Hans woke up the next morning in his backyard with a vague recollection of howling at the moon. Fortunately winter had not yet arrived and the air felt pleasantly mild but, if he did not get up soon it would be highly likely he’d get burnt in places he’d never been burnt before. Somewhere along the line he’d lost all his clothes.

He considered it rather fortunate he was in his own backyard and nobody else’s, although he did check his surroundings very carefully first before deciding this was true.

Thank God.

His phone started ringing from beside his head, which had been a very smart place to put it, and he wondered how, even after he’d removed all his clothing, he’d managed to keep hold of his phone. Then he wondered how, even after removing all his clothing, he’d managed to still keep hold of his phone. Then he wondered, and not for the first time (as this had happened quite a few times in the recent past) what photographs there might be on his phone that he’d want to delete before some random stranger, or his sister, decided to flick through his gallery. As this had happened before, although not quite as recently as the odd photographs he’d taken in the not-too-distant past, he decided to check, seeing as it had now stopped ringing.

He picked it up.

It started ringing again.

‘Hans Endersans.’ His voice definitely sounded like he’d been howling at the moon very loudly indeed.

‘This is Mike, your local neighbourhood watch member. Remember me?’

‘Yeah. You’re the sheriff. You took my phone number when I first got here.’

‘For your security,’ said Mike.

‘Of course,’ replied Hans, barely disguising the sarcasm in his voice. He looked down. Wow, sand really did get crusty in the oddest places.

‘I just want to talk about your dog. There were a couple of complaints on our local pages this morning.’

‘What time is it.” Hans looked at the rest of himself and sighed. The robovac would have a lot to suck up today.

‘It’s 9 a.m.’

‘Cool.’ Still a while ’til he would be needing to drive to the … which restaurant was he going to today?

Oh yes. The one that was only a couple of suburbs away. They opened at twelve.

‘About these complaints, Hans.’

‘I don’t have a dog.’ He padded up the hallway.

‘Oh. Are you, perhaps, looking after a dog?’

‘No.’ He managed to get into the bathroom without looking at himself in the mirror once.

‘Okay. Well. There seems to be some kind of mistake then.’ Mike sounded confused.

‘There does, doesn’t there.’ Hans crossed his fingers for luck. ‘Thanks for the call though. I appreciate the good work.’ He rolled his eyes at himself.

‘Ah … Sure.’ Mike replied. ‘I’ll see you on the street sometime.’

‘I’m sure you will. Thanks Mike, bye.’ Hans restrained himself from flushing the phone down the toilet, and put himself in the shower instead.

^^______O_______^^

He decided to ring Bart after that. Bart did not reply. Instead, he texted.

I’m working. But hey, how are you?

Hans frowned. He never, ever messaged people because he’d rather talk so he could hear their voices and decided whether he liked them or not, basically. There was also the fact he didn’t do words very well. Autocorrect came in handy, when it wasn’t correcting his words to something else entirely.

Yeah no. Call me when you finish, he wrote.

That won’t be until after five, my friend. You never call. I’m excited, Bart replied.

If you can text, you can ring. Either call or don’t bother. It took Hans far too long to tap that out, and the frustration from having to do it in the first place frayed his nerves.

Wow. Guess I’ll call you later then. Solway will be so excited. I’ll have to show her these just to prove a point.

A lot more texts from Bart came through after that. Hans ignored every one of them. He needed to find a fucking tie. And a fucking shirt. And… a pair of fucking pants, socks, and shoes without sand in them. He also needed to ignore the little voice that had woken him up in his head and was talking absolute nonsense about not much at all. That was the thing he wanted to talk to Bart about.

He wanted to know if it was real.

^^___o___^^

Hans really knew how to put on a show when he wanted to. He charmed the pants (not literally) off all the customers in the dining room that day, and continued to charm the pants off all the staff members (not literally) when he helped clean the kitchen that night. He decided to do the bookkeeping in the morning.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, he took a short break at five p.m when Bart called.

‘Quickly,’ he said to the man on the other end. ‘Tell me about the voice you heard.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Bart. ‘Which one?’

‘There’s more than one?’

‘Well, yes. There’s Splendid. He’s the very nice man you chased up that tree that time. Remember him?’

‘Vaguely,’ replied Hans, trying not to scratch under his armpit.

‘And then there’s the lizard. She doesn’t like to use punctuation.’

‘I see,’ said Hans. He didn’t like using punctuation either which was possibly because he didn’t really understand why it was there, or why people bothered using it when they could just say shit out loud and get it over and done with. ‘It could be the lizard, I suppose.’

‘Is there another voice I don’t know about,’ asked Bart in a worried voice.

