Married to a Mermaid at the Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea!

Volume II, Chapter 4: Married to a Mermaid at the Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea! 

Since the Feast of Saint Valentine is only five months away, this chapter of "The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer!" is all about love ... McQueen is drawn into a lengthy flashback in which he recalls his love for Minerva Columba, the Sweet Dove, how he met her, fell in love with her, wrote a song for her, was troubled by a rival for her hand, and finally lost her to a monstrous crocodile. Beneath the dark waters of the North Sea, off the coast of Tannochbrae, Dr Thinley has a similar experience with a mermaid, albeit without any crocodile involvement. And in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic, we learn of the peculiar love Captain Scott had for pickled-onion flavour Monster Munch.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer

Volume II, Chapter 4. Married to a mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea!

Announcer: The adventures of Donald McQueen, bibliographer … Volume II, Chapter 4. Married to a mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea!

McQueen: At the end of the last chapter of these, the adventures of me, the great bibliographer, Professor Donald McQueen of Noxford, I had repaired to my bed in sleepy and erotically-distracted manner, hoping to dream of Daniella Oz, the mistress of the long-octodecimo. However, once attired in my red and black striped nightgown and nightcap, and mummified beneath the sheets, with my beloved cat Doggerel asleep at my feet, I found I could not sleep. Thoughts were racing through my skull, ideas quite different from the pleasing prospect of a dream-encounter with Daniella. I thought first of the great bibliographical mystery before me. Would I ever untie, or cut through, that complex and implausible knot? I still had hopes of using The Ear Trumpet of Death to reach a final, and historically verified, solution, but despite some four years of trying had failed to master it sufficiently-well to allow me to listen-in upon, or visit in incorporeal form, the workshop of Crispus Rossfleisch and his brother Jimbo in the city of Mainz around the year 1460 and find out what the … folio was going on. I consoled myself with the memory that a new fragment of the Codex Assinorum, the great tome at the centre of my bibliographical universe, had recently been discovered at the Bibblybobbleian, here in Noxford. It was one of the very rare fragments of which the substrate was some sort of cheese – possibly Limburger, or Emmenthal – and would thus provide data about the nature of the surface from which, or through which, the text had been printed, or applied, data which could not be gathered from an examination of one of the paper, parchment or pillow-case copies of the edition. Looking at that fragment must be my next task, and one which I would pursue in the morning, once the tedious duties of a Professor Emeritus of Bibliography had been discharged.

I was thus able to put these concerns from my mind. But still I could not sleep. I worried about the forthcoming election at the Temple for the Presidency of the Bibliographical Society of London – could Daniella Oz possibly win that post, as she so richly deserved? – and about the unresolved conflict of my own life with the egregious Cornelius Bunce. Bunce! Bunce! Three years previously, in a railway carriage on a journey between London town and the City of Noxford, he had implied, darkly, and evilly, as was his wont, that he knew something more than I did of the death of my beloved Minerva Columba, the Sweet Dove, some fifty years previously. This was another mystery I had to resolve. Then there was the question of Mr Lavender, who was, it seemed, still alive – an evil dwarf, I fancied, and not the animated ventriloquist’s puppet he seemed to be – and wreaking havoc, and murderous mayhem, about the streets of Noxford city … These, and other unresolved story-lines from the first volume of my Adventures, played upon my mind so that the bliss of sleep moved from the realm of the improbable to the republic of the impossible. But there was a solution. I took out The Ear Trumpet of Death, inserted it into my lughole, and let my mind wander, knowing thereby that I would find some distraction from the troubles that beset me superb intellect …

DM: Yet distraction was not quite what I found, for my thoughts of Minerva Columba, the Sweet Dove, carried me back some fifty-five years to the Noxford of my green salad days.

DM: By the expedient which I had learned of rubbing the magical device on the socle of the trumpet, I was carried back to the summer of 1967 and saw again my young self, seated in the great Lord Humpty’s Reading Room at the Bibblybobbleian. It was my first summer at Timor Mortis College, as a youthful undergraduate, callow and mellow with cannabis, a hollow vessel, a sallow fellow, yellow with a deficiency of vitamin B, my skin like tallow or jello. Can you imagine me? A narrow Apollo. Tall and almost unimaginably thin, my beard, now so white and bushy, but a crust of sandy undergrowth about my impossibly square jaw. And my heart was afire with the love of but one subject – bibliography! The study of the book as a visceral object. I saw before me the Donald McQueen who had come up to Noxford in the autumn of 1966, at the age of seventeen, and was, the following summer, collating a copy of Andrew Dandypratt’s Animadversions upon the matter of mind, and upon the mind of matter (what was the book about? Never mind. It was of no matter) published in 1645 at the height of the Civil War, in the very city in which I resided, Noxford, the stronghold and capital at this period of the Weebles and their royalist supporters, when I spotted, seated across from me in that Reading Room, the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen. Her skin was like honey, her hair like a crown carved from lustrous ebony. And she too was collating a book. This must, I thought, be a fellow student of bibliography. Something stirred in my heart. She turned the pages of a small quarto volume with the sure and experienced hand of a mistress of the art. Her lips moved almost imperceptibly as she counted the leaves and marked them off, in her mind, against her expectations of the sequence in which the signatures would fall. Once I saw her stop, and frown, and turn back to check that she had made no mistake in her accounting. Then she took up the quill which stood in the inkwell before her – pencils were banned in the Bibblybobbleian in those days, as was electric light and heating, the reading rooms being illuminated with flaming brands and warmed by braziers placed at intervals – and made some few marks in the notebook which lay open beside her. Then she resumed her silent turning, and counting, of the leaves.

