Tim blogs for me today

Sherlock Tom and the Mystery Of The Missing Margaret

It took me several moments and a brief but thoroughly entertaining pantomime session before I could place the face in front of mine as that of David Stratton, well-known movie critic and human being. Like vengeful pandas from the sea, memories rose to the surface of what passed for my brain. A blissful sleep interrupted. A wonderful dream, shattered. A bunch of armed men, busting into my room and sedating me with horse tranquilliser directly to the eye, before bundling me into a nondescript white van, gagging my mouth with the neighbour’s cat and careening off down the street.

David patted me on the shoulder in a vaguely reassuring manner as I attempted to discreetly wipe my mouth on his carpet. “Now, now, Tom, I must apologise for the rudeness of my men here,” he said, gesturing widely with his spotted hand at an empty corner of the room and a small wrought-iron lamppost. “But it was imperative that I speak with you at the earliest opportunity. Margaret! My dear Margaret has vanished!”

Margaret! Of course! The last vestiges of sleep-fog evaporated from my cat-addled brain. Margaret Pomeranz, David’s infamous counterpart in the movie-reviewing circles. My chest tightened and my pulse began to beat faster as I cast my mind back into the hazy mists of the past, and my body struggled to keep up. The fond memories, the hours I’d spend watching her on the television, all came flooding back to me. The way she gave every single movie a rating no worse than three and-a-half stars. The way her hair fell over her eyes when she laughed. The way she flicked her hands around, so that I could never tell whether it was a nervous tic or a cute attempt to cover up the onset of Parkinson’s. She was my two-dimensional movie matron and I loved her.

I opened my eyes. “I’ll do it!”, I exclaimed loudly. “Excellent,” said David, as he smacked me across the back of the head with a grand piano. I awoke to find myself at a local movie theatre, enjoying the last fifteen minutes of what appeared to be Action Movie VII. I munched the popcorn that I had apparently purchased and made disparaging remarks about the quality of the plot-line and background music, ignored by the raucous surrounding crowd. Ducking my head, I ran over to the corner of the theatre, where I began to sneeze vigorously, until finally I ejected a small, folded-up piece of papyrus and several other small, unidentifiable organs which variously bounced, splatted or rolled into the darkness, palpitating.

I unfurled the paper with shaking, bloodstained hands. “Tom,” it read, “This is the last place Margaret was seen. She was campaigning for the Office of Film and Literature Classification to reconsider their ‘X’ rating for Debbie Does The Football Team, and was threatening to show a copy to the public in defiance of their edict. See what you can find. Yours, David.” I tucked the paper back into my nose for safekeeping and went to have a look around.

Several hours later and covered in an array of small, unidentifiable scratches and bruises, as well as a thick layer of dust and soot, I was discovered by a wandering usher inside the popcorn machine. Given that I was irredeemably lost and had been travelling in circles for hours, I reasoned that I might need his help. My attempts to break the ice with jokes about the unjustly famous rap star Usher did not go down too well, and with shouts of “Stop, peasant!”, and the well-applied end of a torch, I was once again rendered unconscious.

This time around, I awoke to find myself in a chair. It was a badly-designed metaphor, and I said as much to the man I found sitting at the desk in front of me as I extricated myself from it. His moustache apologised profusely and begged me to sit down as he explained himself. I took a seat on my chair and listened with all the ears I could muster. “I know you’re after Margaret Pomeranz,”, he stated with a prescience unmatched in mortal realms. I took the moustache at his word, but he continued: “You’ve come to right place. Margaret was here last night, but she was arrested by the police and taken away.” I visibly blancmanged, and my chair skittered away into the corner, whimpering, as I shot to my feet.

“Taken away?!?” I sputtered, “Arrested? The only women to ever rate a Vin Diesel movie and not commit suicide, and they took her away!? Where?! I demand answers!!”. If the moustache could somehow read my multiple exclamation and question marks, he was unfazed. He stood up and walked over to the corner, calming down the whimpering chair. “I understand your anger, my friend. Perhaps you will find the answers you seek at the local constabulary.” In my anger, I was uncaring. I threw open the door and flung myself through it, body-first.

In a matter of a few days, I was on the street again. I had been rendered unconscious several times by ushers whose tolerance for my highly exaggeratedly bad sense of direction was growing thin. Passers by looked at me strangely, suspects all. Who could be trusted? Who could I turn to when the OFLC themselves were out to destroy everything I held dear? I hunched my neck into my coat and strode off down the street, stopping every few paces to clutch my neck and wince in an exaggerated comedic fashion.

Soon enough my feet arrived at the police station, and were shortly followed by my body, having been subject to a most unusual temporal delay caused by mixed metaphors. I opened the door and strode myself inside. “Ho, fat man!”, I announced boldly, “Where are you keeping her? Where is she? Where is my beloved?”. An elderly policeman took kindly to my raving at a recruitment poster on the far wall and ran me down with his car.

By now, I was developing quite a convenient callus as my head, and as such I was bleeding merely profusely as I awoke to discover myself in a jail cell at the back of the local constabulary. “Sir?”, came a sweet and familiar voice, “Sir, are you alright? They said that you needed to ‘sleep it off’ when they threw you in here, a performance which I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed.” Leaning over me was the sweet elfin face of Margaret Pomeranz, and to make matters better, it was attached to her body. I wrapped her in a bear hug that I kept in my pocket. “Margaret, dear,” I sputtered, “What happened?”

She span to me a tale of mystery and intrigue so thick and tangled that it began to pool around my feet and spill out into the hall. I struggled to stay afloat as she spoke of conspiracies and plotting at the highest level, and as the tale reached the roof, the walls of our cell could take no more. They buckled and heaved, spattering bricks everywhere and propelling us outwards of the cell into the back alley in a wash of plot, colour and sound.

I gave Margaret a hand to steady herself as she got to her feet, shaking and soaked in conspiracy theory. She looked at my detached hand uncertainly and put it into her pocket for safekeeping. “I’m glad you’re okay, Margaret,” I said, “and I must admit that I came into your story expecting better things. It started off with a splash of colour and action, but it readily became apparent that the director’s formulaic approach to the stock-standard ‘movie-critic-gets-kidnapped-and-framed-by-OFLC-who-are-secretly-controlled-by-Night-Elves-from-Warcraft-III-because-they-think-you-look-too-much-like-an-elf-even-though-this-fact-was-never-made-apparent-during-the-story’ plot line had steered a potentially entertaining movie into a dull piece of cinema that entirely lacked interest. I was very disappointed, and I’m going to have to give it one-and-a-half stars. Tell David he can waive my usual fee.”

As I walked away, Margaret snuck up behind me and beamed me with a wall. I didn’t feel a thing.