Orlando Baptiste Luxuskaas - the gentleman charlatan, philanthropist and amateur chemist, part two

“Rack 'em up!”

Orlando Baptiste van Luxuskaas - intrepid adventurer, Victorian entrepreneur, bona fide gentleman – had an unusually confident tonal swagger to his utterances on this particular evening in the Abacus Gentleman's Club and Luncheon Emporium. The game was skittles and the stakes were suitably high. It simply could not be otherwise.

Earlier that day, whilst hiding in a bush fingering a dead hedgehog, Orlando had made himself a promise, a promise so immense that the promise itself had set in motion an infinity of events that, all permitting, would culminate this evening, in the company of his most esteemed friends and peers. “Ah the glory! The philanthropic joy!” he yelped before discretely smelling his fingers and lurking off across the park, hunched over like a partially-sighted hawker bereft of wares.

In the confines of his home, quite some time later, Orlando washed his hands and rubbed his moustache with the lard from choice quails (gently cooked in a vat of cinnamon and gravel for two-thirds of a fortnight by Messrs Frank, Frank and Dave, purveyors of the finest grooming products for the discerning gentleman, of which Orlando was most certainly one).

Once satisfied that his facial hair had gained the shape and presence befitting a man of his social benevolence, Orlando proceeded to sit jauntily at the edge of a solid, dark oak desk that more than occasionally doubled up as a table. This was his favourite thinking pose, having previously provided him with the basis for such feats of cerebral omnipotence as the realisation that a hat may (and on occasion even does) take on the characteristics of a sulking deer; that dust settles (under ideal conditions); the notion that geese can never be, under any circumstances but one, a suitable anagram for 318.33; and the by now irrefutable conclusion that everything leads back to something, provided that something is distinct, by some margin, to something else.

As he sat there, rather jauntily as previously established, he let out a series of randomly spaced shrills, intended to entice his gloves onto his hands. Having failed in this endeavour, despite several attempts and a splendid (and, it must be said, entirely improvised) impersonation of an intoxicated maid being reprimanded for inappropriate gaiety, Orlando composed himself. This was no ordinary evening, after all. He was to amaze his contemporaries to such a degree that any number of them could be excused for temporarily losing control of their sanity and glands.

He stared at himself in a mirror, gently humming what would, eventually, become the middle eight to the B-side of Enola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a century and several decades later in a historical epoch that would be known, for the duration of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, as the Eighties. Orlando was not best pleased with his appearance but could conclude that pink lipstick coarsely applied his eyelids did little to change this view.

Back in the Abacus, things where unfolding.

Absurd curve

A group of males (collectively: scientists) have stumbled upon what is believed to be a rare and somewhat malevolent absurd curve. The curve, said by a key witness to be “very weird, possibly odd and unquestionably absurd”, have had the team of scientists from Bracknell University (near Bracknell, or so we're told -) working frantically in their respective labs and bedsits, desperately trying to figure something out.

Professor Alban Flabvius, the head of the postgraduate department for obscene triangles and interactive clay, stumbled upon the first coordinates of the imaginary curve whilst doing routine lab stuff with his partially invisible, partially satanic research assistant Dave Id.

“I woke up like every other morning, as I do, being gently roused by the pre-recorded sound of a Vietnamese village being shelled by incessant grenade fire, narrated by Nigel Havers and produced for Children in Need. After ingesting a considerable, and may I add, deliciously healthy breakfast, consisting of nothing but the reddest meat, I was ready to be clothed. Mr Id got me dressed as usual, this being rather a predictable happening, fairly redundant of shock value! Nothing, however, not even the most crazy mad thing you can imagine, no, not even that, Dave [this last comment was directed to Mr Id, who was sitting a little bit nervously, trying to smoothen a small piece of broken concrete with some tissue] – nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to discover. No sir.... Dave! Stop crying! ..for God's sake man.. “.

After having uttered these words, Flabvius left the room, never to return. Mr Id fell asleep, and would later awake in a panic, suddenly unable to locate his partially invisible body.

Doctor Flabvius' colleague, Professor Jasper Nakataan, the head of Involuntary Geofinance and Hygiene, takes off were Flabvius left off. “What Alban, err Professor Flabvius, saw that morning on his fridge was nothing short of a miracle. He discovered an absurd curve! For us scientific guys, that is almost the Holy Grail. But it is absurd, of course. Highly absurd. And possibly lewd, - Professor Slaim of Snrk University, Spradeballe is currently looking in to the subject as a matter of the utmost urgency. All we can do now is wait”.

Despite these encouraging words, Nakataan believes there is a darker side to this particular curve, something inexplicable that most people can't explain. “I found a curve once”, Nakataan explains, “me and Zlad (Professor Zladivarius Egg, head of Mutual Mycology, Bracknell U.) found it, whilst walking in a ditch at the side of a busy road at night. Zlad fell over something and landed head first in the ditch. When he stood up his face was covered in yuck, but something made me insist he didn't wipe his head”.

Nakataan discovered an absurd curve on Egg's forehand, created by the curvature of Egg's forehead and a small piece of black rubbish that lay stuck to Egg's head. “I took a picture of course, several in fact. I insisted that Zlad shouldn't touch his forehead, and should lean his head back at all times so as to ensure that the rubbish wouldn't come loose, of course. I also forbade him to go to sleep, as again not to dislodge the curve. He didn't seem to understand. I explained the value of the discovery and that we had protect it at all costs until we could get it to a lab. Anyway, Egg didn't seem to agree, so I had to kind of cajole him into taking my orders for the good of science, by brandishing a small revolver in a vaguely threatening manner. I allowed him to sleep, as long as he sat right up in front of me so I could wake him were he about to fall or perhaps in some other way cause the curve to come loose”.

Up until this moment, in what is slowly (!) becoming a long, patently absurd tale, Nakataan had not had proper time to look at the curve. But as Egg sat there, perched uncomfortably against a pole in front of Nakataan, he started to examine the curve. Apart from the obvious absurdity, there was more. “I see in Flabvius' curve what I saw in mine, - pure evil and hell. And utter absurdity, naturally”. Nakataan's curve itself saw an untimely demise. Egg had refused to take commands from Nakataan after which Nakataan, being 5 feet taller than Egg, tied him down to a chair and shot his kneecaps off. Unfortunately, the impact of the bullets was such as to dislodge the piece of rubbish and destroy the curve. “When I realised what had happened, I was angry, I felt betrayed. I shoot Zlad a few more times and subsequently discharged a round once in the floor. I'm not entirely sure why I fired a bullet in the floor – perhaps I was in a mild state of hysteria” Nakataan says before he rolls two dice, shuts his eyes and puts a hand to his forehead as if devastated by the result, takes a deep breath, stands up, starts speaking Spanish whilst getting undressed, then runs down stairs naked unto the streets, laughing and crying (in Spanish, somehow) at the same time.

The curve, believed to be the most absurd of its kind ever to be discovered near Bracknell, is now on display throughout public libraries and museums in Berkshire in the following months: April, June, September, May (in no particular order). Contact months just mentioned to find out where and when the curve will be on show near you (provided you live in or around Berkshire, and pay tax).