A Princess and a Guy Like Me

T

he arrival of Star Wars didn’t just bring excitement and adventure; it brought romance. There was something so gorgeous about Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia; she was beautiful but also slightly boyish in her tenacious attitude, which made her easy to relate to. When re-enacting scenes from Star Wars in the playground, we found ourselves with a constant dearth of female candidates to take the role of Princess Leia, so the role was almost always taken by Sean Jeffries, who would delight in running away from me and Stuart Clegg (Han Solo), shouting ‘Shoo, shoo’ to fend off our amorous advances. A few years later while being held hostage by the rough boys in the swimming pool changing rooms, I mentally told myself to remember Sean as Princess Leia if they actually went through with their threat of enforcing lewd interaction between us, as it probably would have helped.

Sean wasn’t particularly feminine, he was just tall and happy to double as Leia and Chewbacca whenever we played Star Wars. Despite that tomboy edge, Carrie Fisher was definitely feminine, with her glossy lips and flowing white dress which acquires a little smudge on the breast area during her escape from the Death Star, serving not only to draw attention to the boobs George Lucas tried so hard to downplay, but also demonstrating a willingness to get grubby, which I for one loved. In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo even seduces her while rubbing her oil-smudged hands, essentially saying, ‘You LOVE it!’

She was a princess but a princess you could relate to if you were a seven-year-old boy, and I related to her every night before I went to sleep (I really didn’t intend that to sound quite so unseemly). In 1977, I was a full four years shy of taking up that particular favourite of male pastimes, despite being aware that my penis had uses other than doing wee-wees (although I had no clear idea of exactly what they were). The relationship I had with Carrie Fisher was far more innocent and involved placing a nightly kiss on her photographic lips, on the picture of her I had torn from Look-in magazine which was blue-tacked on to the wall next to my bed. I did it with such frequency that the picture began to deteriorate, and the area around her mouth became whitened as my saliva broke down the paper. It’s not as if I was ‘film-star kissing’ her. I hadn’t done that with anybody since Kyle, and wouldn’t do it for another year when I would find myself on a bed with a girl called Claire at a friend’s party, again surrounded by clapping children.

Claire and I had decided to ‘go out’ with each other because we were the fastest runners in the school and as such represented perhaps the most formidable power couple at Castle Hill Primary. We were the Posh and Becks of the day, which is approximately how long the relationship lasted (one day). I seem to remember kids running in and out of the bedroom turning lights on and off and screeching with laughter as Claire and I sucked face amid the teddy bears. It wasn’t particularly sexual - how could it have been? Those breathless, dizzying encounters of genuine early passion wouldn’t take place until the bacchanalian teen parties of the early eighties. This was more like a cross between the exhibition kissing of my smooches with Kyle and a rehearsal for the more serious facilitative embraces of later life. Whatever it was, it was a lot more than I bestowed upon my precious picture of Carrie. These kisses were far more tender and infused with a sense of longing that was at once exciting and slightly depressing.

It inspired me to fantasise about what I would do if I met her or how her character’s relationship might progress with Luke Skywalker, unaware at this point that they were siblings, which would have utterly soured my fancy, despite being from Gloucester. Although the sensation was slightly heartbreaking,

I enjoyed it. There was something pleasurable in the predicament of hopeless love; I found it inspiring and would continue to do so as I grew older. Much of the comedy poetry that formed my early stand-up shows at university was about being in love with the actress Diane Keaton, itself a euphemism for the love I had for Eggy Helen, the girl who inspired me to commit window-wide, an emotional cataclysm I would eventually mine for my romantic contributions to Spaced.

We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort. Princess Leia taught me that. Twenty-seven years after I had to replace the picture of Carrie Fisher with a picture of Lou Ferrigno (not for kissing) due to lip damage, I lined up to meet her at the 2004 San Diego Comic-Con, with all the other Star Wars fans, despite being there to promote my own movie and having just completed an autograph signing of my own. Carrie had no idea who I was. Why should she?

