FIC: "Country Matters" (Black Books)
Second of two sitcomathon stories for mandysbitch, who asked for Bernard and country and western music.
Title: Country Matters
Author: Malograntum Vitiorum
Fandom: Black Books
Summary: "'Hello Fran! That's Fran, everybody. I think we may have had what you might call a, a zany misunderstanding.' Lacking a more focused objective for the moment, Bernard fell down again."
Author's Notes: This is not exactly a plot-heavy thing, but for reference, it is set somewhere in the first season, because sadly that's the only one I've seen.
"Country and western music," Fran said with an air of indignant finality. Bernard wondered for a moment what she was on about and then went back to organizing his desk drawers.
"Country and western music," she said again, even more indignantly and finally.
Of course, by "organizing his desk drawers" Bernard meant (or would have if anyone asked him what he was doing, which they inexplicably hadn't) an activity that diverged to some slight degree from the dully conventional meaning of the phrase. At present he was attending to the upper left-hand drawer, which, he was fairly sure, had the key to the Rare Books cabinet in it somewhere. (The contents of the Rare Books cabinet, which might or might not be rare or indeed books, were a matter to be dealt with another time.)
"Bernard."
Before he could determine whether the elusive key was in this particular drawer, though, he had to address what Manny had called the "moth situation" shortly before taking the day off to get his toenails permed or something. The situation, in brief, was that there were moths. There were in fact a startling variety of dead moths of countless subspecies, covering whatever else was in the drawer in a carpet of mothly corpses at least two inches deep.
"Bernard."
The diversity of dead fauna gave the impression that they had been accumulating for some generations, adapting their colors as various levels of air pollution presented them with variously colored walls to camouflage themselves against. They might indeed have something to offer to environmental science, or failing that, they might be able to help unlock the mystery of how the hell they had all got into a drawer that no one ever opened in the first place. Thus, he was loath to simply throw them all away, and was in the process of transferring them to the top right-hand drawer when Fran sat down on his desk and started talking to him, which, now that he thought of it, might have been several minutes ago.
"Bernard! Have you been listening at all?"
"Sure I'm listening. Country and western music." She looked cross, so he elaborated to make it clear that he understood the topic under discussion. "'My. . . wife ran off with my dog and left me to raise all these illegitimate puppies on the inadequate dole that I get from a failed welfare system.'"
"Bernard! You can't just listen to the last three words of a conversation!"
"Well, how many did you say before that?"
Fran made an exasperated noise, dropped something paper-y on the desk and breezed out of the shop. Bernard returned his attention to the task before him.
"What's Fran cross about?" Manny asked, appearing out of bloody nowhere. Bernard fell backwards off his chair.
"Where'd you come from?"
"The front door?"
"Oh." Bernard looked at the door accusingly.
"You need help getting up?"
Bernard thought about witty retorts to this until the moment was well and truly past.
"Fran's cross," he said instead, "because I don't care enough about country and western music, apparently."
"Didn't think she liked that sort of thing." Manny picked up the thing that Fran had left and turned it over.
"Well, I don't know. Am I my. . . am I anybody's keeper?" This was a disturbing prospect, now that he thought of it. "Shit, am I? I hope not."
"Hey, I know him."
"Eh?" Bernard righted himself and his chair, and set the one atop the other in the usual way.
"That bloke." Fran's thing was an ad for some show at some club, a very ugly one (the ad and the club), with an unprofessionally shot publicity photo of four middle-aged men in various denim and flannel situations. One was wearing an actual cowboy hat, and it was to him that Manny pointed.
"That bloke worked at the firm." Manny rarely referred to his previous career, and Bernard preferred to pretend he hadn't had one, but now that he said it, it was clear that the gentleman could be nothing other than an accountant. "He's got my bloody appointment book!"
Manny was suddenly very emotionally agitated, and Bernard said, sympathetically, "What?"
"We had similar appointment books, right? In fact they really weren't that similar at all, but he was a dim bulb, I guess. So we were in a meeting one day and somebody moved seats or went to the loo or something, and next thing I knew I was back at my desk with an appointment book full of that bloke's sexual indiscretions."
"You'd think he'd want it back."
"Never came back for it. As it happened, he got the sack that day. I was going to have to get an entirely new one, but as it happened there was enough space in between the rude descriptive passages for me to write in my own appointments. Looked a bit weird, but it was economical."
