With pictures!
Carl’s mobile phone rang just as he’d caught up with a still huffy Roberta inside the Paradise Forum walk-through.
“Hello?” he puffed, answering it.
Roberta strode on. Carl’s listened, his heart pounding, sweat pouring down his reddened face, gasping for air as he struggled to keep up with her. “What, now? Are you sure? Okay.”
Carl snapped the mobile shut with one hand and reached out to Roberta with the other, grabbing hold of her arm and stopping her in her tracks as she was about to walk out of the forum walkthrough. “That was Jack Sunnier,” he said.
“What did he want?” Roberta pouted.
“It’s … well, it’s a bit difficult to explain.”
“Try.”
“Jack’s just received a call from the thief.”
“And?”
“And … you’re not going to like this.”
“Just get to the point, Carl.”
“The thief … well, he wants us to … he says we should … “
Roberta looked at her watch and started tapping her foot impatiently.
“Well, he … wants us to … show a bit of … er … womance.”
“Pardon?”
“Like in the Dan Brown books. He wants us to show … a bit of … er – “
“Just spit it out, Carl!”
Carl threw back his shoulders, puffed out his chest, and bawled, “He wants us to show a bit of romance.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“The thief, he wants us to … er … kiss.”
He watched as Roberta’s face distorted like melting wax, her eyes widening, her mouth falling open. “Kiss?” she cried.
“Yeah. Just a bit.”
“In your bloody dreams, pal!”
“No, really, Jack said – “
“Did he? Did Jack really say that or are you making it up?”
“Why would I make it up?” Carl exclaimed hotly. “You’re not that pretty and I do have a wife, you know.”
“How do I know you have a wife? You could be making that up too.”
“I’m not making anything up!”
“I am so not kissing you! Ugh! No way, that is just so disgusting.”
“Okay, okay, you don’t have to go all nasty and prudish about it, I’ve seen you at the office Christmas parties, you’re not exactly Miss Prim and Proper then, are you.”
“What do you mean?” Roberta gasped, horrified.
“A few drinks down your neck and you’re like a rampant kissogramme, a sucker, a sink plunger on the face of every available man within arms length.”
“I beg your pardon!”
“You’re like the hugger in those Alien films, the thing that grips onto peoples faces and won’t let go. You’re like a soggy pair of pouting lips on legs, a predator looking for something to sucker onto, a parasite, a - ”
“How dare - !”
Carl’s phone rang. He brought it up to his ear without taking his eyes off Roberta, who’s facial expressions ranged from stunned to indignant to anxious. “Okay,” he said, and snapped the phone shut again. “The thief wants us to do it now,” he told the still gurning Roberta. “He wants us to stop bickering like an old married couple and just get on with it.”
“No.”
“We have to.”
“I won’t do it.”
“We have no choice.”
“I can’t – “
“Oh for crying out loud.” And Carl suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her to him, and brought his lips down hard on hers.
* * *
As Carl bear-hugged a squirming Roberta inside the Paradise Forum, both were too busy to notice a man hurrying passed them with several heavy items of heavy equipment swinging from his neck and dragging his left leg behind him like a zombie.
The man – Bruce – limped out of the forum, across the walkway
and across Centenary Square.
Just as he’d rounded the War Memorial, he happened to glance over to the left. Across to the other side of Broad Street.
What he saw made him stop dead in his tracks.
* * *
Roberta struggled frantically for several seconds and eventually managed to pull Carl’s mouth away from hers by using her fingernails to prise his face away.
“Ugh, you pi’!” she cried, stepping back, mouth agape.
Carl grinned.
“You ‘rute.”
Carl grinned some more. He’d quite liked the kiss, but mostly he liked how angry it had made her, and how she looked very much like a landed fish gasping for air.
Roberta, eyes bulging, mouth hanging open with her tongue lying limp inside, turned and ran. Straight into Rafaels’ bar.
Carl followed, wondering if she was doing a runner or if she planned to maybe buy him a drink – they could chat and get to know each other and even start to like each other, perhaps.
