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Driving Lessons Chapter 68 - Black Magic Woman
America knew there was only one thing to do, so he did it (whilst holding a baby and trying to feed it at the same time with a bottle and also jig it up and down - who knew motherhood could be so difficult?).
"Hello? Artie? We have a problem." (He'd already decided that it was their joint problem and not just his.)
"Can't talk, Alfred old chap, I have a problem with a tiara." England said.
"I've got a baby."
"You've had a baby?"
"No, I've got a baby."
"Why do you have a baby?"
"Why do you have a tiara?" America asked, forgetting the problem with the Queen Mary tiara and how he, Prussia and Denmark were going to steal it.
"I hope this baby is not anywhere near my house?"
"Gotta go." America hung up as the baby spewed up quite impressively.
Back in the nightclub...
"Oh damn, it looks as if I'm being summoned, excuse me your Majesty, I really am most sorry but…"
England disappeared and reappeared in Tesco, some 50 miles away in a shower of golden stars. He was still clutching the remains of the tiara stuck together with chewing gum.
Belarus was chanting to herself, "The tears of a thousand year old Nation…" (Denmark sniffed here) "… into the skull of a sacrificed soul…" (she used an empty Starbucks cup with the moniker 'Bob' on the lid) "…by the light of a full moon…" (the flickering overhead strip-light).
Belarus quickly stopped chanting when she saw him. "Arthur!" She exclaimed. "I'm so glad you're here," she said. "I don't want to have to deal with these two on my own… oh, is that the tiara?"
"Yes it is… erm… why am I here?"
"She summoned you," Prussia pointed out.
"She used my tears," Denmark said. He was still crying quietly.
"Right…"
"She told him fairies don't exist, but I've told him they do," Prussia whispered to England.
"Have you heard from Alfred?"
"America? Nah. Hey let me look after that tiara for you. It looks heavy," Prussia said, attempting to take the tiara from England's hands.
"He rang me and said he had a baby," England said, stepping away from Prussia and putting the tiara back into France's handbag.
"Why are you carrying a handbag? I hope you're not going all peculiar on me," Belarus said.
"He's always been bloody peculiar," Prussia said. "Wait! Can men have babies then?"
"Is there really no fairies?" Denmark asked, still in tears.
Everyone ignored him. "Well I'm going to deliver this tiara back to Her Majesty, once I've found some super glue, and then I'm going home to see what on earth America is on about."
"Oh yeah, that kid," Denmark said, nodding, wiping tears from his eyes.
Denmark showed England his phone with a picture of America cradling a child.
"Please tell me he's back in DC?"
"Nein, he's sat on your sofa." Denmark said. "It looks like a Nation. It's not human is it?" Denmark added, pointing out the weird aura that most Nations/Principalities/Regions/Capital Cities/States had around them (or in Russia's case - pulsated around them in a weird glow from time to time) that only other Nations etc could see.
"Where's he got the baby from? Please tell me he hasn't stolen it. I can't cope with this. I already have a stolen tiara to get back to the royal family. If I find he's bloody stolen a royal prince as well…" England's voice was getting more and more frantic and panicky, totally ignoring Denmark's words that the child was actually probably not human.
"He didn't steal the tiara. You did. I think you're going gay." Prussia pointed out.
"It wasn't my fault. It happened to be attached to a veil."
"I married a gay," Belarus said with an anguished howl.
"You married an idiot," Prussia said.
"Where is Angleterre?" France asked Sealand.
"He's bloody gone with my… I mean the tiara," Sealand replied. "Someone's summoned him. Probably Belarus."
"I thought she could only summon demons?"
"Well he is one isn't he?"
"Well he can be a little grumpy in a morning, non?"
"The Queen's bloody angry with him and I don't blame her. Oh, there's the police sirens… gotta go." Sealand said and slipped out of a fire exit.
"Ah oui! Votre Majesté!" France suddenly exclaimed. He then hopped over the heap of bodies and got himself and the proprietor of the nightclub a cocktail. He was lucky that he was a favoured clientele of that club and that the boss liked him. He proceeded to tell the said proprietor all the latest 'gossip'. But he was stopped by some rather large bodyguards who told him that he was no longer welcome in the establishment as it was not the first time he'd brought it into disrepute.
"But pourquoi?" He asked with a wail.
They listed the reasons and they were not nice: the nun fancy dress party, the Canadian Gay Rodeo Riders Annual Party, the time Denmark visited ensured most of the staff left in a huff and the place got wrecked and now this. They then picked him up and threw him out of the door.
