THE DISASTROUS TALE OF THE BALDS. CHAPTER 10: BALD BEN GETS EVICTED

THE DISASTROUS TALE OF THE BALDS. 

CHAPTER 10: BALD BEN GETS EVICTED 

Several weeks had passed since Bald Ben burned down his family's restaurant in a failed attempt to claim the insurance money. The crown prosecution service had sent several letters to his residence requesting him to come into the police station for an 'interview'. and officers had been sent to his house more than once to arrest him, but every time this happened he either didn't answer the door, ran out of the back of the house and jumped over the garden hedge, or simply didn't answer the door in the hopes they would think no one was home. His father had been transferred to a specialist hospice, and the family had used some of their savings to stay with him temporarily while he settled in, giving Bald Ben free reign over the house and control over what they believed to be a still thriving business, which had in fact quite literally burned to the ground.

Bald Ben was sitting down in the living room watching judge Rinder one morning when he got a phone call from his mother, which he naturally left straight to voicemail.

"Hi Bald Ben, it's just me. I'm ringing to tell you that your father has settled in, so we will all be moving back home tomorrow, love you lots"

Bald Ben sat up when he realised what the call meant.

"Oh shit"

He looked around his trashed family living room, littered with takeaway wrappers, shopping bags, half-empty bags of crisps, the TV he smashed trying to move the sofa to make a fort, which he still hadn't taken down, the pyramid of beer cans he'd built, piles of clothes which he had begun to wash, but then couldn't be bothered, meaning the ones he'd started would have to be washed again, and the remains of the fridge/freezer that he had pulled from the charred restaurant in hopes of eating some of the leftover food inside. 

This mess would take weeks to clean up, and that's if he could be bothered, and he knew himself well enough to know that he couldn't be arsed. He ran up the stairs and into his sibling's respective rooms. From each room, he took their piggy banks and any other cash he could find lying around. Then he ran back down and opened the yellow pages that his family kept inside a cabinet by the front door. He flicked through the book as fast as his chubby, stubby fingers would allow him, and found the section in which the maid services were listed. He spent the next 10 minutes calling each service and asking them to send as many people as they could. After a little while, Bald Ben had assembled a small army of cleaners. He addressed them before they went to war with the rubbish. 

"Now, all of you will be handsomely paid for the task ahead, but I must tell you, it's no easy one. I recently evicted a tenant from this property as they kept avoiding rent, and as revenge for the eviction, they have left the place in quite a mess" Bald Ben lied. 

He gestured towards the house as he detailed all of the rubbish that was littering the house left by the 'tenant'. As if to illustrate his point, the upstairs window spilt open, littering the garden with paper plates.

"If any of you lack the courage for this task, leave. NOW" he shouted

The crowd of cleaners remained stock still.

"Excellent. Cleaners, go to war!"

The team of maids descended on the house, quickly sorting themselves into different rooms, and filtering through all of the rubbish. While they worked, Bald Ben ambled into the kitchen, grabbed a beer from the fridge, waddled back out into the garden to a deck chair, sat down, and watched them work. The cleaners worked for hours, bringing bin bag back after bin bag from the house, but somehow, they were successful. 

Bald Ben inspected the house which was literally sparkling. Every glass surface in the house, the TV, the mirrors, the cups and everything else were all gleaming. Even the carpet was somehow sparkling. Bald Ben began to do the maths on giving everyone a fair and even amount of money. Unfortunately, he had never counted how much he had stolen from his siblings, so once divided equally, everyone was given 70p each. 

"What the fuck is this?" shouted one of the maids

"Where's the rest? I had to peel pizza from the ceiling, I wouldn't do that on it's for 70p, don't even get me started on an entire house!" shouted another

Bald Ben raised his hands to calm the crowd of increasingly aggressive custodians.

"People people. If you check the contracts you signed beforehand, you will see that it clearly stated all of this information regarding payment beforehand. I am not liable if you chose not to read through it" Bald Ben explained

"We didn't sign anything!" 

"Oh shit yeah" remembered Bald Ben

The crowd angrily stared at Bald Ben while he contemplated his next statement.

