxication and thought better of it next day when he saw ees orrible mush underneath. Hence the balaclava, to hide ees shame. But the real reason was, as the trained mind of a modern copper can instantly twig, is that people from the future had whipped the whiskers off the bugger." The Commissioner hardly heard these deductions. The sound of his own weeps drowned them out. He'd had, to be tabloidly frank, a passionate thing for Len Stoves, a from-afar, passionate thing - similar to the affection the otherwise heterosexual Windscale occasionally alluded to for the personage of the King of Spain. "A bloody tragedy, Wilf," sobbed the Commissioner. "He was so young and lithe! Oh, Len, Len! " Windscale got on with police biz. "I'm going up to Cambridge for to knock some eggheads together. Maybees I can commandeer a top secret gizmo and get somone to travel me back in time, where I can proceed to nab the bastards before they shaves W.G. Grace on August 23rd, 1899. Nifty scheme, innit!" Heavy raindrops suddenly hit the window and both men's eyes darted to it. Windscale looked down on the New Scotland Yard sign, turning and turning, as it always did, and he smiled. When his smile was done, the Commissioner was blowing his snout. "He were only a cricketer, sir. And wot's bleeding that, eh?" The Commissioner took a cricket ball out of his gun-drawer and rubbed it vigorously against his crotch, saying "Oh, Len!" in such a demonstation of private passion, that Windscale blushed as he backed out of the room. In the future, the way ahead future - in fact in the future's own future - all anybody does, or will do, is play cricket. This is the great culmination of history's efforts that we have to look forward to! When all the world's problems are solved - no more wars, no more want of any kind, no more need for policemen or agony aunts, when the human ego is calm, and life is worryless, long and every moment of it joyful and healthy - cricket becomes the focus of excitement, the only news, the thing through which all love is channelled. Cricket more than any other game will suit the timbre of those future mindsets. Live to cricket, cricket to live. At the centre of every one of these future communities will be the greensward of the cricket pitch. Folk will walk to it down leafy boulevards lined with the lifelike statuary of male and female cricketing heroes, who thwonked centuries centuries ago and, youthful as ever, shall play again this very afternoon. The accoutrements of the game - the big black scoreboards, the lemonade tent, the distant crack of ball on bat as cricket-hungry boyos practice in the nets - these are symbols of a slow lifelong ecstatic joy, with memories of happy yesterdays no less happy than today. A good world. If you like cricket - which they all shall, of course - it is an infinitely better world than the one Windscale stomped in, millions of years in their past. An almost perfect world, in fact. Except for one thing. The election. In every 237th season an election will be held in which every cricketer - meaning every person - on earth will vote to decide who will be Chairman of Selectors at Lord's, the centre of the cricketing universe. The election of this benevolent despot always causes a ripple in the general hearty joy. In the year 333,476,555 A.D., the ripple will look like being bigger than ever, cos the incumbent Chairman is not your usual easy-going bubblehead, but a power-loving throwback, consumed by ambiton, who will be determined to be re-elected, at all costs. Bat Warwickshire, Assistant Groundsman 2nd Class, middling spin-bowler, will be lying naked at midnight on the quiet pitch waiting for a girl to happen by. At silly-mid-off a couple are already at it. Bat will watch them in the light of the stars. The only other light is from the observation lounge above the Cricket Museum, where the overtall Chairman of Selectors is pacing. At last, a girl wearing only cricket pads happens by. Her name is Slip. She wants sex. Bat will be enjoying himself with her when the Chairman saunters down, flicking his quiff under the stars. He sits by them and watches, but his long body remains clothed - he doesn't honour them by joining in. The Chairman will suddenly say: "I'm behind in the polls, so I am. Sure, I'm going to lose the election." "And does it really matter at all?" Bat will say, between kisses. "Sure, won't the game go on whatever happens and whoever's in charge." Then the lovers will groan to a finish and roll onto their backs, staring at the starry night. The Chairman will say nothing. He will sit there, sniffing a few blades of grass he rubs into a ball between his fingers. "What I need," he will say. "To help me win........" Slip will get up, say no goodbyes, walk away as jauntily as if from the crease after scoring a double century. At the boundary she will dance for joy, then trip over another couple making love, and join in. Sex will be a hoot for these future people, but they think about cricket while they,re at it. Cricket is the soul's greatest joy. "......To help me win....is to do something that will make me resoundingly popular, so it will." "Sure, and why not open for England tomorrow. Select yourself. You,re a fine batsman when you loosen up, so you are." The compliment will give him a good intake of breath, but then.... "Sure, it's true, so it is. But my opponent is a spin bowler with an evil wrist - and guess who's bowling for the Oz tomorrow! What happens if he bowls me for a ha-ha duck, hm? No, I,ve a much better idea, so I have. Something new for the museum." "Sure, and the museum has everything, has it not! There's 50 floors of stuff. Don't I wander its halls every day myself and I still haven't seen the half of its treasures!" "One thing we haven't got." A long hesitation......then in the hushed tones of an awestruck pulpiteer: "The beard of W.G. Grace, so it is. If we had that holy relic, and twas me that took the catch for it, I'd get a landslide, so I would." Bat will laugh at this. Hearing him, several horny prowlers walk towards him in the dark. The Chairman grabs his hand and they hurry away behind the wicket towards the nets. The prowlers converge on each other and lie down. "There is a way, so there is. Help me, Bat. Will you not?" "Of course, Uncle Gary. I will, I will." In the nets Duckie Bails will be waiting for them, clinging to the netting like a netted lobster. Duckie is a notorious figure - bad-tempered batsman, crooked umpire, ungentlemanly, loudmouth, outrageous cheat in a fairdoos age, porcine figure-ed when svelte is the rule. Banished from the game for years, this night he is back at the cricketing holyground with gnashings of his gap-toothed pearly-white teeth. The three stand in the darkness, like conspiritors in a cricketing Gethsemane, until the Chairman speaks: "I think you know Duckie Bails." Bat will hesitate before embracing the villain. His naked body will be hugged by the swine in cricketing whites, a coming-home hug, a brotherly, friendly hug, which will bring Bat's easy life to an end. "Sure, and you,ve just had sex, haven't you?" chuckled Duckie, with a prurience lost to history but enduring in him. "And isn't your skin still a-tingle with it, so it is?" The Chairman will hold their hands in his. "Duckie will go with you, Bat. To help. Sure, and issent he just the man for the job!" Says Duckie: "And I'll open again for England, so I will, if we get the beard, eh, Chairman, eh, eh?" "Sure, and you will, you will, so you will, Duckie. What a great day that shall be, in all, in all!" A shooting star will cross the heavens in that moment and Duckie Bails will look up and say: "Begorra, someone's hit a six, so they have?" Then he will chuckle like a pantomime villain. Bat's skin will goose-over as he regrets that the soothing touch of tonite's lovemaking is gone forever - an old-fashioned melancholy, unusual in those times of long youthfulness and infinite encounters. Before he slopes away, leaving them alone in shiverish moments of the arriving future, the Chairman will hand them a scorecard with a number scribbled on it - it is the number of a room deep under the Cricket Museum. Tomorrow morning, when they skip practice to report there, they will step through a doorway into the distant past. Windscale arrived in Cambridge when its shops were shutting for the day. Tea-time! For once he resisted foody temptations and kept to police business. He found his quarry, the famous Professor Ludovic Chibs, being wheeled across the quad of his college by Frank Mogly, ex-welterweight boxing champ, who was the wrecked Professor's nurse, feeder, bottom-wiper and interpreter. The Professor looked quite lifeless. "It's no use speaking to him, copper," slurred the punchdrunk Mogly. "His