Mister Winner

By Charles Morgan

What would happen if Olympic athletes were allowed to enhance themselves in whatever way they liked to improve their chances of winning? Mister Winner follows the journey of two people who do just that.

Bunny ,a streetwise and gorgeous money hunter, tries to sell her fianc, Lynx, to Cavalisto Thyrax, a castrated developer of sports stadiums. Lynx is an Olympic gold medal winner and Cavalisto wants him as a prime breeding stud for his herd of athletes.

Lynx avoids the plot but, and as a result of the incident, decides to devote his life to helping La Trompette, a tiny heroin addict, to overcome her physical limitations and win gold at the St Petersberg Olympics. After all, why should small weedy people be excluded from the games?

Mello, a man made of huge parcels of muscle, along with 12 struck-off Romanian doctors, pitch in and try to help Lynx while Bunny recruits the Chief Umpire to achieve her aims.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Aug 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781482891898

Charles Morgan

Charlie Morgan grew up in Somerville, Tennessee and worked in banking throughout his 45-year professional career retiring from JP Morgan Chase in 2014. He has a B.S. in Management of Technology and is a Certified information Systems Auditor and Certified Information Security Manager. After retiring, he and his wife began second careers as small business owners. They own and operate two private pre-school franchises located in Texas. Morgan said, "For years, I heard the stories and read the newspaper accounts of the US Navy exploits of my grandfather Charles Gunner Morgan. Originally, I had only his detailed scrapbook with hundreds of newspaper clippings. Then, I discovered in the bottom of his old sea chest many more documents, and two of those were signed by American presidents. This led me to begin researching his story and searching for a writer to help me tell the story. Eventually, I found my childhood friend Jacque Hillman, author and publisher, and we began the project to tell the story of Gunner Morgan." Charlie and Paula have four children and three grandchildren. www.gunnermorgan.com

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Copyright © 2014 by Charles Morgan.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

To order additional copies of this book, contact

Toll Free 800 101 2657 (Singapore)

Toll Free 1 800 81 7340 (Malaysia)

[e-mail]

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

CONTENTS

Acclaim For Charles Morgan’s Books

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

About The Author

Books By Charles Morgan

NOVELS

Knights Of The Secondhand Stew

Mister Winner

The Man Who Said N’Gloop

Heroes Of The New Eden

THE MORNING BLISS TRILOGY

Grand Conception

Morning Bliss

(Youthful Folly to be published 2013)

SHORT STORIES

The Weapons Counter

For more information about Charles Morgan’s books visit him at

www.charlesmorgan.net.au

ACCLAIM FOR CHARLES MORGAN’S BOOKS

Reviews For Knights Of The Secondhand Stew

(Originally Published As Secondhand Porridge )

SUCH a different style of writing. Refreshing, confronting, free-flowing, new. A story that just grips you from the very beginning and takes you on a ride not yet built by Disney. A dispossessed young man called Gavin is the catalyst to this story of discovery, of his own family roots, and of the political machinations of a big world. Crazy, zany, good reading.

by Wendy O’Hanlon, Australian Provincial Newspapers.

A witty surreal, well written novel without precedent. A comic literary magnus opus sui generis… . with a profound and remarkable silliness which can only be the product of genius or insanity. It is a hyperbolic, apocryphal and apocalyptic feast of snickers, giggles, smirks, and the occasional guffaw out loud.

by Jan Sherpenhuizen Lynk Manuscript Assessment Service

DEDICATION

For my magnificent women, Shelagh, Liffey and Jennifer, and also Ann, of course, who taught me so much of what I know about humour

CHAPTER ONE

W inning involves the use of a certain degree of torture, said Cavalisto Thyrax, pontificating as he often did in those days. This was after his castration but before his rebirth.

He paused to peer down the length of the table and judge the effect of a comment that had cracked the ceiling of even his corrosive voice.

‘Maybe he expects applause,’ thought Lynx, sitting safely at the other end of the massive table and separated from his host, his old Uncle Thyrax, by the thirty-two sports commentators. He could actually hear his host now that those massive men had ceased assaulting the party with their corrosive voices and turned their attention to eating the piles of rich food in front of them. Their thirty-two slablike faces seemed immune to their employer’s screech. Perhaps they were protected by their bulging cheeks as they coped with the incoming cordon bleu.

‘Are they going to explode?’ Lynx wondered, momentarily distracted, as he watched the lines of blazers already weakened by the thunder of their wearers voices and bulging ever more menacingly.