Roberta raced up to the bar and wailed, “Dou’le ‘isky in a ‘ig glass. ‘Ake it a tri’le.”
“Pardon?” said the man behind the bar.
Roberta pointed at the spirit bottles lined up against the wall, held up three fingers, and motioned a big glass.
“Would you like ice with that?” asked the barman.
“No! No! Just gi’ it ‘e, q’ick.”
The barman handed over a glass with the three shots of whisky at the bottom. Roberta poured it all into her mouth, swilled it round thoroughly, and spat it back into the glass. She wiped her lips roughly with a napkin and slammed the glass down on the bar in front of a horrified barman.
“Pay the man,” she scowled at Carl. “And never – never! – do that again.”
Carl paid as Roberta stomped out. When he followed her, he was grinning like a Cheshire cat.
* * *
Bruce, scrunched up in the crushed Volvo like a human coil, found that he didn’t have the room to actually turn off the Bristol Road without causing severe damage with his elbow to his nether regions. So he drove straight on, through Selly Oak towards the city centre, viewing the world from an acute sideways angle.
Manoeuvring through the hectic road system without ending his chances of ever becoming a father was difficult but, keeping the car heading as straight as possible without turning left or right, he negotiated Suffolk Street Queensway (narrowly avoiding a collision with a 7.5 tonne truck) and found himself on Newhall Hill.
The Jewellery Quarter.
He drove on up Newhall Street and Frederick Street, across the Chamberlain Clock island
and onto Vyse Street, still not quite sure where he was going and getting a little alarmed that the narrow streets ahead seemed to indicate that he would have to turn quite sharply at some point.
A light suddenly started flickering on the crinkled dashboard. It was a red light, that couldn’t be good. Just as Bruce was wondering what it could mean whilst also frantically wondering where the hell he should dump the statue, the car started to splutter. It kangarooed a bit, the engine dying and coughing limply back to life.
Petrol. He was running out of petrol!
Could the day get any worse?
Bruce had to quickly decide where to go, what to do. He carefully turned the still kangarooing car down Pitsford Street, next to the cemetery, elbowing his groin several times as he did so and wincing a lot. The car was going to conk out at any second.
Now, in fact. The engine died and didn’t come back to life again. The car was right in the middle of Pitsford Street, blocking all the traffic (and there seemed to be rather a lot of it) and he couldn’t get the engine to turn over again.
Panic set in, big time. He had car horns honking at him, people walking passed staring at him, and a crushed car with a bloody great statue on the roof. His brain screamed. His body trembled. He didn’t know what to do.
As he clearly wasn’t going anywhere, he forced open the driver’s door and wriggled himself out from behind the steering wheel. His testicles felt very painful as he straightened up, he was sure they were bruised (hopefully not irreparably damaged). He couldn’t quite lift his head properly either, his neck muscles appeared to have given up the ghost, leaving his head hanging painfully over one shoulder.
Drivers started shouting things out of their windows, things with lots of swear words in them. Bruce just felt very terribly traumatised by it all. It had been a Really Bad Day. Nothing had gone quite according to plan at all.
Bruce didn’t know what to do, so he didn’t do anything. He just closed the car door with an enormous metal-crunching screech, turned, and walked away.
* * *
“Hey, Barry.”
“What.”
“You know that order from Birmingham City Council you said was going to be brought in today.”
“Yeah, what about it.”
“Well, I’m looking out of the window, and I think its here.”
“Already?”
“Yeah.”
“Are they bringing it in?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a bit bigger than we thought.”
Barry came over to stand next to Robert at the window of their goldsmiths shop on Pitsford Street. They both stared at the crushed car with the enormous statue on the roof sitting motionless in the middle of the road outside their building.
“Berluddy ‘ell,” Barry gasped, “I didn’t think it was going to be that big.”
“Me neither. That’s going to take a lot longer than we thought, innit, Rob.”
“And cost a lot more money,” Barry said, gleefully rubbing his hands together. “Tek it round the back, Rob, and we’ll start on it straight away. The sooner we finish, the sooner we get paid.”
