Masterminders Read online

  Masterminders

  By

  Tara Basi

  Copyright © Tara Basi 2014

  All rights reserved

  The right of Tara Basi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Contents

  Chapter One – Global Warming

  Chapter Two – Women’s Troubles

  Chapter Three – Politics

  Chapter Four – Economics

  Chapter Five – Philosophy

  Chapter Six – Sex and Religion

  Chapter Seven – Culture

  Chapter Eight – The Olympics

  Chapter Nine – Human Rights

  Chapter Ten – Author Author

  Chapter Eleven – Revolution

  Chapter Twelve – Dying – Part 1 – It’s Expensive

  Chapter Thirteen – Dying – Part 2 – Charity X

  Chapter One – Global Warming

  It was the year of bizarre adventures with Bobby that set me on the Masterminder path. If not for the Great Cuts we might never have met. It was rumoured the Great Cuts were brought on by the extravagance of the last mayor and his obsession with commissioning giant bronzes of fish. The mayor’s vision of generating a bonanza of tourism for Small Island based on modern fish art foundered for a number of reasons: the lack of an airport, a limited ferry service that had a reputation for capsizing, our special kind of weather and a general disinterest by rich Americans in big metal piscine sculptures. Our ex-mayor disappeared with the fish sculptress shortly after the election results. The painful personal consequence was that my little school was shut down over Christmas, leaving just one primary on the island. My literally poor mum was quickly forced to rediscover her Catholic roots for the both of us. The only secular alternative was the expensive boarding school on Big Island. This was a place of legend said to be lavished with cable TV, World Wide Webbiness and wimple-less teachers. My absent dad was no help, and so, at the start of the New Year, I found myself sacrificed to the nuns.

  It was all a bit overwhelming at first. At my previous, now defunct, school the class size had hovered between five and six, only reaching six when the police forced the gypsy boy with the big knife hidden in his underpants to attend. The five of us had often wished the police would stop bringing him back. But as many as nine could be squeezed into one class at my new school and there was more than one class. In some of the classes the kids were huge. Bobby and I hit it off almost straight away – initially on the basis we could share the being-bullied burden – later, well, that’s the story of the year that changed everything.

  “There’s a disease in Africa that colours your farts red, green, blue, yellow even black,” Bobby declared through chattering teeth. Having spoken, he retreated quickly from the bitter cold, tucking his chin back into his chest, raising his shoulders to shelter his stinging ears and burying his hands even deeper under his armpits. The three of us giggled while keeping up a two-step syncopated polka, poor protection against the whip-ice wind that lashed across the playground.

  “Wow,” Doug dutifully exclaimed once the sniggering had subsided.

  “Liar,” I hissed through pursed lips, blowing a jet stream of white vapour into the razor-sharp morning air. My hands were so deep in my trouser pockets that I could feel my bony knees quietly knocking.

  “Terry, I’m shocked. Do you doubt the DVD?” Bobby snorted in disdain and all doubts immediately melted under the blistering white heat of his keen reasoning.

  Bobby was the intellectual heavyweight of our duo and a half. He had glasses, access to a box set of Discovery channel DVDs, a seemingly bottomless pit of rare insight and a professional dad. I just had the glasses, and Doug, the half, was only clever in class. Doug dreamed our unique worldview would somehow rub off on him. In the meantime he said “Wow” a lot, which was only to be expected.

  Bobby was about a hand taller than me but there was less of him so everything was stretched that little bit further; he looked like a very thin upside-down exclamation mark. His pointy head was topped by reddish tufts of sticky-up hair and he had a paper-cut sharp nose that constantly dripped in the colder months; so not for two weeks in August. His clever blue eyes peered out at the world from behind thick round lenses wrapped in hefty black plastic frames. Bobby had a great big toothy smile that made him look dumb, so he tended to favour a superior smirk, but his most prominent feature was his extremely large ears that stuck out at right angles to his head. In a more tropical climate they would have made excellent heat exchangers. On our tiny island they just went blue and collected icicles. All the bits that should have gone into making his body a little less skeletal ended up in his enormous feet, the fat bottom of the upside-down exclamation mark. I found the sound he made when shivering, like a pair of dice rattling in a tin bucket, alarming at first, but then I got used to it.