I shall build well and I shall build irresolvable! screeched Thyrax, his words hurtling down the table to spurt around his apparently indestructible employees.

. . . I shall build on and I shall build on. Sport shall find a happy place in my domes and my stadiums, my creations, my life…

Lynx realised with some relief that only Bunny, sweet Bunny, could have felt safe from this onslaught of rogue words. She sat immediately to Thyrax’s right, avoiding the fall-out of the tormented verbal missiles.

Lynx smiled at the sight of his lover, at the same time nodding to give his uncle encouragement to continue describing this manic journey through a land of burning ambition. Sex and soft affection momentarily soothed Lynx’s mind and he found himself able to ignore the impact of the white-hot adjectives that tore down the table and slammed into his sunburned face.

The glowing new flesh of Bunny’s superbly tender face, warm in its delight and self-assurance, gave the impression that she had just manifested from some other world. Arched brows and huge questioning eyes expressed the grace of some ancient cat family, a breed of savanna creatures to which one of her ancestors had apparently belonged. Her face, all innocence, blossomed on its slender flawless neck which emerged from a bright indigo dress worth some type of a gross domestic product (Lynx had paid for it but forgot the actual price). And the full lips, like fruit grown by a violin maker, seemed to delicately suck in at the universe, perhaps with the promise of drawing the observer right into that other land of happiness from which she came.

Lynx felt the caress of his delight. And yet. Something seemed to have gone wrong.

‘I can hardly remember how I come to be here,’ he told himself, even then thinking of how Bunny had manoeuvred him, using the flexible skills of her sharp mind and the soft fragrance of her mesmerising body to suggest accepting the bizarre invitation.

A safari night? he had asked her with the seductive power of his bass voice that laughed at the absurd concept.

But how magic, she had replied, purring as his large and strong, if rather soft hand had stroked the happy places of her naked back.

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Something wrong? Yes. But he hadn’t been at her love-nest of an apartment two weeks earlier.

Two years with Lynx had filled Bunny up with everything other than babies. It had been a time of rich living in the tribes of his affluent friends and contacts, a place where life’s party flowed on from one lavish entertainment to another and she had lived as if impatient to scoop out the last reserves of loot from the sweet-worded hosts and their soft-mannered servants. Could anything be better?

Then, two weeks before that strange party a servant belonging to Thyrax had chimed at her door and extended to her the offer that she should sell Lynx to the old builder. What would she do? Betray her rich lover? Surely not?

But what she did was say well yes. The offer seemed to her to be the sort of opportunity that can’t be refused, and this despite her man’s gorgeous olympic physique and all his gold medals. If the truth were to be admitted, he was a bore in all except his body and his money. Come to think of it, though, there was something odd. He had never said how he had come by his loot and had always diverted her attempts to find out.

I have a message, a personal note from Mister Thyrax, as it were, madam, Cavallisto Thyrax’s servant told her in her hallway only hours before Lynx was due to meet her there. Then for no apparent reason the said servant had repeated as it were. The phrase ‘as it were’ immediately occurred to her to be a personal affectation that she found pathetic. Bunny found much in the male kingdom pathetic.

Bunny sensed a rat in the man immediately, and stroked his buttock in response.

Happy the afternoon that followed. With so expendable a man, she could indulge and misbehave as she desired. Bugger Lynx.

The thirtyish fellow handed Bunny a scented golden envelope and told her he represented Thyrax Property Investments Consolidated. Personal delivery from the boss, as it were, the simpering servant said, and then made the mistake of his life. He winked.

Slim and blonde, with fashionably spiked hair, Bunny could see that this so-called man had tried to develop the air of the devilish rogue in his appearance. Alas with the opposite effect to that intended.

But then, any man might have required a tonne of self discipline to avoid winking at Bunny, given the loveliness of her form, the moist welcome of her big triangular lips, the fall of dark hair, the curve of the naked brown arm. But somebody—this servant’s owner perhaps, anybody—someone should have warned him not to wink at this particular woman.

Will your master lay me down and ravage me by the minute if I accept his offer do you think? Bunny asked the slim half-naked butler only some minutes later after the note had asked her if she would be willing to sell Lynx to Thyrax Cavalisto, ‘If he is not a butler I don’t want to know,’ she thought now, wanting it to be the butler that did it in Lynx’s own love nest, a love nest that he had given her.

