Cake Eats Man
                                  
-  A cautionary tale about Battenburg Cake -



The grunting, straining taxi driver gave one last heave.  Mr Travis Enderby shot from the back seat of the black Honda like the cork from a bottle of well-shaken Babycham.  He landed splat on the pavement, his fall broken by the not-well-tipped-enough taxi driver.  Nonetheless, the impact shook the privet three houses along and caused Travis Enderby's flesh to spread across the ground in ripples, like a large jellyfish poked with a stick.  By the time the tremors in Mr Enderby's outlying regions had subsided the cab had roared away. It left behind a morbidly obese middle-aged man, an improbably small suitcase and a whiff of partially combusted diesel.  Travis pulled himself up using his own front gate for support, and made his way down the path to his white-painted bungalow, trundling the little suitcase behind him.

Groggily, Travis Enderby fumbled his key into the lock, and eased his sweaty thirty-seven stone frame through the doorway.  The house smelled musty, which was to be expected after it had been unoccupied for two weeks.  Mrs Graham, the cleaner, would be in the following morning to drop off Bessie.  He'd ask her to have a quick whizz round while she was here.  Travis waddled into the kitchen, thighs chafing, and made himself a Nescafe.  They had given him sleeping pills at the hospital which seemed to be making him sluggish and heavy - even more sluggish and heavy than normal.  Despite his thirst, he was in bed and snoring before he'd taken so much as a sip of the coffee.

Mr Enderby slept.  The duvet rose and fell gently, forming an unscalable peak in the centre.  Even in sleep, sweat cascaded from his brow and darkened the collar of his pyjamas.  Mr Travis Enderby's bedroom was a sacred shrine dedicated to Mr Travis Enderby.  He had cuttings from his career as a self-taught journalist and founding former editor-in-chief of the National Scandal.   The walls were plastered with pictures of him shaking hands with such luminaries and dignitaries as Jeffrey Archer, Norman Lamont and the Marquess of Bath.  His walls also bore awards for such shocking exposés as "Women who love cows too much" and "Killer Trees: When Foliage Fights Back".  He had the NUJ's Best Current Affairs Reporter 1987 trophy for his serious discussion of global warming entitled "Last one to the beach is a pasty ponce".  Awards and cuttings ranged the room in chronological order.  A fresh-faced and svelte Mr Enderby on the left wall showed promise as a rookie reporter, while a progressively more engorged and enlarged Mr Enderby on the right wall was pictured greasy with success at the pinnacle of his career.  

In the year 2000, the awards and accolades stopped abruptly.  That was the year of Mr Enderby's enforced early retirement and withdrawal from society, the year when a truck full of firemen had been called to cut him free from the revolving doors at the National Scandal office after he had got himself immovably wedged in on a particularly hot day.  Since then, he had lived a quiet life in the quiet village of Hoggers Butt, eating cake and collecting Royal Family memorabilia.  Little did the sleeping Travis Enderby know, but all this was about to change.

Mr Enderby slept.  He dreamed of cake.  A horde of giant pink and yellow Battenburg cakes were advancing on Hoggers Butt, bent on world domination. Whitehall had fallen to the villainous confections, and the Houses of Parliament were a cakey mass.  London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Sheffield were in thrall to the vicious foe, who had left in their wake piles of crumbs which would rise up and engulf humanity.  This was the last standoff. Surrounded by battalions of marzipan-coated Battenburgs, Travis knew the only way to save the planet was to eat his way out.  Poor little Bessie was cowering under the table as he leapt into the breach, taking enormous bites left right and centre, repelling the delicious, repellent usurpers, screaming slogans such as "Death or Glory!" and "Mmm, delicious!" in the face of their tyrannical faces.

He woke mid-afternoon the following day sweating and feverish, with saliva coating his face and pillow and the taste of duvet in his mouth.  Travis was in pain, but more importantly he was hungry.  He had spent the last fourteen days in a hospital ward having a series of unpleasant operations on his abscessed skin flaps, and had not eaten properly in what seemed like ages.  Before he rose from the bed, he groped for the large morphine pills given to him by the doctor.  The instructions said to take two, but being a big chap Travis habitually doubled the stated dose for any medication.  In this case, to be on the safe side, he took six tablets, and shuffled into the kitchen in his carpet slippers.

