Parry Marcelyn, senior orthopaedic surgeon and Mayor of Dallas (when he has the time)
 

Ward twenty-seven, of the Ball memorial Hospital in Dallas was run by a very efficient sergeant major type Matron.
Hildebrande Fassbinder had Les so tightly tucked into his bed that he could hardly move.
As non-combatants we were considered too untidy to stay for the ward round, so we hid behind a pillar in the corridor and peeped through the squares of safety glass to watch as Chief Surgeon Marcelyn toured the beds, followed by a gaggle of awe-struck medical students.

When he had nodded, and prodded his way around the whole room, the great man swished back out of the doors with a dramatic flourish, and strode off in a cloud of medical admiration.

We rushed back inside to hear the verdict. 
‘Have you found out why you are here yet?’ Myrtle asked anxiously.

‘It’s great news, they’re not chopping anything off this time!,’ Les looked delighted.
‘I’m getting a new knee instead!’

‘What?’ I didn’t have medical training of course, but it seemed to me that in order to add a new knee, the surgeon would need something to attach it to. I saw Les’s lack of legs as a barrier to the planned procedure.
My friend told me to stop being so pernickety, because I was ‘spoiling it for him’, so I decided I would take a break and go and check the vending machines to see if any of them served something other than gritty coffee, or tea with an unwelcome scum floating on the surface.
My optimism levels were not high.

I left the loving couple organising Les’s bedside cabinet, so he could reach his sweeties, sci-fi novel and bottle of Lucozade more conveniently, but the pre-op tranquilising dose he had been given to ‘calm his nerves’ was already kicking in.



Myrtle joined me in the hospital atrium. A sickly looking tree was bedecked with thank-you notes, written in childish handwriting. Even at this distance I could tell who they were addressed to.
I searched through a pile of magazines on the architectural coffee table, and found an unfinished crossword in one of them to keep our minds occupied.

S blank A blank S and then two blanks, the clue is immortal glory shines at the end of a french street.

‘I hate cryptic clues, what time is it?’ Myrtle jumped up to stare alternately at the two clocks which flanked the large reception hall, each one displayed a different opinion.
We were meant to wait a further hour and a half before an official came to tell us how Les had done on the operating table, but were concerned to be called instead into Marcelyn’s office.

Looking out over neatly tended flower borders, and encrusted with awards and certificates, I had cause to wonder how the good doctor could possibly have time to fit a bit of ‘Mayoring’ in between the other duties and achievements displayed within his office.
Despite my overwhelming conviction that even the least competent of surgeons would eventually notice that he had made a mistake, and give up on pursuing the impossible surgery, I found myself oddly worried.
‘Mrs Scambetter,’ Marcelyn began, erroneously, and the conversation didn’t improve from there on.

‘It’s got to be a mistake,’ said Myrtle, glugging at the half empty bottle of Lucozade, as we drove back to Ballina Central, ‘Les was alive and happy this morning, it was only a knee, people have them all the time.’
I nodded in sympathy, and we entered the city limits in a sombre state.

For some reason the answer to the cryptic crossword clue came to me suddenly, in St Muldyke’s Cemetery later that week. ‘It was Swanson,’ I said, 'Gloria, she starred in Sunset Boulevard, Boulevard is a French street.' It was probably a good thing that nobody heard me.

The hearse had arrived, and brought a fair sprinkling of onlookers in its wake. Organising the funeral seemed to have helped Myrtle, and she was busy thanking everyone for attending.
A short coffin was lifted reverently out of the smart black vehicle. Reverend Cotterall turned to greet the arrival, service book in hand, then stopped in his tracks nervously.

As the casket turned we saw that the other side was oddly truncated. Instead of the polished walnut and brass handles which featured elsewhere, the foot end  was a criss-crossed mass of sticky tape.



‘A forklift ran over it in the funeral parlour,’ confided my friend, ‘I got it cheap on account of the damage. ’ then she sniffed elegantly into a lace handkerchief. ‘He didn’t need the full length so there was no point paying for it’.

‘That’s my gaffer tape, ‘ I remarked tactlessly, suddenly remembering lending the product to my friend to fix her glasses, several weeks before the apartment explosion obliterated the rest of my possessions.’

The service was quite moving, but ended rather abruptly half way through a prayer, when The Rev vaulted over the grave and sped off in the direction of the Vicarage.
The assembled throng broke up, and started heading back to the Church Hall, where corned beef sandwiches and hot beverages were on offer.

Myrtle dallied by the graveside, staring down the hole at the tiny coffin. ‘Well I suppose that’s it then,’ she said, removing her engagement ring, and putting it in the breast pocket of her black blazer. I wasn’t sure what to do and was feeling rather tearful myself, so I backed away to give my friend some space.
 

 Standing half in an evergreen bush,  it seemed like a trivial concern in the circumstances, but my outfit was causing me discomfort. Edna, the hairdresser, had given me a large carrier bag full of clothing that her daughter would never fit into again after three babies. My current attire featured elements from Julie’s Goth period, including some high heel burgundy and black suede boots, which laced up the front to the knees, and had dangly decorative elements which kept getting stuck to my tights.



