5

Murphy and Pkofflunnel walk over the rough terrain on the mountainside. Mooney stays behind them with his gun. He talks as he walks. He loves talking, releasing herds of words into the wild, but unlike most people's herds, his lack organisation. Words go where they please. Sentences that start off in the direction of the watering hole end up mating with other sentences next to the tree.

Some of the words he sets free:
"I suppose you'd call it 'France'. I've never called it 'France' myself, but I've heard other people do it. I've heard other people do lots of things. Sometimes you just have to tickle someone with a feather to hear them do something. I know someone who tickled someone else with a gypsy. Only the gypsy laughed. If you could tickle someone with a giraffe you'd probab..."

That word was probably going to be 'probably' but it's cut short by an indecipherable sound that makes birds fly away. The sound is an ideal accompaniment to Mooney's fall. The gun flies out of his hand. You shouldn't release guns into the wild like that. Release bullets only after you've aimed the gun at an appropriate target (preferably not a bird, unless that bird is beating up another bird), but never send your gun out. It may well fall into the wrong hands.

It falls at the feet of a man with the wrong hands. At least they're wrong from Mooney's point of view. They've always felt right on the end of Murphy's arms. The gun feels right in his right hand. His left hand feels naked, but, as we've already seen, Murphy has no qualms about part or all of him feeling naked.

"Well well well," he says. "It seems as if the tables have been turned. "First things first. Where's... what's her name again?"

"I don't know," Pkofflunnel says. "I used to call all of the nurses 'Andrea'. It's easier to remember one name than twenty or thirty. Her name could be Andrea, but then, it could be something else."

"I used to call them all 'Emily'. They thought that was funny. Let's say her name is Emily."

"Why not Andrea?" Pkofflunnel says.

"We'll compromise and say it's Amilea. Where's Amilea?"

"I've never heard of her before in my life," Mooney says.

"The nurse you kidnapped. Where are you keeping her?"

"I was taking ye there."

"Why would you take us to where you're keeping her?"

"So I could keep ye there as well."

"Makes sense, I suppose. Right then, lead the way. And if you don't take us to her you're going to be spending a lot more time with nurses over the next few months. They won't be good nurses like Emily or Andrea or Amilea. They'll be bad nurses, like... Animal. She'll make you eat live chickens."

They walk for hours. Murphy spends most of the time making fun of Mooney's hiking outfit. They come to a valley with a lake at the bottom. It's a beautiful, inviting sight. Come to me, it says, rest by my waters, drink me. They can't resist. They walk quickly towards it. Murphy has the gun. He stumbles on the way and he releases the gun into the wild. Mooney has been waiting for his chance to pounce, and pounce he does. Like a cat with a knapsack on his back, he jumps on the knapsack on Murphy's back. The gun is on the ground in front of them. Murphy reaches out for it. Pkofflunnel runs towards it. Mooney dives for it, and he gets it.

"Well well well," he says. "It seems as if the tables have been turned. How ironic."

"How is it ironic?" Murphy said.

"That's just a figure of speech."

"How is it a figure of speech?"

"'Figure of speech' is just a figure of speech. In other words, take your clothes off."

"You're jumping all over the place here. It's like the film script in your head is getting all mixed up. 'Take your clothes off'. 'How ironic'. 'Yes, Miss Daisy'."

"At least in my script I didn't stumble and drop the gun, letting my arch-rival get it."

"Actually, you did. And you're not my arch-rival."

"Oh I will be. You just wait and see. You'll curse the day you ever made fun of my hiking hat. Now take your clothes off. All of them. Both of ye."

"What sort of films do you watch?"

"You'll see. Ye're going to have to pay twice as much if ye want to see her alive again. But before that, ye're going to be seeing quite a bit of each other."

They un-dress. Mooney makes them put their clothes in a pile, which he sets on fire, and then he throws their camping equipment into the flames. He lets them keep their shoes. "Stay there until I'm over the hill. Ye can stay there for longer, if ye like. It could be romantic. The two of ye alone next to a lake, with all this magnificent scenery around ye, and a roaring fire to keep ye warm. I feel like laughing, the laugh of an evil genius, a typical arch-rival. Aha ha ha ha ha. No, that's not it. Aha, no."

They hear him practising his laugh as he walks away. Murphy says, "Do you think that if we were photographed together without our clothes it would only fuel the fire of those rumours?"

"Shut the f**k up."

"What do we do now?"

"How would I know. How does the film in your head end?"

"Right now I'm just thinking of those rumours."

"We've got to try and follow him. At least we can see where he goes. There's a good chance he'll go to see her."

"Okay then. We wait until he gets to the top of the hill, then we run."