"Worked out, then."
"No it didn't!" Manny glared at the picture of the cowboy-hat-wearing prat. "It was my personal property."
Bernard studied the ad. "'Country night every other Monday. Western wear encouraged but not required.' West of what?"
"I'm going down there." Manny grabbed his coat and hat. "I've got to restore my honor."
"What?" But Manny was out the door--and while Bernard was not naturally disposed to just dash out and go places with people willy-nilly, well, it was Manny, and he meant well, of course, but the man simply could not be trusted to act responsibly when left to his own devices. Leaving the moths to take care of themselves, Bernard followed.
* * *
"I reckon we should drink a lot of alcohol right now."
Bernard thought about explaining to Manny that it was not necessary to state things that were very, very obvious, but this would have cut into time he could be using to order them some pints, so he did the latter instead.
The people around them were wearing very distressing and un-British things. Bernard was becoming very concerned about Fran's mental health if this had suddenly become her idea of a good night out. Manny was scanning the bar for the Great Appointment Bandit. For the life of him, Bernard couldn't quite imagine how he'd wound up with such weird friends.
They had some drinks. It was a beer night at first, but hard liquor seemed to make more sense after the band took the stage. After each song, Manny said, "I'm going up there. I'm going to show him what for."
Bernard excused himself to the loo. On his way back, he stopped at the pay phone and decided to call Fran to find out why she'd gone insane. She picked up after three and a half rings, which was just like her. "Hello?"
"Fran," Bernard said, "why have you gone insane?"
"What's that awful noise? Where are you?"
"I'm at your stupid thing, with the country music. I'm incredibly drunk. Where are you?"
"Bernard!" Bernard thought Fran was saying his name rather a lot today. "Oh my god, you went there? You see, you see--this is what happens when you don't pay attention to what people are saying to you, Bernard, you end up in some grotty club listening to some arsehole accountant that I had a passionate fling with before I noticed he was an arsehole, playing grotty music with his grotty band!"
"Yeah?" Bernard said heatedly. "Well if you're so clever." He hung up.
When he got back to the table, Manny wasn't at it. Manny was in fact on the stage, singing a song he clearly did not know the words to, with Arsehole the Accountant's arm slung around his, Manny's, inebriated shoulders. This would not do. Bernard approached the stage to explain in a clear and cogent manner why this would not do at all.
Then there was a lot of shouting and people pushing each other, at the end of which Bernard was standing on the stage in front of a microphone with a banjo strapped over his shoulder and a cowboy hat drooping far enough down on his head to obscure his vision. While summoning his powers of concentration to try to retrace the steps that had led him to this state of affairs, he fell down.
This didn't seem to help anything, although it provoked what he assumed was ironic cheering from what had struck him as a pretty unironic crowd. He looked to Manny for help. Manny and Arsehole were sharing some very funny accounting story back at Manny and Bernard's table.
"Right," he said. "This next song is called 'I hate you Manny.'" He cleared his throat. Nobody was paying much attention to him at this point, so he hummed a few bars of "Fat Bottomed Girls" until somebody threw a cowboy shoe at him.
"All right then, well. This song is called 'My woman done left me, well actually I haven't got a woman strictly speaking, but a woman done left me in the sense that it's her fault I'm standing up here talking to a room full of hostile very stupid people and she's not even here.' Oh wait, there she is." Fran had appeared at the back of the room, in a paroxysm of lip-pursing and arm-crossing of an intensity that the Pentagon could have bought and weaponized.
"Hello Fran! That's Fran, everybody. I think we may have had what you might call a, a zany misunderstanding." Lacking a more focused objective for the moment, Bernard fell down again.
"Get off the stage," suggested someone over to his left.
"Yes, right," he located the culprit, "you there, yes, you. You're so ugly, your mother. . . and I hate you."
Around then was when passing out seemed like a good idea, so he wound up missing what Fran later assured him were the really fun bits, although her account was somewhat lacking in detail and he was pretty sure she was lying.
When he got back to the shop, the moths were all gone, a development of which Fran and Manny both disavowed all knowledge. The rare books were missing as well, assuming they'd been there to begin with. He hoped the rare books and the moths were happy together, wherever they'd gone.
