The Beach
It was barely late afternoon when we awoke, one by one, to the screeching of seagulls circling like carrion birds above us.
“Ugh,” moaned Lord Chatfield, “my head.”
The sentiment was more or less universal.
The setting was a white sandy beach set against a brilliant turquoise sea, not a cloud in the sky and not a single tourist in sight. The faint but heady aroma of woodsmoke and fried chicken drifted in on the ocean breeze. It was, by all accounts, nowhere close to being the worst holiday we ever had.
“Is everyone, like, still here?” groaned Mr Simon, the Home Secretary.
Excepting Lord Chatfield and Mr Simon himself – there was Lord Bountmatten, of the Imperial Navy; Major General Warchibald Navell, of the Army; myself, and, of course, our valiant chief, the recently appointed Governor - General of East Hook Island, who requires no introduction.
But something was wrong.
“Lads,” rumbled the Governor, warily dusting the sand off his enormous red party glasses and affixing them precariously to his face, “where’s all the bitchez?”
As far as we could all remember, we had all been practically drowning in native snatch only a few hours before. The girls had been dressed in grass skirts and coconuts and some kind of floral necklaces which did little to nothing to augment the coconuts; and not a single one of them had been, (as far as any of us could recall) invisible.
We looked up, down, left, and right, but not a single native girl, nor a single necklace, nor even a single coconut - half was anywhere to be found; the only noteworthy thing we happened upon was what appeared to be some kind of light aircraft, painted red all over with a white racing stripe running down the middle of the fuselage, lying upside down on the shore.
We thought nothing of it at the time.
“Lads,” the Governor remarked at the moment we finally gave up the search, “This is well out of order. We must have been proper bladdered last night.”
“Alright,” suggested Mr Simon, “let’s think back. We woz at the club, with all the beer and the bitchez and this, and then…”
“I think I heard a bunch of loud noises,” said Lord Bountmatten.
“You mean the music?” chimed General Navell.
“No, it wozn’t the music.” The Governor slowly shook his head, his brow furrowed in intense concentration underneath the big red party glasses. “It was all, like, bang! Bang! Rattatatat!”
“That’s wot the music sounded like to me,” observed Mr Simon.
“No, Sibo, you absolute remtard, I isn’t even talking about the music, though!” The Governor was getting impatient. “There woz a shitton of well bright flashes, and –”
“Okay, bruv, that is definitely sound like you is thinking of the club, though,” Sibo reasoned. “Is you, like, a spastic or something, bruv?”
“No!” General Navell interjected, suddenly very excited. “Winnie’s actually right, though! There woz a bunch of bangs and flashes and we all, like, ran outside, and –”
“There woz a bunch of planes overhead –”
“Yeah! And, like, a shitton of boats and this on the beach –”
“And a bunch of wankers jumping out of the boats into the water –”
“And the planes woz doing all, like, well sick flips and spins and loop - de - loops and this, and dropping flares all over the place, so we ran to the airport to find a plane –”
Five bleary but increasingly panicked pairs of eyes turned as one to the upside - down aircraft on the beach, which – we had failed to notice – was trailing some kind of large canvas banner out of its shattered window. We made our way over to the landing site, weaving around assorted debris and empty beer bottles strewn about the place, until General Navell rolled out the banner for the rest of us to examine. A large, vaguely phallic image drawn in what appeared to be red crayon all but confirmed our worst fears.
Mr Simon spoke for all of us. “Bruvs,” he said, “I think this is probably our plane.”
“Which means –”
“We isn’t on Hook Island anymore.”
“Isn’t it, though,” Lord Bountmatten agreed. “But where is we now, though?”
That was a question none of us could yet begin to answer.
“Ah, we’ll worry about that l8r,” said the Governor. “I is well starving, though. Let’s go get some NANDO’s for breakfast and then we is all, like, put our remembering hats on and remember wot we did last night.”
“Yeah, but hang on a minute,” mused Mr Simon, “isn’t NANDO’s, like, on Hook Island, and we is, like, not even on Hook Island anymore, though?”
“Fair point, Sibo,” the Governor conceded. “I is, like, well thirsty, too, though? So let’s go find the nearest watering hole and then we can figure out how to get back to NANDO’s in time 4 dinner.”
This being the best available option, naturally we all agreed.
Despite our impressive powers of recovery, at this point it is fair to say that we were all still a little bit under the weather, and so it was fortunate for all of us that we did not have to walk very far before we stumbled upon our next clue.
“Look!” exclaimed Lord Bountmatten – being a career sailor, the most farsighted of the bunch – the moment we rounded the first bend in the coast. “Land ho!”
“Wot is you even talking about Bounty, we has already looked 4 all the hoes and there isn’t any,” piped Mr Simon.
