mp clarke

One day on the seabed there was a Restauranting Ray, and when I say restauranting, I mean restauranting. He ate out every single minute he could. Breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and supper. Every time he felt like something to eat, he was off out. There’d be croissants and coffee at the local bakers or maybe a bacon sandwich at the transport cafe. There’d be tea and crumpets at the restaurant in the department store down the road or perhaps a chocolate surprise or two at the sticky sweet shop. There’d be a steak platter down the pub or even a corned beef baguette, sitting in the local deli. Very often he’d try a mid-afternoon beans on toast at the Tempting Turbot’s establishment or a plate or two of vol-au-vents at the Hotel Oceania in the middle of town. In the evening you’d find him maybe grappling with a gigantic German game pie at the Kaisercellar in Tide Street or, more often than not, he’d be winding his way through a plate of delicious fresh spaghetti at the new Italian down Current Chase.    

                 If he wasn’t at work, then he’d basically be out eating. It wasn’t that he was a pig or anything though. He just loved the atmosphere of an eatery wherever or whatever it was. He didn’t go there for the sake, and he wasn’t overweight; he just loved his food and he loved eating it out. The amazing thing with all this was that he never ever ate alone. It was always in company. Even if he’d just popped out for a cappuccino and a biscuit, it would always be with someone else. He didn’t set it up like that; it just seemed to happen. He’d either bump into somebody on the way down there and invite them to join him; or else, more often than not, he’d know somebody wherever he was going, and within a few minutes they would have been offered a place at his table and a plate or a cup of whatever they wanted. As you can imagine this sort of behaviour made the Restauranting Ray a very, very popular bloke. He was well known across the whole seabed for his generosity, his chat and his just general good-to-be-withness. You could always rely on him for a joke. He was always ready for a laugh. He was first into his pocket to pay for anything. And you would never, ever hear a bad word from him about anyone. He was a bit of a diamond geezer really.

               When he moved into the area he bought a place just on the edge of the town centre. Two bedrooms. A couple of reception rooms. Bathroom. Reasonable sized garden. Kitchen diner. Nothing out of the ordinary I can hear you say. Well, yes that’s true; but what he did to it after he’d bought it was another kettle of fish completely. He gutted the kitchen diner immediately for a start. The whole lot went into a skip. He didn’t need it, you see! Not for anything. So, the room became a living memento of his meals out. The walls were covered in photographs taken inside restaurants, up at bars, in cafes. Everywhere the Restauranting Ray had been eating or drinking, a picture would be somewhere in that room. As well as that all the bills that he had paid when he’d been out were pinned up all over the place. On the doorframes, around the windows, on the ceiling. Everywhere. He even had some napkins, signed table clothes he’d been given, beer and wine glasses, plates. Anything you can think of really, from inside a restaurant or a bar or a café, could be found in that room. And it didn’t stop there. Once something had been around for a few weeks, it was taken down, neatly packed away in boxes and stored up in the loft, and its place was taken by the next piece of memorabilia that he picked up from his eatings out.

                His wardrobes in his bedroom were a sight to behold. You see, wherever he chose to eat he would always make sure that he was dressed in exactly the right attire for that place. For example, if he visited a greasy spoon cafe for a full English, he had his oily boiler suit on. If he went to the ‘Crystal Tea Rooms’ at The Coral Hotel, he wore a dinner jacket. His designer suits and shades were ideal for the Italian restaurants he visited and his baseball caps, jeans and trainers meant that he looked like part of the furniture when he tried the various burger joints scattered over the seabed. Whenever a new restaurant opened, he made it his business to fit in there immediately. Some of them were more difficult than others though. You know those places where you’re not really sure what sort of food it is? It could come from anywhere. Like scrambled eggs on toast or roast chicken with fried potatoes or mince casserole or a plate of steamed fish with bread or a ham sandwich. Those places he found a bit more awkward. He used to try to start with the name of the restaurant; that usually gave a clue or two. I mean ‘Luigi’s’ or ‘The Delhi Delight’ or ‘The Great Wall of China’ were pretty obvious but when he was faced with names like ‘The Continental Restaurant’ or ‘The Tiny Tearooms’ or the ‘Eatasmuchasyoulikefortwo’  brasserie, things became a little bit more confused. This didn’t stop the Restauranting Ray though. Oh no! The route was simple for him. A chat with the owner at the bar. A few drinks bought here and there. A gossip with a few of the locals and he was in. Within a couple of visits, he would have sussed out the whole history of the place, down to where the owners were before; where the money for the place had come from; who supplied the food; what their plans for the future were and where their chef was trained (and in what style of cookery). The clothes just seemed to follow on from this. 