Not on your—as it were—nelly, giggled the servant. He had, by now, found himself getting inducted into a series of extraordinary and, to him, novel practices that made his slimline limbs thrash about like some mad semaphore machine signalling an invasion.

The man is a castrate, the, by now, heavily compromised servant explained through his rapidly-disappearing reserves of wind. (buttleing for air, thought Bunny with a smirk) As I say, his essential parts were lost at some point. Nice? I don’t think.

But Bunny, a grand mistress of the seduction scene, did not humour the man. A pro in the art of seduction, she now chose to adopt the ‘Snow Leopard in the Kitchen’ pose and with fluid grace went straight on into the movements of the ‘Old Woman Sat On a Melon’ series of positions.

Shut the crap up and answer my questions, she snapped, as she found voice after a long moan and now rode on top of things, throned on her half-undressed hairy couch.

The news that the servant had divulged had somewhat rocked her, a man who is not a man. Would it be worth leaving her athlete lover and his abundance of both muscle and money for a eunuch? What is the creature worth she wondered and then realised that the quivering slop of a man beneath her held the answer.

And his money? she said, purring slightly. They say that he’s scrapped up a fortune that exceeds my Lynx’s many times over?

A powerfully rich one, as it were, the simple doer of chores replied, his voice riding on stabs of pain and pleasure as Bunny strove on towards her goal of total satisfaction plus.

She thought of the money and then of the many servants all willing and malleable. She immediately flung her legs into the ‘Four Goats in a Pond’ pose.

Sree! shouted the butler as the two-headed knot of limbs, now well tied together, fell off the bed.

Sree it is then, Bunny giggled, letting the man take the bump on his shoulders and riding him like some type of boudoir surf board. He had lost the rest of his clothes by now.

Opps. We’ve fallen off the master’s bed, she put in, during the man’s momentary loss of focus. I do so hope we don’t fall out of his favour.

Fooh! the butler huffed, his voice found again, his eyes round with apprehension and he went on to express his concern. Nobody’s, as it were, in earshot? I mean he, your man, isn’t he an athlete of some note?"

The words shot out in short salvoes as Bunny manipulated his controls to her own advantage, sending him through a more or less involuntary sequence of ‘The Nodding Farmer Finds A Cowpat’ plays.

He is. No less than Lynx Frobisher-Clubknox, she agreed. The very one. Five gold medals at just this last Olympics.

She giggled, pleased with the man’s obvious apprehension and she struck down at him with a series of simple ‘The Honest Blacksmith Bakes A Tart’ moves.

A hairy leg flung itself away to the south-east, making contact with the leg of an elegant piece of furniture. Three gold medals, nudged from their show stands by the impact, rolled off the table and struck the servant on his naked chest.

Poooh cried the modest man, never a one to expect awards. Do you mind as it were?

Shut up, weasel sticks and go for gold. This is the real game, you little twit.

He won’t be coming back will he? I mean, as it were, appearing right here at some, as it were, moment?

Yes! cried Bunny, bouncing up and down on the man again and now feeling the excitement of the idea. He’s coming back from training right now, he phoned just before you knocked. She sighed deep at her own lie, knowing Lynx to be deeply involved with pushups and curls in his gym and not due for a good while. I’m his motivational analyst you know, she went on. I do hope he doesn’t feel under-motivated when he finds us all involved with our prodings and danglings.

They had now reached the bathroom by a motive force that relied, Bunny assumed, on some type of vibratory traction. She saw herself in the mirror and sighed at the sheer impossibility of her own smooth long-limbed elegance

Kline! shrieked the butler making contact with a cold-cold tile on the side of the bath.

Another gold medal fell from its stand on the half-demolished table behind Bunny.

Oh that’s him now Bunny hissed, her face contorted with mirth at the put on. She pointed at the toilet pedestal. Sit on it, she dictated.

"Sit on, as it were, the loo? Asked the butler, a man now lost to even his own self-pity. He was learning fast on a curve that had effectively ejaculated him into a new class of men who had truly been there and truly done it as few men do.

Bunny, not normally one to put men on pedestals, left the slim man to take care of himself some minutes later, moderately satisfied. She kicked the butler’s clothes under the bed before she started putting her own clothes back onto their impossibly lovely places.

