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Island?”
    “It’s not Elmo. It’s Emo,” I huffed. “Emo Island.” That place with that bloody dung beetle.
    Dextrose took a few swigs of beer and wiped a forearm across his mouth. “So. Yer wants a few stories, does yer?”
    My rage vanished like a bloodstain bleached at the prospect of hearing Dextrose’s adventures from the author’s own mouth. How well I knew his own tales of Emo Island. And those
‘fat lasses’ Quench referred to, so indelicately – surely they couldn’t be the lusty Frihedhags, those aged sisters uneasy on the eye, who had helped to save me from
Borhed?
    I’d slept with Piggy Frihedhag, by accident – being rather drunken following the celebrations of Borhed’s demise – and had woken up with an arm trapped in the terrible
vacuum between her voluminous buttocks.
    But of course, it was I who had vanquished the malevolent Borhed, no one else, and it was I who should take the credit. This, I realised, was an opportunity for a little showboating of my own;
Dextrose’s braggadocio could wait a moment.
    This’d floor them. Earn me a little respect.
    “Livingstone,” I said, “have you ever killed a man with a dead penguin?” Because I had.
    I’d expected him to regard me with manly pride, shaking his head in mute disbelief. But no – he actually stopped and thought for a while, as if he had often considered employing an
arsenal of viciously pointy taxidermy.
    By the time he replied, “Nah, son, I don’t believe I ’ave,” my moment had passed. “Why? ’Ave you?”
    “Yes. But don’t worry about it,” I replied sulkily.
    Dextrose butted in. “Good. Cos I were gonna tell yer…”
    “No, ’old on, ’Arry, let the lad speak,” said Quench.
    That appeased my pride. Alright, I would tell my tale, after all. But where to begin? With the salty skipper, ‘Mad Dog’ Mahaffey, who was supposed to have taken me from England to
Emo Island aboard his patchwork vessel, the Unsmoked Haddock, but who had let his dog steer the boat one night and, amazingly, we had ended up miles off course?
    Or with my journey through the Unknown Tunnel, from Frartsi to Emo Island, by pony and cart, at the end of which I had stumbled upon Borhed and the dwarf, Detritos?
    Which tale captured best my bravado and derring-do?
    “Give me a second, I can’t decide where to start,” I told my audience.
    They were becoming restless. Quench was drumming his gold-laden fingers on the table, while Dextrose was attaching crown caps to his forehead using saliva, and had begun to resemble some sort of
homeless Roy Wood.
    Remembering Detritos had started the pangs of guilt. I had tried to put him out of my mind since his untimely death, concerning which I felt – wrongly, I hoped to convince myself –
at least some degree of culpability.
    The frustrating, lascivious, daring, delusional, fiercely loyal little fellow had popped up at the beginning of my adventures and, whether I had encouraged his company or not, he was there at
the end. He had saved my bacon on more than one occasion. Indeed, had Detritos not appeared from nowhere – or rather, from inside a hobby horse – toting an Uzi at the end of the Insect
Race to Death, I might not have survived long enough to perform the coup de grâce with that deceased penguin.
    That’s where I would start my tale, I decided: just after Detritos and his Uzi, grab a little limelight for myself.
    “Right, mink this!” declared Dextrose, the instant I opened my mouth. “Here’s the one about I and Paloma Slaver!”
    Quench actually had to stop himself from clapping like a delighted child.
    “I thought I…” I began.
    But no one was listening.

 

    “…then I turned her over and the minking smell disappeared!”
    Twin streams of frothed ale shot from Quench’s nostrils, his face the colour of a boil forming. He roared with laughter, clutching the table for support though he was seated. My stomach
muscles ached, such had been the night’s hilarity,