‘How the hell would I know? That’s why I asked. So, this is normal then,’ said Hans, wondering if anything that had happened in the last two years was in the least bit normal.

‘I suppose so,’ replied Bart. ‘I haven’t heard either of them in a while. This is really not good news.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘No. I’m assuming because you’ve heard her voice something is about to happen, and I have no idea what.’

‘I see,’ said Hans, which he didn’t, but it seemed like the right thing to say. ‘Thanks Bart. I think I have to go.’ And he did have to go because there really wasn’t that much time to be fucking around talking to people on phones when he had a restaurant to run.

Fortunately, Bart had understood that because it had been the first thing Hans had said before demanding about the voice, and because of that Bart would let him go without harassing him too much to come to dinner at a later date, which remained undecided because Hans had to go.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Bart belatedly.

‘I know,’ said Hans, and hung up.

Then he threw up in the skip bin he’d been wanting to throw Cora Flora Dora Nora (now poorer) in, earlier that day, and went back to work.

He might have been slightly hungover, not that anyone knew because you simply didn’t tell people things like that as it exposed a weakness, and the last thing Hans wanted anyone to say about him was that he was weak.

^^__o__^^

He sat out the back with Fennel (the chef) late that night and they studied the sickle moon while sipping on the bottle of Cognac Fennel had stolen from the manager’s office two weeks beforehand. Hans had found a couple of glasses somewhere as well, so they decided they were uppity and fabulous together.

The bottle, obviously, was half gone when this decision had been made.

‘I say,’ said Hans, swirling the Cognac in his glass for effect. ‘I do believe this stuff is quite shit.’

‘Couldn’t agree with you more, old chap.’ replied Fennel, skoling his drink, grimacing, and holding out his empty glass. ‘May I have some more please.’

‘Quite so,’ said Hans, and giggled in a most masculine way that nearly had Fennel falling off his milk crate. ‘Who do you think would be a good replacement for bloody Nora,’ he added, trying to be serious.

Fennel snorted Cognac out of his nose. After he recovered, which took a few minutes and quite a bit of spluttering, he said. ‘Do you mean Lenore?’

‘Oh,’ said Hans. ‘Kill me now, I’ve been calling her Nora for the last month.’

‘Never mind,’ said Fennel. ‘I don’t, Look, I don’t have much to do with the wait-staff, or haven’t had much to do with them for quite some time, since we started using restaurant managers, and don’t look at me because I’m not doing it either. I don’t know the first thing about silver service, and if someone complained about my soup, I’d probably pour it over their heads, so…’

‘Fair point,’ said Hans. ‘I suppose this means I’ll be staying with you for another week or so while we figure out if any of our people are clever enough to take the reins.’

‘It could be longer, if that’s how you want to go about it.’ Fennel attempted to straighten his checkered trousers, and absently sucked a finger where he’d collected some sauce from his shirt. ‘My mother always said to be as honest as possible when preparing people for something they never thought they’d do, so you know… I’ve lost my train of thought.’

‘It’s the Cognac, old man. That’s how it works. How much was this bottle do you think?’ Hans held it up and studied it under the moonlight.

‘Fucked if I know,’ replied Fennel. ‘Not my department. Why?’

‘Because,’ Hans said and held up a finger for good measure, ‘We need to write it off, that’s why, and God this stuff really is awful and why are we drinking it again?’

‘Because we’re pretending we’re rich,’ replied Fennel. ‘Remember?’

‘Oh yeah.’ Hans smoothed back his hair. ‘I kinda am, sorta and a bit.’

Fennel squinted at him. ‘Are you?’ He seemed to think about it for a while. ‘I suppose you are. How did you survive Covid and all that? Just out of curiosity.’

‘Lots of containers and an Uber connection,’ replied Hans. ‘How did anyone survive Covid? Do you want some containers for this place?’ He looked around the small courtyard for no reason whatsoever. ‘I’ve got a shitload filling up my spare room.’

‘Trying to move away from that, myself,’ said the chef grumpily.

‘And that’s why I like you,’ said Hans. ‘The sooner we get people back into our restaurants and filling our tables, the happier we’ll be. Sorry?’

Fennel looked at him. ‘What?’

‘I thought you said something.’

‘Didn’t say a word,’ said Fennel.

Hans nodded. It must be the lizard. ‘I guess that’s my cue. Do you need a hand locking up?’

‘Nah,’ replied Fennel as they restacked the crates. ‘You good to get home?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ replied Hans. ‘But, I’ll have to catch an Uber.’

‘You’re an expensive man,’ said Fennel, taking the Cognac bottle and grinning. ‘But, you’re sensible. I like that.’

‘Thanks,’ replied Hans as the voice inside his head sprouted something ridiculous. ‘I like that too.’