  By contrast I was a muscle-bound dwarf but still terribly thin compared to almost any other kid in the school. My hair was an unruly black mop that rebelled against any form of brush or comb so I tended to just wet it a bit and manhandle it into submission. My glasses were the prescription kind – thin, brown, wiry frames that never quite sat straight. Mum said I had my dad’s brown eyes and handsome Latin features but I couldn’t remember him well enough to know whether that was really true. All the girls I’d met so far seem quite convinced I was just a skinny four-eyed twat and were quite unable to detect any of the Latin mystique my mum saw.

  Doug was a round fat blob of eagerness with a head and body in perfect symmetry like a balloon animal a clown might make.

  The two and half of us stood in a cold, grey playground overseen by a particularly orthodox tribe of menacing nuns, always dressed in used-chewing-gum-grey habits, topped with grey-black and grey-white wimples. Two sides of the tarmac-grey playground were bounded by our L-shaped, one-storied, concrete-grey school. Forming the U was the soaring wall of the church with its huge stone-grey blocks. Our only escape route to the little smoky-grey town was cut-off by dried-blood-grey, child-impaling, spear-tipped railings. Above everything hung a low ceiling of unbroken grey cloud.

  Bobby momentarily exposed his hands to the elements to hitch up his trousers. Doug and I immediately knew that Bobby was about to say something momentous. Bobby only hitched when his brain clicked. I pictured Bobby having an announcement of such weight that his trousers would be up over his head. I pondered whether his trousers would ever settle around his ankles if he were particularly stupid, however unlikely that might be. That’s what our duo and a half did: think beyond the obvious, unrestrained by facts or dull reality. Our mission was to push back the boundaries of science and philosophy. Selflessly, we used the knowledge gained to solve world problems. We dared to think the unthinkable.

  “The nuns have the African disease and we shall use that knowledge to bring some much needed Global Warming to our island,” Bobby explained.

  “Wow.”

  Imagining those grey and white tents floating down the school hallways trailing noxious clouds of green and yellow overwhelmed me in a ferocious giggle attack, which did a much better job of warming me than the hopping.

  “It’s obvious, they’re always going on about their impossible missions to Africa. And,” Bobby paused to ease his trousers a little higher, “have you ever heard them fart?”

  “Wow.”

  “Even the Queen farts. They’re obviously hiding something,” Bobby concluded.

  Genius. Bobby was absolutely right. Only a week ago we had rigorously debated the bodily functions of Her Majesty and concluded that number ones, twos and wind were inescapable, even for royalty, though hers probably smelled rather nice. We had left open the question of bottom wiping and wh
ether a flunky might be involved. We would save that challenging debate for a special occasion.

  “An infected fart has nearly thirteen times the carbon density of one normal emission. One diseased nun in full flow is equivalent to the carbon output of a small coal-fired power station. Unfortunately, our nuns are selfishly exercising superhuman bottom restraint. I mean to trap the virus and release it into the wild. Animals are incapable of such restraint,” Bobby declared.

  “Wow and whopper wow,” Doug exclaimed as he started jumping up and down with excitement, almost tripping himself up on his horrible brown snot-stained scarf. It was wound many times around his neck yet the end still seemed to arrive a few seconds after the rest of him.

  “How, you ask?” Bobby prompted before I could ask. “We shall secretly obtain a bionic sample from one of the nuns, infect the school gerbil and then feed it chocolate and soda, a foodstuff guaranteed to turn the rodent into a pneumatic cannon of flatulence,” Bobby proudly extolled.

  “You’ve got some chocolate?” Doug almost whimpered.

  “At the moment it’s only theoretical chocolate, my little apprentice,” Bobby gently explained.

  “Theoretical – is that like Twix, ’cause I really like Twix?” Doug said.

