Being Mr. Kenny

“Will you sit down, Mr Cabbage, this demonstration is not hands-on!” Mr Cabbage was halfway down the stairs towards the front of the demonstration lab, and was making his way towards the table.

“Mr Cabbage, if you do not sit yourself down, I will be forced to call security! Mr Cabbage, please!” Mr Cabbage marched on.

“MR CABBAGE!” But it was too late. Mr Cabbage looked at the demonstrator, Dr Phlange, and began to laugh like an evil genius who has just devised a way to take over the world. Dr Phlange backed up against the blackboard and raised the scalpel he held in his hand.

“I’ll use it! I am not afraid to use it!” But Mr Cabbage laughed again and took the scalpel out of Dr Phlange’s hand, snapped it, and let the pieces fall to the floor with a delicate tinkle. Mr Cabbage regarded Dr Phlange for about thirty seconds, then stooped down, removed one of the doctor’s shoes, and ran out of the room. Dr Phlange stood there for a while and then fainted unexpectedly, collapsing on the floor in a little heap.

***

Meanwhile, Chips McBetter was just getting out of bed. He glanced out of the window and saw a man of average height with dark hair running past his window. He noticed he was carrying a shoe. He wore an attractive suit and a nice hat, and Mr McBetter thought nothing of a well dressed man running past his window carrying a shoe. And why should he?

Mr McBetter was usually up much earlier in the day, but he had had a late night the night before, and as a consequence had afforded himself a lie-in that day. That afternoon he had planned to make a visit to his friend, Father Food McBoob, whom he’d known since childhood. Both he and McBoob had attended college together and had parted only when it was time for McBoob to attend clerical college. Mr McBetter went onto university to study engineering.

Mr McBetter kept in good contact with his friend McBoob, which was nice for a man of his age. McBetter was forty-five years old, and had never married. Father Food McBoob had never married either, being a man of the cloth, so both enjoyed the other’s company.

That afternoon, Mr McBoob and Mr McBetter had planned to visit the city of York, but circumstances had made this arrangement quite impossible. Father McBoob had a marriage ceremony to conduct in the morning, and Mr McBetter had been called up for Jury Duty (it was an interesting case: there had been a fire in a cheese factory and someone had died), so the two planned to meet mid-afternoon in their favourite park.

***

Back at the Teaching Hospital, Dr Phlange was just coming round. All his students had left, and they had taken the cadaver he was dissecting with them as they went.
“Oh, hell,” he said to himself as he cleared up, “that’ll turn up somewhere inappropriate I shouldn’t wonder.”

And he was right. At that very moment on the other side of the city, a group of five medical students were doing their best to hoist the body up the University flagpole. They’d got it nearly halfway up when their laughter became uncontrollable and it fell to the ground with a soft “pud”.

Mr Cabbage continued to make his escape with Dr Phlange’s shoe. He wasn’t entirely sure why he had taken it, or indeed why he had approached Dr Phlange so menacingly.

Mr Cabbage was about thirty years old, and was a mature student under Dr Phlange’s tutelage. They had known each other for some time before Mr Cabbage had begun his studies, and they had not especially got on. Dr Phlange found Mr Cabbage strange and annoying, and Mr Cabbage thought Dr Phlange austere and eccentric; a bit too Victorian. His hands always smelt of embalming fluid, and his white lab coat could be relied upon to have a few blood stains here and there.

Mr Cabbage reached the park behind the hospital and stopped for breath. He ditched the shoe in a nearby bin (where it burst into flames), and sat down on a bench. He looked over the city. There was thick black smoke rising from a building in the distance, and he could hear the sirens as the fire engines moved to put out the fire.

Just then, two middle aged men came up beside him and sat down on the adjacent bench, and Mr Cabbage floated off into the sky quite without warning. The two men watched him go.

“Good Lord!“
“Quite!”

***

It took a while before Mr Cabbage realised what was happening. He watched as the ground beneath him got further and further away, and he saw the two men who had sat down beside him not minutes beforehand. He waved, and they were polite enough to wave back. He looked up and pondered his fate. Would he end up on the moon? Or would he collide with an aeroplane? He wondered if anything like this had happened before to anyone else, and if so, what had happened to them. This simply wasn’t the sort of thing one expected!

Bit by bit, however, he noticed a definite slowing in his ascension until he was floating inside a cloud. He marvelled that the cloud felt solid, like a cushion, and he saw that he was seated upon it, and that he and the cloud were travelling horizontally now. He looked down, and he saw that he was over countryside. Then he saw a beach, and before long he was flying far above the sea towards an unknown destination.

Mr Cabbage grew tired and fell asleep, and when he awoke he found himself in the branches of an enormously tall tree, and decided to remain there for a good while.

In fact, he lived in that tree for a good few years, before climbing down and completing his medical degree. He went on to become the finest doctor in the world, curing all sorts of tropical diseases with a special potion he happened to find in his pocket one day.

Dr Phlange was asked to leave the University after it was discovered that he was partly responsible for the body found tangled in the ropes of the University flagpole. The Chancellor had been walking underneath it when the body came loose, and had been killed outright when it fell on him. Passers-by observed that the body was wearing a vague expression of mirth as it plummeted towards the pavement.

Nobody had thought to warn the Chancellor of his impending doom, so they were all imprisoned for twenty weeks for failing to discharge duty-of-care. It was a low-security jail, mind you, so no-one was too inconvenienced.

After witnessing Mr Cabbage rise into the sky, the lives of Messrs McBetter and McBoob were never quite the same. Father Food McBoob was awarded the Popeship quite out of the blue; for one thing he was not in the running, and for another he wasn’t even Catholic - he was an Anglican Bishop. He made this clear to all the cardinals and whatnots but they would not hear of it so he accepted the station gracefully and became the best goddamn Pope this world ever saw.

Mr McBetter wrote a cheap sleazy song for Fifi la Gouche, the famous French drag queen rock band, and it became an instant worldwide hit. He also authored many books on cookery, car mechanics and crochet knitting. Years later in her memoirs, Fifi la Gouche remembered Mr McBetter as her kindest and closest friend, which was ironic because… well it just was. At the age of eighty she wrote a story called “How to dissect a nose” which became famous for its disappointing ending.

Incidentally, her story has nothing to do with this one. You see, in her story, the lead character falls in love with someone, but then forgets about them and the next twenty chapters go on to detail what she eats every day for four years. The last sentence reads “She did not enjoy that meal; the bread was stale, and there was not enough food to feed a bird.”

Anyway, everybody is dead now, so the story has finished. You’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s a happy ending, and just be grateful that I’ve finished something for the first time in absolutely ages.

The End