I was entranced, and had to know what book it was she was collating with such consummate skill. I was a shy fellow in those days, not the magnificent and cocksure professor you see before you now – or may have seen reproduced in facsimile in the recent moving picture by Mr George Clooney – and felt abashed before this brilliant beauty. Nevertheless, I had to speak … I heard myself, my squeaky, still slightly Scottish-sounding voice, echoing down the drainpipe of the years …

Young McQueen: I see you are collating a quarto? I guess, perhaps, by the binding, which I can perceive only partially upon that cradle, and by what I can see of the typography and dimensions of the page before you, that the work is a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century one, perhaps of around the year 1802 …

DM: She looked up at me, with eyes of the deepest brown, and replied:

Minerva Columba: 1803.

DM: With those three words, or one number, she won my heart. There was such sweetness in her look, such intelligence, such a depth of understanding of, I felt, all things, not merely of bibliography. Although her words, or number, had felled my senses and my soul, I was yet emboldened and spoke again …

YM: Could it be the early work of one of the great romantic poets, perhaps Lord Lino or Percy Bus-Shelter?

MC: You are not wrong. This is the first edition of just such a work. But the poet in question is not Lino or Bus-Shelter, but the divine John Creaks, and it is not a collection of his own beautiful odes, but his translation of the surviving carmina of Catullus.

DM: Thus began … our love. I told her of my own paltry work on the oeuvre of Mr Dandypratt of the Weeble-party, and she told me more of the complex bibliography of the romantic poets, which I naturally knew all about already, but feigned ignorance of in order to gain entry to further discourse. When Mr Spamburger makes his moving picture of this second volume of my Adventures, as he inevitably will, he will render this passage as a montage, which the reader would perhaps care now to imagine. 

Spamburger will have to find a youthful actor who looks convincingly like a young George Clooney to fulfil the role of that narrow, callow fellow the young Donald McQueen, and a lady actor whose great beauty speaks of intelligence and wit to represent Minerva – I cannot think of one at the moment, but finding her is, of course, not my problem. We are seen, walking together through the quadrangle of the Bibblybobbleian, deep in earnest conversation, I in my bibliographer’s smock over my Pink Floyd T-shirt and purple loon pants, and she in her academic gown over a deep blue mini-dress with a wide white belt from which hang the scalps of several other students whose bibliographical work she has already deconstructed in the pages of the Journal of the Bibliographical Society of London. We are seen laughing together as we pass the statue of Sooty with the horn of plenty. The scene shifts to the University Parks where we sit upon a chequered blanket beneath a silver moon tree, sharing a picnic of oysters and champagne. Minerva is lounging with her head upon her rucksack, and I am singing to a small guitar. I had quite forgotten that guitar, but not that I had, in my youth, nurtured musical ambitions, not unlike those of my younger brother Starwheel, who had not yet arrived at Noxford (he matriculated a couple of years later, in 1969). I recalled how I had written a song for Minerva, a song which I had not at the time given a title to, but which I later called ‘Kiss me, Minerva’. It was inspired by my love for her, and by her early mention of the Carmina of Catullus. In my vision I approached the young couple, and saw and heard that song … which I still remember with a curious clarity, though it was more than fifty years ago … I noticed written upon the body of the guitar in felt-tip pen the words ‘This machine kills palaeographers’, reflecting my innocent dislike for those who studied medieval manuscripts …

DM (sings): For seven thousand days

 Let me love you, let me live

 Caring nought for times or mores

 Gods that take, and gods that give

 When the spark of day has dwindled

 When the darkness rushes in

 We must sleep an endless night

 And so I ask you

 Why? Why don’t you kiss me

 My love? Why don’t you kiss me

 My love? Why don’t you kiss me?

 Why don’t you kiss me

 My love 

 My love

 My love?

 Though seven thousand suns may

 Set and rise, the briefest spark

 Is all we ever see by 

 Then eternal comes the dark

 Though our minds are strung with cobwebs

 Though our hearts are spun from rain

 We must think, and we must love

 And so I ask you

 Why? Why don’t you kiss me

 My love? Why don’t you kiss me

 My love? Why don’t you kiss me?

 Why don’t you kiss me

 My love 

 My love

 My love?

 Consider please the great weight of this 

 Train. Consider please the sharpness of this 

 Blade. That balcony is high above the

 Earth. This bottle holds the night

 We are not old, we care not for their

 Lies. We are not ghosts, we weep not at their

 Sighs. So let us drink the antidote to 

 Death. And let us never sleep

 For seven thousand days

 Let me love you, let me live

 Caring nought for times or mores

 Gods that take, and gods that give

 When the spark of day has dwindled

 When the darkness rushes in

 We must sleep an endless night

 And so I ask you

 Why? Why don’t you kiss me

 My love? Why don’t you kiss me

 My love? Why don’t you kiss me?

 Why don’t you kiss me

 My love 

 My love

 My love?