"You're all on private property. Fuck off"

The enraged crowd brandished their cleaning equipment as weaponry and began to angrily descend upon the short fat man. A squadron of feather dusters reached him first, striking him on any part of his body they could reach, but Bald Ben fought back, deflecting the dusters and punching the cleaners, expertly taking down the inexperienced fighters. The next wave attacked with vacuum cleaners, attaching them to his exposed skin, causing him great discomfort, but not really injuring him. The issue this created for Bald Ben, however, was the extended range that the vacuums had, meaning that even though he wasn't being hurt, he couldn't stop the attacks from happening, meaning that when the third wave of cleaners attacked him with cleaning fluids, he was left vulnerable. They sprayed him with every solution they had available to them, creating several different noxious fumes, but luckily they were outside so the effects were somewhat limited in the open air. Some of the liquid leaked over Bald Ben's glasses and into his eyes, causing him to scream out in pain as he was blinded, and making him slip on the puddle of fluids and fall to the ground. Every cleaner not armed with a vacuum then descended on him, kicking him while he was down, not stopping for almost half an hour. 

The beaten, bleeding and bruised Bald Ben was left lying in the puddle of what was once cleaning solution, but now also included his blood, tears and piss. The cleaners had stripped everything they could from him, including the clothes off of his back. They had also gone back into the house and stolen some easy-to-take valuables like electronics and jewellery. Bald Ben rolled over onto his front and crawled back into his house, embarrassed. He dragged himself up the stairs to his room to get more clothes, where he found that his PC had been stolen.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" he screamed. 

He didn't even bother getting dressed and just slid into bed and went to sleep. The next morning he was awoken by the sounds of his mother's car arriving outside. He heard her come running up the stairs.

"Bald Ben? Bald Ben? What happened? The front door was left wide open! The TV has missing we've been robbed!" 

Bald Ben decided that his best move was to play dumb, and blame the missing jewellery that would soon be discovered, as well as the cash he himself had stolen, on the 'mystery robbers'. 

"I don't know, but they must have beat me up while I was asleep, look! I have a boo-boo!" he said while pointing to his numerous severe injuries. 

"Jesus christ we need to get you to the hospital"

Bald Ben's mother, while still suffering from the emotional strain of taking her husband to long-term medical care, took yet another one of her family members to the hospital. While Bald Ben was being treated, she contacted their home insurance provider to try and reclaim the stolen goods and money, but she found that they would not pay out as the insurance assessor deduced that entry had not been forced into the home, so it was likely it had been left open, meaning they were not covered. Bald Ben started to realise just how much financial trouble his family was in. They had lost their sole source of income in losing the restaurant, and now they were burning more money replacing all of their stolen property.

He lay in his hospital bed, staring at the white ceiling above his head. He only broke concentration when the person in the bed next to him switched on the ward TV to watch an episode of family guy, which happened to be Bald Ben's favourite program. It was the first episode of season 10, which also happened to be one of Bald Ben's favourites, and as he sat watching the episode, reciting each line of dialogue in a poor impersonation of each character's voice as it was being said, irritating everyone around him, he had an epiphany. 

"Of course! I'll just win the lottery!"

He rolled out of the hospital bed, only to be suspended and stuck in the air by the numerous tubes and wires that had been installed in his body to treat his injuries.

"Oh yeah I forgot about that, at least the morphine is stopping me from feeling any of this," he said as the wires and tubes began to snap, including the morphine tube.

He dropped to the floor with a thud, and as the morphine quickly passed through his system, he began to feel the consequences of his actions and screamed out in pain.

Weeks later, he was finally discharged from hospital, he set to work immediately. Once he was home he waited for no one to be looking, and he darted for his Mothers purse, taking out her credit and debit cards. He snook out of the house and went to the nearest corner shop. He approached the counter and spoke to the man attending the counter.

"I'll have all of your scratch cards please mate," asked Bald Ben

"What? all of them? That's thousands of tickets, you can't possibly have the money!" replied the man

"If I pre-pay will you promise not to talk again?" asked Bald Ben

"Not one word" 

The shopkeeper processed Bald Ben's payment and then began to unroll the hundreds of scratch cards for Bald Ben. Bald Ben left the shop and repeated the process at every store which sold scratch cards within walking distance, and he only stopped when both cards started to decline the sales. Once he had amassed his thousands of scratch cards, he sat on a park bench and started to scratch away, sorting them into two piles, win and lose.