Tell him yes, she shouted, as she paused at the apartment’s front door. Tell Mister Thyrax. Say I will,

Then she flowed out of the door, slammed it and headed for her office at S & D Motivational Analysts, driving the Mercedes that Lynx had given her, (he had chosen the SD36R sporting model with reverse flange nubs). The fact that Thyrax had sent the request by personal messenger, not deigning to even ring, impressed her, but somehow she knew she would need to phone him before making up her mind. Why not phone from Lynx’s? Why not phone from the car? Oh no, Bonne-Elise Smith would phone from her office where she could tape the whole thing.

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Two evenings after this treacherous love scene, a messenger had deposited another envelope, this time into Lynx’s hand. The envelope, he would later realize, contained his destiny.

Lynx accepted it at the door of his own apartment, a place as male as a thermonuclear reaction. Rich too, with wooden walls and a cat curled up on a rug as the only compromise. Bunny, a smooth sweep of poured curves, watched through the open door into his living room, still lying back on his pile of cushions. From there she saw the messenger leave. A lanky youth, younger but more comely that his senior butler friend. He seemed to her a prime example of the essential qualities of good design—simplicity in particular—and she switched her perfect woman’s hunting gear up a further notch. She meowed and slunk her way deeper into the comfort beside her lover as he rejoined her with the envelope. She knew that she could not afford to make any duff moves, now that the sale had been set up but not clinched and that the moment called for plays such as ‘The Horse Flips Its Nose’.

When Lynx had read the message, he passed it to her. She sniffed at it, deriving its meaning more from the feel than its language content. The message, applied in gold leaf to the softest of vellums, smelt of posh food. Bunny pretended to like the sickening pong and toyed with the thing as if to calculate its sociological value while Lynx made a slight, if involuntary, laughing sound. Bunny looked him in the eyes, making an effort not to ovulate too dangerously.

LYNX AND BUNNY,

THIS WEDNESDAY NIGHT. DO COME TO DINNER AND TO A LITTLE SAFARI NIGHT I’VE PLANNED.

UNCLE THYRAX.

What’s a safari night? asked Bunny. She made her words out of doves and starlings and sent them off to fly away to softly alight on Lynx’s ears and sit arranging their plumage.

I have no idea, her lover, or maybe by now her ex-lover, replied. I haven’t seen the old croak since three years ago. And then only at the club.

You don’t want to go, do you? Bunny cooed, pecking at the lips of this extraordinarily well-built man. She had changed her tone again, dropping away to the deep places where musk took the place of gravity. Why don’t you want to go? She made her delicate face as vulnerable as a moth’s eyebrow.

I live next to the castle of a vampire queen and fear to go out at night, Lynx answered her, accompanying his uncharacteristically poetic words with mock dramatics.

A man of gentle and benign stupidity, Lynx let Bunny spend the rest of the late afternoon winning his favour. She chose a no-nonsemse hit-him-for-six strategy, employing techniques that would have drawn shocked envy from the bar girls in a downtown Bangkok dive as they laid out their wonderlands of genitalia and thigh meat. Her thighs, her buttocks, as they slipped and cascaded around Lynx’s own magnificent bastions of flesh, spoke more of nirvana. At times too, they acted out the various theories of the birth of God himself, that difficult concept so readily seized on by the blabbermouths and know-alls of religious society.

OK, we’ll go, Lynx told her some time later, as he finally struggled and slid from her thighs, the upper-class gentlemen at his leisure and much, much too happy for his own good.

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The night of the party, Lynx drove. He chose his yellow Porsche for the journey to where Cavallisto Thyrax had erected the vast jumbles of masonry that had brought him so much notoriety and disbelief.

It started with a house, Lynx explained, quite nice so they say. Then he went more mad and began to extend it out and out and out.

So? asked the girl from nowhere, obviously seeing nothing wrong with the concept of a man just going on and on and on extending his wealth.

He was a builder once but suddenly got rich, meanly rich. Now he’s a developer too. He specialises in Olympic stadiums.

Bunny pouted out of her window at a passing motorist, a young man with no chin. She imagined he might add comedy to the evening by showing off and driving his car through a bus.

Lynx himself had no need to show off with his driving and made his way, so well-mannered in his approach to traffic relationships that it seemed to please, indeed honour, the other vehicles to let him go by.

He sounds like a kook, said Bunny.

I guess he’s doing the childhood he missed first time around, Lynx told her, blowing his entire store of psychological wisdom in one hit, and getting it dead wrong. He thought of the open fields of his own boyhood, the sea, the video parties, the girls and spin the bottle, holidays abroad, the Prime Minister coming to dinner at Ma’s house.