I’m sure she still doesn’t and I have total comprehension of the depth of personal interaction that takes place at these events. It means something to the person that has queued up to meet the signer but it is usually as forgettable and fleeting for the person doing the signing as it is exciting for the signee. Nevertheless, she was there and for the sake of my seven-year-old self I paid my fifteen dollars and got in line. When my turn came I stepped up and confessed everything.

Me: I used to kiss your picture every night before I went to sleep.

Carrie: Do you feel better for telling me that?

Me: Much. Thank you.

As beautiful as ever, she smiled at me and I smiled back. I’d like to think we had a connection, or at least I had amused her with my candour. I’m pretty sure the latter was true because I played it supercool, with all the British dryness I could muster, something the Americans often get a kick out of because they find our repression amusing. The connection, though, was entirely mine. To her I was yet another of the millions of fanboys she has encountered over the years for whom her portrayal of the ass-kicking galactic princess was a formative moment in their sexual awakening.

For me, though, it was the achievement of an ambition I had harboured for many years - to breathe the same air, to look into her eyes and have her look back at me - and it was very nearly everything I had hoped for. I felt lighter than air as I walked in a daze across the convention floor, going nowhere in particular and not needing to wear a mask. I slightly regretted not getting a photograph with her but I was pleased that I hadn’t overstayed my welcome and pushed my luck. I got lucky with Tom Baker in 1978, Carrie might not have been so patient. I did manage to get a picture of me with Lou Ferrigno, so the day wasn’t a complete photographic bust.

I attended a Star Wars panel later that day in one of the large convention halls. Carrie was making an appearance and I was also curious to hear the title of the third prequel announced, despite my agonising disappointment at the other two. She walked out onstage to rapturous applause from the partisan crowd. As the clapping settled into a fading crackle, someone shouted out, ‘I love you!’ She smiled broadly and replied, ‘I love you too.’ ‘I know!’ I shouted, as the crowd swelled into a collective roar of appreciative laughter. She found me amid the throng and smiled, recognising me from our earlier encounter. She gave me an impressed conciliatory nod and winked with genuine affection. I blew her a kiss, which she snatched out of the air and placed into the left cup of her gold-trim bikini which she was wearing that day. Of the thousands of kisses I had bestowed upon her over the years, it was the first she had actually received and something told me it would not be the last. OK so not all of the above story is true. In fact, I went off-piste at the point where she said, ‘I love you too.’ I thought of saying ‘I know’ but stopped myself for some reason. I think it would have got a laugh and I think she would have found it funny but I hesitated and the moment passed.io

Little Things

A

fter three years of waiting, The Empire Strikes Back arrived, heralding a darker, more adult vision of the world I had grown to love. The tone and feel of the movie had an immediate effect on the ten-year-old me, and my writing at school took on a darker edge, with characters not always surviving to the end of stories, or suffering great losses along the way, usually their right hand.

Of course, these stories were still only ever about a page long but their mood changed significantly. I could dive into the sociocultural implications of The Empire Strikes Back and what it meant to America - basically an exercise in self-reflexive revaluation in the wake of the confidence-boosting first installment - but I won’t. It’s a great sequel and widely regarded as the best film in the entire series. Lucas reputedly told publicist Sid Ganis that The Empire Strikes Back was the worst of the Star Wars films,ц which seems odd, particularly as Lucas tried so hard to recreate Empire’s most effective beats in the vastly inferior prequel, Attack of the Clones. He would most likely refer to this as poetic, although it seems more likely an attempt to emulate the success and admiration the original had earned, particularly in light of the critical drubbing received by The Phantom Menace.

Return of the Jedi, released in 1983, was immensely enjoyable, but, on more critical reflection, seems to be a rehash of the first two, with the addition of an army of fighting teddy bears, a wrong step most of us chose to ignore. As a metaphor for America’s involvement in Vietnam, Jedi is perhaps the most blatant and paradoxical in that the audience allegiance is clearly positioned on the side of a group of primitive jungle fighters, attempting to fend off the usurping might of a technologically superior force. Here the Empire is America, being punished for involving itself in a war it could not and did notwin.