Bessie the dachshund greeted Travis joyfully in the kitchen, her little tail wagging like a windsock in a force nine.  The cleaner Mrs Graham had been and gone while he slept, leaving behind the small dog and a smell of furniture polish.  As far as the decor was concerned, the rest of Mr Enderby's house was mercifully free of Mr Enderby's likeness.  However, an official commemorative plate of Princess Diana occupied the space above the mantelpiece which, in a Catholic house, would perhaps bear a likeness of the Virgin Mary.  It had been ordered from an advert in a weekly magazine, and had cost £19.99 plus postage and packing.

There was very little in the fridge that was still edible, but being a man of resource and no small appetite, Travis Enderby constructed a meal from half a dozen eggs and some leftover kippers.  He was already exhausted, but needed to make a trip into the village to get some shopping. After eating, Travis manoeuvred himself into his clothing and collected Bessie's lead.

His specially adapted mobility scooter was parked just inside the front door, plugged in to the mains to charge.  Travis Enderby lowered himself into the seat and, after much fumbling with door, keys, scooter, dog and lead, he trundled off towards the village with Bessie yapping at his wheels.

It was a glorious April day.  The whole village smelled of freshly cut bread and freshly baked grass.  Bees droned drowsily and occasionally drowned dozily in the pond.  Rosebuds peeped around the doorway of every cottage and barn conversion, and paedophiles peeped over the school fence.  The villagers had laid out fresh flowers every few yards along the roadside verges.  These bouquets were in memory of children killed crossing the busy street between the village school and its playground.  Where other villages would have built a tunnel or a bridge between the two, or lobbied for a lollypop lady, Hoggers Butt operated its own special brand of natural selection. The village was rapidly breeding out the tendency to have children too stupid to look before crossing the road.

Hoggers Butt (pop. 4753 and decreasing steadily) is an ancient village in the county of Englandshire.  The 6th Archbishop once described the place as "an smalle cluster of meane and odourous dwellinges such to maken an swine perish," while the RAC Good Village Guide 1952 described its inhabitants as "flatulent, crapulent and corpulent to a man". Little has changed.  Today, Tuesday, was market day, and so everyone wore their Sunday best.  As Travis meandered down the pavement on his overburdened scooter, the neighbours came out to wave and laugh and stare and point.  Ah, the joys of living in a small village!  A child of seven or eight threw half a breeze block at him.  It missed Travis but hit poor Bessie.  She did not even have the breath to direct a snarl at the young hoodlum because she was being dragged along by her neck as the precarious vehicle picked up speed on the downhill.  Mr Enderby smiled benignly and expansively from his morphine haze as the villagers made obscene gestures behind his expansive behind.

Hoggers Butt was populated with the usual rural types: vicars, strippers, W.I. ladies, drug dealers, illegal immigrants, solicitors and interior designers.  It was a quintessentially odd mixture, and sometimes this made for a slightly strange atmosphere about the place.  Today, however, something was odder than usual, although Travis could not place a single podgy finger on it.  Obliviously he careered towards the market square, whistling tunelessly and wondering why the world was so brightly coloured.

Crossing the bridge above Butts Brook, Travis noticed movement down on the bank.  He stopped to peer over the wall.  Under the arch the river tinkled merrily in a vaguely implausible way.  Various mutant catfish swam doggedly against the current, occasionally concussed by empty plastic bottles of Diamond White bobbing downstream.  Two illegal immigrants were attempting to manhandle a swan into a collection of Co-op carrier bags.  The swan, to its credit, was putting up a decent bit of resistance and the young men were covered in bruises and contusions.  Travis tutted to himself as he drove away.  He knew that illegal immigrants caught and ate Her Majesty's swans in places like London - everyone knew that, after all.  Travis had even written an article about the appalling travesty once, but he hadn't realised the swan-stealing gangs had spread as far as Hoggers Butt.  What on earth were things coming to?  Bessie, cowering behind her master's bulk, whimpered at the size of the enormous birds, and so Mr Enderby reluctantly pulled himself away from the scene.  

As Travis disappeared over the hump of the bridge, scooter motor whirring under the strain, the swan launched itself back into the filthy river, taking one of the illegal immigrants with him.  Immediately surrounded by hissing, pecking swans, the young man sank slowly beneath the surface, never to rise again.  The swans began pecking off the fingers and eyes of the waterlogged immigrant with every sign of enjoyment.  The deceased man's equally illegal comrade stalked dejectedly off along the bank.  This was the third man this week from the "Hoggers Butt Immigrant Internment Camp" to have been eaten by swans.  It was getting to be a real problem.  Perhaps they should switch to catching squirrels in future?  Travis, meanwhile, entered the village, a relieved Bessie in tow.