disease has destroyed the part of his brain wot speaks English. He only understands our private language. Yous tell me what yerh wants terh say and I'll pass it on." Windscale's trained policeman's eye noticed that the Professor's skin was too blue for life. He felt his icy-wristed pulse. "This man is stone dead." "Naw, he's bleeding not!" insisted Mogly, his fists up, circling Windscale ready for battle. "He's dead, you stupid git. Bottom of ees bleeding cage, mate. Look!" "I'm tellin ya! He's never dead! He's in wot we calls a catatonic state. Part of his disease. Comes over him sudden like. Anytime." "Oh, yeah." "You betcha. He were fine a minute ago." Windscale gave the wheelchair a whack with his truncheon. Professor Chibs body slumped and rolled onto the ground. "Now look wot you done, fat-arsed copper! Gotta be careful, yer know - him being the world's greatest genius n,all." Windscale was repentant, gave Mogly and the obviously dead Professor the benefit of the doubt - he helped Mogly haul the corpse back into the wheelchair. The cop-spooked Mogly then took off, pushing the wheelchair ahead of his getaway as fast as it would go. Windscale gave chase around a sundial for twenty minutes, before a mild heart attack floored him. He came to with Mogly pinned underneath him and the wheelchair rolling away by itself, under the shadow of Christchurch towards the river of so many tedious youthful memories. "I need yon egghead's help with a case I'm working on, gottit, you cretinous gobbit!" "Yeahyeah, so wot's it worth to yers? Eh? Eh, eh, eh?" Windscale almost handed him a wad of counterfeit fivers. But his attention was diverted by a splash...... The wheelchair had wheeled the Professor into the river. Not unexpectedly, he sank. Windscale confiscated 23 picnic baskets, spread the contents in his lap, and sat munching chicken-legs and marmite sandwiches while Mogly desperately dove among the weeds searching for his late employer, like a mad pearl-diver in an oysterless ocean. At last the body surfaced, its maw gaping as it commenced floating away downstream. Windscale reluctantly left his meal and stepped into a punt to follow the only man on Earth with the knowledge to help him travel back in time to nab the silver-suited miscreants he sought. At 58 stone the great policeman was way too heavy for the punt. But by sticking one punt over another one, hammering it in place with his ever-useful truncheon, and lashing the buoyant picnic-baskets to the sides with clumps of luxuriant hair yanked from the pates of passing students, he managed to create a new craft where the water brimmed to the edge but did not swamp. Windscale hooked the Professor aboard with his punt-pole, then sat eating chickenlegs from pockets-full of chickenlegs, while Mogly - the Professor draped over his back, arms dangling - took over the punting. "Ask the Professor if it be scientifically feesibule for a personage of my exceptionally manly girth to travel backwards in time an hundred years or nighabouts. Go on, ask the bugger!" Mogly made an odd sound - this was the private language. It sounded like Spanish played backwards and shouted from the inside of an owl. The Professor's reply was inaudible. But Mogly was confident: "After much thought, the Professor concludes that a project such as yerh suggests is entirely feesibule. But only if supervised over by his all-knowing genius." Best news all day for Windscale! Wait on, though - wasn't the supervising all-knowing genius stone dead? Sod it! Windscale passed an angry policesiren of wind, inadvertently blowing the punt 14 miles downstream. They had left the Professor drying before a fire and were walking down the length of the great man's laboratory. Mogly was talking scientific gobbledegook from a boxer's perspective, interspersed with commentaries from his old fights. At the end of the room was a jacuzzi, wires connecting it to boxes of tricks on the lab bench. "Treatment for your bloke's condition, issit, yon fart-bath?" "Stupid copper!" laughed Mogly. "Yer in the presence of the greatest invention in the history of the world..... and ya think it's a fart-bath, ha, ha, ha! Stupid copper!" Windscale broke a beaker of acid over Mogly's head and threw him in the jacuzzi. The welterweight continued laughing. Windscale was flicking switches at random. Suddenly, Mogly stopped laughing and cried out with no slur in his voice. "I say, old chap, do be careful, that's delicate machinery you know!" Then the water in the jacuzzi turned red - it bubbled like tomato soup - and Mogly disappeared. It was just as Windscale had thought. The jacuzzi was the Professor's time machine - of course, hadn't he won the Nobel prize for his bubble theory! It was while travelling back and forth in time via his jacuzzi that he had developed his 'disease', - his nervous system getting itself haywired by time travelling. And now his body was nowt but a corpse, poor chump! Or maybe not - was it fanciful to wonder, as Windscale found himself doing, if maybe Professor Chibs, devilishly, had transferred a reflection of his highbrowed personality into the mind of his helper Mogly, in order to survive the effects of timewarped conking out. You'd never get a conviction, but it was more bleeding obvious the more you dwelt on't. Science, eh, wot a marvel! Windscale pressed more buttons at random and Mogly returned wearing boxing gloves, bleeding from cuts above both eyes. "I had him! I HAD THE BASTARD!" he yelled. "He went down twice in the 3rd." Apparently he'd been back in 1975 fighting Carlos Palomino for the world welterweight title in Mexico City. This time he was winning. Windscale shook him and slapped his face. "Professor! Come out! I want to speak to the Professor." Once again, Windscale, in his enthusiasm, overdid it. Mogly fell in a lifeless heap to the floor. In fairness, Palomino's punches did 2% of the damage. Windscale sat on the edge of the jacuzzi in despair. But when the swing doors at the lab's far end creaked in a swing, Windscale's tiny mouth in the big pudding face grinned its widest possible grin. It was Professor Chibs, freshly singed and smoking from his fireside sit, revivified, eyes twinklesome, toes likewise, his genius back in its proper napper. "Can I help you officer?" "Too bloody true, your honour. I want to go back in time to August 23rd, 1899, for to catch some rotten-to-the-core villains wots speeding about in time stealing hair'n,beards." "Always delighted to be of service to the police!" trilled the Professor and with a girlish wave indicated that Windscale should climb into the jacuzzi. As Windscale undressed, his spare tyres clapped together. His sagging gut, full of unreleased belches - one life has only enough time for a certain number of belches - expanded free of encumbrances, hiding his gerbilish genitalia in its greatest folds. He climbed into the hip-deep jacuzzi, scratching his many skin conditions with his truncheon, which naturally he was taking with him to 1899, and sat among the bubbles with an apprehensive grimace on his face. "Awlright, Prof. Do your stuff! Bog me off." "Ta-ta!" said the Prof, pressing all the right buttons, stroking gizmos he'd grown to love. Windscale swallowed bubbles, saw red, spent several minutes sitting underwater enviously watching Carlos Palomino eat a lunch of bubbles in Mexico City in 1975, then was pummelled by a trillion rock-hard inedible bubbles, a meteor shower of cannonading bubbles sinking into his flab. It was like being hit by every knock-out punch ever thrown. Feeling soft like mashed potato he was floating, sinking, singing like a whale, his flesh full of the passions of 100 years, newsprint scrolling before his eyes, each bursting bubble letting out a day that shot through his policeman's soul, drenching him in tears of other folk's laughter and despair. Then he popped to surface in the sea off Great Yarmouth. It was breakfast-time on August 23rd, 1899. At Sandringham Queen Victoria was rising for one of the last times. And in London, W.G. Grace was combing the crumbs out of his beard before his morning exercise. Mmmmmmarrrh, the smell of frying bacon and burnt toast from the seafront hotels! Windscale strode nude, excited and proud towards his first Victorian breakfast. Gulls circled him and seemed to cry his name. But was Windscale already too late? W.G. Grace was 50 in 1899, the shape of a gigantic pear, bellificationsly adipose, sausage-nosed, his magnificent 3-foot long beard streaked with white - it, as much as he, a national treasure. He was the most famous man in England, nay the Empire, nay the World. True, his greatest ball-whacking days were long behind him, but this year was his Indian summer and he had never been held in greater esteem. He'd scored