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THE WEST GELDER TOFFEE INCIDENT

Ryan Lee

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It was around ten o’clock in the morning when Pipe first noticed the unusually large bar of toffee in Fergus Butcher’s hand. It was perhaps a foot long and at least two inches in width, and possibly more than an inch thick. Pipe wondered how on earth a runt like Fergus Butcher was ever going to eat such an obscenity. But then Fergus grinned, and Pipe thought that if any kid in the world could tackle a monstrous bar of toffee it was Fergus Butcher. Fergus Butcher (whose father, like a character from a very young children's’ book, was indeed a butcher) had the biggest teeth in the world. Horse teeth, Pipe would have called them, built for tearing hay from bales and breaking up whole humbugs.

It was perfect weather for cricket. The sun was a dementedly cheerful pineapple ring in a cloudless blue sky, and there wasn’t even enough breeze to ruffle the hairs on a bluebottle’s legs. West Gelder were currently 56 for 5 in the long-running annual match with Derrington. Peter Molem had just swung out at a sunspot and given himself a dizzy spell. Someone ran on the pitch with a pint of bitter and a Woodbine to help steady Peter’s nerves, while on the pavilion his less than gentile wife, Mavis, was doing her best to encourage him.

"Arse!" she screamed, shaking her fist. She turned to Pipe Younger, who was lounging in a deckchair with an open newspaper pulled up to his chin like a blanket. "Did you see that?"

Pipe flipped up the brim of his white sun hat and gazed stoically across the green. "See what?"

"Him!" Mavis jabbed a finger in her husband’s direction. Peter was now gulping gratefully at the pint of bitter. The bowler was watching him with a limp expression of bewilderment.

"He’s going to faint," Pipe said, and the very next moment Peter Molem toppled gracefully into the arms of the Derrington wicket keeper. Pipe sniffed and flipped the rim of his hat down. "Told you."

"Idiot," Mavis uttered. "Only women in films faint."

"My uncle Benjamin died from fainting," Pipe said from under the hat.

Mavis glanced over her shoulder and saw Peter being carried off the field by two of the Derrington players. Peter swung between them like a wet rug. "Died from fainting? How can you die from fainting?"

"He was up a ladder. Forty odd feet. He looked down to see if his baby son was still playing on the grass where he left him, only he wasn’t there anymore." Pipe lifted the brim of the hat and smiled crookedly at Mavis. "The boy was three rungs behind him on the ladder, laughing his little head off. Benjamin fainted away and fell to the ground."

Peter Molem was now flat out on the boundary line. A spectator was helpfully waving something under his nose that was either smelling salts or another Woodbine. Mavis gave him a glance that was part concern and part disdain.

"Wait a minute," she said, turning back to Pipe Younger. "I thought you said your uncle Benjamin was eaten by a whale?"

"Killed by a whale," Pipe corrected. He peered over Mavis Molem’s shoulder to see whether Peter had regained consciousness. He hadn’t. "And that was Uncle Benny, on my mother’s side. His rowing boat collided with a dead minky whale on the river Humber."

"Nice," Mavis said in a better-humour-the-loony tone of voice. "Are you batting next?"

Pipe passed Peter Molem on his way to the crease. Peter was staggering towards the pavilion with the dazed, exhausted expression of a shipwreck survivor washed up on a beach.

"Was I out?" he asked in a parched, vacant voice.

Pipe stopped and peered into Peter’s eyes. They were like dirty windows in an empty house. "Retired," he said. "Sunstroke. Go have a lie down."

"Lie down," Peter whispered dreamily. He lurched away, muttering the words like a holy mantra. "Lie down…lie down…lie down…"

Pipe was just about to smash his first of many sixes when he was suddenly distracted by a strange, squealing cry from the pavilion. The delivery flew by close enough to make the stumps shudder. Meanwhile Pipe rested on his bat and flipped up the brim of his hat.