DM: Minerva smiles, and she does, indeed, kiss me, or the young Donald anyway, when I, he, complete my, completes his, song. I am aware that it would be a repulsive performance if I were to sing it now, an old man with an unruly white beard, laced with fragments of turkey twizzler and gobbets of Schicklegruber’s tomato ketchup … But I was then a very presentable young fellow and, perhaps, the notion of being invited in song to approach my lips would not have been such a revolting prospect …

The montage changes once more, and the young lovers are observed in a punt on the River Plumb, I lounging in the bows with a glass of champagne, she in the stern with the punt-pole in her hand, propelling us under Suicide Bridge. We laugh, and then we laugh again. We had a lot to laugh about in those years. We were laughing with happiness. We are even seen to laugh as we punt too close to the overhanging branches of a weeping willow, which trail across the bows, snaring my spectacles and tearing them from my face before depositing them into the dark purple waters. A second branch coils about my glass of champagne and rips it from my hand, casting it, likewise, into the cold, murky river. And I laugh. Minerva ducks as she passes beneath the trailing branches. This is all in the vivid present, you notice, although very much in the distant past. When we emerge on the other side, I am seen to be raising and filling a new glass with champagne, and in her turn Minerva laughs and tosses her raven hair, as I drink a toast to her skills with the pole. But who is that dark figure, glimpsed loping along the far bank? It is, of course, the monstrous Cornelius Bunce.

At that date he too was, of course, a young man, not a friend but an acquaintance and an exact contemporary whom I had met many years previously when we were both in the Bibliographical Boy Scouts. I can still remember the Bibliographical Scout salute, which is to raise a single finger to the temple, to indicate the seat of wisdom, and to rotate that finger three times, not to indicate madness as many imagined, but to suggest the turning of the cogs of bibliographical thought, while the Scout intoned the international greeting ‘Dib, dib dib, Din, din din’. We came up to Noxford at the same time, I to Timor Mortis and Bunce to St Ivel, and I encountered him sometimes in lectures and at seminars, but never socially. He was a handsome man in those days, albeit not as handsome as myself, with the delicate face of a poet, though his mouth was wide and his eyes curiously reptilian. His best feature was, as I have remarked, his hair, which was long and straight and fine and blonde, like that of Mr Rick Wakeman in his prime. And, of course, in those days he possessed both of his legs. 

At that period, the Professor of Bibliography at Noxford was the late great Saul Backhammock, a man who inspired such affection and respect that he was never known by the silly nickname which would have been so easy for the student mind to have constructed for him. I recall one day in the autumn of the following year, 1968, being seated in the darkened lecture hall at Mirkin College where classes in Bibliography were then held, watching a presentation of magic-lantern slides showing the work of the early printers, especially that great prototypographer Crispus Rossfleich … and his brother, Jimbo. Minerva was at my right hand, and indeed holding my right hand, and sitting to my left, across the gangway, I was dimly conscious of the presence of the tall, gangling figure of Bunce, his head bowed over his notes and his face hidden behind the curtain of his golden hair. Suddenly I felt a plucking at my smock, and looked to my left to see the skeletal hand of Bunce, projecting from the sleeve of his black gown, and twitching me across the gangway. He peered out from behind the waterfall of his shining hair, with a look of extraordinary malevolence, and hissed:

Bunce: McQueen! Kindly pass this note to the sweet dove!

DM: What?

Bunce: Kindly pass this note to the sweet dove!

M: I was shocked and horrified. How had he learned my pet-name for Minerva? And how could he dare to refer to her in this way, while asking me, officially her beau, to pass her a note? The same hand which had plucked at my smock also contained a small folded piece of pink paper, sealed with red sealing-wax, which he now proffered. I hesitated. However, I had no choice but to take it. Good manners dictated that I could not do otherwise. I glanced at it, and saw the words ‘Minerva Columba, Lady Garden College, Noxford’ in a very neat and legible, but small and cramped, hand, which I took, correctly, to be Bunce’s. As I had no choice but to take the note, so I had no alternative but to pass it to my love, saying …

YM: This … gentleman has asked me to convey to you this correspondence.

DM: A shadow passed across her serene countenance, and I had an inkling that she already knew something of Cornelius Bunce, a circumstance of which I had previously had no inkling. She did not break the seal, but slipped the note, unread, into her reticule and returned her attention to the magic-lantern slide before us. I did likewise, and at that moment Professor Backhammock showed us an image of the opening page of that remarkable and mysterious book, the first printed edition of the Codex assinorum of Scrotus, and described the mystery which surrounds it.

I have often wondered if that moment was seminal in my passion for the Codex? Certainly, I became most interested in the book and the shadowy means of its production, although I do not think I resolved to solve the mystery until some years later, when I learned of the competing theories of Professor Peter Pinkelman of Princeton and Dr Flora Van Driver of the British Museum Library, competing theories for the details of which I refer the reader to the fourth fascicle of the first volume of these my Adventures.

That evening, while dining at Botticelli’s, our favourite Italian buttock-themed restaurant in Noxford, I asked Minerva about the note from Bunce, and again a shadow passed across the perfect pale amber mask of her face. She said that the note had merely been an indecent proposal, which she had immediately destroyed and would not respond to. But I became convinced that there was something more to it, and as the weeks passed, Bunce seemed to exert a curious and malign influence over my beloved.