When Mooney gets to the top of the hill he turns around and waves, then he disappears over the other side. Murphy and the prince run towards the hilltop, but it's difficult without shoes.

They get to the top of the hill and they see Mooney about to disappear over another hilltop. "He's heading back towards his house," Murphy says.

"We can't follow him like this. Someone's bound to take a photo, and it'll end up on the front page of some tabloid. How am I going to explain that?"

"We'll just have to find some clothes?"

"Did you see any clothes shops during our hike?"

"When I said 'find' I meant 'steal'. I thought that was obvious. We passed a farm on the way. There was clothes on the clothes line."

They go to the farm. They hide behind a hedge around the garden at the back of the farmhouse and they look at the clothes. One of them will have to wear brown trousers and a shirt with stains on it. The other one is going to have to wear a dress.

"Do you want to wear a dress?" the prince says.

"What do you think?"

"Okay. We'll toss a coin."

"Where are you going to get a coin?"

"Oh yeah... Paper, scissors, stone."

Murphy goes for stone. The prince goes for paper. "Paper covers stone, pauper. Get in the dress."

"You've said that before, haven't you. Get in the dress, pauper."

"Stop complaining and get on with it. At least the dress is clean."

"Typical royalty. Ye have paper and we have stones. In a fight we'd win, but ye'll never come within a stone's throw of us."

"It's the smell that keeps us away. Come on, get in the dress. It's not as if I want to see you in a dress but it's a million times better than seeing you out of a dress."

They go into the garden and take the clothes from the line. The prince puts on the trousers and the shirt while Murphy puts on the dress. They leave the garden, and they run again when they hear a voice behind them, a woman in a dress at the back door of the house, then the sound of a shotgun. "She wears a dress so much better than you do," the prince says, "and she can hold onto her gun too. I bet she holds her drink better than you too."

They keep running until the farmhouse is out of sight. They stop for a rest. "There's no point in attacking Mooney's house before it gets dark," Murphy says.

"Isn't that what we said last night?" Pkofflunnel says. "It didn't do us much good then."

"There was nothing wrong with waiting until it got dark. The mistake we made was leaping before looking. Don't break into a room if you're going to come up against a man with a gun, especially if you don't have a gun."

They wait in a shed on the side of a hill. When darkness falls they leave the shed and they climb to the top of the hill, only to find the cover of darkness shattered by a fireworks display. There's a festival on in the town in the valley beneath them. The town folk hold this festival every year to ward off the evil spirits who spat on their butter.

Murphy and Pkofflunnel link arms as they walk into the town. They're trying to act like a couple, and Murphy is trying to act like a woman. They can drop the act when they're hidden amongst the crowd, but Murphy is in even more danger as a single woman. A man puts an arm around his waist and says, "You're the most beautiful woman I've seen outside of a prison."

Murphy says, "Come with me and I'll show you what I used to do when I was incarcerated."

He leads the man down a dark alley. Pkofflunnel waits at the corner. He hears the sounds of a fight, and shortly afterwards Murphy emerges from the alley wearing trousers. He's buttoning up a shirt. The man lying on the ground in the alley looks dazed, but then a faint smile appears on his face when he sees the dress next to him and he realises he has an excuse to wear it.

By the time Murphy and Pkofflunnel leave the town they've both managed to steal black clothes. They make their way to Mooney's house, and before proceeding with their operation they stop to consult a book called 'The Idiot's Guide to Safely Rescuing Kidnapped Nurses'. Neither of them like the word 'safely'.

There's a light on in the barn behind the house. They look in the window and they see Mooney inside. The nurse is there as well. She's sitting on a chair. Her legs are tied. Her hands are free so she can eat her dinner. Mooney is pacing, talking.

"Do you think he had her here all along?" Murphy says.

"Maybe. She could have been in the house."

"We should have brought a weapon."

"You should have left the dress on."

"We're just going to have to take him by surprise."
"You really should have left the dress on."

"I'll throw a stone at him through the window at the other side and you throw a stone through this window just after it."

Mooney is talking about getting dirty when rolling around on carpets. He's lost in one of his favourite anecdotes. She takes no notice of him as she eats and he takes no notice of the fact that she takes no notice. He's happy in his shell but that shell is shattered by two stones and two men in black. They both have the same man-on-a-mission-rescuing-damsel-in-distress vision. The prince's vision doesn't involve reflective sunglasses. He sees horses and muskets.

Mooney finishes his anecdote when he's tied to a chair. "She thought the dirt came from me," he says.

"Who wouldn't?" Murphy says.

"I see ye've got clothes. I hope ye had a lot of fun before ye got clothes."

