Mrs Pearl Tulip and the Reverend Aaron Titus

“Would your congregation go for these haydns?” The peach-stone faced woman nervously asked the Johnsonian preacher. The Reverend Aaron Titus rubbed a wet brownish yellow finger between his lips. He held his Sunday flock in such contempt that he often referred to them as “custard creamers” and suchlike. From time to time Titus would look for unorthodox après communion snacks to, as he put it, “liven those ruddy Anglican plebs.” Pearl Tulip’s oblong shaped suffocatingly small bakery and café was more than ideal to purchase such tea dipping eccentricities. Mrs Tulip handed over the Reverend Titus a sample of a haydn. Looking very bovine as he slowly chewed said article Titus meditated upon infinity and the banality it would entail if any of his custard creamers redeemed their way through the pearly gates.

Mrs Tulip’s suspense was interrupted when a professional wrestler you’d be hard put to recover a needle from waddled through the shop door “Do you happen to stock Mendelssohn’s Finest Baking Flour?” He flatulated. Mrs Tulip had plenty; the gargantuan constipatory gentleman informed her he only needed one packet. “May I also have a cappuccino please?” Politeness being a requirement for membership of The Guild of Wrestlers of which he was vice president.

Titus shook his head. As Mrs Tulip stepped towards the coffee machine the disappointment on her face aged her by five years, leap ones at that. The haydn biscuit was the fourth that he sampled. From painful experience Pearl Tulip knew that eventual failure to satisfy the preacher would culminate in a tsunami of profanity. The professional wrestler glanced towards Reverend Titus who in turn glared his bloodshot jaundiced eye back at him. The cappuccino was completed.

If such a beverage was served in Italy it would result in three things. Excommunication, concrete moccasins and Saint Peter hurling you into the abyss. The wrestler paid Mrs Tulip and slowly drank his mug of boiled dishwater and chocolate algae.

The Reverend’s eye began to pulsate. Mrs Tulip surveyed her cramper than cramped oblong shaped bakery cum café to make sure there were no customers for who even a parental guidance certificate would be deemed unsuitable. For the Reverend Aaron Titus did indeed use “language that some viewers may find offensive”.

Watching the Reverend’s eye tremble the wrestler had in mind those Tex Avery cartoons where the angry man’s face would turn tomato red and the top of his scalp would be lifted up approximately a foot into the air by a volcanic eruption arising from his skull. You must remember those cartoons. Rolf Harris used to showcase them on his ‘Cartoon Time’ programme before the news unless ‘Charles in Charge’ was on.

However I (as a storyteller) digress and must return to Mrs Pearl Tulip, the Reverend Aaron Titus, the wrestler that you couldn’t find a knitting needle in and build up some suspense leading to the inevitable “tsunami of profanity” that will emit from the preacher’s mouth.

Pearl Tulip just stood there.
The wrestler just stood there.
Pearl Tulip looked at the wrestler.
The wrestler looked at Pearl Tulip.
The Reverend Aaron Titus’s eye pulsated.
And pulsated.
And pulsated.

“Oof!” Went the religious gentleman as he and the wrestler that a golden retriever would be flummoxed to rescue Cleopatra’s needle from were corseted against the 20p-a-go dispenser that contained sugared purcells all different colours and all tasting exactly the same as the last one by “I know what I’m buying darling.”
“No you don’t. Leave it to me. Could we have a box of six almond handels?”
“Don’t listen dear; we just need six ring doughnuts.”
“Are you kidding? We’ve got guests.”
“So? They can eat the ring doughnuts. Almond handels cost more than they’re worth.”
“You are so tight you won’t even get jam doughnuts. A box of six almond handels if you be so kind.”

The married equivalent of everyone’s favourite bingo number carried on their bickering over jam free ringed doughnuts and the substantially pricey almond handles. Both ignorant of the Holy wrath that was about to occur within Pearl Tulip’s miniscule emporium.

The floorboards vibrated. The Reverend Aaron Titus’s Johnsonian frame wobbled and his eye pulsated out of its socket millimetre by millimetre.

Then.

Swear words, profanities, oaths and curses of every shocking hue exploded from his great mouth. A great wind emitted from the Reverend’s throat filling Pearl Tulip’s hyper-cramped oblong shaped bakery slash (or if you prefer) hyphen café.

The haydns pelted the bags of Mendelssohn’s Finest Baking Flour causing them to tear and flood the floor with their contents. Mr and Mrs Dum and Dee were buried alive under all the doughnuts that Mrs Tulip had on offer plus both plain and almond handels. As for the professional wrestler he was knocked cold by broken plastic and flying sugared purcells that were released when the dispenser exploded under pressure.

Falling bricks, falling tiles until rubble was left.

Calm.

But still shock.

The wrestler lay there knocked out cold by the cheap sweets that settled upon him. A deadpan Pearl Tulip saw a car wash green paramedic approach the scene.

“Is that the famous wrestler Gargantua McGriffin? We’ve been looking all over for him. Turns out that our surgeons did a botched job and left an anaesthetic needle within him.”
“Search away.” Said Pearl.

© 2009 Clinton Morgan