Jones Fatcat

By Max Brooks

In rural Wales, a sheep-farmer named Jones Fatcat and his dependable sheepdog, Jones, live a content life. Jones Fatcat had been engaged and engrossed in the world of sheep-farming his entire life, spending his days looking after his flock of sheep, shearing them and selling their fleeces to a clothing manufacturer. 

Jones has strong bonds with his farm, his Land Rover, his flock of sheep and his sheepdog. He had never considered what life would be like without them, until one seemingly ordinary day, when there was a catastrophic calamity, capable of  jeopardising his way of life and leaving him with no choice but to venture out into the unknown and take drastic action to salvage what he could of his former life.

The pathway of this story follows Jones on his mishaps and adventures from the Welsh valleys to the bustling city. Jones, who is craving vengeance on the people responsible for this traumatic and perplexing plight, decides after much deliberation to transform himself from an unworldly sheep-farmer into a venturesome super villain, intent on saving people from suffering the same fate as he did and unmasking the so-called good guys, as a vehicle to reveal to the world their own unethical undoings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805146346

Book preview

9781805146346.jpg

Copyright © 2023 Max Brooks

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador

Unit E2 Airfield Business Park,

Harrison Road, Market Harborough,

Leicestershire. LE16 7UL

Tel: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 9781805146346

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

I could have written on this page a comprehensive biography of myself, but I thought you would find another all-inclusive biography boring, therefore I thought I would just write that this books creation is influenced by everything I’ve ever seen, heard, touched, acknowledged, conceptualised, done, said, written and read.

Contents

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 One

Placed one hundred and four miles away from Cardiff, lay Lianlech stream, which led to a field of thorns, past an oak tree, with an unstable nest upon one of its branches. Further downstream lay a twig stranded on a rock, with the stream flowing either side of it to a small, unwinding waterfall, heading down into a valley. The stream led into a pond named Lianlech pond, situated under a bridge named Mallas Bridge, built in consideration of the slate-mining community several hundred years ago, using the only materials that villagers could procure: rocks from the streams and slate from the mines. In a transverse lay on the bridge was a road, on which was being driven an 18-plate, Royal Mail, Peugeot Partner van. The driver of the vehicle was a fifty-nine-year-old, six-foot postman in a Royal Mail uniform, whose name was Ian Williams. He was slim, of average build, with brown eyes and short, grey hair. He had the radio playing whilst driving and could hear the people saying on the radio that the demand for sheep wool was down, meaning wool prices had fallen.

‘This is bad news for Jones Fatcat,’ Ian Williams thought as he came to a fork in the road.

Ian turned left at the fork in the road and was now entering a village named ‘Hodmyfre’, as indicated on a sign on the right-hand side of the road. On the periphery of the village was a small, fifteen-metre wide, five-metre-deep cottage named the Standing Cottage, standing on the right-hand side of the road with a small front garden. The cottage had bare stone walls, a triangular slate roof, and wooden-framed windows. The wooden front and rear doors consisted of diagonal blanks used as panels encompassed by wooden rails, mullions and wooden frames. The Standing Cottage had a back garden of a quarter of an acre. The area closest to the cottage was a short-cut lawn; behind it, was a tier of flower beds and, behind those, was a tier of shrubs at the far end of the garden. Running in between each of them, and on the garden’s margins, were gravel paths. The front garden was the same width as the cottage, but only three-metres deep, with granite steps leading to the front door and more flower beds either side of it.

The other cottages on Ian’s route were all more examples of eighteenth-century construction of cottages in Wales. After delivering letters to several cottages, the postman drove past a butcher’s shop, which had a sign that read ‘BomB’s Butchers’. The frontage of the butchers was made of stone covered in render. It had a wooden door with vertical panels, three leaded windows and a clear, modern window for displaying their meat.

The postman drove on to the village pub, a stone building with stone walls, a triangular slate roof, a thick wooden door, and leaded windows. A small car park was situated to the right of the pub, and there was a sign on the frontage which read, ‘The Shovel and Pike Inn’.

Ian stopped to put a letter though the front door and then continued delivering to more cottages. He was now heading towards the bakery. This was a cottage with cream walls, a yellow door with mullions radiating out from the lock rail, a slate roof, wooden-framed windows on the second floor, and a window purposely for window-shopping, displaying various types of bread. A sticker on the window gave the name of the bakery, ‘The Breadcoach’.

