Notes: Written for Minim Calibre for Yuletide 2016.

Demento

Fran woke up in the grip of a brain-destroying hangover. "Oh, God," she groaned. She reluctantly peeled her eyelids open - and found herself face to beard with a snoring Manny. "Oh, God," she repeated, eyes widening. She rolled onto her other side where she could pretend he didn't exist.

And saw Bernard Black lying beside her.

"Oh, God!"

The morning only went downhill from there.

"Right," Fran said grimly, once they'd all decamped to the table downstairs. "Who remembers what happened last night?" There was no wine to be found anywhere in the bookshop, so she had to content herself with a calming cigarette. Or five.

"Pah. Who remembers what happens any night?" Bernard said with an indifferent shrug. "You're supposed to start each day with a healthy blank, just like nature intended."

"All I know is that I must have drunk a lot more than I usually do, because I don't remember anything from the last twenty-four hours," Manny said. He rubbed the back of his head. "I feel like someone's been whacking me with a hammer."

"Either that or something so horrible happened that we've all blotted it out," Fran said. She refused to contemplate what, fingers whitening around her cigarette.

Manny clapped his hands together. "Well, anyway," he said, "I'm sure we'll all feel better once we've had a nice cup of tea."

He disappeared through the curtain into the kitchen - and then shrieked.

"I said I'll do the washing up tomorrow!" Bernard called after him with bleary sullenness.

"Help!" Manny yelped. "Assassination! Murder! Other nasty things!"

They shuffled through after him to see what the fuss was about.

Someone had left writing scrawled on the fridge door in smeary, rusty red trails that looked like the desperate fingerpainting of somebody barely retaining the last of their motor skills. HeLP im DyiNg... The words ended in a smudged handprint that turned into a streak sliding down towards the floor.

"Perfectly normal chance pattern of grease after cooking a fry-up," said Bernard.

"It's blood, Bernard, blood!" Manny said. "Somebody was killed in here!"

"Now, Manny, there's no evidence of that," Fran said sensibly. "Probably just another customer looking for a toilet who had a run-in with the thing under the cooker." You had to placate it with some kind of offering if you wanted to get close without it going for your ankles.

"Yes? Then how do you explain... this!" He brandished a sign that had been left propped up in the window. It read, BACK OFF OLD MAN WE WILL DEFEND OUR BOOZE TO THE DEATH.

"Coincidence," Bernard said with a sniff. He waved a hand airily. "And anyway, I've never seen that sign before in my life."

"It's your handwriting, Bernard," Manny pointed out. "And it's written on the back of your 'No unattended children or adults' sign."

"Relax, Manny," Fran said. "It's not as if there's a body. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation." She opened the cupboard that held Bernard's fourteenth emergency booze stash.

A heavily stuffed sleeping bag covered in dark red stains flopped out.

"Perfectly normal... storage stains," Bernard said. He kicked the sleeping bag.

A large knife, coated in something red and sticky, fell out of the end with a clatter. They looked at it for a while.

Then Bernard clapped his hands. "Right!" he said brightly. "Breakfast." He turned to leave, but Fran hooked him by the collar and yanked him back.

"If I'm going to prison for this, we're all going to prison for this," she snarled, nose to nose with him.

"Look, we don't even know if it's a body yet," Manny said. "It's probably, um... a sack of potatoes!"

"In my kitchen? How dare you!" Bernard said.

"Open it up and see, then," Fran commanded Manny.

"You'll see," Manny said, stooping down to lift the end of the sleeping bag. "There'll be a perfectly innocent-" A deathly pale hand flopped out, accompanied by what looked suspiciously like matted strands of sticky red hair. "Aagh!" He jumped back, letting the cloth fall back to cover it.

"Well... I'm sure it wasn't us," Bernard said after a few moments.

"Yes. We're much too lazy to commit a murder," Fran said. Bernard couldn't even lift a fork without getting exhausted from the exertion.

"Probably a... vagrant," he said. "Crawled in here to die." He waved an authoritative hand. "Happens all the time."

"And then he stuffed himself in the cupboard and shut the door behind him," Manny added.

