Making Money

It was called Big Cabbage because it was home to the Biggest Cabbage in the World, and the town’s inhabitants were not very creative when it came to names. People travelled miles to see this wonder; they’d go inside its concrete interior and peer out through the windows, buy cabbage-leaf bookmarks, cabbage ink, cabbage shirts, Captain Cabbage dolls, musical boxes carefully crafted from kohlrabi and cauliflower that played ‘The Cabbage Eater’s Song’, cabbage jam, kale ale, and green cigars made from a newly developed species of cabbage and rolled on the thighs of local maidens, presumably because they liked it.

Then there was the excitement of BrassicaWorld, where very small children could burst into terrified screams at the huge head of Captain Cabbage himself, along with his friends Cauliflower the Clown and Billy Broccoli. For older visitors there was of course the Cabbage Research Institute, over which a green pall always hung and downwind of which plants tended to be rather strange and sometimes turned to watch you as you passed.

And then … what better way to record the day of a lifetime than pose for a picture at the behest of the black-clad man with the iconograph who took the happy family and promised a framed, coloured picture, sent right to their home, for a mere three dollars, P&P included, one dollar deposit to cover expenses, if you would be so good, sir, and may I say what wonderful children you have there, madam, they are a credit to you and no mistake, oh, and did I say that if you are not delighted with the framed picture then send no further money and we shall say no more about it?

The kale ale was generally pretty good, and there’s no such thing as too much flattery where mothers are concerned and, all right, the man had rather strange teeth, which seemed determined to make a break from his mouth, but none of us is perfect and what was there to lose?

What there was to lose was a dollar, and they add up. Whoever said you can’t fool an honest man wasn’t one.

Round about the seventh family, a watchman started taking a distant interest, so the man in dusty black made a show of taking the last name and address and strolled into an alley. He tossed the broken iconograph back on the pile of junk where he had found it — it was a cheap one and the imps had long since evaporated — and was about to set off across the fields when he saw the newspaper being bowled along by the wind.

To a man travelling on his wits, a newspaper was a useful treasure. Stuck down your shirt, it kept the wind off your chest. You could use it to light fires. For the fastidious, it saved a daily resort to dock-weed, burdock or other broad-leaved plants. And, as a last resort, you could read it.

This evening, the breeze was getting up. He gave the front page of the paper a cursory glance and tucked it under his vest.

His teeth tried to tell him something, but he never listened to them. A man could go mad, listening to his teeth.

When he got back to the Post Office, Moist looked up the Lavish family in Whom’s Whom. They were indeed what was known as ‘old money’, which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.

They’d been rich for centuries. The key players in the current crop of Lavishes, apart from Topsy, were first her brother-in-law Marko Lavish and his wife Capricia Lavish, daughter of a famous trust fund. They lived in Genua, as far away from other Lavishes as possible, which was a very Lavish thing to do. Then there were Topsy’s stepchildren, the twins Cosmo and Pucci, who had, the story ran, been born with their little hands around one another’s throat, like true Lavishes. There were also plenty more cousins, aunts and genetic hangers-on, all watching one another like cats. From what he’d heard, the family business was traditionally banking, but the recent generations, buoyed by a complex network of long-term investments and ancient trust funds, had diversified into disinheriting and suing one another, apparently with great enthusiasm and a commendable lack of mercy. He recalled pictures of them in the Times’s society pages, getting in or out of sleek black coaches and not smiling very much, in case the money escaped.

There was no mention of Topsy’s side of the family. They were Turvys, apparently not grand enough to be Whoms. Topsy Turvy … there was a music-hall sound to it, and probably Moist could believe that.