“Tek it round the back, how, exactly?” Rob asked.
Barry slapped him hard on the back and said, “You’d better get the block and tackle out, mate, this one’s gonna be a bugger.”
* * *
By the time Mildred reached the entrance to the Symphony Hall on Broad Street, she could barely breathe and her legs had turned to jelly. She couldn’t remember the last time she walked so far so quickly. As she leaned against the glass for a brief rest, she glanced over her shoulder and gasped.
The man and the woman were just walking round the War Memorial, vigorously slapping each other.
Mildred didn’t have much time. She ran inside the building and raced up to the first person she saw.
“Poo,” she panted.
“Pardon?” said the man.
“I’m looking for a big poo.”
“Toilets are over there on the left.”
“No, I’m looking for a green poo,” Mildren puffed, “A big one.”
“Way too much info,” the man grimaced, and hurried off.
Mildred, acutely aware that the man and woman could find the clue before she did, threw out her arms and yelled, “I NEED A BIG GREEN POO!”
* * *
Roberta and Carl approached the entrance to the Symphony Hall, just as two security guards were escorting a woman out of the building. The woman saw them and started screaming, “Unhand me you brutes, they’ll get to the poo before I do!”
Roberta and Carl hurried by. Inside the glass structure they stood and surveyed their surroundings.
“Nothing green,” said Roberta.
“Nothing lumpy,” said Carl.
“And definitely nothing that looks remotely poo-like.”
They walked on through the foyer until they came to the exit doors on the other side.
They turned and looked back in case they’d missed something green and lumpy and poo-like.
“Can’t see it,” said Carl.
“Me neither.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Dunno.”
“There’s a café over there,” Carl said. “We could sit down and consider our options.”
“Don’t you ever think about anything besides food? It has to be here somewhere, the clue said so.”
“Would you say lasagne looks a bit green and lumpy and poo-like?” Carl asked.
“We’re not going in the restaurant, Carl.”
“Why not? It could be in there.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Roberta sighed heavily as she turned around and looked outside the glass exit doors, across the canal towards Brindleyplace.Brindley Place. The automatic doors opened and closed in front of her – noise, and then silence, noise, and then silence. “I just feel as if we’re missing it, that we can’t see it, that we’re not looking hard enough. I mean, how can we possibly not spot something that looks like a giant green turd?”
Carl sighed as he turned to look outside the glass exit doors, watching the people on the other side of the canal as the door opened and closed, opened and closed. They both stood like that, silent, for several minutes.
And then Roberta gasped out loud, her hands flying up to press against the glass, which pulled her sideways until she almost fell over. “Carl,” she breathed, “Carl, I think I see it.”
“I can’t … oh my God!”
“You see it?”
“I see it.”
They walked through the glass doors and stepped outside. There, right in front of them, was a green, lumpy, poo-shaped sculpture.
“What is that?” Roberta frowned.
“Modern art,” Carl said, shaking his head, “No doubt meant to represent the soul of Birmingham or something equally vague.”
“It’s ugly.”
“Yeah, but its what we’re looking for.”
Just as they were approaching it, the mad woman they’d encountered earlier came tearing down the canal towpath towards them, screaming her head off.
* * *
The security guards wouldn’t let Mildred back in the building through the front entrance. But she outsmarted them and ran round the back, along Broad Street until she came to the bridge over the canal. She leaned heavily on the handrail as she hurried down the stairs to the towpath.
She could see them. The man and the woman. Standing outside the back entrance of the Symphony Hall. They were staring at something. A sculpture. A green sculpture. A lumpy sculpture. A sculpture that looked alarmingly like a huge lump of poo.
Mildred raced down the path, frantically looking for the clue in their hands or on the floor or on or inside the sculpture. She skidded to – but she was shortsighted and it was all a stop in frontbit of a blur, she couldn’t really make out much at all. She had just drawn breath to ask them where the couple, who looked up at her, one frowning, one just looking confused. Mildred had just drawn breath to ask where it was, when her mobile phone rang. “Just a sec,” she said to them, “Don’t move, don’t dare find the clue.”