"Yes. No!" Bernard struck him sternly across the side of the head. "Obviously we did that to keep him safe from... predators, while we had a few drinks in his memory as a mark of our respect."

"Lots of drinks in his memory," Fran said, nodding along.

"We're very respectful people," Bernard agreed.

"And then we all banded together upstairs in acknowledgement of our shared brush with the nature of human mortality," Manny completed.

Definitely a watertight reconstruction of events. It was hard to see how anyone could find flaw with it.

"Still, this could look bad," she said after a moment. "I mean, we'd have to convince the police Bernard was innocent."

She and Manny both eyed Bernard. He didn't look like a man who'd ever been innocent of anything.

"We need to dispose of the body!" Manny said. "We need a hacksaw - no, wait, a cement mixer! No, some really really really strong acid. Bernard, what did you do with those jars of pickled onions Moo-Ma sent me for Christmas?"

"Onions? Onions? I didn't see any onions," Bernard said with an injured shrug. "Apart from the ones somebody left in all those jars of wine," he added. "Stupid idea. Very hard to drink around."

"Why don't we just go across the road and dump the body in that skip where they're doing all the building work?" Fran suggested.

"Aha!" Manny said. "You mean a cunning double-bluff to throw the rozzers off the scent by dumping it somewhere so close they'd never believe we were that stupid?"

Actually, she'd just been thinking that the odds of Bernard and Manny being able to carry anything much further than an asthmatic ant weren't good, but she smiled and nodded.

"But how are we going to disguise it?" Manny said.

"I don't know, just wrap it in some old carpet or something." Did she have to think of everything around here?

Prising the carpet off the floor of the bookshop was a lengthy job that required a hammer and chisel, a plunger, and multiple cigarette breaks to recover from the exertion, but eventually it pulled free with a wet squelching sound, revealing floorboards stained a filthy black.

"At least they'll never find the body with that smell," Fran said, covering her nose.

"What smell?" said Bernard, pausing in drinking the bottle of paint thinner that he'd found in with the tools.

He and Fran stood back and supervised as Manny wrapped the sleeping-bag-clad bundle up in the carpet - it adhered with a faint sucking noise - and then struggled to heft it up on his shoulders. "I don't suppose one of you could help me with this at all?" he said, sounding distinctly strained.

"Oh, of course, Manny," Fran said with an encouraging smile. She yanked the shop door open and gestured him out into the street.

Bernard gave him a parting boot to the backside to help him on his way. "Go on, off you go. Chop-chop."

They watched from the doorway as he staggered unevenly across the street, bent nearly double under the weight of his awkward burden. "Just disposing of this old carpet. Haha!" he said airily, to the completely disinterested old man slumped on a nearby bench with a bottle of whiskey. He made several struggling attempts to heft the sleeping bag over the edge of the skip before he finally succeeded in tipping it in over the top.

"There. That's done," he said, dusting his hands as he returned to the shop. He tilted his head contemplatively. "But, you know, seeing how easily the fragile miracle of life can be snuffed out really makes you reflect on the ephemeral nature of-"

"Pub?" Fran said, looking sideways at Bernard.

"Pub!" he said.

"And let's all agree we'll never speak of this again," she said.

They strode off towards the pub, Manny scurrying after.

Twenty-Four Hours Earlier

"Pub!" Bernard said.

Manny scowled at him where he was in the middle of dusting the books. "For God's sake, Bernard, it's ten o'clock in the morning!"

"Is it?" Bernard reeled back, shocked. "Good God, what am I doing out of bed at this unnatural hour? I need a drink." He went to one of the bookcases, pulled down The Whiskey Drinker's Guide, and opened it to remove a miniature whiskey bottle hidden inside a cut-out through the pages.

"You're an alcoholic, man!" Manny said. "You need to wake up and see what this is doing to your family! Of friends. Acquaintances. Coworkers. Employees."

"Nonsense," Bernard said. He drained the whiskey bottle in a single swig, then took a cotton swab from another cutout in the book and swiped it around the inside of the bottle neck to soak up all the remaining moisture before popping it in his mouth to suck. "I come from a very respectable line of Irish drinkers," he said, the words muffled around the cotton.