His first thought was that Peter Molem had gone into some kind of tropical delirium, a raging fever starring tribes of grinning headhunters and other assorted hallucinations. But then he saw young Fergus Butcher struggling to free himself from the grip of Mavis Molem and a couple of others. Fergus was making the sound, which was eerily similar to the vociferous complaints a piglet made when you tried to put it under your arm.

"What's going on?" the Derrington wicket keeper asked.

Pipe gave him a withered look. "Why don't you borrow my binoculars and see for yourself?"

The people on the pavilion were now clustered tightly around Fergus Butcher, completely obscuring him from view. A fielder on the boundary wandered over to see what the fuss was all about. A few minutes later he strolled over to the bowler and told him what was happening. They both laughed. Three other fielders joined them for a second telling and all of them laughed uproariously. Meanwhile, the people on the pavilion were moving slowly around like a rugby scrum. Somewhere in the middle of them Fergus Butcher was still squealing.

"Oi!" Pipe called to the bowler. "What's up?"

The bowler pointed at the pavilion and laughed helplessly.

"A goofy kid's got a bar of toffee stuck in his mouth," one of the fielder's explained, and everyone on the Derrington team fell about laughing.

Pipe was confused for a few seconds. He didn't see what was remotely amusing about a youngster choking on a piece of toffee. Admittedly he had laughed that time the Jenkins triplets hanged little Maureen Cowens from the branch of a tree by her pigtails, but that had been hilarious, and no real harm was done (Maureen's pigtails were stronger than the ropes they used to moor cruise liners, so the only pain and suffering she experienced was that done to her dignity. Pipe still chuckled when he visualised her twisting and writhing at the end of her platted hair, spitting curses like an angry cat). But then he remembered the bar of toffee he had seen Fergus with earlier. That big bar of toffee. That impossibly big bar of toffee. Not even Fergus could have swallowed a bar that size, he thought.

Though maybe he had broken a piece off and choked on that. His teeth were certainly built for demolishing hard substances.

Just then there came a strangled cry of pain from the pavilion. Spider Lindus went down with his hands cupped over his delicate parts, his twisted face turned up to the blinding sun. And out of the chaos shot Fergus Butcher, running as though the hounds of hell were snapping at his heels. His eyes were very wide and filled with something like religious terror.

He came charging straight across the cricket field with a war cry of such utter conviction that several of the Derrington players jumped out of the way. Pipe thought of a young German officer he had killed in 1916. The German had come at Pipe in just the same fashion, bellowing with rage and fear, sword slashing, a seemingly indestructible body of panic and adrenaline. Luckily Pipe had a gun and shot him in the face when he was still some distance away, but he was grateful the encounter had ended at distance and not in a fight with sword and bayonet.

Fergus passed within a few feet of the wicket. The bar of toffee, which Pipe had correctly estimated to be twelve inches long, two inches wide, and an inch thick, was jutting straight from his mouth. Half a dozen sparrows or three medium sized crows could have comfortably perched along its length, theoretically speaking.

Pipe blinked and shook his head. Had he not seen it for himself he would never have believed it. He turned and watched the young boy tear blindly across the pitch, scattering fielders and startling an old dog that was innocently sniffing the grass.

"Get him!"

Pipe turned the other way and saw Mavis Molem leading the pursuit. Spider Lindus hobbled painfully behind them. They called him Spider because he had been born with eight legs. Not real legs of course; these were like fleshy little socks growing all the way down his chest. Pipe had always meant to ask Spider if he still had them, and whether they were attached or in a special drawer at home, perhaps balled into pairs.

"Get him!" Mavis yelled again, gesturing in dramatic fashion. Then, strangely, she stopped and put her hands on her hips. The group came to a hesitant halt behind her. "Why didn't you get him?"

"Why are you asking?" Pipe found a docker under his hat and struck a match on the sole of his shoe. "You might as well stop and ask yourself why you aren't running any more."

