A sunny morning in June. Chad Eastwood is a man preoccupied with the dividing underhillock. He is a man who winders, and a scraping of ice-cream nothingness hurls prefixes at the window. Minnows wriggle past the glass of the window in mid air; they are confused about Chad Eastwood’s confusion. Suddenly the lead minnow stops.
“Hold it boys! Hold it!”
It addresses Chad directly.
“What’s the problem, buddy?”
“You should be in a river,” replies Chad Eastwood as he exhales green poison upon the glass.
“How about you mind your own goddam business, mister? How about that, eh?” the lead minnow replies quite aggressively. Chad Eastwood shrugs noncommittally and watches the minnows swim off in the direction of the Granford School for Wayward Boys, est. 1867. which is where Chad Eastwood’s great-great grandfather, Dan Eastwood, met his lifelong friend and partner in crime, Gary Sandwich Bag, when both of them were banged up for thieving.
That story is epic, with many rises and falls, ups and downs, as the man says. There’s never a home run but it doesn’t hit some poor bastard on the head, as they say. But the story ends well, with lots of money in suitcases under various beds; the money was then inherited by Chad Eastwood’s great grandfather, Rory Eastwood, who used it to start a salvage business empire, collecting, recycling and reselling cables to which nobody could assign a purpose. In a relatively short period of time, the suitcases of money became truckloads of money, and the Eastwood name found mention in certain high-flying business circles.
At a party in the National Museum of Ireland, (they had wheeled in a couple of kegs and a few optics; someone set up the decks), Rory Eastwood was approached by a certain Jan Handle, a German businessman in the cleaning wipes business, with the idea that Rory might source for him a cat burglar who could enter the home of Mr. Handle’s rival, a Mr. Egg Eggum, of ‘WipeIt!’ fame, and steal Eggum’s formula for his new disinfectant wipe, which had won many prizes at that year’s Cleaning Awards in Berne and which Handle was worried would put him out of business.
An extremely drunk Rory Eastwood agreed and woke up the next morning incredibly hungover and without an idea as to how he was going to source a cat burglar. He went the old-fashioned way in the end and just put a advert in the paper. The advert was answered by none other than Paul Sandwich Bag, who was the son of Rory’s father’s lifelong friend and partner in crime, Gary Sandwich Bag, and who, fortuitously, was still very much in the thieving game.
Paul set to work, sneaking into the Eggum mansion, which was on the island of Hibiscus, in the Adriatic Sea, in the wee hours of the 1st of April. In an ingenious move, he was dressed in a gorilla costume, figuring that if anyone saw him, they would think he was one of the family messing about for April Fool’s Day. The plan worked, and after the minor hassle of thirty metres of lazer tunnels, five vicious wallaby sentries, three pit-traps, a giant rolling boulder, and a cockatrice, Paul Sandwich Bag got out of the Eggum mansion with the secret formula.
Early in the morning, a couple of days later, in the front room of Rory Eastwood’s mansion, Rory and Paul presented Jan Handle with the secret formula, which was in a purple vial. Handle smiled like an evil villain and rubbed his hands together in glee. Unfortunately, he could not resist opening the vial just a little – it was a rash move, he should have turned it over the the chemists – and he paid the price. Tentacles of purple mist snaked out of the vial and engulfed Handle’s face, transforming him instantly into a beast which was half man and half octopus. Handlepus, as he became known, slinked off down a drain and plopped into the sewers, where he lives to this day obsessively cleaning pipes and grates with his tentacles.