"Mon poncho!" He cried when he saw his most salubrious piece of clothing had ripped. "This cost me five pounds at ze aéroport," France whined as he stood outside in the pouring rain without his handbag. It was 1 am and the paramedics had just taken someone outside on a stretcher with a Chanel lipstick stuck in their ear, a black eye and possible shock. France noticed that it was the (probably) gay English prince and hurriedly turned away so that he wouldn't be spotted by said prince and then headed for his car.
He wondered vaguely where Angleterre was and then realised that the rather pleasant vibrating feeling coming from his pantalons was his phone informing him he had an incoming call.
"Ah Angleterre!" He said, utterly delighted.
"You randy old pervert!" England shouted at him.
"Moi? Of course."
"Have you bloody fathered yet another bloody kid?"
"Eet eez of course possible."
"And left it at my house for a bloody laugh?" England added.
"Oh non." France said, rummaging in his pockets for his car keys. He found them, got in the car, realised that he had never driven in the UK without England or some other unfortunate and hesitated for all of two minutes while England shouted at him down the phone.
"Where are you mon cher?" France finally asked, ignoring the diatribe about babies and America which for France was interchangeable.
"Tesco."
"Oh bien, pick me up a nice Rioja, s'il vous plait."
"No I bloody will not! Get your arse back to my house and see what's going on. Actually no don't, come here to Tesco in…" here England conferred with Den, Prussia and Belarus. "….Reading."
"Reading?" France frowned and started the engine and backed into a police car, then drove over the kerb and then drove off down the road, zig zagging a little. He had no idea where Reading was. But he had freedom. Freedom of the open road. Something he'd never had before. He came to a roundabout and sat there for a while thinking. Did he give way to traffic from the left or the right? There didn't seem to be any point in thinking too much as there was no traffic and so he drove on anyway. England was still prattling on about some baby or some such that had been discovered in a wicker basket at his house. France felt sorry for the child. England's house really need redecorating. A whole new look and France vowed he would undertake this when he got back.
"What a cute baby!" The Tesco checkout woman said to Den as he held out the picture of the child on his phone to her.
"It's not human," Prussia said.
The woman looked at the four people in front of her. The woman in the blue dress looked very scary and was holding a bottle of vodka as if her life depended on it and saying it was for her 'big brother'. The one with the red eyes, the one who'd said that the child wasn't human was throwing a miscellany of goods such as nappies, tins of beans and a potty into a trolley. The one with the wild hair, the one holding the phone was leering at her and telling her he made 'good father material'. The other one, with messy hair, an even messier suit and carrying a lady's handbag was twitching as if he'd drunk too much caffeine and talking very aggressively into a phone to someone called 'Francis' who sounded like a pervert. Instead the woman put the stuff through the checkout and waited patiently for one of them to pay. At least it livened up a very dull night shift, even if she couldn't remember actually seeing the one in the suit enter the shop at all.
"Money?" The one with the sticky-up hair said to the red-eyed man.
"Me? I'm not allowed money," the man with red eyes said.
The woman in the dress produced a wad of roubles.
"We don't accept foreign currency," the woman cashier said. Her hand hovered over the red alarm button that went straight through to the local police station.
"Arthur?"
The man with messy hair turned from telling someone called Francis that he would 'take him to the vets and get him done'. "What?" He asked.
"Twenty-four pounds and five pence," the man with the red eyes said, looking at the cash register.
The Englishman rummaged in his pockets, pulling out a raffle ticket from the last year's Rotary Club Dinner (he'd unfortunately missed the announcement of the winner as he'd found himself locked inside a toilet cubicle for most of the evening after the lock broke - he was sure he'd won the first prize and suspected it was a fit-up). He paused, the thought of losing a £20 garden centre voucher still rankled. He also had a sheet of paper listing instructions on how to use his mobile phone - written by France - so it was basically unintelligible. There was also a credit card. He grasped this with glee. It said 'Alfred F Jones' on it and was a Bank of America gold card.
"Fill up the trolley. It's all on me or my name's not Alfred F Jones," he said.
"But you're not…" The Dane was about to say but was shushed quickly by the man in the messy suit with the messy eyebrows.
The cashier waited patiently, her hand hovering over the alarm button.
The man with the red eyes swaggered down the aisles with a strange and quite arrogant strutting walk filling up the trolley with German beer and party poppers (for some reason). When the blond one with stuck up hair and carrying an axe pointed out that they now had a child to look after they would have to be more sensible. The woman cashier smiled.
"Ah isn't it lovely? I think it's very good that you're all so accepting of your situation. It's nice to see more diverse couples using our store. We had a couple of gay dads coming in yesterday." The cashier told them.