Donny Wellborne says he’s started to collect athletes now to go in his stadiums, Lynx added, making his small laughing sound as he slammed the Porsche into the shock waves of the freeway traffic. At the same time, he tore absent-mindedly at the six-pack of choc bars in his pocket and fielded one into his mouth, whole as he liked them.

You don’t seem to like parties any more, Bunny went on, sounding genuinely perplexed at this almost surreal concept.

I feel like an Eskimo in a Morroccan market at parties these days, Lynx replied, after a slow pause. It’s all a big put-on, somehow. His own reply actually shook Lynx, while it appeared to leave Bunny looking blank. Up till then, he had enjoyed a perfection of social ease and self-confidence at parties and always loved them. Had a year or two, locked into the intimate nakedness of his obsession for Bunny, unscrambled some type of a recipe that God had so lovingly developed?

What are you looking for then? Bunny asked, presumably not expecting a deeply philosophical answer from one such as Lynx.

Lynx wondered if she was doing her professional bit or just being a friend. He had first met her when the agency sent her to him as his sports motivation supervisor. During their first exploratory meeting in his office at home, he had succumbed, as they sat opposite each other, to the sight of the part of the lower side of her thigh where it turned in its downward slide and started to climb gracefully up again, back into her skirt. The slender strength of her torso had then come into focus and inevitably the sensational mass of her hips, as strong as a race horse’s flanks. She for her part had spent the time staring at the uncompromisingly expensive room and they had started plundering each other’s assets without delay, only taking time to strip naked before doing so, with Bunny bent back over the mahogany desk, generating a frenzy of the sort of lust that God appreciates as much as the birth of his galaxies.

No indeed, Lynx had to admit to himself that he had no idea what he was looking for, and, instead of answering, made a noise like a monkey being asked to donate blood.

Not much later, the Porsche, released at last from the slingshot of the freeway, cruised into the grounds of the Cavallisto Thyrax residence. Lynx felt uneasy for no apparent reason, felt the fabric of his soul flapping in the slipstream of his own thoughts and felt small.

Bunny’s enthusiasm for the outing had actually shocked him. During the years that he had known Bunny, Lynx could hardly have helped noticing her obsession with wealth and the wealthy and how it tugged her along over the pavement of her own restricted background. As wealthy as he might be himself, he knew Thyrax to be far wealthier, his fortune piling up in drifts around him as he resolutely set out to develop the world, building every type of olympic stadium, ordinary stadium, cricket stadium, football gala stadium and any other type of oval or oblong monster that did the trick. Was Bunny suddenly into stadiums and the loot they generated?

Was Thyrax, for that matter, in some bizarre form of madness, actually building nests to attract a lover? The idea came from nowhere but with a sombre dread that Lynx immediately pretended he had forgotten. The idea formed that while he had spent their time together as an innocent soul lying in the sun of a cloudless day, Bunny had been moving in on her own goal. And was that goal his money? The idea dug a hole in Lynx’s mind. It was the first time he had thought of it and why then? Well the mysterious Uncle Thyrax might have alerted him, this so-called relative whose past was generally unknown and whose present so strange.

But then, as they drove down the long wooded front drive, Lynx’s thoughts turned from these thoughts which might have saved him from what was about to come. Ahead a vast dome rose out of the night, becoming ever bigger as they approached. The extraordinary sight, the sheer size of the thing in an ordinary residential setting cut Lynx off from thoughts of treachery for the time being and, as fate would have it, dissuaded him from making the U turn and dash for home that his instincts so demanded of him.

Now it was too late.

CHAPTER TWO

S omething certainly stank. The feeling clawed round Lynx’s mind, probing its claws through the coils of his brain.

The table that he and the sports commentators sat at looked like a solid item, carved from the king of some fast-disappearing rainforest. It stood fort-like in a clearing at the centre of the wrecked entrance hall of the original house, a large, cave-like hollow that spoke of either disaster or madness. He suspected the second already. Furniture, much of it smashed, lay in mounds on the rest of the wooden block floor to either side of the table, along with piles of out-of-date gym equipment and discarded sports items, bats and balls, hurdles, ruined stands and entertainment lobbies and even parts of old four wheel drive vehicles too.