The Phantom Menace presented us with barely disguised oriental bad guys in the shape of the Trade Federation, although these were more likely manifestations of George Lucas’s business demons, since the whole film is a veiled whine about having to pay taxes. In 1977, Lucas was Luke, a young idealist, obsessed with adventure, excitement and going really fast; in 1999, his concerns are more financial and out of touch, although going really fast still figures. The prequels, though, are ostensibly a justification of evil. An account of how even the best people can go bad if exposed to certain circumstances. The three films work towards us pitying the ‘big bad’ of the first three films, namely Darth Vader. This faceless murderer, whose grip on the galaxy represented the outdated imperialist mentality America wanted to shed, became a spurned lover and tragic widower, lumbering around the Emperor’s secret laboratory melodramatically shouting the word ‘no’ and expecting us to empathise with his decision to become a homicidal intergalactic despot.

The war in Iraq had been raging for two years by the time Revenge of the Sith was released, a film that told us that sometimes even good people do terrible things. One of the most interesting expansions of this theory is demonstrated in the recent Star Wars video game, The Force Unleashed which takes place between Episodes III and IV (the last and the first film) and deals with the foundation of the rebellion through a morally ambiguous protagonist called Starkiller (Luke Skywalker’s originally intended surname). Starkiller, who seemingly works for Darth Vader, attempts to hunt down the remaining Jedi. However, in so doing, begins to feel sympathy for the opposing team. The game is brilliantly realised and for my money is the most enjoyable incarnation of the saga since Return of the Jedi. As Starkiller (and initially Vader), you travel from planet to planet, laying waste to a variety of ‘enemies’ including Jawas, innocuous little sand scavengers, and Wookiees, the race of bear-like humanoids that gave us one of the most beloved characters in the Star Wars universe, Chewbacca. It feels strange playing this character, basically killing anybody who gets in his way, irrespective of their moral stance. However, these actions are ultimately justifiable as they lead to the formation of the rebellion and the eventual destruction of the Empire. As elsewhere in the world, it was impossible to conceal the huge civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the message of the game is essentially a rallying justification for the reality of actual world events, this being ‘Hey, sometimes you just gotta fuck up a Wookiee.’

Before I let Star Wars go (and it’s unlikely that I ever truly will), it’s worth mentioning how the films affected me emotionally, if only to demonstrate how deeply its influence ran.

It was 2 June 1983 and Return of the Jedi had arrived in cinemas in the capital. After much planning, Sean and I were due to travel to London to see it. However, a last-minute change meant that I was unable to make the trip as early as Sean due to my being admitted to Bristol Children’s Hospital to have a birthmark removed from my forehead. The birthmark, an oval of darkly pigmented skin on the right side of my forehead about the size of a ten-pence piece, became troubling to me as I grew into my teens whereas before I had assumed it to be cool. I developed a habit of constantly smoothing my hair down to conceal it in order to avoid hurtful comments from people who hadn’t seen it before, the most common of which was, ‘Why have you got as leaf stuck to your head?’

When my mother realised the birthmark had started to bother me, she took me along to our GP who identified it as a ‘hairy naevus’ and assured me that he could ‘have it off in no time’. I was put on an NHS waiting list and in a matter of months I was booked into Bristol Children’s Hospital where the procedure was to take place. On 2 June, as Sean Jeffries was travelling to London to see Return of the Jedi before me, I was getting into my pyjamas and climbing into my bed on ward 34 of the BCH, being looked after by a number of delightful nurses, all of whom I fell in love with. I watched the original Star Wars on the ward’s video cassette player as a consolation for missing the fun in London, and Mum and Richard went into Bristol and bought me a Biker Scout action figure, one of the new Return of the Jedi range, released in conjunction with the opening of the film. Even now, I can still feel the thrill of studying the packaging before ripping it open to get inside (would have been worth a fortune today if I’d left it in the box, stupid child). The smell of the fresh plastic and the sophistication and newness of the mould compared to the older, now well-used figures in my collection filled me with a wonder and excitement that completely dispelled my nerves about the operation.

