Life Goes On

Preamble

I, Michael Cullen, King Bastard the First, dodged the traffic like a London pigeon in its prime. Some got caught, but only the old ones, or the sick. Old ones shouldn’t try to dodge the motors. Sick ones should stay at home.

Moggerhanger threatened to kill me. I believed he would like to. No matter how much of a bastard I was, there were always bigger bastards in the world. Moggerhanger was a rich bastard (he still is), which made him more effective than a poor bastard like me. He was also an older bastard, and we know what that means.

Come and get me. What else could I say? Bravado cost nothing, and he’d have to catch me. Maybe he’d have a fatal accident, though no doubt it was a condition of his will that the beneficiaries would have to deal with me before laying their maulers on the cash. He had many paid helpers, which was why I dodged the traffic like a pigeon. I ran across the light-on-green at Oxford Street. That was very close indeed. I didn’t know his henchmen were driving buses.

Volume One of my memoirs was scribbled in a disused railway station in the Fen country. Where I am penning this account of even more extraordinary adventures will be explained at the end. If this tale is pasted on the billboards, Moggerhanger’s a ruined man, though only in reputation. He is far too clever, and has too much influence in places that matter, to worry about going to prison, where he belongs. In any case, he is Lord Moggerhanger of Moggerhanger (Bedfordshire), whereas I am Michael Cullen, of no importance to anyone except myself, and with no distinguishing marks — at the moment.

I used to be a 22-carat no-good bastard, in the opinion of friends as well as enemies, but since my father married my mother twenty or so years after the event, I have only been a bastard to myself, which isn’t saying much, because I am too fond of my own skin to be more of a bastard than is absolutely necessary. Once upon a time I was only enough of a bastard to keep myself sufficiently alert regarding what the rest of the world would do to me if I let it. I learned early on in life that the best form of defence is self-preservation. I’m more than halfway back to being a 22-carat no-good bastard because my mother and father don’t live together anymore, thank God. I’d rather be a bastard than a nonentity.

However, as this story will reveal, I’m far more gullible than I thought.