Gumma-Mumma!
Gumma-Mumma!
Gumma-Mumma!
Gumma-Mumma!
Caught in the momentum of the masses' rush, they entered into a low-ceilinged cavern of stone, carved from the deepest darkest warrens of the sewers. The above chant – pounding, trance-like, somewhat grating – was already in full swing.
Alongside more than a hundred mean looking sewage workers, all waiting expectantly before a ramshackle stage lit by the unearthly glow of flaming trash cans, flaming candles, flaming torches and flaming flames, our undercover Crumpet-Hands Man and Detective Pilchard (and hat) were lost in with the crowds, the whole mass chanting between chews of their clandestine gum:
Gumma-Mumma! Gumma-Mumma! Gumma–
The chanting ceased, replaced with fawning rejoicement. A large figure warbled onto the stage, their little arms, like matchsticks protruding from a boiled egg, held aloft in gratitude. The crowd went mad – this was indeed their god.
While the sewage workers basked before the portly figure with religious servility, Crumpet-Hands Man swiftly rotated his deaf-and-blind partner back in the direction of the stage. (In all the delirium, unbeknown to the detective himself, he'd somehow gotten himself turned around.) Also-unbeknown to the detective was the fact that he was currently pointing his huge cartoon eyes at a fellow worker's paunch.
“What you looking at?” the worker sneered, more than ready to trade blows with this Puff. “You like a bit of fat on a man, huh?”
Stamp! “But for the price of a pound of mutton!”
“Fair point, chum,” the worker bowed, easily convinced.
With a boom the doors to the cavern were bolted shut. The chew-tinged cheering descended into a masticating murmur. The mood hushed, the flames dimmed. Some toon in a big hat burped “BHAAAAR-MUTTON!” On the chime of a gong, thus, the meeting began.
“Comrades!” the figure upon the stage proclaimed in a shrill and kinda-feminine bellow, chewing on a glob of pink gum with all the cultured sophistication of a pitbull gnawing on a prosthetic limb. “Our endeavour is almost at an end! By tonight we will have succeeded in strangling Trifle City of its precious water supply!”
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Up like a geyser went another cheer; before it came back down again, Crumpet-Hands Man took the opportunity to visually interrogate the portly figure holding court atop the stage – a figure, he now realised, he and the detective had encountered in the tunnels of Chapter 4...
This was a large lady, her circular eclipse cast in the aura of the flaming flames. She was practically spherical, akin to a spud with a face, the only features which dared interrupt the curvature of her globe-like form being her stumpy limbs and her pea-atop-a-potato head. Yet these attributes in no way detracted from the woman's presence; she was indeed as imperious as she was oval. Like a general fresh from the battlefield she wore grubby maintenance overalls just like those of her comrade audience. Cropped, purple, neon-tinted hair, bound in a tight ponytail, tugged at the corners of her mean face. She wore thick-lensed glasses and a perpetual sneer, as though a short-sighted librarian squinting disparagingly at a world of small print. Crumpet-Hands Man could well picture this woman in such a habitat as a public library, for she maintained the spiteful expression of one who toiled in the spirit-sapping corridors of some local bureaucracy; he was willing to bet her name was Karen.
“–In a few hours our plan will have succeeded, and the scum of this city will know the same suffering which I endured for so long.” the woman screeched on, wrapping her warbling jowls around a piece of gum the thickness of a truck tyre. “Without water the city's inhabitants will find themselves dirty, filthy – the very condition I warned would inevitably befall their surroundings less they mended their ways. For years I implored these people to keep their streets tidy, to pick up their chewing gum, dispose of it hygienically. 'Pop it in the bin, damn it! Don't be spitting it all over the pavement!'” the woman cursed reminiscently, turning a shade of crimson two-tones darker on the vexation scale than her hair. “But who listens to a powerless nobody, a faceless council worker? A Towns and Indoor Tidiness Supervisor formally known as Karen?”
“Ah ha!” our hero clapped.
“But for the pri-!”
“Shhh! Not yet, detective!”
“Sorry...I mean, yes?”
“Fair point,” the sewage worker blahed. The Karen went on.
“Well,” she sneered to her adouring crowd, rubbing her little hands maniacally, “let's see if these slovenly fools regret not adhering to my instructions when they've no running water to rinse their pig-headed heads. Then they'll listen! Then they'll listen to Gumma-Mumma!”
Every sewage worker in the cavern raised a fist, cheered. For the sake of appearances, Crumpet-hands Man raised a crumpet, albeit gloved.
“So, comrades, we will fight-on!” the embittered woman wailed. “We will wreak vengeance! We will show this city the error of its ways! And will we succeed?”
“Yes!” the crowd, the riverdancing hero and the wide-eyed cartoon in the Russian hat all replied.
“Will we be victorious?”
“Yes!”
“Will we triumph?”
“Yes!”
“Will we be silenced?”
“Ye-No!” (Feet-a-flame, tapping left foot to right like a convulsing Fred Astaire, Crumpet-Hands Man was doing well to even hang on to the yes!ing detective in such a toilsome rabble, never mind instruct him.)
“And, come the end,” Gumma-Mumma roared from the verge of the creaking stage, “when every citizen in Trifle City is dripping with gum and unable to move, I ask you – Will our actions be justified?”
The climatic eruption of so many gum-filled yeses was almost deafening. The only oddity to disrupt the unity was a sole shriek of:
“But for the price of a pound of mutton!”
Silence. “I mean... Yes?” came a tiny voice. (Followed by a burp.)
But the detective's correction had arrived too late. It seemed that our heroes covers (as well as the eyebrows of those standing nearby) had been blown.