  Ignoring Doug, Bobby went on: “Once we’re sure the disease has taken hold, evidenced by the tell-tale signs of coloured gases drifting out of the gerbil’s cage, we’ll release the creature into the wild. It will have relations with all and sundry. As everyone knows, the gerbil is renowned for its romantic tendencies. Soon, the whole island will be wrapped in a rainbow cloud of carbon thicker and warmer than any duvet.”

  “Won’t that be a bit smelly?” Doug asked after silently ruminating for some seconds.

  “Idiot child, would you really prefer being buried alive under layers of permafrost-snot to a tan, even at the some risk of some environmental side-effects?” Bobby answered, obviously a little frustrated by Doug’s inability to see the big picture.

  “Wow,” Doug replied with subdued enthusiasm.

  “Absolutely brilliant, Bobby. We’ll hardly notice the smell after the first year or so, right?” I added, wanting to be sure Bobby didn’t lump me in with Doug as a myopic dullard.

  “Besides, this is only a first step in tackling Greenhouse Congestion,” Bobby explained. “There is much more we’ll need to do, much more.”

  Life was sweet. Suddenly it seemed a little less cold. We couldn’t wait for the break to end so we could start sampling!

  The next morning was just as cold; the thin sunlight hardly dented the morning frost. Our fridge of a playground seemed even less welcoming without our half.

  “Excommunicated?” I gasped in shock.

  “A martyr to carbon, a true warrior who fought the establishment and paid the price, a hero we’ll always remember,” Bobby solemnly declared.

  “What did he do?” I was confused. The last time I’d seen Doug was just after Bobby had volunteered him to borrow some nun laundry as a sample for our experiment. As school turned out he had stayed behind, hidden in a broom cupboard. I remembered his last poignant words: “Will socks do?”

  “He must have fallen in and become trapped, poor sod,” Bobby enigmatically answered.

  “Trapped, where?”

  “It’s too horrible, it would be better not to know,” Bobby almost whispered.

  “Tell me.”

  “The nun’s laundry bin. He was stuck there all night till they found him. Can you imagine it, entombed by wimples and habits, the night closing in, the strange noises, the smells, the horror and no escape?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Indeed, he went to get a sample but the samples got him. Now he is a sample, barely human. Fortunately, our fight for Global Warming goes on; I managed to rub my hanky over his head before they led him away.”

  “Wow.”

  “Are you trying to be a Doug substitute? Because I think that’s a bit shallow: the poor boy’s only just gone,” Bobby admonished.

  “Sorry, I just kinda slipped into it. Maybe his spirit still lingers? So, today we do the gerbil?” I sheepishly replied.

  “Indeed, in honour of Doug we shall infect the gerbil. I hope you brought the chocolate and the soda?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Good. I shall sample the chocolate extensively to ensure that it is of the required quality.”

  Bobby subjected the chocolate to such a rigorous examination that we were left with only one square, which Bobby explained was more than enough to inflate the gerbil.

  “At personal development library time we shall strike; be ready,” Bobby commanded.

  The week progressed from cold to colder and the ghastly turn of events only added to the chill.

  “They say Gordon will make a full recovery,” Bobby hopefully suggested.

  “Who’d have thought a gerbil could be so dangerous?” I replied.

  “It’s the mathematics – all multiplication is ungodly, even for atheists like us, and the four times table is pure evil. It’s a well-known fact that too many children in one room reciting four by four will raise emissions to extraordinarily dangerous levels.”

  “You think that’s what triggered the gerbil explosion?” I asked Bobby.

  “Without doubt. Gordon was just an innocent bystander, and now he has joined Doug, another excommunicated hero, to suffer a week of inquisition-detention,” Bobby declared.

  It seemed Gordon had been on gerbil feeding duties when the creature spontaneously erupted. He’d been caught in the eye with a piece of flying gerbil but the nuns had shown little sympathy. A hastily convened inquisition had declared him guilty and had excommunicated the lad.