              The wardrobes in his bedroom were jammed to such a bursting point that he’d had to spread out to other parts of the house and even the garden, to find places to store all his eating out clothes. They were his pride and joy. All of them. And he never, ever threw a set of clothes out, whatever state of repair they were in. If a place shut down or something became so tatty that it was just too far gone to wear, he would simply fold it up, put it in a plastic bag and store it up away in the loft with all the other stuff from his trips out to eat.

               His work clothes were the poor relation in all of this though. Yes, he made sure that they were always washed and ironed and ready to wear but he didn’t give them the intensity of attention or the love and thought that he gave to the clothes that he wore when he went out eating. After all there’s only so much leeway in what you can really practically wear when you’re a dentist and that’s exactly how the Restauranting Ray looked at it. His clothes for his job were functional, needed to be there obviously but were not something he really gave much thought about. A pair of plain trousers and a white dentist’s top. That was his outfit every day for work, and he never ever changed from that. But I don’t want to give the impression, that because he didn’t like to give too much thought to his work attire that he didn’t care about his job. Far from it. The Restauranting Ray was a dentist supreme.

               His practice was situated right on the edge of the Ten Mile Reef and was one of the most successful on the whole of the seabed. He had folk coming to visit him from all over the place. Apart from his reputation as a technically good and careful dentist, his abilities as a sociable and chatty bloke brought the customers flooding in. And with the customers obviously came all the money as well. He was earning a fortune. Well, let’s face it, he had to really to feed his restauranting habit! But there was a dark secret lying behind the Restauranting Ray’s dental practise and what went on there. The fact was that the income from his clients alone was simply not enough to pay for all his visits out to eat and he had found a somewhat unethical way of supplementing it. 

               The vast majority of the customers who visited his practice chose to take ‘The Gas From The Coral’ option. This involved a piece of fresh red eye coral from the Ten Mile Reef being strapped gently across their mouths with adjustable bands. After a few minutes the narcotic qualities of the gas that seeped from its pores would start to take effect and the client would gently slip off into a deep sleep. The Restauranting Ray would then carry out whatever work he had to do before strapping on a piece of blue eye coral that would, with the gas that it emitted, within a few minutes, bring the client out of their deep sleep ready for a friendly word or two and to pay their bill.

               The payment of the bill however wasn’t enough for the Restauranting Ray. Whilst the majority of his clients were asleep, basically he robbed them. If any of them had gold fillings or a gold crown from a previous dentist, he would take them out and replace them with fake ones. He would go through their jacket pockets, handbags, wallets and whatever other personal belongings they had brought with them, and he would take something. It would generally be some expensive jewellery of some sort or maybe a credit card or a mobile phone. Over the years during his visits out he had met a number of people who were only too willing to take these items off his hands and give him money in return. Nine or ten of these thefts a day would, over the course of a month, add up to a huge amount of cash and hence a huge amount of meals out. It always seemed to go like clockwork. Yes, the customers would nearly always discover they had lost something, but they trusted the Restauranting Ray implicitly and would never, ever suspect that it was him who had actually taken the things. Some of them used to come back and ask if anything had been handed in but he was so sincere in his answering and always so ready with a joke that they always went off smiling, looking for their stolen stuff elsewhere.