Mavis didn't quite see the logic in Pipe's thinking. "Twit. You should have stopped him. He's gone now."

Fergus had indeed gone. Straight through the thicket on the far side of the pitch. You could see where he had flattened the bushes.

"He's got his teeth wedged in a bar of toffee!" Brian Vest blurted. "You should have seen it, Pipe!"

"I did."

"Wedged right up to the gum-line! Planted like trees they were! Trees! I tried to pull it off but it wouldn't budge!" Brian demonstrated how he had gripped the bar of toffee in one ham-sized fist and pulled, and shook, and tugged, but to no avail. Pipe winced. Brian worked at the slaughterhouse and punched cows unconscious for fun. No wonder poor Fergus had squealed that way. No wonder he had bolted either.

"Stuck you say?" Pipe mused.

"Have you ever known anything like this before, Pipe?" The question came from Harold Butcher, the village butcher, father of Fergus. He was a tall, bony man with a secretive smile that made you wonder if all that time he spent with raw meat and sharp knives was some kind of macabre rehearsal for flip-out day.

"Not exactly," Pipe said. He drew on the cigarette and exhaled. "I knew a man who ate a bicycle once, for a bet."

"Did he die?" Brian Vest asked.

"Nope. Well, he did eventually but not because he ate a bike. George, that was his name, died when his wife ran off with another man. He shot himself in the head. Twice."

Mavis sighed heavily. "Very interesting, Pipe, but what…twice?" She gaped at Pipe. "He shot himself twice in the head you say?"

"Nope." Pipe eyed her steadily. "I said he shot himself in the head. Twice. First time the bullet lodged in his brain but he didn't die. He came out of hospital in 1909, and in 1911 he shot himself again, only this time he made a decent job of it."

Mavis sighed again. "Twit."

"What's going on," Eric Dawson asked, pushing his way to the front of the little group gathered around Pipe Younger. Eric was the village newsagent. Although he was always the first to know of war in some far flung banana republic he was oddly slow of the mark when it came to village gossip.

"Young Fergus has got his front teeth planted in a bar of toffee," Harold Butcher explained. "One of those big ones." He opened his arms to show how big the bar of toffee was. At least two and a half feet by Pipe's reckoning.

Eric hummed professionally - he was also the only sweet merchant for miles around. "A Celebration bar. Was it one of the flavoured ones?"

"Does it matter?" Pipe was getting a bit tired of this. Either they were going to do something about it or they were going to get on with the game. It was time to decide.

"We should go look for him," Mavis said. "We can split into pairs or threes like we did when Tommy Golfball went missing."

"His name's Tommy Emerson," Pipe corrected, eyeing Mavis sternly. "That thing on his head is a growth, not a golfball."

Mavis shrugged. "Whatever. But a search party is called for."

John Harbuckle nodded and tugged up his pants. "Right. I'll get me shotgun."

"I said a search party not a hunting party, twit."

This was the kind of thing that people usually looked towards Pipe to organise. However, on this occasion he was happy to let Mavis run the show. In truth he suspected that by now Fergus was at home and the bar of toffee was either in the bushes or sticking out of the back pocket of his shorts for after tea.

Mavis split the group into pairs. She opted to leave Peter at the pavilion, partly because someone was needed to man the base, and partly because he had fainted again. Pipe was paired with Spider Lindus.

The search for Fergus Butcher took most of the afternoon. Most of the Derrington team joined in but by then everyone was resigned to the fact that the game was officially abandoned for only the second time in its long history.

"I hope the little runt appreciates this," Pipe told Spider. "This game hasn't been called off since that Frenchman fell out of his balloon."

"How long have we been playing Derrington then?" Spider asked. They were searching the fields and outbuildings on the old Macdonald farm. Pipe wished he had brought his dog, Snap, but the old fella was at home with his nose in a bowl of tepid water.