The village market was in full swing.  Since the Co-op was on the far side of the main square, Travis piloted the scooter through, and occasionally at, the people in the crowds.  In one corner of the market square, a swarthy South American looking chap with large ears stood idly swinging a bicycle chain.  He was surrounded by some rather fetching young women and appeared to be prepared to hire them out to passers-by on a buy-before-you-try basis. This certainly made a change, Travis mused, from the pestilent organic vegetables, tatty hand-painted glassware and grubby hand-knitted baby clothes that you usually saw at such events.

It was only upon much closer inspection that the truth dawned upon Travis, as he noticed the absence of expected bulges and the presence of certain other, unexpected bulges on the svelte forms of the merchandise.  He wheeled away in horror.  Simply ghastly!  He had personally been responsible for a three-month campaign, back in the '90s, alerting people to the horror of transvestism, specifically as it related to those in the discreet personal massage industry and allied trades.  His own publication had printed no less than twenty seven articles concerning twenty seven different men who had been duped by these so-called women and hadn't found out until it was simply too late to do anything about it.  Why, Travis himself had once in his younger days paid good money to a charming oriental lass, only to discover that...  But it doesn't do to dwell on the past.  One of the trannies attempted to pinch Travis on the ample posterior, an experience like attempting to pinch a handful of cottage cheese.  Travis and Bessie thought it would be better to make their way to the Co-op by more circuitous routes.  They quickly quit the main square for the temporary safety of the back streets.

In the back streets, the butcher's apprentice, having earlier smoked almost a quarter of a marijuana cigarette, had undertaken a dreadful killing spree, holding a cleaver aloft and singing Pink Floyd songs.   He was apprehended by an officer of the law before Travis's very eyes.  The policeman, noting the blood-stained implement the young man was holding, and the piles of dismembered corpses lining the thoroughfare, let the young scamp off with a caution. Typical of the justice system nowadays!  Travis attempted to upbraid the constable about this shocking breach of standards, but it quickly became apparent that the policeman was also stoned.  Hardly surprising, of course, but still, it's the principle of the thing.  Travis decided that perhaps, after all, it was better to stick to the main market square.

Despite Travis's negative impressions about the general trend of declining standards in Hoggers Butt over the last two weeks, he couldn't help but concede that some of the changes to the village had been more positive.  It appeared than the vicar's bid at the parish council meeting to have hanging reinstated as a punishment for persistent litterers had been successful.  Two fresh corpses were dangling in the breeze like the pendulums of broken clocks.  Someone had drawn comical moustaches on them in red felt tip.  Travis began to giggle uncontrollably.  It was all so ludicrous and yet so proper.  A line of temporary stocks had been assembled, inside which a trio of agitated traffic wardens were finally getting their comeuppance, as they were pelted with rotten fruit and small rodents by irate SUV drivers.

Outside the Jobcentre, there was a queue of illegal immigrants and spongers.  The immigrants were led to the front of the queue by an efficient, spectacle-wearing woman and given special plush seats to sit on.  They were then issued with £5000 in cash and escorted to a fleet of waiting limos which would take them to their 5 star hotel rooms in the 'Hoggers Butt Immigrant Internment Camp'. Meanwhile, the spongers complained about the unfairness, picking their spots and clutching their pac-a-macs while their toddlers sucked on dummies dipped in Special Brew.  Mr Enderby could have sworn that the Jobcentre woman handed one of the illegal immigrants a glossy leaflet entitled "101 Ways to cook Swan."

Deciding that the best thing to do was to get the shopping done and go home as soon as possible, Travis Enderby made a bee-lined beeline for the Co-operative Supermarket.  Where were all these insects coming from?  In the Co-op, a mentally disabled midget was standing by the tomatoes, throwing them up into the air and attempting to catch them before they hit the floor.  The passata-esque mass on the shiny vinyl attested to his failure rate.  "Neither big nor clever," Travis muttered at the retarded midget, as he piled buy-one-get-one-free Fruits-of-the-Forest gateaux into his trolley.

On the way home, Travis was accosted by an emaciated old trout who claimed to be the former Princess of Wales.  She said that she had been abducted by aliens and had spent the last nine years being probed.  Travis took pity on the mad bint and gave her 50 pence for the bus fair to Hoggers Norton, but was a little astonished to discover, further on, a large saucer-shaped edifice populated by odd-shaped chappies with skin which, not to put to fine a point on it, had a greenish tinge.  Now, Travis wasn't a racist although he spoke as he found, but he'd had quite enough of these foreigners today and would really prefer it if they would all go back to where they came from, wherever that was.  And so he told them so.  After an hour spent probing around Travis's sweaty skin flaps, the little men, now somewhat greener, had yet to find a receptive orifice in which to insert their probes.  They eventually gave Travis up as a bad job and dropped him and his scooter really not far from his house.