Let us return to the montage. We see the youthful couple – I mean Minerva and myself – in one of the many antiquarian bookshops of Noxford, standing together before a shelf of vellum-bound tracts and trying to guess the dates of the contents, or at least the terminus ante quem for each volume, from a study of the form of tooling or manuscript lettering upon the spines. We are seen to laugh, as I draw forth a small volume I have tentatively dated to 1535 to find the date on the first title-page to be 1534. But who is this, lurking behind one of the bookcases, the tip of his golden bonce protruding above the top shelf and swaying slightly from side to side, like a small haystack on a stick? It was, I think at that moment, when I saw Cornelius Bunce eyeballing my beloved between two volumes of that great bibliographical work The enemies of books, that I understood that he had designs upon my beloved. And when I looked around at her, and saw that she too had spotted Bunce, and was looking at his dark eye, visible between the Enemies, with an intense fascination, I recognized the possibility of his exerting an almost hypnotic power over her. The scene shifts and the youthful Donald and Minerva are seen running along the beach and sporting in the breakers at Pervert’s Pleasure, Noxford’s unisex naturist resort on the banks of the Plumb where the tides had swept up the mighty Thames and deposited a long strand of sand on the south bank of its tributary. This part of the montage will obviously require some pixilation. But who is that, lurking in the dunes with a pair of binoculars? I believe the reader will be able to guess. Now we see the lovers in a cornfield, sharing a picnic on a bright summer’s day. Skylarks swoop overhead and the pop of champagne corks mixes with their joyous song, and with the laughter of youth. The only dark point in the whole arcadian image is a scarecrow, drooping and seemingly decaying on his steak, some few metres away from the happy couple … A scarecrow with long, bony limbs and lank golden hair, smeared with mud. The weeks and months pass, and we see the young Donald McQueen in his room at Timor Mortis, with Minerva seated opposite him, beside a roaring fire; he has had to smuggle her into his rooms after dark since, in those days, there was a strict curfew which meant that members of the opposite sex had be out of students’ rooms by three in the afternoon, which was believed to be the tupping hour, except for same-sex couples, of course, which were not believed to be present at Noxford until 1994, when the rules were relaxed a little. There were, in fact, severe penalties for a woman caught with a man in her room, or vice versa, after hours, and for anyone found harbouring a Smurf, Muppet, Munchkin, ghost, any creature with more than two legs, any creature with fewer than two legs, a vampire, communist or gypsy at any time. Robots were allowed, of course, as were wombles, who were believed in those days (wrongly) to be entirely asexual. This was before the Great Uncle Bulgaria scandal broke and the world came to know the truth about wombular sexuality! Returning again to the montage, now set in the springtime of the year 1969, we see the young couple beside the fire, both with cats upon their laps, both glancing through the correspondence of the day which contains the latest number of the Journal of the Bibliographical Society of London (to which Minerva has again contributed a sparkling and devastating review). Donald begins to read the Journal, but Minerva is hesitating over a letter, written upon pink paper and sealed with red wax. She frowns, and rises …

YM: What is it, my dear?

Minerva: Nothing my sweet. But I fear I must leave you momently.

M: I felt myself changing tense … She glanced over towards the window, at which the curtains were still open, and I fancied for a moment I saw a face pressed against the glass, a wide, pale face, framed with pale hair. But that was absurd. My rooms were on the second floor, with a sheer drop of six metres beneath my window. I turned to find Minerva gone. It was the last time I saw her alive. I ran to the window and looked out and fancied I saw, by the light of the moon which had just risen over the dome of the old brothel of Merkin college, two figures scuttling away through the shrubbery, one unusually, indeed preternaturally, small, the other very tall and thin …

The next morning, when Minerva had not returned to me, I sought her out in her rooms at Lady Garden. But she had not been back there. I began to look for her, visiting our favourite haunts, all the libraries and bookshops we loved, the river, the cornfields, etcetera, etcetera. I even tried the vegetarian discotheque and the cage-fighting arena, into which we had never ventured. Then I remembered our cavortings at Pervert’s Pleasure and ran thither. I disobeyed the first rule of the place by remaining fully clothed as I entered the resort. It was still early in the morning, with a silver mist covering the river and the sandy shore where its waves lapped. I wandered along the strand calling out, quietly for I did not wish to disturb the naturists who were snoozing beneath the palm trees even at that early hour, ‘sweet dove … sweet dove …’. Then I saw ahead of me two dark birds pecking at something at the water’s edge. It was a small thing, pale and honey-coloured. As I approached the two birds squawked and flew up into the air, leaving the pale thing behind. I approached and looked at the thing. It was a human hand. It was her hand. I knew it well. How often I had held that hand, and how often that hand had held mine! I knew every delicate curve of its amber fingers, its primrose palm. And there on the littlest finger was the silver ring I had bought for her, the ring bearing a cameo of the likeness of our mutual hero Henry Bradshaw of sainted memory. It was her hand. 

There was no visible blood. I assumed that it had been washed away by the lapping of the dark waters of the Plumb. But all around the hand were footprints in the strand, although it was impossible to say in most cases whether they were fresh or old. But most prominent, and deepest, among the marks in the sand were the huge, three-toed prints and swirling tail-marks of a monstrous reptile. It was clear what had happened. Minerva Columba, the sweet dove, had been eaten by a crocodile.