a double-century almost every day since Easter and his mood was overdosed on triumph. As was usual, the great man ate a hearty breakfast at his London home, attended to his surgery - he was a doctor when not cricketing - in which he slapped the backs of his dying patients and boomed cricket into their pale faces, then he exercised by chasing his pack of beagles over Hampstead Heath. With his prophet's beard blowing in his face, W.G. looked like Jehovah's more reasonable younger brother. And when he playfully swang his bat, whacking the noggin of anyone he passed by, concussing them, it looked more like divine punishment for lewd thoughts, rather than the boyish exuberance of the greatest cricketer of all time. On the morning of August 23rd, 1899, Bat Warwickshire and Duckie Bails, 333,476,000th century cricket fanatics, were waiting for the legend to jog by, intent upon stealing his beard. Wearing neat cricketing whites over their silver suits, their futurosity was hidden, but still somehow obvious - in the way they stood, the cock of their eyebrows, their bizarre simplicity of being. Bat fidgeted with his barber's scissors. Duckie Bails vaporised squirrels with his ray-gun, irrevocably changing the future with every zap. In bushes behind them were hid their swag of trophy cups - trophies for games not yet played! Suddenly, they grabbed each other. "Sure, and isn't that himself behind them beagly-dogs?" "It is, it is, so it is! Oh, bejabers! Sure, and wot a magnificent sight of towering ebullience!" From boyhood these two had been soaked in cricket and nowt but cricket. The sight of the actual flesh-&-blood W.G. Grace was too much for them. They froze, gibbering, hearts beating louder that the barking of W.G.'s beagles. These were suddenly all about them, hard wagging tails buckling their knees. Then W.G., his high-pitched laugh cutting through the barks, was upon them. Bat was already fainting. Duckie Bails was shakily zapping his ray-gun to knock-out his hero, but only succeeded in conking a few beagles, until W.G.'s playful bat hit him in the face - his eyes flew to the boundary, green grass span towards him - splattero! Bat was similarly batted as he swooned, so swooned into another swoon during his original swoon - double-swooned he hit the ground and dreamed of cricketers as yet unborn. The duo from the future, so successful in their trial-run of stealing the hair of Len Stoves, had completely failed in their encounter with W.G. Grace, who was padding up in Lord's by the time they came to, each with a beagle sitting on his chest. "Sure, and it's not so bad, Bat," said Duckie Bails. "If we get the beard off him this afternoon at Lord's, mebbess we can watch him hit a few sixes first." The idea was intoxicating to Bat, whose layers of conservatism shuffled in his mind - he seemed to know that if he heard the clonk of W.G.'s bat upon ball just once, then the future he loved would thereafter be tedium for him and all his enthusiasms die in his heart. But he did not argue with his outrageous accomplice. They wandered wide-eyed through 19th century London towards Lord's, each with two slightly-stunned beagles under their arms and a few more woozy ones stumbling at their tripsome feet. No one on their way to the match that day was half as excited as these particular aficionados. The denuded Windscale, unable to find any clothes to fit him, sat on the London train whacking his goosebumps with his truncheon. He arrived in Liverpool Street station dressed in discarded copies of that day's Times, then took a handsome cab to Lord's. He scowled at the passing view - Victorians all looked like villains to Windscale. And there were far too many horses about. He salved this irritation by jabbing his huge pudgy fist from the handsome and knocking out whichever horse was within jab-reach. Thus, he left a trail of snaggled traffic around horses dropped in harness. Arriving at Lord's, with no antique coin to pay the fare, he told the driver he was a time traveller and paid him with a dead cert winner for the 1966 Grand National - the earliest romp home he could remember. He convinced the driver he could clean up with a sure bet 66 years hence and enjoy a wealthy dotage, and the man was duped by the prospect, though he was 72 already. A sudden gustyness blew most of The Times off the timecop. Thus his 58 stone was a more than usual spectacle of fleshy excess to these people who'd never even seen their wives or husbands stripped and who made love through holes in the bedsheet. Women screamed. Men pulled their toppers over their eyes. "'Ere - you've forgotten to put your uniform on, lad," said the mountainous old-fashioned copper on the gate, whose instincts recognised the naked apparition as a fellow policeman. Windscale was stunned. There could be no mistake - the nose! the gut! - it was his own great-great-grandfather! A blub arose from his throat. He could not control it. A lone orphan his life long, this was a deeply emotional moment for Windscale. He embraced the man warmly, greasing his shiny buttons with sweat. "Daddy! Oh, daddy! I's so happy to see yer. My heart bursts, it do, it do." "'Ere, wot's your game!" Windscale came to attention. "I am Detective Chief Superintendent Windscale, from 100 years in the future. I've cum back for to arrest some noxious perps wot is intending to steal the beard of W.G. Grace this very day." "Cor blimey blooming heck!" said great-great-grandfather. "My boy Wilf's boy's boy, you'll be, and a copper too boot! I is bursting! Bursting!" They both wept on each other's shoulders for half an hour, during which time any number of beards could have grown, never mind been stolen. To other coppers who came up to enquire, the Victorian Windscale explained: "It's me great-great-grandson. Wot a handsome figure of a man, issnee?" Then a cricket ball went over their heads, smashing the window of a gentleman's outfitters over the road. Cripes! This could only mean that W.G. Grace was already batting. They hurried into the ground and there he was receiving a long hop to legside from the Australian bowler, which, with a beautiful stroke, he clipped to the boundary. Applause and appreciation all round, except from the two Windscales. "I 'ates to say this, son," said the elder. "But I can't bloody stand this game. Encourages idleness I finks." "Too true, dad. And idleness is wot gets villains started on the crooked road to crime." "I 'eartily concurs, lad." The sun came out from behind wooliness and the day was suddenly sharp and bright with fierce light. Windscale's piggy eyes rolled around the spectators. He guessed the villains-from-the-future would be covered up in a Victorian garb disguise - but all it needed was a glint of sunlight on an inch of their silver suits peeping from underneath, and he'd have em! The sight of an enormous naked man had attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales. He sauntered over, as portly as Windscale, with his latest mistress, stopping to applaud a six and from W.G., then for a single, eating vol-au-vents all the way. "I say, and wot do you do? Are you with a circus?" "'e's a policeman from the future, your majesty, come to protect yon legendary cricketer from villains intent of klepping ees beard." The Prince was horrified. Meanwhile, his bosomy mistress, with typical aristocratic insensitivity, was poking Windscale's ample flesh with her parasol. It was a not-too-unpleasant sensation for a policeman who hadn't had sex in three years. It gave him, shame on him, an erection, and a beetroot blush to go with it. Fortunately, his overhanging belly hid his wagging finger of passion or an embarrassing scene may have ensued. But his groans of pleasure as the sharp point of the parasol pieced the skin of his buttocks - the curious lady was circumnavigating him - caused even W.G. to look up from the crease. Great-great-grandfather Windscale was explaining the detail of his great-great-grandson's mission to a horrified Prince of Wales. Meanwhile, one of the very beagles brought into the ground by Bat Warwickshire and Duckie Bails - yes, they were there! - trotted by and saw what it took to be a small throbbing red sausage. It bit. Hard. Windscale swallowed his scream, then burped it back, his cheeks billowing three times before he swallowed it again. The Prince's anxious hands were tugging his own kingly beard. "If these wotters get W.G.'s beard orf him, ooo-oooo - we'll lose the Boer War, oo-oo, the Kaiser will wib me all winter, oo-oo, wiots in Bangalore! The honour of the Empire, oo-oo, do be at stake this day! By heck!" He looked out at the game - W.G. looked so vulnerable with all that green space around him, nothing but lantern jawed Aussies between him and a stadium full of potential