He wrote "NO COUNTRY MUSIC" on the blackboard and went to bed with a deep sense of accomplishment.
-end-
Title: Country Matters
Author: Malograntum Vitiorum
Fandom: Black Books
Summary: "'Hello Fran! That's Fran, everybody. I think we may have had what you might call a, a zany misunderstanding.' Lacking a more focused objective for the moment, Bernard fell down again."
Author's Notes: This is not exactly a plot-heavy thing, but for reference, it is set somewhere in the first season, because sadly that's the only one I've seen.
"Country and western music," Fran said with an air of indignant finality. Bernard wondered for a moment what she was on about and then went back to organizing his desk drawers.
"Country and western music," she said again, even more indignantly and finally.
Of course, by "organizing his desk drawers" Bernard meant (or would have if anyone asked him what he was doing, which they inexplicably hadn't) an activity that diverged to some slight degree from the dully conventional meaning of the phrase. At present he was attending to the upper left-hand drawer, which, he was fairly sure, had the key to the Rare Books cabinet in it somewhere. (The contents of the Rare Books cabinet, which might or might not be rare or indeed books, were a matter to be dealt with another time.)
"Bernard."
Before he could determine whether the elusive key was in this particular drawer, though, he had to address what Manny had called the "moth situation" shortly before taking the day off to get his toenails permed or something. The situation, in brief, was that there were moths. There were in fact a startling variety of dead moths of countless subspecies, covering whatever else was in the drawer in a carpet of mothly corpses at least two inches deep.
"Bernard."
The diversity of dead fauna gave the impression that they had been accumulating for some generations, adapting their colors as various levels of air pollution presented them with variously colored walls to camouflage themselves against. They might indeed have something to offer to environmental science, or failing that, they might be able to help unlock the mystery of how the hell they had all got into a drawer that no one ever opened in the first place. Thus, he was loath to simply throw them all away, and was in the process of transferring them to the top right-hand drawer when Fran sat down on his desk and started talking to him, which, now that he thought of it, might have been several minutes ago.
"Bernard! Have you been listening at all?"
"Sure I'm listening. Country and western music." She looked cross, so he elaborated to make it clear that he understood the topic under discussion. "'My. . . wife ran off with my dog and left me to raise all these illegitimate puppies on the inadequate dole that I get from a failed welfare system.'"
"Bernard! You can't just listen to the last three words of a conversation!"
"Well, how many did you say before that?"
Fran made an exasperated noise, dropped something paper-y on the desk and breezed out of the shop. Bernard returned his attention to the task before him.
"What's Fran cross about?" Manny asked, appearing out of bloody nowhere. Bernard fell backwards off his chair.
"Where'd you come from?"
"The front door?"
"Oh." Bernard looked at the door accusingly.
"You need help getting up?"
Bernard thought about witty retorts to this until the moment was well and truly past.
"Fran's cross," he said instead, "because I don't care enough about country and western music, apparently."
"Didn't think she liked that sort of thing." Manny picked up the thing that Fran had left and turned it over.
"Well, I don't know. Am I my. . . am I anybody's keeper?" This was a disturbing prospect, now that he thought of it. "Shit, am I? I hope not."
"Hey, I know him."
"Eh?" Bernard righted himself and his chair, and set the one atop the other in the usual way.
"That bloke." Fran's thing was an ad for some show at some club, a very ugly one (the ad and the club), with an unprofessionally shot publicity photo of four middle-aged men in various denim and flannel situations. One was wearing an actual cowboy hat, and it was to him that Manny pointed.
"That bloke worked at the firm." Manny rarely referred to his previous career, and Bernard preferred to pretend he hadn't had one, but now that he said it, it was clear that the gentleman could be nothing other than an accountant. "He's got my bloody appointment book!"
Manny was suddenly very emotionally agitated, and Bernard said, sympathetically, "What?"
"We had similar appointment books, right? In fact they really weren't that similar at all, but he was a dim bulb, I guess. So we were in a meeting one day and somebody moved seats or went to the loo or something, and next thing I knew I was back at my desk with an appointment book full of that bloke's sexual indiscretions."
"You'd think he'd want it back."
"Never came back for it. As it happened, he got the sack that day. I was going to have to get an entirely new one, but as it happened there was enough space in between the rude descriptive passages for me to write in my own appointments. Looked a bit weird, but it was economical."