During the cocktails ceremony, he had identified the sports commentators themselves as some type of mammoth, possibly from that same rain forest, apparently not extinct yet, but working on the concept. They wore blazers adapted, perhaps, from the tarpaulins you drape over cars before hail storms. Now, straining around their massive torsos, the material served to divert the squish and flop of food that failed to stay in their mouths as they smashed at it, ripping and mulching as mammoths do when faced with plenty.

Lynx’s own body, a piece of superbly crafted flesh, seemed almost insubstantial in among these massive hunks. This, despite Lynx’s ability to run middle distances faster than any other man on earth, as verified many times over by the gold olympic medals that, with accustomed modesty, he flung onto a table in his fiancées bedroom. But then, what has a billionaire to prove, other than he takes the whole thing for granted anyway?

So what is your aim then? Lynx asked his host, unashamedly shouting the message up the full length of the table. He wondered if the man actually knew. At the same time he hoped this reclusive balloon might also let drop why he had invited him and his lover to this bizarre dinner.

A new Eden, nothing less, Thyrax honked back, apparently refuting the idea of pure whimsy completely.

Lynx, a man as handsome as the leather on a club chair, had known Uncle Thyrax all his childhood, but he felt he had never met the man he now faced, this builder of places where athletes could, with immense effort, arrive back at the place they had started from before anybody else. He realised that Cavallisto Thyrax had become a sort of architectural James Bond, knowing only too well how his massive drifts of money continued to multiply as the man set about redeveloping the world according to his own personal taste. But what a fat James Bond! They had apparently made him out of some type of fluid poured directly into the man’s dangerously stretched skin.

Thyrax, a balloon wobbling on his feet with their leather boots and knee-length woolly socks, might have been persuaded to go on and explain things to Lynx’s satisfaction before the whole evening got completely out of control, but at that moment one of the huge men sitting to either side of Lynx leant over, his mouth open to display teeth grinding the integrity out of some sort of meaty substance.

Grmph, the commentator slurped. The words pushed through the meaty pulps that stood in the way and arrived filtered and devoid of their finer parts.

I see, Lynx replied, as ever an upper-class man of impeccable manners, even when surrounded by gross life forms. He smiled and looked at the monstrosity on his left.

Prashoom! that mammoth exhorted, nodding his huge red face.

Lynx retreated from the two extinct men, gazed down the table and fixed his eyes on his fiancee, the only familiar entity left in the evening. Despite the eternal loveliness of his woman, the idea that she had something to do with the way things had turned out, spun once again into his mind. Was she playing some type of horrific joke?

You are looking as if divinely conceived, Thyrax said, now addressing his face to Bunny. The pressurised liquid voice sounded distant to Lynx, yet audible as if on a psychic telephone.

Thank you, came the soft reply, far too submissive for Bunny. Lynx knew Bunny well. She always had the world on her own terms and cooked to order. No surrender.

Something really REALY stank.

I’m so delighted you could come to my little festivity, came the nose concerto of the fat James Bond.

Lynx, felt tetchy and bored with his helping of Lobster Quardrille a la Cointreau. A dark hand gripped his inner man and squeezed. Why had Thyrax seated him so far away? And separated him from his host and his woman by some thirty woolly gaboons?

Lynx had become aware of the sports commentators as soon as Thyrax had greeted them at his front door and shown them how to go through it with such a surplus of selling energy.

A curious noise, Lynx had observed, as the door opened and the howling hit both him and Bunny.

You will be referring to my new acquisition. A herd of sports commentators, the mad developer had enthused, shouting above the extraordinary din. The noise had resembled a sort of hysterical growling, very much like a whole shipload of sailors swimming in sulphuric acid and yelling out for help.

These are all your other guests? Lynx had commented. He had expected to see the usual glittering lines of old marshmallow-armed women, girls in a thousand-a-metre gowns and nail-hard men smothered in moisturiser. He felt rude, in a way, but simply couldn’t make things out, this strange Thyrax that everybody talked about but never saw. Did he surround himself only with sycophantic dongs?

Let’s have a sippa and eat right away, the man had replied, using his immense vocal reserves as a hydraulic system to hose Lynx and Bunny down with the words. After that we begin our safari experience.

Lynx simply hadn’t had the guts to ask for a translation, but noticed for the first time that his host wore, not a dinner suit, but a green safari jacket complete with heavy boots, khaki socks and a pith helmet.

The man’s full of pith, he had whispered to Bunny, but she had ignored him.

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Lynx drifted back to the present to find himself still sitting at the table.

So, Thyrax was saying, "Thyrax Developments will build a