“Have you found the statue or the next clue yet?” Cavanagh’s voice cried into Mildred’s ear.
“No, I don’t think so. But I’ve found the legal people.”
“Do they have the statue or the next clue?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure?”
“No.”
“Well, do they have the double life size statue of three men and a scroll?”
“Wasn’t that a film?”
“Concentrate, Mildred!”
“No, they don’t have the statue. At least, I don’t think they have. The man looks very bulky though, he may be carrying something under his shirt.”
“Mildred, if he was carrying a double life size statue of three men and a scroll under his shirt, I think you’d know about it.”
“He’s a big bloke.”
“I’m not that fat!” Carl yelled.
“Mildred, I want you to … oh, wait a minute, my secretary’s just come into the office.”
Mildred waited, the mobile phone held at her ear, her eyes watching the man and the woman, who both looked a bit edgy and kept glancing sideways at the green sculpture. She hummed a bit to pass the time as, in her ear, she heard Cavanagh talking to his secretary. The woman started inspecting her nails and looking a bit bored. The man pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and took one out.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” the woman said.
“I don’t. Not really. I just carry them around to make me look good.”
“It doesn’t work,” the woman drawled.
The man put the packet of cigarettes back in his pocket.
* * *
“Mr Cavanagh,” the secretary said, closing the office door behind her and approaching Cavanagh’s vast desk, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but this just came in and I wanted you to see it straight away.”
“What is it, Julia?”
“Well,” Julia said, nervously, “You know you wanted that small statue from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery gold plated?”
“Yes, what about it?”
“Well, we’ve just had the invoice for the work.”
“Is there a problem?”
“There seems to have been a bit of an error. The goldsmith’s invoice is slightly more than we anticipated.”
“It’s a twelve inch statue, how expensive could it be?”
Julia didn’t answer. Cavanagh put on his glasses and took a piece of paper from her outstretched and slightly trembling hand. He scoured the invoice column until he reached the bottom.
Then he leapt up out of his chair screaming, “HOW MUCH?”
* * *
Mildred held the phone away from her ear when Cavanagh started shouting. When it seemed as if he wasn’t likely to stop shouting any time soon, she put the phone back in her coat pocket. “Where’s the clue?” she asked the man and woman standing in front of her.
“We don’t know,” the woman told her, “We just got here. Who are you anyway?”
“That’s not important,” Mildred said dismissively.
“I think it is,” said the man, stepping forward and looking a bit, well a bit manly. “Who are you?”
Mildred didn’t answer, and the man took another menacing step towards her.
“I’m … I’m an undercover agent,” Mildred suddenly blurted, suddenly wishing she had a gun she could pull out of her pocket. “This is a top secret mission,” she added, getting into the swing of things, “And you’re interfering in government property.”
“You’re a government agent?” the man gasped, laughing a little.
“Don’t mock me, I’m a dangerous woman,” Mildred warned as fiercely as she could manage, “I could have you shot by snipers with just a snap of my fingers.” Mildred tried to snap her fingers, but couldn’t. “Have you not watched Jack Bauer in 24?”
“Yes,” the woman said, exchanging a look with the man, “But Keiffer Sutherland is young and fit and rather tasty looking and he’s … not.”
“What do you mean, I’m not young and fit and tasty looking?” the man snarled at the woman.
“I’m sorry, Carl, but by no stretch of the imagination could you be described as a Keiffer Sutherland lookalike. Even if I were wearing dark sunglasses at night and you were standing a mile away in a fog, I still wouldn’t mistake you for – “
“Yeah, okay, okay,” the man huffed, “I get the point.”
The man huffed again and then, as if suddenly remembering she was there and eager to change the subject, he looked over at Mildred. “Are you really a government agent?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Really?” said the woman.
“Yes!”
