The Post Office of Doctor Moreau (2/5) By Kenton Hall

(1/5), (2/5), (3/5), (4/5), (5/5). Part 1.

I remember the one time Moreau and I worked together so vividly, it is as though it has been tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. (When, in fact, what I have tattooed on the inside of my eyelids is a butterfly with the name "Sandy" patterned across its wings - and a Frankie Goes To Hollywood logo.) As you may guessed, being a protagonist-for-hire comes with certain lifestyle limitations. Personal relationships, love, family, comfortable shoes - these were the things we traded in order to bring narrative satisfaction to the literate masses. But Moreau would never accept that.

We were assigned to retrieve a trio of sacred pine needles - on behalf of a small, primitive village in Essex - before their gods became angry and visited Estate Agents upon them.

Ordinarily, this would have meant great personal injury, a fleeting but tragic romance and the loss of at least one of the needles to a counter-agent from Villains 'R' Us, who, of course, planned to use it to power a device which would locate and reanimate the bodies of dead Teamsters. At least thirty countries would be visited and many, many good people would die. Moreau, on the other hand, was of the opinion that a story could have a happy ending, provided we employed appropriate narrative pace. In a little under three days, we had retrieved the needles, returned them to the village and opened a fete.

More importantly, I had met Sandy, the woman I would eventually marry and who would bear my son, Daniel. Moreau, for his part, was appointed as Protagonist General and successfully lowered the page of consent from page 113 to page 3, which made us all VERY happy.

In order to counterbalance the seeming breeziness of the adventure, Moreau made sure that all of our obstacles were handled by other agents almost, but not quite, out of our field of sight, lending the enterprise a healthy dose of irony and comic relief. It was amazing. For years, he chipped away at the various facades we had created, the excuses we used to make life more difficult for ourselves, and never once robbed us of any of our flavour or character. The very process of correcting the world lent a charming narrative disparity that was wonderfully impossible to understand.

As he once said, "While the past remains imperfect, the present remains tense. The future, dear boy, that is our paradise."

All good things must be beaten to death with bricks, however, and one night the dream was well and truly shattered. Moreau was returning home from the Embassy, as usual using a route that somehow managed to avoid rush hour traffic, pass a delightful yet inexpensive frozen yoghurt store and then always arrive in time to claim the last parking spot on the street, directly outside his home. He was about halfway across his expansive lawn - bred in such a way to always appear freshly mown - when a harpsichord dropped from the sky and landed on his head.

That was the problem, you see, with Moreau's worldview. It just didn't allow for the fact that into every life a little harpsichord must fall. He survived, as I'm sure you've surmised, but something had happened that was to change all of our lives forever. The blow to the head has rendered Moreau's highly-tuned sense of perfection - to use a technical term - wonky. He still saw a world out of order with itself, but his vision for how it ought to be put right was now extreme and more than a little deranged.

Continued...Next Page (3/5)

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