I was trying to discreetly free up a cluster of skulls when I saw a most peculiar thing, a single eye, disconnected from any kind of face, was staring up at me from the grass. The eye then looked side to side and vanished. A familiar giggling noise seeped into my brain, and I spun round on one heel, grabbing hold of the shrubbery to stop me collapsing in a dizzy heap.

Les rolled out of the laurel bush in a fountain of leaves and ended up on the gravel path, unable to breathe from laughing so much.
‘It was ..a..great funeral service..’ he panted, ‘I loved the vicar hurdling over the coffin at the end, very scandinavian!’
 

‘Leslie Scambetter, I knew you wasn’t dead!!!’, Myrtle rushed towards us, her face going through a series of mood induced transformations which ended up in a mix of outrage and relief.
‘Knee replacement for a legless man,’ he gasped in delight, ’I thought, here’s a chance for another go at the old medical negligence fraud. They wouldn’t dare challenge it, with the mess the admin is in at that hospital.’

I looked this way and that, trying to update my thought processes with the confusing incoming data, eventually I tottered over to the grave. ‘Who’s in the box?’ I asked, hoping to sound like an Agatha Christie sleuth spotting the flaw in the murderer’s cunning argument, though I suspected that ‘game show host’ was nearer the mark.

‘Ohh that’s the hairdresser's Flemish rabbit, Mr Snuffles. He got run over chasing the greengrocer’s bicycle. The thing was surprisingly heavy so the swap worked a treat, and saved the expense of a pet cremation as well.’

‘I thought that Edna was crying too much! muttered Myrtle, ‘I suspected some sort of …well it doesn’t matter now,’ she corrected herself.

‘So the hairdresser knew?’ I asked, attempting to get my facts straight.

‘Ho yes, it was partly her idea. Young Julie, her daughter, works in Dallas General as a filing clerk, she was our inside man.’

We retrieved Les’s latest ride from behind a tomb.
‘Triple lithium batteries and tungsten gearing, check out the glow in the dark decals, it’s a superb machine and will be perfect for Kingston.’
‘Jamaica?’ I questioned.

‘No she went of her own accord, boom boom,’ Les chuckled.

Myrtle’s face dropped, ‘you’ll have to leave the country.’

‘Yup, don’t fancy jail. Doris is going out there to help look after her fancy man’s Mother, said I could tag along.’
Seeing our faces drop he chirped up, ‘Don’t worry, you two will have no problem keeping yourselves busy, cleaning up corrupt governments and the like.’
 

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cotterall returning, rubbing his guts and looking downfaced.
I decided to head him off, so my friends could say their goodbyes in peace.
The Rev and I walked together towards the wake chatting about this and that, until Myrtle caught us up.
‘Was it the medlar jam?’ she asked the reverend.
‘Perils of the job,’ bewailed the churchman.

I learned a new vocabulary word from the church ladies in the hall, a loupe. This is the small magnifying glass that jeweller’s use to peer at pieces of jewellery before they click their tongues and offer you five quid for it.
The collective verdict, after some period of study, was that Myrtle should get more for her ring than she paid out for the funeral, so all was fair enough.

Later, washing up in the church kitchen, I realised that something had been puzzling me. ‘How does Les get the money?’ I asked, waving a tea-towel printed with an infomap detailing beetles of the Patagonian jungle.
‘I mean you can hardly get compensation for death under the scalpel paid to the corpse, that would give the whole game away.’

‘Oh he thought ahead’ explained Myrtle, ‘It’s all going to his brother in Jamaica.’
Seeing my frown she continued, ‘He is his own brother,’ and raised her eyebrows to make it all clearer.
‘I see,’ I said, not very convincingly.
‘Never mind,’ said my friend, ‘I think it’s time for a brew anyway.’
She found some mugs and I pulled the Ovaltine out of my borrowed black fringed handbag with zebra skin handles. It had been a long day.
‘ You know, that crossword answer, I thought she was called Gloria Swansong, with a G, funny how your mind plays tricks,’  burbled Myrtle, before dozing off into a snoring heap on a stackable chair.



Everyone else had gone, so the Rev stayed behind to help me finish tidying up the kitchen. It turned out that he knew a remarkable amount about insects living in the rainforest. He was quite a different man when not being hounded by massed troupes of Church ladies.
Eventually, when every pot and fork had been neatly stacked, Cotterall coughed awkwardly, and apologised again for his sudden departure from duty in the graveyard earlier. I don’t know why, maybe it seemed such a shame that he was blaming himself, but I found myself telling the Rev the whole story, up to and including Les being replaced by a deceased rabbit.

I could see that the churchman was struggling to inhibit a reaction, what if he became angry and informed the authorities?
My anxiety was unnecessary, Cotteral gave up the struggle to hide his emotions, and roared with laughter, wiping tears from his eyes with the squeezed out dishcloth.

The row woke up my friend, and we were led out of the hall so the Rev could lock up. He patted each of us on the back as we squeezed through the broken front door, then signalled we should wait a moment. The churchman returned swiftly and pushed a cassette tape into my hand.

‘Something for the car ride,’ he explained.

We rode off towards the high street with Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ blasting out of the speakers. ‘Tribute to Les,’ I explained, a little doubtfully.

‘He’s very weird that vicar,’ said Myrtle sleepily, ‘nobody even knows his first name.’
‘I think he’s called Geoff,’ I said, smiling to myself.

‘Oh,’ replied my friend.