  “Doug, Gordon, all that chocolate, the samples, the ten tins of baking soda. All gone, and for what?” I lamented.

  “If the noble polar bear can survive with shrinking kneecaps then we can overcome this minor setback. Always remember, Kyoto was not built in a day and Global Warming won’t just come to us. We have to increase our carbon footprint, we cannot be neutral, this is war.” Bobby’s rousing speech brought a little icicle to my eye.

  “For Doug and Gordon, onwards, but what’ll we do?” I asked, fighting back horrible images of Doug and Gordon doing double confession time.

  “The great African flatulence gerbil experiment is over; a more direct approach is needed. We shall revert to brute force rather than the subtleties of genetic engineering. I shall cleverly convince Mrs Dudgeon that this Friday and every winter Friday is national baked bean day and nothing else should be served for lunch.”

  With the help of this persuasive eco-argument and bribery we enlisted the help of the fearsome Madge, the school bully and World Wide Webby expert. Aided by her purely mechanistic workman-like skills, we skilfully applied our intellectual creativity and directed Madge to fake up some government websites that had Jamie Oliver beaming out and demanding all children must receive enormous quantities of beans on Fridays – a particularly cunning accomplishment given the island had no internet access. Mrs Dudgeon, our school cook, was so impressed she decided we needed a week-long festival with nothing but pulses.

  “That’s all sorted then,” I happily declared after Mrs Dudgeon had left to look up a range of suitable Mexican and Indian bean recipes.

  “And you call yourself a Masterminder,” Bobby answered, giving me the particularly twisty smirk that meant I was not even halfway out of the thinking box. Our little group called itself the Masterminders. Bobby was a fully-fledged Masterminder, I was a junior and Doug had been an apprentice.

  “The extra carbon in the methane our little school can produce will only take us so far – maybe two or three glorious Saharan summers and then nature will re-establish the balance and we’ll be back where we started,” Bobby explained.

  “Recycling?” I offered, wanting to quickly recover my Masterminder credentials. Though I understood the theory of recycling, I was often confused by the practice. Before I woke up in the mornings mum had
already laid out breakfast and left for her first job of the day. One morning, all alone, I had been particularly puzzled by the different coloured bins and what to do with the breakfast debris. I was almost late for school because I couldn’t decide whether egg shell was kitchen waste, cardboard, metal, plastic or glass, so I just ate the shells and dashed off.

  “Exactly right, but ordinary recycling won’t create a permanent hole in the zone directly above our island. We need to think big, bigger and biggest,” Bobby carefully explained.

  “Poo?” I hopefully suggested.

  “Nuclear waste,” Bobby answered, clutching his jacket lapels with both hands and staring statesmen-like into the space just above my head.

  This was my first encounter with Bobby’s ability not only to think out of the box but to leap beyond any kind of box shape. It wouldn’t be the last.

  “We’ll need a sponsor. After school meet me at the gate,” Bobby added.

  And I did and off we went to see Mr Crumb. Mr Crumb ran the island’s EU-sponsored Inward Investment Development Agency from the back of his post office, or as it was better known locally, the Complete and Utter Waste of Time Agency. The bungalow post office occupied a prime position in the main village square with direct views of the giant bronze cod. It had a single entrance sandwiched between two big bay windows with little squares of bottled glass that distorted the image of anything that happened to be on display. In general, the distorted images flattered the goods for sale, which could be anything from a lawnmower to an elaborately decorated urinal. Apart from the official post office stuff everything else for sale in Mr Crumb’s shop was salvaged from the beaches, cleaned up, painted and stuck in the window with a seemingly random price tag.

  “Development business, you say. Let me change hats,” Mr Crumb said, then took off his Stetson and donned a beret. Mr Crumb had an enormous bald spot ringed by wilful strands of greasy hair that he tortured into a full head covering and then hid under a hat, possibly knowing that his efforts at pate camouflage fooled very few. He listened intently to everything Bobby had to say, only occasionally interrupting to ask a question about the detail.