              And so, this continued day in day out, week in week out, year after year with never a suspicion directed at the Restauranting Ray. That was until the fateful night he ate out with the Obese Octopus. That evening he had nothing other than sweet stuff. Cakes, puddings, chocolate. All he wanted was anything full to the brim with sugar. He occasionally used to do that. Get a fetish for something and really go for it and nothing would stop him. That night he just went for the sweets with a vengeance and that was the beginning of his downfall. You see, the Obese Octopus, as well as being very fat, was also very inquisitive and would never, ever really let anything go until he had got to the bottom of it. When he woke up the morning after being out with the Restauranting Ray and he had got over his hangover, the fact that a dentist was eating so much sweet stuff really bothered him. It didn’t make sense. He was always lecturing everybody on how eating too much sugar was bad for your teeth and there he’d been the previous night going at it hammer and tong. The Obese Octopus just couldn’t put it out of his mind for the whole day and for some reason it started to link with the fact that on the last two visits to the dentist he’d lost some money and eight sets of golden cufflinks he’d had in his bag. He couldn’t explain to himself why there was this link in his mind, but it was there and it was really, really bothering him.

              That afternoon he made an appointment for a check-up. It was the usual scene as he arrived. A handshake or eight, a few blokey jokes and then up onto the chair for the coral treatment. This time however the Obese Octopus had a plan. He’d decided to stay completely conscious for this one and he’d decided to do it without the Restauranting Ray knowing it. The coral would only work if it stayed in place for at least a minute and what the Obese Octopus did to stop this happening was, (when the Restauranting Ray was checking his drills and all the other stuff he needed), he lifted the red coral away from his mouth and only put it back when his dentist friend turned around and came over to start the treatment. So basically, he hadn’t been drugged, although he pretended he had been, and he was completely aware of what was going on around him and what the Restauranting Ray was doing. The Obese Octopus just couldn’t believe his eyes.

               The first thing the Restauranting Ray did was to quickly check that the Obese Octopus was, as he thought, unconscious. Once he’d done this, he started to rob him. A few more cufflinks and a rifle through his wallet this time. He was just on the point of lifting out the Obese Octopus’s Visa card , from his jacket hanging up on the door, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

“What on earth are doing?”

He turned around to see his octopus friend floating towards him with a more than irritated look in his eye. Well, the Restauranting Ray just completely lost his cool. He didn’t think about making an excuse or trying to pretend it was just a joke, he just scarpered. Out through the surgery door and off over the Ten Mile Reef. Within a few seconds he had completely disappeared out of sight.

                 The Obese Octopus quickly took out his mobile and phoned the police, and within the hour the Restauranting Ray had been picked up and taken to the local nick for questioning. Now the legal system down on the seabed was a little more advanced than the one on the surface. They didn’t immediately take things for granted and slam somebody in prison just for the sake of it. The authorities wanted to try to understand what had made the Restauranting Ray behave in the way he had been behaving. So, the Wise Wiztor was called in and his patient was given a bit of psychoanalysis, a bit of hypnotism, a few cuddles here and there and a large portion of Wise Wiztor magic and the solution was found. What had basically been happening was that the Restauranting Ray was a victim of kitchenphobia ie a hatred of the kitchen. The Wise Wiztor had found out that a few things had happened in the ray’s past in kitchens that had permanently scarred him. For a start he’d seen his mother continually burn Yorkshire puddings in there. He’d witnessed his father unfortunately put the knives away where the forks were supposed to go and vice versa. And he’s even seen his Uncle Roy touch his Granny Rita’s ink firer in there on one fateful Christmas day. All these incidents, along with many others in kitchens, had turned the Restauranting Ray into somebody who couldn’t stand everything that room in the house stood for. So, from a very early age, he started avoiding them and this gradually evolved, as he reached his teenage years, into the beginnings of his obsessive need to eat out and his gradual metamorphosis into the Restauranting Ray and all that entailed.

                   The solution to the problem was simple really and the Wise Wiztor, in his wisdom, spotted it immediately. He used his spells to take the letter ‘k’ out of the Restauranting Ray’s mind. So, whenever anybody spoke to him about a kitchen or he thought about a kitchen, he registered it as ‘itchen’ and just started scratching. This was simply solved by some cream that the Wise Wiztor gave him. So, the horrific memories of that word from the past just left him. He had a new room built in his home called the Noodlydoodly Room instead of being called the kitchen. And he went on to live a full, active and honest life. That Wise Wiztor really is a clever bloke. Don’t you reckon?