In those days crocodiles were a serious problem along the banks of the River Plumb and there were notices up at several points around the town to warn of the dangers. Between six and fourteen students a year were said to be have been eaten by crocodiles, and there was indeed a famous case of a large and leathery specimen known as Simon Cruncher which had been killed in 1962 and slit open to reveal the partially digested bodies of an inorganic chemist, two classicists and half a medieval historian. Simon Cruncher had been given that name, I am told, because he was particularly prone to crunching Simons. By 1969 the problem was at its height, and the most notorious maneater among the Plumb River crocodiles was at that time Crooktooth Jack, who was said to be larger and fiercer still than Simon Cruncher, or the terrifying Cambridge crocodile named Bloody Margaret, or even the monstrous Edinburgh University alligator known as Ruby Dick (because his scales were said to have a reddish hue, due to their being infused with human blood, and by analogy with the infamous Moby Dick, a urogenital condition which was then rife among Edinburgh University students). Crooktooth Jack was famous for having once swallowed a jogger, and it was said that the victim’s watch could sometimes be heard when Jack was approaching. It was not the ticking of the watch which could be heard, of course, like the clock within the crocodile in Peter Pan – an idea which I have always thought absurd – even if the ticking could be heard from within the crocodile, surely the clock would have quickly wound down and fallen silent – no, the ingested jogger had been wearing a digital watch, and it was the alarm on this, set to ring at half hourly intervals to help the owner regulate the patterns of his exercise, which sounded loudly and suddenly from within Crooktooth Jack. Although I had never heard this electronic alarm myself this story sounded thoroughly believable, unlike that in Peter Pan, as the digital watch would no doubt have survived inside the crocodile, long after the wrist which wore it had been digested and, with a good battery, for many years.

It was generally believed at the time that Crooktooth Jack had been responsible for devouring my beloved, and certainly the footprints I saw that day were the largest crocodile spore I had ever seen in the muddy banks of Plum. A search was made, of course, and the police, once informed, placed an advertisement in The Noxford times, and posters on trees near the site of the presumed devourment, appealing for witnesses. But this was one of nine crocodile-related deaths that year, and the chances of the scaly culprit being apprehended, or even identified, were slight. The great problem of crocodiles in Noxford was only solved in 2009 by means of a well-funded programme of re-education, with the reptiles being given lessons in reiki, reflexology, sensual massage and mindfulness, which they naturally found so distasteful that they quit the city entirely. Little did we know how blessed we had been. The crocodile terror of the last third of the twentieth century was very heaven compared with the problems we have today with elephants.

I recalled all this while lying in my bed, with the magical trumpet dangling from my ear, in a kind of trance, seemingly experiencing again those visions, sounds and montages from my youth. I saw myself on the beach at Pervert’s Pleasure, discovering and identifying Minerva’s hand … And I saw the horror and grief that distorted my face, and shook my young frame. But, oddly, those emotions, horror and grief, were not so obvious in my expression and form as I would have expected them to be, or recalled them to have been … I observed myself mastering myself in the face of a terrible shock and horror. And I knew, of course, what I did next. I looked around, first to be sure that Crooktooth Jack was no longer near at hand, then to see whether anyone else might be nearby to have witnessed my beloved’s final moments with the crocodile, and then with the thought of whether there might be other parts of Minerva dotted about. But no. The morning was still and quiet. No one was at hand. No other hand, or other part, was at hand. The waves of the tidal Plum lapped at the sand and the only sound was the singing of birds and the far away hooting of the steam engines at Noxford station. I reached down and picked up Minerva’s hand. It was as cold now as it had once been warm. I kissed it, and tried to remove the ring from the littlest finger. I wanted, in an instinctive way, to preserve something of my beloved and did not think I could, or should, make off with the hand itself. But the ring would not budge from the finger. I thought for a moment, then raised the hand to my lips, and bit off the littlest finger. I replaced the hand on the sand, then tried again to remove the ring, but it still held fast, so I dropped the finger into the inside pocket of my bibliographer’s smock. I have it still. The ring is still in place, though the flesh is brown and desiccated now so that it can easily be removed. But I have chosen not to remove it, and keep both ring and finger in a specially-made casket, among my most treasured possessions. I assumed, quite rightly, that the finger would not be missed and that the authorities would believe that it too had been bitten off by Crooktooth Jack. Then I ran to the nearest telephone box to raise the alarm.

I rubbed once more at the magical device upon the socle of the ear-trumpet and withdrew it from my earhole. I was quickly drawn back through the invisible curtains of the dimensions, and deposited in my bed. I glanced at the clock. It was still only five-and-twenty past midnight. Everything was as it had been, save that Doggerel was now absent, no doubt having left on a midnight mousing excursion while I was lost in the world of the trumpet. The trip into my own past which had begun with such happy memories and ended in such tragedy, had done nothing to help my sleepless state, and so I determined to try again, with a little more purpose. I would listen to something tedious, something so dull that it would force anyone past the borders of wakefulness and into the world of snores. I would listen to the next episode of Dr Thinley’s Casebook … I fitted The Ear Ttrumpet of Death to my ear, and concentrated …

And I was successful in my quest!

Stiff announcer: Dr Thinley’s casebook. With Andrew Crookback as Dr Cameron, Barbara Sullen as Janet, and Bill Simpleton as Dr Thinley. This week ‘The Tannochbrae Horror, part 3: Married to a mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea’, written by Smudgminda Poe and adapted for the wireless by Hamish Thistlecock.