When visiting hours ended I said goodbye to Mum and Richard and settled down for my first night alone in hospital. At 6 a.m. I was woken by the nurse and asked to put on one of those embarrassing gowns that leaves your arse exposed. I was then given a small plastic cup containing two pills, which I duly swallowed. Nine hours later, I became aware of a familiar whistling coming from somewhere in the distance and struggled my way back to consciousness as though from the bottom of a swimming pool. The first person I saw when I opened my eyes was Mum, sat by my bed looking anxious. Actually, it’s perhaps more accurate to say I opened my eye; the other one was already open and had been since the operation, despite Mum’s frequent attempts to close it. The procedure had entailed cutting the naevus out of my forehead, then pulling the skin together and stitching it up. This resulted in my right eyebrow being pulled up into a quizzical Spock-like expression, where it remained for a few months until the skin was stretched back to normality. Fortunately I was a teenager and frowned a lot, which helped pull the skin around my eyebrow down to a less surprised height. In the hours after the operation, though, the stretch was at its maximum and however many times Mum gently closed it, the lid would open, settling me back into an unnerving one-eyed stare.

Mum called the nurse who came over and welcomed me back to the land of the living. She was a bit surprised that I was awake and seemed impressed, if slightly concerned, that I had come round from the anaesthetic an hour or so early. I remembered the whistling and realised the culprit had been R2-D2. Some of the other children on the ward were watching the Star Wars video a few beds down and the sound of robots and lasers and spaceships had brought me out of my heavily induced sleep prematurely. Mum immediately noted this down in her ‘things to do if ever Simon is in a coma’ book before cracking open the grapes.

I recovered very quickly, unlike the boy in the bed next to me who had had his ears pinned back. He could only manage half of Star Wars later that evening, before projectile vomiting Ribena into a kidney dish. The nurses hit him up with a few more painkillers and sent him off to his bed, while I was allowed to watch the video all by myself, the TV stand pulled up intimately to the end of my bed.

A few weeks later, now fully recovered, I travelled to London with my babysitters, Paul and Fay, a young couple who often looked after my sister Katy and me when Mum and Richard were out at the theatre. I loved Paul and Fay. They were cool and loved movies as much as I did. Whenever they came round, they would allow me to stay up just that little bit past my bedtime, so we could discuss our favourite films and television shows. They had no children

of their own at the time and they felt more like friends of mine than friends of Mum and Richard’s. When the marketing campaign for Return of the Jedi began, we hatched a plan to see the film in one of the big theatres in London, where the screen was four times as big as Screen 1 in the ABC and the sound system consisted of speakers that encompassed you in a siege of blaring, crystal-clear sound. I was extremely excited; not only was I going to London to see the film I longed to see more than any other, I was going with my friends, who treated me like a grown-up and laughed when I swore.

I had only been to London once before, as a birthday treat in 1977. We had visited the Natural History Museum and Madame Tussaud’s, then gone to see Harry Nilsson’s musical The Point! at the Mermaid Theatre. On the journey from South Kensington, where I had marvelled at the huge dinosaur skeletons in the museum, we stopped on Wood Lane to look at the BBC building. We actually stopped the car and got out to look at it, the famous concrete doughnut where so many of my favourite programmes were made. Eighteen years later I called Mum from my dressing room inside the building, before recording my first appearance on the BBC’s Stand Up Stowand reminded her that we had once stood outside and just looked, like Victorian orphans outside a cake shop. It says a lot about the level of mystique retained by television at the time that it could make a grey, ugly building seem enchanting. In the early eighties I would experience the wonder again, when I went to see daytime magazine show Pebble Mill being recorded in Birmingham and met Don Maclean from Crackerjack. I also met Greek crooner Demis Roussos but he was a bit of a knob. I knocked on his dressing- room door and asked for his autograph, which he grudgingly scrawled in an illegible dribble of ink into my autograph book. To this day, if ever I sign an autograph, my internal monologue is singing ‘Forever and Ever’, to remind me to put some effort into it, lest anyone walk away, look at their spoils and think, ‘What a knob.’

