Chapter 1: Sir Percy Shows My Wife A Big One

My wife's clear voice reverberated around the cavernous, yet surprisingly well-attended auditorium. The dark hall was imbued with the cloying smell of cheap pipe tobacco, moderately expensive perfume, and a few centuries worth of sturdy English peasantry. A colour slide from our recent expedition was projected on the wall behind her.

" ... and the largest subject measured 34.65 centimeters long and 18.2 centimeters around, when fully erect."

I could hear some gasps of astonishment above the murmur of the crowd. They soon retreated to an incredulous silence as she advanced to the next slide.

It was an image of a dark-skinned African native about 30 or 35 years of age, clad in tribal gear, clutching a long wooden spear at his side. He grinned into the camera. An animal skin was slung over one shoulder, and draped down across his chest. He wasn't alone.

My wife had knelt next to him, holding a clearly visible tape measure against the erect phallus he sported. You couldn't see the numbers, of course, but there was no doubt that the prodigious length nearly exceeded her forearm.

" ... measured over 184 cc's in volume. At least 50 examples measured in excess of 125 cc's over the course of the observations." Another excited murmur ran through the auditorium, and I chuckled to myself.

But I suppose I should start the narrative somewhere near the beginning, rather than spring out at you with the dénouement at this early stage.

Seven months earlier...

It all started at a meeting of the Anthropological Society of the Royal Museum at Sir Basil's old haunted house in the southwest of England, Blechley Manor. My wife Teresa, or Tess, held degrees in sociology, biology, anthropology, and a half dozen other –ologies, and she had been cornered by that old goat, Percy Eddington-Eddington. Pee, as we called him, had tramped around the interior of Africa for a couple of decades as a somewhat disreputable guide and expedition manager, surviving on the odd Great White Hunter looking for a new mangy lion skin, to replace the old mangy lion skin in his den, or selling a fantastic story to the supermarket tabloids in the States about great unknown monsters of Lake Victoria or some-such. The various native governments had booted him out of one equatorial country after another, and he finally ended up back in England, making himself a pest to the National Health system and writing angry letters to the Times regarding the lax moral habits of Girl Guides and the absolute going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket-iveness of the British Motor Car Industry. But now he had Tess in his sights.

I saw Tess glance at me with the resigned, wistful smile, like of a parakeet caught in the paws of an arthritic, declawed tom-cat with no teeth. She knew she would survive the attack, but she had better things to do at the moment.

I made my way over to them, stumbling over the chaise lounge and upsetting a tea table of biscuits and lime-juice. Brushing the watercress off my jacket with a nonchalant wave of the hand, I greeted old Pee.

"What ho, old cock. I'd have thought they would have locked you in a padded room at Colney Hatch and thrown away the key, by now." I grinned cheerily.

"Go soak your head, you young ass. I'm talking to your wife about something of earth-shattering importance, and we don't need you butting in and going on about some bally cricket match you just photographed," he replied with an air of haughty self-importance, an air made difficult to carry out with any real aplomb by the raspberry jelly stain on his bush jacket and the remains of a piece of cucumber sandwich stuck to his mustache.

"Oh, Sir Percival, be nice!" Tess shooshed him. "You really should remember you're not out in the bush trying to face down some cannibal chieftain or a raging bull elephant or something like that."

"Bahhhh!" he harrumphed and, taking one last glance down my wife's bodice, strutted off to annoy some other unfortunate prisoner of the night.

"What on earth was that all about?" I asked, guiding Tess to the remaining tea table and handing her a couple of steaming fluid oz. of Earl Grey's finest.

"The old coot. He has this ridiculous notion that there's some long unknown tribe in the Congo that hasn't had any contact with civilization in a thousand years except for him and two German missionaries sometime during the reign of Queen Victoria. He claims the men there are endowed with gigantic phalluses (or is it phalli? I'm never sure sometimes... ) that they've developed through years of selective breeding and some sort of odd diet they have, and that they'd make marvelous subjects for our next project."

I knew what she was talking about. The Royal Geographic Society had underwritten our last expedition, running a census of the walrus population in Greenland, and the BBC documentary had done well in the ratings, beating two political debates and the Yugoslav Song of the Year competition for the first half hour, until it was edged out by a football match between the Surrey Young Lads Club and the Edgingham Bakery Guild. Now they were after us to go out and bring back "something that'll keep them from changing the dam' channel so fast", as the executive at BBC-1 had said.

We were at the Anthropological Society to listen to some sort of magic-lantern lecture by Dame Rosemary Thistlefuzz on the 'Harvest Dances of the Maori of New Zealand", but all I remember about it was the seemingly endless number of slides of large brown women bending over in the fields, and equally large brown men with odd tattoos, sticking their tongues out at the photographer. The lecture ended early, thankfully, when Dame Rosemary accidentally dropped her pince-nez in the salmon dip and the cat tipped the entire tub over onto the 14th century oak flooring.

"He's obviously sprung the last gasket he had, and has gone completely batty, the old relic. I think he should be condemned and shut away permanently." I replied, with some gaiety. It always amazed me how long some people could go on being a horror to their relatives and neighbors.