“Honestly? Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Well, alright, no, not really,” Mildred relented, feeling a bit silly now. “But I do work for the government, and I want that clue. My boss sent me to get that clue, and if I don’t get it he’ll be a real miserable git and my life won’t be worth living.”
“Oh, so you’re going for the sympathy vote now, are you?” the man drawled impatiently.
Mildred didn’t answer, she wasn’t really sure what he meant. Instead, she glanced at the sculpture that looked alarming like a green poo sliced in half. The woman turned her head to look at it too, and so did the man. In an instant the three of them were lunging towards it, scrambling into the middle of it and searching the inner walls for the clue.
“MILDRED!” came a voice, and Mildred straightened up quickly. “Mildred, what are you doing?”
“Ron!” gasped Mildred, “What are you doing here?”
“I was going to surprise you and meet you from work,” said her husband – a very small, round kind of man with a few stray hairs on his head. “They tell me you’d already left. I was just walking back to the bus stop on Broad Street when I heard you, I’d recognise that scream of yours anywhere.”
“I’m busy right now, Ron.”
“It’s late,” he said. “Come home. The budgies miss you, and I’m hungry.”
“I just need to finish something first.”
Ron then noticed the man straightening up next to a woman who’d just extricated herself from a green piece of sculpture. “It’s not another man, is it, Mildred?” Ron gasped in horror, as the man’s mouth instantly fell open. “You’re not having an affair or anything, are you?”
“Ron,” said Mildred, “I’m just a bit busy at the moment.”
Ron reached out and gently took hold of her arm. “Come along, dear,” he says firmly, glaring fiercely at the man, “We’re going home.”
“But, the clue, the statue, Cavanagh said – “
“Home, Mildred. The budgies are waiting.” And Ron pulled her along the towpath back towards Broad Street, with Mildred glancing miserably over her shoulder.
* * *
Carl looked at Roberta. Roberta looked at Carl. Then Carl raised his hand and said, “I’ve got it, the clue.”
“Read it,” Roberta says excitedly. “Is it the last one? Can we go home now? Only Eastenders starts at 7.30 and I don’t want to miss it.”
Carl opened up the folded piece of paper that had been taped to the inside of the green poo sculpture, and read out loud, “Leave the money … “ Carl stopped. Frowned. Looked at Roberta. “Money?” he said, “What money?”
“The ransom money, I suppose.”
“I don’t have any ransom money, do you?”
“I don’t have lunch money let alone – “
“How are we supposed to leave the money if we don’t – ?“
“Just read the rest of the clue, Carl, and we’ll figure out the money problem later.”
Carl looked at the paper in his hands. “Leave the money,” he read, shrugging and adding, “Not that we actually have any money, not on us anyway, not money we’ve been given to leave as a ransom or – “
“The clue, Carl!”
“Leave the money in the poo properly sealed, then walk down Broad Street and all will be revealed.”
“All will be revealed,” Roberta repeated.
“Except if we don’t have the ransom money, nothing will be revealed,” Carl sighed miserably. “I mean, how much money are we talking about here, do you think?” He pulled out his wallet out of his trouser pocket and started counting the notes. “I have about £275 and change, do you think that will be enough?”
Roberta blinked. “You have £275 in your wallet, in cash?” she gasped.
“Yes,” said Carl.
“You have £275 in cash in your wallet and you whinged about buying me lunch?”
“I did buy you lunch!”
“Yes, eventually, after I’d begged and threatened and coerced you into it.”
“What’s your point?” Carl asked.
“I … You … I … Oh forget it,” she puffed, “You’re a lawyer, you wouldn’t understand the point if I drew diagrams and had Scrooge tattooed on my buttocks.”
Carl still looked confused.
“Come on,” said Roberta, “Let’s go down Broad Street and see if anything’s revealed.”
Is anything revealed? Does Roberta have any tattoos – Scrooge-like or otherwise – on her buttocks? Will she get home in time to watch yet another actor being mown down by a car in Eastenders?
Find out in the final edge-of-seat exciting episode of Da Brummie Code, coming to a computer screen near you soon.
Until then, ta ta.
D
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