Anyway, in 1977, we clambered back into Richard’s Opel Manta and set off for the famous house of wax. In 1995, I was fantasising about stepping out of my ESTB and striding across Wood Lane towards the awestruck little boy gawping at the building where they made Doctor Who. In 1983, I was sat in the auditorium of the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road, and as the lights dimmed, the curtains parted and the Twentieth Century Foxfanfare blasted from the circle of speakers, London’s potential to amaze seemed boundless. It was a truly amazing experience and when the film came to an end, we left the theatre, dazed and thoroughly entertained. Paul has often recalled the moment he looked over to see if I was enjoying the film and witnessed my slack- jawed awe at the imperial speeder bikes, careening through the forest of Endor at breakneck speeds. I remember sensing Paul clocking my expression and nudging Fay in amusement. Rather than look back at them and break the moment, I continued to gawk at the screen, happily making a performance of my genuine wonder. This wasn’t to show off or get attention, more my way of demonstrating to them how grateful I was that they had brought me there. Besides, it’s not like I really had to act: the speeder-bike chase was and still is a hugely exhilarating sequence, pissing on anything else that came afterwards, helped along perhaps because I care(d) so much about the individuals riding the speeder bikes in the first place.

The effect of the film upon us was so strong that, even a full year later, Sean and I would cycle every morning the four and a half miles from his house in Little Whitcombe, up the same steep hill where I had been visually punished for fondling Meredith Catsanus’s budding boobs, to my house in Upton St Leonards. We would then climb over the fence at the end of my garden into the small area of woodland that backed on to our house and play with our Star Wars figures, re-enacting the forest scenes from Return of the Jedi with a host of new characters and vehicles collected since the release of the film.

And then one day, 25 May to be precise, a friend of mine by the name of Chris Dixon was hit by a car while out running and was subsequently rushed to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, where he remained unconscious for ten days. Chris lived in the same static-home park in Little Whitcombe, Gloucester, as Sean Jeffries and in truth was more Sean’s friend than mine. There was even a slight antagonism between Chris and myself as we jostled for Sean’s attention. I was Sean’s best friend at school but at home, with the benefit of proximity, Chris and Sean became very close. Whenever I visited Sean at the weekends, Chris would join our fun and games, and though there was a proprietorial tension between us, we got on well most of the time. The thing that bonded Sean and me specifically was a love of Star Wars, which had started sixyears before and been maintained as the saga continued.

After Chris’s accident, our sojourn to the woods became a way of keeping our minds off the battle Chris was fighting in Bristol against his injuries. Towards the end of the week, Sean pulled into my driveway on his racing bike as he always did and said, in a tone of voice I had never heard him use before, ‘Chris is dead.’ I had stepped out of the side door of the house to get something from the garage as Sean had arrived and now stood in my socks, staring at him blankly, trying to process the information he had just imparted.

His eyes were red, and although I didn’t see him cry, I knew he had not long stopped. This in itself was alarming. I had never known Sean to cry, not even while being terrorised by sadistic bullies in the changing rooms at Gloucester Leisure Centre. Unable to truly comprehend the idea that someone so young, someone I knew, could have died, the idea that Sean had been crying seemed somehow more terrible. We walked numbly over to the large Safeway supermarket near my house and bought drinks and Return of the Jedi themed biscuits, then went back home to do what we always did. We played Star Wars in the woods behind my house. Perhaps not as vocally or even as enthusiastically as we normally would, but play it we did and it helped us enormously.

Escaping into that world which we so loved enabled us to cope, at least initially, with the shock of losing Chris. I hadn’t been bereaved since the night Mum had interrupted Fabulous Animals, but this time the implications were so much more serious and shocking. I suddenly understood the dazed look of bewilderment on my mum’s face that night as I felt it creep across my own, eight years later, as Sean delivered the news. That evening, lying on my bed, the tears came and I was able to articulate my grief freely; but for those first few hours in a world where I suddenly and shockingly found myself one friend down, I had coped in the only way I knew how: by going into my imagination where, in death, you simply disappear and become part of a greater world. I can still see Chris in my head, a robust young bruiser with a scruff of blond hair and an infectious, cheeky smile. I’m sure Sean can too.