In the previous episode, Dr Thinley’s spectre has been haunting Dr Cameron and Janet to absolutely no avail, and has observed the possession of Cameron by a demonic presence. At last, the dim-witted but curiously touched Janet has spotted the outline of Thinley’s ghost, and suggested an exorcism at Arden House, a notion which the demon inside Cameron is determined to resist. Now listen on …

Thinley: At last Janet has seen me. But at what cost? I do not believe the Reverend McPortillo has any power to exorcise me, but then, until eight weeks ago, at the end of series twenty-seven, I did not believe in mermaids, or ghosts, or demonic possession … or in evolution by natural selection, or in the possibility of manned space-travel, or in allergies. But now I do … believe in mermaids, ghosts and demons, I mean. Evolution, space-travel and allergies are just the delusions of a feeble mind! My ghost wandered off, into the coal cellar at Arden House, to consider its position. I knew I could not go far. Like all spectres, I was doomed to wander the approximate area I had haunted while alive, so I could go as far as the Bawdy House on Rosscommon Street to the South, or to the cliffs where I was believed to have met my end to the North, but no further. I thought back to that time, the last moment when I stood on dry land as a living man, and then I thought back a bit further, and drifted into a flashback … We do’nay have harps in Scotland, of course, so my flashback has to be indicated by the skirl o’ the pipes!

I had been out to visit wee Isla-Joan McNevis who had three xylophones stuck in her crevice, and Samuel Innis-Crum who had a spaniel which was refusing to move from a spot where the sun did not shine. I don’t mean Scotland. I mean his arse. I had been assisted in that extraction by the veterinary surgeon, young Yellowley, who had refused to deal with the problem alone because of what he had called the ‘dog-man interface’. It was a beautiful early evening, around six o’clock, pitch dark of course as it was all year round at that hour in Scotland, but the moon was full and by its light, I took a walk along the beach beneath the cliff …

I spotted something glinting on the shingle and, thinking it might be a mandible containing golden teeth, or a discarded tiara, I rushed over to it. It was a curiously-wrought bottle of dark green glass, with a golden lid, a bit like those I had seen filled with Schicklegruber’s tomato ketchup (the finest condiment a Scotsman can buy), but much older with a silvery patina of improbability. I knew it came from the lost city of Atlantis ... which, as everyone knows, is sunken beneath the North Sea just off the coast of Tannochbrae. There was no label on the bottle, but the dark green glass was decorated with runes and symbols which I could nae read, but somehow understood to communicate the word ‘ale’ to my mind. I opened the bottle, hoping to quaff some of the legendary beer of Atlantis, which can make a man feel like a god, and a woman feel like feeling a man who felt like a god. But when I got it open, the bottle was empty. I sniffed at it and caught a hint of the scent of Atlantean ale, beneath the sharp, salt odour of the ocean. In disappointment I threw the bottle far out into the waves.

Was it my imagination, or did I hear a distant cry when the bottle hit the water? Was the ocean lamenting? Or had I perhaps hit a seal? I walked back up the cliff-path, deep in thought, and climbed again onto my bicycle – did I mention that I was riding my bicycle and had left it on the clifftop road? That’s the kind of thing I would not have to say if this episode of Dr Thinley’s casebook was on the television rather than the wireless! I got back onto my bicycle and began to pedal very slowly along the clifftop road towards the town, the dense trees of Muckiedoon Wood on my left, and a sheer drop on my right, with the moonlight spilling down and illuminating my narrow way. Then, quite suddenly, there was a figure in my path, a human figure, wearing a long black tartan overcoat and tam o’shanter, with a long black tartan scarf streaming out in the sea breeze. I braked as hard as I could, and very slowly came to a stop, just before I collided with the figure. It waved its arms, and raised its head, so that I could see the features of its pale face. It was all too familiar. It was the face of Dr Alexander Snoddie, the keeper of the Tannochbrae lunatic asylum, one of Janet McPherson’s many admirers, and my great rival both professionally, and personally (I have no time now to tell you about my personal life, but it involves an on-off love-affair with an inflatable Highland cow, a haggis with a hole it which I had dressed in a plaid skirt, an indifferent barn owl, and an old woman with a David Tennant fixation, all activities in which the evil Snoddie had attempted to outdo, indeed to out-woo, to out-moo, to out-screw, to out-twit-twoo and to out-Dr-Who, me) … Snoddie! I cried. What are you doing here, man? I almost hit you on my very slow bicycle!

Snoddie (mad voice): Oooooo, Thinley, how I hate you!

T: He waved his arms again, and his scarf billowed ... Really, Snoddie? Why on earth would you hate me?

Snoddie: You have everything I want, man! That inflatable cow, that haggis with the hole in it, that indifferent owl, old Mrs Crombie with her David Tennant fixation, the respect of Dr Cameron, the proximity of the lovely Janet, and, most of all, the starring role in this ridiculous medical drama!

T: What do mean, man?

S: It’s Dr Thinley’s casebook! It should be Dr Snoddie’s casebook!

T: You’re mad, Snoddie. Quite mad!

S: That’s as maybe! That’s as maybe! But I am going to kill you, Thinley, and take all that’s yours, your cow, turnip, owl, old woman, Janet, Cameron, and the starring role in this increasingly inappropriately-named ‘casebook’.

T: And, so saying, Snoddie reached out with his long, powerful hands, at the end of his long powerful arms, and gripped me by my saddle and my crossbar and threw me over the cliff! I fell … I fell … I fell … I seemed to be falling for ever … It was going on an awfully long time … I fell … I fell … and then I hit the water! 

