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Scorched Balls on the High Seas
An episodic naval mystery by Konstantin Lepyokhin.
PART 1 - FIRE IN THE CANTEEN
"Kendall's balls are on fire Sir!" exhaled Petty Officer Southall with a just a hint of excitement detectable in his voice. Lieutenant Van Den Hauwe, unflustered as ever, stared off into the middle distance, in imperial terms 2 feet 7 inches, of his admittedly cramped quarters. "We've been at sea for 64 days, Southall, we're all feeling a little bit..." "No! Sir! His balls are actually on fire, Sir!"
Van Den Hauwe sighed and arched his arm gracefully through the air scooping an officers cap from a desk laden with other peoples paperwork, spun on his heel and quickly followed Southall through the claustrophobic corridors festooned with pipes and other grey painted metal things, all the while making sure not to break out into anything as undignified as a trot or a jog.
When Southall disappeared around a corner into the canteen, Van Den Hauwe followed his lead and on entering was confronted by a chef in checker trousers and a toque hat expending a carbon dioxide extinguisher into the groin of an agonised sea man. “Stop! You might crack his balls off!” a voice was heard to shout from somewhere behind a hot plate with a solitary sausage on it.
On the two officers entrance everyone stopped what the were doing and stood to attention, with the exception of the chef who continued to extinguish and the stricken seaman who continued to roll around howling in a disconcerting manner.
Van Den Hauwe surveyed the situation and silently recognised that while the fumes had certainly extinguished the fire it was debatably if the continued testicular exposure to a jet of freezing gas was alleviating the man’s suffering. “I think he’s had enough, Chef Sheedy” he said, carefully pronouncing the words ‘Chef’ and ‘Sheedy’ as to minimise the potential for sounding stupid.
Unused to criticism, or perhaps only too familiar, Chef Sheedy stopped and sullenly ambled off into the kitchen, trailing the clanking extinguisher behind him. Two first aid men were fetched and the singed sea man was strapped to a stretcher and eventually removed from the canteen through it's narrow entrance with all the tender loving care of a duo of incompetent removal men trying to get a sofa out an apartment.
With these departures, only Southall, Van Den Hauwe and three sailors now remained at the scene of the perplexingly indiscipled episode. Of the three sailors, stood in a line and sandwiched between the two rows of plastic benches, one was picking at grubby nails, an other seemingly attempting to catch sight of his own eyebrows while the last in line stood casually with hands in pockets while whistling an apparently inaudible tune. Van Den Hauwe suspected shenanigans.
“You three!” the Lieutenant said accusingly “what do you know about what just happened here?”. A chain reaction of elbow nudges went down the line until the end one, with no one to elbow, reluctantly answered. “Sir! All I know is we were having breakfast when I noticed a column of black smoke coming out of Kendall's trouser area and when we alerted him to the column of black smoke coming from his trouser area, he undid his fly and we saw that he was very much alight, Sir”.
Van Den Hauwe wasn’t having any of it. “Do you seriously expect me to believe this man’s ba…test…gro…this man’s person just caught ablaze of its own accord?” The three shrugged stupidly.
“OK, all three of you report to Captain Wilkinson Corduroy-Brown’s quarters at 14.00 hours sharp, I can assure you are going to get to the bottom of this. In the meantime I want you scrubbing the decks, do you understand!” “But Sir, this is a submarine” one answered back sheepishly. Van Den Hauwe liked to imagine he was an officer on one of the Royal Navy’s grander battleships. “We’ll surface then!” he retorted not quite covering up a rare faux-pas.
The men were dismissed and Southall sent to inform the Captain. Van Den Hauwe stood alone in the canteen. Removing his cap, he wiped his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief. It was humid at the best of times on board a submarine and that fact was no less so in the aftermath of someone’s balls having been set on fire.
What will happen next in this exciting story of torched balls? Part Two coming maybe
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He has arrived, the mountebank from Bohemia, he has arrived, preceded by his reputation.
Evil Dr. K "The Jimmy McNulty of Payment Protection Insurance"
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