‘What are you doing ’ere?’ whispered the Scarlet Panther throatily, a thin film of sweat glistening on her amazing knockers, as she lay in Pegg’s muscular arms.

‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ quipped Pegg, his dwindling member resting on his lower chest.

The mysterious beauty (the Scarlet Panther) looked at the inert figure of Canterbury standing nearby, still wearing his burka. She frowned, a delightful wrinkle appearing between her eyes like the one Meg Ryan used to have.

‘Are you sure ее cannot see us?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘If the virus you implanted to disable his early-warning sensors performed a temporary memory wipe, then he’ll need time to recompile his storage platters. Trust me, he is in the robot equivalent of snoozetown, USA. He didn’t see a thing.’

‘Zhat’s a relief,’ smiled the Panther, arching an exquisitely plucked eyebrow. She was unspeakably beautiful. Tall and slender with alabaster skin and a shag of wavy copper hair. Born and raised in Paris, France, her American Ivy League education had not fully rid her of her Gallic purr. She was tough, tenacious and wily, but possessed an innate sophistication that hinted at a deep intelligence. Pegg always felt slightly hypnotised by her perplexing charisma, feeling clumsy in her presence, forever cursing himself for saying things before he had properly thought them through.

‘Believe me,’ said Pegg, ‘if he had been watching us, there’s no way he wouldn’t have achieved major droid wood.’

The Panther let his crude remark go with an admonishing smirk that only made him blush with regret for an instant.

‘I’ll repeat zee question,’ she furtherised. ‘What are you doing ’ere?’

‘Looking for you, of course,’ said Pegg, ‘although I didn’t have to look far. How on earth did you know I was in Morocco?’

‘Zee flag was up over zee riad,’ stated the Panther plainly.

‘What?’ coughed Pegg.

‘Zee flag zat lets everyone know zhat you are in.’ The Panther was finding it hard to conceal her amusement at Pegg’s frustration.

‘Damn it, Canterbury, I told you not to put it up!’ Pegg spat, jamming a fist into his palm.

‘Eet has been up for months actually,’ said the Panther.

‘Damn it, Canterbury, I told you to take it down!’ Pegg jammed the other fist into the other palm.

‘I am teasing you,’ purred the Panther, tracing a fleeting white strip down the valley between Pegg’s diamond-hard pecs. ‘I saw zee jet come in to land last night. I ’appened to be taking tea at Ali Ben Hassan’s Old-Fashioned Tea Shop and Internet Cafe in the square, when you arrived.

‘It’s supposed to be a stealth jet,’ grumbled Pegg through his teeth.

‘Yes, but you put all those lights on zee side and painted “Pegg Jet” on the fuselage in reflective paint.’

Pegg cursed internally with a bob of his head and muttered something as his lips tightened into a sphincter of regret. He became lost in thought.

‘Looks pretty good though, doesn’t it?’ Pegg eyed the Panther hopefully.

‘Hell, yes,’ she said in a comedy African American voice that wasn’t racist. She smiled, sensing his moodiness dispersing. ‘Why were you looking for me?’

‘Oh, come on, Murielle,’ Pegg said affectionately to his old lifeguarding colleague, for it was she from earlier. The two had chosen different sides of the moral highway after leaving Gloucester Leisure Centre and had been on a perpetual collision course ever since. ‘I know you lifted the Star of Nefertiti from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquity in Cairo, with the express intention of selling it to the highest bidder.’

‘Oo told you?’ Murielle enquired, half furious, half impressed, half amused.

‘Who do you think?’ Pegg was enjoying having the upper hand.

‘Needles!’ It was Murielle’s turn to jam her fist into her palm. ‘Le petit twat!’

‘I love it when you talk French,’ chuckled Pegg, only to be met with an angry glance from his nemesis/fuck buddy.

‘I knew I shouldn’t have invited him over for zhat tour of zee local minarets.’ Murielle cursed her decision to holiday with a known informant.