After three whole days of sitting down and scratching cards, the loss pile was now taller than most houses, but the win pile wasn't small by a long shot. When he flattened out and organised all of the successful scratch cards, he had collected an amount so large, that when they were stacked flat on top of each other, the pile was 70 cm tall. He started to count up all of his winning tickets, most of which were low values of £1 or £2, but the grand total after all of the tickets were calculated was a whopping £15,132! Bald Ben was really proud of himself, until he realised he had spent £743,962 on tickets, meaning he had made an overall loss of £728,830. His parents would not be pleased. 

He went home with the winning tickets, and when he got to his house he found the door was locked, the curtains were drawn, the family car was missing and that all of his possessions had been thrown into the front garden. On top of the pile of possessions there was a note left by his mother.

Dear Bald Ben,

Yesterday, I discovered that my bank card had gone missing, so I cancelled the card and allerted the police. When they got back to me they said that before the card had been cancelled they had been able to confirm it was being used in the local area, and when they went to one of the shops in which it had been used and reviewed the CCTV, they found you, using my stolen card, to buy scratch cards. They also say that they suspect you were involved in the burning down of the restaurant, and there is an open warrant out for your arrest.

This family cannot take anymore heartbreak. We are struggling to pay for your father's healthcare without you throwing away our money. We have been forced to sell the house and move away to somewhere smaller, we will NOT be in touch to tell you where too, its time you made your own way in the world. Your siblings have also been instructed to cut contact with you, but they have told us that they wanted to do that anyway.

If you have ever had any love for this family you will do what's right and leave us alone. We can no longer abide your constant misbehaviour, criminal damage and general poor attitude. I love you and you will always be my son, but for the sake of my family, I am forced to disown you. You are no longer a part of this family and we would appreciate if you no longer used the family name and simply went by Bald Ben instead.

Signed, 

Your Mother. 

Bald Ben found himself tearing up while reading the letter. Not because of the fact he had lost his home and his family, but because he now had no way of making chicken tenders and would have to pay for his own wifi. He couldn't even go and live with Bald Leon at Bald Jack's house because of all the mess going on with him not trusting the agency. He decided that he should at least keep the lottery tickets, and he would cash them in small amounts at a time to not raise any suspicion, he was now technically the richest he had ever been, but he didn't have anything that mattered. 

He roamed the streets, nowhere to go, bar hopping and terrorising locals to try and fill the void he felt inside. He even got thrown out of the local library when he tried to use their computers to cyberbully people, getting thrown out because of the smell he emitted. He eventually went into a small dimly lit pub on the main street, sat at the bar and ordered a pint. 

But then something caught his eye. Sat across the bar, nursing his own pint, was a finger monkey, who was only a few inches tall.

"GERKIN!" screamed Bald Ben, running over to the little primate

"Jesus! Do I know you pal?" shouted the scared finger monkey

"Gerkin? It's me! Bald Ben? Don't you remember? I can't believe you're back little buddy!" 

"Listen mate, I don't know who you are. I'm just a normal finger monkey who recently gained sentience and intelligence okay? You've clearly got me confused with someone else."

"No Gerkin, It's definitely you. You said that you die and then come back but you lose your memories, but you said that after some time your memories come back too, when did you gain sentience"

"I don't know, like a few weeks ago?"

"And where were you when that happened? Was it the island?"

"...yeah... I was on an island. I felt compelled to protect something there, but it was just me..."

"So why did you come here?"

"I... I don't know... It just felt like that island wasn't my home... so I come here..."

"So you see this place as home! Hang on I've got a picture of us all together somewhere. Your subconscious must have told you to come looking for us!" shouted Bald Ben while pulling out his phone.

He held up the picture of himself, Bald Leon, Bald Jack and on Bald Ben's shoulder was Gerkin. Gerkin looked into the eyes of the image of himself in utter disbelief.

"That... that does look like me. So who are these other guys. Can we go see them?" he asked excitedly.

"erm... No. Not yet Gerkin. There's been a lot since you left. I don't even really know where the others are"

"What do you mean? And why do you keep calling me Gerkin? I assume it's my name but shouldn't it be Gherkin?"

"I don't know Bald Leon named you. I think we should stick together, see if we can help you find your memories"

Bald Ben and Gerkin left the bar (without paying for either of their tabs) and went out in search for adventure and in search of their friends. Little did they know how much their friends needed them.

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