And a split-second later the bicycle hit the water behind me. The icy ocean closed over my head and I descended … I descended … I descended … I seemed to be descending for hours and hours. At first the light of the moon shining through the water was blue, then, as I sank, it became a deep blue, then green, the same colour as the glass of the bottle I had found, then it darkened into brown and finally to black. I descended a bit more … and a bit more … and a bit more … and then I saw a silvery light coming up towards me. It looked like a shining fish, swimming up from the depths to meet me. But when it drew nearer I saw that it had a human face, and flowing auburn hair, and wee breasticles … It was mermaid! She was the most beautiful woman, with a fish extension, I had ever seen … She drew close to me, and I fancied the cold, salty water around me grew a little warmer, and a little sweeter on my tongue. Then she put her arms about my neck and kissed me, filling my lungs with sweet air … Oh, mermaid, I said – somehow I was able to speak under water now – am I dying and dreaming of you? Who are you and where do you come from?

Umpy (mermaid, Scottish accent): I come from the lost city of Atlantis, and my name is unpronounceable.

T: Oh, Unpronounceable, why do you have a Scottish accent?

Umpy: I d’nay have a Scottish accent. I have an Atlantean accent, which sounds very similar indeed …

T: Oh, Unpronounceable, you are the most beautiful fish I have ever seen.

Umpy: And you are the most beautiful man I have ever seen. What is your name?

T: I am Doctor Alan Thinley of Tannochbrae.

Umpy: Oh, Doctor Alan Thinley of Tannochbrae, let us be man and fishwife!

T: Oh yes, let’s! … And that is how I met a beautiful mermaid whose name was Unpronounceable, and how we became engaged, there and then, in the darkest depths of the North Sea. She took me by the hand and led me down, down, deeper and down into the icy blackness of the ocean until at last I saw the distant lights of a great city. It was Atlantis. We drew nearer, and I caught the gurgling musical sounds, and the fishy, smoky flavours, of a great underwater metropolis, lit up with blue and green lights like a huge fairground lit up with blue and green lights … I found that I could breathe in Atlantis, and Unpronounceable did not have to keep kissing me to fill my lungs with air. But she kept kissing me nevertheless. Indeed, it seemed she could not keep her hands, or her lips, or her fins, off me. And I felt much the same way about her, taking every opportunity to drink in her lips, and caress her soft skin, and hard scales.

Some of my listeners may think, on hearing this story, that I am indulging in nothing more or less than the sexual fantasy of an old Scotsman. But, I assure you, that is not the case. All that I beheld beneath the ocean and, especially, the beautiful and acquiescent mermaid who fancied the kilt off me, were as real and true as the kissing-stone in the Kirk at Tannochbrae, which makes everyone who kisses it fall in love, or lust, with the next primate they see (a serious problem when a troop of baboons was brought to the wee town by Maxwell’s Circus of Cruelty in 1922, and much earlier when the place was visited by the Archbishop of St Andrews in 1654), or as real as the silver statue of Hannibal McLector which stands in the town square and reflects the light of the rising moon upon my ghost now, as I remember these wonderful, terrible events. It was all as real as those things, I assure you.

Unpronounceable moved me at once into her Atlantean house, which was nothing less than a palace of coral and mother-of-pearl. I learned that her father was the King of Atlantis, and so she was, strictly speaking, the Princess Unpronounceable … But I took to calling her Umpy, which she seemed to like, and she would call me Doctor Alan Thinley of Tannochbrae, when we exchanged our sweet nothings on our pillows of scarlet seaweed. The date was set for our wedding, and shortly beforehand Umpy introduced me to her father, the King of Atlantis. He was a magnificent merman, who sat upon a throne of shells in what can only be described as a crystal palace … He wore a crown of shark’s teeth stained red with the blood of mariners, and carried a sceptre made from the penis of a wright’s wale, studded with pearls, and a trident made of iron which was covered with rust. He blessed our union, and said I was the most beautiful and accomplished human being he had ever met … and that was saying something, as he had met David Tennant!

On the morning of our wedding I was dressed by fish-attendants in a robe of silver kelp, and a crown of kippers, and was driven in a gilded coach pulled by three hippocamps, and four camp hippos, to the great cathedral of Atlantis for the ceremony. As we passed through the streets the people of the lost city lined the route, cheering and waving their arms and fins, while sunfish and moonfish danced in the waters above, like … well, like dancing fish. And as we progressed towards the cathedral, my mind was occupied with but a single thought. How were Umpy and I going to do it on our wedding night? She had no discernible genitalia – I had looked, and subtly felt, very hard for a possible opening, but could find no means of egress to her fishy loins. I was keen to consummate our love … But I could not see how, for the life of me, we were going to do it. Perhaps it would be a case of manual labour, or of lip-service, only … But that would not be entirely satisfactory, I feared. All through the ceremony, these were the thoughts that beset me, so that I barely heard the words of the archfishop, as he took us through our vows, or the choir of merboys singing in the cathedral as we were declared man and fishwife … At last I was alone with my bride, and asked her how we would now consummate our love.

Umpy: Oh, darling Doctor Alan Thinley of Tannochbrae, we will make babies in the age-old mermaid way. I will expel a thousand eggs from my cloaca, onto the sea bed, and you will swim above them, and fertilize them, by ejecting your silvery semen in great clouds that will billow down upon my precious brood. Then we will guard the eggs until they hatch. Some of them, perhaps seventy percent, will be eaten by crabs and lobsters, but many hundreds will survive, and hatch into tiny, transparent merfolk, or half-merfolk … I am not sure quite how that will work … Since merfolk are half human and half fish, will our children all be three quarters human and one quarter fish? Or will three quarters of them be human, and one quarter fish? Or will half of them be merfolk, a quarter human and a quarter fish? I was never very good at mathematics … or genetics …

T: But her voice was fading into the distance, for I was swimming, out through the palace window and upward, upward, upward through the freezing waters of the North Sea. I could not bear to stay. To have such a beautiful wife but to be able only to jizz over a pile of her eggs … that was not what I wanted from being married to mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea …

Stiff announcer: You have been listening to ‘Married to a mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea’, the third part of ‘The Tannochbrae Horror’, an episode of Dr Thinley’s Casebook. The cast was as follows: Dr Cameron, Andrew Crookback … Janet, Barbara Sullen … Dr Thinley, Bill Simpleton … Umpy the mermaid, Morag McFagg. The play was produced by Pottie Winkles.