‘He is a known informant,’ said Pegg echoing her thoughts, ‘and besides, if you hadn’t, we would never have had all that amazing sex. Now let’s return the diamond to its rightful place in Cairo, then get a suite at the Marriott Hotel and Omar Khayyam Casino and have some more -’

‘Eet’s too late,’ said Murielle, already regretting selling on the Star of Nefertiti and, in doing so, missing out on at least a month of shagging and blackjack. ‘I stole it to order, eet’s already been delivered.’

‘Who to?’ urged Pegg, rising up on to his elbow to indicate urgency.

Murielle avoided Pegg’s gaze; she seemed reluctant to divulge the identity of the buyer, although Pegg sensed this was more from regret than any misplaced loyalty to her employer. Pegg intensified his glare so that Murielle could almost feel it burning into her pale, flawless skin, which she clearly moisturised regularly.

‘Lord Black,’ she whispered shamefully.

‘What?’ Pegg leapt up, his body flexing with tension. Things had suddenly become very serious. He didn’t even have a semi any more. ‘Lord Black is a notorious criminal and nobleman, Murielle; I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve foiled his attempts to commit massive atrocities in the name of needless financial gain!’

‘I know,’ pleaded Murielle, ‘but this was simply a case of interior design and zee fee ее offered me was really good considering the current economic climate. Eet was more than enough to keep my deaf brother Etienne at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris.’

Murielle became unfocused momentarily as her thoughts drifted to her gifted, but sadly deaf younger brother, for whom she committed most of her non­violent crimes, thus giving her illegal activities a moral justification only intensified by the fact that she always made sure there was never a direct victim. ‘Murielle, I need you to focus,’ enforced Pegg, pulling her face towards his with a gentle yet firm insistence. ‘What do you mean, interior design?’

Murielle shook her head several times, trying to clear her thoughts, her fiery red hair scattering across her swimmer’s shoulders.

‘Ее said ее was doing up his town house in Hendon. Ее was collecting artefacts to go round his pool and said zhat zee Star of Nefertiti would make a wonderful addition to ees collection.’ Murielle frowned as she searched her memory.

‘There’s no way he’s decorating that room with antiquities,’ said Pegg emphatically. That pool’s tiny! - I saw it in OK! - it would be way too cluttered.’ ‘Ее said it would go nicely with some of the stuff his great-uncle Barney left him in his will,’ Murielle recalled. ‘Ее did seem to have a few design ideas, even if eet wasn’t for the pool area.’

‘Oh, he had a design all right,’ seethed Pegg, ‘and if by Uncle Barney he means Colonel Barnabus McCartney, then his design is to hold the entire world to ransom by threatening to fire an ancient Egyptian laser beam into the sun.’

‘Fuck erduck!’ said Murielle.

‘We have to get to Hendon and stop Black before he puts his plan into action,’ said Pegg, punching a series of numbers into a wall-mounted control panel.

‘I am sorry.’ Murielle hung her head in shame, her hair forming a curtain across her coral-pink areolae, so that Pegg could no longer officially see her boobs. ‘Eet’s so hard to tell what ee’s thinking due to the mask.’ Lord Black famously insisted on wearing a mask, reminiscent of Doctor Doom from The Fantastic Four, despite having to settle out of court with Marvel for the privilege.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ said Pegg, checking to see if he could see them from a different angle. ‘You had no idea and I know your judgement is often clouded by your love for your deaf brother.’

‘Not just my deaf brother,’ she said honestly, lifting her head, much to Pegg’s relief.

‘We’ll leave immediately,’ said Pegg. ‘It will take fifteen minutes for the jet to power up and perform its auto-check cycle - I’ve just activated it remotely via this pad I had installed last year.’

‘What shall we do until zhen?’ asked Murielle, noticing Pegg’s penis had inflated and was rising into threat pose like a one-eyed pink cobra.

Pegg smiled and walked towards her slowly, wiggling his hips.

‘Actually, lam on,’ admitted Canterbury.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 873