“No, I mean, it’s, like, more land, and it’s ahead of us and this, on the other side of that really small ocean,” explained the Admiral, with that air of patient superiority which an expert must sometimes assume when attempting to communicate with the uninitiated.
“But why iz the island on fire, fam?”
Bountmatten rolled his eyes, his Ulyssean patience wearing thin at last. “No, Sibo, you absolute mongoloid, the lads on the other beach has obviously lit a smoke signal 4 us, isn’t it? We is saved!”
We spent the next minute or so calling out across the strait at the top of our lungs – to no avail. We were forced to conclude that either the lads on the opposite shore couldn’t hear us, or – more likely – they had given up the search and rescue effort for the evening and gone back to the pub.
The next breakthrough came shortly thereafter.
“Bruvs,” exclaimed an excited (if rather out - of - breath) Mr Simon, “Look wot I just found!”
There, laying a little ways up the beach, was a giant, crimson - red letter “N,” half buried in the sand.
“NANDO’s can’t be far away!” He continued, apparently almost overcome with relief. “Come on, we has gotta hurry b4 they all is queuing out the door and spewing in the car park and this!”
We might have all followed him without a second thought if not for the quiet ruminations of Lord Chatfield, who had silently observed all these developments with an air detached but discerning skepticism.
“Wot’s it doing on the beach, tho?” he asked.
Silence.
After a long pause, the Governor was the first to speak. “That is well random,” he agreed.
It was, indeed, a most irregular sight.
“Hang on, lads,” Chatfield murmured, quite clearly deep in thought and increasingly troubled by the thoughts he was thinking. “Hang on a minute…”
We all turned to him expectantly.
“Wot is it, Chatters?”
Suddenly, his eyes widened. Grimly, like a man who could not quite comprehend what he was seeing and almost didn’t want to know, he turned back to the smoke signal on the opposite shore – then pointed a few degrees off to the right.
“Look!”
It was then that we laid eyes on the fleet. Barges of every size – small, medium, large, and extra large – arrayed row upon row against the far shore; packed to the brim with guns and trucks and armored vehicles and bustling with activity, with a bright red flag waving proudly atop every mast.
Looking back on it, it is somewhat surprising that we never noticed it before.
“It’s all, like, boats and shit,” reasoned Mr Simon. “And they is all parked together, like cars at the NANDO’s carpark, but on the water, yeah?”
We looked from the boats, to the unattended smoke signal burning vigorously on the far shore, to the bright red “N” half - buried in the sand on our side of the Strait, and came one by one to the same terrible conclusion before anyone dared to voice it aloud.
“Lads,” said the Governor at last, “I think we’s been had.”
“The Basiltards must be doing some kind of pub crawl on Hook Island,” Mr Simon murmured.
“And they stole all the booze and all the bitchez,” agreed General Navell. “And…”
“And they blew up our NANDO’s,” finished the Governor, his voice laden with that quiet, indescribable fury that every so often made lesser men quake in his presence.
The sun had set before any one of us recovered the power of coherent speech.
No further explanation was required. Each of us knew perfectly well that NANDO’s extra spicy peri - peri sauce was one of the most combustible elements in the known universe. One little incendiary bomb in the right place would have been all it took. The evidence was irrefutable: we had just borne witness to the most terrible war crime in the history of Kerbin.
The only silver lining was that we were all too plastered to remember a thing.
Of course, it is only in the darkest hours that a man’s true character shines through, and so it should come as no surprise that the Governor was the first to speak.
“Lads,” he rumbled, grave but determined as we had ever seen him, “we is not having this. We is not having this 4 one minute.”
“Bruv,” wailed Lord Chatfield, “NANDO’s is, like, totally blown up, bruv. Wot is there even left to do, bruv?”
“Shut up Chatters,” roared the Governor. “This Communist bullshittery isn’t going to stand, isn’t it!” He paused for a moment, drawing himself up to his full height and pacing left and right along the shore, and we could see his ginormous brain muscles working overtime inside his gloriously balding skull. He was just getting started.
“I tell u wot we is gonna do, lads. We is gonna get the hell out of here, and then we is gonna find the Imperial Fleet, and then we is taking our Lad’s Holiday back.”
“Winnie, m9,” whined an incredulous Lord Bountmatten, “is you even remember wot happened the last time you tried an amphibious inva –”
“Shut up, Bounty!” the Governor thundered, and I, for one, will wager that, for the first time all evening, his voice carried all the way across the strait and into the waiting ears of the enemy.
“I is hereby declaring myself the First Lord of the Ladmiralty, isn’t it? We is going back 2 Hook Island to take back wot’s rightfully ours, yeah? We is fight them on the beaches. We is fight them on the landing grounds. And we is fight them in all the other places. We is never bitch out! And we is going to retake our NANDO’s if it’s the last thing we ever do.”
With the matter decided, we resolved to plan our next move at the nearest pub.