"Worked out, then."
"No it didn't!" Manny glared at the picture of the cowboy-hat-wearing prat. "It was my personal property."
Bernard studied the ad. "'Country night every other Monday. Western wear encouraged but not required.' West of what?"
"I'm going down there." Manny grabbed his coat and hat. "I've got to restore my honor."
"What?" But Manny was out the door--and while Bernard was not naturally disposed to just dash out and go places with people willy-nilly, well, it was Manny, and he meant well, of course, but the man simply could not be trusted to act responsibly when left to his own devices. Leaving the moths to take care of themselves, Bernard followed.
* * *
"I reckon we should drink a lot of alcohol right now."
Bernard thought about explaining to Manny that it was not necessary to state things that were very, very obvious, but this would have cut into time he could be using to order them some pints, so he did the latter instead.
The people around them were wearing very distressing and un-British things. Bernard was becoming very concerned about Fran's mental health if this had suddenly become her idea of a good night out. Manny was scanning the bar for the Great Appointment Bandit. For the life of him, Bernard couldn't quite imagine how he'd wound up with such weird friends.
They had some drinks. It was a beer night at first, but hard liquor seemed to make more sense after the band took the stage. After each song, Manny said, "I'm going up there. I'm going to show him what for."
Bernard excused himself to the loo. On his way back, he stopped at the pay phone and decided to call Fran to find out why she'd gone insane. She picked up after three and a half rings, which was just like her. "Hello?"
"Fran," Bernard said, "why have you gone insane?"
"What's that awful noise? Where are you?"
"I'm at your stupid thing, with the country music. I'm incredibly drunk. Where are you?"
"Bernard!" Bernard thought Fran was saying his name rather a lot today. "Oh my god, you went there? You see, you see--this is what happens when you don't pay attention to what people are saying to you, Bernard, you end up in some grotty club listening to some arsehole accountant that I had a passionate fling with before I noticed he was an arsehole, playing grotty music with his grotty band!"
"Yeah?" Bernard said heatedly. "Well if you're so clever." He hung up.
When he got back to the table, Manny wasn't at it. Manny was in fact on the stage, singing a song he clearly did not know the words to, with Arsehole the Accountant's arm slung around his, Manny's, inebriated shoulders. This would not do. Bernard approached the stage to explain in a clear and cogent manner why this would not do at all.
Then there was a lot of shouting and people pushing each other, at the end of which Bernard was standing on the stage in front of a microphone with a banjo strapped over his shoulder and a cowboy hat drooping far enough down on his head to obscure his vision. While summoning his powers of concentration to try to retrace the steps that had led him to this state of affairs, he fell down.
This didn't seem to help anything, although it provoked what he assumed was ironic cheering from what had struck him as a pretty unironic crowd. He looked to Manny for help. Manny and Arsehole were sharing some very funny accounting story back at Manny and Bernard's table.
"Right," he said. "This next song is called 'I hate you Manny.'" He cleared his throat. Nobody was paying much attention to him at this point, so he hummed a few bars of "Fat Bottomed Girls" until somebody threw a cowboy shoe at him.
"All right then, well. This song is called 'My woman done left me, well actually I haven't got a woman strictly speaking, but a woman done left me in the sense that it's her fault I'm standing up here talking to a room full of hostile very stupid people and she's not even here.' Oh wait, there she is." Fran had appeared at the back of the room, in a paroxysm of lip-pursing and arm-crossing of an intensity that the Pentagon could have bought and weaponized.
"Hello Fran! That's Fran, everybody. I think we may have had what you might call a, a zany misunderstanding." Lacking a more focused objective for the moment, Bernard fell down again.
"Get off the stage," suggested someone over to his left.
"Yes, right," he located the culprit, "you there, yes, you. You're so ugly, your mother. . . and I hate you."
Around then was when passing out seemed like a good idea, so he wound up missing what Fran later assured him were the really fun bits, although her account was somewhat lacking in detail and he was pretty sure she was lying.
When he got back to the shop, the moths were all gone, a development of which Fran and Manny both disavowed all knowledge. The rare books were missing as well, assuming they'd been there to begin with. He hoped the rare books and the moths were happy together, wherever they'd gone.
He wrote "NO COUNTRY MUSIC" on the blackboard and went to bed with a deep sense of accomplishment.
-end-