"Nobody knows, son. The cricket match has been running for the best part of a hundred and fifty odd years, but before that the two sides used to play another game. It was called ball. The object of the game was to get the ball - usually a small pig - and keep it until the end of the game. Didn't matter what you did to win just so long as you had the ball when the marshall called time. You could kill a man fair and square but if you ate the pig they hanged you for it."

Evening's long shadows were creeping over West Gelder when Fergus was finally located. He was hiding up a tree in Grumble wood. Brian Vest had spotted the bar of toffee poking through the leaves like a sniper's rifle. Pipe and Spider got back to the pavilion about twenty minutes after. Fergus was sitting in a chair under heavy guard, sobbing miserably, his head tucked down as far as it would go.

"Now then," Pipe said as he approached. "What's all this then?"

Fergus lifted his head, the bar of toffee rising like a drawbridge. He gazed helplessly at Pipe. "Ick cuck," he said, and a long stream of brown saliva oozed down his chin. "Eee keef are cuck in ga coffee."

"You don't say?" Pipe knelt down in front of the boy. Heads clustered above them like moons. Fergus raised his eyes worriedly. "Ignore them, son. I just want to have a go at getting this thing out. Alright?"

Fergus gave a suspicious nod. The bar of toffee clonked against the bridge of Pipe's nose.

Pipe gripped the bar of toffee. Fergus's eyes widened in alarm and a low, squealing growl began to broil in the back of his throat.

"Easy," Pipe murmured. He tugged gently on the bar of toffee. The boy's head moved from side to side. Pipe had seen enough. The poor lad's buckteeth were jammed in like nails hammered into a floorboard. He let go and stood up.

"Should we call a doctor?" Eric Dawson asked.

"Or a dentist?" Brian Vest suggested.

Pipe shook his head. "It's worse than that. This lad needs a carpenter."

It took four men to carry Fergus Butcher across the village to Pipe Younger's workshop; they carried him by his legs and arms, face up so that the bar of toffee didn't scrape along the ground. Fergus didn't stop twisting and bucking and squealing the whole way there, and when he realised just what Pipe Younger intended to do he began to thrash and scream even harder.

"By eck!" Brian Vest declared as they hoisted Fergus onto Pipe's bench and slid his head between the vice. "It's like trying to hold down a giant fish!"

When Fergus's head was nicely in place Pipe tightened the vice - not so tight that it would cause the boy pain or damage, but tight enough to stop him from whipping his head around and taking someone's eye out with that monstrous obstruction.

"Now," Pipe said breathlessly. "Hold still or I'll cut your head off."

Fergus went limp.

The job was straightforward enough. First Pipe used a coping saw to take ten inches off the bar of toffee. Then he took a rasp and removed another quarter of an inch. Finally he used sandpaper in decreasing grades to reveal Fergus's buckteeth in all their troublesome glory.

When it was all done, the vice was loosened and Fergus was allowed to sit up. He looked dazed and startled like someone who has just lit up an exploding cigar.

"Can I have this?" Harold Butcher picked up the bar of toffee and smacked it thoughtfully against the palm of his hand. "I'm going to belt him with this for all the trouble he's caused."

With that Fergus was dragged out of the door to face his second traumatic ordeal of the day. Pipe wiped his tools and put them back in their places.

"There's a good story in this," Mavis Molem said with a little sneer. "I bet you'll be telling this one for years."

"Happen I might," Pipe replied, finding another docker under his hat. He didn't light it. A man who smoked in a carpenter's workshop needed his head testing. Pipe had once seen a pile of sawdust go up like gunpowder, launching the man who happened to be sitting in it, smoking, so high into the air that he literally vanished out of sight for a few moments. And not all of him came back down again either. "Or I might start telling the one about the little girl who-"

"Night, Pipe!" Mavis called, and swiftly departed.

Pipe chuckled and went outside to enjoy a smoke and a sunset.

END