The last couple of hundred yards of Travis's journey were by far the most unpleasant.  As he passed the farms, pigs were crying out to him, begging to be turned into bacon, sausages and pork chops.  He felt slightly vindicated by this, as it corroborated the memorable speech he had given at the Vegetarian Society's annual dinner ten years ago, but the pigs' grunting glottals quickly became irritating.  It was like listening to poor people talk!  

The heat was becoming oppressive.  Travis had always maintained that the country could stand to get a good few degrees warmer without anyone complaining and that global warming was crackpot stuff and nonsense.  But he was a large sweaty gentleman, and this blistering tropical heat was going a little bit too far in April.  The young child in the house next door but one was lying down on the pathway looking terminally swollen while his mother wept apathetically. The child had apparently been set upon by killer ants.  The bees, too, were still out in force and looking murderous.  Travis, sweat pouring down his chins and seeping through his shirt, manoeuvred his cart into the bungalow and locked the door behind him, almost catching Bessie's tail in his haste to shut out the ghastly, freakish world.

Ten minutes later, Travis was lying down on his bed with a large slab of chocolate fudge cake to calm his nerves.  The room was spinning, and it seemed he had perhaps overexerted himself today.  Odd headlines kept jumping at him from the numerous clips on the walls.  "PRINCESS DI ABDUCTED BY ALIENS!" screamed one, and "KILLER ANT INVASION!" another.  There was also "BAN KILLER WEED, BEGS MUM OF MURDERED TEEN!" and of course "LAST ONE TO THE BEACH IS A PASTY PONCE".  Travis was only thankful that he had encountered no pregnant women or cows.  Trembling, he wondered if this was the final reckoning, whether perhaps he had died in hospital and this was hell.  Taking some more morphine as a sedative, he fell fitfully asleep.

Mr Enderby slept like the dead.  He neither moved nor sweated.  His snores slowed to faint, shallow breaths.  He was deathly cold.  Two days later, the barking of a near-starving Bessie finally managed to attract the attention of the neighbours, who called the police.

The police broke down the door with their "way cool" battering ram, and fed Bessie the "far out" dog.  At first they merely assumed, being stoned, that Bessie had been abandoned in an empty house.  When they eventually found Mr Travis Enderby smeared with chocolate cake lying comatose and naked on his bed, they were of the impression that he was some sort of apparition.

Mr Travis Enderby, his body wracked by infection and the after effects of large doses of morphine, heard odd phrases drifting to him from another world.  "Whoa, man, that's like, so freaky!" seeped into his consciousness, as did "dude, all this cake, I got the munchies big-time now!"  Luckily, there was also, "hey, I have the best idea, let's totally call this guy an ambulance!"

Then there was an ambulance, and white antiseptic ceilings, green surgical masks and the smell of flowers.  Days passed in this fashion, measured in slowly emptying drips and slowly filling catheters.  Mr Enderby slept.

Then a face loomed out of the whiteness, gaining definition.  It was the first face Mr Enderby recognised.  Never had Travis been so glad to see the frankly frightening features of his cleaner Mrs Graham. Gradually, while she sat and talked, Travis's vision cleared and the world swam into sharper focus.  Odd words pricked at the edge of his consciousness as he gazed in wonderment at the safe, wonderful, normal world about him. "Hoggers Butt," and "Bessie," and "Victoria Sponge," all permeated through to his brain.  He sat up with stunning rapidity at the mention of cake, and began to listen properly to what Mrs Graham was saying.

"...and a potato salad.  It was a lovely day for the picnic and it was the first time our Millie had been out since the birth.  She was worried at first but I said to her at least he's healthy that's the main thing.  And eight pound two is a good weight for a littlun even with the hooves, which are right soft anyway you couldn't hardly tell she said.  My Desmond, he gave her a good bit of money to put away for the baby.  She said not to, that she could manage and that we were to save it up for our retirement, but Desmond insisted.  It'll mean doing without for a while but well, it isn't every day your only daughter gives birth to a healthy bouncing calf, now, is it?"

Mr Enderby suffered a relapse shortly afterwards.  He stopped breathing the following day.  Given his weight and medical history, the doctors took the decision not to resuscitate.

Perhaps they came to regret this decision when, two weeks later, the Battenburg cakes advanced on London.