beard-nappers. He snapped his royal fingers and in a trice was surrounded by cricketing officials - their eyes half on him, half on the growling beagle gripped onto the pained Windscale's penis. "We can't possibly abandon the match, sir. W.G.'s going for his double century. Oh, no. The disappointment, sir. And who would they blame, sir? Tall bleeding story anyway, sir." Police protection was the only answer. Windscale was bustled into the changing rooms and kitted out, padded and swathed. A signal to W.G.'s batting partner told him he was to allow himself to be bowled. Windscale, who had never played cricket in his life, was being sent out to play for England in order to protect the immortal beard at the stumps. The ripple of applause as he walked to the crease gave him a lightness of step. But the beagle, still clinging on under his trousers, caused the occasional twitch of pain to ripple his double chins. The bat was small in Windscale's hands. He twiddled it like a truncheon, lip pouting, waiting to receive. WELL HIT THAT MAN! Windscale tapped the ball as if it were a pickpocket's head - it flew to the mid-on boundary. Windscale and W.G. commenced making runs. They met briefly in the middle..... "There's two villains......" The point continued on the 2nd run..... ".....Cum for to klep your beard....." And another run....... "I am the police......" W.G. received. Clipped the ball to the most awkward place for the fielders......more runs..... "I is here for to protect yerh chinny-chin-chin from baldness, gorrit?" A high pitched laugh from W.G. On the next set of runs Windscale was too pained from beagle penis-bites to speak. So they just compared bellies - Windscale won. Next shot, W.G. hit a six, making him 199. It was the end of the over. They met in the middle with time for a chat. "Look here, chum," laughed W.G. "These villains of yours. They're in the ground, right?" "Uh-huh." Windscale's beady eyes rolled. "I tell you wot - just keep jolly-well looking - when you see the blighters, you point them out to me and I'll hit them for a stonking six." Having said so, he appraised Windscale's pained expression doctorishly. He then, seemingly demonstrating a stroke, whacked the wriggle in his batting partners trousers. The beagle slipped into Windscale's sock, silenced. A doctor for 30 years, W.G. had cured his 3rd patient. "I'll keep looking," said the relieved Windscale, then limped up to receive. His eyes were on the Aussie slow bowler, trundling up with his fingers in a languid grip of the ball. In the same instant that the ball left the bowler's sly hand, Windscale was blinded by a glint, a sudden revealing wink of lightening from the stands. Beside the peanut vendor stood a tall figure popping peanuts. It was Bat Warwickshire. Engrossed in this surveillance, Windscale forgot to bat - the ball bounced off his nose, almost into the wicket-keeper's hands, and rolled into space. He made a run. "By the peanut vender! Tall bugger! One of THEM fersure!" W.G.'s amused eye was on the peanut-popping figure as they passed for a second run. Windscale injected a note a seriousness into the occasion: "He done in the England Captain 100 years on! Scalped him horribly hairless, he did! Best player since yous, he were!" W.G. took it seriously after that. Thinking of such bad-doos to a fellow maestro brought on of his famous tempers. His hit, when it came, was given with a daemonic energy focused by a lifetime's supreme mastery of batsmanship. It was like the Victorian age's revenge on every criticism the future would have of it. The ball flew straight, no curve at all. Bat, hopeful Bat, Bat the lover, Bat the star-gazer, Bat the easy-going denizen of future leisure-filled days, had just noticed a pretty girl shading her eyes by the scoreboard.... his head turned.... the ball didn't strike him full - it glanced, killed the peanut vendor. Bat panicked, pulled out his ray-gun, and ran - not away, but towards - towards the only thing his bleary vision could see - the beard, W.G.'s magnificent growth. His long cricket-trained legs strode, tripsomely, dizzily, scissors in one hand, ray-gun in the other. The whole of Lord's was on its feet - this was the double century, and wot a whackeroo to make it with! Glinting flashes from revelations of the silver suit beneath the Victorian costume. Policemen invaded the pitch, a puffed-out blue haze on that hot lemonade-glugging day, blowing whistles, truncheons raised, falling Keystoneishly, rolling upright again, fifty of them, more, then more, then one extra - Duckie Bails in a copsuit, his mind full of ideas of redemption, for if he can bag the beard he will open batting for a future England and his rotund statue will grace the boulevards. The overtall Gary Spindler, Chairman of Selectors at Lord's in the year 333,476,555 A.D, will be pacing his office above the Cricket Museum as twilight falls on another cricket-filled day in that future of ours. Singles are already wandering onto the holy of holies, hoping for lovemaking when the stars come out. The Chairman will be in half a mind to join them, to appease his anxiety with warm young flesh on the new-mown grass. When his nephew Bat and the caddish Duckie Bails zoomed off into the past from the antique jacuzzi in Room 837B, he'd thought they'd be back in a blink with the coveted beard. But apparently it didn't work like that. You stayed away for as long as it took you to accomplish your mission. Bat and Duckie didn't know this either. So if they hung about in 1899 to eat buns or wiggle their stumps in the women, they might be too late for the election, and without his last minute gambit the Chairman would become the ex-chairman, just another cricketer oiling his bat, dwelling on other men's glory. Peckish, he decided to visit the tea-tent. There was bound to be some cake left over - funny, but he liked it better stale. He walked through the darkened museum, a peculiar feeling in his belly, nothing to do with anticipation of cake. Some instinct told him to turn on the lights, something he had never done before. He preferred the mystery of the darkness and the not to see his long face in the reflected glory of the trophies. But his finger made him flick the switch. Egad! Every display case was empty! Not a pullover or a pad to be seen. No silver trophy, no picture of Boycott or Bardsley. Nowt! The Chairman's habitual stoop went down a notch - he reached out for a cricket bat to steady himself - there was none. Could this be a dastardly trick of his election opponent - everything stolen and the incumbent Chairman blamed? But when he hauled his headachy head up again the display cases were full. But not with cricketing memorabilia. With footballs. Footballing cups. Footballing jerseys hung framed on the walls. Team photos of footballers swarmed. On plinths were little squares of colour where hologramismic strikers kicked home the same goal over and over again. The Chairman ran down the winding stairs, breathless, sick at heart. He knew what had happened. The election didn't matter now. He'd lost every sensation in life he valued. All that mattered now was to dive into that dank jacuzzi and get back to a time when people played cricket. Slip was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. Naked except for her pads, she was looking for Bat, wanting more of the restful lovemaking she'd had with him last night. But in the moment the Chairman saw her, she changed. Her hair went spiky. A bee-like black-&-orange strip covered her taut cricketers body. She became fatter, her face bruised and twisted. She spat at his feet. There was a wailing chant outside, a crash of breaking windows all around. The Chairman tried to dodge past Slip, but she fouled him and had him down. She began the kicking. But left when the other supporters broke in. They were the ones who kicked the Chairman to death, not her. She snarled this to the disciplinary inquiry afterwards and got off. Leaving the chant behind her, Slip went on the wander down the dark corridors of the Football Museum. Her body tingled as if from lovemaking. But she'd never let a footballer ball her - not ever, the bastards! She walked through a long ribbon of darkness towards a brightly lit room. She kicked open the door. It was Room 837B, where the jacuzzi was installed. She will stomp up to it with typical defiance and stand on the rim like a suicide on a ledge, her boots squeaking on the ribbed plastic. Then she will stoop down to pick up the disgusting thing floating inside the popping bubbles - it will be W.G. Grace's beard, white and greasy. She nearly topples in. But she will not be that fortunate. The bubbles will suddenly stop and, with her balance delicately kept, she'll see another version of herself - a calm, pleasure-seeking nudist in cricket-pads - who she will hate on sight but will never forget. One moment Windscale was swinging his bat at villains-from-the-future. Next moment, ambushed by bubbles, he melted into the grass, and was surprised to find himself back in his own time, 43 not out, toes wiggling in Professor Chibs' jacuzzi, a frothing flotsam of broken cricket bats all around him. It was the dawn of the following day. Looking through the windows of the deserted lab, Windscale could see early-morning joggers beginning another English day. All seemed well and normal. But he was seized with a loneliness he hadn't felt since boyhood. There had been no goodbyes between him and his great-great-granddaddy, a man now long dead, to whom he had felt particularly close during their brief policing moments together. He felt torn away from his ancestor, as lost and blubby as a kiddy in a grimacing crowd. Whenever Windscale became emotional he repeated this stern mantra to himself - "I AM THE POLICE. I AM THE POLICE." - It didn't work so well today. With the aid of a tooth-mirror Windscale pick toothpick-sized splinters of bats from that foot-deep chasm that was the crack between his buttocks. Then the sombre fatcop dressed his manly porkbody and hurried off. The case wasn't solved yet. One of the villains was still at large. Windscale spent the journey-time to London ordering breakfasts on his mobile. The waiters were carrying the trays into the elevators at New Scotland Yard when he arrived. He was hungry enough to gobble off the trays there and then, but the elevator doors swished shut before his pudgy fingers could grab even a rissole. So he was condemned to salivate as he puffed up the stairs. The saliva slimed out of his gasping mouth in a constant stream, soddenerating his clothing, and ran like a record-breaking leak of ectoplasm down the stairs, through the lobby and out into the street where it made a sticky mess of a military parade in Whitehall. It also slipped Windscale up, sending him back down most of the stairs he had climbed on his buckled ankles. Thus, it was nearly an hour before 842 pounds of saliva-drenched policeman emerged at reception on the 14th floor. For once his snarl wasn't as loud as his belly's grumble. He stomped along the corridor to eat his cooled feast. But halfway along he saw a pizza rind flying out of his office door. Then an empty carton of prawn balls. Then an biscuitless biscuit tin. Windscale nutted the glass of that corridor's shotgun-cupboard, yanked out a gun, and was off to shoot the lips off whoever was purloining his hard-earned nosh. Bugger it, but he'd been all the way back to the 19th century in the line of duty! No-fair-doos that some gluttonous prawn-nibbler should nick his crop. But he stopped in his salivary tracks when Sergeant Stephanie Petherwick came out of the office, smelling the gift of a rissole in one long-fingernailed hand, saying into the office: "I'll see to it right away, Wilfie .....I mean, Chief Super, he-he-he-he-he-he-he." Her terrific rearend wobbled seductively down the corridor as she gnawed doggy-fashion on the rissole. Windscale cried out to his truelove but only gargled with a throatful of dribble, which now tasted salty with the tears that rolled down his cheeks into his sloppy gob. Petherwick had been his right-hand in policing, also hisfirst in the bedroom. They were to have married. But she was murdered by the serial killed Broderick Cumber. So how come she was back on life's beat? Windscale peeped into the office, shotgun first, and saw HIMSELF! sitting at the desk, buttons popping after an unexpected windfall of tucker. HIMSELF! with a puffy hairdo and curly mustache - cum to think of it every man he'd seen that morning had sported a puffy hairdo and curly mustache. HIMSELF! - but he himself was HIMSELF!, not HIM there, but HIM here! The puffy-haidooed Windscale plastered a handful of mushy peas into his nostrils and sniffed - he'd invented this way of eating mushy peas, or rather, the other Windscale had, or maybe both - then he looked up to see HIMSELF-without-a-puffy-hairdo staring at him down shotgun barrels. Mushy-pea slurred on the back of his spotted tongue as he yelled: "YOUS IS UNDER ARREST FOR IMPERSONERATING A POLICE OFFICER, YOU VILLAINOUS PILE OF GRISLY PLOP." Windscale spat on the desk - seven splashing quarts of spit, in fact - and roared: "ME! ME? I'S NOT IMPERSONERATING MYSELF - YOUS BLEEDING IS! YERH SKINNY SPUNKLESS GUT-PADDED UNFLUSHED LAV OF A GIT! I AM THE POLICE! IT BE YOUS WOT IN UNDER BLEEDING ARREST, MATE!" At triple volume: "PETHERWICK - CUFF THE BASTARD!!!" Sergeant Petherwick hurried in with an assortment of bondage gear, but didn't know where to put it. "CUFF HIM!" ordered Windscale. "CUFF HIM!" ordered Windscale. "I SAID CUFF HIS BIG TOES TO HIS BAGGY ARSE! " yelled Windscale. "Me gives the orders! Me do! Me! CUFF THAT UGLY-LOOKING GEEZER THIS BLINK OR ELSE!" Soon both Chief Superintendents were on their knees, waving their long-arms-of-the-law at the helplessly undecided Sergeant. "Stephie! Don't you know me! CUFF HIM!" "It's your little Wilfie, Stephie! CUFF THE BASTARD!" But, puffy-hairdo aside, these chunkhunks were a twinset - Petherwick couldn't legally tell them apart, so just rattled her chains like Marley's ghost while they clawed her with increasing hoarse implorings. So the twins hit upon the ill-mannered idea of showing her their respective penises. She would surely recognise the right one. But it was hard to get them out from under folds of flabber. So they gave this up and started bumping each other's bellies together in an aggressive manner, sometimes with Petherwick inbetween, while quizzing each other about their lifetimes - foster homes, police constable days and classic cases. These memories reduced both men to tearful emotionality and they stomped around their desk yelling "I AM THE POLICE!" into each others mushes, and finally merely barking. When the tea-trolley came around, the Windscale without the hairdo was nearest the door, so blocked it and scoffed every penguin biscuit on the trolley. It was a major victory. The other Windscale, robbed on his elevenses, commenced salivating. So the other-other Windscale slammed the door on him and hurried off with Petherwick. When other-other-other Windscale opened his office door the corridor was empty except for a dazed tea-lady littered with penguinpapers. "We'll deal wiv him later, my darling!" said the Windscale ho scoffed the biscuits. "To Lord's cricket ground, pronto-chop-chop!" Petherwick was full of questions. But she did as ordered and sped Windscale through the mid-morning slumberous traffic. He sat in the back of his van, a chubby digit fiddling lovingly with Petherwick's chestnut pony-tail. Tickled, she tossed it out of his fiddle, tossed it like a frisky pony in a field full of daisies on a spring day. Windscale laughed with glee, a sound like a cement mixer grinding up otters - a love stolen by that arch-villain, death, was filling his artery-blocked heart once more! As usual, the great detective had trouble getting out of the van. And the donkey he kept in the van to haul him out wasn't on duty. So he struggled manfully. But unbeknown to him his doppleganger had installed an ejector seat. Petherwick pressed the button when she saw her Chief wasn't going to make it without help. It shot him fifty feet into the air. He landed on a traffic warden and left quite a mess. But it afforded him a good view through the windows of the buildings overlooking Lord's. "Again, Stephie - send me uppity-up again!" "But Chief...!" Windscale flopped into the seat once more. Petherwick pressed the button. SPLAT! A vicar out shopping would not see the vicarage again. Windscale pulled himself together and rearranged his fat. "Yeah, that was interesting, weren't it not! Pull the van 10 yards down, Steph, and let's do it again!" "Again, Chief?" "Uh-huh!" Was this, Petherwick's horsy expression seemed to ask, some kind of violent let's-not-touch-each-other foreplay? She made noises like mice left behind on a train. Petherwick was aroused. She pressed the button. Windscale shot through the roof again, his hammy arms flapping to give him the extra moment of aloftness he needed. He fell to earth on the Duchess of Devonshire, in town that day to train her dog how to behave in traffic. All it learned was to be ever vigilant for 58-stone detectives dropping from nowhere. Twenty-seven more ejections had Windscale dishevelled and bruised, with 27 more pedestrians squashed in mid shop. Petherwick, meanwhile, was orgasmic to the point of seeing angels - she'd pulled off all her buttons and was spitting them up at the flying about-to-splat Windscale. When he came over to