"I ain't gay, I'm a Viking. I'm Denmark… I mean Danish. Dane. Great Dane." Denmark told her. He did look like a big lolloping dog, the cashier thought.
"And I ain't gay, I'm Prussian. That's like German but more so," Prussia told the woman.
The woman in the blue dress just raised an eyebrow.
"Cute child though," the woman cashier said, referring again to the picture on Denmark's phone which now showed America feeding the baby with a bottle and singing 'Alexander Hamilton'.
"It is not human," Belarus told her. Again.
"It could be a capital city?" Den whispered to Belarus.
Belarus shrugged. But she was looking at England with an intense horrid look on her face.
The woman shakily put through the additional items and waited for the mad Englishman to pay with the credit card.
England prayed that he could guess the pin-code. After all, America was such a bloody pinhead… "1776…" he punched into the machine and waited. Bingo. So bloody predictable. The oaf deserved to be ripped off. He had no idea why he had America's credit card in his pocket. But he was seriously thinking, after he and the rest of these idiots had got home, of poring over the new Screwfix catalogue and treating himself to a new wheelbarrow.
France sang 'Une vie d'amour' to himself. He thought he had a good voice (some people would completely disagree, England being one of those people) and had once 'cut a record' with the said Charles Aznavour - only one copy of this survived and was the prize possession of Azerbaijan ('Az') who considered France a god amongst nations (the other ex Soviet Nations considered Az to be mentally insufficient).
Whilst he was singing, he was ignoring his phone's sat nav. As the phone's sat nav hated him with a passion (it was sentient thanks to some inadvertent magic by England) it was not taking him back to London it was taking him to the north of England (no euphemism intended) which, if France had been sentient himself, he would have been horrified. And so France headed into the mists of the North singing his little French heart out.
"Does anyone no how to sooth a small child of undeterminated gender?" America texted to everyone on his contacts list in an outburst of illiteracy.
Only Russia answered, from an airliner above Asia somewhere, with an irate panda sat next to him. Panda had insisted on a double whisky as soon as he had got on the plane and had told the air hostesses that he had been kidnapped. They had thought he was a child in fancy dress. Russia was of course drunk and texted America that he should 'bath the детка with lots of bubbles and take a big drink of vodka for yourself'. America had no idea what he was talking about. But Panda then face-timed and told him he and England were 'dead men walking for letting Russia take him back to Beijing'. America cheerfully waved at Panda and hung up.
"Weirdo," he said to the baby. "Not you, dude. I mean the other dude." He then began to walk up and down, occasionally patting the child's back while he listed all his presidents in order. "This always works for me when I can't sleep," he told the bawling child. By the time he'd got to Chester Arthur, they were both asleep on the chintz sofa.
Den and Pru had always had a talent for appropriating motor vehicles, whether they be ice cream vans, canine control vans (that hadn't ended well - two rabies and tetanus shots later was testament to this) and once a minibus carrying old people to a seaside outing. They had abandoned the last one on a slipway off the E20 near Copenhagen.
"We'll sort this out," Den said, strutting out of the Tesco. "Come on Pru, we're always good at finding cars."
England and Belarus were left with the shopping bags. "I hate those two," England grumbled.
"Is that child yours?" Belarus asked England.
England, for a moment flummoxed, was looking at Den and Pru and misunderstood, thinking she was referring to one of the two Nations. "They're both idiots aren't they? I think we could pretend we don't know them."
"The child at your house, left on your doorstep. Are you the father?" She asked, her eyes narrowing.
Before England could answer. Den and Pru had indeed struck gold. Or at least silver. Most probably bronze actually. A pizza delivery van left 'parked' (and parked being the operative word here) on the kerb, the lights still on, the engine running, the driver (a lazy Italian) nowhere in sight.
"Come on, dude!"
"Oh I don't think this is quite legal…" England protested.
"Listen wet pants, we either get in this or we wait here all night for the police, end up in a cell with Princess Crazy here and eventually get back to your house and find that America and that demon kid has pebble-dashed your dump of your place with formula-milk induced vomit."
England didn't hesitate again and jumped in the back with Belarus. She glared at him. As far as she was concerned, he had not denied he was the father of the infant and thus she had been cheated on. This was not to be sanctioned. She sharpened 'Natasha' her favourite knife and glared at him.
England sat next to her clutching France's handbag containing the tiara to his chest. He was still thinking about superglue, princesses and demon babies.
In the front of the van, the horrid refrains of 'Is this the way to Amarillo?' rang out from the two imbeciles driving. England prayed to the gods who might look over Nations that a) the child was not a product of a Nation and b) that he might be able to explain all this to his Government and Her Majesty.