DM: The story, such as it was, had had the desired effect. The ear-trumpet dangled then dropped limply from my ear and I was, at last, bored into the realm of sleep …

Announcer: That was The adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer. Today’s chapter was sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of London, and by Schicklegruber’s tomato ketchup, the finest ketchup money, or sexual favours, can procure. It was written and performed by Paul W. Nash with special guests Elizabeth Crowley, William Hale, Rebecca Howard, Lucy Matheson, Georgina Shomroni, Iona Spark, David Stumpp and Stewart Tiley. The theme to Dr Thinley’s casebook was ‘borrowed’ from Trevor Duncan.

Next time in The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer.

Scott: The journal of Robert Falcon Scott, 29th March 1912. All my companions dead. All the dogs dead, all the ponies dead, except for Florence, who is no longer talking to me. All supplies exhausted. Only one packet of pickled onion flavour Monster Munch left … And to cap it all, there is something massive moving around outside the tent. I think it is a polar bear!

Oates (echoing): There are no polar bears at the South Pole, Captain. They are to be found at the North Pole.

Scott: Then it must be a giant penguin! Wait, who said that?

Oates: It was I, Titus Oates.

Scott: But you are dead!

Oates: Yes, it is I, the ghost of Titus Oates. You know that Amundsen beat you to the Pole, don’t you?

Scott: Yes, damn him! I found his discarded pickled-onion jars all around the site, and a rude note in Norwegian, and a single silk sock with the monogramme ‘RA’ hanging from the Pole itself! And all that yellow snow. That’s where the huskies go, you know?

Oates: Yes, I know.

Scott: That’s why he beat me, Oates, that’s why he beat me ...

Oates: What, because of the huskies? 

Scott: No because he took pickled onions, actual pickled onions, in jars, while I was persuaded to take ... (contemptuously) Monster Munch ... (offering to Oates) Monster Munch?

Oates: No, thank you. I am a ghost and cannot enjoy Monster Munch. You know what is going to happen, Captain, in years to come? My name will be associated with noble but futile sacrifice, and yours with noble but futile endeavour ... and coming second to a Norwegian.

Scott: Really? What I can I do about that?

Oates: Nothing. You are going to die soon – in about three minutes – and your reputation is beyond your influence.

Scott: Surely there is something? Can I not set things right when I am a ghost, like you?

Oates: Sadly you will be doomed, like me, to haunt the empty wastes of Antarctica, your voice lost in the howling winds and eddying snow.

Scott: Bugger! There’s something outside the tent, Oates. It cannot be a giant penguin. Is it the abominable snowman?

Oates (impatiently): There are no abominable snowmen at the South Pole, Captain. They are to be found in the mountains of Tibet.

Scott: Then what is it?

Oates: What are you eating?

Scott: Pickled onion flavour ... Monster Munch.

Oates: And where do you think Monster Munch comes from?

Scott: Er ... Walker’s?

Oates: And where does Mr Walker get his Monster Munch?

Scott: I don’t know.

Oates: From a monster, Captain, from a monster. And that monster has been on your trail for the past seven months, dogging your footsteps to the Pole and back, following a trail of discarded, bright purple, iridescent, crisp packets. And now the monster has found you ... and he wants his munch back.

Scott: His what?

Oates: His munch.

Scott: What’s that?

Oates: I don’t know exactly. It’s part of a monster. The part Mr Walker pulls off and grates into bags and sells for three ha’pence. The part Mr Walker persuaded you to take with you to the Pole. So you were right about Amundsen, in a sense.

Scott: I see. Amundsen succeeded because he had pickled onions in jars ...

Oates: Yes, and Mr Heawood is more than content with that, and has left him in peace. While you kindled the wrath of a monster by purchasing and devouring its personal munch!

Scott: Will the monster be appeased if I give it back its munch?

Oates: Captain, you have eaten almost all of its munch!

Scott: So I have. I suppose the monster will not want it back now.

Oates: Would you?

Scott: No. So this is how it ends. Torn to pieces by a vengeful monster whose munch I have inadvertently devoured! ... Let me finish my journal entry. 29th March 1912. I have been visited by the spirit of Titus Oates, who has told me of my legacy, which will be one of heroic failure, and has warned me that I am about to be eviscerated by a monster, whose munch I have inadvertently ... Wait. This makes no sense. Could it be that I am hallucinating? I am starving, dehydrated, slipping into hypothermia in the bleakest, coldest landscape imaginable ... Are there really such things as ghosts and monsters, with munches? Or am I merely dying? Yes, that must be it. How much of what I remember is real? Did I reach the Pole? Were there pickled-onions jars, and a rude note, and yellow snow and a single Norwegian sock there? Surely, Pickled Onion Flavour Monster Munch will not be invented until some sixty-five years hence ...