"I bet you couldn't even go twenty-four hours without a drink," Manny said knowingly.

Bernard opened his mouth to argue - and promptly started choking on the swab. Manny was still in the middle of performing the Heimlich manoeuvre when Fran came in, turning to shrug off her coat with a heavy sigh.

"You wouldn't believe the day I've had," she said, as Bernard made gagging noises and Manny attempted various different chest- and back-pounding actions in the background. "I went to the bank, and an old lady tried to get served ahead of me! I said, 'Listen, madam, you might have been here before me, but you didn't get to the checkouts first, did you? We can't all afford to wait around all day - some of us have to work for a living instead of getting paid a pension just for being lucky enough to be born before the war.'" She shook her head in disbelief. "Some people are just so self-centred!"

She sat down and stretched her legs out with a weary sigh. "Honestly, I could murder a cigarette." She turned her head towards them just as Bernard finally coughed and spat out the cotton swab. "So what's going on with you?"

"I just bet Bernard he couldn't go twenty-four hours without having a drink," Manny said.

"Ha!" Fran threw her head back and laughed. "He couldn't go twenty-four minutes."

"I accept your challenge," Bernard said, drawing himself up with stiffly injured pride. "I'll prove to you that I am merely a light social drinker, and in return, I expect you to pay my weekly booze bill."

"How much is that?" Manny asked.

"Three hundred and ninety-four pounds," he said.

Twenty-Three Minutes Later

Bernard crawled across the kitchen floor, weeping. "A drop," he begged. "Just a drop! The merest sniff. Just open the bottle and let me breathe it in!"

Manny stood on the countertop, clutching the shop's last remaining few bottles of booze to his chest and fending off the weak advances with the end of a mop. "No, Bernard, no!" he said. "Be strong!"

"Strong?" Bernard roared. "I'll give you strong!" He charged the counter, snapping at the mop like a rabid dog. Manny yelped and cringed.

"Oh, Bernard..." Fran appeared in the doorway, waving a gin bottle enticingly. "How about a little drinkie?"

He leapt across the room with a new lease of strength to snatch it from her, upturning the bottle to drink it down in a series of glugging gulps. Then partway through he started to cough and spat it out with a betrayed splutter. "Poison!" he gasped, accusingly.

"Actually, it's water, Bernard," she told him.

He gasped again and clutched at his throat, gagging in horror. "Water? That abominable stuff isn't meant to be taken internally!"

"Quick, Manny, make a break for it!" Fran shouted. He scuttled for the exit with the bottles clutched in his arms.

"Come back here, you overgrown excuse for a garden gnome!" Bernard bellowed, lunging after him, but Fran grabbed his arm to twist behind his back and he sank down with a whimper.

"Dump it in the skip over the road!" she shouted after Manny. "He'll never make it that far in his weakened state."

Bernard flailed feebly before sagging to lie face down on the floor with a pathetic groan.

Another Twenty-Three Minutes Later

Bernard was still in his prone position when Manny returned to the bookshop with an armful of shopping.

"Is he dead?" he asked. Fran, kicking back in the armchair with a cigarette and a magazine, gave an indifferent shrug.

Manny went to stoop over him. "Bernard," he said. "I've bought you some-"

Bernard leapt up like a shark out of water and savaged the shopping bag, ripping it to shreds with his teeth and scattering the contents across the floor.

"Pah!" He spat out a fragment of plastic bag and glared. "What's this?" he demanded, waving a package of tomatoes indignantly before he tossed it aside. "And this garbage?" He hurled a stick of celery at Manny. "None of this is booze!"

"As I was saying," Manny said rather petulantly, gathering up the ruins of his groceries, "I brought you some nice healthy fruit and vegetables to help you detox."

"I don't need to detox," Bernard muttered sulkily. "I'm all tox. If you took my tox away then there'd be nothing left."

"Oh, Bernard, just give it a try," he said. "Look, there's some lovely grapes here." He held them up hopefully.