Situated two properties away from the Breadcoach was a church, which had brick walls, a slate roof, a brick bell tower, arched stained glass windows, double oak doors and a clock under the belfry.

Passing the church, Ian came to the other periphery of Hodmyfre, where there was a drive to his left. Ian turned onto the drive and then made his way to the top of it, where there was a sign that read, ‘Jones Fatcat’s farm’. The lane did not go straight up to a farmhouse; instead, it ended at a fence that ran alongside a different part of Lianlech stream adjacent a muddy paddock. However, to have reached this point, Ian would have already gone past the farmhouse. Specifically ,the farmhouse was placed eight-metres back from the fence, with its front-left corner edgeways.

Ian parked his post van outside the farmhouse, just beyond the sign. The farmhouse was built of white stone walls, it had a slate roof, a slate chimney, a pine door with square ornamental patterning, six leaded windows on its frontage, and a cock-shaped wind dial on the roof. On the other side of a gateway was a concrete-surfaced courtyard between the farmhouse and Lianlech stream. In the other vicinity was a wooden garage with double doors painted grassy green, to blend in with a grassy hill, situated behind. Also, in Ian’s view was a fenced-off front lawn, a derelict fireplace left outside, and a figure of a man with a dog and flock of about twenty-six sheep on top of the hill.

Ian got out of his van with a parcel in his right hand and called out, ‘Jones, parcel! It needs your signature.’

Jones’s sheepdog had been well educated to perform remarkable achievements for a dog, which meant that, instead of Jones going down the hill to collect the parcel, his dog ran down the hill to receive it. Jones’s dog was a six-year-old male collie named Jones, who had now zealously run up to Ian. Ian figured that Jones Fatcat was not coming down the hill to sign for the package, so he put his electronic signature device on the ground for Jones to sign for the package.

He watched as Jones placed his front-right paw on the device. ‘Close enough,’ he said, handing the parcel over to Jones.

Jones took hold of the parcel with his mouth and then ran back up the hill with it. Once back in his van, Ian thanked fate for showing him this tactful skill of Jones’s and was looking forward to more fatefulness. Something that is fateful has unpleasant consequences. Ian’s encounter of Jones, in the foregoing situation, was derived from fate, but the consequences for Ian and Jones would have been a noun for fate. However, in keeping with Jones Fatcat, it was going to be very different. As for Jones, the flock of sheep, the farmhouse and its land, the future of their association with there owner was going to be a future of fatefulness (the noun of fateful).

The following morning was a wet one, with rain running down the post van’s windscreen as Ian did his daily drive up to Jones Fatcat’s farmhouse. He had received a worrying notice from Jones’s bank concerning the mortgage on his house, which, with compassion, Ian was going to hand over to Jones Fatcat.

After driving to the top of the drive, he stopped outside Jones’s farmhouse and opened the van door. Remembering the previous day’s events, he looked up to the top of the hill and, noticing Jones’s absence from the hill, approached the front door. Ian knocked on the door and, in close succession, the door was opened by Jones Fatcat.

Jones Fatcat was forty-one years old. He was five feet six and of a small build, with short brown hair, a hairy chin and brown eyes. He wore a mazarine-blue hoodie with an image of a German Q-ship in the sea, with a British submarine hiding directly below it. He also wore flesh-coloured trousers and bistre walking boots, with biscuit eyestays and tongues.

‘Hello, lan,’ Jones said.

‘Hello, Jones,’ replied Ian. ‘You remember when you told me about the time you sank in the marsh on BerisBeau mountain, and Jones pulled you out? Well, I sank in the same marsh yesterday afternoon, but neither of my dogs pulled me out. I had to pull myself out, by grabbing hold of a bush.’

‘That makes you the fifth person that I know to have fallen in the marsh,’ Jones replied.

‘Oh, and there’s a notice for you – from the bank, I think,’ Ian said, giving the letter to Jones, which Jones then gazed upon.

The entire story of Jones letting his mortgage payments slip could be seen through his eyes. It was as if he were a captain of a vessel that had been floating around in one of the horse latitudes, but then he was forced to carry out a course through the rough sea and gales of the trade winds, unprepared.

‘Don’t worry about it, Jones. It will go away,’ Ian said, wishing arbitrarily for Jones not to fret about the letter, irrespective of the case of a subsequent increase of the worry.

In response, Jones tossed the letter to the floor and said calmly, ‘Well,