her, beaming a smile of satisfied detection, she was ready to do what she'd promised herself she wouldn't - give herself to him with total abandon! - but he said: "I's gorrim! Got the silver-suited sod! Got his arse good'n'proper, I has! Simple detective work, Sergeant Petherwick. I hopes yous learned summuck from this, eh, eh, eh, eh." Windscale's painful ejections were, it transpired, a search for the outlaw Duckie Bails, who had escaped arrest in 1899, and who, if still living, the great detective had deduced, would have taken rooms within a close proximity to Lord's. He had further deduced that the beard-stealing fugitive would have a telescope in his window, for checking when the covers were coming off the pitch on a wet day. On the umpteenth launch Windscale caught sight of this very object. It, combined with the looming background of an Edwardian decor, was a dead giveaway to the whereabouts of the man-from-the-future lost in his past who had survived into something-like Windscale's present. Petherwick did the door knocking. Duckie Bails: "Who is it?" Petherwick, as instructed by her chief, said poshly: "I'm from the England Selection Committee. We're looking for undiscovered talent to win the Ashes with and wondered if......." Duckie Bails flung open the door, chuntering chipmunkishly with excitment. "Sure, and I can play! I'm brilliant, so I am! Always was!" He was a tidge older, rounder, and maybe his outrageous twinkle was less noticeable than his air of thwarted peek, but this was not a decrepit Duckie Bails - future people lived for yonks and 100 years on he was spry and chipper. Yeah, it was the same man, cept for a puffy hairdo and curly mushtache. Windscale had him by the collar. "You're nicked, my son. Now then, where is it?" The question was hardly out of his mouth before he saw the beard of W.G. Grace. It was in a frame over the mantelpiece on a wall crowded with a shining eyeful of stolen cups and pristine memorabilia of 20th century cricket. Petherwick screamed when she saw the beard. Windscale gave Duckie Bails his angry wide-open left eye. "Yous, lad, yous know wot yous does to me......yous disgusts me, that's wot!" Duckie Bails dropped at Petherwick's feet. "Please, madam, begorra - please let me play! All these long years I've been in hiding, so I have! I had to hide - because of this! THIS!" He shook a fist at the beard. "Take it awayyyyyyy! It has ruined my life, so it has! Sure, I'm heaps betterer than anyone they've got these days. Let me open for England, I implores you!" Then he realised that the buttonless Petherwick, her milkwhite flesh spilling from the churn of policewoman's uniform, was not in any way connected with English cricket. He dived onto the settee, pulled his raygun from behind a cushion and before Windscale could karate-chop him, he'd shot it off three times. The beard fell from the wall, its frame smashing, awaking comatose ticks in this greatest cricketing trophy of all. The other two shots hit Sergeant Petherwick, one on the end of each bosom, melting her nervous system, turning her blood to orange sand. "Oh, Wilfie!" she gasped. "If only we could have our lives over again!" Windscale held her rough policewoman's hand - with his other he was strangling Duckie Bails. He knew Petherwick was sinking fast, and felt an urge to speak sweet nothings before she left him forever. But how could he, with a tongue tied up in police-notebook language? So the lovers shared a brief exchange about the training of policehorses. Then Windscale's rosy lips suddenly blurted: "Aw, Stephie, they could open the doors of all the jails, for all I bleeding care, if only we could be together for one more day!" Petherwick's delighted heart skipped one of its last beats. "Would yous have left your wife for me, Wilfie? Hm? Hm? Eh? Eh?" "WIFE?!?!?!?" Windscale's bloated face was an unreadable confusion, and while trying to read this, Petherwick died. Sand showered out of her wounds and there was nothing her stricken loverboy could do to stop it. When he had delivered Duckie Bails to the paddywagon, Windscale stood in the street awhile, staring at nothing in particular, aware of the sand blowing from the folds of his coat, half-aware of the ambulance-men scraping up the unfortunates he'd inadvertently squashed earlier on. A sensitive and idealistic young copper with a puffy hairdo under his helmet, was at his elbow. "You okay, Chief?" "Mm?" "I knows how much yerh valued Sergeant Petherwick. She was one helluva copper! I thought maybees I could drive yerh home." "Home?" Windscale absent-mindedly took W.G. Grace's beard out of his pocket and blew his nose on it. "Yeah, home. My 'WIFE' will be there, won't she?" "If she's not out campaigning, sir." "Campaigning?" "The general election, sir." "Oh." Windscale was married to the Home Secretary. This England was a subtly different place. His life was not quite his own. Sir Cynthia Passy-Wix was an elfin woman under a bouffant hairdo, with a face alternately cruel and wronged. She was waiting for Windscale in the dining-room of their Knightsbridge mansion. It seems they'd had a tiffsome row the night before and to make up the great stateswoman had made her monstrous hubby his favourite high-tea of currried pig's feet and popcorn. Windscale stood in the doorway sniffing the pig's feet. His coat was ripped in 50 places, each one of his 58-stones was bruised, his face was streaked with anguish, a gory mixture of saliva and blood pooled at his feet. "Busy day, dwarling?" "Ugfd." "Lost the moustache, I see. Makes you look more sort of, I don't know, laddish. Hungry-poos?" Windscale sat down to eat, eyeing his wife with a shy glower. She circled the 10-leaf table, nibbling mints, her sequinned hot-pants and bikini-bra getup getting brighter as she neared the chandelier, then darkening as she walked away, thumbs in bikini-straps, speaking of the state of the nation in tones alternatively cruel and wronged. Every time she passed by Windscale, she picked a dropped morsel off his bib and poked it into his cheek for him. Windscale, though passionately attracted to her pixieish sexuality and gung-ho manner, was boil-burstingly irritated by the underlying liberalism poisoning the purity her right-wing views. So he chucked once-bitten pig's feet at her to shut her up. She took this for lover's-play and cooed. When her real husband arrived a little while later, she was standing on the table in her stilettos, swinging her bikini-bra above her head, yowling like a vixen, and smeared from head to foot in runny curry juice. Windscale was in his shirt-sleeves licking off the streams of curry that were running down her legs. "SO!" said other-Windscale. "Yous twos has met, I sees! BASTARDS!" Sir Cynthia left the room without a word and returned ten minutes later washed and reeking with tarty perfume, wearing a man's dinner jacket, looking smart but gruff, wronged and cruel. "Well," said she, "has either of yous two gentlemen an explanation or wot, eh, eh, eh, eh?????" "Yesadeedy, pet, I has!" said other-Windscale, hand up like a schoolboy. "Obviously, this fake me has been manufacturated in a fishtank somewheres by one of them Johnny Foreigner criminal masterminds yer reads about but which don't actually exist, for the purpose of impersonerating myself for A) their own evil profits, B) for undermining the roots of our shared national values, and C) transforming our English way of life into some kind of Arab bleeding bazaar wif knobs on." "That's my own ickle Wilfie!" she said and embraced her sweaty-palmed soulmate, running her fingers through his puffy hairdo. "Yeah, awl right," said real Windscale, hugging the emtpy popcorn bowl. "Yon fat git do be your proper married husband, but fing is, darlin, in another sense, I'm him and he's me. We're the same man twice over due to a trick of the clock, as it were - gettit?" Sir Cynthia purred as she left other-Windscale and sat on real-Windscale's lap, sniffing his pig's footed breath. "So you're another Wilfie Windscale, then?" "Un-hurh." "He-he-he-he - In a contest, big boy, I thinks yous would tip the see-saw." She dug her nails into his gut so hard that the polish cracked. "Yeah, you be the fattest!" "Bloody isn't not, ert!" yelled other Windscale, his mushtache straightening with miffedness. "He's not half the man I is! Why, that's hardly even a paunch he's got there!" An expert fancier of the larger man, Sir Cynthia disagreed. She plucked real-Windscale's chest hairs while she fluttered her eyes. Windscale was blurting out the story of the W.G. Grace case in an incomprehensibly jumbled manner, going OW! every time a chest hair went awol. His toshy natter about silver-suited men from the future, and all the gen on that future which Duckie Bails had spilled while waiting for the paddy-wagon, was received with mightily harumpherated harumphs by other-Windscale. Sir Cynthia seemed to be hardly listening. She was sucking his earlobes and licking his 3-o'clock shadow. "I knows....." dove-trilled Sir Cynthia, ".....lets finish this upstairs, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh!" She took each Windscale by the hand and, a mouse between two elephants, led them up the great stairway. 