Stephen Walker - Mr Landen Has No Brain

‘Teena, for the last time, I’m happy as I am. I don’t want you trying to make me boyfriends.’

Teena rolled her eyes in a way that suggested disbelief.

‘You really want to help me?’ said Sally.

‘I only do these things for your benefit.’

‘Then repair that hole and recapture that rabbit. Then un-super-evolve it and its mates back to how they should be.’

‘But–’

‘And if you make one more attempt to find me a boyfriend

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll kill you.’

Sally slammed the mobile home’s front door behind her and stood on its top step, counting every conceivable way of killing Teena. There were a hundred and eighty seven. She looked at her surroundings; the caravans, mobile homes and wailing seagulls that made up Wyndham-on-Sea’s largest caravan park. Just nineteen, she was its youngest ever manager. And, apart from one highly noisy resident, there wasn’t a soul in sight.

Three days earlier there’d been souls in sight, two of them, when the world’s biggest mobile home had pulled into camp, a gleaming white double decker the length of a Eurostar, the sort of thing the Rolling Stones would refuse to take on tour because it was too ostentatious. In the passenger seat, all long limbs and gleaming shark grin, had sat Teena.

The driver was her assistant, Mr Landen, a small man who made vroom vroom noises as he drove.

He’d said Teena was the world’s greatest scientific prodigy all grown up, engaged and determined to have one last week of dullness before settling down to a life of marital excitement. And this particular stretch of North Yorkshire coastline had struck her as being as dull as they come.

Teena had said she was a total babe. The last four years running, she’d won the New Scientist Playmate of the Year Award. And while she didn’t approve of such things – they demean women and trivialize their contribution to science – that didn’t stop her pulling on her shortest, lowest-cut dress and turning up to collect them.

Now she was out to find Sally a boyfriend. It was to do with pity; it wasn’t fair for other women not to share the pleasure she’d found. Teena never used the word love.

Resigned to another five days of the woman, Sally descended the mobile home’s three metal steps, turned left and headed for her managerial offices, a low flat roofed building that incorporated her living quarters. On the way, she ignored that one resident in sight, the giant rabbit whose front-half was now trapped in a wheelie bin. For a master of the night it didn’t seem too bright but few people in this place did.

She reached her offices and grabbed the door, ready to enter.

But then, reflected in the door’s wire-glass, she saw them …

… the spinning moose heads of Bab’s Steakhouse.

‘Hello?’ Sally stuck her head round the front door. ‘Anyone here?’

No reply.

So she entered the dining area and took a look around. The moose heads of Bab’s Steakhouse, a low, purple building directly facing Sally’s offices, had only spun once before. She hadn’t expected to see them spin again before the restaurant’s grand opening, which wasn’t for another five days.

According to her Uncle Al (the caravan park’s owner), when those heads started spinning, the public would gasp in awe at their majesty. No one would be able to resist going in.

But at the try out, as soon as the heads had started up, the antlers had flown out with such force they’d decapitated the grinning shop window dummies meant to represent enthralled bystanders.

When she’d last talked with her uncle, he’d said that after a long and involved search he’d just hired the cook, a sterling woman with a wealth of experience – some of it involving cookery. And, though the steakhouse wasn’t technically a part of the caravan park, despite being slap bang in the middle of it, Sally felt she should introduce herself.

But this was the most disturbingly decorated restaurant she’d ever been in. She tugged at one of the chains hanging from the violet ceiling. It rattled. She imagined its manacle around her wrist and pulled an appropriate face.

And what was that by the window? An iron maiden?

Sally pushed open the black, round windowed door that linked the dining area to the kitchens. ‘Hello? Anyone here?’

Still no reply.

She saw a small, white kitchen kept in a state of psychotic tidiness but she saw no cook.

She stepped into the kitchen.

Then someone hit her over the back of the head.

‘Touch your toes, female, and you shall learn what it is to be brought to ecstasy by a supreme master of love making.’

‘Thank you for your generous offer but since I’m an engaged woman and I forgot to give you any genitals, I don’t think I’ll bother.’ Having finally got him back into her mobile home, and out of the wheelie bin, Teena stood Lepus before her. Mr Landen was hugging the rabbit’s right leg. He was four foot tall, his flat head was as wide as his shoulders, and he had no neck. His one huge eye and one tiny eye gazed adoringly up at the rabbit as he stroked its leg a little too fondly for her liking. Still, she should have been grateful that someone was taken with the thing.

And perhaps Sally did have a point about Lepus but the situation might yet be saved. She said, ‘If you’re going to impress Sally into wanting you as a boyfriend–’

‘Oh, no, I don’t want to be her boyfriend,’ said Mr Landen in a voice half Peter Lorre, half childlike, ‘I’m happy with my bunny.’ And he rubbed his cheek against its fur to prove it.

‘I was talking to the “bunny”,’ she said.

‘Oh.’ He stroked on.

She told Lepus, ‘If you’re to be her boyfriend, you’ll have to smarten up your act.’

‘Smarten up–?’

‘No more sexual boasting. And a little more style.’

‘Style?’

‘Young women like style. It shows a man’s more than an animal. And to help you achieve that style, I bought you something to put on your head.’

‘Is it a carrot?’

‘Generally speaking, wearing a carrot on your head isn’t stylish.’

‘In rabbit circles, only the king rabbit gets to wear a carrot on the head. The rest of us must watch in envy as, once a week, he parades before us beneath his carrot.’