A Bright Moon for Fools

by Jasper Gibson

  They took me to search my flat. The atmosphere had relaxed and, as we drove across town, Detective S. was telling me about his love of real ale. The relaxed atmosphere, however, had not extended to a third officer in the car, who looked just like the singer Tricky, and insisted on saying everything very close to my face. We pulled up at traffic lights. My mother’s cousin was loading shopping into her car.

  “That’s my mother’s cousin,” I said.

  “Do you want us to stop and say hello?” said Detective P.

  “Yeah,” said Tricky, who was sitting next to me in the back. He leant close to my face. “And give you a slap?”

  “No thanks.” I said. We drove off.

  Outside my flat I made a request. “I’ve just moved into the building. Any chance you can take these cuffs off?”

  “Yeah, no problem,” said Detectives S. and P.

  Tricky came up very close to my face. “If you try and run,” he hissed, “I will personally knock you down.”

  “I’m wearing Timberlands,” I replied, “and you’ve got my shoelaces.” Tricky looked down and grunted with satisfaction.

  Once inside the flat, they quickly satisfied themselves that I was what I purported to be: an untidy writer. Tricky sat me on a stool in the corner of the kitchen, folded his arms and stood watch. Ostensibly this was a search for weapons-grade plutonium, though I was still in the dark as to where the idea had come from that I was involved in black market nuclear arms dealing. My flat had a secret room behind the back of a cupboard. They failed to find it. They did, however, find some rather private photographs of my then-girlfriend Peta.

  “Who’s the brunette?” shouted Detective P. from the bedroom.

  “Hey!” I shouted, standing up. “Leave those alone!” This was the moment Tricky had been waiting for. He shoved me back on the stool and started bawling threats into my face. The other detectives carried on floating around my flat, picking things up and having a bit of a chat. This wasn’t how I imagined a counter-terrorism search would be. It felt more like an episode of Through the Keyhole.

  “My name is Jasper Gibson,” I said into the microphone several hours later. “And I’m writing a book about removable vaginas.” The detectives were giggling. They were ready to start the interview. One left the room to fart. Then, finally, they were ready to tell me what had happened.

  An off-duty traffic policeman from Leeds, who owned a boat in the marina, had been listening to our conversation in the Wibbly Wobbly. He was either half-deaf or a complete fantasist, and had so selectively handpicked individual words from what we were saying, that he had convinced himself he was in a Die Hard movie and I was Alan Rickman.

  Where had the plutonium idea come from? Suddenly I remembered:

  T–: “The other option is your characters could use a radar jammer, like they use in jet warfare.”

  Me: “Yeah, but that would make them more conspicuous, not less, right? If the radar was suddenly jammed.”

  T–: “True. Also they probably couldn’t get their hands on a radar jammer.”

  Me: “That doesn’t matter. This is fiction. They can get their hands on whatever they want; weapons-grade plutonium, light sabers, you name it. They’ve got removable penises. Sky’s the limit.”

  But instead of calling Darth Vadar, this man had called the Met.

  With the interview terminated and my shoelaces returned I was finally released. The door to another interview room opened. Tricky walked in and behind him was T–! Only it wasn’t T– . They had managed to arrest the only other person in the pub that night who had a beard. I burst out laughing. Tricky didn’t seem so keen to get close anymore.

  The custody sergeant exhaled and shook his head. “Don’t,” he said, “please don’t.” The not-T– burst into a torrent of expletives.

  When I returned to the Wibbly Wobbly the following week, more details emerged. The manager told me how the pub had suddenly flooded with fake couples who ordered gin and tonics and only drank the tonic. Despite such massive amounts of surveillance, when T– left the pub, they had somehow managed to lose him and, in a panic, had raided all the houseboats until they finally found someone with the right facial hair. A waitress trying to get home had found her car surrounded by machine-gun toting officers screaming at her to get out. She was so scared, she collapsed and hit her head.

  The off-duty traffic policeman and boat-owner was known to the publican and they had barred him for life. Someone stuck a policeman’s helmet on the bow of his boat and graffitied ‘pig’ along the side.

  I didn’t feel sorry for him, but I did feel sorry for the detectives – except for Tricky, of course. They were under an enormous amount of pressure and that call had put unstoppable wheels in motion. Plus, they never found my plutonium. If anyone wants some I’ll be down the Wibbly Wobbly next Friday.