3-in-a-bed was not morally lax, she explained, if two of the three sexifyers were the same person, even if the 2 contained more flesh than Rubens ever daubed on his bed-sized canvases. In the end the 2 Windscales rolled about in the bed fighting each other and Sir Cynthia took what pleasure she could. In was into this den of loose skin and wrestling rolls of fat that the unshockable butler admitted Frank Mogly, wheelchair-pushing his lifeless master, Professor Chibs. Windscale had sent for him to properly explain the time travelling guff to his wife, or rather to his other self's wife. Due to the unmissable fact that Professor Chibs was stone dead and that his 'interpreter' Frank Mogly knew sod-all about science and answered every question with an analysis of the boxing style of Roberto Duran, it was hard for Sir Cynthia to get a gist of the problem, used as she was to the transparent obfuscation of civil service reports. But she thought hard, wheeling around in the wheelchair in her see-through negligee while the late Professor lay stretched out on the carpet in his dusty tweeds. The Windscales paced a nude beat, sweaty, each swinging a pillow and taking turns to bark o-level science questions at Mogly. Suddenly, Sir Cynthia had that I've-had-enough-look, which twitched subtly into that mind-made-up-look. The Windscales, side-by-side like a couple of tweedledees, stood to attention, holding their breath to control their ripples, while their grande dame pontificated..... "Sticky problem, thissin! But the obvious thing to do is for one of you Wilfies to get your winkle back into the past and give W.G. Grace his beard back. Okay-dokes? And the other Wilfie can go into the future and sort fings out there, arresting anybody wot looks doubtful in this matter. Then maybe everything will be put shipshape right and ticktock trueblue again, eh?" The Windscales dressed without bothering to check whose underpants were whose and set off for Cambridge with Professor Chibs and his boxer amanuensis. They were bundling themselves with difficulty into the back of the 1-Windscale van - it looked like a contest to see how many hippopotami you can get into a mini - when Sir Cynthia ran barefooted into the street in a tizzy. "I've just realised, lovers - if ya missions succeeds, only one of yerhs will come back! That means that one bellificatious darling of yous, I'll never see him again! I can't bear it! WhaaaAAAA!!!" She briefly snogged both the pudding faces overflowing from the billowing flesh that stuffed the van. "And what if, what if - O God! - what if when all this is fixed up, my darling chompers, that I dossent know either of yous, that we're not even married???" She faced real-Windscale in terror. "We wassent an item was we, in your subtly-different England??? We were total strangers!" Windscale answered with lowered eyes. The Home Secretary fled back into the house, her perfume remaining, purple streaks in the manky twilight. The pair of Windscales pondered on mutability and chance as they burped over every bump, flatulated around every corner, their podge filling every available inch of the van, until Mogly pressed the button that ejected them onto the college green. They hadn't spoken a word on the way, except for a few remarks made by real-Windscale about the puffy hairdo of the other, these drowned out anyway by the rat-rat-rat of his double's flatulations. But now real-Windscale gripped puffy-haired-Windscale's arm in a brotherly manner. It was a moment of affection that surprised the otherworldly cop. "Yeah, wot? WOT?" "I couldn't tell yous when yerh wife was present. This afternoon. Sergeant Petherwick. She....." "Pethers? NOT? Naw, not....?" "Yerh. Raygun gorrher. Hard to bear, eh? Got the bastard, o'course." The newly griefstricken Windscale slapped his hands in his curly hair, over and over again. Original-Windscale didn't need to ask if his mirror-image had loved Stephie. Of course he had. But other Windscale had a choked question. "Where yous comes from, mate, where yous is a bachelor ......Yous and Stephie? Was you shacked or owt?" Windscale disguised a grin of death. "Naw," he lied. "Our beats never crossed." Other-Windscale, delighted: "She was all mine, then!" But when he sat in the jacuzzi, waiting for Windscale to press the buttons to pop him into the 333,476,000th century, he gabbed out the following sombrely: "Lookere, I fink I's will stay put in the future, gorrit. No need for yous to sod into the past on my behalfs. Naw, you stay here wif Cynthia, she's a champion moggy and no mistake. I don't wanna stick around here wifout my darling Stephie - even the New Scotland Yard sign will always remind me of her. Naw, I'll stay put in tomorrow land. I's sure they'll need a good copper, eh, eh, eh, eh?" Then the bubbles doubled their bubblesomeness and his jelly sank into the raspberry red briny placenta of time. Real-Windscale stood thinking, stroking the beard of W.G. Grace while Mogly shadow-boxed around him. There was, truth be told, no reason to step into the past again. He was better fixed here. A snazzy knobsucking misses, Home Secretary no less. And he felt a certain lightness of heart in this not-quite-so-snobby, puffy hairdood England. But the word DUTY ka-plinked in his head and after that there was no choice to be made. "There's a gigantic naked man at the door insisting on seeing W.G," said Agnes Grace, the retired cricketer's wife. The doctor shook his head in a deadly no, meaning W.G. wasn't well enough to see gigantic naked men. "I know who it is!" said the sick old man from behind the new beard it had taken him 16 years to grow. "Please show the blighter in." Windscale had undershot. It was October 1915. W.G. Grace's iron constitution was broken. He lay dying and in great distress. The Great War was confusing his boyish mind terribly - he felt his life had been wasted playing cricket. The Zeppelins which floated over foggy London were a nightmare to him - he shuddered like a rodent afeared of vast owls. But when Windscale's naked brutality entered the sickroom, he felt safe. "I brunged yer beard back, guv," said Windscale, rung the thing out, picked snots from it, and handed it over. "My beard! O, my beard!" W.G. caressed it, kissed it, wiped his tears with it. "I was never the same after they stole my beard. My game went skew-wiffo. Did you ever get the other man?" "Yeah, course I bleeding did." Bat Warwickshire had been cuffed by Windscale on the pitch in 1899. Now, during this very moment, he was serving a life sentence of eternal cricketlessness in Reading Jail. It would be an hundred years before Duckie Bails would join him. But justice was triumphant, as it sometimes was. W.G.'s new beard was Santa Claus white. It didn't compare with his old one. So he fumbled for scissors in his doctoring bag and began cutting his old goat's beard off. Then he tied the more youthful equivalent over his ears. Windscale took time off raiding the fruitbowl and held up a mirror. W.G. was satisfied. Even on his white face with its dark sunken eyes, the beard from his heydays was a whiz. He looked young again. "MY CAP, MY BAT!" he cried. Windscale acquiesced to his dying wish to play cricket from his deathbed, padded him up, plonked his cap on his burning head, shoved a dry bat into his shaking hands. The nurse was requested to fetch a box of cricket balls, which she brought in disapprovingly and offered one to Windscale as if it were a large pill. The final game could commence..... As of old, W.G. was a fast fierce hitter. His policeman-from-the-future amigo was soon concussed, bowling from inside a wardrobe. The windows were emptied of glass and the curtains billowed with hauls of fog. The group-photos of Gloucestershire from the 1870s fell from the wall, and then the flowery wallpaper was picked off with 6 after 6, till holes in the wall let the balls through into the rest of the house, smithereening nik-naks. Some sixes rolled down the road through the fog and beagles broke out of the garden to chase them. When Windscale tossed the final ball in his box from inside the creaking wardrobe, it was not hit. It dropped with a echoless thump. The great copper peeped out and saw W.G. embracing his bat in a dance of death, his purloined beard back in its rightful place. There was a smile upon