The Handlebar Club Forum

Potatoes had been a favourite of Stone's for many a year and with all the fear the night had brought so far he had begun to regress into comfort thinking. The hours grooming chat was coming to a close, the dreams of Tahiti and potatoes were all but done, but why was he even in this place? Ah yes. There was business to be done.
"Sir, I must thank you for your hospitality however there was a purpose to my visit and as pleasant as it has been may we now attend to it please?"

"Please! James! For goodness sake, you knew the vicar was coming to lunch today! Clean yourself up and get downstairs!" shouted his mother in her loudest, angriest whisper, waking James from the black abyss of drunken sleep.

James murmured a response and glanced at his laptop, unbelieving at his prolific drunken prose. He shut the lid, freshened up and went down to lunch.

Lunch time was drawing near and Baldrick had expected Stone back hours ago. Where could he be? Perhaps staying behind to re-watch Mike Pickles Stocks "Dreamin" video over and over again wasn't such a good idea.
"No that can't be true" said Baldrick out loud even though there was nobody else there "The monkeys are fantastic, the dog is great, the handlebar is sublime, but the song is just brilliant!"
His excitement had grown to the point where he was almost shouting, but then he remembered why they had flown to India in the first place. His thoughts first turned to Dalloway waiting at home for them to complete the mission and then... the mission. Ah yes. Now where could Stone have got to?

“To the moon Alice!” Jackie Gleason's voice rang out from Rajeev's portable DVD player.

Absurdly enough, Stone's mission to purchase poison from Rajeev turned into an all-night Honeymooner's marathon when Rajeev produced a big bag of highly potent marijuana.

As dawn began to break over the slum, Stone turned his bloodshot eyes away from the screen and noticed that Rajeev had fallen into a deep slumber in his high-backed chair. Without thinking twice, Stone stuffed the big bag of weed into his rucksack and headed back to the hotel, nodding nonchalantly to Rajeev's henchmen as he walked away.

Away with the fairys he was, once he had smoked some of the weed he took from Rajeev. He didn't know how to roll so he used his pipe. He lay back on a deckchair in his garden and inhaled the smoke from his pipe and admired the sound of the birds that were In a small fern tree next to his shed.

"Shed my inhibitions," he said. "I must shed my inhibitions."

Lo, a woman wearing a very short skirt approached.

Approached by the sexy woman in the hotel garden, stoned out of his mind, listening to birds and imagining he owned the place, Stone was totally unprepared for what happened next.

The alluring lady walked right up to him and leaned forward, revealing bountiful, mesmerising cleavage and then stabbed him through the heart with the razor sharp stiletto clutched in her gloved hand. Stone died instantly, in a state of sexual and narcotic bliss.

Baldrick found him by chance only moments after the woman had left. There was a note on Stone's body: "Greetings from Sir David," it read. Baldrick pulled the murder weapon out of his dead friend just as the police arrived. Baldrick was covered in blood. It was an open in shut case and neither Baldrick nor Stone would ever return to England again.

"Again, again, again!" yelled the director. "Why must I work with such amateurs? Stone, when pretending to be stoned at least pretend your an actor pretending to be stoned and we may be on to something and you, booby lady, yes you... When stabbing I want you to stab, stab, STAB! Now everyone, back to starting places please. From the top and let's try and make this the last one!"

"Stone gets stabbed action scene, take 276, ACTION!"

"Action is the key," explained James to the vicar over lunch. "This is the future; things need to happen all the time. There is no time for long character descriptions or some kind of archaically slow build-up to a climax - every moment must be a climax."

James looked at the blank faces of his mother and the vicar and wondered if they could sense his disdain. He longed to retreat to the intellectual solace of the world of his own creation, where fiction and reality meshed into a blur of excitement.

Excitement grew as Baldrick sat in his cell wondering what was to come of him. It seemed the police where happy they had their man, but who was the real culprit? How on earth did this woman know where to find Stone?

Sir David meanwhile sat in his Brighton mansion laughing in a very satisfied manner. He thumbed his long and flowing beard with one hand as he typed the next line in a second letter to the beautiful woman from India. He wrote " Dear Miss Amour"

Amour was not her real name, of course; but what better code name for the most lethal and beautiful assassin on the Subcontinent. Sir David wrote his next instructions in the poetic, uncrackable code of his own devising. Baldrick could not be allowed remain alive. No, Sir David could take no chances. If Baldrick were to somehow return from that disease-ridden slum jail, the consequences could be disasterous. No, Baldrick must die; he knew too much.

"Much time and effort went into writing this script! The least you could do is bother to learn the lines!" The director always seemed to be shouting these days, thought Poly as she struggled to remember the lines after her traumatic ordeal. mshevhad been advised by the doctors not to return to the set yet as she still ran a high risk of infection from the burns. The trouble was when she wasn't working her mind turned to that handsome moustache which stared across the bar at her the other day. Just what had happened to Dalloway?

Dalloway, having successfully disposed of his wife in a well-orchestrated accident house fire (thanks to Sir David) was now a wealthy man. He stared at himself in the mirror of the penthouse suite he had been renting since his house had burned down. He couldn't shake the image of the immolation of poor Poly and was uncertain as to whether or not he was willing to live his life with someone who had been so badly scarred. He took a great deal of care ensuring that he always looked his best. Not only was he a sharply dressed chap, but his physical beauty was unsurpassed. He swept his fingers over his moustache one more time and resolved never to see Poly again; it would be too hard.

Just then, the phone rang. Sir David was calling up from down in the lobby. He wanted his due, of course. Dalloway considered his options. He had none. He would be in Sir David's clutches for the rest of his life.

Life had not been easy for Dalloway. Born near Galway in western Ireland to a family of Gypsy tinkers, he had grown up significantly poorer than that of the general population. As with many Traveller, he also grew up outside the educational system. Instead of going to school he became involved with breeding dogs, then later, horses. Dalloway could talk the leg off a cast iron pot and due to the difficulties in evaluating the merits of a horse offered for sale, it offered great opportunities for dishonesty. Dalloway always capitalised on these opportunities. It was one such opportunity that introduced him to Sir David.

"David!" A shrill, frightened voice interrupted Sir David's conversation with Dalloway. Two of Sir David's cronies dragged a poor dishevelled man into Dalloway's suite and threw him on the floor at their master's feet. "David," implored the man, "please...I'll have the money for you by next Tuesday... please have mercy!"

"Call me sir, damn it!" growled Sir David through his shining white mane. The man opened his mouth to talk, but Sir David closed it with a well placed foot to the face. The man crumpled into a heap and Sir David stomped on the side of the uncomprehending beggar's skull, producing a loud crack. The man twitched and was still. Sir David turned to his henchmen, "Take him away," and turning to Dalloway, "Clean up this mess, I don't want anyone asking any questions."

Sir David turned abruptly and strolled casually out of the room, twirling his moustache and smiling to himself, decidedly pleased with his demonstration. Dalloway would not dare to cross him now.