"Grapes!" Bernard seized them. "Grapes turn into wine." He tore the pack open and stuffed a handful in his mouth, holding them there hamster-cheeked for a few moments. "How long does it take?" he asked indistinctly around them.

Several Hours Later

"Ferment, damn you!" Bernard jabbed at the bunch of grapes with a knife. "Ferment!" He threw them into in a bucket, then added the rest of the fruit and vegetables as well, stabbing at the mix indiscriminately. "Why aren't you turning into wine?" he shouted at it.

He ravaged the kitchen for other ingredients to add to the mix, coming up with two tins of baked beans, a half full bottle of tomato sauce, and a jar of Branston pickle. He twisted the top off the vinegar, prepared to pour it in as well, then reconsidered and drank from the bottle instead.

As he did, his eyes fell on something glimpsed out of the window, and he choked. "Gah, get away!" he spluttered in outrage, waving his arms. "That's ours! Ours! How dare you!"

Manny came scurrying in, wide-eyed. "What? What's happening?" he asked, shoulders hunched, as he stared in every direction like a startled ferret.

"That tramp is stealing our booze!" Bernard said, pointing at where a thickly bearded old man rifling through the skip outside had just discovered the bottles Manny had dumped. Bernard waved his wine-making knife threateningly. "Get away!"

He ripped down a sign and scribbled BACK OFF OLD MAN WE WILL DEFEND OUR BOOZE TO THE DEATH on the back of it, holding it up to the window.

"I don't think he can read it, Bernard," Manny said. He watched for a few moments. "Oh, wait, I'm wrong, yes he can," he added. "Excellent grasp of hand gestures, too."

"Fine!" Bernard barked. "I don't need those bottles anyway! I have my own wine." He lifted the bucket to his mouth and took a gulp, then spat it back out in disgust, swiping his face clean with his hand. "Aagh, what is that horrible taste?" he demanded. "It's vile."

Manny dipped a finger into the bucket and sucked it reflectively for a moment. "Tastes like beans, actually," he said.

"Well, it tastes suspiciously like a vegetable, and I don't like it." Bernard sank to the floor at the base of the fridge with a woeful moan, cuddling his fermentation bucket.

"Only twenty more hours to go!" Manny said brightly.

More Hours Later

Fran sat in her armchair wearing bulky headphones, eyes closed and cigarette flailing carelessly close to the rows of books as she rocked out to the beat. "Yeah, yeah," she sang along tunelessly, and did a little boogie in her chair.

"Fran!" Manny popped up in front of her as she grooved on, oblivious. "Fran!" He lifted the headphones off her ears, and received an immediate punch to the solar plexus for his trouble. "Oof!" He doubled over.

She opened her eyes. "I was listening to that," she said indignantly.

Manny struggled to regain his breath. "Fran, Fran - listen!" He held up a finger. "The wailing's stopped."

They looked towards the curtain cordoning off the living area, and the makeshift barrier of bookcases they'd dragged in front of it.

"Do you think that means it's safe to go back into the kitchen?" she asked.

"Better go prepared." Manny seized the mop, while she picked up a hefty encyclopaedia.

They found Bernard curled up on the floor around his bucket of red-brown sludge, sucking on an empty wine-bottle like a dummy.

"Aww, look, he's fallen asleep," Manny said.

"And he left us a message," Fran cooed. The words 'HeLP im DyiNg' were scrawled on the fridge in a crude attempt at fingerpainting.

"Right," Manny said, turning to her. "Now, this is all for his own good, so it's imperative we make sure there's absolutely no booze left anywhere in the whole building. We'll both have to stay here tonight to keep a close watch on him."

Fran nodded along wisely. "You go and check in the bathroom to make sure he hasn't filled the shampoo bottles with whiskey again," she said. "I'll make another search of the kitchen."

"Right!"

As soon as Manny was gone, she hurried over to retrieve a box from the countertop that was labelled "Rice cakes - Fran's!" and opened it up to retrieve the vodka bottle inside. She lifted it to her mouth to gulp down several healthy mouthfuls. Bernard's head lifted weakly at the sound, like a still-blind newborn kitten questing after milk.