"We were going to leave you here tied to the chair," Pkofflunnel says, "but I have a better idea."

They make Mooney take his clothes off and put them into a pile, and then they set his house on fire.

As Murphy and Pkofflunnel walk away with the nurse, Mooney is wondering if he should put his clothes on before trying to put out the fire.

4

Maria falls in love with Hank. They waltz in the ballroom of an Austrian castle, they kiss on the balcony of his penthouse, make love next to a lake in Switzerland, laugh at inappropriate jokes in Monte Carlo and stare into each other's sunglasses in Nice. They travel all around the world. There's a very interesting story about a funny looking dog in Russia. Maria will gladly tell it, if you ask her about it.

She never forgets about Murphy and Pkofflunnel, but her love fades. She believes they're dead until she arrives in Nice with Hank. It's July now, and she sees Murphy and the prince all over the press. The papers report a love affair between the two men. The two men in question haven't contradicted this story because it covers what they were doing in the mountain with the nurses.

Murphy thought that Maria didn't care enough about him to look for him after he went missing. Then he heard about her and Hank and he thought she didn't care about him at all.

Murphy and Pkofflunnel are living together. Pkofflunnel lets Murphy stay in his house, which fuels the fire of the rumours, despite the constant trail of women and women's clothes from their bedrooms. They're always arguing, like the odd couple, but despite this they become good friends.

Breakfast on a sunny morning. "That woman you brought home last night looked as if she'd been doing something to her face," Murphy says to Pkofflunnel.

"They all do things to their faces."

"Something she shouldn't have done. Or something where she thought, 'This might work out really really well,' and then regretted it later."

"I didn't bring her home for her face."

"You're royalty. You can demand the best. You don't have to settle for women deficient in the facial area."

"She wasn't deficient anywhere. It's all in your mind. You've been doing something to your mind."

"We all do things to our minds."

"Something you shouldn't have done."

"We all do things we shouldn't do. Every time we get drunk it's something we shouldn't do, and think of all the things we do that we shouldn't do when we're drunk. Imagine the things we shouldn't have done, but we did, and we can't remember doing them."

"You've done something to your brain with scalpels and tweezers."

"That's what that woman did to her face."

"There was nothing wrong with her face."

"I suppose it depends on the light."

There's a letter for Pkofflunnel in the post. It's from Mooney. The envelope contains a photo of a woman tied to a chair. Despite the gag covering her mouth and the look of fear in her eyes, Pkofflunnel recognises the face. It's one of the nurses. The letter is a ransom demand. 'She told me everything,' the letter says. 'She'll die but her knowledge will live on, unless you pay me two million euros...'

The money is to be left behind a rock near a path on a mountainside. Murphy and the prince go there at the appointed time, five o' clock in the afternoon. They leave a bag behind the rock and then they hide, pretending to be bird-watchers/hikers. They have camping equipment and binoculars.

A hiker walks by. "That's him," Murphy says.

"How do you know?"

"He's not a real hiker."

"He looks real to me."

"He's too real. He might as well be singing 'Fol deree, fol derah, fol deree, fol derahahahahahahaha, fol deree, fol derah, my knapsack on my back.'"

"Fol deree, fol derah, fol deree, fol derahahahahahahaha, fol deree, fol derah, shut the f**k up."

They can hear him whistling as he casually walks towards the rock. "Who in their right mind would demand that we leave the money behind a rock?" Murphy says.

They watch him as he looks all around before picking up the bag and looking inside. They can hear an F word when he realises that the bag is empty.

They follow him back to his house, a long trek through hills and valleys. His song is now a stream of expletives. It's nearly dark by the time he gets to his house. Nearly dark isn't nearly dark enough for breaking into houses. They wait until after midnight before breaking in. Mooney is there with his new friend the gun. He says, "Ye don't seriously believe I'd keep her here, do ye?"

His gun doesn't say anything but they're still afraid of it. He leads them outside at gunpoint. It's a cold night. They look up at snow-capped peaks and stars sparkling in the sky. He takes them to his barn. He handcuffs them to an old plough. "Try to get some sleep," he says. "It'll be a long day tomorrow."

It's a long night trying to sleep on the hard floor of the cold barn. The prince isn't used to cold and hard. Warm and soft are what he's used to. Murphy is has more experience with hard and cold, or cold and hard, but he still struggles to sleep.

In the morning Mooney takes off the handcuffs and tells his captives to go outside. "And take the camping equipment," he says. "Ye're going on a long hike. Carrying all that crap on your back will make it much more enjoyable for me."

He points towards a hill in the distance and tells them to start walking in that direction.