his face. Windscale sat in the garden coughing up cricket-balls W.G. had playfully batted into his astonished gob. There was a brief glimpse of a Zeppelin through a gap in the fog. All over London, beagles dropped the balls they were bringing home, and howled. Puffy-hairdooed Windscale had been informed by his other self that in the extreme future people did bugger all but play cricket. He checked his notebook and this lying nark's information was written down in his own minuscule handwriting. So how come, as he proceeded (or will proceed) through this future England, there was nothing but football stadiums. No houses. No shops. No moterways. No clumps of trees. Just footer grounds. In which bleeding case, how was he to arrest the Chairman of Cricket Selectors for conspiracy in the stealing of a beard? These footer grounds were only a mile or so away from each other and seemed to cover the entire country. Inbetween grounds was a no-man's land of stinging-nettles and dirt roads. Puffy-hairdooed-Windscale hitched a lift from a team coach on its way to the national stadium for a play-off. The team looked like a lot of lags. The in-the-nude Windscale gave them a stiff lecture on moral redemption, but all they did was make remarks about his puffy hairdo and his weight, and though he expertly tapped one knuckle into each remarker's grin, knocking out a front tooth, it didn't stop the remarks nor the shocking atmosphere of violence and irresponsibility. Windscale was shocked. When they arrived at the National Stadium a sea of rival supporters turned over the coach. What was wrong with the authorities, allowing such mayhem? When Windscale yelled "I AM THE POLICE!!!" he was quite right. There were no other police in this timezone. "YOUS YOBBOS IS ALL UNDER ARREST!!!!" It took him till twilight to karate-chop the lot. Then, with the traditional tidiness of your British Bobby, he got busy laying them all out on the pitch, in rows, ugliest ones to the left. There were teeth everywhere. In the stands, home supporters had enjoyed the karate choppings, but were bored by the laying out, so had taken up canoodling, all going mmmmmmmmmmmmm. They wore football strips, boots, but had discarded their shorts. Lewd throaty groans shot out of the mmmmmmmmmmmmm from all around, and pasty-fleshed Windscale, resting on his back in the middle of the pitch, felt he was on an island surrounded by pleasure-loving mosquitos and nymphomaniac frogs. As the last ray of a red futuristic sun sank behind the away end stand, Slip dashed down the left wing to offer herself to the violent hulk who had just destroyed the enemy supporters. Her knees were scabbed. Her thighs black and blue. On her face was a look of hunted depravity. She was the most vicious young woman Windscale had ever seen. He was both repelled and excited. "Cummon, fatso. Let's do it! I wanna do hard-core fings on yerh!" Windscale took fright and spent his time rifling the pockets of the unconscious for sandwiches. He found some. But Slip wouldn't leave him alone. She fondled between his buttocks and stuck her whole head into his folds. Suddenly he yelled heartbrokenly: "Oh, STEPHIE! STEPHIE!", lifted Slip up by her spiky hair, and slammed her mouth on his. A light shower of rain had them slimy and muddy. They rolled and writhed, cackled and wheezed. Slip licked the crumbs and satsuma rinds out of Windscale's naval. He rubbed her up and down his great gut, slapping her with tyres, flannelling himself with her till she was red raw. They were too engrossed to notice that the unconscious, toothless victims of Windscale's afternoon moral crusade were being helped to their feet by a sneaky influx of fellow supporters. Suddenly, a great flash!!! Eyes screwed. LIGHT!!! BRIGHT SORE LIGHT!!! - The floodlights were on. Slip slipped down Windscale's bellyhump, getting her first horrified view of the creature she'd been sharing passion with in the gloaming. Then she refocused and saw the host almost upon them. The supporters were savouring the delicious anticipation of killing the fat git and the black-&-blue hussy. They each held a football high. Pummelled to death with footballs? Windscale was on his feet, notebook in hand. "YOUS BASTARDS IS ALL UNDER ARREST. I'LL HAVE YOUR BLEEDING NAMES, GORRIT!" A thousand footballs flew at him. Slip was bounced into the turf. Windscale punched a few away. But the weight of footballs was too great. His knees buckled and he flopped down. Only shapes of bright light now, holes in a blanket of green and white strip - white scabby knees a-plenty - boots kicking, laces whipping. Windscale rolled over into a meal of mud, expecting the grave. Instead his snoring woke him up on a cricket pitch at dawn. Slip, a soft warm-hearted girl, bruiseless, lay asleep on his gently heaving paunch. Other peaceful couples lay here and there. The only light was at the window above the cricketing museum, where the Chairman of Selectors stood anxiously watching the dawn. Windscale could smell bacon and eggs. He lifted Slip off without waking her and followed his nose. Coming down the long statue-lined boulevard, slow and nervous, towards the cricketing holy of holies, were Bat Warwickshire and Duckie Bails. They'd just been released from prison after 333,474,000-odd years locked up. They looked hardly any older, cos apparently men from the future dont grow much older in the past. Puffy-hairdooed-Windscale, in the stands, a tray on his lap heaped with runny eggs and fried bread, had never met the two miscreants. But they recognised him awl righty. Bat hurried out of range of his glower, found Slip asleep on the pitch, looking just as he'd always imagined her during his numbingly long absence. Her fingers were laying gently in two of the wicket holes. They twitched, like a flautist dreaming music. She awoke. Saw Bat for the first time. Windscale, meanwhile, had arrested the overtall Chairman of Selectors. Later that day, with Duckie Bails and Bat Warwickshire giving evidence, he denounced the man before the Committee, Cricket's ruling body. Thus, Gary Spindler had his name removed from the election ballot for cheating. It was replaced with the name of Wilfred E. Windscale. HISTORICAL NOTE: The white old goat's beard of W.G. Grace appeared in the jacuzzi on the eve of election day. It was a message from 20th-century-Windscale that the past was returned to normal. The possession of the beard, when announced by the futuristic Windscale, won him an election landslide. As Chairman of Selectors Windscale will be in his element as guardian of the rulebook, the only policeman in the land. When, in his inauguration speech, he will say: "I hates bleeding cricket, I do, summick awful, eurgh!" they will think he is joking. When real-Windscale arrived back from the deathbed of W.G. Grace, he found his own time in proper ticking order. Everything was just as before. Except, to his chocaholic's surprise, Cadbury's were making a half dozen chocbars he'd never munched before. Oh, and another little problem - there were 6 other versions of himself arguing in his office when he arrived. New Scotland Yard creaked right down to its basement black museum as they crossed truncheons, trading insults and flatulations, each insisting he was the bona fide real McCoy. The Commissioner stood in the doorway, infuriated and astonished. Seven tomatoes, which were the Windscale noses, were reflected in his springing-out monocle. But he wasn't commish for nowt. He twigged a surefire way of figuring who was the genuinely most Windscaleish Windscale of them all. An eating contest!!! Baked beans and custard!!! He only overlooked one thing - to overfeed all 7 Windscales would eat up the entire metropolitan police budget till the future was old hat. Sir Cynthia Passey-Wix, recently appointed Home Secretary in a cabinet reshuffle, happened to be visiting New Scotland Yard when she heard a vile sound of bursting coming from the canteen. She insisted on going down to investigate. As usual, her high-heels clipped ahead of her entourage and she punched through the canteen doors just in time to see the sixth Windscale make windy noises from his every orifice prior to an explosion of his great tubby body which brought the assembled copperdom to their feet in laddish applause. One Windscale was left. The one and only, unexploded, eating champ! He carried on spooning beans, full but still hungry. Sir Cynthia wiped an explosive splatter of half-chewed baked beans from her eyes and stomped through the suddenly dead quiet room - only the sound of blubber sliding sluggishly down the walls disturbed her fury. She looked from face to face with the wild wronged rectitude of a hanging judge on a spree. But when she looked at Windscale, it was love at first sight.