Fran set her foot on his head to shove him back down, and he subsided. "Ahh," she said, wiping her mouth contentedly, and hid the bottle in its box again.

A bet was a bet, but really, if she was going to spend the evening in the company of a sobered-out Bernard, she definitely needed to be drunk.

That Night

The bookshop was in darkness, except for the glow of the lit cigarette that illuminated the mop-haired figure lying face down at the desk.

A stealthy footstep sounded on the creaking floor. Then another.

Then a loud thump, a strangled curse, the sound of someone hopping, a small crash, several more thumps, and an extended session of muffled cursing.

Then, once again, the creak of stealthy feet.

Until the light of a torch abruptly flared in front of the shop door. "Aha!" Manny said, sitting up in his sleeping bag. "I knew it! I knew you couldn't last a single day."

He shone the torch first on the scowling Bernard in front of him, and then over at the slumped figure supposedly sleeping at the desk. The light revealed a pale plastic form with a mop shoved down the back of its shirt to approximate hair and a cigarette taped to its hand.

"My shop window mannequin!" he gasped in indignant shock. "You told me a customer stole that."

"I took it for your own good," Bernard said, glaring. "It was making people think we welcomed customers. Look!" He lifted the mannequin by the back of its shirt and shook it accusingly. "Look at that face! It looks happy. I don't want my customers to come in expecting to be happy. The next thing you know, they'll start thinking the books are here for them to buy!"

He wrenched one of the mannequin's arms loose from its frame and waved it menacingly. "Now, get out there and bring me some booze before I cave in your oversized troll head and use it as an ashtray!" he said. He whacked Manny over the head with the plastic limb.

"Ow!" Manny defended his head with his arms. "Bernard, I- Ow!" Bernard thwacked him again. "It's too late, Bernard!" he finally managed to explain. "The pubs are all closed by now. There's nowhere to get you any booze until tomorrow morning."

"No booze... until morning?" The mannequin arm fell from nerveless fingers as Bernard sank to the floor, staring off into the middle distance as if stunned.

"What's going on down here?" Fran descended the stairs, wrapping her dressing gown about herself.

Manny waved a hand in front of Bernard's apparently sightless eyes. "I think he's gone into shock from alcohol withdrawal!" He bent down worriedly. "Bernard, can you hear me?" There was no response.

"No, I've seen this stage before," Fran said, coming to join them. She leaned into Bernard's space, speaking slowly and clearly. "Bernard, what would you say to going for a kebab?"

He looked up, a glazed light returning to his vacant gaze. "That's... the best idea... I've ever heard..." he slurred.

Fran straightened up. "He's started processing his body's own natural alcohol reserves," she said. "By now his liver must be about six hundred percent proof - he could be drunk for days!"

Manny turned the lights on and then winced. He rubbed the top of his head, whining a little. "Ow, I think I've got a concussion now. And would you just look at the state of this place," he fretted. In addition to the dismembered mannequin, Bernard's furtive sneak across the bookshop had involved knocking over three piles of books, some empty wine bottles, and the fermentation bucket full of vegetable slop.

"Why don't you just take Bernard back upstairs and keep a watch on him?" Fran suggested kindly. "I'll clean all this up."

"Oh, would you? Fran, you're an angel." Manny prodded Bernard to his feet and herded him, zombie-like, over to the stairs. He paused halfway up. "Oh, and don't forget to wake me and check whether I remember anything, just in case I've got a head injury," he said.

Fran smiled and nodded.

As soon as she was gone, she grabbed Manny's sleeping bag from in front of the door, carelessly threw the dismembered mannequin and mop-head inside, and then poured the sloppy red contents of Bernard's wine-bucket in after it, knife and all. She shoved the whole lot away in a cupboard where Manny wouldn't see it, then retrieved her vodka stash from the counter and took a healthy swig.

"A toast!" she said. "To forgetting this whole bloody evening ever happened." She tipped it up and drained the rest of the bottle.

Then she staggered upstairs to where Manny had fallen asleep supposedly watching Bernard, flopped down on top of the two of them, and promptly started to snore, dead to the world.